Baby steps

[brynndragon]

I'm trying to better understand the concepts of yin, yang, and qi. Here's a small attempt, a baby step toward comprehension:

If yang and yin are as two children on a see-saw, always in balance and always in motion, where is qi? Qi can be found in three places. Qi is the fulcrum of the see-saw, the center-point that both defines the balance between yin and yang and allows for their constant motion. Qi is the force that causes the sea-saw to move, generated by the conflict and cooperation of yin and yang. Finally, qi is the sea-saw itself, the connection between yin and yang without which the dynamic force of their movement could not exist.

Comments

qi wizz

[emerlion.livejournal.com]

I've been practicing Chinese Medicine for 12 years and I'm still trying to understand it, myself.

Probably the only way to really grokk Qi is to learn Mandarin and go live in China for a few years. It's one of those concepts that exist within a cultural context and cannot be translated.

But here's what I tell my patients when they ask me "how does this stuff work?" It doesn't really explain yin and yang, or qi, but it sort of helps explain how qi works in a medical context:

Say you've got a winding river flowing through Vermont, with cottages all along its length. A bunch of beavers come and build a dam in the middle of this river. So upstream, the river floods, and the trees along the river die because of too much water, and all the cottages are flooded. Downstream, the trees and grasses are dying because they're too dry, and the cottagers are out of water. Now, you can't see the beaver dam because the river is so windy and twisty; all you see are the effects of the beaver dam - the flooded trees and houses upstream; and the dried-out riverbed downstream. So what can you do - you can grab a bunch of buckets and start hauling water from where the river is flooded to where it is dried up; with enough buckets this will eventually even out the water levels on both sides of the dam. However it's a lot of work, and you have to keep doing it. OR, you can track down the beaver dam and blow it up: then the river will do what it wants to do naturally, and level out again, so the "symptoms" of flooded-out cottages and dried-out cottages dissappear.

Don't know if this helps any.

Re: qi wizz

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Oh hell, I don't even want to *think* about trying to explain it to other people - I'm currently concerned with trying to explain it to myself ;P. I suspect I'm going to take the time between now and actually starting the program (a year and a season) to start looking into the philosophical and cultural roots of chinese medicine because once I start the program I won't really have the time to do that. Oh, and getting the co-reqs out of the way as well would be handy. Although right now I should be concentrating on getting into the program first - order of operations and all.

Which isn't to say that I won't gank that when the time comes - it looks like a good quick explanation to me. There's also the gardener metaphor that _Between Heaven and Earth_ discusses, but I'm not sure it'd be wise to work with a metaphor from a book that I'm having real problems getting myself to read ;P.

Re: qi wizz

[emerlion.livejournal.com]

There's also a really good book out by Steven Birch that explains acupuncture in Western Scientific terms, and talks about the whole scientific-methodology-applied-to-TCM thing.

When I get back to Ottawa I'll dig it off my shelf and give you the ISBN.

[agnosticoracle.livejournal.com]

How do you measure them?

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Why does it matter?

[agnosticoracle.livejournal.com]

If you talk about yin and yang being in balance or there being an excess of on or the other, then there must a way to measure them. Otherwise how could you honestly say whether they were in balance or which one was in excess?

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Before I could either answer that question or explain why the question is wrong I would need to know what yin, yang, and qi are. Since most of the point of this post is the fact that I have barely begun the process of wrapping my head around those concepts, it would be impossible for me to do so at this time (if ever - I'm beginning to get the impression that understanding these concepts is tantamount to understanding quantum mechanics).

[agnosticoracle.livejournal.com]

According to acupuncturetoday.com Yin and Yang are both types of Qi: "Yang [qi] is generally associated with items or concepts that are bright, warm, and in motion (example male). Yin [qi] is generally associated with objects or ideas that are dark, still and cold (example female)."

link (http://www.acupuncturetoday.com/abc/yinyang.html)

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Ah right, the fourth place that I forgot in my analogy: in the children themselves, as in all of the ten thousand[1] things that make up the world. Thanks for pointing out the oversight.

[1] ancient chinese equivalent of infinite

[agnosticoracle.livejournal.com]

But I'm still wondering how you'd be able to measure the ratio yin qi vs yang qi in an individual so you could honestly say if they were balanced or one was in excess.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

In four and a half years, I'll let you know :).

[doctorellisdee.livejournal.com]

yin is heads, yang is tails, qi is the coin itself.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I like that.

[(Anonymous)]

I was flipping through a book on Taoism. I read that in Chinese, there's just 'sticks' and 'a bunch of sticks', not 'stick' and 'sticks'. So linguistically you're already conditioned to think of objects as part of a larger whole.

It was then that I knew I wasn't going to get Taoism. Sure, if I spent the next year of my life studying chinese and the taoist classics, but otherwise...

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Objects as part of a larger whole actually makes a lot of sense to me, on a gut level. Getting my conscious thought processes in on the deal might take a bit of work, however. Well, I'm going to have about a year and a half between now and when I start acupuncture school if things go according to plan, so maybe I'll start in on the language and those classics in the meantime.