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.
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qi wizz
Date: 2006-05-30 12:16 pm (UTC)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.