I went to look at an apartment today where the people were literally almost begging the landlord to sign the lease.  I was bothered at being in the same room with people freaking out about their living situation while I had thought to myself beforehand “I am going to try to walk in the Tao, whatever happens happens”.  After they left the landlord voluntarily told me that she doesn’t like the way the Portland renting market is because of how people are stressing her out, calling her and asking her to give her a deposit before even seeing the place.  I don’t think that’s good for anyone.  I could resort to panicking about what I’m going to go in 9 days when I have to fly to NJ without having a place to live, but I’d rather just relax and let the Tao unfold.  No stress for me!  It’s not worth it.  I will survive.  The Tao is, and I don’t know why, but that’s ok.  Right now I’m feeling held by the universe, even though it’s easy for that to not appear as obvious as always; it’s still there, and my feet are still here on the ground.

A definition of passion:

• A powerful emotion, such as love, joy, hatred, or anger.
• a) Ardent love. b) Strong sexual desire; lust. c) The object of such love or desire.
• a) Boundless enthusiasm: His skills as a player don’t quite match his passion for the game. b) The object of such enthusiasm: Soccer is her passion.

How noteworthy that love, joy, hatred, and anger can all be lumped under the same category.  I am new to Chinese medicine, but it makes sense that the element of the Heart is Fire, and fire is the driving force behind all of these emotions.  They all can make your heart pound and your blood surge through your veins, as if you were sitting in a hot spring, soaking in water made hot by the firey core of Earth.

In Chinese Medicine, the Heart is referred to by many different names, one of which is the Empty Vessel for it’s ability to receive and let go of energy. In class we learned that the Heart is metaphorically comparable to the Ji River in China, which is a clear river that passes through a gritty, murky river but remains unsullied as it comes out the other side.  We learned that the Heart must not hold onto things, that it must be a space to receive vibrations and let them go while retaining it’s own inner clarity.  We learned that people must not grasp wildly for things and perhaps as an alternative let them come on their own.  It makes me wonder if a huge portion of our problems, at least in this country, is from dominating things without satiation and hanging onto things we should let go.  We are hanging onto ghosts of what “should have been” or “should be”.

This all makes sense, but a few things I have to wonder about.  If we, for example, have a friend or lover we invite into our lives, how should we let them come and leave without leaving part of their “vibration” in our hearts?  I feel like each person I hold close to me has changed my life and even perhaps influenced my own unique vibration.  I guess I’ll have to think about that as I practice Qigong and delve further into the curriculum.

One thing I brought up in class recently was the idea of commitment in a relationship.  My question was “If the Heart is the Empty Vessel, how does that relate to marriage or partnerships?”  The answer that makes sense to me as I try to navigate Taoism is that in a healthy committed relationship, both parties are willing participants and can leave if they want to, but choose not to.  Each person is willingly and peacefully occupying space in the other’s heart.  No one is being desperately clung to.  Each person stands on their own as an individual with a full life, but the two come together to make their collective candle burns brighter.

EDIT:  My friend Joshua responded to this post by mentioning the etymology of the word passion, which  you can find here.  He wrote “Thank you for sharing Kristin I would also like to add another definition for “passion”, and that is the original meaning of the word: suffering. And not unlike the others, it is felt in the heart.“  Thanks, Josh

Chinese medicine is a healing art that draws one of it’s major distinctions from its methods of information processing.  It employs a top-down approach to information navigation.  Rather than building from small to large (think cell to organism), practitioners are taught to look at every system as a confluence of mutually-dependent energies pushing and pulling each other.  You start with the person or system you are exploring and you approach with a specific “lens” with which to diagnose.  If the lens is the 5 Element System, you have five elements with five distinct “personalities” or energies to approach the patient with to determine an imbalance or pathology.  For example, if a person’s wood element is dominating it corresponds to very different pathology than if their fire element is dominating.  You can look to the relationships in the five element system first, and then proceed further down from there through more detailed systems, in which case you are gathering more information inclusively, rather than ruling information out.

Modern science can attest to the richness of complexity in the biology of the human being.  Combine that with emotions, life experiences, and body memory and you have a very complex puzzle standing before you.  The more information you gather, the more unraveling and healing you can facilitate in a person’s body.  There is no limit to how deep you can explore someone’s health through the system of Chinese medicine.

It is my observation that Western medicine depends heavily on the left brain, which is the house of language, linear thinking, and logic.  Separation/distinction from things around you are felt here.  The left brain is predominantly where things are broken down into tiny fragments and reassembled to form conclusions.  There is a limit to how much information we can process here in our conscious awareness.  I’ve read estimates that the human brain can only juggle 7 distinct concepts in a given moment.

The right brain is the house of spatial reasoning, feelings, intuition, and visuality.  Oneness with the earth and people around you is felt here.  This is a video of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist’s, experience of a stroke, which temporarily deactivated her left brain.

Chinese medicine is taught in a way that requires the development of the left and right brain.  Students are required to memorize a cannon of information as well as develop their intuitive faculties about the qualities of energetic relationships they are sensing.  In other words, Chinese medicine is both a science and an art that is studied and practiced.  In my personal way of understanding things, gathering information through intuition is a way to let your unconscious sift through information and process it “beneath the surface”.  I believe this allows people to process more information.  For example, you might sense a pattern that you’ve seen before, and that pattern involves multiple relationships, but it is a pattern, and thus can be represented by one overall “chunk” of information.  If it is true that people can only hold seven associations in the conscious mind at once, well, the potential networking of relationships just got exponentially bigger.

Some of my criticism of modern science, and industrialized society at large, is that the quality of right brain information available to people is oftentimes devalued or completely disregarded.  To take a pragmatic view of things, I would argue that evolution gave us both areas for a reason.