So firstly thanks to everyone who came to the Chinese Medicine seminar last night
So for the next eight weeks, there will be a Zoom meeting on Monday nights at 20:00 BST on the evening class link, for one hour. The course is called An Introduction to Chinese Medicine. It will be of special interest to those of you who wish to go into more depth regarding your Tai Chi training but is also of more general interest for health reasons. Chinese Medicine is based around prevention, the principle here is that the body is by and large a self-regulating mechanism and that the mind and body are constantly replacing and regenerating themselves, this is how healing occurs. Skin cells are replaced, blood cells are replaced, bone, muscles, sinews, nerve cells, and everything gets replaced. In ten years’ time, you will be a different person. Having a sound grounding in Chinese Medicine diagnosis and theory means you can spot the early stages of imbalance and address them yourself much more effectively than once a disease has reached an advanced stage. Once we understand how Qi (life-force) is made and how it can become depleted we can do a great deal to support it in its task.
The first few sessions will be focussing on the Theory of the Zangfu or Internal Organs and what they are doing in the context of Chinese Medicine theory so you will have to forget most of what you know about the Western theory of organ functions which are based on anatomical factors. Zangfu theory is the core of the Chinese Medicine world view, organs in this theory are not just anatomical units but include energy meridians and various other parts of the body, and functions that you may be surprised are very different from Western medical concepts. Just like the Chinese language which is thousands of years old, it was not developed as a correlate to Western medicine’s anatomical views, in fact, it was developed long before Western science and medicine, the bulk of which is only just over a hundred years old. The core textbook of Chinese Medicine – the Nei Jing or Yellow Emperor’s Classic – was written about 5,000 years ago and is still in use today. This is not just an academic curiosity, it really is constantly used as a reference work by thousands of Acupuncturists, Herbalists, and Chinese doctors all over the world every day.
Last night we talked about doing one organ per week but on reflection, this will not leave enough time for other topics so instead, we will spend 2-3 weeks on the Zangfu and move on from there. Chinese Medicine is a vast field so we will not be able to cover the entirety of it in a few weeks, the purpose of the course is to prepare the way for the Summer Health and Massage Course and to give you an overview and a grounding in the subject, a springboard as it were. We will be dealing with some basic theory each week and if possible do as much practical work as Zoom will allow, for example, diagnosis and even some massage techniques if people can find partners to work with.