One of the first things you’ll learn in Chinese medicine is that in the body, there is either ease or dis-ease. This simple statement has a profound effect on our ability to keep ourselves healthy. In a very elegant way, it points out that illness is closely related to tension.
This truth is essential to keeping healthy and it is very easy to test. Tighten your fist for 60 seconds and your whole forearm will start to throb and ache. This happens because of the compromised flow of blood and/or energy as our bodies are not designed to hold tension for more then a few seconds.
We’re tense not just because of stress. Most of our tension is not connected to real survival challenges and instead related to the Four Riders of the Apocalypse: stress, poor sleep, poor diet and/or lack of daily movement.
From Chinese medicine point of view, when our body experiences the lack of ease, our organs get compromised supply of resources. And if one or more organs don’t receive the resources they need, it is logical that their production will suffer and things in the body will not get done in the way they were supposed to – hense leading weakness and later: to disease.
Western science shows us that when healthy, human body is supremely resilient. Even the most violent viruses such as Ebola do not kill everybody they infect. This truth means that it is not just the virus that causes the disease that ends up killing us but it is also the weakness of the body that plays a big part in our survival. And to survive, we need to keep the body in the state of ease…