Chinese Organ Networks: Pericardium

The twelve organs of Chinese medicine are a way of dividing the world--the world as seen through human eyes--into twelve sections.  Everything in the world, then, falls into one of these sections, just as every cherry in a pie will end up in one slice or another, unless of course it gets cut in half and ends up straddling two slices.  That happens with the organs, too--in fact many phenomena have multiple organ affinities--but we'll leave aside such complications for now.  The point is that the twelve organs are a convenient and powerful lens through which to view things, and not least medical things.  We already have a two-fold division (yin and yang, night and day, male and female, etc.) and a three-fold one (heavenly, human, and earthly realms), a five-fold one (the 5 "phase elements" of wood, fire, earth, metal, water), and even a six-fold one (the six levels or conformations).  Each of these lenses has its utility; with the leap up to twelve, we have the most specific, fine-grained lens of all.  It encompasses all of the levels before it, for each organ is associated with yin or yang, with one of the three realms, with a phase element (or multiple elements, if we look closer), and with a conformation.  Twelve allow for complexity without going off the deep end.

Yet despite the universal appeal of the number twelve, early Chinese medical texts speak of the "five zang (solid organs) and six fu (hollow organs)."  The focus of this article, the Pericardium, was conspicuously absent from this picture.  And indeed, if you had to choose 11 or 12 organs to represent the entirety of the human universe, the membranous sac around that surrounds the heart would not likely be one of them.  There are so many...more substantial structures to choose.  So it's fair to ask: what's the deal with the Pericardium?

Actually its status as the added-on organ is key to its nature.  The Pericardium was brought into the picture, in a sense, to keep the lonely sixth fu organ company.  This is a clue to what the Pericardium is all about: relationship, intimacy, vulnerability.  Qi Gong teacher Bill Frazier explains the late arrival of the Pericardium in another way: this "heart protector" (a common translation of the PC) only became necessary when humans began living in such dense proximity that we no longer knew all our neighbors. When we lost the deep communal connection synonymous with tribal or small-scale pastoral living, we began to need to guard ourselves in a new way.  Suddenly it was dangerous to share our innermost selves; amongst strangers who knows who might take advantage of such open-heartedness?  In this little myth, along came the Pericardium to guard the gates of the Heart.

It's not hard to recognize the necessity of a Heart Protector, a body guard or watchdog to mind the Heart-emperor, who's too busy tuning in to the heavenly mandate to look after his or her own damn self.  But in modern Traditional Chinese Medicine, this guardian role of the PC may be over-emphasized.  The flip side of the Pericardium's role is to open the Heart, like the dog who allows trusted people entry to meet his master.  We all need protection, safety, security, but too much of these things cuts us off from other people, from potential fellowship and communion.  We need walls around our Hearts, but we also need gates that can open.  The Pericardium is this gate, and it might just as well be called the Heart Opener.

On the calendrical scale, the PC is associated with post-equinox autumn, and in the context of the day, with the post-sunset hours or approximately 7-9 PM.  These are times of darkness overpowering light, of inward-turning.  And also of intimacy.  As Heiner Fruehauf, my source for virtually all of this cosmology, points out, who goes out on a romantic lunch date?  The dinner hour is the intimate one, the one charged with romantic potential.  Looking at the larger yearly cycle, it may be less obvious how the dark, chilly month of (roughly) November carries such sexy connotations.  It is, no doubt, also a season of death: nature dies back, and following her lead, humans course through the woods to hunt.  Yet this was once the traditional wedding season in China.  It is after all the time when the leaves fall: the forests are undressing to reveal the mountains, the bare breasts of nature.

It will come as no surprise, then, that the anatomy most closely associated with the Pericardium is this region of the chest.  One Chinese name for the Pericardium is Xin Bao, "heart wrapper;" another is Dan Zhong, "chest center."  The quintessential pericardium point is, more specifically, the midpoint between the nipples.  This is a vulnerable area of the body, no doubt, and an intimate one.  To whom do we bare our chests, our breasts?  Well, to a lot of people, maybe.  But out culture's schizophrenic relationship to nudity and sex can be seen as symptomatic of a larger Pericardium pathology.

As discussed, the Pericardium controls how open our hearts are at any given time.  In love, the Pericardium relaxes and dilates, we let our guard down, and are able to share ourselves completely with another person.  Part of the potential of love is to take this openness out to the world; to come from a place of safety in vulnerability and expand outwards to face everyone and everything in our lives with open hearts.  Of course there is the risk that when our open hearts are betrayed or wounded, the Pericardium sits bolt upright like a bodyguard that had been snoozing and battens down the hatches.  We shut down emotionally, put up barriers, simultaneously protecting ourselves and cutting ourselves off.  Back now to modern PC pathology: though we need to open and close our hearts appropriately, most people are stuck too far to one end of the spectrum.  There are those who, through trauma, have their Pericardia on permanent lock-down mode--scared, nervous guard-dogs who don't recognize friends.  Though it's rarer, some people fall into the opposite category: they are too open-hearted, have trouble delineating boundaries for themselves, and get into trouble because of it.  Perhaps more common than this is the confused Pericardium: we may be too open on the outside and shut down or exhausted within.  A healthier model might be the reverse of this: a reserved, moderate exterior containing a passionate heart.

This whole time our model for the Pericardium has been the dog: guardian, yes, but also faithful companion, playful puppy, tireless servant.  In fine symbolic fashion, the best and worst of the Pericardium are summed up here.  Our source of joy, innocence, and playfulness can also translate to a lack of seriousness, as in a puppy who only wants to have fun.  The antidote to this, perhaps, is the training that turns a pup into a mature, loyal and selfless companion.  Represented here is the channeling of heart energy towards away from simple pursuit of pleasure and towards a higher calling; the act of sacrifice.

(<-- Not a puppy, I realize, but an equally heart-opening furry thing)

Dravyagunavijnana (Ayurvedic Pharmacology, or Foxy Science)

I was going to add this as a comment to my last post, but then no one would see it.  So here it is, my little footnote, writ large with its own heading.  Which may as well be in Sanskrit.  In that language's aggressively precise grammar, words are glommed onto each other to form compounds, like we sometimes do in English, btu moreso.  Dravyagunavijnana, a modest example of this phenomenon, is composed of the words for substance (dravya), quality (guna), and knowledge (vijnana), and is essentially the term for traditional pharmacology.  Could there be a more straightforward encapsulation of the herbalist's most basic line of study?  Knowing the qualities of different substances.  To think I forgot to mention this in my last post!

Dravyagunavijnana, or the art and science of the materia medica (to throw in scraps of another dead language here), is very much a foxy pursuit.  I don't mean it's leggy and red-headed, but rather that it's un-hedgehoglike.  According to this scheme of classification, which may or may not (anyone?) predate literary critic Isaiah Berlin and his Tolstoy study The Hedgehog and The Fox, hedgehog intelligence has one Big Idea, and everything fits into it.  This is the territory of ideology, big-time.  Of -isms.  Fox intelligence is of an opposite sort; it sees every situation as different, and accrues lots of little insights instead of one big one.  Berlin was arguing that the Tolstoy of War and Peace is at heart a fox, but one who wanted desperately to be a hedgehog.  But back to dravya, their guna, and the vijnana thereof.  It's foxy because every substance, be it an herb per se or a mineral, metal, or animal part, is its own entity.  The more hedgehoggy eye of theory comes and sticks all these things in categories--derived from if not one then just a few Big Ideas--so that oyster shells and coral are both cooling (from an Ayurvedic perspective) and calcium-rich (from a Western one) substances.  But in fact they are not the same, nor are red and white ginseng, nor aconite harvested on the summer solstice and aconite harvested at some other time of year.  They each have their own qualities.

This is all a very convoluted way of saying that it's helpful for an aspiring herbalist to be interested in these qualities.  To wonder what the spicy sweetness of American Spikenard root might signify, and how this sets it apart from the closely related but blander-tasting Wild Sarsaparilla.  To be the sort of person who can entertain themself for hours in a tea shop, sampling and reading about different varieties of Camella sinensis.  Some might say, "it's all just tea."  But they'd be missing so much!  The devil may be in the details, but so is the magic.  

You Might Be a Closet Herbalist If...

Teacher, carpenter, blacksmith; these are venerable trades as essential now as they were in antiquity.  Alright; being a blacksmith may no longer carry the social cache that practicing law or being an advertising executive does, but it's still a recognized vocation.  Other once-honorable trades haven't fared so well in post-modernity--and at the risk of spoiling my punch line too soon--herbalism is one of them.  After nearly a century of censure by the (still only fairly recently) dominant biomedical establishment, the status of "herb doctors" has plummeted to the point where it doesn't even register on most people's radar.  There are signs that this is changing, though, as part of the widespread resurgence of interest in sustainability, in local economies, in do-it-yourself self-reliance, and simply in health.  Though herbalism is a loose, diverse, and sometimes contentious catch-all category, it's on the rise however you slice it.  More and more people are claiming herb lore as a valuable part of humanity's heritage, whether through Chinese or American Indian traditions or from what their own grandmother passed along in the kitchen and woodlot.

Herbs are our original and (some of us believe) our best medicine.  No matter where you live, at least a few essential medicine plants--and there aren't any plants that aren't useful as medicine--are readily available and free; I would estimate that all the medicine most people need grows within a few mile radius of their homes.  This holds even for inner city neighborhoods: look at Detroit, which has half-reverted to wild fields and young forests, or New York City--I could spend a whole season foraging in Central Park.  Herbs are right under our noses, if only we knew where to look.

In the spirit of fanning the flames of the wholistic medical renaissance, this post is intended to root out potential herbalists amongst you, my readers.  This is not an evangelical mission--convert, convert!--but a gentle prod in the direction of asking yourself an oft-overlooked question: are you a closet herbalist?  Whether as a folksie kitchen concocter or a white-jacketed integrative clinic practitioner, would using plants as medicines fulfill you and benefit others? So:

You might just be an herbalist at heart if...

-You like plants, have always liked them, felt drawn to them, wanted to draw them, identify them, smell and taste them.  Or, perhaps, been intimidated or scared of them.  But either way, noticed their presence, took walks in the woods for no reason other than to gather some mushrooms, sit under your favorite oak tree, see if the basswood was blooming yet.

-You like to help people.  Again, maybe like me you're sort of scared of people, not entirely at ease in social situations with strangers.  But you feel the flow of fulfillment when you're able to help ease someone's mind, answer a question, solve a problem.

-You're at home in the kitchen; you love to cook, brew, concoct.  This is not an absolutely essential characteristic of an herbalist, since some practitioners use crude herbs exclusively or practice shamanistic "plant spirit medicine."  But, historically, herbalism falls under the twin domains of outdoors and kitchen.  Add to that, "laboratory."

-You're interested in ways of knowing beyond the standard, modern scientific paradigm.  Reductionist science is a valid and useful epistemological model, but its microscopic tunnel vision often misses the forest for the trees.  Trying to understand herbs through pharmacology alone is practically impossible, as a single plant can contain hundreds of "active" compounds.  Traditional ways of knowing, from shamanistic to intuitive to "energetic," fill out the big picture view.  If you are interested in these "alternative" models but don't feel you have an inroad, plants can provide the bridge.

I'm sure there are other characteristics that predispose one towards working with plants to heal, but this is what I've come up with here off the top of my head.  Let me know what I've missed!

While we're honoring the humble herbal vocation, here's a small gallery of herbalists from near and far, people I've had the opportunity to learn from in one way or another.

A Vaidya (Ayurvedic practitioner) in Kapilvastu district, Nepal, pointing out some Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera)

Bishunath Karmacharya, a Newari vaidya and alchemist, at his home in Banepa, Nepal, with some of the sought-after medicinal Yarshagumba (Cordyceps).

A father and son team at the family clinic in Naradevi, Kathmandu.  

A tantric jharphuke vaidya practicing his "brushing and blowing" ritual technique in combination with herbal medicine in Bhaktapur, Nepal.  

Matthew Wood, author of The Earthwise Herbal and The Book of Herbal Wisdom and my primary teacher at The School of Traditional Western Herbalism.

Gail Faith Edwards, founder of Blessed Maine herb farm, author, and teacher.  

Dr. Heiner Fruehauf, Classical Chinese Medicine luminary, founder of the CCM program at National College of Natural Medicine, and creator of the Classical Pearls formula line.