Chinese Organ Networks: Liver

And so we come around to the Liver.  The Liver is a frickin' doozy.  Enough so that I'm actually procrastinating jumping into the meat of the matter, because I hardly know where to start.  This is an organ system rife with rich associations and layers of meaning that seem to shoot out in all directions like fresh green tendrils in springtime.  Stubbornly spreading up and out, against gravity, persevering against tough odds--namely the laws of physics, which luckily seem not to apply to living things.  Or rather, life finds the loopholes and bends said laws to its own benefit and makes of Newton and Descartes a gleeful mock.
                                                                          ^An ancient Etruscan bronze liver, probably used for divination instruction and practice

As usual, the macrocosmic position of the organ reveals much of its nature.  We saw how in a sense the Gallbladder marks the beginning of the new year, as yang (light, warmth) makes its return--as yet unfelt, perhaps, but influential all the same.  To the Liver falls the task of continuing the what the Gallbladder has initiated.  The Gallbladder's job was romantic--the spark in the dark, setting things off with a little explosion; the Liver's is decidedly less so.  The Liver doesn't take that critical first step back towards the light, but rather the equally critical second step.  It plods forward, against the flow, against gravity.  It perseveres.  Its animal symbol is the ox: the creature best suited to long, hard labor.  The ox wants and needs something to push against.

Labor...pushing...if this is all sounding suspiciously feminine, it's not a coincidence.  The Liver is the organ most closely associated with womanhood, most obviously through the blood, which the Liver is said to store.  "Women are blood, men are qi," goes a Chinese medicine saying.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.  We aren't finished with the ox.  Could there be a more specific connection between oxen and women?  Here's a hint: take a look at a picture of an ox head or skull.  Georgia' O'Keeffe was on top of this one (though she chose a ram, the effect is much the same.)  The relation of head and horns is strikingly similar to that of womb and ovaries via the Fallopian tubes.  Women, in some sense, have the power of oxen: to push, to persevere, to plod forward and continue the endless work.  Masculine energy is more apt to come in bursts; men are often good initiators and warriors, hunters, whereas women keep the ball rolling.  Hormonally, women may be better suited to traditional "women's work"--not just the obvious maternal activities but such slow, methodical, careful work as weaving, spinning, seed-sorting, knitting.  It's not just a matter of culture.  Women are rich in blood, which in Chinese medicine also means certain hormones, and this hormonal reality shapes much of physical, psychological reality.

Of course it's not just women who benefit from the ability to push, to go against the flow.  This type of sustained work is at the heart of self-cultivation practices, from martial arts to meditation and everything in between (Tai Qi and Qi Gong and genuine Hatha Yoga tend to fall towards the center of this spectrum).  The Chinese sagely ideal is of wu wei, effortless action; but in order to achieve such a state of skill it is necessary to train intensively.  The archetypal Zen master who flows so artfully through life does not achieve their mastery except through rigorous training.

There's yet another feminine connection to be made.  The Liver's cosmological time is most of January and the beginning of February, a period which overlaps (even if it doesn't completely correspond) with the Western astrological sign of Aquarius.  At first glance the associations are disparate; the Liver with blood and femininity and Aquarius with water, creativity, prophetic change.  Symbols take us deeper, however.  The traditional shorthand for Aquarius is a double squiggle, like two letter M's nested on top of one another.  Now it is an interesting fact that the word for "mother" in virtually every language begins with or contains the "m" sound.  mother, mama, mom, mu, ma, aama, maman...there are probably exceptions, but I can't come up with any.  Infants seem hardwired to make the "m" sound in relation to their mothers.  The letter M even look like a couple of a pair of bent legs, spread, as in a reclining birthing position.  Aquarius is also classified as an air sign; we'll soon see how air or wind relates to the Liver.

That's two liver-blood-femininity strings of association so far.  We've momentarily come up for air; time now to dive down and pull up one more set.  The Liver stores the blood, has everything to do with this vital substance.  What is the blood, on the level of micro-macrocosmic correspondences?  It is our vital water, our veins and arteries like rivulets and streams and great rivers.  They all flow into the sea, our great reservoir of blood, the Liver.  Another way to look at it: evolutionarily we come from the ocean.  Primitive sea creatures need no closed circulatory systems, but when we crawled out of the watery depths, we needed a way to bring some of that ocean with us.  The blood, and especially the Liver's blood reservoir, is that oceanic remnant.  It's noteworthy, too, that we're not talking about fresh water here.  The ocean is salty, and so is the blood.  Nor is the saltiness of either composed of simple sodium chloride, though that is the most prominent component of ocean and blood salts by weight.  The ocean contains hundreds of trace minerals in solution, and so does our blood.  Though nutritional science hasn't uncovered a physiological need for every such mineral, more and more are being found to be essential to health.  This is why unrefined sea salt (including salt mined from ancient sea beds) are so critical to health.  Remove all those essential trace minerals, and you compromise the quality of your internal ocean.

Another conceptual leap: the Liver and blood relate directly to Wind and the nervous system.  The most basic connection is to be found in the trigram Xun, The Gentle or Wind or The Subtle.  It shows a single yin line penetrating up through two steadfast yang lines.  It is yin moving upwards, and represents the pervasiveness of subtle influence.  This is how a breeze operates: it is gentle, but if it maintains a consistent direction it can be powerful in the long run.  But Xun is also a symbol for Wood, the upward growth of springtime.  It is the yin aspect of Wood, just as the Liver is the yin Wood organ (and the Gallbladder yang Wood, as represented by the trigram Zhen, with one yang line thrusting up below two of yin).  Wind, the force of movement and communication, is related to springtime.  Spring is, after all, the time when things are shaken up, when the "winds of change" blow.  That, roughly, is how the physiological force of Wind or Air is related to the Liver.  (An interesting contrast with Ayurveda here; in that system, Wind or Vata is more associated with the large intestine, and while it is closely related to the nervous system, the concept of blood and the liver is largely separate.  At least as far as I understand it.)

So the Liver is responsible for Wind, for proper movement.  Movement of what?  Of qi, primarily.  Of subtle energy, including perhaps the electro-chemical impulses that are the language of our nervous system.  Now it may be less surprising that trace mineral deficiencies have been implicated in a number of growing disorders including ADD and ADHD.  These can be viewed in terms of Wind; hypermobility; an ungrounded and in some sense overactive nervous system.  When our blood is not well fortified with the natural ocean's mineral spectrum, our Wood and with it our Wind go out of whack.  In our terms, its a Liver problem.

We've yet to look at the Confucian 12 officials system.  In it the role of the Liver is clear cut: it is the general.  It commands, strategizes, schemes.  Physiologically, the little-L liver sorts out thousands or millions of chemical reaction pathways, sending this here and that there and generally ironing out an operating plan for the Gallbladder to execute.  The Liver is resourceful.  As a commander it wants to win; it strives to live.  See?  It's not just the Chinese language that contains plenty of forgotten symbolic resonance.  The liver is the only organ that is capable of fully regenerating itself from a small fraction.  It's that (re)generative power of Wood.

Finally, the herbal side of the story.  The herb that best represents the upward and outward exuberance of Wood is none other than the familiar cinnamon (Chinese Gui Zhi (twigs) or Rou Gui (bark)).  Cinnamon was anciently classified in the Tang Ye Jing as a "Wood within Wood" herb, meaning that it is the essence of Wood.  Although modern TCM likes to treat the liver in terms of suppressing flaring liver yang with cold herbs and smoothing out the liver qi with herbs like Bupleurum (Chai Hu), much modern Liver pathology has more to do with cold in the blood.  Here our internal ocean gets frozen over, leading to blood deficiency and stasis, with signs like cold extremities, menstrual cramps with clotty bleeding, and sexual frigidity.  Bulldozing through the ice with qi-moving herbs won't work; we have to melt the ice.  Cinnamon gets into the blood layer (Jue Yin) and does just that, especially when combined with the star blood herb Dang Gui (Chinese Angelica).

Sources: as always with the Chinese Organ Networks series, virtually all the material for this post comes from Dr. Heiner's Fruehauf's Chinese Cosmology lectures at NCNM.  Hail the chief!

Chinese Organ Networks: Gallbladder

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know exactly where the gallbladder is, or what it does.  That’s the little-G gallbladder we’re talking about, as opposed to the big-G esoteric Chinese organ system.  But bear with me on this atypical anatomical aside.  The gallbladder happens to be a dark green sac tucked under the liver, where it stores and concentrates bile.  Bile is what our bodies use to emulsify fat.  This means breaking big globules of fat into tiny little droplets.  Bile works like soap: it ‘cuts’ grease, through a bit of chemical magic making it essentially water-soluble.  Because let's face it: our bodies wouldn't work very well or look very nice if we couldn't get oil and water to mix.  Thanks to the gallbladder and its bile, it becomes possible to absorb said fats via the villi of the intestines and put them to work everywhere from our cell membranes to our brains to our sex hormones.  Yes, fat is sadly underrated.  

So much for the gallbladder; unless you’re unusually interested in medicine, you’ll probably forget the little tidbit you just learned about this organ and be none the worse for it.  And yet you may know more than you think you do about the Gallbladder, big-G.  The Chinese functional, cosmological, symbolical organ network.  Dubious?  Well, chances are you’re familiar with the saying that someone “has a lot of gall.”  Maybe you’re apt to say it yourself when the someone pisses you off, does something cheeky, bold, possibly transgressive.  (Granted, you might just as often hear that s/he has balls, or a lot of nerve, but gall is really the most accurate.) The saying indicates that, even if as a cultural we’ve forgotten, we used to think in embodied terms.  Like other traditional cultures, our ancestors recognized that emotional and physiological realities aren’t distinct and separate realms.  It is possible to eat your heart out, or, even worse, to screw your brains out.  (That's jing, essence, you're squandering!  Or so the Daoist sages tell us.)   

As the saying about “a lot of gall” indicates, the Gallbladder is for courage.  It is the commander of the battle, leading the troops by example, charging out first into the fray.  As such, it must be able to act decisively and intuitively.  Gallbladder types have no trouble deciding and acting, even if it sometimes seems they act and then decide. 

The Gallbladder holds a very special position in the macrocosmic organ clock.  In the last position we had the Triple Warmer, stationed at the most yin time of year, roughly early December.  Light--yang qi--was at its weakest then; the days were about to be as short as they get.  With the Gallbladder, we take the first step back towards the light.  This is the position of midnight, of winter solstice.  In some sense this is the yinnest time; in another, it is the most yang.  It is here in the dead of night, in the depths of winter, that we witness the rebirth of the light.  Christmas, after all, was originally a pagan festival, and it is no coincidence that it falls around the solstice and involves lots of candles and lights.  December 23rd may not seem to contain much more daylight than the 22nd, but the decisive first step has been taken.  The long climb back towards June 22nd and the summer solstice, and the Gallbladder’s clock partner the Heart, has begun.  

Of course, unless you’re truly observant and unusually sensitive, you won’t notice that the days are getting longer for some time.  You certainly won’t feel any increase in warmth, not for months yet; at bottom, this is because matter follows energy with a lag of 90 degrees (1/2 pi radians, a quarter turn of a circle).  The upward movement is already present on the day after the shortest day of the year; the shift has occurred, but it will take a while to manifest physically.  The energy of yang returning is subtle but powerful.  In the Gallbladder time, even if we don’t notice it, this decisive shift occurs.  In the hexagram corresponding to this organ position, one yang line shoves up beneath five yin lines.  The yang is back, it has been reborn, but it is small, and as yet hidden beneath the ground, like an unfurling plant that has not yet broken through the surface.  

This image of a plant shooting upwards is actually an ideal symbol for the Gallbladder; this is the first organ of the Wood phase element.  In 5 Element theory, Wood is the springtime, the force of upward and outward growth, exuberant new life, that comes after the dormancy of Water (winter).  The motion of wood is strongly upward, counter to gravity.  And, fittingly, the Gallbladder is responsible for uprightness.  A military commander stands up straight and expects the same of his troops.  There is strength in this kind of perpendicular straightness.  A flood of symbols come to mind: a flagpole, a skyscraper...perhaps an erect phallus.  The Gallbladder is an overwhelmingly masculine archetype.  Returning for a moment to anatomy and physiology of the corresponding bodily organ, it is the fat that the gallbladder helps break down that nourishes our endocrine and reproductive systems.  If we can’t digest fats, our courage and our libidos both start to break down.  

A bit of food for thought for the herbalists out there: could Spikenard, Aralia racemosa (and A. californica), be considered a Gallbladder remedy?  It is, after all, an herb that aids in the digestion and metabolism of fat, nourishing them endocrine system, and has been  said to lend courage and confidence that we can handle what comes.  Ah, beautiful Spikenard!

We’ve already alluded a couple of times to a theme that quickly emerges with the Gallbladder: taking the first step.  Initiating action.  A good image for the Gallbladder is a spark plug, a device that provides the initial impetus to get a powerful cycle moving again.  And like a combustion engine’s, this organ network’s energy can be explosive.  The Gallbladder can express a lot of anger; this is healthy, but if it comes out suddenly and violently, it is pathological.  The transition back into the light half of the year should be barely noticeable; it is happening underground, after all.  

The Gallbladder channel runs down the sides of the body.  Actually it doesn’t so much run as it does zig-zag its way down just lateral to the eyes to the little toe.  It has a back-and-forth energy to it.  Gallbladder pathologies often have something of this back-and-forth, "half-in, half-out" nature.  The Gallbladder swings open and shut, acting like a door hinge.  Pathologies that affect the Gallbladder's Shao Yang layer are neither here nor there: Malaria is the archetypal example.  Its characteristic fever is the "intermittent" fever that comes and goes every few days, coursing through predictable cycles.  Alternating chills and fever are a hallmark of Shaoyang (Gallbladder-Triple Warmer) disorders, and the herbs that treat them tend to be exceedingly bitter.  In the Chinese system, there's Chai Hu, Bupleurum; in the New World herbal tradition, we have boneset, Eupatorium perfoliatum.  Not coincidentally, bitter is the flavor that stimulates bile flow, in effect opening the hinge and letting whatever is out.  


The Gallbladder animal totem is the humble mouse, or more properly the rat.  In Chinese mythology, the rat rides on the ox (the symbol for the liver, as the next post will discuss) across the river and hops off first upon reaching the other side.  Thus the rat wins the race; the Gallbladder is always first.  Rats are courageous, often disgustingly so; and interestingly, rats are one of the few mammals not to have a gallbladder.  That's probably a good enough head-scratcher to end on...

As usual with these organ posts, all credit due to Heiner Fruehauf and his Cosmology lectures. 

Ways of Knowing Plants

I thought I knew my plants, or some of them: a fair sprinkling of native Northeastern herbs and trees, some Rocky Mountain and desert species of the Southwest, and a cross-section of the flora of the Himalayan foothills.  Cultivated crops (sounds simple, but not everyone can recognize a potato leaf or the overgrown thistle that bears artichokes) and the naturalized European species that are more familiar than half our native plants.  I can take a walk down a Vermont back road and recognize Wild Sarsaparilla and Blue Cohosh and Dolls Eyes and Bloodroot; in Nepal I kept an eye peeled for Nirgundi and Chutro and Amala.  I knew them by name in three or four languages; I knew their traditional classification and uses and some of their constituents.  I often knew something about when and how to harvest them, how to prepare them for medicine, how to combine them with other plants to bring out certain facets of their personalities.  I knew, I knew, I knew--though I knew there's always more to learn, I thought I knew quite a lot.

But what is knowing?

This is a question at the heart of most of the debates surrounding so-called alternative medicine.  What is so challenging, so alternate, in traditional-style herbalism, or Chinese medicine?  It isn’t so much the techniques we employ, but the reasons we employ them.  It’s the fact that we rely on subjective instruments, on qualities over quantities.  The feel of a pulse and the look of a tongue instead of the clean lines of an ECG or the starkness of an X-ray.  It’s our subjective ways of knowing, our trust in intuition and in the power of the human instrument, that set us apart.  

Likewise when it comes to medicinal plants.  With them, there’s knowing and knowing.  I can recognize a species, know its names, its chemical constituents, its traditional classification according to one or another materia medica, and still not really know it, no more than memorizing the stats on Cal Ripken’s rookie baseball card makes me know the man as a person or even as a player.  The facts are signposts, fingers pointing at the moon; they are springboards, points of departure.

When asked who her own favorite teachers and sources of knowledge were, one of my herbal teachers replied “the plants themselves.”  At the time (not much more than a year ago) this struck me as a bold and perhaps outlandish response.  Direct communication with plants was something limited to those gifted in shamanistic journeying and plant spirit medicine, I thought.  Sure, chatting with the soul of Burdock or Queen Anne’s Lace was nice work if you could get it, but we mere mortals had to make do with study and accumulated experience.  

I don’t mean to say I hadn’t had any direct experience of the herbs I was coming to love.  There were inklings.  The sense of nourishment and groundedness I began to notice when taking a spoonful of ashwagandha after meals; the almost palpable fire-in-the-belly feeling that ginger can provide.  With these experiences, I started to realize that part of the work of becoming an herbalist is refining the senses; I suppose I’ve come a ways in that regard, since these days a sip of coffee sends an impulse through my system that I feel before any of the caffeine could have entered my bloodstream.  

But the ashwagandha and ginger were herbs I needed; what about coming to know the scores of others I had no personal use for?  The madders and yarrows, the docks and daisies?  I wasn’t going to take these for days and weeks to get a sense of them.  And I wasn’t subtle enough in my perception to get to know them from one or two encounters.  

Or maybe I was.  The key was sitting in plain sight all along.  It was deceptively simple: simply tasting the plants, usually in tincture form, and sitting with them in meditation to observe their effects.  I was introduced to this technique of plant meditation in my first session with the School of Traditional Western Herbalism, and it was a revelation.  

We tasted yarrow that first time.  When the little brown bottle--like something out of Alice in Wonderland--came around, I didn’t recognize the herb by taste, so my experience was unbiased by preconception.  On the tongue I noted spiciness, resin, pungency; bitterness too.  As the initial taste sensations faded, I noticed feeling of upward and outward pushing.  I became more aware of my skin, my surface, and of the back of my neck.  I don’t recall every nuance of that sitting, but as we went around the circle and shared our experiences, I was blown away.  Few of us had recognized the plant (it turned out to be tinctured from a high-altitude, unusually potent specimen), and though we all had varying experiences with the plant, a vivid and coherent portrait emerged. In my mind I’d had yarrow categorized as a blood herb, helping to move or astringe the blood (stopping bleeding) as necessary, and indicated (according to my teacher Matt Wood’s instruction) by a red and blue complexion; also as a specific remedy in certain kinds of fevers.  Now I began understand why and how the plant might have such effects.  More than that, I began to see the personality of the plant, its particular energy and presence.  It was not so much a blood herb as a surface herb: the skin-deep sensations I’d been noticing reflected its ability to govern the blood flow to the surface.  A number of us felt a warmth within that then diffused to the surface; this is how yarrow helps in fevers, by bringing out a sweat.  Neurons fired; connections were made; my intellectual understanding of the plant came face to face with the direct experience of it, and each helped inform the other.  I’ll never be able to forget what yarrow does, because I have at least a first level of knowing who or what yarrow is.  

There’s more to be said about trusting our senses, not just our vision but our smell and taste and the landscape of inner sensations I was first introduced to in Vipassana meditation.  I want to ramble about the value and power of the subjective.  And I want to describe all the plant meditations I’ve done since that first one, the plants I’ve started to get to know in a way that makes me feel like I’m starting my education all over again.  I’m sure I will write more about certain herbs as time goes on (especially if I pick up on any reader interest in that area--any herbal folk reading this?).  But my experience, conveyed in words, dies as it crystallizes once more into run-of-the-mill knowledge.  Maybe all I’m really trying to say is, ‘There’s a whole living world out there. Go taste it!’  

    

A Little Eye Candy

I'm awful wordy on these pages, so as I sit here in the Portland airport all sentimental I thought I'd reward the faithful with some eye candy: various favorite shots from Nepal and North India, 2008-10.  Shout out to Thandiwe Gobledale, Alden Towler and his Aunt Ninny for photo credits.  

Goat sacrifice at a rice mill to in honor of the goddess Durga.  Millions of animals are sacrificed every year at the culmination of this Dashain festival.  Tamang village of Borjyang, Kabhre district, Nepal.  

The annual Newar tradition Mha Puja (honoring one's own body) at a home in Patan, Nepal

At a rang waali's (color vendor's) stall in Kolkata, 2009

Getting the full treatment on Holi, the festival of colors.  Pedong, Darjeeling district, Spring 2009

Sadhus lounging at Pashupatinath, Kathmandu

A prayer flag in lower Mustang on the Annapurna circuit

Sorting coriander seeds on the porch of a village house on the outskirts of the KTM valley.  When asked how old she was, this woman shrugged and said in Nepali 'who knows, my eyes don't work, can't hardly get around, it's about time to die already'

One of a million little roadside shrines in Kathmandu

Bel juice vendor in Kolkata

3-tier sleeper class, baby

Where's Waldo material.  I'd be scowling too if I were buried in vinyl handbags in 95 degree heat...Bhubaneshwar, 2010

Near the fabled Jagganath temple in Puri, Orissa