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. 

Notes from a Cookbook to be

I'm finally doing it: throwing together my obsession with food and my increasingly arcane views on health into a sort of manifesto, masquerading as a cookbook. The project's still in its early adolescence, but I see no reason not to provide a taste of it here.

* * *

Guidelines for Cooking and Eating Well:

Base your meals around what’s fresh and in season.
Use all your senses.
Don’t be Afraid of Salt and Oil.
Use Good Ingredients and Be Generous with Them.
Be Mindful of Balance.

Together these add up to a formula for good eating and, through it, satisfaction and health. The first guideline may seem obvious, but the point is often lost on folks: you’ll eat better if you head to the market with an open mind and let yourself be moved by what looks, smells, feels, tastes, and sounds good. That’s where the second rule comes in, obviously. Engage with your ingredients on a visceral level. Then as you head home with a bag full of whatever called out to you, let inspiration for how to use it all come to you. Or if that’s too abstract, start planning your meals as you roam amongst the garden rows, market stalls or aisles. Just don’t let preconceived notions of what you’re going to cook dictate your choices completely. You’ll miss too many delights that way.
My third and fourth rules may come as a surprise, since I’m advocating a certain level of indulgence and claiming to offer a healthy approach at the same time. The idea is that food should be about pleasure, not guilt; depriving ourselves of what satisfies us now is only likely to lead to overindulgence in less wholesome ways later. True, we first need to discern what is truly wholesome and nourishing. And the answers here may be counter-intuitive. After all, we have been trained for a few generations now to avoid so many of the foods we naturally gravitate towards. Nutritional science has by turns steered us harshly away from fats, carbohydrates, sugar, and meat. Every two weeks, it seems, there is a sea change in what is allowed to count as healthy. And partly as a result of this indecision, we find ourselves in the midst of what Michael Pollan calls a “national eating disorder.” We are simultaneously obese and starved for nourishment; record numbers struggle with anorexia. It’s probably not a coincidence that fewer and fewer people spend time cooking, or even feel comfortable in the kitchen. For the question of what to eat is a remarkably simple one (and one that applied science has done more harm than good in trying to answer). Michael Pollan again: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
The heart of the answer is incredibly simple: eat food. Real food. The sorts of things people have been eating for millennia. We all know at some level what this means: real, crusty bread that you have to chew; vegetables that aren’t jetlagged from their red-eye flight from another hemisphere; fragrant nut and seed oils and sweet yellow butter; and, yes, meat, from animals that lived happily and healthily and were slaughtered humanely.
Lest this sound too good to be true, there is a mounting movement to support exactly this kind of traditional food and reveal the dangers of modern, industrialized diets. The work of the early 20th Century dentist Weston A Price has been championed by Sally Fallon and others to show that people living on traditional diets tend to be in excellent physical condition and don’t suffer from the degenerative diseases that plague modern Americans. “Traditional diets” means exactly what Michael Pollan does: real food. But some of the details are surprising, because it is often exactly those foods which we’ve been warned against most severely that turn out to be most supportive of good health. A prime example is fat. Fat itself has been demonized, which is absurd since fats are an essential class of macronutrients that we need to produce everything from cell membranes to sex hormones. Simply put, without fat people go crazy, wither away and eventually die. The key, however, is getting the right kind of fat, and this is where the biggest surprise comes in. Because the saturated animals fats that we all “know” are bad for you turn out to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Butter, lard, tallow--all of these are life-supporting lipids, provided they themselves come from healthy animals. In this sense the authorities are correct, for most of the butter on the market come from cows raised away from their natural pasture and in factory farms. But real, sweet, yellow butter is out there, too, and worth every penny you pay for it. This kind of butter actually concentrates the nutrients found in green grass, providing a rich source of the omega-3 fatty acids that have emerged recently as so crucial to good health. Lard from pastured pigs is similarly healthy, in proper proportion. Of course, it’s not just animal fat that’s good for us: plant oils are great too, if they’re unrefined. This is what makes extra virgin olive oil so healthy as well as so flavorful. What most people don’t realize is that tons of other seeds and nuts are equally healthy and delicious, if we can get a hold of them in cold-pressed forms. Sunflower, mustard, hazelnut, almond--every edible seed has precious oil locked within.

...But for whom? What the Weston Price/Sally Fallon school of traditional diets tends to gloss over is that not all people are the same. Some of us struggle to keep our weight down, while others can’t ever seem to put on a pound. Some are prone to acne while others have perpetually dry skin. Some people do indeed have to watch their salt intake and blood pressure, while others have to make sure they’re getting enough iron and other nutrients to keep from becoming anemic and having fainting spells.
Almost everybody has an intuitive sense of what’s right for them. Haven’t you ever bitten into a radish or a cucumber and felt unreasonably good? Or eaten a supposedly healthy meal only to find it’s given you gas, or that you’re hungry again 90 minutes later?
A one size fits all approach doesn’t work. This is where traditional ideas from both Eastern and Western traditions can help immensely... (to be continued)