A TCM Checkup - yin and yang
April 16th 2007 08:09
The way Traditional Chinese Medicine sees health is as the flow of yin and yang. These concepts, yin and yang, cover many things. Here we will just take a quick overview of what they mean in our health.
Firstly there is waking (yang) and sleeping (yin). We need enough sleep to restore ourselves so that we can move easily to our days activities (yang). And this may be more than we think. If you can allow yourself to sleep until you are ready to get up. You may be surprised by how much sleep you need. But when you do get enough sleep your alertness goes up a lot. In the West we tend to devalue the yin – we care about what people (the yang) but without the restoration of sleep we will do less and do it less well. Nourishing the yin aspect of our lives (the yin) is important.
During our activity (yang overall) there is also the flow from yin to yang. Working ceaselessly all our waking hours is not a recipe for good health. Those pagers are stressful, even when we aren’t paged. They mean part of us still working – even when it doesn’t look like it. And so the yang intrudes into the parts of our lives where we should be resting (a yin time). How rare it is to find people who can truly rest: who don’t get agitated and want to fill there rest with more activity, however aimless.
Our waking hours should alternate rest and activity. For each of these times are likely to be a little different. I take a while to start the day, others like to work lots in the morning and tail off in the afternoon. Others only fire up once the sun starts setting. The more you can know and work in accord with your own yinyang rhythm the easier your life will be.
The yin and yang can be applied at any scale, we can take it down to seconds (me thinking about what to say next and then typing for instance). But these strokes are useful and give us an easy place to start.
So to have a good foundation for your health have a look at how you flow from yin to yang.
Firstly there is waking (yang) and sleeping (yin). We need enough sleep to restore ourselves so that we can move easily to our days activities (yang). And this may be more than we think. If you can allow yourself to sleep until you are ready to get up. You may be surprised by how much sleep you need. But when you do get enough sleep your alertness goes up a lot. In the West we tend to devalue the yin – we care about what people (the yang) but without the restoration of sleep we will do less and do it less well. Nourishing the yin aspect of our lives (the yin) is important.
During our activity (yang overall) there is also the flow from yin to yang. Working ceaselessly all our waking hours is not a recipe for good health. Those pagers are stressful, even when we aren’t paged. They mean part of us still working – even when it doesn’t look like it. And so the yang intrudes into the parts of our lives where we should be resting (a yin time). How rare it is to find people who can truly rest: who don’t get agitated and want to fill there rest with more activity, however aimless.
Our waking hours should alternate rest and activity. For each of these times are likely to be a little different. I take a while to start the day, others like to work lots in the morning and tail off in the afternoon. Others only fire up once the sun starts setting. The more you can know and work in accord with your own yinyang rhythm the easier your life will be.
The yin and yang can be applied at any scale, we can take it down to seconds (me thinking about what to say next and then typing for instance). But these strokes are useful and give us an easy place to start.
So to have a good foundation for your health have a look at how you flow from yin to yang.
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