Traditional Chinese Medicine contemplates something that in the positivist view (of some Western communities), has gone completely unnoticed, the Qi (pronounced chi). For her, everything in the universe is Qi, whether it is the current of bioelectricity that constitutes the body, the material structure of a bone or other tissues or the emotions that generate thoughts/feelings.
Qi can be defined, if one wishes to simplify this definition to the extreme, as energy; however this concept is very broad, since it encompasses various manifestations among which are forms/functions/a varied number of physical and non-physical substances/structures/feelings/signals/waves/vibrations/emotions/thoughts and other visible and «invisible» elements that form the body at all its energetic levels and that intertwine it in a network of internal and external relationships, in short it reaches the delicate and impalpable fluid/ether called Yin and Yang.
This way of thinking about things, beyond the limits of the positivist gaze, when understood in depth, expands the therapeutic possibilities to levels that the biomedical conception does not reach. If we stop contemplating the solid structures, tissues and cells that form a physical body as purely material structures and start thinking that they are not so much, or that this structure goes beyond the idea of material, that they are condensed energy, the most deeply rooted concepts about matter will immediately begin to change; a disease with organic deterioration is no longer just a disease that is damaging the physical body, it begins to take the form of a global imbalance and a state of discontinuity of the flow of Qi in all its forms and manifestations that involves all the so-called personal history or legend.
In Chinese Medicine it is considered that man (microcosm) is a reflection of the Universe (macrocosm). The man who is between heaven and earth is what in this worldview is called Ren: person/subject/individual, is a form of energy which in turn is nourished by the Yang and Yin energy coming from the first two (energy of heaven and energy of the earth). The same laws that explain the changes in Nature, Yin-Yang, Wu Xing, (five movements or five elements), apply to the functioning of the organism. The organism is a unit, it is a system in which any function, organ, tissue, structure, vibration, are related to each other. Moreover, there is a direct correspondence between what happens in nature and what happens to the subject (and vice versa). The changes and mobilizations that exist between the energies that make up heaven and earth are innumerable, so man and nature are closely related.
I invite everyone to read Matias’ post with the topic of the day.
El Arbol de la Vida - Tercer Ciclo 