Post about "learning"

This morning, we woke up to cars covered in frost and my husband, son and I spent 15 minutes scraping windows so that we could drive to work and school. My husband told me that he was planning on biking but had run out of time. He said it felt so good to bike yesterday because he worked up a huge sweat. Arg!, I said, the Neijing says not to sweat in the autumn and winter! He looked at me and smiled, sort of shook his head and then kissed us goodbye. The Neijing is not the magical thing to him that it is to me.

I got in the car with my son, who was refusing to wear his hat and wanted me to turn the heater up full blast. I drove past swarms of children and teenagers on their way to school in the 33 degree weather this morning. My son and I looked at their shorts, skirts and thin sweatshirts, saw their bare necks and heads, legs, shivering from the cold as they stood with their arms wrapped around themselves, trying to stay warm.

My son is only six, but we’ve talked a lot about Zheng Qi and Wei Qi…which we refer to in simplistic terms as “The Soldiers.” Today we talked about The Soldiers at The Doorways and gates that go into our bodies. We talked about our bathroom door and how we almost have to slam it closed in the winter because it swells from the cold, but in the summer, it opens and closes so easily.

He asked me why sweating isn’t so good for us in the winter and we thought together about how hard it must be for The Soldiers to close The Doors in the wintertime after they are opened from sweating. If these doors are left open, cold and wind can get inside and make us sick. We played with these concepts and with his help, I began to see even more fully how simple and amazing these ideas around seasonal living are. He must have seen it too, because he quickly put his hat on and turned the heat down a little. He wants to be healthy and he wants to thrive – it’s just a matter of communicating how to do that and empowering him to start figuring these things out on his own.

This is what is so beautiful about Chinese medicine and ancient medicine in general. Really, it’s what is so beautiful about ancient thinking. This type of thinking honors both the artistic and the scientific points of view. It allows a type of intelligence that includes the imagination, somatic sensation and emotional input. It’s a world view based on beauty and observation, both inside ourselves and out and requires that we pay attention to what’s going on around us at any given time – rather than putting value only on the abstract.

Instead of trying to quote facts or studies that would be meaningless to this child, we were able to talk about something we both experience daily – the inability of our bathroom door to close. We used our imagination, our intuition and our logic to come to conclusions together….and that’s the other big thing. Instead of some pedantic exercise in lecturing another human being about the facts of life, of this body, of this world – we discussed these things as equals, as two beings coming together with our equally valid and wonderful experience and in this way we both learned something. What an amazing gift to start seeing the world in this way, to start seeing our health in this way – to be in partnership for the discovery  of health in the relationship between patient and practitioner, parent and child, etc.