New Perspective, New Opportunities, Ⅱ
While many of these words are familiar, the associated ideas are often not. Unless you’ve been around Chinese Medicine for a while, ideas like tonifying, chi, orifices, yin, yang, phlegm-heat, wind, transformation, Spirit and more, are all probably pretty strange, especially as it applies to your health!
Yet, this is where Chinese Medicine really shines. Your body is known to be entirely interlinked, dependent and reactive upon the environment it is in. Truly, your body cannot be separated from the environment. It is constantly engaging with the world around us, being sustained by it, from the air that we breathe and filter, to the foods you eat and process, to the pathogens that seek to break through your immunological barriers that your organ systems are hopefully warding off.
As human beings, we are continually intertwined and dependent upon this beautiful planet and all of the abundant life-giving resources it offers. It is because of these unique ideas and a bio-organic perspective in healing that Chinese Herbal Medicine is enabled to do things, not thought possible, with a bio-mechanical understanding of the human body.
In an effort to unveil what is hidden in its esoteric nature, let’s dive into the classification of Chinese Herbs that “Release the Exterior”. Such a unique and yet foreign idea, let’s try and understand this concept for the purpose of opening our minds to this idea of bio-organic healing.
As we often write about in our various articles, Chinese Medicine likens the body to the Earth, or a garden which is a microcosm of the Earth. In Chinese Medicine, we have an understanding of both an interior and an exterior of the body. The Exterior in this sense can be equated with the outside crust of the Earth. The most exterior aspect of your body is obviously, the skin. The skin then becomes the bridge between your body and the environment. A lot of different things can happen on this front.