Living A Balanced Life, Ⅲ
Living a balanced life is wise and prudent regardless of whatever circumstances you may be coming from.
Living a balanced life is both the solution for healing extreme damage to your body, as well as preserving the valuable resources held within your body [your five organ systems].
This is specifically your Chi, Blood, Yin (immune, fluids & cooling) & Yang (metabolism, fluid transformation and distribution), also known as the Four Treasures of your body.
What things should be included in the worthy pursuit of living a balanced life? In our western culture, more often than not, daily life appears in the form of: paying bills, sex, sleep, work, food…
That’s all to life, isn’t it? Or is it?
All of these things are defined in Chinese Medicine Methodology as our external life.
In the Chinese way of thought, the internal world, defined literally as your internal world of emotions, your mind including your Shen or spirit, is just as important as your external life, if not more important. The reason here is that your external life sprouts from, and is a manifestation, extension and resultant from your internal life.
If your internal environment is the seed and soil of your future, of course you’re going to want to give priority to the quality of that soil, paying a lot of attention into what kind of seeds you are planting!
What you may not know is that each of your five internal organ systems also has an associated spirit within them, responsible for key aspects of your personality. For your Liver Organ System, the spirit is your Hun, or soul. For your Heart Organ System, it is your Shen or spirit. For your Spleen (Digestive) Organ System it is your Yi or logic. For your Lung Organ System it is your Po or courage and for your Kidney Organ System it is your Zhi or will.
The true definition of balance is unique for each individual, as each individual’s specific needs are different.
These ideas on a balanced life we provide to help work as a prompt and stimulate change, the basis of Chinese Medicine.
Below is a picture of a Triangle of Balance created by one of our Chinese Herbalists. As you can see, the External Life corner is where you may spend most of your time, yet it is still only one third of the triangle. Two thirds of it is usually barely transversed.
Many people would do well to include all three, in some fashion or another, to round out and balance their life, perhaps even you!