Chinese Herbal Treatment of the Small Intestine

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Chinese Herbal Treatment of the Small Intestine Audio

Chinese Herbal Treatment of the Small Intestine Excerpt

Note: Although the material covered in this class has tremendously rich diagnostic significance for acupuncturists as well as herbalists, the specifically herbal material presented in this class is intended to be used only by licensed herbalists. A full working knowledge of Chinese diagnostics and common standards of herbal prescription will be assumed. Prescribing herbs without sufficient education is dangerous.

“The Small Intestine is also not going to be healthy if the Stomach is not healthy. This is part of that whole question of, ‘What are the benefits and the drawbacks of treating the Small Intestine indirectly, balancing the Heart and the Stomach?’ It’s a must! It’s an absolute must. There isn’t a healthy Small Intestine without a healthy Stomach, because the Stomach is the primary grunt-work cognitive organ, and it’s sort of like the gross adjustment, and then the fine adjustment, on something. The gross adjustment, the gross processing of ideas or food or life experience, is Stomach, and if the gross process is off, then your fine tuner is just, is hopeless, you know? You can’t fine tune something that’s going, ‘Huh, well, she said, dahhh…’ You know, you can’t do it. So, conclusions, assumptions, and stories that we’re living in, phlegm type of stuff.

There’s a lot of treating the Stomach especially for its failure to chew its food up properly, in terms of phlegm, that’s necessary. So there’s, for instance, Six Gents, Liu Jun Zi Tang with Chang Pu Acorus and Yuan Zhi Polygala, comes up all the time for what seems to be a flailingly confused Small Intestine, but is actually a Stomach not doing its job of basic processing clearly, so that the Small Intestine is hopelessly gummed up and confused and doesn’t know what’s going on.

The Stomach can also be overprocessing, which will whack out the Small Intestine too. The relationship of thought to perception can either be gummy and unclear, or too hot, or too scattered. The scattered, again, is Gui Pi Tang. People who go in for recreational thinking. ‘Hi, recreational thinkers anonymous.’ People who start, just having fun thinking about things, and it’s junk food of the mind. It’s not really what you need to be paying attention to. That’s gonna be a Gui Pi Tang base.

There’s also thinking too fast, and thinking too hot, when the Stomach gets greedy and becomes a kind of [bzzzzzzzzzzz sound] fast-moving blender, which it can when there’s a lot of sensory bombardment, the Stomach speeds up, thinks it has to eat fast, chew fast, swallow fast, come up with the answer fast. This is very hard on the Small Intestine also, because it can’t take the time to have ambiguity in it, and things can get overly clear with a hot Stomach. If the Stomach is too hot, everything gets way too clear, and that heat gets passed on to the Small Intestine, and you have a Dao Chi San type situation where there’s an incredible level of literal-mindedness, and when we’re very literal-minded, it is very possible to think very quickly, and very clearly. It’s not just realistic anymore. It FEELS very realistic because it’s very clear and the mind is working so swiftly and the mind is very clean, but it’s bullshit! Because it’s not open to the ambiguity of life, which is much more yin and murky and dark. So it can be heat burning things too clean and not allowing enough yin and murk. Or it can be yin deficient heat, which takes us into the issue of the nervous system and the tai yang and the Bladder and the Kidney.

Sometimes, the Stomach is actually the schlemazel of the nervous system, or tai yang, and Kidney, the Water element, that the Stomach is thinking so fast because it can’t be quiet, because it can’t slow down.”

© 2018 Thea Elijah