Podcasts about wuxing

This episode we look at time and direction and the influence of geomancy--theories of Yin and Yang and a little bit of how people viewed the world through that lens.  For more, check out the blog page:  https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-127 Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is episode 127: Time and Direction in Ancient Yamato   Officers of the court stood in the pavilion.  The soft trill of water could be heard trickling from one reservoir to the next.  They watched closely, as the figure of a court official, one hand out, pointing at a measuring stick, slowly rose along with the water.  Eventually, the figure's outstretched arm indicated a line with a single character next to it. On cue, one of the officials began to beat the large drum that was nearby.  The rhythm was slow, but deliberate, and the sound was loud, echoing out to the mountains and back, showering the nearby palaces in a layer of sound.  Across the palace, people briefly paused, took note of the number of strokes, and by that they knew the time of day.  Without giving it much more thought, they then went about their business.     This episode we find ourselves partway through the reign of Naka no Oe, aka Tenji Tennou—his formal reign started in 668, but he had been pretty much running things since the death of Takara Hime in 661 and, arguably, for much longer than that.  668, however, saw Naka no Oe ascend the throne in his new palace of Otsu no Miya, officially making him the sovereign.  And although 645 is the year Naka no Oe and others had started the Taika Reforms, it's not wrong to say that  that 668 and the start of Naka no Oe's official reign, brief as it would be, that he finally had the ability to bring it all together and set it into stone. We've talked about many of these reforms before on the podcast, but a lot of them were associated with the continued push to incorporate continental concepts into Yamato society, covering everything from court ranks to how to organize agricultural production.  Of course, there was also Buddhism, which we've covered numerous times, but there were other concepts coming across as well, including ideas about history and writing, as well as ancient STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  This included architects, and new ways of constructing buildings.  And it also meant ways of seeing the world, including things like directions and time.  And this is what I want to focus on this episode, taking a break from the primary narrative to spend some time on what we might call Yamato concepts of science, especially how they thought about the structure of reality organization of time and the universe – their cosmology, as it were.  After all, to better understand the reasoning and motives of people, it is helpful to try and understand how they saw the world, not just for translation—understanding what it means when an entry says something like the “Hour of the Horse” on an “Elder Wood” day—but also for understanding how things actually worked in their eyes.  For instance, the idea of ”auspicious” and “inauspicious” times and directions is something that most listeners probably don't incorporate much into their daily lives, but the Chroniclers and the people of Yamato absolutely did, so understanding concepts like this can sometimes be the key to unlocking why historical people may have taken the actions that they did.  In particular, we'll talk about things like yin and yang, five elements, ten stems and twelve earthly branches, and what all this meant for the Yamato ideas of organizing time and space. A large part of Yamato cosmology is tied to something called Onmyoudou, literally the Way of Yin and Yang, which in the organization of the Ritsuryo state fell under a particular ministry, known as the Onmyo-ryo.  If you've heard of Onmyoudou before, you likely have heard about the “Onmyouji”, practitioners who studied the flow of yin and yang—and who could reportedly do miraculous things with that.  A 10th century Onmyoji, the famous Abe no Seimei, is perhaps the most well-known, with numerous stories about his exploits, which were then turned into a fantastical series of stories by the award-winning author, Baku Yumemakura.  Those were then turned into Manga, movies, and more.  Abe no Seimei is like Japan's Merlin, or Gandalf, at least in the stories. Back to the organization we mentioned, the Onmyou-ryou was responsible for Yin-Yang theory, or Onmyou-dou, which included divination, as well as astronomy, or Tenmon-dou, and calendar making, or reki-dou.  While some of this was based on straight up natural observances, a lot of it was explained through older concepts of Yin and Yang theory.  Today, you might encounter a lot of this in the theories around Feng Shui, and this can also be referred to as “geomancy”, or earth divination.   To give a broad overview of Onbmyoudou and its origins, it is part of a large corpus of concepts focused around a concept of energy known as qi or ki—which forms the basis for a lot of Chinese and Japanese cosmology, or their concept of how the world worked.  Much of this is tied up in concepts that are modernly broadly called “Daoist” or associated with so-called Daoist practices.  That term can be a bit misleading, as strictly speaking, Daoism refers to the teachings of the legendary philosopher Laozi, in his book, the Dao De Jing, as well as works attributed to later authors, like the Zhuangzi. There is some controversy as to when and to what extent this strict Daoism came to Japan.  However, in the broader sense, the category of “Daoist “ practices includes an entire panoply of various folk practices, including concepts of Yin and Yang – and in the archipelago, many of these concepts were imported with the various books that people had acquired on the mainland, even if they weren't strictly tied to Daoist religious practice.  For example, there were aspects that were borrowed by various Shinto shrines, and others formalized into ritual practices under the new government.  And of course many of these became linked to various Buddhist teachings and practices, as well.   But what did this actually look like in concept and practice for practitioners of Onmyoudo in Japan? Let's start with the idea of yin and yang.  One of the earliest references comes from the Zhou Yi, the Zhou Book of Changes, the core of what we also know as the Yijing, the Book of Changes.  Here we see the idea that the universe began with a single force that split into two, and those two forces make up all of creation in one way or another.  Yin and Yang, or In and You—or even Onmyou—refer to these forces, which are characterized as shadow and light, moon and sun, female and male, cold and hot, etc.  So these forces are opposites, but it should be noted that they are not necessarily good or evil.  After all, too cold is just as bad as too hot.  Likewise too much darkness is as blinding as too much light. As most people have seen, yin and yang are often depicted as a circle divided into two comma shapes, with a smaller circle in each.  One side is white with a black circle and the other is black with a white circle.  This is the “Tai Chi” diagram, but the diagram itself doesn't seem to have been depicted like this prior to the 11th century, at least that we are aware. But the concepts are much older.    Now if you've heard of the Yijing, where it came from is something of a mystery.  One theory is that it started as a written account of folk wisdom, and may have even given instructions for things like when to plant and when to harvest, based on changes in various heavenly phenomena.   But overall it is organized into 64 chapters, each associated with a particular hexagram.  Start with a line, that can either be a full line – representing yang – or a broken line representing yin.  Stack three of these on top of one another and you get a trigram.  If you chart out every single possible combination of yin and yang lines, you get 8 unique trigrams, sometimes referred to as the baqua.  Stack two trigrams atop one another and you get a hexagram, a combination of 6 lines that can have 8 by 8 or 64 unique variants.   It's theorized that the Yijing resulted from taking all of the collected sayings or aphorisms and bits of advice and cataloguing and dividing them into 64 chapters, each one associated with a given hexagram. Going further, each line of the hexagram is  associated with particular line in Yijing, and various meanings are ascribed to it and its association.  It's a complex and fascinating system and I don't have time to go into it fully, but I would note that this was used as a form of divination—yarrow stalks or other means of random lot drawing that gives you a binary outcome – zero or one, yin or yang – could be used to determine the six lines of any given hexagram.  This, in turn, would reference a chapter in the Yijing which was then interpreted as a sign as to how to read a given situation that you might find yourself in. What's really important to understanding the worldview of the time is this idea, represented by the hexagrams in the Yijing, that you can encompass everything about the universe by making and cataloging different amounts and arrangements of yin and yang. It's a science, as it were – a systematic approach to understanding the differences in the world by breaking it into component parts.    And if this seems preposterous, consider this:  today we understand that all things are made up of tiny atoms.  And these atoms are all made up of the same material—protons, neutrons, and electrons.  And yet, how those atomic particles combine create atoms with wildly different qualities.  And how those atoms then combine into molecules and so on and so forth describe how we explain everything around us.  So is it really so far-fetched? I'm not saying that we should suddenly start to figure out the measurements of yin and yang in everything, but if we want to understand how the people of the time saw their world, it may be helpful to hold an open mindand understand the assumptions that they were working from and where they came from.  As human beings, we naturally look for connections in the world around us, and this was no exception.  People would observe facts, know how that it worked, and often then would back into the reason for it.  This is a tale told across cultures, and we still see it, today.  At the same time, we've developed structured approaches to test out our theories, empirically. So for the moment, let's leave the trigrams and hexagrams, and talk about another idea that also gained traction as people were trying to figure out how the world worked.  This was the five elements theory also known as Wuxing, or Gogyou, in Japanese.  The five elements in this case are Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, and Earth.  Some may notice that these, along with the sun and the moon, are used in Japanese for the days of the week:  Nichi (sun), getsu (moon), ka (fire), sui (water), moku (wood), kin (metal), do (earth). Buddhists, by the way, also had an elemental system with only four elements,  Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, possibly connected with some Greek influence, and brought along with Buddhist practice.  For now, however, let's focus on the five elements. The idea in wuxing is similar to that of yin and yang in that everything in creation is made up of these five elements in some degree and configuration.  Furthermore, there are creation and destruction cycles.  So fire creates ash, or earth.  Earth gives birth to metal.  Metal creates water—look at a cold piece of metal in a warm environment and see how the water droplets form on it, and imagine what that looks like without understanding humidity and how there could be water vapor in the air.  And then water creates wood, or plants—any farmer could tell you that without water the plants die.  And wood is where we get fire from. Of course, the reverse cycle is the opposite.  Fire eats the wood.  Wood drinks up the water.  Water rusts metal.  Metal tools plough the earth. And Earth can be used to douse fire. Finally, there is another cycle of weakening. ,. Because fire heats and weakens metal, metal chops down wood, the trees roots break up rocks, the earth soaks up water, and water likewise puts out or weakens fire. So the theory went, if these elements make up all matter, these relationships continue on a more complex scale in everything.  So if something was thought to contain a lot of “fire” element, then it would be potentially helpful if you needed “Earth” but destructive or at least weakening to metal and wood.  Properly accounting for these elements was important to achieve the results you were looking for, whatever that may be.   These were the kinds of things that were incorporated into traditional medicine practices, but also applied to auguries or divination about things like where and how to build a building.  Even today, Shrines will sell calendars that help people know the prominence of certain elements, and some folk remedies may look to balance elements, much as medieval European medicine was often designed to balance the four humors that ancient physicians believed were present in the human body. The chart of these five elements and their relationships is something you may have seen.  It is a five pointed star, often inside of a circle.  Of course this is also similar to a western pentagram, though typically drawn with the point of the star up, but it has nothing to do with Christian values or Satan, or anything similar.  Rather, it is just a way to represent these five elements, and you'll see it frequently in reference to Onmyoudou. The elements were used to categorize many different areas into groupings of five.  This includes grouping the various directions into five directions.  Of course, you may be wondering about that, since most societies usually mark four cardinal directions, and in this case, they did the same, but added the fifth as “center”.  And so you get things like the north is water.  It is related to cool, or cold weather.  It is represented with the color black. To the south, opposite of the north, is fire.  It is hot, and the color is red.  Of course, this probably doesn't take a huge leap to see the connections they drew: since these civilizations are in the northern hemisphere, the farther north you go, the colder it gets, and the farther south you travel, the warmer it gets, generally speaking, at least until you reach the equator. Meanwhile, the west was related to metal, and the color white, while the east was related to woods and forests, and the color…. Blue.  Alright, that last one, in particular, probably doesn't make sense to a lot of us.  After all, we likely associate blue with water, and wood, or trees, would be associated with brown or, possibly, green.  Well, in this case, it goes beyond that.  The north is water, but it is also associated with darkness—shorter days in the winter, and things like that Sothe association of north with black makes sense, but many also look at the ocean and don't necessarily see it as “blue”, or dark or even black, like Homer's famous “wine-dark sea”. Furthermore, although they have a word for it (midori), “green” was not a primary color in Japan, instead  considered more of a shade of “aoi”, or blue.  Even today they refer to a “green” traffic light as an “aoi shingo, not “midori” shingo.  So if you asked someone in the Asuka period to describe the wooded hills and fields, they would have likely used “aoi”.  And of course, we are missing the fifth element.  In the center we have the element earth and the color yellow. A lot of these different concepts were brought together during the Han period, when they were trying to syncretize all of the various philosophies and attempts to describe the world and bring them all together into a single system.  This meant that the Yijing, the wuxing theory, and others were mixed together with various other philosophies and theories of how the world work.  Things like the Shanhaijing, the Classic of Mountain and Seas, along with stories about immortals, the Queen Mother of the West, and more were all rolled together, and basically assumed to be true.  This included various real-world observations.  Therefore, there were many attempts to try and reconcile these various theories together. One of the other concepts, which we've discussed before, was the system of ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches.  We've mentioned this before regarding the sexagenary style of counting the years, but we'll recap here.  The ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches are concepts that go back to at least the legendary Shang period, and even show up in various bronzes Andit wasn't until later that they would be associated with other ideas.  The ten heavenly stems were each associated with one of the five elements, with each element being represented by a greater and lesser, or elder and younger, stem.  And then each of the twelve earthly branches were associated with animals—what we often call the Chinese Zodiac. We talked about how this applied to the calendar, in that it was used to track years in 60 year cycles, but also it was used to track days of the year.  The twelve earthly branches were also used for earthly directions.  The first, the rat, was in the north, and the order continued clockwise to the east, the south, west and then back to the north.  Now this means that the four cardinal directions—north, south, east, and west—all match up nicely with one of the twelve earthly branches, but as for northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest?  Those were all combinations of two branches.  So, for instance, the northeast was a combination of the ox and the tiger, or ushi-tora. Speaking of eight directions, where have we also heard the number eight come up recently? That's right: the eight trigrams, or bagua.  So each one of those trigrams, each representing a different concept, got associated with a direction as well.  This makes it easier to see where practices of geomancy came from.   You had a system with complex, overlapping associations between concepts and the physical world, and in the Tang dynasty, they used all of this  to understand not only  how things had happened, but also how the world would be in the future—in other words, they tried to use it to make predictions.  Hence the “mancy”. In the Yamato state, all of this became an official part of the government under the Onmyoryou: a branch of the government whose job is to make observations and figure things out from there, for the good of the state and the people.  They made observations of the heavens to figure out how the calendar should be aligned—which months should come at what time, and when there should be “leap months”, or intercalary months, to keep various astronomical phenomena in the correct seasons, which were also further divided up into 24 periods.  They also kept track of the movement of bodies like the various planets, because those planets were also assigned values, and thought to affect the flow of energy within this framework.  And so comets, storms, eclipses, and more were all important because of the theory that everything in the heavens impacted and were reflections of how things were happening on the earth.  Similarly, these various discussions of white animals and other omens were likely captured and catalogued by these officials as well, attempting to figure out what they meant. All of this also influenced things like how palaces, buildings, and even capitals, would be built and laid out.  For the palace, it was important the the sovereign be in the north, looking south.  In fact, many maps would have south at the top because that is how a sovereign would be viewing it, were it stretched out before them.  And one would need to consider various features, including mountains and streams, as all of those things carried various meanings, but it wasn't as simple as just finding the one thing that could affect a person.  As they observed differences they would also have to catalogue what happened and try to determine what the cause could be, based on their understanding of the world.  And in the archipelago this would also include an understanding of Buddhist and local kami-based wisdom and knowledge as well. One of the things in the Chronicles that inspired this episode was something I actually mentioned last time,  a record from 666  talking about Chiyu, a Buddhist priest of the Yamato no Aya family, who presented a south-pointing chariot to the sovereign, Naka no Oe.  this appears to be the same Chiyu from a similar record in 658, which also refers to him building a south pointing chariot.  So did it take him eight years, or is he just now presenting it to the sovereign?  And what, exactly, is a south-pointing chariot? Well, as the name implies, a south-pointing chariot is a two-wheeled chariot that always points south.  More appropriately stated, it is a wheeled device with a figure on top, much like a weather vane, which always points south.  This is usually described as the figure of a person or an official pointing in the appropriate direction.  This was a mechanical, rather than a magnetic compass. As the chariot, or carriage, is wheeled around, the two wheels spin.  The wheels themselves are independently connected to a series of gears.  If the wheels spin at the same rate, then their movement cancels each other out.  However, if one wheel turns more than the other, then it will cause the figure on the top to rotate.  Of course, as the chariot turns to the right, the left wheel, traveling along the outer diameter, will travel farther than the right.  This will cause the figure to turn counter-clockwise to the left, but from an outside observer's perspective, it will continue to point in the same direction, even as the chariot itself turns.  Turning to the left would cause the opposite effect. Though it may have been used earlier, there appears to be reliable written evidence of a South Pointing chariot starting from the third century.  The first one was based on much earlier stories of a similar device, but it is unclear if it was a chariot, some other device, or even just a legend that was told as historical fact.  From the third century on the design appears to have been continuously improved upon. I should point out that all we have is descriptions—we don't have any actual south pointing chariots, let alone diagrams showing how the mechanisms worked.  There is the possibility that it used a kind of differential gear to work automatically, but we don't have any actual evidence.  There are other theories that it may have required some kind of manual switch, so that it would attach to one wheel or the other as needed.  That would require that the chariot be moving in either a straight direction or turning in one particular direction, which seems rather unwieldy. I noted some of the problems with this, and even moreso in a place like Japan, where 70% of the terrain is mountains.  Up and down hills, along paths that are likely anything but the smooth, paved surface we have for roads today—and even those have plenty of irregularities and potholes that could throw off any such device. And if you want to use it for any real distance, then you have to factor in other things, including the curvature of the earth.  After all, with the earth being a sphere, any chariot traveling due west to east or east to west, other than at the equator, would have one wheel traveling farther than the other one.  Granted, at the scale we are talking about, it probably is all but negligible, and the rough terrain and simple slippage of what were most likely wooden gears probably entered a lot more variability than the earth's curvature. One of the other issues is that the chariot only points “south” if you set it up to do so.   And if you know that, well, why do you need a south-pointing chariot?  Ultimately, it seems that this is more of a novelty item, good for impressing crowds and demonstrating some engineering principles, rather than an actual, useful invention.  After all, it was forgotten about and recreated multiple times, often centuries apart.  Had it been a truly useful invention, it probably would have been kept in constant use.  Meanwhile, I suspect that there were a fair number of farmers and others who knew that you could more easily and reliably use the sun and stars, as long as the weather was clear. There is also some evidence of an understanding of magnetic compasses since at least the 2nd Century BCE.  Early Han sources suggest that a spoon made of naturally magnetized ore could be placed on top of a polished bronze surface, and it would align itself north to south.  We don't have any actual surviving examples, however—there are later versions that you can find, where the plate is divided up into various directions, and then a magnetized “spoon” is placed on top, but nothing has actually come from Han tombs.  Furthermore, this seems to mostly be for geomantic purposes.  A more practical compass, with a magnetized needle, seems to have been developed by the 11th century, which could then be used for actual navigation. By the way, the “spoon” as a compass pointer may be in reference to the “Big Dipper” constellation, which was envisioned as a spoon, or ladle, in shape.  The seven stars were often used in geomancy, likely because of their importance, at least in the northern hemisphere, of pointing to the north.  So there's some thought that the “needles” of these early compasses weren't litterally  spoon shaped, but symbolically representive of the Big Dipper or the Northern Ladle.  Quick astronomy lesson, here.  If you are in the northern hemisphere, particularly from the 35th parallel to the north pole, you can see the seven stars that make up the constellation or asterism we know as the Big Dipper.   In English we sometimes also refer to this as Ursa Major, though technically the familiar seven stars are just a part of that larger constellation.  In Japan, the same constellation is often referred to as Hokuto Shichisei, the Seven Stars of the Northern Ladle.  It can be seen further south, but parts of it may dip below the horizon during the autumn season. It is important for several reasons.  One is that it is made up of particularly bright stars, which you can generally see even when other stars may not be visible.  Second, its distinctive shape lends itself to being easy to find in the sky.  And finally, if you draw a line between two of the stars at the end of the “cup” of the ladle, you can follow that line to find Polaris or hokkyokusei, the north star, which means you know which direction is north- and once  you know that, you can use it to figure out any other direction.  And Polaris is less than a degree off of true north, making it even more accurate than most magnets, as the magnetic pole can be quite different, depending on its current position, and magnetic north changes over time as the magnetic field around the earth fluctuates. That said, this was not necessarily the case in ancient times.  Four thousand years ago, the star closest to true north would have been the star Thuban, in the constellation Draco, a star that most of us probably haven't heard of.  Polaris, in the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Bear, also known as the Little Dipper) apparently took over as the north star around 500 CE.  However, even before then, the mouth of the dipper could still be used to indicate north.  In fact, if you draw a line between two of the stars in the back of the constellation, then you also end up finding Thuban.  So even if the north star itself wasn't accurate, finding the dipper would still help you orient yourself, especially if you can find true north during the day and then compare that with the constellation at night. Which helps to understand why astronomy, or Tenmondou, was so important in the Onmyouryou.  Though it wasn't just a study of stars, but of the way of the heavens in general.  And the changes in the heavens, brings us to another important concept—the flow of energy across the seasons.  From the bright days of summer, filled with sunshine and yang energy, to the dark yin energy of winter's long, cold nights. It wasn't enough to just know what happened, and where, but when was also important. Obviously you need to know when to sow seeds, flood the fields, and harvest the rice.  Beyond that, though, you have other concepts, such as how the the day and hour of an event could be symbolically important. And of course, all of these had their own associations with various concepts of the flow of yin and yang energy. Now knowing the year, the month, and even the day is largely just a matter of counting.  But let's talk about something a little more tricky:  How do you know the hour? This brings us to the vignette at the top of the episode, about the clepsydra, or water clock, that Naka no Oe is said to have built. Now we talked about some of the fountains and similar things that have been discovered in the Asuka region back in episode 118.  One thing that they believe they also found evidence of is something called a water clock, which is, as its name suggests, a clock powered by water.  It is typically depicted as a series of three or more boxes or reservoirs that each hold an amount of water.  Water is placed in the top reservoir, and then a hole towards the bottom is unplugged and it is allowed to drain into the box beneath.  The hole is of a particular size, and thus the water flows at a constant rate, filling up the container below, which has a similar hole, etc. all the way to a reservoir at the very bottom.  The multiple boxes mean that the water level in the intermediate boxes stays relatively constant, resulting in relatively consistent pressure and flow rate.  The last reservoir has a measuring stick on a float, so that as the last box is filled with water, the measuring stick raises up.  Since it is rising at a constant rate, one can use that to tell how much time has passed, regardless of anything else.  Thus you can keep time even at night. There is a record of Naka no Oe making one in the fifth month of 660, and he would have another one built in 671, which we will discuss later.  It is interesting that both of these inventions appear twice in the narrative—once during the reign of Naka no Oe, aka Tenchi Tenno, and once during the previous reign, that of Takara Hime, aka Saimei Tenno.  In this case it is said that 671 is the first time that the water clock, or roukoku, was actually used. From what I can tell, there is nothing that definitively indicates that the Mizuochi site in Asuka was definitely the site of Naka no Oe's water clock.  There isn't much in the Chronicles telling us what it was like or where, exactly, it was built, and there wasn't anything found at the site naming it as the location of the roukoku.  However, the site is in a prominent enough place, with channels for water and a pavilion of some sort.  They definitely found evidence of pipes, remnants of lacquered wood, and reservoirs for water, among other things, that suggest something to do with moving water happened in this area.  So it seems a very strong choice, as it all fits with theoretical archeological reconstructions. A water clock like this is excellent for keeping accurate time at all hours of the day.  However, it does have a slight problem in that anyone without a clock is still going to have to use the sun and similar heavenly cues to know what time it is.  So how do you let them know?  Well, it turns out that the continent had an answer for that as well, and instituted various systems of drums and bells to let people know the hour.  In fact, some of these practices continued, in one form or another, right up to the modern day—with or without a water clock.  After all, the key was to give the community some sense of the passing of time, but I doubt anyone was using it to time things more precisely than a general idea of an hour—though they did have the concept of their own minutes and seconds.  Which brings us to just how they saw time back then. The system of time that the Chronicles seems to use also came over from the continent, where there appear to have been several different methods for telling time prior to accurate clocks.  And while there was an idea of dividing the entire day into twelve segments, the time as it was announced was not always consistent with those twelve segments, or hours.  Rather, time was based around the key parts of the day.  So, for instance there was sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight.  And while noon and midnight remain exactly twelve hours apart, sunrise and sunset change with the seasons.  So if you call out sunrise, and then divide the time between sunrise and noon into equal segments of time, the size of those time segments change with the seasons.  On top of that, because of the tilt of the earth and our slightly irregular orbit around the sun, the sun appears to “move” across the sky faster or slower throughout the year, with a difference of about 30 minutes total between the extremes.  This isn't going to affect most people's daily lives, but would have been noticeable to those taking accurate measurements. In ancient Han, this appears to have been common in cities and towns, with a watch that would call out as they progressed on their rounds at set points in the day and night, relying largely on heavenly cues—which I suspect did not lead to the most accurate timekeeping, but it was sufficient for what most people needed.  The telling of time in this manner was partly to help with keeping track of the time of day, but was just as much an announcement that the watch was on duty and a warning to would-be criminals. Now a water clock was an excellent device for keeping track of a standard, absolute time, such as it were, but it required constant maintenance.  If you already have a watch calling out the time, perhaps they can also keep the water clock properly set, but you did have to have someone constantly filling it up and draining it at known points of the day.  Plus there was the problem that you only knew the time if you could check it, and this wasn't like a clock tower or something similar. And so in 671 it appears that Nak no Oe instituted the continental idea of drums and bells to announce the time to the people—or at least to those at the court.  We don't have a record of exactly how they were, used, but we can infer from other sources on the continent, and what we do know that some tradition of announcing the time with drums and bells continued to be employed in Japan until the Meiji era, though perhaps not without interruption:  Temples and the like had bell or drum towers, and as the day progressed they would beat out the time.  It was not, however, telling time as we might think of it, with one stroke at the first hour, two on the second, etc..  In fact, in many ways they counted backwards, and they only counted 12 hours, not our modern 24.  By the Edo period it seems that it was common practice to toll the bells nine times at noon and at midnight.  From there, they would count down, with 8 bells at roughly 2 o'clock, 7 bells at 4 o'clock, and 6 bells at 6 o'clock.  That would be another issue.  From 6 o'clock, the number of bells that would be tolled continued to decrease, so that at 8 o'clock it would be 5 bells, then 4 bells at 10 o'clock.  It would then jump back up to 9 and start over again. Why these numbers were used for the different hours we are not entirely sure, and I have no idea if these numbers were the same ones used back in the 7th century—though it does seem to match similar continental traditions.  Even the hours themselves were known by the twelve signs that came to be associated with the zodiac:  the hour of the rat, the hour of the ox, the hour of the tiger, etc.  Midnight fell in the middle of the hour of the rat, and noon fell in the middle of the hour of the horse, with each hour being almost exactly 2 hours by modern reckoning. There were other systems in use as well.  One divided the entire day up by 100 and then each of those divisions by another 10.  The key was whether or not it was an absolute or relative measurement. Something like the roukoku would indicate an absolute measurement.  After all, the fall of water from one reservoir to another was not affected by the change in seasons—at least as long as the water didn't freeze.  The flow was constant, as was the measurement of time. For those using other forms of reckoning, such as celestial phenomena or even a sundial, things might be a bit less accurate.  This was especially true when using concepts like “sunrise” and “sunset”.  Still, through observing the changes over the year, people eventually figured out charts and rules to help reconcile absolute forms of measurement with solar time.  There were other methods for telling time, as well.  Perhaps one of the more pleasant was the use of incense sticks.  By the time of the Tang dynasty, incense in stick form was relatively common, and it had been noticed that sticks of incense could burn at a fixed rate.  This meant that you could use incense sticks like candles were used in Europe, counting down how far they had burned to tell what time it was.  If you were really fancy, you could make a single stick out of different types of incense, so that as it hit a new hour, the scent would change, alerting you to the time through your olfactory senses. Speaking of time, we are coming to the end of ours for this episode.  We do have some more information on this on our website, Sengokudaimyo.com, and we'll have links to those sections of the website accompanying our blog. Next episode we will focus more on the reign of Naka no Oe, aka Tenji Tennou, from his seat at Otsu no Miya. Until then, thank you once again for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website,  SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  

Daoism (formerly called Taosim) is the more prominent indigenous religion of China.Daoism incorporates philosophical writings from ancient scholars, and mystic divination based on a variety of fascinating methods. The Dao-de-jing (or Tao Te Ching) is one of the most famous classics, along with the Yi Jing (I Ching).In this episode we explore the mysterious figure of Laozi (Lao Tsu), and the complexities of the Wuxing. The systems of hexagrams, trigrams, and binary code are significant today to everyone living their best digital life, and the systems of heavenly stems and earthly branches affect the lives of all those who learn to understand them.Understanding the Dao and Qi are sure ways to improve your life. All this and more...Support us on Patreon or you can get our merch at Spreadshop. Join the Community on Discord. Learn more great religion factoids on Facebook and Instagram. 

这一回中孙悟空当了唐僧的徒弟，但他注定要忍受种种烦恼屈辱，一点一点磨掉他骄傲的脾气，这才能帮助唐僧做成一项有意义的事业。 This time, Sun Wukong becomes Tang Seng's disciple, but he is destined to endure all kinds of troubles and humiliations, and wear away his proud temper bit by bit, only in this way can he help Tang Seng accomplish a meaningful cause.

Viewed as the "least threatening" megacorp, this Hong Kong based company has what's considered to be the longest reach of any of the corps. Uncanny financial wizards they've risen rapidly in the corp standings. Primarily involved in shipping and insurance, there's more going on under the hood than it seems at first glance with this rapidly rising corporation.

S4E10 - Grounding to Be Our Best Recording Date: October 4, 2021 Transcript: Download transcript here Keywords: Fall, harvest, wu sing, season of metal season of lungs, slowing down, meditation, breathing exercises, holistic practices, gaining balance, embryonic breathing, Tien Di Shen Gong, heaven and earth spirit practice, guided meditation Summary: Jeremy Duke shares strategies for coping with the stress we have all experienced over the past year, "Grounding to Be Our Best". Topical Index: Introduction [00:00] Fall season of harvest [01:02] Seasons of stress [02:02] WuXing - five phases or five elements [03:16] -- Season of metal (Lungs) -- Earth Element Finding our center [4:37] Breathing exercise [06:11] Embryonic breathing [08:10] Grounding exercise [13:24] Tien Di Shen Gong [16:33] Closing [22:11] Find out more at https://networks-healing-circle.pinecast.co This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

On ne peut pas faire de Feng Shui sans connaitre les caractéristiques des 5 éléments chinois, et surtout comment ils interagissent les uns avec les autres. C'est la base de la base ! C'est pourquoi cet épisode est un peu plus long que d'habitude, je voulais prendre mon temps pour que vous saisissiez vraiment l'importance des 3 cycles. Enjoy !

Gwyn and Ode discuss Wuxing, the difference between elements and phases, and what the phases are and how they interact. Also Ode butchers some tones.

Sun Wukong gets his arse kicked for once when Red Boy doesn't believe that Pilgrim Sun used to be mates with his dad. Can Zhu Bajie fill his shoes? No. Obviously not.Links:Subscribe to our Patreon or buy us a coffee.Wuxing (or the five phases) on Wikipedia.Episode artwork is a photograph of statues of the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas from the Great Temple of Mazu in Tainan.Follow Caoimhe, MJ and this podcast on Twitter, follow MJ on Instagram and follow Caoimhe on the Fediverse.

The words Di Dao (Di Tao) is a concept that most of our SuperFeast community would be familiar with, as it's the way we source our herbs. Di Dao herbs are of the highest quality and grown with integrity to ensure optimal, powerful healing properties. For a herb to be classified Di Dao, it must have been grown in its natural habitat; Which means the right region, soil, and microclimate for that specific species. The beauty of Di Dao herbs is they perform optimally, much like the human body when it is holistically cared for and nourished the way it needs to be. In this episode, Mason chats with Jansen Andre on The Awoken Athlete podcast about SuperFeast's commitment to Di Dao sourcing, herbs for optimal performance, and a holistic perspective of the nuances that affect performance within the body at all levels. Mason details the integrity behind Di Dao sourcing and how it ensures the livelihood of micro-farming stays alive; Continuing the wisdom and teachings of Di Dao within communities. Whether you're an athlete or not, we're all being physically, emotionally, and mentally pushed with our hectic, under-nourished lifestyles. This episode addresses the best herbs for lifestyle support and performance on all levels.      " Di Dao. Going to the spiritual homeland of the herbs and buying and growing them there. Far away from industry. You're getting the spore or the seed from that area and making sure it's a particular microclimate in which it grows. This is based on texts over 2,000 years old that tell you how to do this."   - MasonTaylor     Mason and Jansen discuss: Qi and performance. Cordyceps and performance. Adaptogens and performance. Jing, Qi, Shen; How they work. Comparing Di Dao and organic. Preventing injury and exhaustion. Jing; nourishing a solid foundation. How to take SuperFeast tonic herbs. Di Dao; growing, sourcing, and integrity. Disease, healing, and building the body back up. The colonisation and institutionalisation around healing ourselves. Performance in business and the freedoms of staying investor-free.   Who is Mason Taylor? Mason Taylor is the founder of SuperFeast. Mason was first exposed to the ideas of potentiating the human experience through his mum Janesse (who was a big inspiration for founding SuperFeast and is still an inspiration to Mason and his team due to her ongoing resilience in the face of disability). After traveling South America for a year, Mason found himself struggling with his health - he was worn out, carried fungal infections, and was only 22. He realised that he had the power to take control of his health. Mason redirected his attention from his business degree and night work in a bar to begin what was to become more than a decade of health research, courses, education, and mentorship from some of the leaders in personal development, wellness, and tonic herbalism. Inspired by the own changes to his health and wellbeing through his journey (which also included Yoga teacher training and raw foodism!), he started SuperFeast in 2010. Initially offering a selection of superfoods, herbs, and supplements to support detox, immune function, and general wellbeing. Mason offered education programs around Australia, and it was on one of these trips that he met Tahnee, who is now his wife and CEO of SuperFeast. Mason also offered detox and health transformation retreats in the Byron hinterland (some of which Tahnee also worked on, teaching Yoga and workshops on Taoist healing practices, as well as offering Chi Nei Tsang treatments to participants). After falling in love with the Byron Shire, Mason moved SuperFeast from Sydney's Northern Beaches to Byron Bay in 2015. He lived on a majestic permaculture farm in the Byron hinterland, and after not too long, Tahnee joined him (and their daughter, Aiya was conceived). The rest is history - from a friend's rented garage to a warehouse in the Byron Industrial Estate to SuperFeast's current home in Mullumbimby's beautiful Food Hub, SuperFeast (and Mason) has thrived in the conscious community of the Northern Rivers. Mason continues to evolve his role at SuperFeast, in education, sourcing, training, and creating the formulas based on Taoist principles of tonic herbalism.   CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST    Resources: Mason Instagram SuperFeast Instagram SuperFeast Apple Podcast The Awoken Athlete Podcast Mind and Body Peak Performance with James Newbury (EP#106)    Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We'd also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher, CastBox, iHeart RADIO:)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Jansen Andre: (00:00:00): All right, Mason from SuperFeast, thank you so much for coming on The Awoken Athlete podcast today. For those of you who don't know, Mason runs a beautiful company called, SuperFeast, which is based around tonic herbs. Do you want to give us a little introduction, Mason, about what you do and how did you even start?   Mason Taylor: (00:00:23): Yeah, thanks for having me on. As you said, SuperFeast is about to turn 10 years old. So I've been doing it for a while now. The majority of the time when I started out, what I wanted to end up doing was Taoist tonic herbalism. So it's that style of herbalism that springs from the classical texts of Chinese Medicine and gears more towards prevention, the cultivation of life, the cultivation of potential, having the ability to not fall into early degeneration and wasting away, which is what we see as the norm in the western world.   Mason Taylor: (00:01:01): And even though I was really interested in performance, I had that drive in my early twenties when I was exploring this to see what was possible for my body. I was really curious in that, from a business sense getting into herbs, I was really interested in the trajectory that I was on towards the 70 year old self and 80 year old self. And the only place, at the time, especially around herbalism, I could see conversation or I could see terminology around how to get into a lifestyle flow utilising things like herbs that in a western sense and even in a modern Chinese Medicine sense is used just for symptoms. If there's a problem, respond with medicines, with herbs.   Mason Taylor: (00:01:48): The Daoist approach, had a conversation of how to cultivate life so that you can put the odds in your favour more and more and more not to end up in practitioners' offices. Not that I'm averse to it. I like working with practitioners as well, but not end up institutionally dependent. I will go into terminology a bit later in describing what these, so the three foundational treasures are, in the body. So the elements that make up what either keep you functioning and stop you from degenerating, keep you large over your life and then ensure that your best self is coming through, is Jing, Qi and Shen.   Mason Taylor: (00:02:28): And I just had conversations and practises in herbal usage around how to ensure that we really guard these treasures. That just really translates to hopefully, if it's maybe a little bit more or a lot more when we enter into our elder stages. Which of course then is going to mean that throughout our entire life we're a bit more robust and healthy. When we get to those later stages, you've got a relatively strong body. Your bones aren't wasting away. That's the Jing.   Mason Taylor: (00:02:56): You're hormones in a foundational level, are able to stay adaptive and if you don't have Jing, it's what people waste away with hectic lifestyles, no sleep and all that kind of stuff. You've got lots of Jing when you're a kid and that's why you burn it at both ends, but then people keep that up and they don't adjust and they don't get wiser as they get older, therefore their bones start wasting, their hips, their body has no strength. They lose that foundational energy. That's Jing energy.   Mason Taylor: (00:03:24): And so we want to make sure that that's safeguarded as well as our Qi. That's what enables us to stay mobile and regulate our heat, regulate our fluids, move us. Basically put the spark in the machine. Living Jing is just like, just say your body is just this machine of potential and flesh and if it's not animated, it's just sitting there, you need that thing to be rock solid. You need it to be really strong and have a lot of genetic potential. That's your Jing. And then you put a spark in and it comes to life and you can move through the world and animate through the world and regulate all the functions of the body. That's the Qi.   Mason Taylor: (00:03:59): That's the other thing we want to be nice and strong in our body throughout our entire lives and then the point of that is the Shen. Which is essentially if the heart's really healthy, the heart fire, which is not just the physical heart. If all the organs are really working well and showing that the emperor that is the heart, is really flowing, then throughout our lifetime, our consciousness, our virtuous nature, are part of us that's determined to be less of an asshole and more of an awesome person that isn't projecting all over everyone and actually has the capacity to learn from experiences, go through psychological developments, let go of ideologies, step more into our own truth, so on and so forth.   Mason Taylor: (00:04:43): That comes forth and what you see then is if the Shen's really allowed to express as you get to 70 and 80 and 90, what you see in people who are just, you know, they are these people that have evolved themselves, they're not vomiting their opinion all over everybody, they're not resigned, they're not resentful, they're not fearful, they're not unable to forgive, stuck in their ways. They can be fun, they can take the piss out of themselves and they're someone who's not a burden on the family. Not that I'm not judging these things, but it's like, that's the whole conversation.   Mason Taylor: (00:05:20): That's a very diluted one around this concept of Taoism and then get rid of the word, Taoism, ancient Chinese philosophy kind of stuff. It's just humans that were just like, how can we can just make this... Just keep us healthy for as long as possible and it's not deity based. You don't have to buy into a religion or anything like that. It's just around your own potential and your own discovery path. And that's what I started to discover before I started SuperFeast and I was like, that's... I wanted to get into herbs and then I discovered there were these herbs that were in that longterm focus and intention, so I just jumped in then and I didn't focus on the herbs back then, because I didn't think there was a market for it.   Mason Taylor: (00:06:00): And then I did actual markets for years and then people were coming to me with bigger and bigger intentions around their health and I was like, well, the only thing that's really going to help from what I can offer, at least, medicinal mushrooms like Reishi, tonic herbs like Astragalus and the Lion's Manes and Ho Shou Wus and all these really, the precious herbs, the Taoists call them. The superior herbs. They call them the messengers from heaven.   Mason Taylor: (00:06:25): And so over the years I just kept on adding them in and I've started doing a few formulas and educating people about this style of herbs that is more folky and it's not about, a lot of the time, practitioners and especially modern Chinese practitioners are like, "No. Herbal practise is for us. We dish out the herbs." Like this and you can't meddle with that. And you go back to the classics and there are these herbs that are like, these are really safe. And really beautiful. And can be used with a little bit of education, as long as you're determined to keep on listening to whether you can use these in everyday life.   Mason Taylor: (00:06:59): And that's the point of it. Take out the colonisation and the institutionalisation around healing ourselves and keeping ourselves healthy. And so I educated more and more about that. And then at some point my wife, now wife, joined me in the business about five years ago. We started taking it a bit seriously, because I have a bit of Peter Pan syndrome and I run off doing whatever I bloody want all the time. And then we took it seriously and it started really taking off and now we're a decent enough company, still family owned in Mullumbimby here now. I started off in Sydney.   Mason Taylor: (00:07:28): And yeah, we have a bunch of formulas and really, a bunch of crew here, working and helping us manifest the mission to help people just take that little bit extra control of their body. Feel that sovereignty and their capacity to not just cross their fingers about not getting sick. And then also as well, having longterm intentions and just having relationships with these herbs. They're really beautiful. I mentioned a few there. It's like the Schizandras. I don't have Ginseng, but the Ginsengs, these herbs that everyone would have like... We started the Cordyceps. These herbs are, yes, they're adaptogens and people are using them in a really cool way to help their body become more adaptive and to get greater output.   Mason Taylor: (00:08:18): That's when you look at them as an adaptogen herb, a Westerner. This is an adaptogen that's going to help you adapt and get better output. And that's sick. But that's an agenda based kind of in, output, what benefit to me. And that's cool as well. I don't mind that, but an adaptogen herb, like Schizandra or Ginseng is a herb that's going to help you. It has a non-specific effect in the body. So you don't know where the markers in the body are going to go or where the energy is going to go. You just know that it's going to harmonise more. And so it's not just going to take the immune system up and stimulate it, for example.   Mason Taylor: (00:08:54): It might lower it in some situations, like autoimmune conditions. And then it has an accumulative effect on the body. So the longer you take it, the greater effect you see. And this is how the Russians describe adaptogens. And then also, it has a non-toxic, non-harmful effect on the body, which is basically what 2,000 years ago, the first medic, Shennong, was like, hey, these are the herbs you take that are non-toxic. But then, yeah, so adaptogens good, people are using them.   Mason Taylor: (00:09:22): But then tonic herbalism and Taoist philosophy and then you take away the Taoism, it's just the philosophy of having a relationship longterm with this herb to help a dream of your own or a vision of your own health stay present throughout your life. And you're an athlete and you can see a lot of athletes all of a sudden go, I really want that potential now, and it's a strong intent, but I also, I'm starting to realise that I don't want to come out the backend of my professional athletic career and be flogged.   Mason Taylor: (00:09:49): And they start thinking about their 50 and 60 year old self and so, the terminology around tonic herbalism starts helping to align your outer actions and your lifestyle to that longterm intention as well as taking a shit load of Cordyceps or whatever now, to in order to get a really good workout and recovery in this instance. So yeah, that's kind of a long way of answering your question.   Jansen Andre: (00:10:15): So, yeah. Overwhelming, but you mentioned and I know on your website that these herbs and plants you source are ancestral to China. But I read you kept it that way except for Cordyceps. Is there a reason for this?   Mason Taylor: (00:10:33): Cordyceps is in China. It's just the wild Cordyceps is really rare and expensive and unsustainable to meet the demand. And so there's a technology there to ferment it in a broth and so, still then, it's the only one, so it's our only mushroom that's not grown on wood, grown outdoors, that kind of thing. We've got a very specific sourcing philosophy that we take very serious and Cordyceps is the only one that isn't strictly Di Dao. For that reason, but we just do our best. We've got a really unique broth recipe.   Mason Taylor: (00:11:05): It's why our Cordyceps is unique and isn't just like all the other CS spores in the market. And we've got a team of herbalists who tend to it and we don't grow on grain which is a big for me. A big no no. And I definitely don't have hardcore judgement of everyone that grows mushrooms on grain, but I don't personally agree with it, because it's not the native food of a mushroom. The native food of a medicinal mushroom is wood. And there's an alchemical process that occurs when that mushroom is growing through the wood. It has an enzymatic reaction with the wood. Is eating the carbohydrates within that wild wood, right.   Mason Taylor: (00:11:45): Quite often, people are like, it doesn't really matter. You can grow on grains and oats and coffee and some people even grow on paper. And it's cheap. What we do is expensive. And having integrity a lot of the time and upholding in the sense of wanting to uphold a tradition is really expensive and a lot of people are like, look, it doesn't matter. There's similar biomarkers in the one grown on whatever, even like a [inaudible 00:12:10]. And that's what the scientific community goes, you can just pick out, that's what scientism does. You go, I'm going to pick out one variable to justify that ours is just as good as the others.   Mason Taylor: (00:12:22): But then if you go back into true science, which is thousands of years of usage and subtle understandings through thousands and thousands of practitioners and people that have laid down the foundations for science to then jump in and create variables on this kind of herbal system, there are certain things that aren't measured yet, that they are aware of. Like you need to do a complete, full extraction of that herb so that it's not just that one beta glucan or chemical that you're justifying the awesomeness of your product with. There's undiscovered chemicals which are symbiotic to the entire reason that this herb is being revered for 5,000 years knowingly. And probably further back than that.   Mason Taylor: (00:13:16): And that's why we just kind of let them speak for themselves. People often find a really science data, we're data driven, but a real, pick a variable and market it kind of product and then people are like, that's good. And then they'll kind of want more, because they don't want to just trust that it's good and good stuff's happening. A lot of people will find our stuff and then they'll take it and there's a little "je nais se quois," a little special something that's present in the herb that they'll go, oh, it just feels a bit different. And yeah, when you get longterm, you feel more safe and comfortable taking something that is complete and it's been grown in the way as close to possible that our ancestors and our immune system have evolved taking it.   Mason Taylor: (00:13:58): And so there's a special little softness and trust that you can ease in and as well, then placebos start getting activated which just means you're not anxious and tense and just you're not trusting the mind's data and believing in marketing. You can feel that there's something with substance and essence going into your body. And that's why, and I'm definitely not the only one doing it, this is a very ancient tradition, growing herbs Di Dao. Going to the spiritual homeland of the herbs and buying and growing them there. Far away from industry. You're getting the spore or the seed from that area and making sure it's a particular micro climate in which you're growing in. This is based on texts over 2,000 years old that tell you how to do this.   Mason Taylor: (00:14:47): And people are like, oh, but it's not organic. And it's like, yeah, you can buy organic certifications very easy and I like organic certification, but the way I... I could go organic really quickly. Or I could drop, I'd have to pay through the nose. It's exorbitant what these people expect me to send out there. It's a big business which is I'm like, well, I don't need to get you out, just pay you thousands and thousands to go to every single little micro farm. And these are micro farmers. These are villagers who we're growing from and that's why organic farms are these huge growing operations, which are really good and can do high output.   Mason Taylor: (00:15:30): And they're doing it really well, a lot of the time, but they're doing it in a way that's not, you can't go right up into the mountains and grow in that capacity. And you can't do it with wild wood in that capacity in order to cheaply be able to just get that person out to certify organic, that big farm, indoor lab that you're doing. As good as it is. And I really, like a lot of my friends who are competitors who do that, because they're then able to do actually do mass market stuff. But for me to go organic, I'd have to dramatically take a back step in effectiveness. Because I'm a little, first of all, I'm a small company and we also support people in the village, say where we're growing Reishi.   Mason Taylor: (00:16:13): Like one of our farmers, Mr. Li, is training other people in the village so that there's actually jobs locally. That's localising the industry. It's keeping it traditional. It's keeping it family owned. It's not this huge herb, these overarching companies that own all the farmers and tell them, like me having investors telling me you can't do it that way. You need to work this way. And I'm like, no, no, no, but we're going to lose the integrity and they're like, look, it doesn't really matter. If people don't know about that standard that you set and then majority of people won't really give a shit. And we're like, no, but I give a shit and that's the same with the farmers. They give a shit upholding this tradition and they know if they produce the best Di Dao herbs and we have people who know how to test that, try it.   Mason Taylor: (00:17:00): I know how to test it, try it and go, hey, the quality is, this never happened, but I've done it before when I was doing my testing of right in the beginning of knowing that they say that's Di Dao, but that's not true. And you grill them. They go, oh yeah, that's actually a commercial spore that we're growing with. It's not a wild spore, Reishi, from the area in which we're growing, because that's hard to do. And so, yeah, it's a very difficult thing to do, growing in this way. But it connects you to something. It connects you, you're going back to the source of these, why these herbs were revered and so those farmers that are growing this way know that there is an impact, a viability of their product, if they make it the absolute best possible and don't compromise.   Mason Taylor: (00:17:53): They know that there are companies like mine that will buy that top notch Di Dao product. And so we get a little, we get Mr. Li teaching a young woman locally, how to grow Reishi and the first few years she might not be doing the absolute best, but there might be a little bit of crème de la crème that we will be able to buy off her in the beginning. And we've got people going out there and making sure the area is clean. We test in TGA labs for pesticides, metals, aflatoxins, all and beyond, and then all these things that actually aren't needed to be tested for, but we do, in China and in Australia.   Mason Taylor: (00:18:32): And so what I would need to do for organic is send out this guy who charges thousands of dollars in order for me to maintain this little thing that they think is a marketing hole in one, is having an organic symbol. And pay him a thousand dollars to go this woman's farm, check it out, pay them, whatever, three thousand dollars a night for them to stay over the night and then go back and do some other little testing in order for them to go, yeah, I'm going to tell you what you knew already. It's good. There's no pesticides in the area. And is that worth it in order to support the localization? It's good, I want to support this woman, but I'm not getting enough Reishi, but I want to support her.   Mason Taylor: (00:19:17): And so these are the nuances of behind the scenes of how our company works. And I know you started talking about Cordyceps and we just went into discussing why it's a good question, why isn't Cordyceps at that same level as the other herbs. And it's just because we can't leave the crop in abundance. It's like Reishi. We don't do Reishi wild anymore. We did when we started. And now it just got too popular. Before it became an issue, we opted out and went to the best possible farming practise. And we've done that with Schizandra as well. In the beginning it was just like, there's just no way we're going to be able to ever get through this much wild Schizandra that's in Changbai Mountain and sure enough, yeah, actually when this probably doesn't seem too healthy.   Mason Taylor: (00:20:03): And we work with good local governments. We move provinces in China if they're irresponsible with the land management which I know people who like China, that's not true, actually no, it is true. There are local governments, some that are like ours, that are really harshly regulating the population of pine trees or the amount of pine nuts that are up in the Changbai forest and soon to be the only amount of Chaga that's been harvested in order to maintain and preserve. So we work with that, but then go beyond that just to make sure we don't strip the environment. You've got to leave it better than you found it.   Mason Taylor: (00:20:44): So yeah, we've gone now to, I think, the majority farming of... You know, it's still incredible Schizandra. It's still in the wild. It's still the most amazing Schizandra being pumped out, but it just makes it a little bit better for everyone. But yeah, I can't do that with Cordyceps. So do that in a broth.   Jansen Andre: (00:21:03): So you're adjusting, from what I gather from that, determining, depending on how popular or how much of a certain thing you're selling, you have to go back and look, is it possible to keep getting it from the same source?   Mason Taylor: (00:21:21): It's a never ending analysis. So the biggest at the moment is Chaga. So the last time I was in China, we were going up to Chagang to harvest Chaga up in, near the North Korean border, it's a mountain called, Changbai Mountain, a national park there. And they were just moving in the direction of, it sounded like there were some, the way it worked is the guys that would go in, they'd go on week expeditions to go and harvest Chaga, because it's quite deep where you go and they've been doing it for 20 years, at least.   Mason Taylor: (00:21:56): So they know how to ensure that they're not stripping so much that they're not going to have a crop for the next year or in five years and 10 years. A lot of them are getting their kids ready to do this as well. But now it was getting popular, so we're like, okay, it was getting a few two minute noodle harvesters, as I call them. As always. Going like, I can do this. But the barrier to entry seems to be holding. It's a skillset that can't just be, people just can't all of a sudden know how to go and find the Chaga. There's snakes and shit and people are scared of going there and doing these expeditions. So the barrier to entry seems like enough, but I've already talked to my team over there and been like, let's just watch it.   Mason Taylor: (00:22:47): Because North American Chaga is not being managed really well. Now it's starting to, but it's not a sustainable harvesting of Chaga that's going on in North America and people think it's the same happening in China. And it's not at that point yet and the government's also about to start regulating and licencing the people that can go in to this particular area to harvest Chaga. They've already done it with pine nuts and it's really, they're not just a little slap on the wrist. You get really scorned if you go and break those rules.   Mason Taylor: (00:23:17): And so yeah, we haven't had to do that yet for Chaga, but I've got a back up source that's my second favourite place to get Chaga from, if need be. But yeah, that's an example of keeping our finger on the pulse. And with Poria, for example. Poria, really not well known in this kind of, in my community. Maybe my community a little bit more, but a really popular Chinese herb. Not so much in the adaptogen community, Poria mushroom isn't really well known. And it requires pine to grow and so wild pine is what you want. And the primary place to grow Di Dao in the centre of China, the government wasn't regulating the harvesting of pine.   Mason Taylor: (00:24:05): And so, even though the people we would work with, we're pretty sure, especially because they ended up moving with the operation, but they were adhering to harvesting methods that weren't going to be stripping the whole ecosystem. The government wasn't regulating it and so there were people around taking advantage and it leaves a bad vibe on it and so you don't want that vibe. And you can't do Di Dao if you're involved in something that isn't going to sustainably leave the environment as it is. So we went to our second ideal place to grow Di Dao down in Jinlun province.   Mason Taylor: (00:24:41): And there, the government harshly regulates for each person how much pine you're going to be able to go and harvest. Where you can harvest. Ensuring that you're planting and contributing back to the replanting to the extent where it's like we'll go and trek up and ask you to show where you've harvested yours and then if they find anything else in the vicinity, they'll investigate it and have it be marked as being a particular farmer's quota. And so those are the things that go in behind the scenes that people don't realise to actually grow a Di Dao herb and that's why it's hard.   Mason Taylor: (00:25:15): You can imagine, it's like oh, screw this. Well, let's just get pine from a domestic pine farm. But that's, of course, it's so easy and that needs to be happening to an extent, because you can't give the world how much Poria it needs of all wild pine. But there is a way and maybe it stops at some point. I don't know. Maybe at some point I need to just have, all right, here's the Di Dao range and then here's the other range. Here's the one that's maybe a little more for widespread consumption. But yeah, at the moment we don't have to do that. But yeah, that's everything that kind of, the other stuff that goes in behind the scenes.   Jansen Andre: (00:25:56): Very interesting. It seems like a very intense and long process as well as people putting their lives on the line in terms of wild animals and nature and stuff to go and forage and harvest these herbs. I just want to strip it back, right back for people that are unaware of adaptogens and herbs. What would be a reason that somebody would consider taking medicinal mushrooms or tonic herbs and what are the main few that you focus on at SuperFeast that you would include in say, your average person's daily consumption that you would consider the most important. Considering we live in such a Yang, fast lifestyle.   Mason Taylor: (00:26:51): Good question, man, good question. There's many directions I could take why people take tonic herbs. I'll start seeing if I can rattle them off and not distract myself. So clinically, the tonic herbs in general, a lot of them are used in formulas in order to overcome particular disease states. But I leave that to a practitioner. The intention of tonic herbalism isn't, and my formulas, for instance, isn't to treat disease states.   Mason Taylor: (00:27:27): But when you're in that instance where you're working with a practitioner, say how they would use it is perhaps they would get you onto medicinal mushrooms alongside a treatment... A really good example is chemo. There's a lot of people who have identified that you can take medicinal mushrooms alongside the chemo. So a lot of people are out there going to medicinal mushrooms, specifically for the treatment of cancer. And there are institutions researching that and there are countries that utilise that in their actual conventional medical system. But that's something that we're not at that place yet.   Mason Taylor: (00:28:11): But there are a lot of practitioners that have realised that having medicinal mushrooms going into conjunction to cancer treatments like chemo and radiotherapy, the intent there being to ensure that the body isn't destroyed by the treatment itself. So keeping the immune system adept, strong, activated. So that's one area where people might use tonic herbs or a practitioner might use tonic herbs.   Mason Taylor: (00:28:38): In the convalescence stage of a disease, so the healing and the building back. So after you've undergone... Someone with, I'm just trying to think of an example, if someone's gone through two years of hyperthyroidism and they've been undergoing lots of little micro herbal treatments and hormone therapies and they get to a point where they're feeling, okay, I don't feel like I'm sick anymore, but those years absolutely wasted me. And took it out of me mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically. And so at that point tonic herbs are going to have a lot to do with the rebuilding of the body, right? That's when they're really beautiful and tonifying. They can tonify functions of the body.   Mason Taylor: (00:29:28): There's also, we could say the same for preparing for big surgeries. Preparing the body for huge medical treatments and that doesn't just have to be things like chemo. There are a lot of herbal treatments or even someone who's sick and flies over to Mexico and is getting that hypothermia treatment and they're doing the oxygenation of the blood and they're doing lots of colonics and whatever it is. Those take a lot out of the body. You need a lot of strength and so people would use tonic herbs to strengthen the body and prepare it in those instances.   Mason Taylor: (00:30:06): Then there are people who are looking to, they're looking to prevent injury, prevent acute illness, thinking about just preventing illness in the future, preventing exhaustion creeping in the future. They watch their parents' minds kind of waste away, their brains kind of waste away or the bones waste away. And so there's an intent around prevention. And a lot of people are starting to realise that there is this class of herbs that are basically herbal foods that can assist you and might not be perfect and there's no guarantees, but it's like, why are we going and upgrading the quality of our water from tap to filtered to maybe the best spring water we can find and adding in some hydrogen.   Mason Taylor: (00:30:58): Why are we going from yeah, cool, I'm getting organic veggies from the health food store to try and include some wild foods in your diet. It's because you're upgrading and potentiating and trying to get these habits to norms that will mineralize the body and potentiate the body. Tone the water of your body into this beautiful crystaline substance that can help you maintain a high quality of life for longterm. And that's the same with tonic herb intention. And so there's that instance.   Mason Taylor: (00:31:31): There are people who will take it further from the Taoist intention who want to cultivate longevity. And that can be the longevity of your ability to undergo big psychological evolutions and initiations. So a lot of people have the strength to really get past maybe that leap from 50 years old. It's going to take, all of a sudden everything that you'd identified as important and what makes you up, becomes less important internally to you. But you don't have the ability to let go of that identity, shed the skin and go into that next phase of your life. Because it's scary and I don't have judgement of that.   Mason Taylor: (00:32:17): I've had to learn. It's been tough for me, even just going, feeling from 30 and becoming a new dad and identifying with being one particular way and then all of a sudden having a business and needing to land, basically. And not just be flying off with the fairies and so on and so forth. All these different little changes and shifts that happen throughout our lives. To be able to move through them with a skip and a step. That takes a lot. And just in order to ensure that our bones stay healthy. People want longevity for the sake of making sure the kidneys are healthy. The kidneys regulate the bone marrow, the brain, the dewy substances.   Mason Taylor: (00:32:54): The brain in Taoism is considered marrow. So ensuring that that aspect of the body is supported by its core organ so that we have greater capacity to think in really complex ways and feel in really complex ways when we're older. Basically, all that comes down to in Daoism as an intention, is cultivation of life. Cultivation of the treasures. Our Jing, our Qi, our Chen. And cultivation can literally be as we burn through it. Because you only have a certain amount of Jing, say, like the wax of the candle. As you burn through it, you add a little bit more on.   Mason Taylor: (00:33:30): Well, that's actually adding a little bit more, it's more so keep living off Qi. Keeping living off breath, diet, the herbs and that's the energy you use to get through the day and you don't have to take the wax off the candle and put like a coal burning oven. And get your energy in a non-sustainable way. If you burn through your Jing too early, you're going to not have the foundations the thrive. And you might live a long time, but people are really dying a long time.   Mason Taylor: (00:34:02): So that whole intention around longevity in that sense, which our culture does not value as much as, really supporting people to become elders, in a sense that they're healthy and that they're in this capacity to share their wisdom lovingly and willingly with younger generations. That doesn't exist that much. You need to take that into your own sovereign intention. And so in that sense, that all comes down to there are transformation of energy going on through your organs at all times as it continues to circulate. And that transformation is Yin Yang, Yin Yang, Yin Yang, Yin Yang.   Mason Taylor: (00:34:47): And that's just your capacity for your Qi to transform smoothly and constantly, which means you're going to constantly have emotions and they can constantly transform and lead you in places where you can get a little bit of a virtue going. And then the fear comes back and boom, boom. So that's all that. And then when you go in on that, that's the five organ system, the Wuxing, five elements. Even though the elements is a rough translation. So the whole point is to ensure that the energy is moving through the heart and the spleen and the lung and the kidneys and the liver and it's able to just transform.   Mason Taylor: (00:35:28): Yin Yang, Yin Yang. And that's like that fire Qi. It's just a Yin Yang transformation of Qi going from substance, from something of Yin and consolidation to the Yang through expression and movement in unique ways. And in the heart, it kind of like, ah, that reminds me of fire. It feels like fire and in the spleen, it goes to the spleen. That's really earthy and soil kind of phase transforming through the kidneys. It's like, ah, it's got that water quality. It's just a feeling of what's out there is also in here. But it's really simple. Just, your lifestyle just keeps it going. Just keeps it transforming.   Mason Taylor: (00:36:10): And if you're transforming smoothly, you're not wasting your Jing, Qi and Shen. And at some point you can cultivate your Jing, Qi and Shen. The idea, so you're less of an asshole and more of an awesome person when you get older and you're quite healthy. So that's another intention there. And that's probably the reasons why people would get attracted to it and then now it's as well. People are just, I need my brain to be on this morning, so I'm drinking Neural Nectar. This incredible herbs supporting that marrow of the brain and other areas that I know translate to me feeling sharp and there's blood flow through the marrow. I can feel wit and cloudy and supplementing of the kidney energy that's supporting that what we see as mental capacity.   Mason Taylor: (00:36:54): So in a Western sense, the Nootropics. They're just helping me nourish the brain, getting some L-dopa in from the Mucuna. Helping me to regulate my moods, so on and so forth. So I also have very micro, not a lot of the time, probably an 80/20 macro intention to micro intention. But there's a micro intention today, because I've got this podcast and I'm having someone on mind, I want to make sure that I can talk and think in really lateral ways without using what's actually not there to be used. You know what I mean?   Mason Taylor: (00:37:31): And so there's that as well. And that's kind of where it falls, you know, take Cordyceps before you work out so that your lung is nourished in full Qi flow, so it can function in its Western pulmonary capacity, blood oxygenating capacity, in a better way. While it nourishes the kidney energy and balances out the Yin Yang in the kidneys which is where strength and endurance and power emerges from, if that Qi is flowing. And so do a little short term. Yeah, have that Cordy before an event so that I'm feeling really incredible and that little bit of extra capacity. But then eventually, that becomes, huh, I can embody that at all times and not have reliance on the herb to do it in an immediate manner. Yeah.   Jansen Andre: (00:38:19): So back on what you were originally just talking about with Cordyceps and different types of adaptogens, what about an athlete? What would be the most useful kind of tonic herb or adaptogen to use to increase performance, prevent injury and be mentally sharp and clear for everyone listening. Say, for instance, someone was about to go and compete, about to go and do an endurance event, in the lead up to the event, would you say use it for four weeks to gain, I know you were saying before it's accumulative as well on the body. What's kind of your thoughts on that and timeframe with consuming something like that to get the best benefit of it so that when it comes to race day, you're ready?   Mason Taylor: (00:39:18): It's sooner the better. Day before is awesome as well. The intention is, maybe people can relate with say, their breath work. Maybe they're like, oh cool, I'm going to start doing some breath work for this event and wow, that really helped me get prepared and I feel like I had greater output and recovery during the event. I'm going to do that again for the next event and then the one afterwards, they just never stop the breath work, because it's like, ah, this helps me feel good all the time. And all of a sudden it becomes like drinking water or having a smoothie or whatever.   Mason Taylor: (00:39:56): That's generally where tonic herbalism is going to land you and you'll realise it's got three intentions, they say. A really direct one in order that you might pick up the usage of particular herbs, which I'll get into soon, before an event in order to ensure that specifically your lungs are really potentiated and your kidneys as well are really potentiated during the event. So you have a high athletic performance while you're actually in there.   Mason Taylor: (00:40:23): So that's the first and then you might pick up some of those herbs at the beginning, in the weeks leading up. Then you're going to have herbs for your recovery to ensure that you haven't, you want to ensure that you in flogging yourself, you're not "flugging" the substance of your body. And I'll get into those as well. And then there's going to be just your everyday regular intention, like taking your medicinal mushrooms, like a Mason Taylor:'s Mushrooms blend that we've got.   Mason Taylor: (00:40:50): It's got a lot of herbs that will help potentiate you for the event, but you might not have that association. In the lead up, you might want to go focus on things like Cordyceps and Astragalus and the Qi herbs and the Yang herbs to help you get ready for that. So that might just lock into a... And then when I'm just between events and I'm just wanting to keep myself healthy and going, then I'll take my Mason Taylor:'s Mushrooms or there might be something else that you're interested in, like Schizandra.   Mason Taylor: (00:41:16): Ironically, all the tonic herbs are going to help. But some of them just have the brand and the proclivity to help an athlete perform much more. So let's have a look at where you're going to be at in the build up and I've mentioned them already. There's going to be a combination of, a lot of the time it's the Jing herbs and the Qi herbs which people are going to be more attracted to when wanting output. And that is also going to depend on how sustainable your recovery is in training and your lifestyle is in training.   Mason Taylor: (00:41:54): If you are really good at sleeping and really good at taking days off and really good at getting into your parasympathetic nervous system regularly, and not feeling fearful. You're not an athlete, you're not looking for performance out of fear constantly, because you're not an enough, you know. There's an actual, really soulful intent that isn't, your identity isn't dependent on the outcome. That shift's going to mean that your athletic intentions aren't going to leak your Jing as much as someone that is doing those things.   Mason Taylor: (00:42:30): So not to put, that's all of us. We're all learning through this process of getting into the dojo and a lot of the time, while we're younger we're not going to be very good at it, so a lot of athletes really like the Jing herbs. So the Jing formula, Cordyceps is another amazing one. I'll even throw Schizandra and the Beauty Blend that we've got over at SuperFeast into that one. It's going to really ensure that you actually have the substance in your kidneys to feed the power and the strength and the adrenaline.   Mason Taylor: (00:43:04): When you're leading up into that, Cordyceps kind of takes the reins. I know, I don't like, I'm pretty a lot of people fall into the tonic herb space who do like Yang herbs, like Deer Antler Velvet, there's a tonic by ant that people will get into or it might be Tongkat Ali and other beautiful tonic herbs. Siberian Ginseng, Rhodiola, these are those going over towards these Yang tonic herbs that will take the substance of your body.   Mason Taylor: (00:43:34): So it will take, say, the water of your body that holds all your power and strength in the Yin of the kidneys and the Yang will start heating it up and turning it into vapour in your body. And so that you become really lubricated and that power and that potential in the water is spread through the entirety of your body and germinating the Jing so that you can really express. That's what the Yang is about and why you're going to be attracted to those Yang herbs.   Mason Taylor: (00:43:59): A lot of the time, a primary example is the Cordyceps. And that's why Jing herbs are really popular going in, but if you are feeling really good with your lifestyle and your recovery and everything, at some point you'll see a switch go over the main herbs that you're going to use to prepare for are the Qi herbs, like Astragalus, Ginseng, White Atractylodes, Codonopsis, even Poise. And they are like, so I've got a Qi formula which people will, all of the athletes will go, yeah, Jing. Oh my God, the Jing and the Cordyceps, that's like, I need these and I can feel them feeding me.   Mason Taylor: (00:44:39): But at some point they click over into, they feel like they've got a good flow that they're always ready to perform and then they go, uh huh, now I just need to bring a refinement by the way that I animate myself and I move myself and they start tonifying. And this is an interesting one, because the Cordyceps is a Jing and Qi tonic. And this is why it's the perfect intro for people. But then they start adding in Astragalus and the Qi formula and all of a sudden their lungs' ability to bring in vitality and energy to the body, so it can animate itself and not get fatigued, that's what becomes more important and you've always got the foundation of your Jing through your lifestyle and maybe taking of Jing herbs in your recovery stage. Does that make sense?   Jansen Andre: (00:45:28): Yeah. Yeah, wow. I was literally just about to ask you about the Qi blend. As you describe on your website, the Energy Blend, but it is a slower building effect on the body in terms of stimulant and hit as per se.   Mason Taylor: (00:45:43): Yeah, it's a slower build, because most people don't have the foundations within the kidneys in order to really get the most out of their diet and their spleen to produce Qi and the Qi that you're extracting from the air. But that is the true, they combine the Gong Qi that you get from your food, from cooking your food and the Gong Qi that you get from breathing. Your body harvests that and combines that and then there's Yin Yang expressions of that.   Mason Taylor: (00:46:20): One goes to the surface of the body and it's known as your Wei Qi and the other goes through the organs and the meridians and charges the organs so that you've got daily function. That's constantly happening. And so it's a more direct Qi, but in the beginning, people need to experience their own Jing, because everyone's trying to just have heaps of Qi energy immediately without having the foundation. So they need to take the Jing herbs, they need to learn how to sleep and recover and being Yin, because otherwise see what happens. People are constant heating up all their waters and creating vapour. What happens if you don't replenish the water?   Mason Taylor: (00:46:56): Boom, you become deficient. And so once you do have that good flow, so I like talking like James Newbury, the crossfit guy in my podcast, because our first podcast, he was just like, it was all recovery. And I was like, yeah, good message. And so for a lot of people listening, Jing's going to give them those, holy shit, I feel so good on the Jing. And they think it's giving them this energy. But no, it's all of a sudden you're plugging holes and you're not used to the holes being plugged and you're not used to holding onto the water. You're used to constantly needing to replenish the water.   Mason Taylor: (00:47:31): I don't know what that is in the athletic community, but it's like energy drinks, coffee. Doing all hardcore Yang breath practises so that you've got some oxygen coursing through your veins and so you start becoming less dependent on these extreme ways to get energy into yourself. But once you've done that, to an extent, not that I don't like these things. They can just be done sustainably. Once you've done those, then you start doing the Qi tonics and then it starts, you really start feeling the quick vitality come back.   Mason Taylor: (00:48:04): But it's just a really good way for people to know if you're not feeling like there's a... If you can't feel with the Qi herbs that you've got a really good, slow build of energy occurring, it's like, okay, maybe I don't have the foundation. You can do your Qi herbs, your Qi blend, alongside Jing herbs, Jing formula. There's no rules. You make your own way. I need to make rules so people feel like they have a framework to enter, but really, you can just go slow and steady.   Mason Taylor: (00:48:32): There are no rules in tonic herbalism. It's your herbal practise, but then that's why we're here to help you as you go. Change the framework to make it more unique, but I also have to give a general one when you're entering. And yeah, so then at that point the Qi herbs is what you find eventually, it's the bridge. The Shen is what connects you to the heaven. Your virtuous nature, your kindness, your generosity. Which is also really at some point in your athletic career, you realise it's really important to cultivate as well, right?   Mason Taylor: (00:49:10): Your ability to accept. Your natural ability, so on and so forth. Staying humble if you're like an absolute maniac and naturally the best ever. That Shen, heavenly, virtuous nature is really a beautiful thing that you're going to need to cultivate as well, so maybe your Shen herbs is something as well that you take in the aftermath in order to process. How did I feel when that person that I used to be better than has started beating me? How am I feeling about that? And processing that. That can be the Shen blend in herbs like Albizzia Flower, Asparagus Root, Reishi, Pearl or Oyster Shell. Again, not plant based, but these are those herbs and they've got a Chen formula there.   Mason Taylor: (00:50:00): And it can be part of the Shen formula, because it's not vegan, then just Reishi on its own and even again, like Schizandra is also a really beautiful shen tonic in itself, but you can sit and contemplate, how did I feel about that win? What does that win mean to me? And how can I, what is now my, did it feel vacant? Did it feel amazing? Chen is really that processing stage as well, so that can be really useful and that, but that's the heavenly. The earth based, just being a physical body is the Jing. And so a lot of the time you will see Taoists and people who get really just clicking to auto mode with the herbs, will just constantly be on the Qi tonics.   Mason Taylor: (00:50:43): And that's the mushrooms as well, mostly. Munda mushrooms, like the Chaga, Lion's Mane, Poria, Reishi to an extent, Maitake, Shiitake, Turkey Tail, Tremella, they all have a proclivity for regulating water in the body through a spleen function and heavily a lung function, heavily a regulation of Qi through the liver function, so they're seen as those middle to good Shen, Qi, Jing. Qi is really helping you translate and be that bridge between heaven and earth, which is what the Taoists see that we are, bringing virtuous nature. Generosity, kindness, love, infinite love, to the absolute physical realm. And where we've got the capacity through Qi to bridge those two dimensions.   Mason Taylor: (00:51:34): And so you'll find people in automatic mode. You'll click into just taking medicinal mushrooms and Qi herbs. And that will just be keeping you, because that just keeps the spark in the machine. Your lifestyle's keeping the machine healthy and not flogging it and recovering. You know you've got a Gong to put in practise and maybe spending time in nature so you're naturally cultivating that Shen a lot of the time, because you have a desire to be as good a person as you possibly could be. Not that good, bad has anything to do with it.   Mason Taylor: (00:52:03): And so you just take the Qi to kind of, so that you're getting the most out of your breath, the most out of your food. You have a good diet. You're not too stressed out all the time, so you can actually breathe. You don't have to do crazy where I'm half breathing all the time in order to get that breath. Although they're really cool as well, all of a sudden your whole lifestyle's geared towards keeping the spark in the machine moving and keep everything regulating so you're evolving and just living as harmoniously as possible.   Mason Taylor: (00:52:32): And then at times you might spill over and go, cool, I'm in winter now. I'm getting off coffee for 30 days and taking Jing. We've got a 30 days of Jing challenge. And you go, cool, I'm going sit and really consider my kidneys and my fear and look into the deep waters of my body and cultivate that Jing. That kidney water energy where the Jing is kept. You have to look at your mortality at that point, what that means and see what arises from that fear. Feel like, oh, what was useful fear? Just actually keeping you alive. And then where's it irrelevant or irrational fear? So there might be times when you go really deep into the kidney Jing herbs for that emotional intention as well.   Mason Taylor: (00:53:17): And then you're kind of like, cool, now I just need to not think about my tonic herbal practise and just click in a order with the mushrooms and the Qi herbs. Or whatever. For a long time, people are going to just be clicking into just, oh cool, I'm just taking Jing herbs. And that's fine as well. Again, there's no rule, but you just got to listen and check in every now and then to adjust.   Jansen Andre: (00:53:39): So let's talk about a framework. It's obviously an intuitive kind of practise of taking these herbs, but say for instance someone is constantly jacked and hyped all the time. They're not focusing on their breathing. They're not doing meditation and they're constantly tired. But they want to find that inner Qi and they want to get back to ground zero and get grounded. What would you say, how would they all start to include these to channel that?   Mason Taylor: (00:54:11): I mean, okay, so let's look at your really, if you're really looking at longterm, that that's your identity and you don't really know your body and you don't really know the path back to harmony, because you've gone too far off into power lifting or the triathlons or whatever it is. And a lot of the time, and I've been there heavily with my identification of being this perfect, healthy specimen. I've had a long time as a raw foodist, pretty much a vegan vegan, it was kind of where I was coming from. And it was really great for me, but at some point I went way too far off centre into my own ideological dogma.   Mason Taylor: (00:54:53): And then I just in tracking back took a long time. And I enjoyed that process. So it's like, if you're willing and wanting to do it on your own, then very good. But it's going to be a slow process and it's going to be a matter of you slowly getting the terminology that can help explain where you're at. Maybe that's a Western terminology, maybe that's a classical Chinese Medicine terminology of whether it's a Yang deficiency, primarily, or a Yin deficiency or maybe it's just like in a hyper way, your inner sympathetic nervous system creates excess cortisol, maybe.   Mason Taylor: (00:55:31): It doesn't matter what. You need a terminology and a framework to take you back to centre. And if you're too far off it's just, cut the time and go find a classical acupuncturist or maybe a really good naturopath who can do your markers. And so that way, just to start with, I'll say that, because if you're feeling a bit lost and anxious about it, that's a way, in a grounded way, to do it with tonic herbalism is really good, but it's a big stab in the dark that might not actually hit the specifics for your treatment.   Mason Taylor: (00:56:06): Because that's potentially, you're on a trajectory towards early degeneration or not. And so although it might be like a lot of lifestyle factors, like adding in some tonic herbs, starting to getting some Jing yoga in or some Qi Gong into your practise, like all these kinds of things, they're going to be lifestyle things that you're going to want to work on. At the same time, your proclivity and need to go that extreme, is something that you'll need to address. And you need to get really in touch with your body. So although it's not seen as a real symptomatic illness or anything at that point, you want a practitioner. Because you don't get too many opportunities in your life where you clock onto that intent to come back into harmony and live in harmony for longterm, and you want to take advantage of that opportunity really quick and really work with someone to get an understanding of exactly who you are and what your body is and how it relates.   Mason Taylor: (00:57:01): And a classical acupuncturist can really help you go like, look, you're... You know, for me, me and a friend, we both are entrepreneurs. One of us is more geared towards a Yang deficiency, the other more towards a Yin deficiency. For me it's a Yin deficiency, for him it's a Yang deficiency. And so, just little things for him are really specific. For Yang it's sitting on the surface of the body and you go and do extreme saunas. You're wasting, you're releasing all of your Yang. And so it's not really a useful thing to do and so maybe getting in the sauna without having that excess sweating.   Mason Taylor: (00:57:35): So those are little things that where it's going... And for me it's otherwise. For me it's the end action of the substance and the Yin of the body, is what I'm constantly needing to adjust my lifestyle to cultivating. I'm not someone as well who does run on Yang. I'm a very Yang type person, but then I'm able to see over the last four years, at some point I hit this, I had an identity about being this outspoken, I'm this huge personality and I'm Yang and I'm achieving, but at some point what clicked in, which is something that's on all of my charts, if you look at my human design and my astrology and all those kind of things, at some point I need to come back and do a cave and reflect over the last few years. It's far out.   Mason Taylor: (00:58:24): I've been constantly drawn back to just being in darkness and in a hovel and I've kind of judged myself for doing that. And going like, why am I doing this? Why my like is, why am I not out achieving? So on and so forth. But when I start actually working with, I can actually, whether it's through a bit of therapy, a practitioner or majority is just getting my own reflection back into forgiveness of myself and love of myself constantly. I know when it's like, now I need a little click on the ear to stop whinging and get up and do something which you know is right for yourself. Or when it's like, hey, you've got to listen to yourself right now.   Mason Taylor: (00:59:04): And in that instance it's because I've gone really towards Yin depletion and so for me then I just kind of, then I need to find my way and to live sustainably so that I don't chronically do that to myself and then have to have these episodes where I just can't see anyone. That's not a healthy way to be. And so you've got to listen. But, and then coming back to the fact that someone's being extreme in the athletic world. Just generally, you're going to want to start getting onto some Jing herbs, because generally, you would have depleted yourself.   Mason Taylor: (00:59:40): The Jing formula I've just got there is a neutral balanced Yin Yang. It doesn't throw you through fire in any direction. Generally really good for the population to start, giving you the experience of your kidney water Qi flowing so that you can feel that you're not wasting anymore. You're not leaking it. And then with that you maybe notice a distinction around ah, maybe I should drop some coffee and maybe you can just do some good sleep and then so that's a good entry.   Mason Taylor: (01:00:06): And then the mushrooms. Because they're just so all over the place regulating of the body and protecting of the body. It's like a formula, like the Mason Taylor:'s Mushrooms formula, if you want capsules, like the Mushroom M8. And other brands as well. If anyone ever has any questions about other brands, I'm not precious. I just do SuperFeast, because I learned, I had a problem for years and years about talking about my own company. I don't know why, this is my thing.   Mason Taylor: (01:00:34): I didn't like having products and felt uncomfortable with it, but I can see people listening to me, listening to this podcast, SuperFeast is there as a place for them to access these really precious herbs so I do just talk about it in the SuperFeast context, but feel free to send me others if you just want me to give you a heads up on different things.   Mason Taylor: (01:00:54): The mushrooms are just, they're in every organ. Like a formula like that, they're in every organ. They're immunologically getting yourself potentiated and modulated and so a lot can just start going right when you get onto the mushrooms. And you just start there. And you do two months and you start with a quarter teaspoon of the extract powder and then you maybe get up to a teaspoon. Some people are more sensitive, they like just a half a teaspoon. Some people, whether it's the Mason Taylor:'s or the Jing formula, some people are like, my body wants two heaped teaspoons a day. Is that okay?   Mason Taylor: (01:01:28): So, yes. Listen to your body. And that might happen for a week. Sometimes people do that for two months. I took mushrooms, two tablespoons of mushrooms of Chaga and Reishi for two years, basically, straight. Every day. Pretty much. But that was because I'm very extreme. Always very excess too. I found a pendulum, my pendulum doesn't swing so far anymore, but that's my personality and what I needed to do in order to initiate myself into the world that I'm in right now and really understand the mushrooms. But what's important, is as much to listen to that part of you that wants to up the dose, is to listen to that part of you that knows when it's time to down the dose.   Mason Taylor: (01:02:10): And not, because the tonic herbs are beautiful and you don't form

Today on the podcast, we're bringing ancient teachings to life as we journey through the Daoist delineation of the human psyche by way of storytelling. In this transformative conversation, Mason and Yin yoga, meditation, and medical Qigong practitioner Stephanie Nosco discuss the Wu Shen, also known as The Five Spirits; A system of spiritual descent, allowing us to live out our Dao through bringing the light of Heaven down to Earth, and alchemising pain into growth. Stephanie's transfer of knowledge and her ability to bring this elusive spiritual system to life through story and metaphor is brilliant. This intrinsic part of the Daoist teachings can't be measured or quantified but is the consciousness behind everything. Descending from the Heavens with Shen and moving through Hun, Yi, Po, and Zhi, Stephanie takes us on a journey, pulling out the light and different expressions of each spirit along the way. In a realm of work she's so passionate about Stephanie expresses that compassion for ourselves is essential on this path of healing. For true transformation, wisdom, and inspiration will arise from our psyche, only when we are willing to go into the murky depths to do the work, and begin to consciously live out our Dao. Tune in for wisdom.   Mason and Stephanie discuss: The Five Spirits. The spirit of the organs. Mingmen and our destiny. The wisdom in storytelling. Bringing Shen into the body. Practices to nourish the Hun. Hun disturbance and depression. Practices to help the Yi spirit. Po disturbance and breathwork. Medical Qigong to nourish the five spirits. Yin yoga as an avenue to explore the spirit dimension.   Who is Stephanie Nosco? Stephanie is a dedicated yin yoga, meditation, and medical qigong practitioner. After over a decade of teaching these modalities and witnessing their transformative power, Stephanie has fostered a deep appreciation for the human spirit and its undervalued potential to heal the physical, mental and emotional body. Stephanie is endorsed by yin yoga founder, Sarah Power's, through the Insight Yoga Institute. She has sat multiple long silent retreats, with senior teachers from both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist traditions. Her most recent interests surround how spirituality, energetics, and psychotherapy intersect, and is currently completing her Masters' in Counselling psychology. Stephanie views Yin Yoga, Meditation, Qigong, and psychotherapy as methods to re-awaken what we already know. She founds her teachings on the principle that this inner knowing is the true guide towards health, healing, and awakening.   CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST    Resources: Nosco Yoga Stephanie's Instagram Stephanie's Facebook Yin Yoga Teacher Training  Rooted In Spirit Book Sarah Powers Yoga   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We'd also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher, CastBox, iHeart RADIO:)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Steph, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.   Steph Nosco: (00:02) Thank you so much for having me.   Mason: (00:04) Yeah, absolute pleasure. I was very excited to stumble upon your Instagram page. I am learning a lot, I am frothing on it. Is it ... How do you pronounce your last name? Nosco?   Steph Nosco: (00:18) It's Nosco, yeah.   Mason: (00:20) Yeah, Nosco. Nosco Yoga. It's very good. I think I found it through Kimberley.   Steph Nosco: (00:25) Oh, okay. Yeah. She does Qi-Fu therapy.   Mason: (00:30) Qi-Fu therapy, yeah.   Steph Nosco: (00:31) Yeah, nice.   Mason: (00:32) She'll be jumping on the pod as well. We did a live together on Instagram.   Steph Nosco: (00:36) That's great.   Mason: (00:37) Saw you guys. How did you guys connect?   Steph Nosco: (00:40) Just through Instagram, just through the Gramme world. Yeah, and she reached out to me about doing a live. And so, I was like, "Sure, I'd love to chat with you about it."   Mason: (00:48) The Gramme.   Steph Nosco: (00:49) Yeah.   Mason: (00:49) That's how my now wife found me, through Instagram and just sent me a DM.   Steph Nosco: (00:55) Oh, hilarious.   Mason: (00:55) Yeah.   Steph Nosco: (00:56) Yeah, there's definitely pros and cons to media for sure.   Mason: (00:59) Oh yeah. Now, what I liked about your Gramme is you're straight up, you're talking about the spirits of the organs. Do you want to ... Because I just use very general, crass language around that. Do you want to go in and just ... You focus on that, you've got a Yin yoga background as well. And that's what you teach, a lot of Yin yoga, which everyone loves here. [Tarnee 00:01:24], again my wife, runs a company here with me. She's a Yin yoga teacher. And it comes up and everyone's always wanting more. And I thought, "Oh, great. Steph can help kind of satiate everyone's drooling for Yin yoga in their desire."   Steph Nosco: (01:35) Yeah.   Mason: (01:37) But going into the spirits, the [Zhi 00:01:39], everyone's heard about it a little bit from Rhonda Patrick that's been on the podcast, seen that this is a part of Chinese medicine that's been cut out, diminished, and therefore left this vacancy. The storytelling's been cut out, the capacity to get kinetically in touch with the body through Qi and knowledge of Qi. Through healing, through just that general understanding that comes, it's such a huge missing piece. And you're talking about it so well just through looking at what you put into your Instagram posts. So, let's dive in. You want to just start everyone off in understanding what it is?   Steph Nosco: (02:17) Yeah, sure. So, I guess we can think about it like there's two different systems sort of happening, which kind of can get a bit confusing. So, a lot of people are familiar with the five elements, which are called the Wuxing. So, there's five elements, as you know. And they move in a wheel. So, the wheel of the five elements from water to wood, wood to fire, fire to earth, earth to metal. So, it goes in that spiral. But the Wu Shen, Wu means five and Shen means spirit, which we're going to be talking a lot about. And essentially, the Wu Shen is the empty space in that wheel. It's what makes that wheel turn. It's the consciousness behind everything.   Steph Nosco: (02:58) And so, when I first heard about the Wu Shen from actually my shamanic Chinese medicine teacher, I was just so fascinated, I wanted to know more. I was like, "Tell me more about the spirits," you know? Like, I was just ... I wanted to dive into this so badly. I formerly was a Buddhist practitioner and very, very into meditation. And I have a religious studies background. So, I was like, "Give me more of the Wu Shen." And so, I learned a lot from Lorie Eve Dechar who's an acupuncturist. And she just has so much information about the spirits. And I started reading kind of classical texts that were really hard to get, because a lot of these texts are like out of print, you can't even buy them. So, it was like a book less than an inch thin for $200, kind of thing.   Mason: (03:46) Oh nice. I love those ones.   Steph Nosco: (03:49) Yeah. So-   Mason: (03:51) Any in particular? Because I know everyone will start hounding you and me for that little-   Steph Nosco: (03:54) Yeah. So this one, Rooted in Spirit by Claude Larre and Elisabeth Rochat is really great. They have quite a few translations on the Neijing Suwen, which is a lot of where this stuff comes from. So, me being religious studies background and super nerdy into this stuff, I was just so lit up about it. And then, also realising there's a big gap. Like, we're not talking about this. And why aren't we talking about this in yoga out of all places? And Yin yoga is such a perfect avenue to explore the spirit dimension. My teacher is Sarah Powers. So, I learned a tonne. That's kind of how I got interested through this stuff. But she didn't offer a lot of this information because it is quite obscure. So, I was like, "Okay, let's dive into it."   Steph Nosco: (04:41) Yeah, so I guess, what can I say about the Wu Shen? So, again, the Wu Shen is that axis in the centre. And it exists along a vertical plane. Yeah, a vertical plane versus the Wu Shen exists on that horizontal plane in that horizontal axis. So, the Wu Shen kind of moves in a different order than the elements, which can get a little bit confusing. But we can think about it like a map to the spirit that enters through the GB20 at the crown of the head, okay? Through what ... [Shu shu ninati 00:05:11] is what we would call it in yoga or Taiji Pole is what we would call it in Daoism.   Mason: (05:18) It's like, you were talking about the compass. It's like, you can say everyone's like, yes, there's ... And again, we've talked a lot about Yin Yang, Wu Xing as like, well, ultimately, it's the foundation of medicine. And it's like, that is literally, we don't need to go into Western diagnosis. It's literally the healing that arises from the diagnosis and bringing about harmony in the Yin Yang, Wu Xing. Yet you're talking about that, literally being on that nature plane and that physical plane. And then, all of a sudden, boom, we put up the horizontal axis.   Steph Nosco: (05:53) Yes. Yeah.   Mason: (05:54) We've got a compass.   Steph Nosco: (05:55) It's bringing heaven literally down into earth. So, it's bringing ... How spirit comes down into earth through me. That's what it is. And so, what's confusing, I heard your episode on the three treasures. You guys talked a little bit about that.   Mason: (06:09) Yeah.   Steph Nosco: (06:11) Yeah, so it's kind of like, we have the three treasures, which are essentially the different densities of Qi, because everything is Qi. And Shen is the densest form of Qi. But within that Shen, there's also different gradients of density of energies. And so, that's what the Wu Shen are. And so, the five are Shen, which gets confusing because Shen is also all of them. But we can think of also like shining a light through the prism. Everything is Shen, everything is light, everything is spirit. But when you shine that light through a prism, it divides, right? So, we have these different densities. So, we have Shen, Hun, Yi, Po, and Zhi.   Mason: (06:55) What comes ... I've just been listening to a podcast around the nature of animism, and how we are this ... We're this dot of ... You know? The smallest portion of humans have gone completely into the intellect and the analytical way of looking at the world. And literally for all of history, every single human is getting the kinetic ... Like, everything is alive around us. You can feel the living nature of everything. And what I'm just realising in the process I'm going through is looking at Yin Yang, Wu Xing, you know? Even that is a step away from the analytical Chinese medicine that is just purely nuts and bolts and seeing someone as symptoms and disease states, to then go to Yin Yang, Wuxing, but then straight away, when the Zhi and these aspirations of the various organs that can emerge and the aliveness and the spirit that can emerge, the personality almost that can emerge, not only just then did I see that you've got that upward, that horizontal that then gives you a compass.   Mason: (08:08) What I can feel then, then I've got the contrast and the story of the body and the world. And the universe starts colouring ... It's just started colouring in for me a little bit. I can really start feeling the aliveness of everything. And it's just playing in really nicely to my week and listening to this podcast around animism. And I love people like Stephen Harrod, you know, the herbalists who they're bringing this storytelling and this metaphor to herbalism and to the plants. Same as people doing that to the stars, not just studying these things going, you need to feel the aliveness and you need to be able to tell stories. And that's what I'm feeling and I'm excited to go in with you now and hear these stories.   Steph Nosco: (08:51) Yeah, so I guess we can start with the first kind of story, which is maybe more of again metaphors. Metaphors and stories, they just bring these teachings to life. And it has to be that way, right? Because we can't measure, we can't quantify the five spirits. So, Laurie, Lorie Dechar, she's just a brilliant, brilliant woman. But she actually had a download. So, this is not in any texts. But she had this download that the five spirits could be likened to like a mountain. And she uses the [Kumoon 00:09:20] Mountain, which is the mountain, it's like a sacred mountain in China. And what's funny about this is now this mountain, this Kumoon mountain is on the border of Tibet and China. And she heard once, one of her friends recently went there. And they reported, "Oh yeah, it's really deserted now. There's like old tanks there and it's just like there's garbage." And she's like, "You know what? What an amazing metaphor for where we're at now as a species." It's like this Kumoon mountain has been abandoned, you know?   Steph Nosco: (09:57) And so, her job is like ... I asked her, "Can I use the metaphor of the mountain in my work?" And she says, "Use it." She's like, "We need this. We need to bring the spirit down. We need to bring the spirit down the mountain." And that's really what we were kind of chatting before the show is that the Daoism is really a system of descent, of spiritual descent. So, it's not about ascent, it's about bringing the light of heaven down the mountain. And as we move down, we actually alchemize our difficulties into growth and we realise our Dao and we live our Dao, which is really what actually the whole function of the five spirits is to live out our Dao. And for the listeners who don't know what that is, our Dao is our purpose. It's like the Wu Wei, right? When we're living our Dao, we live with naturalness, we live with ease. This effortless effort. And yeah, we don't have to try so hard, our life just kind of flows because we're living in alignment, in spiritual alignment.   Mason: (11:06) Two questions. Can you talk about the significance of a descending model being offered or just being present, you know? Not necessarily as like, this is the way you need to live forever. But as an offering potentially, I'm not sure whether it's balancing out or what, compared to the ascension model that is so prevalent now.   Steph Nosco: (11:29) Yeah. So, the ascension model is kind of like, if you meditate enough and if you're spiritual enough, you're going to kind of get to ... You're going to kind of bypass all of the shit. Or it's like, I'm going to be ... My life is going to be completely neutral and happy when I am up here. So, it's very much ... it's still existing in this good and bad dichotomy, versus embracing the paradox, you know?   Steph Nosco: (11:58) I saw this thing on Instagram. I don't know if you saw my riff the other day on my feed. It was like one of the spiritual accounts I was following. And it was on the emotions and how the positive emotions have this line, right? This line above, below. And it was the positive emotions, like compassion, love, gratitude, all these things. And it's like ascension. And then below was like all the negative emotions. And then at the bottom, it said death. And it was very much like, we want this, and we don't want this, right?   Mason: (12:28) That's the Abraham-Hicks model, I think, no? Don't-   Steph Nosco: (12:31) It could have been. But it was-   Mason: (12:33) And I'm going to retract, I don't know. For anyone that loves the Hick, do not come after me if that is wrong.   Steph Nosco: (12:40) Yeah. Anyway, it was just this kind of meme or this image. And I thought, you know what? This is the problem with the ascension model is, it says anything that isn't good or anything that lives in the shadow, there's something wrong with that, and I need to bypass that somehow or I need to ... What's the word I'm looking for? Jump over it or ascend it or transcend it maybe. But what alchemy says, what this Daoist alchemy says is, that stuff, that lead is actually the gold. That is why we're here. Like, if we weren't meant to go through those difficulties, then we would just still be a spirit in the clouds, you know? It's those things that teach us, it's those things that season us. And so, that's what we're doing is, we're going down the mountain. We're bringing spirit right into those difficulties, right into the grit.   Mason: (13:33) And so, when we go on this, we'll go on this journey down the mountain through the spirits. Although they're the same thing, technically they have different expressions.   Steph Nosco: (13:45) Yes.   Mason: (13:46) I'm imagining, you're going to kind of highlight and ... I don't know why I said the word ... Though the word showcase, it does not seem appropriate. But nonetheless, I'm going to say it.   Steph Nosco: (13:56) Maybe.   Mason: (13:57) Showcase.   Steph Nosco: (13:58) I could get up and do a dance or something.   Mason: (13:59) Yeah.   Steph Nosco: (14:00) Yeah.   Mason: (14:00) And over here we have Po. Po is going to be a beautiful spirit for you to get into the alchemy.   Steph Nosco: (14:06) Yeah.   Mason: (14:08) Are you going to kind of like just highlight for us and bring us into that feeling of how, through embracing these various parts ... And how would you suggest in the beginning for someone new relates to this? Are these various expressions of the spirit of ourselves, of our own organs? Is this a universal expression of a particular type of Chi that we can all relate to? How do you relate to these spirits?   Steph Nosco: (14:35) Yeah, they're universal. They're definitely universal energies. And they're very personal. So, I would say that they're both. You know, everyone experiences Shen differently, everyone experiences Hun differently. And yet, everyone has it. So yeah, it's kind of both, I think. It's both personal and transpersonal.   Mason: (14:53) And finally, can you just give a nice little ... Just bring to awareness for me what you see, again, the medicine being starting to acknowledge this horizontal element of the compass that is this spirit, versus just practising Chinese medicine on that horizontal plane?   Steph Nosco: (15:14) Yeah. So, the way Lorie describes it, and the way my Qigong teacher describes it is, it helps to ground the changes, okay? So, we could go to acupuncture and have a treatment. And then, within three weeks, we're back in that usual pattern. And so, unless we alchemize, what I mean, unless we take the light of our awareness, which is our Shen, and we bring it down into those difficulties and transform them, that pattern is still going to be there, because remember Jing, Qi, and Shen. Shen is the mind and the mind influences everything. If we still have that same pattern in our mind, that same rift in our ... I don't want to say personality, but in our psyche, then that pattern is just going to keep coming. And so, especially things like with co-disturbances, like chronic pain, we got to do this Wu Shen work to ground change.   Steph Nosco: (16:11) So, it's a transformation. It's not just about getting back to where we were before. That's really important. Yeah, it's not like I'm going to be healthy again. It's, I'm going to actually take this symptom and ask, what is my body trying to tell me? What is the wisdom in this? What is the lesson? What is the meaning?   Mason: (16:28) It really starts dipping into like a way of maintaining flow. If you're looking from a Western sense, I always think it seems like it's getting deep into the emotions, it's getting deep into the psychology of who we are, but in a way that's approachable, a way that can be invited into the family, having some language around it, so we can kinetically get an understanding of what's happening for say ourselves, our wives, our husbands, our partners, our children, so that we can ground the healing and the expansive way of living into our home, bringing the medicine into our home, rather than just relying on an external institution to give it to us.   Steph Nosco: (17:16) Yes, it's empowering, because once you start to know what's going on with your spirits, with your psyche, then you can say, "Maybe I can make that change." Or, "Maybe I need support right now." But there's that level of awareness.   Mason: (17:29) So, for me, I can definitely ... I feel like I'm attracted to this and have talked about the fact that I like that this style of living is descending, especially when you've ... Especially I'm someone that's gone through, in the early days, through that new age community that comes with the implications. Perhaps it's good in short doses, I don't know. I definitely learnt a lot through it, you know? You need to aspire. Basically, you need to learn, you need to let go. And then, maybe you'll become pure enough. Maybe if you do all these things right, you can look through the eyes of God and be a good person. But until then, you keep practising , rather than easing back into the completeness and the wholeness in which you are.   Mason: (18:17) So, for me, I'm going to take myself into that mentality of starting at the top of the mountain in my completeness. And then hand it over to you to take us on this journey.   Steph Nosco: (18:28) Yeah, sure. Okay. I did write notes. So, just to keep me on track.   Mason: (18:34) Beautiful. I love it. I just started standup comedy. And I had a phobia about-   Steph Nosco: (18:38) That's awesome.   Mason: (18:39) I was like, "I'm not ever allowed to write notes ever." And then I'm like, "You know what? I think it's not a bad thing to prepare. I think I should write some notes."   Steph Nosco: (18:48) Yeah. I mean, there's just so much. Like, it's just, this information is just so rich. And yeah, I'm just really, really grateful for the elders that came before who mapped this out. It's just incredible. So yeah, definitely honouring those ancestors. Okay, so let's start at the top of the mountain. So, the Shen is the sun. The Shen is the light. So, we think of the Shen relates to the fire element. And this can be seen in the light in someone's eyes, okay?   Steph Nosco: (19:22) So, it's said that the Shen comes in upon conception. And you can start to see it in the light in the baby's eyes or the smile in the baby, right? And so, I like to divide it. It's easier for me to understand the Shen when I divide it into two parts. So, the one Shen, which means, this is who we really are. This is our ultimate nature, awareness. And this is the part of us that's always going to be okay, even if we're not okay. This is the deathless aspect of our mind. And because it exists beyond time and space, it knows the truth at all times. So, that's the one thing about the Shen, it is the truth, the truth of who we are, okay?   Steph Nosco: (20:06) But then we have what's called the Shen Zhi, what you were talking about earlier, which is like the rest of the spirits. So, it's the personality self. And the heart is like the capacity to be aware and to make contact with the truth, both personal truths, like our personality self, and ultimate truth. So, this is our willingness to hold both. And my teacher always says this to me, Sarah Powers, actually. She's like, "We have to have a willingness in our spiritual practise to wake up and grow up," you know? Both. And so, that's the Shen Zhi. That's the working with the Shen Zhi. It's the personality self. And then we have this like ultimate self, okay?   Steph Nosco: (20:51) What else do I want to say about the Shen? So, the Shen gets disturbed when there's any kind of shock or trauma. So, when the heart is shocked with something, like say you just get in a car accident, what happens is, the Shen will actually leave the body, because it belongs to heaven. It takes any chance it gets to just kind of vacate. And so, when our Shen isn't in our body, we don't have access to truth and we can't really make decisions very well.   Steph Nosco: (21:19) So, another example would be falling in love. When you fall in love, that also disturbs the Shen. And the Shen, the mind, the awareness will leave the body. And so, you often don't make the best decisions when you're in love. Or when you're over-excited. So, one of the-   Mason: (21:35) That's probably the key distinction there.   Steph Nosco: (21:37) Yeah. So, anyways. So, Shen disturbances will show up often if somebody is ... Kind of like they use inappropriate laughter. So, we can notice they're saying something really serious, but they're laughing. That can be an indication of a Shen disturbance. So, also this anxiety or being almost over-joyful would be like a Shen disturbance.   Steph Nosco: (22:06) And another metaphor that I like to give is, it's kind of like, when our Shen is healthy, it's like looking into a clear pool of water, it reflects the truth. When we're really busy, when we're really agitated, it's like a wavy river or wavy pool and we can't see clearly. So, it's really important when we're working with the Shen, just giving ourselves basic space, you know? Like, spend time every day being quiet. And I think this is one of the problems in our modern life is that we aren't often quiet. We're constantly stimulated. And there's really not enough space for the Shen to reside. It's often out of our body.   Steph Nosco: (22:51) Even when we close our eyes, the Shen will rest down into the heart. So, when we sleep, the Shen will go into the heart, but similarly when we meditate. So, when we meditate and close our eyes, it gets the Shen to actually drop down into the heart and for our energy to collect. So, something like a silent retreat, I used to lead them before COVID, I fricking love silent retreats. Even just taking an hour to not talk. Like, let things settle down. So, that's really the work of the Shen, because if we don't bring the Shen home, it's really hard to bring awareness into any of the other spirits.   Mason: (23:29) Can I ask you there, with Shen, something I liked about your posts is, you've had the ... I'm always careful not to personify these energies and spirits too much, but also I love it.   Steph Nosco: (23:41) Yeah, so do I. Yeah.   Mason: (23:44) And for you, I mean, for me when I'm relating to the Shen is ... And I appreciate kind of the variation that you're bringing in terms of that personality element of the Shen, which is almost, if we see the Shen as the heart as the emperor and the other organs serving the emperor and feeding in various ways of thinking and being and different ways of virtuous nature and various emotions. We see a personality come and get delivered through the heart or through the Shen, however informed by the other organs and other energies. Is that fair to say?   Steph Nosco: (24:19) Yep, totally, 100%. Yeah. And the heart knows what's going on, right? Through the blood because the blood pumps through. And it's always going through the heart. It's kind of like the heart talking ... It's exactly like you said with the emperor. It's like, "Oh yeah, that's going on there, okay." So, it's kind of ruling the show. So, if the emperor isn't home, there's a problem, right? So, it's about bringing it down. And the Shen is easily scared. So, whenever we're anxious, it's like the Shen isn't in the body. So, doing anything as far as practicality, give yourself space, find time to be quiet. And anything that brings you into your body. Like, even massaging your feet or even putting your hands on your body while you're meditating. Or even if you just need a five minute timeout, you know? That helps bring the Shen home.   Mason: (25:13) How do you relate to, if there is a personification or story around your own Shen, I'm interested how you relate to that and feel that, kinetically feel that story unravelling for yourself with that Zhi?   Steph Nosco: (25:28) Yeah, I often think of the Shen as like a bird that gets scared really easily. And so, I tend to have like, even right now on this podcast, like before this podcast, I was like, "Oh no, my Shen is out of my body. I need to calm down," which of course that internal dialogue made it worse. But yeah, I often think of this little bird that gets scared and it flies away. And then, when I sit down and I calm down and I breathe, it's like that little bird can come back into the best of the heart. And then there's just more awareness.   Mason: (26:03) Naturally, I can feel, although we're going to go nice and deep on this podcast, as we go through all of these various elements of who we are and the major organs, I can see already in you describing that, the interplay between the various Zhi, between the various spirits, and the roles that they play and the way they interact. Could possibly derail us, I'm not going to. But I could just ... You know? You even start to talk, bring that bird storytelling, I'm like, "Oh, wow. And I can see." It's much easier for me to see now how various other spirits would be playing a role in supporting the heart and the Shen now in a story, rather than a theory.   Steph Nosco: (26:45) Yep, 100%. 100%. Okay, can we move on now? Any more-   Mason: (26:50) No. Yeah, of course.   Steph Nosco: (26:52) Yeah, okay. I mean, like each one of these, you can do like ... Like, I did a Yin series on each one. And I was like, "It's not enough time." But it is good to kind of get an overview because they do interact with one another. So, the Hun, for example, is a messenger of the Shen, okay? So, if you think of the Shen like a light, now you're coming down the mountain into the mist and into the clouds at the very top of the mountain. So, now the Shen is starting to take form through dreams and visions. And that is really the role of the Hun as a messenger of the Shen. And these are what's called the upper spirits. They both relate to the blood. And they both inform any kind of messages from heaven, from I guess the [Yan 00:27:41] energy.   Steph Nosco: (27:42) Let me just grab my notes here. So yeah, it's called the cloud soul and it goes up and down in our sleep. So, when we sleep, the Shen moves from the eyes into the heart. And the Hun will also be in the eyes when we're awake, because remember the Hun follows the Shen. So, when we're awake, that's where the Hun is at our eyes, because the Hun really wants to learn. Think about the Hun like wood element, it wants to grow, okay?   Steph Nosco: (28:13) So, the Hun comes down and it learns. It learns, it plans, it formulates our dreams and visions. And it's not all that refined when it first comes into the body. So, for example, a baby can't really plan. Its visions aren't really formulated yet. But as we start to get older, this is the kind of thing that the Hun learns. And sorry, going back to the closing the eyes thing. When we close our eyes or sleep, the Shen will rest in the heart. But the Hun will actually rest in the liver. And that's how it digests our experience through dreaming. So, the Hun is also related to dreams.   Steph Nosco: (28:53) Yeah, and so it's really hard to live out our Dao, right? So, Shen is like, "Okay, now I know what my Dao is, sort of. Or I have some kind of idea." It's this insight, this light. And it's hard to really live that out if we can't make a plan, okay? So, it starts to kind of manifest down at the Hun.   Mason: (29:17) Right, so I mean, I saw you talk about that in terms of the heart, the Shen having ... It's like, "Oh, here's our values." And that was really useful for me as an interpretation.   Steph Nosco: (29:32) Values is a really good word. This is what I value, this is my truth, right? And so, how do we live that? Well, we're going to need some kind of plan because we don't live in heaven, we live on this plane. And so there's this ... I mean the Hun does have density. But it's not very dense. It still comes and goes, it's still fairly fleeting if that makes sense. So, somebody with a Hun disturbance, they often lose hope, you know? Hope is a Hun thing, having hope for the future, seeing possibilities.   Steph Nosco: (30:10) Some people who don't have or have a Hun disturbance can also be like wandering aimlessly through their life, kind of like, "Oh, I'll do this now. Oh, I'll do this now," but they can't really direct it. So, it's, let's have a plan, let's have a vision. Let's take this light and actually start to manifest it. But it's the first point of manifestation, right? And so, this is all about the Hun.   Steph Nosco: (30:34) And then, some ways that we can work with the Hun, obviously dreamwork. Dreamwork is really great. Practising using your imagination. As a former Buddhist, I was like a strict Theravada Buddhist practitioner for many years. And I was like, "I'm not visualising anything." Like, just breathing or Dzogchen, you know? But this idea of practising , like let's go on a little journey here, like a guided visualisation journey. Anything to exercise the imagination is brilliant. And I think that this is one of the things that we've lost in our modern day is like, our imagination has been beaten out of us, you know? By the time we're in high school. So, visioning is really important, exercising your imagination. And then, also letting the sceptical part of you that's like, "Oh, that's not possible." Let that part kind of step back so that you can really let your imagination loose. And that will nourish your Hun as well.   Mason: (31:27) That's a really, really important distinction. Like, I was just transported back to my university days and to my high school days. And I remember my first year of uni, where I could really feel it. Like, the final fatigue in having that imagination, that visioning, dreaming part of myself kind of like beaten out of me, within that context anyway. And it takes a long time to get that back. So, I mean, anything to be able to support that liver, wood energy, when you're going through that system, if you do find yourself dismayed around your lack of ability to be imaginative and dream anymore, that's huge.   Steph Nosco: (32:13) Yeah, it is. And it's a practise. And I think people don't realise that. Like, I have so many students that come and say, "I can't visualise," or, "I can't. I'm not a visual person." Okay, neither was I, but you practise. And it becomes easier over time. And I mean, one of the things, I often relate the Hun, and I know some teachers don't. Some teachers relate compassion and loving kindness to the Shen spirit. But I actually really like it in the Hun. Like, I really feel compassion as a liver energy for me, because it's very active. And it's also like, when you do a loving kindness meditation, you're using your imagination. You're using the faculty of the Hun to imagine, how would I look and how would I be in that person's shoes? You know?   Steph Nosco: (32:58) So, you're using that capacity to kind of take different perspectives. And being able to walk in another person's shoes or imagining what it would be like to be them is a large faculty, I think, of developing compassion and loving kindness. And so, that's also an aspect I feel of the Hun spirit. And that's just coming through my meditations, not necessarily maybe the classical way to describe it. Yeah.   Mason: (33:21) Well, I mean, the classical way as well, I find the trump there is that, thankfully the classical texts have gone and systemized this especially so a Western civilization can interpret it, not that that was their intention.   Steph Nosco: (33:36) Yep.   Mason: (33:36) But if you go back to the nuance of the conversation, the organs are collaborating. There's no rule-   Steph Nosco: (33:45) Totally.   Mason: (33:45) You know? Like, I know you know this. But that was an important one for me to remember as well. Like, okay, hang on, courage. Courage comes from the ... That's right, it comes from the lung. But I also feel courage from the kidney. But that's wrong.   Steph Nosco: (33:56) Courage comes from the ... Yeah, totally.   Mason: (33:58) Like, that's wrong, isn't it? Because ...   Steph Nosco: (34:00) Yeah, and actually, I was having this conversation about trust and faith, because I feel like trust is very much a Yi thing, but then some people think it's a kidney or a Zhi thing. So, it's like, but they're both, right? It's both. And anyway, so you're right. It kind of depends on which way you look at it. And it can be an open conversation, rather than a, this is right and that's wrong.   Mason: (34:21) And again, it's like a village, you know? I know it's like a civilization in the way that it's described a lot of the time, the emperor of the heart and the general of the liver, you know? Like, we don't need to use that language necessarily. It can be a village on more of a small scale. It's always going to be a collaboration. The leader of the tribe isn't solely taking responsibility for feelings of infinite love and generosity for everyone.   Steph Nosco: (34:49) That's right.   Mason: (34:50) That's completely attributed to the whole tribe working together.   Steph Nosco: (34:53) Totally, totally. Yeah. Yeah, so that's kind of the Han. Can I move on? Or do you have any more questions about the Han? Or comments?   Mason: (35:05) Well yeah, I do have comments. I try and shut myself up sometimes.   Steph Nosco: (35:11) No, I'm curious. I would love to be in dialogue. I mean, yeah. I'd love to know.   Mason: (35:14) Just going along, it's interesting ... We talk about ... We talk, have the spirit and this awareness of the spirit of the various organs, so that if the liver wood ... The way you understand it, if our liver wood is flowing and transforming between its expression of Yin Yang Qi, then we see a healthy ... Basically a healthy spirit, a healthy expression, a healthy personality, a healthy function of the Hun. If we see a disturbance of that wood Qi, then we start seeing ... That's where personification or bringing it into more of an animalistic metaphor, we can start seeing that an aggravation can come about and a frustration can come about from the Hun.   Mason: (36:04) If you have this very tactile, spirit based way of approaching it, then you can go, "All right, let's just see in the beginning how I can remedy this first of all." There's certain practises, a Yin Yoga, a Yin Yoga sequence, working with that liver meridian, perhaps some foods or herbs that are friendly. And so, is this the way that you relate to keeping us along? Or how do you relate to that healing element?   Steph Nosco: (36:32) Yeah, definitely. I would say, again, like you were saying before, it's all in conversation, right? Because it's not like, okay, if I'm dealing with liver stuff, I don't just do liver because I know that water nourishes wood. So, if I'm feeling like a wood element thing, where I don't have any dreams and visions, then maybe I actually need to nourish ... Like, I need to be more in that dreamy space of water.   Steph Nosco: (36:55) So, yes and no, I would say. Like, they all work in harmony. But definitely I would use practises like Qigong and Yin to like ... Maybe with more of a focus on liver stuff to work with the Hun. But then also we have to remember, it's like the things that we do every day. Like the little things that we do every day. I'm going to get into the Yi in a moment. But something that my partner does all the time is he just stands up in the kitchen and just eats food. And he's just like not even ... And I'm like, "It's not good for your Yi." Like, it's just little things like that, that can really help us along. Not giving yourself enough time to sleep. Like the ending, like the morning when we're dreaming, because that's when we vent, right? That's when we vent our emotions. Like, giving yourself enough time to sleep, that's going to make a big difference in the Hun spirit.   Steph Nosco: (37:47) Even just enjoying beauty. Not giving yourself enough time to enjoy beauty. Go outside, look at things that are beautiful. The Hun loves beauty. So yeah, and even just especially the colour green. Like, get out in nature, breathe that in. And people don't think of that as a medicine, right? But it is. It's these little things. It's the little things that we do every day, our habits.   Mason: (38:13) Beautiful. All right, Spleen.   Steph Nosco: (38:15) Also one more thing I want to say about the Hun is that it can also show up, like we often think about the liver in anger. But it actually shows up in this context more in depression, which is something that I just kind of was really learning this year was that, again, if we don't have hope, if we can't dream of a future, there's this sense of, "Okay, well then what's the point?" So, that can also be a sign of a Hun disturbance.   Mason: (38:43) I mean, just again, you feel the tactile nature of this alive way of seeing the body, rather than just a cog, you know? Bunch of cogs in a machine. You can see, there's depression, we can look at it as a whole as something that is emerging. We can go and look at the nuance of depression emerging from, it's got this kind of feeling to it, or maybe emerging from this kind of style of stagnation. Like, just different roads, I guess, to Rome, and getting back to the core issue, but not just going, "Bang, depression, that's diagnosed."   Steph Nosco: (39:15) Totally. And I think one more thing I want to say, coming back to your point and our point earlier, we were talking about empowerment, is these things again can't be measured or seen. It's not like you're going to go to one magical Chinese doctor and they're going to be like, "You have depression because of a Hun imbalance." It's more about self-reflection, feeling into your patterns, feeling into your spirit, right? It's very much this kind of inner reflection, learning this information, feeling it in your body, sitting with metaphor and story, working with your dreams. And then, "Maybe something's going on with the Hun." Do you see what I mean? So, it's less of this diagnosis where we're putting ourselves in this box and we're handing our power over to someone else to tell us what's wrong with us.   Mason: (39:57) Decentralised healing.   Steph Nosco: (39:59) Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Shall we continue? Okay. So, we come down from the clouds. And now we're on earth. So, we were on the earth plane. And we are now at the centre, which is the Yi spirit. So, Yi is translated as intention or clear thought. So, this is now where the dreams and visions start to manifest. They start to manifest as what? As our specific intentions to do something. But it's not only the intention, it's the follow through. So, I often like to think, since we're doing story and metaphor, I often like to think of the Yi as a humble farmer, because a lot of the descriptions of the points in the body in the other organs are described as like the palace gate and the 10,000 halls or whatever. But the Yi is described as living in a hut.   Steph Nosco: (40:57) And so, the Yi is like this little farmer who is like, "Okay, now I'm going to take the light of the Shen and the dreams and visions from the liver and I'm going to do something with it." So, this is the part of us that's showing up every day and getting our hands dirty. So, it's the ... And I also like to think of the Yi spirit, not only as intention, but as devotion and constancy. So, let's just give an example of, say you wanted to start a Qigong practise or a yoga practise. And you have this insight that this is my path, I'm going to start. You get these dreams and visions. Okay, I'm going to do it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at this studio.   Steph Nosco: (41:38) Okay, so you have the dreams and visions. And then the Yi says, "Okay, now I'm going to set my alarm and actually going to go do it. I'm actually going to follow through on it day in and day out."   Mason: (41:50) No wonder my acupuncturist tells me I constantly have a spleen deficiency.   Steph Nosco: (41:55) Yeah. So, one of the things that tends to happen is, the classic disturbance is this rumination of thought. So, it's the thought that goes round and round and round and round without follow through, right? And so, then it's just stuck there. And it causes all kinds of ... Like, the knotting of the Qi and all of the things that ... And there's this feeling of like, I'm stuck, I doubt myself. Is this even good? It's just this sense of being frozen.   Mason: (42:24) Get out of my body, you shaman witch.   Steph Nosco: (42:26) Yeah. So, one of the things I-   Mason: (42:30) I said witch, by the way everybody, with a W.   Steph Nosco: (42:36) Okay, with a W. Yeah. And I think for a lot of people, this is where the work happens. This is where the rubber meets the road, you know? We can have all of these ideas, but unless we're going to actually do them, it just won't happen. And I think part of the problem is, to come back to this Yi metaphor, the Yi relating to the stomach and spleen organ, which is about digestion. So, sometimes we literally bite off more than we can chew. We have this grand idea. Okay, I'm going to do this now. I'm a wood type, so I have a lot of ideas. And then it just stays. All the ideas just stay, but there's no connection to the lower spirits, right?   Steph Nosco: (43:14) And so, one of the things I always suggest to people and my students is, take small bites. So, things like, okay, I want to start this podcast, or I want to lead this yoga retreat, or whatever it is. Maybe you make the phone call to rent the space. You know? Like, one thing. Write it down, do it, check it off a list. And take a moment to feel grateful. So, bask in that. Bask in your accomplishment of doing something. That really helps the Yi, because the Yi is also about nourishment. So, if we're spinning round and round and round and not actually following through on our dreams and aspirations, we don't feel nourished by life. So, even if it's that one little thing that you can check off on your to-do list, it really helps the Yi spirit. If you say you're going to do something and you don't do it, that creates that imbalance. So, it's better just not to say that you're going to do it.   Mason: (44:12) Huge. Yeah. I'm having a really big moment.   Steph Nosco: (44:16) Okay. I can see the gears turning a little bit. Yeah.   Mason: (44:20) Well, I feel, again, I have known this about myself theoretically. I've talked about it in therapy. And of course, bringing the real ... The storytelling and bringing it to live and animating it, it brings me into the reality of feeling actually what's going on. And it's always these moments when rubber does hit the road and distinction becomes something that I can embody as a knowing of myself and start possibly offering respect to that element of myself that can't digest these huge ideas that I just throw down, you know? Down the oesophagus and into the stomach.   Steph Nosco: (45:05) Right. Right.   Mason: (45:06) Yeah, it's a really beautiful ... It's a really transformational and practical way of having actual perception occur of who you are.   Steph Nosco: (45:21) Yeah. Yeah. And I've often, when I teach programmes, it's often like, "Oh, that's me." Or, "I have that one." Or one girl in my last training was like, "I think all of them are out of balance." And she was freaking out. I was like, "Don't worry about it. It's fine." It's like, we start where we are, right? And we just ... Yeah, again, compassion. Compassion for where we are and we just start where we are.   Mason: (45:43) Yeah, it's also nice starting at the place where you don't have to do a lot. And you talk about devotion. And it's nice having devotion for something that isn't aspiring to be given something by some entity, you know? That's going to ... Or given something by some ... I don't know, beam of light or whatever it is that you ... Yeah, it's different ... It's a very different energy.   Steph Nosco: (46:06) Yeah. And I think that some people think of devotion as like singing to a goddess, which it can be. Like, I do. I have a Guan Yin Dharma practise and I love singing to Guan Yin. So, it can be that. And singing is really good for the Yi, like physically singing. The character for the Yi is the symbol for the heart. And then on top, the Chinese character for a music note. So, this idea that we're singing our heart's song. We're singing our life into being. But again, we're not just singing one time, we're singing constantly. It's like in that constant.   Steph Nosco: (46:38) But you don't have to be devoted to a deity. You could be devoted to ... Like, for me, one of my friends, because I was really wanting to get this information out there, and I was struggling. And she's like, "Think of your Instagram posts or your media posts," because of COVID, everything's locked down. Like, I need to teach. She's like, "Think of it like devotion. This is your devotion practise. Like, you post. You don't post for yourself. You post for other people. But it could be anything. It could be your garden. It could be your work or whatever. It doesn't have to be ..." Your relationship, that's also devotion. So yeah.   Mason: (47:10) Beautiful.   Steph Nosco: (47:11) One thing I will say, one more thing about the Yi spirit that's important to mention is it can often show up as an imbalance as excess sympathy. And so, this is when someone isn't quite ready to take responsibility for their own life and starts to help someone else. So, they're taking a bunch of actions for someone else's life, rather than their own. So, an important thing when working with the Yi spirit, taking bite sized chunks of tasks, but then also saying no to other people is really important for the Yi spirit.   Mason: (47:45) I mean, one thing I love and have a soft spot for is the activist community. And there's a part of myself that loves being expressed within activism. I do not choose to be identified completely in that realm. But just that advice that you just gave, whether it's maybe a practitioner, maybe an activist, someone who's just going out and fighting for the earth.   Steph Nosco: (48:12) Right.   Mason: (48:12) I feel like that distinction's just very important.   Steph Nosco: (48:14) Right.   Mason: (48:14) Don't need to go much further down there. But if you want to, go for it. But yeah, just wanted to point that out.   Steph Nosco: (48:19) And I think that if that's somebody's Dao, then it's good, because this is the thing is, we can't say that ... Like, if that is their life, if that's what the heart is saying is true, then it's true. If that's not what your heart is saying is true, then it's not true. And this is something we'll get through when we get to the Zhi, if we ever get there. Is-   Mason: (48:40) Another hour, let's see. Fingers crossed.   Steph Nosco: (48:41) Yeah. But the Zhi, again when we're doing work that's in alignment with our purpose, it actually is energy giving, right? So, it's just kind of something to note. Okay, let's move on.   Mason: (48:54) Let's.   Steph Nosco: (48:55) Okay, so now we're going into the lower spirits. So, the Yi is actually not an upper spirit and it's not a lower spirit, it's at the centre, okay? So, we have upper spirits, Shen and Han. We have the Yi in the centre. And then we have the lower spirits, which are the Po and the Zhi. And these relate to our body. So, we say ... Sorry, not our body, related to the earth. So, they belong to earth. Upper spirits belong to heaven, the lower spirits belong to the earth.   Steph Nosco: (49:19) So, the Po is our animal spirit. So, it's, like I was saying, the Hun learns. The Po doesn't learn, it knows what to do. The baby is born, it takes its first breath. We don't teach a baby how to breathe, it just breathes, okay? So, this is what the Po does for us day in and day out, it keeps us alive. It's our automatic processes. But it does learn through trauma. So, when the body goes through some sort of trauma, the Po spirit will hold onto that as a semantic memory. And so, this is where our demons live, this is where the shadow lives. And this is what happens. So, we have the vision of the Hun and the Shen. And we have our intention. And we're like, "Yeah, I'm going to get up to go to that yoga class." And then the Po spirit comes in.   Steph Nosco: (50:07) Then the lower spirit says, "Oh, but you should just sleep. Oh, but X, Y, Z." And this is often these unconscious forces that get in the way of living out our highest intention. So, this is where we get into the downward descent. It is our job to take the higher spirits and witness. This is why we go to therapy, it's because we have to witness these kinds of patterns that have been inlaid into our soma.   Steph Nosco: (50:41) So, chronic pain is like a classic Po disturbance, having kind of a chronic issue, chronic pain. And then, any kind of rigid thinking, this inability to let go, the inability to change, right? If you think about the Po spirit relating to metal element, relating to the season of fall, it's all about death. It's about letting transformation happen, transformation occurring. And so, people who have this Po disturbance, it's really hard to move forward. There's this big resistance to change.   Mason: (51:12) Quick question.   Steph Nosco: (51:14) Yeah, so this is really ... Like, when I say the Yi is where the rubber hits the road, kind of. But it's actually when we start to interact with the Po, because it takes a lot of intention to bring the light of the Hun and the Shen down to meet the Po. So, the problem, this is where oftentimes our spiritual practise stops because it's all rainbows and butterflies until we meet our shadow. And then we tend to just abandon ourselves. We abandon our anger, we abandon our anxiety, we abandon blah, blah, blah.   Mason: (51:46) Could you clarify soma quickly?   Steph Nosco: (51:48) Yeah, so the soma, the body. So, all sensations, any time you feel something, that's Po spirit. And someone with some kind of extreme Po disturbance might not be able to even feel their hand. They'll have complete dissociation, or opposite, too much pain. So, too much sensation, not enough sensation. And again, it's not like if you get in a car accident and you have a broken leg, yes you're going to feel pain, but that's not really Po disturbance. The Po disturbance I'm talking about is this kind of chronic pain that tends to show up that's unexplainable.   Mason: (52:26) Unexplainable, right. I was going to ask. And is that simply there from the rigidity, due to our lack of ability to go into the shadow, fear, grief.   Steph Nosco: (52:37) Yes.   Mason: (52:38) Fear of death, whatever it is, and actually bring it.   Steph Nosco: (52:41) Yeah, so Lorie talks about it being like it starts to sink. So, the Po spirit starts to drop down and kind of harden. But it's the upper spirits that will kind of elevate it and keep it from that entropy. I guess we could call it entropy.   Mason: (52:57) Huge. No wonder the association of transformation is like all ... I know alchemy and alchemist is kind of always what I think of when I think of that part of myself. It's like a warrior alchemist.   Steph Nosco: (53:07) Yeah. And kind of you have to be. I mean, and a compassionate one too. I keep on saying this word compassion. But it's like, we need it. And that's why we want the Hun and the Po to exist together, right? The Han is going to come down and support the Po. And the Po will inform the Han and all that. But let's not get into that because we got to make our way down the mountain.   Steph Nosco: (53:28) But just really quick, just some ways that we can start working with the Po, breath work. So, this is the thing is that, yes, the lungs give us our demons or provide us with these shadows. But they also provide the exact thing that we need to kind of work through those shadows. So, breath work is incredible, absolutely incredible. Cold therapy, super good. Movement, any kind of somatic psychotherapy. I've been really into internal family systems therapy recently.   Mason: (54:00) Huge, yeah. Great.   Steph Nosco: (54:04) Yeah, so then being with your emotions. Like, just being with them. Like, rather than saying, classic spiritual bypass, "I'm angry, that's not good." We say, "What is my anger here to tell me?" Right? Way different. Right.   Mason: (54:23) I guess the metal there. I mean, we talked about that descending, packing in, getting hard. I think about a calcification, I think about all of a sudden a metal element that's not pliable at all, that just becomes like super rigid as this shield.   Steph Nosco: (54:37) Yes, inflexibility. And Lorie even says, things like unexplained lumps and bumps, like benin tumours and stuff, that's all Po stuff. Yeah, it's interesting.   Mason: (54:50) Yeah.   Steph Nosco: (54:51) Okay. Any questions on the Po?   Mason: (54:55) So many. Let's move on.   Steph Nosco: (54:57) Okay. So many. Maybe another time. Okay, then we get to the Zhi. So, the Zhi is at the bottom of the mountain. We are now below, deep into the caves. And the Zhi relates to the water elements. And it's all about our power. So, this is where our energy comes from. And it's about our aligned will or our willpower. Zhi means will. Now there's a difference between having the ego's will and working with the aligned will. So, ego's will would be like, "I want to make a million bucks just because." Okay? So, that's going to take a lot of energy because again, we're going against the stream. Maybe not, if our purpose in life is to make a million dollars, then maybe. But if we're going against the stream of our purpose, which is called ... Well, I'll just go into this now because I find it super interesting. Have you ever heard of a [Ming Man 00:55:56]?   Mason: (55:57) Yeah.   Steph Nosco: (55:57) Yeah, so the Ming Man, it's said that our destiny, which is like our soul's purpose, comes into the body and it's stored in the Ming Man, which is the space just right in between the kidneys on GV4.   Mason: (56:10) The gate of life, right?   Steph Nosco: (56:12) Yeah. Yeah. And so, it's said that there is this knowledge of why we're really here. But it's completely unconscious. Remember, lower spirits are the subconscious mind. So, when we start to work down the mountain, there's this deep listening that happens when we work through the Po spirit, when we bring the light of heaven down, there's this deep listening that starts to happen. And we start to actually touch this lower light, which is like why we're really here.   Steph Nosco: (56:44) And once we align ourselves with why we're really here, it's effortless. We're in that Wu Wei, we're in that flow of our life. And it's like, we don't ... And this is really important, we don't have a choice. It's not like I decide what I'm going to do. It's like, "No, no, no. I'm listening. What is the earth telling me to do?" This is a very different thing, because in our Western analytical mind, we want to control and joystick our way through life. But it's not like that.   Steph Nosco: (57:17) One of the things with Po is that we start to surrender to the mystery. And when we surrender to the mystery, we have this deep listening. And then it's like, that's what I need to do and there's no choice. It will take so much energy not to do that thing once you hear that call. And then there's this wellspring of energy and longevity that starts to arise from these kind of deeper waters.   Steph Nosco: (57:41) So, again, what's interesting is again that paradox is, yes there's the light from heaven, but there's also this light from below. But we can't access that light from below unless we're willing to go down. Yeah.   Mason: (57:52) Beautiful.   Steph Nosco: (57:59) Yeah, so I guess that's all I have to say about the Zhi, other than if we have an imbalance, there's this forgetfulness, lack of will, wanting to cut corners in our life, kind of like a con artist would be like a Zhi disturbance. And then there's tumidity and addictions, sex addiction, being addicted to things like that. And yeah. Made it.   Mason: (58:22) That external ... Like, that ... There's something beautiful, just bringing up that ... And again, the Zhi describing the spirit of all of the organs, while also Zhi being used as the name for the spirit, the will expressed for the kidneys, a little distinction there, just in case, I remember [crosstalk 00:58:41].   Steph Nosco: (58:40) Yeah, I know, it's confusing because you've got the Shen Zhi, and then the Zhi itself, which is like the Zhi. I know. It's really ... It's really confusing. One more thing I want to say about the Zhi is, that's where wisdom is. So again, this is kind of the problem I find with these ascension traditions. If we aren't willing to go into the mud and to do our work and to go through that fire of transformation, wisdom and knowledge are two very different things. Wisdom arises, right? True creativity, true inspiration, our true work arises from the light of that deep listening.   Mason: (59:22) Thank you very much for taking us down the mountain.   Steph Nosco: (59:24) Yeah, you're welcome.   Mason: (59:25) That was really beautiful.   Steph Nosco: (59:26) It was a long journey.   Mason: (59:28) Not really, put so succinctly. And I mean, delivered with ... Again, the storytelling is something I feel Western thinking and science has been trying to belittle and just rub on the top of the head of animism and these stories and scrub, "Oh, how naïve," you know? "Oh, off you pop."   Steph Nosco: (59:51) Yeah, "Oh, that's cute."   Mason: (59:52) "That's very cute of you. Off you go. Leave it to the big boys and girls though to actually do the real healing." Whereas, going just very simply telling the story and taking us through that journey like that, all of a sudden, it gives me this invisible access once again of accessibility, decentralised, non-theoretical. It gives me an ease that I don't have all this stuff to remember. And if I don't remember, I'm bad and naughty. It's just a terrain in order to explore. I really appreciate the way you did it.   Steph Nosco: (01:00:26) Yeah. Well, thank you for listening. It's such a pleasure to talk about quite an obscure topic that does take time to explain. So yeah, I really appreciate having the platform to share.   Mason: (01:00:40) Just quickly, through bringing this in, you know? Like, we love Sarah Power. Again, Tahnee's studied with her. I've had her. I think I was a Yin yoga teacher in another life before I started SuperFeast. And had her books. But through the Yin yoga, through bringing it into the teaching, what have you seen as being ... And maybe not obvious ones, but major benefits to yourself, students, maybe just people in their everyday life who are turning into your Instagram? Like, what has been the main benefit of engaging with this way, this medicine?   Steph Nosco: (01:01:21) Yeah. That's a really great question. One of the biggest things I've seen, and this happens to me a lot is people will change, often, not always. But there's many people who change the entire course of their life, because again, when we work our way down the mountain, any kind of life misalignments that are highlighted are brought to the surface. And so, I just had a girl the other day saying, "Hey, I'm leaving my job to go to acupuncture school." Or, "I've signed up ..." This often happens, "I've signed up for X, Y, Z course. I'm now ..." Or, "I've divorced my partner." That's happened to me too.   Steph Nosco: (01:01:56) So, it's like these things where it's like, okay, I see it, and I can't not see it. And I have to take action. And then, after that change happens, this girl's like, "Oh, my frozen shoulder is gone. That's weird." Or, "My irritable bowel syndrome is gone. That's weird." So, it's that, as we start to make those life alignments or those life changes, as we start to live out our Dao, it just flows, health flows, right?   Steph Nosco: (01:02:24) And so, yeah, that's one of those things, if people come to by Yin yoga teacher training, they're like, "Oh, I'm going to be a great Yin teacher." And sometimes they are. But sometimes they change the whole course of their direction of where they're going in their life. And that's what matters, right? I mean, I want people to be good teachers. But really, we're practising Yin yoga as a tool to be better people.   Mason: (01:02:45) That's really beautiful, especially the way you're teaching it. You can't just go and live this on the surface. This needs to be embodied if you're going to be an effective teacher or human.   Steph Nosco: (01:03:01) Yeah. And I mean, my Yin classes, I tell stories. Like, I tell tonnes of stories, like very intricate stories, metaphor. And so, what I do is, I get people to come to my class and then I give them a practise. Okay, so this week, you're working on X, Y, Z. Like, I don't teach drop-in classes anymore, just registered programmes and series because I want this information to land and then actually be integrated. And so, that's kind of where I'm going right now in my work

Wuxing Lin, a Pure Land Buddhist monk studying at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.  He is also doing his internship at the Midwest Buddhist Temple.

The team continues to go after the team responsible for derailing the Wuxing train... including breaking one of the runners out of a KE detainment facility with the liberal application of explosives Also, apologies for the rough sound and the late release. the original was lost and the back up was very nearly ruined and restoring it was... arduous

We're so stoked to have one of our favourite guests, Rhonda Chang, back on the podcast with Mason today. Initially we weren't sure whether our SF community would be ready to receive Rhonda's wisdom, however, to our absolute delight everyone frothed on her first episode - you can check it out here. We always knew we had to have Rhonda back on to continue sharing her deeply authentic application of the traditional philosophy and practice of true Chinese medicine, or what Rhonda refers to as 'Yi'. Rhonda has a brilliant article explaining the difference between Yi and what many of us know as modern Traditional Chinese Medicine, I highly recommend you check it out here.  Mason and Rhonda discuss: Yinyang wuxing theory and how that relates to the body and organ systems. The qualities of the five elements; Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal.  The spirit and body as inspearable parts of the whole, and the importance of holding this view when working to heal dis-harmony in the body, mind and spirit.  Rhonda's classification of  tonic herb. How the practice of Yinyang wuxing is a method of healing, and not a 'medicine'.   Who is Rhonda Chang? For the past 40 years Rhonda Chang has been involved in the study and practice of traditional healing. The journey has been long and tortuous. Rhonda began her studies at the Beijing College of Traditional Medicine. After graduation Rhonda worked as a physician at a number of hospitals in China. In 1986 she migrated to Australia and opened her own treatment clinic.  Rhonda operated her clinic up until 2012, where she felt that government regulation was overly restricting her practice of healing and that the professionalisation of TCM in Australia had subordinated it to modern medicine. Since then Rhonda has focused her energies on writing books and promoting a return to traditional YinYang Wuxing healing principles. Resources:Rhonda Website Rhonda Podcast Rhonda Books   Rhonda's Facebook Group     Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher, CastBox, iHeart RADIO:)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:01) Rhonda, thank you so much for joining us again.   Rhonda: (00:05) Thank you for having me.   Mason: (00:07) Absolute pleasure. It was by far one of the favourite podcasts from the community that we've ever had.   Rhonda: (00:15) Nice to hear. Yes.   Mason: (00:16) Yeah. A big feeling of nostalgia for everyone, I think, as they returned to our roots.   Rhonda: (00:24) I'm so glad, actually, a general public and so interest in this kind of talks, which very encouraged.   Mason: (00:35) Good. I didn't know either how, whether our community would be ready or willing to have the conversation, but people who have never studied Chinese medicine have written to me, old friends saying I listened to that podcast and I really resonated. So I'm encouraged as well. So we covered so much of, especially the content in your book, Chinese medicine, masquerading as Yi. And I got to get my pronunciation of Yi.   Rhonda: (01:11) Yes, that's right.   Mason: (01:12) And then what was that? Sorry.   Rhonda: (01:15) I said, I'm calling the Yi, just tried to separate from the Chinese medicine because when you talk about Chinese medicine, when you're using that word or even traditional Chinese medicine, people get confused to this modern Chinese medicine, seems they've taken over the name, so I prefer to call Yi as a..   Mason: (01:35) I agree. It's almost in the long run. It is going to be less energy to just return to a classical word. Like Yi, we do tell people, if we're speaking English, we will refer to classical Chinese medicine as Yi and masquerading Chinese medicine is TCM, but still you're right. But Chinese medicine-   Rhonda: (01:59) It's hard to. Yes. I think this medicine, it's not really about a Chinese, it's about the philosophy. So I called them Yi because of that. Even before the Western medicine come from China, the Yi, didn't have a Chinese there and only the Western medicine got into China and then they try to separate. So they call the CE, which is a Western medicine and the Gong E, Chinese medicine. So that's how the name come from and that's only last the 100 years. So before that it was just Yi. That's what I actually like to go back to Yi.   Mason: (02:38) Huge distinction. That already takes so much of the commodification of this medicine out because Yi belongs to the earth. It doesn't belong to a nation, a civilization.   Rhonda: (02:58) That's right. Very much. It's not about the Chinese. It's about the tradition of the healing. So it's about the earth and the moon and the sun and the us and the oldest class. Yes. So it is.   Mason: (03:11) Just as we go into discussing the concept of what Yi is at its essence and the yinyang wuxing cycle. I just found a quote that you had on your Facebook group, which I encourage those who want to study more yinyang wuxing yi is that the Facebook group?   Rhonda: (03:34) Yes.   Mason: (03:36) A quote from the book of changes, when the sun reaches its Zenith, it will decline when the moon reaches its fullest, it will wane heaven and earth, wax, and wane. They all comply with the regulation of time, let alone people let alone ghosts and spirits.   Rhonda: (03:53) Absolutely. Yes. I love that phrase.   Mason: (03:57) It really sets us up for where we're going to be going today in this continuation of health and harmony.   Rhonda: (04:04) Well, if I'm going into that, it's a lot to talk about it. And that's what I'm writing this, I'm writing this a new course. It's about how the sun positioned the moon and the world. We call that the sun position on earth. We call the (inudiable), which heaven kind of a positioning on earth. And then the moon time circle around which it gives us that sense of time. Isn't it? So the time and the position, how they form that so-called the yinyang wuxing was here and our body with the meridians and the organs. Yes. But I wouldn't go through that because that's a lot of new names that people won't really get it so quickly, but we just talk about Yin and Yang and we'll see how the wuxing. We cut off of how the wuxing concept came from, but we just talk about what is the wuxing now in which we call that Woodfire and Metal and Water.   Rhonda: (05:09) In my other courses, I actually explained how this concept came from. It wasn't just abstract. It was exactly from the sun, the moon and on the impact on us, that's how that happened. But we'll talk about wood, because everything got a Yin and Yang, which we call that Yin is kind of a contraction and Yang is expansion. So everything got Yin a Yang, like a wood. The Yang of the would erect the Yin of the Woodcontract isn't so that bending and that solid. So they go Yin Woodand become solid. So that actually we say everything, just about all wuxing, everything you see it's about wuxing thing, kind of variation and different ways of presenting. So as our body basically have this Woodthing, organs, we call wuxing organs.   Rhonda: (06:15) So your liver is like a Woodso the Yang of the would make you errect isn't it. And so the Yang of the liver makes your body straight and the Yin of the body flexible. So you can bend. And then that's what organs are. Your body also is said, Yin and Yang that, what is the Yin of the body is your flesh, your bones and your muscles and all this material and the Yang of your body is your spirit. So what is spirit and the body do is spirit using your body to perform their desire or their thoughts? like what, we call thoughts. So your body is actually responsible to perform what your spirit wants. And then your spirit actually depends on the body to perform.   Rhonda: (07:23) So if there's no body they can't perform, and if there's not spirit, the body will rot because the spirit makes the body lively. The spirit is a Yang. Anyway, that's in the book. I explain the more detail. So we say what the spirit do for your Woodis... So if your spirit, Yang of the wood, Yang of the spirit, the Woodspirit, I call them a striving tool. What they do is they make you kind of you want to fight. And the stand for yourself strong. The Yin make you flexible and acceptable go along with it. So, but if your Yin is not good, what do you do? You fight? And that if your Yang is no good, you kind of timid.   Rhonda: (08:19) So you can't cope with the problems and hide yourself because you're scared. So that's how everything you got. If you have a problem with your muscles? So if you muscle can't move or tight, always what we say, that you've a Yin problem, isn't it? So if you are muscles can't get you erect, so we say that it's your Yang problem. And you can actually look at all this and then your body too like Kidney. Kidney is Water. Most people can relate to these, isn't it? Because Kidney  really is a Water organ. So what that Water do is that it's got Yin and Yang, which this Yin and the Yang of the organ study, or even in the traditional texts, it hasn't really explicitly describe this insight or Yang side of each organ.   Rhonda: (09:26) They can quite often, you hear people say, this herb's a good for your Kidney  energy, but what is Kidney  energy? So instead Yin and young it's completely different because the Yin of the Water make you sink, isn't it? The Water go down and the Yang of the Water make you go up, you vibrate and so make you move. So what the Kidney  do is reserve, Kidney  reserves your body energy, your heat, because they call the steam, the Water is called a steam. And then they reserves your heat that make things a moving and then transform to wood, because the Water create a wood. But if Water is all frozen, they are hard to create any of these. When they say Yang in the Water, and then the Wood start to grow. So this is the relation of that Wood thing Water create wood.   Mason: (10:27) It'll be warm. We warm up the Water. We create vapour that can rise up to the liver.   Rhonda: (10:31) That's right. It's not that it has to rise up to liver the make the Water runny, so the liver. What they do is that when they evaporate, they go up to the sky. Isn't it? That in the Water. So that's our Lung . That's in organ, that's our Lung . A Lung is like our sky and in the small world. And then the Water rising up where the Lung does like the sky does they can gather the Water. And then when they do it, they give us a rainfall. So they gave a moist to all over the world. And that's what your Lung that's exactly. So Lung get us all the moist from the Kidney  rising. And then Lung also does is a separate from the bad/good, or what do you call it? A turbid and the fresh. So they gave us a fresh rain and that makes your body fresh.   Rhonda: (11:20) We'll talk about Kidney . That's what is in Yin side and Yang side of Kidney . So what the spirit do with the Kidney  Yin and young is your Yang of the spirit to get govern the Water we call that enduring. What they do is because a Kidney  actually is Water. Water really can hold on anything, absorb anything, but then it pushes everything. It can actually destroy everything. How does steam like Metal and the storms and the Water can destroy them, isn't it? But on the other hand, Water is the softest thing. So it actually takes everything. Anybody can go in there. Isn't it? Anything can get into it. So that's the Water. So what happened is if you have good Kidney  energy, you tend to bury a lot of things. You can handle a lot of things. And if you don't have a lot of Kidney  energy, you can't hold on anything. You look at everything you think that's too big for me. So you don't have the Kidney  Yang energy, but if you don't have a Kidney  Yin energy, of course you dry it out. Yes.   Rhonda: (12:42) So that's the Kidney . Kidney is a Water organ. So it's a Yin in nature. So what they most like is a Yang Qi. A lot of people say your Kidney  deficiency very rarely is your Kidney  Water Yin deficient, because unless you don't drink and you drink, you got Kidney  Water really. But if not hold Water, is Yang problem. But sometimes that your Water is that ge a so slow and rotting, but that's complicated. That's not just your Water problem, that's your soil problem because the Water is not bounded. so there're no banks and they flooded everywhere. And of course your problems. It's all linked. That's why we call it the soil.   Mason: (13:28) To spleen, to clean it up. [crosstalk]   Rhonda: (13:36) We get it from the liver, which is the wood, and now we'll go backward. Okay. And what create the Woodis the Water and what creates the Water is the metal. And then that's kind of a people feel very difficult to understand how the Metal create the Water, isn't it? Because of Metal have this nature gather the things. They're kind of a concentrate, isn't and then they separated the pure, the cleaner, so that's what Metal's kind of nature. So if you put a Metal outside and you find in the humid, they all running Water, isn't it? Especially the cold, you can see the Water or running outside. So that's what I do that draw the kind of moist. And then they gave them around Water. So they create Water. That's what Metal create the Water in the nature as well.   Rhonda: (14:27) Like there're stones and you find all the rivers with the stones, because they gather them them and then they make them separate them, clean them and leave them running. So that's what your Lung s, because of your Lung s gathers Qi, air and then gathers moist in the body and in the whole system is actually acting as a gatherer, hold everything together. So that's why you get Qi so you body actually in the one piece rather than floppy. So if you see somebody very floppy, you find themselves can't breathe very well. So what happened is it's a Lung metal. It doesn't work well. So you body is not gathered and it's kind of sloppy. That's what it gets. So that's what the Metal does and middle actually we say in naturally, how does it, they gathering so they're kind of dry, so they liked the Water. And I mean, they, they gathers those moist. They collect the moist and then they`cannot dry. So if you have a Lung Metal indeficient, you don't gather the moist and you get a very high fever because you can have dry cough and the sore throat and a fever start because you body it got too hot. And then if you go to a Lung Metal or Yang deficient or problems, I don't like to say deficient because the most time some people ask me, what's the deficiency and damage. I used two words; damage and deficient. Deficiency doesn't imply you got a kind of a disease. It's not rotten. It just weak in that site. But when you have damage, that means that the function is got something else in there, like a rubbish in there or darkness or there's something blockage.   Rhonda: (16:33) So it's a more damage and that's what Metal does. So when the Yang is deficient, you get a mucus, you cough and you get thick and you body even smell, odors, because your Lung is not giving you fresh, separate the turbid and the freshness. And then in the body, other senses, they use the Lung actually get the things together and the separate them. So then use a large intestine to dispose all the waste. That's what we do the poo, which is our body's kind of waste. And also they dispose from the skin. So that's why in the Nei Jing says that the Lung actually controls your skin. In my book, I actually talk about skin represent all organs as well. So each organ have problems or showing skin as well. But that's one Metal and what created the Metal is soil. We all know, that isn't that? So soil actually got up. People translate this as earth. I don't like to use nice earth because earth is like the whole globe, but soil is just...   Mason: (17:59) Yeah, exactly. I get that.   Rhonda: (18:03) That's soil. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.   Rhonda: (18:04) It is that actually. So the soil, what soil does is soil actually sticky at her [inaudible 00:00:18:13]. So everything gets them to the soul. That's what the soil is nature. So, when the Yang of the soil it's loosening kind of like separately. So when you actually have things into the soil and you'll find that they take everything. They're not like metal. Metal is gathering, kind of consolidate them, but soil just take everything. And now what they do is that process now. So then they process them into whatever. So what it does in your body. The soil does is that you take all the food into the soil, isn't into your soil organ, which we call the Spring   soil. And then what it does is they separate from, I mean, not separate, they process them. So then into all your organs need.   Rhonda: (19:09) So they make into what you need. I mean, people say nutrition, you have to eat certain things. You don't because the soil actually have collect all the information as well, not as collecting, what do you call the food or things. And they collect all information from all of your organs to say what they need. And then it processed food and supply it to make the Yin and the Yang kind of a balance into certain parts of the body. So if your Kidney  need the most, they probably kind of gathers, kind of sorted out most things that supply to the Kidney  and if you kind of wherever you need it, it's actually processed there. So, that's what I call sorting you know, sorting out. So why is [inaudible 00:02:04]. That's what soil does.   Rhonda: (20:06) So if you have problems with the soil, I mean, apart from the food you... Can't take, if your Yang of the Yin soil problem, you just don't want to eat this. You can't take things eat. And then if your soil is not a processing and then not sorting, and you find you eat but you get hot, thick coat all the time, you feel sluggish and you don't have the enough taste of the food. You might have taste of food, sorry. You just don't feel fresh and after eating you just feel heavy. So if you don't really have, if you have a Yin problem of the soil, you do actually have trouble to taste the food because your organs are not really telling your body what they need. Yeah so, that's you just don't know and you can eat, but you just don't know what is right for you.   Rhonda: (21:05) So you don't get the message yeah, properly. Yeah. So the body in the emotional thing as what we call the soil. Soil is the reason, like the reasoning, because of they have all the message coming to you and then it's sorting out thi and then they're sorted out, work out what all this message is about. So I called them the reasoning. And this is, if you have a problem, you know how the people do like that. They have so much things and they just feel their head is too heavy. So they don't know, they can't work out things. So, that's when the Yang problem, when there's a Yin problem you just can't receive. You don't really know the message.   Mason: (22:28) Yeah. You just finished talking about the the reasoning Ju   Rhonda: (22:31) Yeah. Reasoning Ju . Yeah. I called them my Ju.   Mason: (22:34) Will?   Rhonda: (22:37) That's right. That's will. You know, reasoning will, you could say, but I call them a Ju because it's not just the will. It's about more meaning. It's like sometimes it's not what you will, what you wish to do, but it is like inbuilt, you just want to be proud. It's not your will to be your wish to be proud but you kind of that's all your nature is, so we call that Ju it's like, you stand for, you can't help yourself. Yeah.   Mason: (23:14) That Ju being essentially the been the spirit of each organ that you've been talking about.   Rhonda: (23:20) That's right. Yes, and so when we talk about the soil the Ju that's what the spirits actually using the Spleen soil to kind of act in their reasoning. The reasoning took out the Yin and Yang. They ying make you kind of receiving and the Yang make your working out what they all mean. So yeah, that's the soil. And the back after the soil, it's the fire. Yeah. I mean, what goes backward? Because we came from the woods. It's easy to talk this way. Yeah. So, when we say fire. Yeah. That's right fire. Fire is your Heart  . Yeah. Because we say we got all this heat in the body, isn't that where they come from, it's come from the nature and is maintained by the nature. So how you get this heat? It's not, I mean, we say we've got a food and a we burn.   Rhonda: (24:25) It's not true. As soon your spirit goes, you don't burn, isn't it. You don't have the heat. So it's your spirit that actually connect your body with the nature and that with the sun, the moon and the nighttime, that's why you need to cover up because of spirits resting. So it needs you hold on to what you get in the day, so that your time and spirits open. I mean your Heart   actually got a Yin and Yang. The Yang actually release to get the spirit out. So the spirit make your body active and you connect to the world and you're interacting with each other. And the nighttime spirits go inside and they rest. So that's what a Heart   does, Heart   in kind of the ground. So it makes you hold back and the Yang make your rise. So the spirits up, and that's when you're acting.   Rhonda: (25:19) So that's what the Heart   majorly do. That's why we say the house of your spirit. Yeah. That makes your body kind of warm, make your body active. When you're active, you tend to create a heat. Isn't it? So that's because your spirit and the make your active, make you kind of strong and then make your rice heat. Yeah. So, but then of course, if you're done really reserve a lot of heat in the Kidney , when you create this heat, you don't just expense spend it. It's like have a bank. That's in your Kidney , Kidney . I always tell people I say your bank. So if you drink a lot of freezing cold Water, you use your banking savings to warm up that Water and that kind of yeah, drain a little bill. I always say that fill the Waterville that they're heating the Fire   bill is a lot...   Rhonda: (26:14) A lot cheaper than the body's Kidney Water heat bill. Where we got to actually the fire. Yeah. So, that's what a Fire   does. And then if you, I call this a spirit to control your Heart   fire. I called them aspiring Ju. It's like you aspired to do things. You kind of have a lot of desire. You're active and you're bright and you can see your eyes actually kind of light. That's why you actually see something you really like to do. So we said, this is your desire. That's where your Heart   Yang Fire   and the Yin make your ground says, don't go mad, don't go. Like you see something I want to buy all of it, and then you're what do you got the Yin side of that, the aspiring Ju is saying, no be careful with your money.   Rhonda: (27:14) So then ground you down and to make you calm. So when is it make you're active, when it make you calm so that's what it does. Yeah. So if you find that lot of people when we call them a Heart  broken in English. Isn't that? So, so called a Heart  broken is your Yang of the Fire   damaged. Your Heart   Fire   damaged. So then you just look, everything bland. You don't really have any desire. You just lost yourself. Yeah. But when in that kind of cases, what I do is that I use your Kidney , our warm your Kidney . I use a lot of foods. These things make the Fire   actually make the Heart   fire, the body of the Fire   kind of warm. So they're helping, what do you call that aspirant Ju. Your helping your Fire   spirit to, to perform.   Rhonda: (28:06) So, and then also you ground this Fire   into the Kidney s. So then you gave them a support, sort of give them a lasting kind of heat. So gradually they feel back to themselves and that they're running again. So that's how you work with the spirit and the body. Yeah. I mean, people think oh, that's only the spirit, but you work because it's spirit and body inseparable. When is separated the body will die and rot away and the spirit of become ghost. So it's, don't know where to go and lets your journey finish and you know where you go. So, that's a fire. And then what create Fire   is the wood. So we come back to this cycle. So it Woodcreate fire, Fire   create the soil, soil create the Metal and Metal create the Water and Water get back to work.   Rhonda: (28:55) So, that's how every organ is in the body. So then you may say, what about my arm, what my fingers? So your fingers or your arms, it all have this, a five elements as well. So every five organs control every part of the system. Yeah. So if you say you're tense your tight muscle, then we say, okay, maybe your liver WoodYin have a problem. Isn't it? But if you actually have say rash or something on your arm then what we say is a liver WoodYang damage because your liver actually is your blood ocean, it's all of your body blood. And then when liver WoodYang damage, you blood does flow free. So that's why you get the problems with the, what do you call them? That blood problems. When you see the rashes it's always Blood stagnation. Yeah. Stagnation. So we called them liver WoodYang damage. Yeah. Always.   Mason: (30:01) And I really liked in your book, you're taught like you really, you, you were talking about the blood vessels and this really allowed me to drop in to see the liver would medicine to be that Yang is that a erectness of the blood vessel as if we have no yin, we run the blood runs too hot. But as soon as you bring in that Yin and that suppleness and that bend to the vessels, all of a sudden there's more of like a babbling brook and they can cool down.   Rhonda: (30:27) That's how it is. Yeah. That's yeah. That's basic five so-called the five elements and the five organs and then controls your body sickness. Yeah. I mean, any sickness, you give you any kind of example, you can include these five elements in the Yang side and the way you work that out and you can choose your acupuncture points or you can actually using your herbs. And yeah, you'll find.. Because in one of the blog, I think I write about how you recognise herbs. I mean, people, we were educated in the university says all this spirit of herb or they called Shen Nong...   Rhonda: (31:09) You know, like what they translated is he actually carried a little where you had a picture, carry a little basket and go around in the nature and the collecting herbs and the tasting herb's. And it says the three times he almost died and it's all, that's all lies because the Shen Nong is the emperor. How could he actually carry a basket to go around the mountains, asking people? He organised this. But what he did was he didn't really organise these people to go around to see what people using for herb. Because a lot of people don't know enough herbs why does he? How can he get all this message information? In fact, he sent the scholars out who actually going to testing or collecting or watching how animals and all the herbs are growing. And then they separate them into yinyang wuxing nature. And then they can use say I think I saw one of your herbs or two.   Mason: (32:14) That's Eucommia everybody. Yeah.   Rhonda: (32:20) Yeah. And then it says, it's very kind of it's good for your so-called Kidney . And they're also good for your bones and the muscles. Isn't it? So what you do is that if you're actually kind of peeling the skin and you're breaking them, it's got that kind of fine fibre and the really elastic that's what actually works on your liver. It's a give you liver Woodkind of a Yang and Yin because it's a flexible, that outside is a firm is hard and they grow in the cold areas. Yeah. Generally they don't like, like Queensland weather, and yeah they liked the colder places. So what they do is when you actually Yang, you like yin. So they actually kind of warm things. So that's the way they strengthen your bones. So Kidney  controls the bones. So that's why we say that actually help your Kidney .   Rhonda: (33:20) Yeah. Give you the flexibility as well as the strength of the bones. Yeah. So yeah. That's how you're actually watching all the herb. So then when you got this problem, you say, okay, well I'll have this, but of course, a lot of things that have different degrees. I like to use a lot of herbs, which they call the poisonous. It's not because they poison it's because they got strong kind of a yinyang nature. So when we talk about poison is not talking about like a Western terms of poison for more, formaldyhde, benzene, that's absolutely poison. And then you can't get away that not benefit from it. But when we say poison, it's like, they go the strong yinyang nature. So if you like a actonite, fu zi what we'll call it (inaudible). That gives you so much heat. And if you're overtaking can dry up and you die, of course, and you get a spasm and then you kind of, you got rid of all your moist and then you die.   Rhonda: (34:20) It does. But when you're actually eating them properly and processing properly, it just beautiful power. And I use that. And I like, because that gave you absolutely desirable strength to correct the sickness. So if somebody freezing cold, I mean, cold. It's not just you feeling cold, but internally cold, like everything, not running, people get a blue lips and the blue toenails, everything. So that means that you're, there's nothing flowing. Isn't it?   Rhonda: (34:56) There's not enough heat. You use that. It's so useful because I say most of the problems is your lack of a Yang team, the heat, because your body is Yin and most of your problem is the Yang problem. You don't have enough power, enough strength. We all desire power. Isn't it? In every way. So that's actually I like those kind of herbs and also some herbs. I mean, that's most people say my tastes not very good because all my formula is so strong. It's because there's some of the herbs, like a myrrh and frankincense it's got that kind of really terrible taste, but they get so beautiful to clean up your blood, blockage. Like if you had a, it's I called my liver WoodYang herbs it very beautiful to help your blood flow smoothly and it cleaner.   Mason: (35:56) Yeah. That was the myrrh and frankincense, you said? Yes. Yes.   Rhonda: (36:00) So that kind of things. And the myrrh and frankincense.   Rhonda: (36:03) Yeah. So it's that kind of things. And [inaudible 00:36:04] doesn't have any kind of too strong effect. So they don't really hurt at all. I think that you can actually making the little tablets every day having been it's definitely good for you cleaning up, but yeah,   Mason: (36:17) a bit of a tonic.   Rhonda: (36:18) Hmm. Yeah. Oh, it's it's yeah. Well, one we called tonic and I kind of a field. Yeah. What is tonic? Everything is tonic.   Mason: (36:30) Yeah you're right.   Rhonda: (36:31) Everything make your body flow is tonic. And when you need it, it helps you flow. That's tonic, isn't it. But so, there's no bad herb or good herb to me but, some herbs like a Ginseng. I call them because they're so they're strong, they're good. But then at the same time, it doesn't give you any kind of off the balance. Those herbs, so you could say them tonic, actually. Yeah. You can just, long-term taking them. And without any problems, like food, almost like food, they just don't taste as good as food, but then they act like a food. Yeah. So those things you could say are tonic and they actually benefit every parts of your body. And also like a liquorice, that goes your wuxing organs and also help you kind of breaking down any kind of problem, harmonise. It's kind of a soft up of any poisons, anything, any in your body. So you don't call them tonic. Yeah. That's   Mason: (37:34) We could have, we could, because we, we love the tonics here. We love the tonic herbs.   Rhonda: (37:40) Or you could say they're tonics, yeah. I think that's the kind of, yeah.   Mason: (37:44) I think it's a good distinction you make there that anything used appropriately can all of a sudden become a tonic because you're using it within its,you know, within its yinyang wuxing nature. That's right. Yeah. It will bring life.   Rhonda: (38:00) That's right. Yeah. Yes. And especially I would call it. Actonite is a beautiful, tonic is a strong strongest tonic, but of course you got to take a little bit of careful. So you will not really kind of using them. Like you, don't [not, 00:02:20], I mean like some people, if they have a bit of, you got to know the body condition like that. And then you may not talk about it as the general tonic, like, say, you can just eat, but I'll definitely say that's a very strong tonic. Yeah. But some herbs like, like Ginseng I'm talking, it doesn't give you, it doesn't matter what your body condition, you take it, it's always nice. So, I mean, in the modern sense, you say that's tonics, you know? Yeah.   Mason: (38:49) Yeah. But I mean, even with, because we're taught, like, what we were talking about before was with, with the Shen Nong for Everyone, I do encourage everyone quite often, I'll remind everyone again, it's nice to have a few of them the Shennong Divine Farmer Materia Medica. I believe, well, the pronunciation Shennong Ben Cao Jing.   Rhonda: (39:06) Yeah. That's right. Ben Cao Jing. Yeah.   Mason: (39:06) Ben Cao Jing. Ben Cao Jing, I think is how they say it's a translation. I'd like everyone to have a copy or two, if they're interested in that's where we see, as you were saying, the poison inferior herbs, the regular herbs, and the superior herbs.   Rhonda: (39:26) Yes. That's right, yes. Yes. The superior herbs. Yes. There's no damage and there's no problem. Yeah.   Mason: (39:33) But even with the ginseng, I mean, as you said, we call it ginseng or (inaudible), like a tonic. However, there's still always going to be, you know, a time when it's not appropriate or a time when you... So therefore you've needed to put understanding of the herb in order to ensure that it stays a tonic and not harmful, folks. So you're never going to not...yeah.   Rhonda: (39:57) It's like ginseng. I mean, it generally good, but sometimes you're taking them when it's not, so-called, appropriate. It's not really kind of correct to your condition in not, you don't notice anything. You just feel like you waste your can put into the soil, the soil say that's not needed. So it's probably the way or get rid of them as a waste, you know? Like, so that's how, how, how things are, you know, like sometimes like say when you're so thirsty a drop of Water, you appreciate so much, isn't it? But when you don't need too much and you have it, you just feel all "ahh", holding onto your stomach. You think I'll having, 'm drunk , you know? So everything got a kind of, yeah, you got to understand the, the concept of the yinyang wuxing and your body. And then you can actually work them better.   Mason: (40:52) Well, and that's, and that's why, you know, at SuperFeast, that's why we focus on the superior herbs because there are herbs that people can engage with without causing damage to the body. But what I like about them is, as you said with Water, you know, if you're, if you're not thirsty and you're hydrated and all of a sudden you drink a lot of Water, you'll feel something without doing much damage, but you will learn-- you'll also learn something about your body and you'll learn something about the elements. So you've done no damage. And you've learned about how, you know, how to look after yourself, which is, that's what I like about superior herbs as well.   Rhonda: (41:26) Well, that's very important, but that also, when you talk about this herbs, like yeah, individual herbs, you can actually make them like, say superior and inferior or whatever. But if there's herbs, formulas, if you make it into a formula and you can actually balance them all and the benefit, all of the things,you know, like in my book, I've got this RCN formula and which,you know, like the Kidney , Kidney  formula, Kidney  energy yeah. That's, that's basically balances every part of the body and the people taking them, like every daily things, because it, it just help you reserve your heat, helps you reserve your energy.   Mason: (42:19) Well, this is where I like your book. I mean, I've read a lot about the five elements,you know, which I know is even that translation doesn't really do justice to what we're talking about with the wuxing organ or organ system. And what I really, really love about this continue as I, as I learn more and more about the elemental cycle, is that when we think about the liver physical anatomy, the organ, yes, of course I can get my hands under my liver and under my ribs and I can feel my physical organ. But when I drop into my body, when I get out of my head and stop thinking about anatomy, when I drop into my body, I can't think about this reductionist organ. I can't isolate it. I can't feel isolation.   Rhonda: (43:11) Hm!   Mason: (43:11) I can't feel necessarily phase one and phase two. But, when I come, because ,that's a very stagnant system, when I come fully into the yinyang wuxing cycle, I can really get a sense of the quality of Woodinternally.   Rhonda: (43:28) Yes. And then you feel freer thinking, that's why I'm really against this so-called modernised or what they call the modern Chinese medicine because they using this anatomy. And they actually limit your thoughts, because when you're thinking about anatomy and you're thinking about the materials and you don't think about a spirit part, and you don't think about the cooperation and you don't think about, and then if you say "My arm got a problem", or "I've got a rash" and you think about rash rather than thinking about what is going on in the wuxing organs, isn't it. So then you limited yourself and then you try to find the so-called herbs that cure rash. And then when it doesn't work and you're going to find another one, you're going to find another one. And whose is it for?. I mean, individually, you might going to try everything and after a while you just give up, because you're just going to disappointed.   Rhonda: (44:22) Then you go to Western medicine and, but, if you stop thinking that you're thinking about a blood, you thinking about that this rash as a blood not flowing. So then you thinking about a liver with Yang damage and you suddenly thought, "Oh, what actually makes the woot erect?" And you start looking at the herbs and you start looking at a surround you and the food, everything. So you're suddenly free and you have a hope and you do have hope and you can find everything around you to help. So that's how important is you have this kind of concept of yinyang Wuxing.   Mason: (45:05) Yeah. It helps so much in a day-to-day level, too, you know. And as you were, you were talking about, you know, your Kidney  formula that helps bring a flow to every part of the body. If you're waiting for a symptom, if you're waiting, if you're in a, if you're in an anatomical reductionist mindset, it makes it very difficult to be dedicated and feel that what you are wanting is to support Yin Yang transformation consistently through the body, you don't get attracted to maintaining harmony,   Rhonda: (45:37) That's right, yeah. And then also you lose power. You lose your own power. So as you say, if you thinking about yinyang wuxing, you suddenly connect yourself to the whole world, whole nature, and you suddenly feel freer. You don't waiting for the drug company, give you information, what the drugs do or something, and you suddenly thinking, okay, everything surround me. "What things can help me?" And you really do freer and you become active and you become emotionally. You're not going to be too sad, and just waiting there to tell you, then tell you how long you're going to live and what condition you're going through. All that. Yeah, you absolutely can convert that problems. Every problem, all kind of problem. If you're thinking about that nature where you can, a lot of people feel very difficult belief because, I had a patient and then she got home with all the herbs once. And then her son was telling her: "Mum, you just going backyard and collecting all this rubbish and then you boiling up and your drinking.   Rhonda: (46:35) And I said to her, and then, so when he came, I said, "You think you can just go into the shops and buy these little chemical drug and you take, you don't even know what it is. And I said, do you have absolutely any idea what's in there or what they do? You just got to trust. Isn't it? I said, I'd rather trust, nature than trust all those people." Because quite often these drugs, they, they kind of telling you one thing, but it's only about it. You know, you do a PhD for three years, isn't it? Three, four years maximum. And then you, you, you announce something. It says, Oh, I had this, rats test or something. And that developed this, something, something. And then for that life, you're not people don't live like rats in a few years. We'll live like a 70,80.   Rhonda: (47:25) Now people even like, you know, 90 years. You don't know in 20 years down the time, if you actually 30 and 20 years' time, you have a problem with this. It's only about a, what do you call it? A 50's and irreversible, or the problem happens. So I say, I definitely trust nature better because you're part of nature. Really? You thinking a lot of people, I mean, I, once actually there was somebody, I can't remember her name, very famous for, you know, television or radio person. And then she said, "Yeah, I wonder where we come fro. You know, you come from the earth and the heaven, earth, soil, create you. That's what it is." We were kind of almost like isolate ourselves so much from nature. And now we're thinking we come from somewhere else. But if you're thinking about yourself, you do come from nature, whatever the problem you have, it's in the nature. Of course, the chemical things that we created and damage ourselves, but still there's nature way to get you corrected. So you got to look for it. I mean, there's always that.   Mason: (48:42) I love it! Before we go. Just wanted to touch on one last little piece that I think is really important when discussing yinyan wuxing. Yeah. And then I'll let you go. And then I'm going to have to ask you back on the podcast to talk about herbs. Just a little distinction that I think what has happened as a hangover from the colonisation of Chinese medicine and Western medicine thinking is that when we talk about liver Yang Qi and Yin Qi that people, and I'll just speak for myself, I've had to really work, to not relate to, okay, I have Yin Qi I have damaged or low Yand Qi. And now I just need to increase the Yin Qi so that I've got my Yang Qi and I've got my Yin Qi in the liver. I put them on the shelf in my liver and then I'm healthy, cause I've got both those things, but it's a transformation.   Rhonda: (49:39) That's right. That's right. So you can't really just thinking, "Oh". I mean, sometimes it's like that, like say, I eat something really bad and you suddenly get a, you know, like a kind of a diarrhea or even poison feeling. You know, you feel really bad, you just give a big cleanup herb. So, so get the, you know, get rid of the rubbish and the Yang is rising again, and then you fine, and that kind of a single problem is like that. But if it's something a bit deeper and the more problems, like a, almost a little bit of chronic and you can't work on that, you got to think about it, say, okay, you've got to cut him off. Of course, you know, the rotten trees, the rotten fruit, rotten things, you got to cut them off. Otherwise they do kind of affect the tree regrow and sometime they drop off anyway.   Rhonda: (50:28) But other times that you got to cut off. So how do you cut off? It's not operation, you've got to use the herbs. So which I kind of strong and get rid of a poison, you know, like sometimes a little bit of harsh or some herb's a little bit of poisonous even, you know, get rid of the rubbish. And then on the other hand, what you do is that you got to support your body to regrow. Isn't it? Regrow that liver wood. So what do you do? You work on the Kidney , you work on the heat in the Kidney . So you get a Water kind of flow and you get the nutrients grow. So that's when you actually get the liver recovered. So that's how you do. But also sometimes, you know, a lot of people I used to see, because I think I had quite a good practise and I had a lot of people refer, but often you're not   Rhonda: (51:18) People come in with very complicated problems. Very few people come to me just for flu or something. I love those because you gave a few packet, they gone, they finished. But quite often, you get very complicated cases and all mess up. And then some people come to me say, "I can't take any herbs. I take it. I react. You know, I get a very bad feelings, even food, and I'm just sensitive to everything." So what are you going to do with this kind of things is so what we say, your soil, you're not soaking up. Everything is too messy. So what are you going to do? You got to loosen the soil, gets things moving a bit. So you don't really treat the regional problem and you treat the soil, you get the soil loosened, you get all the things sorted out who belong to who, and then, you know, and then you sat working on that side.   Rhonda: (52:07) So it's... Yeah. It's all.   Mason: (52:12) sorry.   Rhonda: (52:13) Sorry. It's all kind of connected interconnected. That's why wuxing can't be separated no, but say, if you have a or you just lack of Water, you pass out, what do you do? You can Water. And that's very simple problems, but once things are connected or complicated, like a flu, some people get a cough, you know, really bad cough. And then in my book, I think I had this case and that it just can't get over it. And then you have all kinds of a Lung herbs it's not working. So what do you do is that you work on the soil because soil create the metal. So you got to actually help them get a soil rising and then get the, what do you call that metal? Get the Lung metal, new metal. So then you work along that way and the school. And sometimes you, you know, your liver problems and you actually work on Lung because the Lung controls the, what do you call Lung Metal controls the liver wood. So you can have use Metal herbs and to chop off some of the, you know,bad wood.   Mason: (53:18) Yeah. Getting rid of some of the putridness.   Rhonda: (53:21) So all these herbs are very real, this philosophy, and this theory in a clinical practise is very, other say, direct help. You can't get away. And when you work on that, it's just so it's freer. Yeah.   Mason: (53:40) That's all we want. Like, that's something again, like you go, well, let's remove the blockage or restore the ability to create so that we are back into, into a flowing of harmony of, oh, what you that's. The other thing I wanted to bring up is that the Qiqua continues to be of a transformation for me because it's like, we're not just trying to restore a Qi.   Mason: (54:03) Patient for me because it's like, we're not just trying to restore a Qi in restoring Qi it is non-stop Qihua so we'll finish on this I think it's a nice distinction.   Rhonda: (54:10) Yeah. What is Qiqua you know if you, actually learned the [mandarin language 00:54:20] , have you heard that, the [mandarin language 00:54:19] this is the one which I have to talk about it, which I'm writing in this course, it's called the [mandarin language 00:54:29] it's the yun it's you know yunqi. You've heard about Yunqi it's like a luck people say it's luck but it's not. It's the sun movement, sun position on earth and the time that created this atmosphere, that's called the Qi. And how this Qihua how this changes is the Yin and the Yang kind of meeting together. If you talk about [mandarin language 00:01:02] I think it's got the oldest, lots of your kind of terms-   Mason: (55:02) Yeah. Correct.   Rhonda: (55:03) which is the time of the earth, you know, like a time movement of the earth, which is time we call the time. And that actually kind of work with the sun position and create these atmosphere, the qi, weather. So this weather changes it's called follow this wuxing cycle, you know, from Spring   to summer and to really hot heat, and then to dampness, and then to, what do you call them? Dry Autumn and try the cold Winter. So that's kind of what they call the little qi. We call the liuqi. This six Qi is the dry is the Metal and the Water the cold is the Water. And then the Spring   is what we call the Wood the you know, in the early Spring   is the wood. And then the rising heat, which we call the [foreign language 00:56:09] , like a main heat, the initial heat. And then there's a, [foreign language 00:56:14] which is called a spreading heat. And this is the six Qi where the Fire   has two parts. One is initial and one is spreading. So this, after all, it's a five qi, this is the circulation of the Qi and that's called a qihua from one transformed to the other. It's called a qihua. Yeah. That's how it is. Yeah.   Mason: (56:40) And if we get into that flow, then we can enjoy life.   Rhonda: (56:43) Yeah because it always says that so-called this qihua is following so-called the season, but in your body actually this qihua actually there's this qihua. I just writing because very confusing one part because they suddenly changed a position and then people can't understand, because it always say day and night is a combined creator something it's like, say, you know, your, what do you call that Water? You know, all the wood, say, for example, your trees, if you only have the daytime, you don't have nighttime it doesn't really go isn't it? So it's actually night and day joined together and then create the wood. So there's certain position, certain time. So that's what we call the [inaudible 00:57:36], which is again too many new terms. [laughing 00:57:36] But that's how the qihua come from. That's how the Qi and how the change, how the transformation is about. Yeah. That's a it's a, what do you call that? It's kind of a field there's for thousands of years I will say I'm reading all kinds of books nobody explained the way, because in the old times, maybe that's just like a common sense.   Mason: (58:00) Yeah.   Rhonda: (58:00) So they don't have to explain a lot of things in detail, but to us now, we,re just lost because they say this, and you're saying, why this come from? Where are they from? You just don't understand it's like when you're using computer, you know, you tap tap and everything come up and you say, how did this derive? And you don't know because we're so used to this. And now we think we're just using them, but we don't really care about the initial. And then you can't develop it. So good mathematics. Mathematician has to go through this from one plus one, or, you know, dividing and plus, they have to go through these steps. So rather than just using computer and to get the result. So this has being a hard work for me.   Rhonda: (58:44) Yeah.   Rhonda: (58:44) I'm trying to explain them the way that we can understand. It's like a one plus one, how this come from and you got to, I mean, there's a result there, but we don't have the steps coming from. So I'm trying to work through this. It's like a, [mandarin language 00:05:02] you know a lot of people say [mandarin language 00:05:05] is like a five, you know, heavenly, stance but really it's the position of the sun because in the book of a change, you know, they say it's position and time, everything is a position time that's what the book of change is about, time and position. That's how you are, you know, because you're born here and in this time, that's crazy if you put your Yin like another place, you'll be different, isn't it?   Mason: (59:36) [Aggreeing 00:59:39].   Rhonda: (59:37) So they'll be all different. Like, yeah. So everything is a position and time. So what is the position? Position is the same position to the earth that gave you the position. If we didn't have the sunrise sundown, you want to have a sense of position. There's no position. It's not everything be the same, isn't it in the back.   Mason: (59:59) [Aggreeing 01:00:03].   Rhonda: (59:59) So that's position and that's what we call the [phase said in mandarin language 01:00:06] and the [foreign language 01:00:06] is the time. So I worked this out and then there's not many people really talk about that directly. So I actually explained everything like that book of change, and also about the [mandarin language 00:06:21] and the, you know, this [inaudible 01:00:22] called the [foreign language 01:00:22] it's all about this time and position, and that's how you treat the people and treat them, you know, choosing your point choosing herb's. So, yeah, anyway.   Mason: (01:00:34) Well, no pressure because I know it's going to take a little bit of time, but well we're waiting, we've got a lot of people that told us they're going to be waiting for that course, but we're patient that's okay. We know. Well, because you've got the step of doing the de-colonisation, which is huge. And, and that's something I really appreciate your time.   Rhonda: (01:00:54) I'm glad that you did because of that took me eight years to get that down. But now I feel thinking back I say what's all that point to talk about how the change should really just working on energy to say how it really is carried forward with real herbs, real medicine, real healing [laughing 00:07:12] but anyway, it is because if you don't really kind of separate yourself from this modern and this [inaudible 01:01:21] you lost yourself, you can't go back to the roots unless you're really careful understand this is, you know, you push this off, then you can clearly know where your role is. Yeah. One so your listeners actually wrote to me and said that she wants to going to study Chinese medicine, you know, like become a practitioner. And she said, "Which of your book should I read?", I said that the first book will prepare you not to get a poisoned by them.   Rhonda: (01:01:49) [Laughing 00:07:52].   Rhonda: (01:01:49) And the second book, give you a clue how the real medicine should go. And now I say, you get this ready and then you go into the course and you might not get yourself too confused and too damaged. Yeah. I mean, at the moment, people has to go through this course to get a qualification to be able to practise. But in the future, I think we're going to have a set up a new practise again, we call the Yi practise which is not governed by this Chinese medicine. So like when Chinese medicine first started, there's no recognition there is nothing, but we were freer, well, alternative healing, but now they've become a complimentary. So it's not really powerful anymore. So we're going to set up a new one, which I call the Yi-practise and we're not going to govern by name so we're going to set up all this our way. [Laughing 01:02:42] That's if I get there anyway,that's the aim, because I want this, the Yi to be stand on it's own again rather than to be kind of a, what do you call set? Like a hot, somehow got to hold on to somebody else to do it because we were independent kind of healing system. Yeah. Can't be combined. It's not the same thing. Yeah.   Mason: (01:03:07) No, it's not. Yeah. It's not. Yeah. It's not some little novelty on the side to be complimentary to western medicine.   Rhonda: (01:03:15) Plus it's very very powerful, it's not really, I would say it's more powerful and the safer than drugs and cheaper really. I mean-   Mason: (01:03:24) So much cheaper.   Rhonda: (01:03:25) Oh so much cheaper. Really you just have a little bit bottle of tablets, the herbal tablets, or you have a package of herb's and people say, oh, $20, $30 a day but then you know how much drugs you're going to take and how much expensive is that? And how much environmental damage and how much really it's what do you call it? Animal tests, all these things go on. It's just terrible really.But anyway, I won't go through that. [laughing 01:03:53]   Mason: (01:03:56) Now we're going to get to that. I mean, just the amount of disease that's going to get prevented because people get into a mindset of continuation and harmony and-   Rhonda: (01:04:05) Yes yeah. And it's powerful really. It's not a yeah. Somebody also wright to me, I think from your course also said you know, before they always thought that, you know, they hear all the talks about how Chinese medicine are not very good and then said that after listening to your podcasts and I realise, actually, I'm so happy that it's powerful kind of a practise. I said it is. Modern Chinese medicine is not powerful because they, they don't have principles you know, they don't have a proper guide and if you have a proper guide this is a very powerful medicine very much.I mean healing. I still try not to say medicine, it's a healing. It's a very powerful healing. Yeah. Very, very good.   Mason: (01:04:57) Alright great.   Rhonda: (01:04:57) So anyway, yes,   Mason: (01:04:59) Everyone, everyone go out and buy Yinyang Wuxing Spirit, Body, and Healing. This book is amazing. It's one of those ones, buy a couple and go and give it. We've had a lot of acupuncturists listen. And a lot of Chinese medicine students listen to the podcast as well and express how much they've appreciated it. [crosstalk 01:05:20] Talk a lot about how, you know, they felt that. They were trying to come back to the roots-   Rhonda: (01:05:27) Yeah.   Mason: (01:05:28) Not knowing how so it's been nice to provide some guidance as well.   Rhonda: (01:05:32) Thank you for your promotion on this [Laughing 01:05:34] because we [crosstalk 01:05:34] we want more people to know [laughing 00:11:38].   Mason: (01:05:39) Well, that's, I mean, when I got into this, I just wanted to see people not degenerate early in life and have space to evolve and become better people. That's like very simple when I was like all right I like Daoists philosophy and I like the herbs that the Taoists were saying like you're saying, "Oh, you know, these are the superior herbs and they can be used like a food to keep everything rolling and in harmony" I was like, "that's a good outlet" But it doesn't stop there because herb's are such a small part. It's this [crosstalk 01:06:11] it's so much more.   Rhonda: (01:06:13) It's all the philosophy and the, even the outlook of life and [crosstalk 01:06:19] everything involved. Yeah and practise as well. Yeah herbs, acupuncture. Yeah, I mean later, maybe while I get my course ready and I can talk to you a little bit more about how acupuncture, how yourself can actually help yourself acupuncture and the knowing a few of the points and the how you can do it. Yeah. Because [crosstalk 01:06:40] yeah, because yeah. Well, for a lot of people, you don't have to know everything about accupuncture. We'll just teach you a little bit, easily point, very easy and the safe points and how you treat the general field problems, very simple ones and all easy ones. But there's also powerful. It's like your tonics.   Mason: (01:06:59) Like a [inaudible 01:06:59] yeah [crosstalk 01:07:03] . Well, yeah. Medicine isn't to be institutionalised and it's never so complicated that you can do all nothing.   Rhonda: (01:07:13) Yeah. Well, for a thousand years in China, medicine healing wasn't the, what do you call it? The institutionalised, wasn't govern. It's the people actually in public, accept you. If you don't work, who's going to see you. And the only way you work, you got the good names and then people will follow you and the people will treasure your skills, you know, and they're always, they call it a scholar physician and then there's also just the technicians. Yeah. I mean, people with a simple problem, maybe you go to a technician and the people actually have a real problem or rich people and they all go to this scholar physicians, and they all know everything about it. You know, like a philosophy, Daoism and Yin and Yang and the wuxing and the book of change all these things and then they become a physician practitioner. Yeah. I mean, scholar, physician. Yeah. So there's a difference in it yeah. But anyway.   Mason: (01:08:15) It's definitely something worth preserving-   Rhonda: (01:08:19) Yes.   Mason: (01:08:19) Even if it rather become the dominant medicine, preserving it so it's present on the earth.   Rhonda: (01:08:24) Yeah. I wanted it to be a dominant medicine because that will be so good for earth. You know, there will be no poisons to create in the river and in the Water system. and then in the air, it's just good for everybody.   Mason: (01:08:40) Well, let's hold that vision will allow our spirits to shine through our organs and help that vision. [Laughing 01:08:46]. Rhonda thank you so much. We love you and we look forward to having you back on the podcast, whether that's talking about the course or I'd love to just go through and talk about many of the herbs, your favourite herbs as well.   Rhonda: (01:09:05) We can actually also talk about some particular cases that you've sometimes you know, you have a people asking, then we talk about how these yinyang wuxing principles actually should guide them into this, the healings and all that. Yeah. I, well, that's kind of a chats. It's good. It's good for my inspiration too, but I keep the acupuncture part I need more time to get my things working out for us. Yeah.   Mason: (01:09:36) We're not going anywhere.   Rhonda: (01:09:40) [Laughing 01:09:40] At school.   Mason: (01:09:40) We'll wait patiently and I'll just make sure everyone goes and jumps on your newsletter list on your website and also Facebook group yinyang wuxing yi, Y-I.   Rhonda: (01:09:52) Yeah. Well, I mean, at the moment maybe people get disappointed because I don't do too much. I just got a feel I'm on the Facebook at the moment are putting on few of, what do you call them? The words at the moment I'm teachng field Chinese classical Chinese words where they come from, what they mean, because this is important for me in the future with the course. If you don't understand the words in that translation, it just doesn't work the same. So eventually I'll be the charts, everything going to be in Chinese. So I want people to know that basic and then later because yeah, you can actually make a translation of charts, but then I feel there's not too many words to learn and if people understand that and they eventually will, you can actually read the Chinese chats, you know, you can go in there to search your own kind of answers for lots of things. So I feel, yeah, that's what I'm doing at the moment. Yeah. My husband doing all this animation and the words [crosstalk 01:11:01] He actually write for me first and as well so I just can, I did a little bit and have a look is right and then maybe I add something up. Yeah. That's all. So we're doing that to get the words going at the moment. Yeah. And-   Mason: (01:11:17) Amazing.   Rhonda: (01:11:18) Hopefully I can get a course of ready soon.   Mason: (01:11:21) Great. We look forward to it. Okay.   Rhonda: (01:11:23) Thank you. Thanks very much .   Mason: (01:11:24) Good bye for now. Speak to you next time.   Rhonda: (01:11:27) Thanks so much. Yeah. Okay. Bye.

Mason is thrilled to welcome Rhonda Chang to the podcast today. Rhonda is a traditional healer who specialises in the art and healing principals of yinyang wuxing. After becoming disillusioned during her studies in Traditional Chinese Medicine, in her native home of China, Rhonda decided to go her own way. Straying from the path of convention to re-educate herself through the exploration and deep analysis of the classical texts. After 30 years of research and practice Rhonda published two books: Chinese Medicine Masquerading As Yi — A Case of Chinese Self-colonisation and Yinyang Wuxing Spirit, Body & Healing, and continues to raise awareness around the true origin and principals of Classical Chinese Medicine. Today's chat is truly eye opening and informative. Rhonda is a rebel with a cause, and it is an absolute delight to have her with us, sharing her wisdom and knowledge with integrity and conviction.   Mason and Rhonda discuss: The difference between Classical Chinese Medicine and Modern Chinese Medicine, which otherwise known as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) The concept of 'Yi'. Wuxing - Five Element Theory. Rhonda's process of "de-colonising" herself from the standardised TCM curriculum she was originally trained in. Symptoms vs diagnoses; how Westernised TCM is still operating within a symptom based ideology. Rhonda's top tips for wellness.   Who is Rhonda Chang? For the past 40 years Rhonda Chang has been involved in the study and practice of traditional healing. The journey has been long and tortuous. Rhonda began her studies at the Beijing College of Traditional Medicine. After graduation Rhonda worked as a physician at a number of hospitals in China. In 1986 she migrated to Australia and opened her own treatment clinic.  Rhonda operated her clinic up until 2012, where she felt that government regulation was overly restricting her practice of healing and that the professionalisation of TCM in Australia had subordinated it to modern medicine. Since then Rhonda has focused her energies on writing books and promoting a return to traditional YinYang Wuxing healing principles.   Resources: Rhonda Website Rhonda Podcast Rhonda Books   Rhonda Facebook Group   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Hey, Rhonda. Thanks so much for joining me.   Rhonda: (00:03) Pleasure. Thank you.   Mason: (00:05) Now, I don't often get nervous when I'm doing podcast interviews, but I'm... like, I didn't really tell you, I showed you that I've got your book sitting here with me. But I'm a real big fan of your work.   Rhonda: (00:20) Thank you.   Mason: (00:20) And ever since I first heard that podcast that you did on Qiological, which I'd stopped listening to Qiological a long time ago. I was still subscribed, but then the Chinese Medicine masquerading As Yi came up, and I was like... It got something awake in me because I had this consistent disappointment with Chinese medicine and I'm studying more of the Daoist path of medicine, but want to interact with Chinese medicine today, as it is, and kept on becoming disappointing and finding something disingenuous about it and you informed me about what that inkling is.   Mason: (01:01) So first, off the bat, thank you so much for that. Can you explain the difference between Chinese medicine and even, like, what the term Yi means?   Rhonda: (01:11) Yi, yeah. I call that an ancient Chinese healing called a Yi. Which, I mean, they translate Yi in English as medicine, but there's so much difference. There's a fundamental difference in theory, the understanding life, everything. So that's why I call them a Yi, I don't like to call them medicine. They're not really equivalent to Western terms of medicine.   Mason: (01:37) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (01:38) Well, what a difference. Yi is... You know, Chinese medicine is created after 1950s. And the Communist Party actually took over China and they want to change everything because... I mean, it's not just Chinese Communist Party did it, it was actually from 1900, early 1900, after Opium War and China defeated and then they also did change in China.   Rhonda: (02:04) I mean, especially, I think, the contribution was America actually started to get all the young Chinese students going to America to study because the theory is these people going back, they will be the leaders of the country. And then they will... You know, kind of favour our country, our philosophy, our beliefs. So they did, and these people, later in... You know, like mid-1900, China was like internal wars and so many parties and the communists and the National Party and all this kind. But they all believe in science.   Rhonda: (02:43) So everyone... When they established the government, they want to ban Chinese medicine. And then when Mao took over and he said, "No, I'm not going to ban it, I'm going to modify them." So that's where they come from, the modern Chinese medicine. What they modified is they got rid of the theory. A lot of people are telling me, they say, "Why hasn't Chinese medicine always talk about Yinyang Wuxing ." But they talk about Yinyang Wuxing, which is completely different to what Yinyang Wuxing was in traditional ancient Chinese healing, the meaning.   Rhonda: (03:20) So what happened is they... What modern Chinese medicine do is that they recognise your body as anatomy and physiology and pathology and disease, exactly everything to Western medicine. And then they try to match the traditional healing technique, like formulas, acupuncture needle points. So then they match this, they say, "Oh, that description, just like a modern disease. What is it?"   Rhonda: (03:49) So then they actually kind of make a little bit of complicated, say. There was a wet disease and there was a... pneumonia, for example. There was a wet pneumonia, there was a dry pneumonia, there's a hot pneumonia, there's a cold pneumonia. And then they made up all different formulas for it, and then people just matching. But for a practitioner, you don't understand how this formula came about and you don't know how to apply them. You're just guessing. And if it doesn't work, you're paralysed because you say, "Oh, well, you know, the ancient people hasn't met this kind of cases."   Rhonda: (04:25) So wanting the traditional yi was, I mean, they don't really... there's no... I mean, the body recognised as the ba gua, if you heard of it. And that's what... what do you call the... Meridians. Meridians is a ba gua. You know, I was calling you before and there was a [inaudible] and Dìqiú. What is [inaudible]? [inaudible] is the sun position to the Earth, and they go square. East to west, isn't it? And north to south. So that's made a square. So then they call the Earth is square.   Rhonda: (04:58) A lot of people say Chinese old people didn't understand, they think the Earth is square. It's not that sense, it's the sun made our sense of direction. If there's no sun, then you don't really know where the west, left, and there's nothing, isn't it?   Mason: (05:13) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (05:14) So that's what is the [kin der 00:05:15] and Dìqiú, which is the time of the Earth rotate themself and around the sun. So that's a time. And these two work together and make a big difference to how your body is and how you actually live. Say like, the sun may be in the right, say mid-day, but on the... you know, it could be summer. It could be winter, isn't it? So that actually make difference, too.   Rhonda: (05:43) So that was what medicine made kind of a understand your body. How you actually responding to the sun position, because a lot of people say, "Oh, we're not really kind of to do with the sun." But you do. You sleep at night because the sun is down, and you wake up in the morning because the sun is up." And even in the cold days, even in the cloudy day. So your body actually responding to the sun, the moon. The reason is the sun give you the heat, the Yang Qi we call it. And the moon, what they do, is the moon waves your Water.   Rhonda: (06:19) So when the Earth and the moon and the sun in the same line and what happen is the tide go high. So that's why your body... Your body's 75% the water, isn't it? So you're responding to that. And according to when you're born and you have different constitution. And then that's why you're waving the external differently. So then we work out how that your body actually responding to the sun, the moon, the so-called Meridians. That's what the time is. And then your internal organ is... What do you call that? We call that direction or wuxing. Well, wuxing is when the sun first rising or in the spring, what happened is that you, the Wood started.   Rhonda: (07:05) Your not is a first thing, isn't it? The Wood start growing. And now we say that's the Wood, that's your Liver, and your Liver responding to that. And then the... You know, like a longest day of the year, which is in that time, summer, and you're body actually responding to your Heart. And you can't help it, you're just responding to that because, you know, that make your hot... make you active, isn't it?   Rhonda: (07:32) Make your Heart desire. Yes. So then the winter, shortest day in the winter, and that was what we call... And your body also responding to that. That's your Water. So the Water actually go downward, and that's when you kind of go down. Yeah. So this is the medicine, traditionally. So how that work with your body is because in different times, because your body responding to the sun, the moon, and the time, so your body actually move around.   Rhonda: (08:07) We recognise that where they go. This is also not imaginary. It's also the sun always come from the East and going down from the west, isn't it? So your body responding the same way, and you're going... so the Meridian, actually running around like this, and the back and the forth. You know, the front. So then we recognise this is the point, and then when you have a problem, that means that you don't respond. Because you're part of our Earth, really. You're living on it. You cannot help it, to be effective.. That what we say. The heavens, Earth, and the people are in the one line. So you can't actually get away from it.   Rhonda: (08:49) But if people actually get in kind of, say, mood problem, so we say your Spirit blocked. So you don't respond, you can't connect to the... What do you call that? The spirits of the Heaven and the Earth. Yeah. So now if you have, like, a physical problem and one that doesn't really connect, you feel the pain. And that's why you feel sick.   Rhonda: (09:12) So what we do is from acupuncture point, you can actually choose your time. So your time, you just have to go slow, so then you choose your time with the acupuncture. And then with the herbs, and somebody just wrote me a email, says, "How do you say Yinyang Wuxing terms? How do you say these plants actually can help your... What do you call it? Like I said, Liver. Animals Liver, and it can help your Liver."   Rhonda: (09:38) So what Yinyang Wuxing terms in that? I said... I haven't replied, but I'm going to write a little blog about it. And you see, your Spleen, we call that, or your stomach, or your... What do you... The Heart, in our terms is all about Yin and Yang. So Yin and Yang in the Heart, which is Fire, you know? The nature of Fire, rise, isn't it? And the nature of the Water sink. So the plants, which have the same nature as your Heart and they also benefit your own Heart. Because they got the same Yin Yang nature. And the Water, the same.   Rhonda: (10:20) So if you have a Kidney problem, and then this plants or anything around you exist which have that same kind of nature, and you can use them either to rise your Water or to kind of increase your Water. And that's how so-called nutrition, but we don't really look at a nutrition point, you see? Everything is Yin Yang, you see. There's no thing says that, you know, you've got to eat vitamins or proteins or sugar to benefit you. It might, but in our terms you got to actually benefit your Yin and Yang. And so if your kidney have a problem, I mean, the Kidney is naturally a Water organ so they're kind of a cold.   Rhonda: (11:07) So for Yin and Yang, they need a heat. So then you need something warm for the Water, and you choose some plants, like cinnamon, and aconite. They're actually very, very hot and warm for the Water. So you add that in there, and then your Water rise in your body. And that's what I treat for edoema. That people have a edoema, and you use that. It's very, very well. Very, very effective, powerful. So that's what difference are. You don't recognise the body as the anatomy. So whatever disease... I wrote a little... what do you call it? E-book on this coronavirus. Because [crosstalk 00:11:45].   Mason: (11:45) Oh, you did? Cool.   Rhonda: (11:45) Yeah. The people say, "You haven't made this disease, how can you treat it?" So what you do is you actually look at a symptom and you interpret it into Yinyang Wuxing because fever comes so quickly, seems develop very fast. What I mean, it's the Fire, isn't it? So how do you put a Fire down? You actually Water control with Fire, isn't it? So you increase Water, and I choose a lot of herbs which are really kind of cool, and the Water, increase Water quality. So then you treat it.   Rhonda: (12:18) I mean, recently, I had a girl actually ask me what to do and she had a very bad fever and I think she tested negative, but she took some packet from my book, she got a formula, and then she took, like, three-packet-in-one in kind of two days. Her fever dropped like within 12 hours. Everything disappeared. 12 hours. Finished.   Rhonda: (12:43) Clear. Sorry?   Mason: (12:47) Did she have a COVID infection? Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (12:48) No, not... she just had a kind of fever, infection. You know, sore throat, runny nose, [crosstalk 00:12:53] maybe. I said, "It doesn't matter, it's COVID or anything because we don't really treat the disease." [crosstalk 00:13:00]   Mason: (13:00) Yeah, right. That's the same as going... you know, when we say "liver," we're not saying liver with a little L talking about the anatomical liver.   Rhonda: (13:09) Yeah, when we talk about Liver, we're not talking about anatomical liver, but we talk about Wood. We talk about our flexibility, and we talk about our strength. That's what a Liver does, what Wood does. Wood actually flexible, and firm.   Mason: (13:24) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (13:24) So that's what we're talking about. So if you actually... You know, somebody kind of timid, you know, very scared for always that it's Liver with the Yang then, it's because they're not straight enough, so they're not firm enough. Isn't it?   Mason: (13:36) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (13:37) So if somebody actually get kind of really angry, you know, very easy hot temper, so what we say, " lose the flexibility," so we say it's your Liver Yin problem. So we don't talk about a disease at all, we talk about a Liver as a Wood. And when we talk about the Heart, we talk as Fire. So the Fire... They're floating, but if they do float above the ground, they're not grounded. It's weird, isn't it? So what you do, you need to ground them. And that's where we work. So we don't really... I mean, like, somebody palpitated, you know, it really is always the Heart rising. And that's Fire in the Heart, it's floating.   Rhonda: (14:17) So what you do, you use a oyster shell and... What do you call it? Abalone shell and what do you call it? A mother of pearl.   Mason: (14:26) Pearl, mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (14:27) You ground them. You ground the Fire. And it works. I mean, people that you listen to and they say, "Use this shell," they don't even dissolve Water, so you drink the tea, what that do? There's the calcium, but the calcium doesn't dissolve in the Water that you use, and you don't use it, absolutely a difference. And I remember that somebody read this somewhere, she read it and she said she got some kind of a cyst in her uterus and as she read some modern Chinese medicine report, said, "Oyster shells can actually dissolve this cyst."   Rhonda: (15:05) So she asked me to give her 90 grams. Normally, I use 30 grams. I did, myself. But anyway, there's no problem. I know that would be too heavy, but she didn't think of it, so I did 90 gram.   Mason: (15:18) Yeah.   Rhonda: (15:19) And then she said she couldn't really... She couldn't move. She just feels sick and doesn't want to move. Lazy, heavy. It's hard to see. So that's what difference. Yeah.   Mason: (15:33) I mean, the difference is so huge. And I think I underestimate how big the difference... And say, for myself, growing up in a Western society, which is fundamentally reductionist and fundamentally compartmentalises things, and then I'm given this Watered-down Chinese medicine and it's kind of like, as you've said in your book, it's like an ornamental Chinese medicine. And the Western approach, the pathology approach, the anatomical approach has this patronising nature due to the self-colonisation of Chinese medicine, right?   Rhonda: (16:14) Yes.   Mason: (16:15) So can you help me with my pronunciation? Is it in the '50s, what really dropped it for me was that there was... it's, this is a new medicine, you know? This is a new experimental type of medicine that's a fusion of some Chinese principles with Western. Is it [inaudible 00:16:31]? [inaudible 00:16:32]?   Rhonda: (16:32) Say it again?   Mason: (16:33) [inaudible 00:16:33]?   Rhonda: (16:33) Oh, [inaudible 00:16:44], yeah. [inaudible 00:16:34] is that right? No?   Mason: (16:42) Yeah. Yeah, the...   Rhonda: (16:43) [inaudible 00:16:44], yes, yes, sorry. Yeah.   Mason: (16:45) My pronunciation is so terrible.   Rhonda: (16:46) That's all right. That's all right.   Rhonda: (16:49) [crosstalk 00:16:49], yeah. [inaudible 00:16:49], yeah. [inaudible 00:16:51]   Mason: (16:52) That's what absolutely blew it out of the water for me, and so the way I kind of... I will use, say... I will refer to TCM, Traditional Chinese medicine, when referring to the [inaudible 00:17:04] [crosstalk 00:17:06].   Rhonda: (17:06) Yeah, [inaudible 00:17:06]. Yeah.   Mason: (17:07) Classical Chinese medicine when talking about Yi, and I don't know whether that's... how useful that is or not, but going in your book you kind of see that there's reference from some experts talking about half-baked Chinese Medicine, and a real Chinese Medicine. So all of a sudden I start realising that all universities here, all universities in China are teaching an experimental 70-year-old medical system that is...   Rhonda: (17:37) 60, yes.   Mason: (17:38) 60, right. 60-year-old medical system that is completely watered down, and...   Rhonda: (17:45) Very much.   Mason: (17:46) The fact you've talked about it, you just nailed on the head, they think it's just harmless that we go, "Look, let's just get the best of both worlds, the best of Western Medicine and the best of Chinese Medicine." But they are completely in... You can't put them together. And you cannot lay them on top of each other in any way, and you said there that they've gone, "Well, let's just start compartmentalising symptoms to make it easier for everybody." [crosstalk 00:18:15]   Rhonda: (18:15) And it's not easy, because it's not reliable. So, I mean in the book I say that there were some Chinese Medicine students says, you know, what do you call it, they knew Chinese ways like a fly bumping into the window. It's bright, but no future. And it's so true, it's so bright but there's no future. Because it's just fake, it doesn't work, because how do you really work on a different philosophy and then you're using a different kind of practise? So they're definitely not matching. And they actually decided to make it the best of two world, but actually they made it a worse of the two worlds. You know.   Mason: (18:56) Right?   Rhonda: (18:56) It's just so terrible.   Mason: (19:00) Well, because they don't actually... as you're saying, that style of medicine, the fake Chinese Medicine, TCM, which is being taught doesn't follow a logical scientific pathology based approach.   Rhonda: (19:10) No, that's right.   Mason: (19:11) Which can work in its own right, and for its intention. And it definitely doesn't follow Yinyang Wuxing principles.   Rhonda: (19:19) No, that's right.   Mason: (19:20) And it doesn't necessarily work. It's kind of flying in the dark. You see these studies come about, going, "We're studying the use of this formula for a cold, headache, due to blah blah blah." So it's like, straightaway we're in a symptom-based approach.   Rhonda: (19:38) Yeah.   Mason: (19:39) And they're basically trying to see what percentage...And some different formulas are going to have a different percentage of effectiveness based on the symptom, but they're like, this formula, what percentage can we accidentally lower the symptoms by using this formula? Right? Like, that's kind of like the only way I can see it, and I'm just like, it's... I get it, because it's so tempting to use anatomy and use pathology.   Rhonda: (20:10) Yes.   Rhonda: (20:11) And the problem is, it's not reliable. I actually trained the same way. I train exactly as... What do you call the modern Chinese Medicine who go through this university, that was the first time when China... You know, after the revolution, they reopened the university. I mean, during the revolution they stopped all the education, university, for nine years, I think. And then they re-opened, that's the time I actually got into university. I learned Chinese Medicine, and I was looking for some kind of traditional arts, you know, like philosophy, and absolutely nothing. And then there's nothing they explain. It's like, it makes sense.   Rhonda: (20:48) And I used to question the teacher and the teacher gave me a dirty look, and everybody look at me dirty, because they think, you know, "What do you know? Why do you really always getting in trouble?" So now I stop listening, and now I start writing stories no matter in the class.   Rhonda: (21:03) So after finish, you become a practitioner. And you're in the hospital. People come in for real sickness, you know? I remember I was in Beijing, a little country... Country... what do you call that? Like, a hospital. And the people... actually, the farmers, are travelling like 100K or 30K and in that time, they didn't have a car, kind of on the horse or on the... You know, so slow and all the track go "boom, boom, boom," and [inaudible 00:21:32].   Rhonda: (21:33) And then they come here 5:00 in the morning and they get a ticket and then they're waiting for you to treat it. And I thought, you know, you can't really just fool these people, you've got to fix them isn't it? So I start to learn myself. I learn actually from... You know, I follow the field of old people who didn't have a degree, you know?   Rhonda: (21:56) But they trained in the... Like, family train. But then they didn't really teach me enough, so I just got some of these formulas, and now I just thought of the formulas. I've got to be able to modify them. I mean, how did they create these formulas? So now I start to kind of try myself, because you're here... Because I read about traditional texts. In those days, not many available. You can't even get a proper whole Neijing publish.   Mason: (22:30) Whoa, that level of suppression.   Rhonda: (22:30) Yeah, it was very bad. And so you don't... I never really heard about Bagua until I came to Australia, you know, believe it or not. And... Yeah, so you couldn't really... you don't get too many sources for that. I kind of from here, there, I guess, here, and I was very... I mean, a good practitioner because I did kind of pay attention to it, and over the years of course I learned more role and now try more, so I get each kind of so-called problems overcome.   Rhonda: (22:57) And now when I'd done all this, I thought I'd better in teaching, we're told that all these disease you can't treat and how did I treat it? So I actually started, I thought there's something wrong with our teaching. I said, "All I did for 30 years I've been kind of training myself. If I was trained in university..." And I, actually, during the training myself, I had to overcome my education, so I called it decolonise myself.   Rhonda: (23:26) Because they colonised me, and then they gave me all this wrong information and you can't get away from it, you know? Like, people come in with a cancer and you go oh, cancer is damp heat. And you've got to use some cooling herbs, you got to really... You know, kind of things are breaking down. It didn't work, really. So what do you do? I mean, I know so many people who have been through all these Chinese doctors.   Rhonda: (23:51) I won't say they killed them, but they definitely not help. So what they did is they give you so much cooling herb, with a cancer what happens, you don't have your own heat. You don't have your own force to fight anymore. You've got to give them warm herbs. Of course you've got to clean up, you know? You've got to have herbs that... Like a rotten tree, you've got to chop them up, you know? Get rid, clean up, but at the same time you've got to nurture them and you've got a renew... What do you call that, leaves, isn't it? New trunks. So you've got to use warm herbs, and with it, with clean Water.   Rhonda: (24:24) But nobody doing that, so I thought, "I might actually get this sorted out and that's why I did a Ph.D. Little bit late and writing this book. So this is a masquerade, this book, it's during my Ph.D. study and eventually I produced this book. And then after that... After that...   Mason: (24:44) The book is amazing. The book is amazing. Every... it's so thorough.   Rhonda: (24:49) It's because, really, it took me eight years to get this delineated because it's so hard to make a clean... You know, everyone know what I write. Actually, my husband's being like my supervisor almost. And he read it, and he says, "What do you mean?" You know, "Why do you use Chinese..." Because he can't help it. You can't simply bring yourself into Chinese Medicine. So then I actually eventually decided not using Chinese Medicine anymore, I've got to use a different term because it was just so different. I don't want to mix up.   Rhonda: (25:20) And I was so angry about this kind of mixing up, because... You know, you waste your life going to university and waiting six years, you know, five years to study and a year in the hospital. And then you come out, and you land a fake thing. And then you have to... I mean, it took me years to just clean myself out and then try to re-learn. So I thought, "I must really write this and let people know about it." And I send to China publish, they wouldn't publish, of course. Yeah.   Rhonda: (25:52) I mean, [inaudible 00:25:53] but maybe in the future better because at the moment everybody who in this field in China who has authority, who has power, they all contribute into [inaudible 00:26:05] in Chinese, right? Of course they wouldn't let my voice out. So but it doesn't matter, so I thought, "I let them out here first and then eventually I'll get them there." Because...   Mason: (26:15) You'll get there.   Rhonda: (26:15) It's so savvy, not to get people learning this fake thing also. I was so angry. I'll write this book really with my patient. People deserve to know this, you know this. It took me, really, eight years, yeah, to get this cleared out and sold it up. And then traced out why they did that. I mean, it's a psychological kind of problem behind that, that was... I call them a self-colonising movement, you know, in China. Yeah. So that's... Yeah, it's very, very important, I think, to get knowing that. And then followed by that, and the people said, "Then what? I mean, how do we learn the tradition?" And so I thought I'll write another book about it, how I did it, you know? What I did. So that's what the second book is about, yeah.   Mason: (26:58) And the second book, the Yinyang Wuxing, Spirit Body and Healing?   Rhonda: (27:03) Yeah, that's right. Now I'm working on the third one, which actually going to talk about how this yinyan was in all this... The term was come about. Because these things, even if you read the traditional Chinese text, and like classical Chinese, it's very difficult to understand those books because of all the things that they take for granted that we know, that we don't. So when you read it, you feel like you go, "What are you reading?"   Mason: (27:31) Yeah.   Rhonda: (27:31) You can read the word, but you don't understand the meaning.   Mason: (27:34) Well, that's why I especially liked that the Yinyang Wuxing book is... I pick up several copies of Neijing and enjoy it and quite often I walk away going, "I read it, and I theoretically get it, but it was... the essence [crosstalk 00:27:51]."   Rhonda: (27:51) How do you apply? You can't apply, because actually, if you really start learning that from beginning, beginning how there's a Yin Yang above, how there's a wuxing what's come from, and then that's all about... Like, we call that, "Looking on the sky." You know, the stars. And then looking on the ground, say, what happens when the star in position or the sun, the moon, and Jupiter, where they're positioned and where we are.   Rhonda: (28:17) So then to actually form, and then the words, a lot of them, I thought about that, and then in the Neijing a lot of numbers, how many [inaudible 00:28:26], how many time.... it's so different time to ask you now to what we're using, so I am writing them, the current book, I'm writing to convert all this, the equivalent of what all that means.   Rhonda: (28:39) And then when you read a traditional textbook, you understand. So that's my first book, in the next one. And I'm actually a series of it, and then another one, which is herbs. How do you recognise herbs? And how the actual Yin Yang okay? So how you choose them when you actually use them. Because at the moment, you're looking at herb books, a lot of them say, "It's for Kidney, for Kidney." But Kidney is rarely... from a Kidney Yin and kidney Yang is completely different. So you've got to actually understand, so in what way it work for Kidney.   Rhonda: (29:13) And like, diagnose a sickness. "Oh, they call that a Kidney deficiency." What is Kidney deficient? That's the only half-words. You've got to make sure, they said, is it a Yin or is it a Yang. You know, and that makes big different, how you practise. Yeah.   Mason: (29:28) Well, let's go into that a little bit. You mentioned how it's sad that people think they're learning something authentic and they're actually learning something fake, which it's then... I like your work because you're providing a solution, because if there's no solution for where to point yourself, if you're an acupuncturist, and you just have to acknowledge that you studied something just new, you know? And it's not what you thought it was, there's a bit of an existential crisis sometimes, you resist knowing because you are an expert and you had these skills and the institution told you you had the ability [crosstalk 00:30:05].   Rhonda: (30:05) Yes, very much.   Mason: (30:05) [crosstalk 00:30:05] this and that, but you don't.   Rhonda: (30:08) Especially if you have a little bit of position, you know?   Mason: (30:09) Oh, yeah. [crosstalk 00:30:10]   Rhonda: (30:10) In that name. [crosstalk 00:30:10]   Mason: (30:10) Yeah, love the name as well.   Rhonda: (30:13) Yeah. [crosstalk 00:30:13]   Mason: (30:13) Love the accolades.   Rhonda: (30:14) Very, very, afraid to change. And that's why you're kind of defensive. Once I actually wrote a little bit and joined one of this internet group which are talking about Chinese Medicine, so I just said a few things. Oh, there were so many people up against it. So angry.   Rhonda: (30:30) And they asked... demand me explain. "No," I thought, "I don't really have time to explain to you all this in here," and then they kick me out of the group, and they said, "If you don't explain, you're better off, this is not a place to show yourself." Oh, all right. So I just dropped it, it didn't really matter. So many people, very defensive. Very defensive.   Mason: (30:51) What I see there is especially, there's something... they are wanting to learn and then stagnate, which is the main difference between a fake TCM and a real yi is I see that.. You said you were a good physician, and that is rare, and also what they want to do is they don't care whether they have someone that's good or not, they want to just be able to, as you said, commodify and pump out these physicians.   Mason: (31:23) Now the difference is, someone who isn't willing to really walk the path, acknowledge the fact that we are in communion with the sun, heaven, moon, the earth, the way it's moving, that's its own path, it takes its own discipline, and requires a certain amount of integrity, because there's... Yunyin is never ending flux. Verse, in the fake style, they want to say, "That's the symptom, and I'm going to fix that symptom." They still use the fancy words, damp, heat, it's still, to a Westerner, you're like, "Ooh, wow, this is so exotic, a damp heat."   Rhonda: (31:56) Yes.   Mason: (31:57) But it's still bullshit. [crosstalk 00:31:59].   Rhonda: (32:00) Yeah, exactly. And that's... Damp heat, it's a... You know, people think that's a diagnosis, it's not. What is damp heat? That's only a symptom. It's like if people say, "I'm actually Blood deficiency." What is Blood deficient? That's a symptom. That's not diagnosis. So you've got to really understand how that happened. All that is wuxing. You know, who created? Who made this?   Rhonda: (32:25) So you got to work on that, then you can treat it. If I say, "I got Blood deficient, no," I've got to say, "Oh, nourish the Blood, and I've got to find it. It's not, because your body actually able to kind of create everything. It's not really nutrition, that's why I'm kind of against this nutrition point, as well. I mean, when you're working in the natural food, you don't say it's because of nutrition.   Rhonda: (32:49) It's because the powerful Yang, or the powerful Yin, and that's how they actually make your body bouncy and make you well, rather than say, "Oh, this got some vitamins, or this got some kind of minerals and all rubbish." Yeah.   Mason: (33:04) It's harder to get ego attached on to it, because it's just a part of the nature of the universe, and the key term in the book that I saw the difference between, say, someone who's going to go to fake Chinese Medicine to someone that has the capacity to walk the authentic path is their understanding of Qihua and that was the biggest distinction.   Mason: (33:29) I realise when you were talking about Qihua and we'll go into what it is to explain to everyone, but a physician who just wants to treat the Blood deficiency and think that that's an actual diagnosis. They are going to treat the Blood, treat the Qi and say, "We've gone about that very holistically in accordance with the tradition."   Mason: (33:52) But they don't understand the transformative cycle of Yin and Yang and it's never ending transformation.   Rhonda: (33:59) That's right. Yes.   Mason: (34:00) Chi qua. Can you explain that? Because it made the difference for me.   Rhonda: (34:04) Yes, well, Qi which means like a force, like... We say things you can't really kind of grab it, that's called a chi, you know? But it's got a energy, but then it's kind of a airy kind of energy. That's called a Qi. Hua It's the transform, transformation. You know? We say, "How does the sun, actually the heat, transform to Water rise?"   Rhonda: (34:30) And that's actually become a Water Qi, isn't it? So then when the rise heat, we call it a Fire, kind of... what do you call it? Qi. And then when they actually turn you to... what do you call that? Growing trees, that's what we call that tree, like a Wood Qi. So that's actually called a Qihua, it's the Five Elements, kind of... oh. People say element, I don't quite comfortable with this word.   Rhonda: (34:56) But anyway, it's the transformation of one thing to the other and the force. So that's why we call it Qihua. So that's why somebody... In that book, I think I gave you an example, somebody at the university, a Ph.D. student, and then they talk about nutrition. I said, "I'll ask him," I said, "What about Qihua?" And then he said, "What are you talking about? What is that?" You know? He didn't understand at all. But Qihua is very important, it's how the changes. And you heard of [inaudible 00:35:25].   Mason: (35:25) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (35:27) [inaudible]. Yeah, that's what I'm writing at the moment in the next book with theory part is also the sun position, and the Earth movement, and how to... That the sun movement, the position... Which you cause, you know, like the sunrise and sundown. We call that the [inaudible], that movement. And the Qi which is the Earth changing, and that create a different atmosphere.   Rhonda: (35:53) And that is what I call the [inaudible]. You know? That now turned into, like, a luck. You know, how your luck is. Because your luck is can't escape from the sun and the moon.   Mason: (36:05) You make your own luck.   Rhonda: (36:09) Yes, yes. Because luck is about a sun position and your time. So that's what it is. It's a time and a position.   Mason: (36:15) And I think the fallacy of the West is looking at that fundamental principle of life, that we are connected, and that our atmospheric positioning is going to effect us and our capacity to... you know, even considering if you're talking about something that in the West has a gravity, like... you know, the word cancer.   Mason: (36:37) And then to talk about it in context of Water Qi, Wood Qi. But because Westerners require drama, I think it's almost intimidating to go into what's seen as something that's just... You know, it's folk medicine, it's not real, that's why they've gone to Commodify Chinese medicine for the West, we need to actually take out all that terminology that has anything esoteric whatsoever and therefore, you know, therefore we're going to be able to sell this to Westerners.   Mason: (37:18) And if you look at where Western Medicine is, the detrimental scalpel, taking the scalpel to medicine and nature and separating them is... It's evident what's happened, and I just want to reiterate that this medicine is very, very effective if you go back to its roots.   Rhonda: (37:42) Very, very effective. In fact, I think I said in the other podcast, I mean, this is kind of a bit of personal, but I've actually been poisoned by formaldehyde and benzine. And I was like a Liver and the Kidney failure. I mean, I didn't go to Western Medicine so I couldn't really get any kind of [inaudible 00:38:00] diagnose, but I didn't really want it because, you know, you're that sick and you mentally kind of weak as well so I didn't want them to curse me, to say, "You're going to die in a few months," or whatever.   Rhonda: (38:11) So I actually totally relied on herbs, and acupuncture, and treating myself. And I'm actually on the mending, yeah.   Mason: (38:20) Wow.   Rhonda: (38:21) So, I mean, I'm still not 100%, like what I used to be, but I'm definitely still alive.   Mason: (38:25) Wow.   Rhonda: (38:26) [crosstalk 00:38:26] to this stage, I lost all my weight, like 42 kilos, and like skeleton. And couldn't eat, and I turned to just black, like a green and blackish. And, oh, I was completely... getting a fever every few days. You just... you're thinking, I mean... I definitely prepared to die, but I thought, "Even when I die, I'm not going to waste the medicine." There's no way I'll let them torture me. But I actually just rely on herbs and acupuncture and treat myself and I'm almost normal now. [crosstalk 00:39:00]   Mason: (38:59) Wow. You were talking about it being sad about practitioners being taught this new style of medicine. What I find sad, as well, is a lot of people listening, and like myself, I have... I'm going my path right now and I'm going to not go down the practitioner path for the moment, but I talk about this... I talk about the Chinese herbs as a fan.   Mason: (39:26) I talk about acupuncture as a patient and as a fan to this medicine and an advocate, but you can't... The problem here, in Australia especially, which I'd like you to talk to the people listening who go and have acupuncture, how to navigate the relationship within acupuncturist and find someone in this current day where you're not really allowed, technically, in Australia, to practise classical Yi. Right?   Rhonda: (39:53) That's right. It's very, very, kind of dangerous to practise. That's why I actually kind of erased myself. Because when you're being a practitioner, you agree that's when we kind of... You know, in 2012, when we become, like, a so-called, a government recognised practise and that's why I erased because by then, we have to sign a paper to say we agree their terms, and the one of the term which I can't agree is you got to actually become a... What do you call that? Assistant. Like, a complimentary to biomedicine. Which means if somebody come to me, I actually got to send them to Western doctors if I think they're serious. I mean, what I do?   Rhonda: (40:39) If I send everybody go to them, what am I doing? But then, when you treat everybody seriously, if anything happen, even when you're treating life and death, isn't it? If somebody happening something really serious or whatever, even to die, and you send yourself to jail, and they bankrupt everything they can fine you everything. So how can you really practise? You couldn't really do it. So most people, I think the best they do is just kind of... You got to lay back and do a little bit. I can help you as much as I can, that's all it is.   Mason: (41:10) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (41:10) You can be serious now, it's kind of political condition. But this medicine, it definitely very powerful. And also a lot of herbs you're not allowed to have. And because this called biomedical kind of terminology, and they say this is poisonous, while the herbs, actually, I was importing and they said, "You can't," they said, "It's poisonous." I said, "Who actually kind of analysed? I want to see the paper says this poison." And they said, "Because this relate to another herb, the name's similar."   Mason: (41:40) Whoa.   Rhonda: (41:40) I mean, that is ridiculous.   Mason: (41:40) Yeah.   Rhonda: (41:40) So they're not... They understand nothing, basically. So you can't argue with them, so you can't really... it's very difficult to practise. I know... Well, I'm teaching, but I also feel sorry for people who want to practise the real thing. But at least you help yourself. They can't stop you help yourself, you know? Like, if I didn't have this knowledge, I'll be dead, long time. You know? Like, I'm still alive, and I'm still working. So it's...   Mason: (42:12) And kicking.   Rhonda: (42:12) It's something really good. You know, very important for yourself, to do this. So and I hope, actually, eventually if there's enough, that's one of my aim to do this course training, eventually we're going to set up association called the Yi Association. And we're going to set up our own kind of way, and like a Chinese Medicine before. They didn't recognise, but they can't stop you because they've not recognised it, we don't want them to recognise it. But they can't stop us.   Rhonda: (42:39) So we're in this kind of form, and enough people we're truly an association and we're going to push that all over the world. We're going to do this real Yi. You have to, because it's such a beautiful knowledge. You know, when you actually learn it, it's powerful and it's beautiful when you learn it. At the moment I'm doing a little bit on my Facebook group, the Yinyang Wuxing Yi Facebook group. Actually, I start teaching language because in my course, if you actually... You got to learn the basic terms, and then you'll be able to kind of follow me.   Rhonda: (43:15) So now I'm training a little bit of this work. I mean, even just the words are beautiful, really, to learn. I'm not teaching modern Chinese word, I'm teaching, like, the sun, how they actually first come, it's like the run, and then with the stroke, and the straight line. The straight line, which means... you know, if you know the bagua the straight line is a Yang , and the broken is like a Yin. And the straight line, what it means it's a sign is a powerful, it's firm. So that's where the words come from. And eventually they make a square, and with the line. And square means the sun actually is east in the west and north and south, going down, going up. And so that cause what they call the position of the Earth. [crosstalk 00:44:03]   Mason: (44:03) Square... I'm sure there's going to be people that want to know whether they can join your Facebook group.   Rhonda: (44:11) Yeah, yeah.   Mason: (44:11) Okay.   Rhonda: (44:11) Facebook group, open to... I mean, you have to ask to join in, but it's a group anybody can learn. So I made it as a group because I thought it concentrated all the things in there, so... yeah.   Mason: (44:23) Oh, yeah, of course.   Mason: (44:26) I mean, I'm really excited to hear that you have a page. And Tahnee my partner, who's a bit jealous that I'm talking to you, [crosstalk 00:44:32] next time, maybe we'll do a podcast with both of us so Tahnee can speak with you as well. She did have six months studying acupuncture at a university.   Rhonda: (44:43) Yeah.   Mason: (44:43) And [crosstalk 00:44:44].   Rhonda: (44:44) Well, acupuncture is good, because acupuncture, you have a little risk. So when you become acupuncturist, you're able to do all the things. And then you don't really have to talk about it. You know, like people come in if they like it, you don't really have to talk about philosophy or disease, whatever, they talk about what their problem, you go your own way, and then you chose point, then you do your way. And then it's less risk than herbs. But then, I mean, herbs and acupuncture are equally important. If you actually learn acu and you don't know herbs, I say it's like you got left arm, you don't have the right arm. You know? Like, you're half, really.   Rhonda: (45:23) So you got to have all of them and you'll be able to do everything. And also, after this new [inaudible 00:45:29] I don't know, if I live that long, I'll want to make the last [inaudible 00:45:34] I want to make is called a [true yo 00:45:36]. I don't know if you heard this [true yo 00:45:38]? Which is like a shaman, which talk about how you actually work on spirit and then to get people... Because we say your body is a spirit in body, that's how your life is. And then there's way, actually, to work on your spirit, to make your body actually live that. This is, in China, like a cure.. 1600 was, like, a government-organised practise and there's a lot of books.   Rhonda: (46:02) And then cure... what do you call it? Qing Dynasty in China, 1600. They didn't quite believe these things, so they didn't really kind of push them down, but the government didn't have this kind of practise anymore. Not in the imperialist kind of government, didn't have this department anymore. So it's become kind of a private and... What do you call it... We call it, like, ordinary people would still kind of practise, but of course, after war and this period and during the communism, of course, that's completely [crosstalk 00:46:34].   Mason: (46:34) Gone. [crosstalk 00:46:34]   Rhonda: (46:35) Recently, actually, there's a lot of book up here, which are hidden in Taiwan, the national library. And they actually started publish online and now I actually got all the copies of them. So I think one day I'm going to work on that. That'd be beautiful, really. I love that.   Mason: (46:52) That would be... I was going to say, like, I think Tahnee is going to absolutely love your course. You know, [crosstalk 00:46:58] the course that you're going to come up with, and then when you come up with that course, she would as well, but I especially want to be in on that one. You can get me in there for the prototype, I [crosstalk 00:47:08].   Rhonda: (47:08) Well, I mean, that's a long for idea, but at the moment, I really want to get these things done. You know, like the theory of [inaudible 00:47:14] and the medicine. Body, about body, how you actually reckon the body as Yin and Yang rather than anatomy.   Mason: (47:19) Absolutely.   Rhonda: (47:20) And all this. And then you got to recognise the herbs, how that actually in Yin Yang rather than chemistry. And then you've got to understand Meridians as, what you call.. Time, rather than, what point make what disease. And especially annoyed with the name in the West and the teaching acupuncture... Bladder number 45, or something, that's just ridiculous.   Mason: (47:41) Boring.   Rhonda: (47:42) You have to know the words, that's why I'm teaching the words, as well. Because all these words actually have meaning. There's meaning about these points, so you've got to learn that and you understand how that work together so that's [crosstalk 00:47:56].   Mason: (47:55) Yeah, well, then, there's life in the true word, there's life, there.   Rhonda: (48:00) Yes, yes, yes, yeah.   Mason: (48:03) For [crosstalk 00:48:03] is... Again, they've taken a scalpel, they've cut it out, and they've plunked it there, and it's not living. It's inanimate.   Rhonda: (48:08) That's right. That's exactly. It's not living. Yeah, everything got a living, you know? That's all we believe. You know? Life. You got to use life to survive, to make a life rather than using fake things, you know? Like chemical... chemical, you can't say they're not working, but then they carry it on with side effect and all the consequences. It gets really ridiculous, but once you're actually on the chemical things, you can't change them. Because it's like... say, if somebody actually had lots of chemotherapy and they come to see me, and that's most value I have, because when you have all this chemicals in there and they manipulate bodies, sometimes you can't even identify this is your own system problem, or is it the drug problem?   Rhonda: (48:48) So you go to actually try to get that... you know, kind of push it away and settle them down before you can really treat the real cases. So it's really difficult, yeah. I know, it's not... We're not in the good time, not in the right timing for this medicine, but maybe it's also good where they're challenging, so I think we probably make a change. Yeah. I mean, slowly, I'm starting. And then eventually more people will have this power, more people will join together, and they will fight.   Mason: (49:18) I think so. I really... I've seen somewhat of a resurgence, I think there's a renaissance, I think that people have realised how bored they are within a system that is basically like a grey piece of cardboard.   Rhonda: (49:32) Very much, very much.   Mason: (49:33) People want to live.   Rhonda: (49:33) Yeah, exactly.   Mason: (49:35) And as a practitioner, they want to live, therefore, help people live themselves.   Rhonda: (49:38) Yeah. I mean, you can't live like that, just... You know, material.   Mason: (49:43) No.   Rhonda: (49:44) It's a... what do you call that? Spirit is more important than... You know, we can live short, but if we live a good spirit and you feel like "I lived," but if you really live long and you're just like... It's terrible, you're just like a vegetable, it's not... No use, no good. Yeah. Definitely.   Mason: (50:01) Well, I'm going to continue to do the... What I'm going to do, I've got a few books that I like keeping around as several copies for when I meet someone, when I meet an acupuncturist, new acupuncturist friend, that I give out the Chinese Medicine Masquerading As Yi is one of those books. So everyone listening, as a SuperFeaster, it is mandatory reading to get both of Rhonda Chang's books. Yinyang Wuxing, Spirit Body and Healing.   Mason: (50:31) It's not actually mandatory. I'm just kind of like, putting it in that terminology. Highly recommended, and Chinese Medicine Masquerading as Yi and once you've read it, it's one of those ones that I think especially, like, Yinyang Wuxing, I'm at that point where I definitely need to read it again. I've read through once, and then jumped to different parts, and now I'm going to need to read again. Same with... Because this isn't something black-and-white to memorise, this is something to feel and experience. So I just wanted to... Before we head off, and I'm definitely going to ask you to come back on the podcast, and I think I'll definitely get Tahnee in there with um..   Rhonda: (51:07) Thank you.   Mason: (51:09) But considering a lot of the people listening here, not practitioners, but they are people who are developing their own personal health culture, wanting to understand their body in a crazy Western health scene that is just confusing at times. Can you talk just from a sense of one's own lifestyle and relationship to their own body without the context of them necessarily healing others, just themselves? What advice have you got in the principles of Yinyang Wuxing? How can they get more into the flow? How can they ensure that their in a preventative space and how to get... You know, bring their spirit, so they can have long-term health?   Rhonda: (51:51) Okay. Well, the very, very first thing is avoid eating chemical, if you can. You know, like a sugar. It's a chemical, but if you're eating this... I think there's another one which called Sri Lanka kind of a sugar and now I think Australia making them, too. It's... Dried the sugar cane juice, and you can use that. That's not really a problem.   Mason: (52:14) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (52:15) And because of chemical, when they get in the system, and they... For a start, they're very fine, and they could attach in your system, and then they become like a blockage. And secondly, a chemical, it doesn't go the same way as the Yinyang Wuxing, you know, in your body transformation. So sugar is, and there's salt. Salt... Which a lot of people say, "I'm eating, like, a table salt." That's a pure chemical, very dangerous. Because the sea salt, if you have, it's 80-something, you know, different minerals. And the ratio is the same as your Blood. So you can't go wrong, and you don't need to eat this table salt and that add a bit of zinc and a little bit of... What do you call that? [crosstalk 00:52:57]   Mason: (52:57) Iodine.   Rhonda: (52:58) Iodine, all the different minerals. You have sea salt, and you actually kind of balance. But the sea salt, a lot of them on the shelf say, "sea salt," it's not real, it's not life. Because real sea salt, you crush them, you make them a fine, and after a few hours, they clap them together again, because they're life. And then if there's rain, you don't put water in there, they absorb the moist and they become kind of moist. And when they dry, they actually evaporate, like a sea. So that's a real life sea salt. And the salt and the sugar, this is two very important... And you've got to avoid eating chemicals.   Rhonda: (53:34) Because chemical, if they get out of your system, all right. But if they don't get out, they block your system, that's what we call cancer. Cancer is a blockage. It's something not flow. You know, if you've ever seen a cancer cell, and I actually... When we were in China practise, I actually... We had to do operation and all these things in the internship and the one guy actually had a leg, got a big cancer on his legs. It was smelly. You walked into that room, and you smell is that stink. Really, really bad. It just wasn't me. So what happened is the cancer, just cause blockage... They're blocked. They can't really move.   Rhonda: (54:17) So chemical really block your system, because they don't change. They're not really kind of... Like other thing. You eat meat, and you can't find any meat, animal meat in your body if you eat... What do you call it? Natural food, apple, you can't find apple in your poop, in your pee. But if you eat sugar, you find it is in there. So if they get out, you're lucky. If they don't get out, they're in your system, they block it, and then you cause the blockage and the Water will stale, and then they'll be rotten, and then mushrooms grow. That's what the cancer is. So if you want to actually be healthy, that's the first advice, no chemical. Yeah.   Mason: (54:56) Beautiful.   Rhonda: (54:56) And also warm things is better, because we're like a refrigerated drink, because we say your life is heat. You know? If somebody lying there, you don't know if they're alive and dead, and you touch them. If they're still warm, you think they still got life in there. If they're cold, you know they're dead. So what happened is your heat reserve, that's where your energy, that's what your force are. So if you drink cold drink, it doesn't go to your Blood straight away, that's why you bubble. You know, your pores all close off, you get goose bubbles.   Rhonda: (55:27) Because... goosebumps. And what happened is, because your stomach also hold out and then your body actually... Your energy, your Kidney reserve the heat, warm them up, and then they [inaudible 00:55:39], then they go into your system. So by then, what happening you lost your reserve. So it's better not to drink too cold drinks. Yeah.   Mason: (55:48) Keep yourself warm.   Rhonda: (55:50) Yeah.   Mason: (55:51) Put your coat on in winter.   Rhonda: (55:51) Yeah, and... I mean, if you're keeping clothes but if you're active, exercise, you don't put a lot of clothes on, it's all right. But internally, you don't want to cool your body down. Yeah.   Rhonda: (56:00) Don't drink too cold drink all the time. Yeah. That's basic.   Mason: (56:04) Beautiful. Well, but the basics are what, over decades, 20, 30, 40, 50, years, that's where the medicine is.   Rhonda: (56:11) Yes. Yes.   Mason: (56:12) [crosstalk 00:56:12].   Rhonda: (56:12) Yeah. [crosstalk 00:56:13]   Mason: (56:13) I love it so much. I've loved this conversation.   Rhonda: (56:16) Thank you very much.   Mason: (56:16) I'm sure you've got a busy day ahead of you. As I said, you're not going to go long without jumping back on the podcast, because I love it too much. I love your message too much.   Mason: (56:25) And I'm excited to join the Facebook group, I'll get the link off you and I'll put it in the show notes for everyone. But what's it called, just in case people want to look it up?   Rhonda: (56:35) Yinyang Wuxing Yi, which is yin, Y-I-N-Y-A-N-G.   Mason: (56:36) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Rhonda: (56:37) And W-U-X-I-N-G and the Y-I. Yinyang Wuxing Yi. Yinyang Wuxing, which is the theory, and yi, which is the healing, and [inaudible 00:56:37] approach. Yinyang Wuxing Yi.   Mason: (56:37) The healing. That's Y-I, everybody.   Rhonda: (56:37) Y-I, yeah.   Mason: (56:37) [crosstalk 00:56:37] yi.   Rhonda: (56:37) Y-I. Yi, yi.   Mason: (56:56) Beautiful, everyone get the books. Where... Best place to get your books? Is that your website?   Rhonda: (57:01) Yeah, my website is rhondachang.com, and get book from there. But at the moment, because I don't have a printed book, I rely on Amazon to print. But Amazon, at the moment, they don't send to Australia. So have to wait a little bit, but you can buy it from Amazon.com.au, but they cost a little bit more than I would for sale.   Rhonda: (57:23) Doesn't matter.   Mason: (57:24) No one minds. No.   Rhonda: (57:25) Yes. It's worth it, they're funny. Because it's... If you're learning about Chinese medicine or if you really feel disappointed about Chinese medicine, and you should read this. And you understand the why, and you got a future, because you know where to go.   Mason: (57:42) And guys, that's it. If you felt disappointment in Chinese medicine, in acupuncture, you know, that Chinese Medicine Masquerading As Yi, that is a book that will... It'll validate.   Rhonda: (57:53) Yeah, open your eyes. Really.   Mason: (57:57) [crosstalk 00:57:57] open your eyes.   Rhonda: (57:57) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Mason: (57:57) I love it.   Rhonda: (57:57) Thank you very much.   Mason: (58:00) I mean, I've got so many things I could go on about, but let's just call it here and I'll see you next time.   Rhonda: (58:03) Okay. No worries.   Mason: (58:03) Have a great, great day.   Rhonda: (58:05) Thank you very much. Yeah. Bye.

The entire world is made up of these five elements. LET'S COMMENT ABOUT IT!!! visit mtbecker @ live-grow-sustain.com

While everyone else is likely being eaten or turned to ghouls or some other equally foul thing, Wuxing shows Seether their version of southern hospitality...

While evacuating, Ducky is tasked to help another runner team as Team Murder Hobo do what they do on the Wuxing cargo ship.

With the subtly of a freight train, the team infiltrates the Wuxing vessel and deftly extracts the package.... or... they would have, except, ya know... pirates

Back at it! Thanks for your patience during our break. In this episode the team is headed to Laos to retrieve the Spirit Revolver from an abandoned WuXing test site located in an abandoned missile silo. There's some silly table talk, a bit of legwork, some character advancement and a little comparison with the Sixth World. Thanks for hanging out with us.   milkrunpod@gmail.com

Wuxing Corporation Special! Everything you ever wanted to know about Wuxing but were too afraid of getting geeked to ask. The ins and outs of the corp that everyone forgets is a AAA. Hong Kong is getting pretty popular these days, so scan the info on the Megacorp headquartered there.