Hello, beautiful beings!

This is a short message to let you know that the podcast is taking a short break while I focus on a few other projects.

In the meantime, I’d love to share with you this gentle, guided meditation to cultivate your Qi – your life force energy, nourish your Three Treasures (more on these in episode 50 & 32) and power inner connection. This Qi meditation is a powerful way to bring coherence to body, mind and soul.

For those who prefer to meditate seated – this can be a great way to break up the day, clear & recharge your Qi – your life force energy – and come back to yourself. This is just one of the many Qi-charging rituals in the Radiant Energy Reset (we also have a luscious, lying down version). If you’d like to go deeper into this ancient wisdom that supports you in feeling radiant, clear & energised, you can learn more here. And in light of everything that we talked about in recent episodes, this meditation can be a great way to support further self-connection, self-knowledge and deep embodiment.

(00:00) Intro
(00:09) A message from Dr. Maz
(03:15) Qi Meditation

You can also find the Qi Meditation on my YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/@drmaz_qi

As AI becomes more and more prevalent, I’ve heard questions asked about its cost in terms of resources and energy (to power the machines).

But what about the cost to our own life force energy, our Qi?

We say that “where our attention goes, energy flows”, so where are we placing our power when we outsource our thinking, creation and communication to a non-living entity?

And how does that impact our own vitality, which rests upon the cultivation of energy – Qi – within our body, mind and soul? As we will discuss, health is so much more than just the absence of disease. Rather, it manifests when we are living as the most glorious expression of ourselves, deeply embodied in body, mind and soul.

In this episode, I share my thoughts as a doctor of Chinese and Taoist Medicine – and offer powerful ways to empower our connection within.

(05:08) Heart, Soul, the organs of creation & our unique voice: Fire element

Subscribe to the YouTube channel to be notified when I share my embodiment mediation

You can access the whole collection of Qi rituals in the Radiant Energy Reset

Hi everyone, welcome to the Balanced Natural Health podcast where we share insights from the ancient science and timeless wisdom of Chinese medicine. Information from the old natural ways of healing can support us in leading more beautiful, more vibrant and more vital lives today. In this podcast I share simple, natural and accessible tips that you can incorporate into your everyday life for more vibrant health and wellness. I’m so glad you’re here.

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Maz and welcome back to episode 50 of the podcast. In today’s episode, I will share some further musings on what we touched on briefly in the previous episode (episode 49). We talked about the Year of the Fire Horse, and all of the energies that are coming through – which some people are saying will go towards the growth of AI and the proliferation of AI… but there is another way that can go as well. 

So the question that I’ve been pondering – and having lots of really rich and beautiful conversations about – over the last few months, and even longer actually, is about: 

What does it mean to be human?

We hear about all of the environmental, or energy, costs from a fuel perspective of running the machines that generate all of this content that is flooding the world around us – but what about the cost to our own life force energy, to our Qi, and the cost to our health?

Is there actually a cost to our health?

This is something that I’ve had a lot of thoughts about as I’ve watched the flood of AI in our mainstream society, and watched as things become more and more airbrushed, more and more unreal and more and more un-alive. The reality is that everything that we touch and create through our living beings is imbued with some of our life force energy – that living Qi that is in us, and in all living things and in the natural world around usa. And this is what is missing in the echo chamber of generated stuff, because it’s generated by non-living entities. 

In this episode, I’ll share with you some perspectives from Chinese Medicine, and from Taoist medicine, about what it means to be human, what true health is, what our definition of health is and what our unique role as humans is here on this realm. 

We will ponder the question of what are we empowering: where are we placing our power?  We know that where attention and intention goes is where energy flows – where Qi flows. This is how we practice Qi Gong and many forms of energy healing: it’s about the impeccable nature of our focus and our attention, and so when we continue to keep placing that energy, that Qi, that living life force outside of us, are we taking power away from within ourselves? Are we disempowering ourselves and what are we empowering outside of ourselves? Are we outsourcing our life force energy and what is the cost? 

I’ll also share some rituals, habits and invitations of different things that we can practice in order to come more into deepre connection with that wellspring of life that is within us all: the life force energy that flows through us as living beings and that can guide us. The reality is that even though we’ve been maybe encouraged or invited to look at AI as some great bastion of intelligence and all-knowingness, that is simply not the case. It’s just a collector of information – and not all of that information is even true or even accurate. 

I’m going to share some interesting conversations that I’ve had with the AI overview in Google, where it was telling me blatantly incorrect information and then justifying why it was doing so. This was about things like times and dates of full moons, that were wildly inaccurate. And yet, we’re giving our power away to it, and taking its advice on how to make choices, or how to act in living our lives. 

I’ll share some different things that we might weave through our daily life in order to bring us more into connection with that current within – to bring us more into empowerment and embodiment, so that we can make choices from there. 

To begin, I’d like to share some concepts from Chinese Medicine thought, about what does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to live a rich, fulfilled and complete life, and to embody our existence here on this earth completely. And there are several concepts I’d like to talk about here, and one is about the Fire element and its connection to creation, to our Heart and to our Soul – or our Shen, as we call it in Chinese Medicine. Shen roughly equates to our soul or spirit, our consciousness, our present awareness. The Fire element s also connected to our sexual organs, and our tongue as well – organs of creation, and what we create or speak into the world. 

I will also share about the Three Treasures of Chinese Medicine: the Jing, Qi and Shen – or the Essence, the Qi (our life force energy) and the Shen (again, this is the spirit). And, I will share about the unique position that we see humans as holding between Heaven and Earth, and our role of being an integrated and capacitated conduit between Heaven and Earth energy – our role in grounding the cosmic and etheric energy here on Earth. In light of this, we will also talk about the importance of having internal coherence and integrity, in order to support that process. 

Okay, so we begin with the Fire element. You may have heard me talk before about the Five Elements of Chinese Medicine: each are connected to an organ, and an organ system, and also to an aspect of our consciousness. And in the case of the Fire element, it rules the Heart, it rules the life force within, and it’s also connected to our Shen, which is loosely translated as our soul or spirit, our present awareness. It’s the spark of life that we respond to in someone’s eyes. 

We all carry that divine spark of life force energy within. And interestingly, in Chinese Medicine, the Heart is connected to the Womb and the testes (or, the “Room of Sperm”) and to the tongue, and it’s linked with the bitter flavour. And what is really curious -and  I’ve talked about this on a beautiful podcast that I was invited to speak on recently – is that the bitter taste receptors are found not only on the tongue… but also in the heart and in the womb as well!

Somehow the ancients understood this connection between those vital organs, which are considered to be organs of creation. So we’re birthing the divine in material form – through the form of a new human, a new soul here upon this Earth – and we’re birthing it through our words and our unique voice and our creations. And I think it’s interesting that in this Double Fire year that I’ve talked about (according to the 60 year Stems and Branches calendar of Chinese thought, we’re now in a Double Fre Year of the Fire Horse),  many people are talking about this being a year that is really going to see the rise of AI. 

But I think that there’s also another invitation – and an opportunity – for us to bring more of this embodied divine creation through our beings, bringing this Fire energy through our beings, and creating with our words and our unique voice. And this is a big part of my concern, and why my spidey senses have always felt really ick about engaging in creating content or even modifying content with AI or ChatGPT, Claude, whatever – because in doing so, there is a certain frequency or tone of our unique voice that is modified, that is also censored, possibly – and it can happen so slowly that we don’t even notice it’s happening. 

The modification can be subtle, but it changes our unique voice, it changes our expression – and our connection to other living beings. Becuase this is how we connect – with our voice and our expression, with our deepest thoughts, our unique turns of phrase, and everything else that pours through us. 

So there is an interesting thing to consider in relation to this thought: what are we empowering? Where are we placing our life force energy? Are we giving our power away to something that’s inert and dead? It’s not imbued with life force energy, it’s not connected to the Heavens and the Earth, the cosmos and Gaia – the living being beneath our feet – and the web of life that’s all around us, and that we depend on for life. 

We’re putting our attention, our power, our questioning. into something that’s external and not alive, and we are allowing our living life, our living beings, to be guided by that. Can we maybe turn back towards looking within, towards looking to the world around us for answers as well, towards aligning with the cycles of Mama Nature, the laws of Mama Nature. It is such a potent choice point now that we all face. 

And iit’s an individual choice. Everyone’s going to have different spots on the spectrum where they sit. But I think it’s an important thing to bring to awareness and to consider, so that we can make choices consciously. Because, and I’ll come back to this again later, like any tool, AI is a tool that can be used to our benefit – but it’s when we give our power away that that balance shifts. 

Are we using AI – or is it using us? I see many instances around me where I see that it is using us, it’s harvesting knowledge about our thinking patterns, about what it is that makes us human, about how humans react. And there’s that famous saying about “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product itself”. So I wonder, what are we participating in? Why are we giving so much of our power, focus, attention and time to something that is not of this living world. That’s my thoughts on the Fire element and how it relates to creation, and the world that we are creating with our expression and our connection to other living beings. 

The other idea that I’d like to touch on is that of the Three Treasures in Chinese Medicine. In Chinese Medicine, everything that we do is about cultivating these Three Treasures, which are so called because they are the foundation of a vibrant, well-lived, long and abundant life. 

The state of our Three Treasures – and how well we cultivate and look after them – will dictate how quickly we bounce back from injury, how resilient we are, how joyfully and completely we experience this lifetime, and also how we move through each stage and season of life. They are at the root of our health. They are the Jing, or Essence; the Qi, our life force energy; and the Shen, or the soul, spirit, consciousness, present-awareness that I talked about earlier. 

You may have heard me talk quite a lot about our Qi, our life force energy, if you’ve listened to me before, but we also tend to our Jing – our Essence, and our Shen – our Soul-Spirit. 

Our Jing – Essence – can also be called our Pre-Heaven Endowment, or our genetic endowment. This is what we come into this worldly embodiment with. And it is our, in a way, our earthly connection. So it’s a connection to the Earth part of that Heaven-Human-Earth trilogy, or trinity. 

And then we have the Shen, or Spirit. This is our connection to the divine, to the great-all-that-is, to the zero-point field of all possibility, to maybe the Akashic Records or the Kordylewski clouds (the big plasma clouds in the sky), maybe to the consciousness of water all around us, and to the abundant wisdom and all knowingness of Mama Nature as well. So that is the Shen aspect, and it can be said to have some relationship to the Heavens, or cosmos, within that trinity of Heaven-Man-Earth. 

Everything that we do, through practices like nourishing our daily Qi, stops us from dipping into our genetic endowment, our Essence. And the more that we nourish our daily Qi, the less we dip into those deep reserves of energy that are intended to last us through this life. And also the more that we come into alignment with the expression of our Soul or Spirit here on this earthly realm – or plane, or whatever you want to call it, within this experience of reality – and the more that we can be a conduit for the divine, for that cosmic energy, that heavenly energy, then the more that we can create Heaven on Earth, and be that connection. 

And so everything that we do in Chinese Medicine is geared towards the cultivation and nourishment of these Three Treasures. For example, we nourish our daily Qi, our life force energy, with foods that are well digested, with making sure we have a balance of rest and activity, with processing our emotions so our Qi doesn’t get snagged or scattered. And in that way, we can avoid having to dip into our deep reserves of Jing or Essence, that Pre-Heaven energy.

So I think of Jing as our long-term savings deposit – It’s like a term account that’s meant to last us for a whole lifetime – whereas our Qi or life force energy is like a daily spending account. And the more that we can make sure that we’re well resourced for every day, the less we dip into those deep reserves.

And the Shen is our connection to the source, to all-that-is, to the greater universe, to Mama Nature. The clearer that our Spirit, Soul, awareness is – which we do through practices like emotional alchemy, like moving our emotions, like stream of consciousness journaling, cultivating our awareness with Qi Gong and meditation – so the clearer and brighter that Shen, then the more of that divine, cosmic, Heavenly energy we bring through into this embodiment on Earth. 

We’re hearing a lot now about somatic practices, about embodiment, about getting grounded, about being embodied in our body and souls, and rebalancing that over-reliance on the mind and the rational aspect. But again, I think when we see how much many are relying on the external mind through AI, we can see that we are moving in fact, further and further away from embodiment – away from deep grounding, from deep connection. 

Because (and this will bring me to my next point about Heaven, Human and Earth) when we are deeply embodied in our bodies, in our flesh and blood living bodies – when our mind is connected to our body and our soul, when we have integrity and coherence and alignment with every aspect of our being, when we know our mind, when we know who we are, when we know our Heart, when we know our Soul, when we are connected to the whispers of our beautiful beings, to all the messages that they are letting us know all the time – then we are a beautiful conduit between Heaven and Earth. 

And that is something that we talk about in Chinese Medicine – we understand that humans have a place here connecting the heavenly upon the earth. I mean, I believe personally that all living beings – whether it’s animals or trees, flowers or rocks – play that same role. I don’t actually place humans above other living beings. However, traditionally in Chinese Medicine, all life here on Earth – but especially humans – is that connection between Heaven and Earth. 

In a way, we have a responsibility – or maybe an invitation – to be that conduit, that hollow bone, that capacitated vessel to allow information from Heaven and Earth to flow through us. And that is where inspiration, intuition, divine guidance, inner knowing, new ideas, insight, and yes, intelligence as well, spring from. They’re informed from the integrity and coherence of all aspects of our being. 

And this brings me to another concern that I have- that in placing our power in AI, in giving up our reasoning, or the sorting-through of information to see if it has the ring of truth about it, then we are placing all of our power in something that focuses only on one aspect of knowing, of understanding, of perceiving the world. And that is, intelligence. AI being artificial intelligence, is using only one aspect of the whole spectrum of thinking. 

And in fact, there are many others – and really learned and amazing scientists, for example, like Einstein, who many see as the bastion of intelligence and intellectual brilliance – who acknowledge that intelligence is only a servant to intuition and insight. 

There are many stories of great leaps of understanding, and great leaps in our view of the world, that came not from intelligence as such, but from divine inspiration, from following instinct, from following intuition. And my concern is this: what are we doing with placing so much attention and intention in this model of artificial intelligence that’s external to us? Are we then missing out on our own divine inspiration, on those new leaps of thinking and understanding? And how can we cultivate that quality within ourselves, that inner connection, to allow more of that power to empower us from within? How can we cultivate that inner connection to light us up from within, and to inform our expression in the world, and our contribution to the world around us? This is vital, because this has an impact on how we live our lives – and on how healthy and vibrant we are. 

I see health as being so much more than merely the absence of disease or symptoms. Rather, I see health – and a life beautifully lived – as us being the most gloriously-expressed versions of our true selves. Carl Jung put this beautifully as well: he said that the “privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” And this is what we talk about in Chinese Medicine too. The question to ask is, how do we live our destiny here? How do we express our genetic endowment, our Jing or Essence that we have come into this world with, through our Qi and through our Shen, which is our connection to the source to the zero point field of consciousness? How do we bring our unique perspective, our unique fragment of the whole to that? We do this through being completely ourselves – and through completely expressing ourselves as well. 

And also, I believe that being human is about connection. It’s about recognising our place in the great web of life around us. And this is at the heart of Chinese Medicine: we understand that health comes from alignment with Mama Nature’s cycles, and observing her wisdom and her natural laws. 

And health is about connection with other humans as well. So, how do we connect? We connect with our voices, our ideas, our unique expression. And what I’m seeing in the world now is a dilution or a “beige-ing” or “vanilla-making” of those ideas. Expression is being sanitised and airbrushed: the potency and the life force energy behind it is being diluted. Everything that we touch, everything that we labour on, that we pour through us is imbued with our life force energy. 

And you can really feel it, like, I’m sure I’m not the only one -in fact, I know I’m not the only one, because I’ve had many conversations with people about this! These days, I actually can’t be bothered with social media, because it’s a wasteland and an echo chamber of the same reiterated beige slop of AI, and the same kind of AI-speak. So much content has lost its heart, it doesn’t speak to my heart anymore. There’s no connection there. It’s content overwhelm, which is, in my opinion, as a Chinese Medicine doctor, further contributing to our disembodiment. 

I’ve talked before about the Spleen, and how our ability to digest our food and our nutrition here on this Earth – and our ability also to direct our intention, and look after our own intent and rational thought – comes also from the Spleen. And the Spleen is also tasked with digesting mental information and content. And right now we are existing in a flood of data, most of it heartless, meaningless, and it’s just filling up space. There’s no connection there. It’s just an overwhelm that is depleting our Spleen energy, depleting the Qi that we need to fuel a beautiful, vibrant life. 

And I also think this goes some way to answering a question that I get often, which is people asking me, how can I get more joy in my life?? How can I feel more motivated, more focused? And I think that this is also part of connecting to that Fire element within – the Heart and the Shen, the spirit – because the Fire element rules joy. 

If we are not allowing that Fire element to express through us, if we’re not flexing our expression – or flexing the muscle of expression, connection, communication – then our joy can go by the wayside as well. And if we’re not within ourselves – if we’re not at home in our bodies, but we’re externally somewhere else – then it becomes harder to connect with that joy and inspiration. So I think a big part of reclaiming more joy, more radiance, more connection, more inspiration, more motivation, more focus is coming back home to ourselves.

As you can probably tell, I’m quite fired up about this topic and what it means for us as humans, and what it means for the world that we’re creating! But in the interest of not flooding the world with more content and overwhelm, I will start to wrap this up. And there’s a few more ideas I’d like to talk about before I do. 

The first is that because I’m a scientist, I have tested working with ChatGPT, AI Overview in Google, and a few others, because in order to pass my opinion or judgment on something, I like to be informed about it. And what I found, as I touched on earlier, was the mistakes that it was serving up in the information it was presenting me with. 

For example, I wanted to find out what time of day the most recent full moon was. And with great confidence and assurance, the AI Overview in Google informed me that it was on the 19th of March, and then told me a whole other little story about the particular name of this moon. And I was like, “hello, I think it’s actually on the 3rd of March, isn’t that right?” And it was like, “oh, yes, it is. Yes, oh, you are correct. I saw your query about a full moon, and I just jumped straight to the new moon phase”. 

I asked it – why are there so often so many errors, because this is not the first, it’s only the last, or most recent, in a long line of errors that I’ve seen when I’ve asked questions. And it said, “I’m just designed to provide answers with assurance and confidence in a conversational way”. Hmmm. And yet, I see and hear people tell me that they often ask AI Overview for information about things. But, the information is not correct! 

The other query that I had with AI was about me (because the one thing that I know, with certainty, I know more about than AI does is myself!). So I asked it, “tell me about Dr. Maz”. And it went on to tell me a lovely story about how I offer three hour deep dives (which is not true!) It came up with names for protocols that I offer (I don’t offer any protocols!). It didn’t mention the Qi programs that I do actually offer, but it made up other protocols. And when I questioned it on that, it admitted, “oh, yes, yeah, no, you’re right. She doesn’t do that”. So it was just telling me a story based on what it thought I wanted to hear. 

So, again, I’m curious – what kind of world are we creating when we’re living in an echo chamber of this machine reflecting to us what it thinks we want to hear? And what are we training it to provide us with more of? Like, is it true? Is it honest? Is it authentic? These are the thoughts that run through my mind. And it’s something I wonder about with this continued reliance, and complacency, on what AI Overview tells us. 

Are we losing our ability to think critically, to search out information for ourselves – to test for that ring of truth in regard to the information that we’re being served up? And I’ll say once again, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to this. AI exists on a spectrum of machine assistance, of technological assistance. And I think when we use it with consciousness and with awareness, and we weigh up the cost and the benefit, then it’s a different thing to just being lulled into a sense of complacency – of relying on it to feed us what it wants to feed us. 

The reality is that even if there are no nefarious or dark intents behind it, the information that it feeds us is still filtered through the lens, or the prism, of the creators of it. And who knows what it’s generating behind the scenes? There’s now that platform for AI agents only to connect with each other. My question is, for those who use AI as prompts or as a conversational partner, how is our thinking and our own process being shaped by the queries and prompts that are provided by AI? Who is providing that? And to what end? And is it a benefit to us? Are we missing an important piece of the puzzle? Because again, we’re engaging with artificial intelligence – and not artificial embodiment, groundedness, insight, intuition, artificial wisdom. These aren’t part of the equation. 

It’s just intelligence. And what these models like ChatGPT and Claude rely on is an aggregation of information only, of data – some of which is incorrect, incomplete, biased – and it’s missing that essential spark of inspiration, that spark of life, that thing that animates our leaps of faith and insights. 

I will say that the one unexpected gift of the AI boom, and the generative content boom, has been that for myself – as a recovering perfectionist – it’s given me the space to embrace my errors and my imperfections. And when a spelling mistake makes its way through, or I miss a word somewhere, or my grammar is not perfect, I’m now in a place where I can celebrate it because it’s a stamp of authenticity. And I see the same in those posts that I do read on socials, and the content elsewhere that I do read. 

When there is a mistake, it just actually strengthens that connection that I have with the content creator – because I can see that it’s a real person behind the words when I’m reading and connecting to them. And aside from that, you can feel the difference between something that is imbued with soul and life force energy, and something that isn’t – it’s very obvious. That human touch is either there, or it isn’t. But it does put a little warm glow in my heart just to affirm that this is a real human writing it. And that leads me to another point. 

Detractors to my opinion might say, well, what about people who aren’t naturally gifted writers? To which I would answer that there’s always ways around that, right? Ways beyond asking a machine to generate your content. To give an example, recently I read a book, and I’m pretty sure the writer said that she was dyslexic, or had trouble writing. So she would dictate her thoughts to a machine, it would get transcribed, and she would then re-read it and edit it accordingly. It was her unique voice pouring through, with machine assistance, but still her voice. 

And it was a very different read to reading a book, say, by someone who is a naturally gifted or trained writer. However, even though there were many things I would have edited differently, or that didn’t completely make sense, I could feel her essence – I could feel her spirit, her soul, her life force energy coming through that book. And becuase of that, it was engaging. Iit wasn’t perfect, it was a bit clunky, but it was vital and alive – and I loved connecting with it. 

And again, perhaps that’s the silver lining here: releasing that grip on perfectionism and polished-ness. The trith is that where we find ourselves now is just one point along a long path. I mean, this is a whole other conversation, but we have been airbrushing and photoshopping and polishing up and making-perfect many aspects of our life. Look at fashion magazines! I mean, my life before Chinese medicine was as a designer. 

So I spent many hours photoshopping models faces and making them look more perfect. So this, you know, AI and generative art, generative content hasn’t sprung out of nowhere, it’s been a slow decline, perhaps, I mean, in my personal opinion, into this dilution of what is real, what is alive, what is imbued with life force. And I guess the invitation is just to consider where we all sit on that. 

Again, this is going to be personal – it’s going to be unique, but I think so long as we come at it with consciousness and with intention, then it changes the nature of our interaction with it. And then perhaps we become not the tool, but it becomes the tool in our hands, and we can use it in ways that are beneficial. 

Now, one point or one objection that’s come up in conversations is, well, it saves time to use AI to repurpose my content, or to generate content for me. And yes, it does. But a question to ask is: what is the goal? Is the goal just stuffing a content hole? Or is it creating meaningful communication that comes from your unique voice – not something that’s been being sanitized through the lens or the filter of AI before it gets pumped out and disseminated? 

I think that the time, effort and life force energy – the Qi – that we put into something, makes it glow from within, it makes it somehow weightier, more valuable, more able to be connected to – as opposed to something that’s pumped out in a fraction of a second, by a soulless machine. An enitity that’s not alive, and that’s not imbued with that energy. 

I do hear also from some of my lovely friends who were saying that there’s pressure to pump out content all the time, and they acknowledge that that content being churned out is probably only read by other machines. So again, the invitation is to consider: how are we contributing to the flood of information out there? And what is that doing to our own body, mind and souls? Is it aiding our vitality, our health, our integrity, our coherence? Or is it overwhelming? 

We can choose to unplug from that overwhelm as well. I’m definitely seeing that more and more in the community around me – that there’s less interaction with social media, people are spending less time on there, because they’re saying it feels like an echo chamber of repetitive beige slop. 

Now before I finish up and move into some rituals that can help us to embody and ground, I’d love to share this quote from the book, The AI Con by Bender and Hanna. I’m about to read this book, but this quote jumped out at me straight away. It is, “if you can’t be bothered to write it, why would I be bothered to read it?” And that’s ultimately the question, isn’t it? The truth is that I can’t be bothered reading stuff that has been generated by AI: it’s not worth my life force energy and my time. And it makes me turn away from those creators who use AI to try to connect with me – that’s not real for me. 

Maybe others have a different position -and that’s great, because we’re all different. But I’m just sharing my own thoughts on that. 

I know this has been quite the download! And the invitation is there for all of us to contemplate (whether with respect to AI, orsoemthig else):

Where are we putting our energy?

Now, I’d like to share with you some simple ways that we can call back that power within, ways that we can empower ourselves, so that we can become more embodied, more grounded, more full of our own life force. Ways to support us in being a capacitated and vital vessel for that infinite cosmic and earthly Qii that is wanting to connect with us and pour through us at all times. 

The first of these is connecting to Mama Nature. This doesn’t have to be necessarily going on a big nature hike, but it can be something as simple as getting your feet on the Earth, as taking time to study a leaf and the beautiful intricacy of it. Or maybe it’s a butterfly, a dragonfly or a bird. Maybe it’s the way that the light is hitting a flower or even a tree trunk, or maybe even your own eyelashes! This has been something I’ve been doing for decades – laying in the sun and feeling the sun’s goodness and warmth on my skin, and also watching how the light refracts around my eyelashes, and the beautiful rainbows that come from that. This is something that I could contemplate for hours. Likewise, watching the play of light on a droplet, or on a spiderweb,  or on my dog’s beautiful coat. She’s beautiful, shiny and black, and when the light hits, you can see all of the refractions of the whole spectrum of the rainbow in her fur as well. It can simply be feeling the breeze on our skin. 

It can also be as simple as stream of consciousness journaling. I’m such a fan of this practice,because it’s a beautiful way to work that Fire portal of the Shen – the Soul – the Heart, our tongue, and our unique voice. Whether it’s speaking our truth to each other, or writing all of our thoughts as they pour through us in stream of consciousness (not needing to be perfect, but just for the sake of allowing expressioncan), both can be a really beautiful way to come into clarity with our body, mind and soul. To allow more and more of that insight and inspiration, intuition to come through. 

Another practice is in listening to the whispers of our body, getting curoius about what our body is speaking to us, and honoring those impulses. Am I hungry? Do I need to have a drink right now? Do I need to stop, actually step away from the computer and do some really deep, beautiful belly breathing? Do I need to lie down for five minutes? Do I need to close my eyes? Do I need to pee? There are so many different impulses – and beautiful vital messages – that we’re receiving at all times. The more that we listen to and honour those, the more they are available to us – the more and more they pour through and the more specific and powerful they can be. 

Another way, unsurprisingly, is Qi Gong and also meditation. This doesn’t need to be seated or formal meditation. It can be walking meditation, for example. I’ve shared this on my socials before: just walking slowly, slowing down our steps and feeling the touch of our skin upon the Earth as our feet make contact, and as we move through each step of that walk. It could be contemplation on a candle flame. or on the clouds in the sky. or leaves blowing in the breeze. Whatever it is, just allowing time for that stillness and slowness, and allowing time for the busy-ness to settle so that those messages become clearer as they pour through us once again. 

And one other practice that I might offer is rather than asking AI or chatbots for guidance, is to ask yourself for guidance – because you know, your soul knows, your whole being knows. Sometimes this can come through more clearly after we have been still – after we practice meditation or stream of consciousness journaling – once we bring that coherence to our conduit, to our vessel. And the fact remains that the same questions that people ask AI, we can ask of our own soul. We can ask our own inner wisdom, and the divine, = source, = all-that-is, Mother Nature,  God – whatever you want to call it. We can write tehse questions down, or we can ask them in our heart and wait for the answers. 

Again, the more that we practice that and we flex that skill, the clearer those messages become. I’m actually going to share one of the beautiful, guided seated meditations from my Radiant Energy Reset Qi program. I will share that on my YouTube channel, so you can find that by going to the show notes. It will be up in a few days time. And if you would like some guidance on how to meditate, that can be a gentle way to begin that process and then to see what pours through. 

I know for me, sometimes when I meditate, there’s insights and answers that are pouring through even while I’m trying to keep my mind still – but it can take time. Some days it’s more than others. So I would invite you just to practice that – to commit to practicing it for a certain period of time – and see what comes through for you. 

I hope that has been interesting, insightful, thought-provoking. If there’s someone that you feel might benefit from this, I’d love for you to share – and let’s keep talking about this. Let’s have conversations about this. 

Let’s have conversations with ourselves about what our intentions are, what we’re hoping to achieve with what we’re doing, what kind of world we’re creating, because we’re all learning. We’re all discovering as we go. We’re all expanding as we co-create this world together. Thank you so much for listening and wishing you all the very best. See you next time!

The Year of the Fire Horse is almost upon us, galloping onto the scene on the next New Moon. This is a “Double Fire” year, carrying the invitation and the opportunity for dynamic changes, transmutation and transformation – and explosive power, if we are prepared for it.

The Snake Year that is currently drawing to a close has pushed us to shed our skins and release that which no longer fits, so that we can shine bright with the essential Fire energies of this Year of the Fire Horse.

I’m so excited for the unbridled, wild and untameable energies of this coming year – but the Fire Horse has not always been welcome. Indeed, individuals born in Fire Horse years were painted as ungovernable (yay!), reckless and dangerous – precisely because of their independent nature, fiery will and authentic expression of their truest selves. And none were more stigmatised than Fire Horse women.

Women born in the Year of the Fire Horse were shunned as wives – seen as too wild, too free and too full of passion. Female foetuses were aborted, and unlucky “accidents” befell female babies. The lucky ones had their birth years misattributed to the neighbouring years. This data is clearly documented in the 1966 birthrate in Japan, which dropped by a staggering 25%.

Why are these qualities of passion, self-authority and living one’s truest impulses so feared? I have some thoughts. And I also believe that this coming 2026 Year of the Fire Horse is a potent opportunity for all of us – Fire Horse or not, woman or not – to embody even more of our most wild, essential selves. To be guided by our hearts and souls – both aspects of the Fire element.

(00:00) Introduction

One of the practices that is so important in grounded and capacitating these powerful energies of the Year of the Fire Horse is Qi Gong – literally, “energy work”. I have created a beautiful, self-paced experience that guides you through energy work practices in just 10 minutes a day. Open up the flow in your meridians, alchemise blocks, unlock the secrets of your energy centres (chakras), charge up your Qi and tune up your biofield – so that you can best harness these powerful energies coming our way. Learn more here.

(00:00) Hi everyone, welcome to the Balanced Natural Health podcast where we share insights from the ancient science and timeless wisdom of Chinese medicine. Information from the old natural ways of healing can support us in leading more beautiful, more vibrant and more vital lives today. In this podcast I share simple, natural and accessible tips that you can incorporate into your everyday life for more vibrant health and wellness. I’m so glad you’re here.

(00:32) Hello beautiful beings and welcome to episode 49 of the podcast. I’m Dr. Maz and in today’s episode I would like to dive into something really timely and very exciting because as many of you may know we are about to head into a new lunar year – the Chinese New Year is coming up. It begins on February the 17th here in Australia and this year upcoming is a really exciting, powerful, dynamic one. It’s ripe with possibility and opportunity and it is the Year of the Fire Horse.

I’m just so excited about the energy that’s about to come through this Year of the Fire Horse. We’ve been getting ready for this new power that’s going to pour through us with the Snake Year that we’ve just been through. So we’ve just been through a shedding of skins, releasing of anything that might be clouding or dimming our power – and the way it shines through us. This has all been in service to clear the way for the wild, untamable power of theYear of the Fire Horse.

In today’s episode we will talk about why this is such a powerful year and what it means for feminine power – the rising of the deep, wild, sacred, untamed feminine within all of us. Because we all contain at least a seed of the masculine and the feminine.

We’re going to talk about what that means for reclaiming our essential, truest, most vibrant expression of selves. We will also talk about how we can best support ourselves to capacitate the flow of this powerful energy in this Year of the Fire Horse. Also, things to look out for and practices that we can put into place to ground and hold this huge influx, this surge of Fire Horse energy that’s coming our way.

Maybe you’re tapping into this energy as well? Perhaps you’re feeling like it’s been a weird kind of stop-start (or not-quite-start) to the Gregorian calendar, or maybe you’re feeling an upwelling of excitement – like something’s really brewing – and that is the Year of the Fire Horse that is coming.

(02:44) So first of all, let’s take a look at what is the Horse year – and what is the Fire Horse year, specifically.

In the Chinese view of the world and from the Chinese calendar perspective, we have a 60 year calendar. It’s a beautiful calendar called the Heavenly Stems and the Earthly Branches. And this calendar has been used for millennia to map climate cycles, weather patterns, to harness the best harvest and to best align ourselves with the environment, This is because in Chinese medicine, we acknowledge that we are woven into the web of life all around us. And so knowing how we can position ourselves to be in the best alignment with the prevailing energies of the climate – and the weather for each particular year – is really beneficial. And this is something that has been honed to a fine art.

The 60 year calendar is based on the 10 Heavenly Stems and the 12 Earthly Branches. There’s 12 animals – these are the 12 Earthly Branches. And this is where we get animals like the Snake, which we’re having this year, or which we’re just wrapping up, and the Horse which is coming up.

Each of the 12 animals have unique attributes. So for example, the snake likes to stay quiet, close to the ground. It’s really tuned into frequency and vibration. And it is well known for its ability to shed skins.

And the horse, in contrast, is full of a dynamic bursting forth. The horse is known for its energy, its love of movement, its freedom, its independence, and its generally enthusiastic and outgoing nature… and so on for all of the other 12 animals. So we’ve got the 12 Earthly Branches and the 10 Heavenly Stems.

The 10 Heavenly Stems are based on a Yin and Yang version of each of the five elements. The five elements are a really key way in which we describe the world in Chinese medicine, Taoist medicine and Taoist thought.

The Five Elements are Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Wood. And for each of these, we have Yin and Yang counterparts. We’ve got Yang Fire and Yin Fire within the Heavenly Stems. So what happens is we have 12 animals, but we have a 60 year cycle. And this is because each of the animals gets a go in one of the Five Elements.

Now, you might be wondering, hang on a minute, there’s 12 animals and 10 Heavenly Stems, which would make 120, not 60 – and you are correct. But there is a rule that only Yang stems get matched with Yang branches (or animals that are Yang), and Yin stems (Yin type elements) get matched with Yin branches (Yin animals).

In the case of the horse, the horse has a Yang nature because it likes to move, it likes to be dynamic, to move explosively, it likes to run free, it has a really fiery active energy. And in addition to that, the horse is ruled by Fire. So no matter what element it falls in, the element associated with horse is already Fire.

So in this coming Year of the Fire Horse, when the horse falls into the Fire element, we have Double Fire. And there is potential for so much transmutation, transformation and alchemizing, because Fire is the element of transformation. It turns one thing into another, it’s dynamic, it’s full of energy, it’s the life force within all of us.

(06:33) And this is why this Year of the Fire Horse holds so much power for all of us, whether we’re a Fire Horse or not. There is an opportunity to claim this wild untameable power within us all for ourselves. And the Fire Horse is the most dynamic of all the horses.

In another 12 years, we’ll have the Earth Horse year – the element of Earth moderates that fiery Yang nature of the horse that is innate to the horse anyway. So Earth Horses are said to be more grounded. And, for example, a Water Horse will be more balanced than a Fire Horse in as far as their dynamism goes, because Water and Fire have a polarity, they balance each other out. So if someone is a Water Horse, they will possibly be less impulsive, explosive, dynamic than a Fire Horse.

(07:29) Now, because of its double Fire nature, there’s been a lot of stigma around people born in the Year of the Fire Horse over the centuries, and particularly women. This is due to the nature of a society that liked women to be biddable, meek and submissive and to surrender to the will of others. And particularly so in a society that valued collectivism and submission to authority – anyone who stood in their wild, untameable, self-sovereign self-authority was a threat to that system – and none more so than women.

(08:06) Tragically, for centuries, many female babies were aborted when they were due to be born in a Year of the Fire Horse. If they were lucky, their birth was misattributed to the year before or after, to make them more marriageable. They might also have fallen prey to unlucky accidents or infanticide. There’s actually some pretty chilling data looking at the rate of infant deaths due to accidents in the Year of the Fire Horse, and there was definitely a spike in that.

This was looking at the data in Japan from the Year of the last Fire Horse in 1966. And we can also look at a really fascinating bit of data from this same year in Japan, where we see that the birth rate actually dropped by 25%. This was possibly due to people holding off on having a baby in a Year of the Fire Horse. Perhaps they didn’t want to risk a female child being born as a Fire Horse, which would ruin her prospects of marriage (because Fire Horse women were seen to be unlucky wives).

Or it could have also been due to misattribution of that birth year to either the year before or after the Year of the Fire Horse .You can have a look at the data, it’s very clear. There’s been quite a few articles speculating about what’s going to happen in Japan in this new Year of the Fire Horse, given what happened in 1966. And when you actually look at the population chart by birth year, it’s really quite striking.

And I think this is why it’s so important, more than ever this year with this Fire Horse energy coming in, that we all step into and claim this wild, untameable essence of ourselves: this wild truth, this self-sovereignty, self-governance, self-authority that runs within all of us, whether we’re a Fire Horse or not, whether we’re a woman or not. I think that this is so desperately needed in our modern society where we have externalised our power, we’ve given away our authority to systems outside of us – and we’ve forgotten, some of us, that we all carry this spark, this stream of the divine within us.

We all can connect to that at any moment and that can give us direction, that can give us vital information. And I feel that it’s time for the reclamation and remembrance of this force that is within us all – the force that is the wild and untameable, the truest essence of ourselves, and what could be described also as the deepest part. It’s the Yin and the feminine part of ourselves in a way, and it’s that which has been hidden or suppressed. And I feel that this is never more important than now, for this aspect of ourselves to be expressed and reclaimed, because for too long now we have been living an unbalanced way of life – we revere one way of being at the total denigration of another.

(11:21) We revere the intellect and rational thought and logic, and yet we have denigrated, forgotten about and belittled the value of instinct and intuition – or body wisdom and felt senses. And I love that we’re talking more and more about the power that comes from these senses and impulses, and the information that we get from our nervous system. We are so much more than our intellectual mind and when we are only operating from one half of ourselves, we’re only operating at partial power.

But when we combine the Yin and Yang aspects of ourselves, we have access to the totality of our power, the totality of our essence. So this means giving space to honouring our feelings over always our thoughts. It means honouring our deepest desires over the external shoulds of society or our communities or expectations.

It means honouring our own needs and speaking up even when it might go against societal norms. It means also honouring that which is of the body – and giving the body space as well to share its wisdom with us. Not just living in the mind, but actually listening to the whispers of the body and soul.

And also it means honouring and giving space to the living over the dead. And I’ll explain a little bit more about this.

(12:59) In Chinese medicine we understand that each of the five elements also rules an aspect of consciousness. And in the case of the Fire element, it rules the Shen, which is translated loosely as our present awareness, our consciousness, our spirit. It’s how much spark of life someone has in their eyes: when you look at them, you can see that you’re connecting to something beyond the physical.

You’re seeing that spark of the divine in someone’s eyes. And everything that we do in Chinese medicine is about cultivating our shen, cultivating all aspects of self. We are looking to cultivate our shen so that we can be living as the truest, most vital expression of ourselves.

And this brings me to my point. So many forecasts for the 2026 Year of the Fire horse talk about the rise of AI, because Fire relates to energy, which relates to, in the modern day, electricity, internet and technology. But while this may be true, and while we are certainly seeing that AI tools are exploding everywhere, I think that at the same time we are having a massive influx of energetic power coming through our consciousness- if we are available for that.

(14:20) And that means actually allowing time for cultivation of our presence and our awareness, our consciousness, our attention – and not just giving it all up to AI. I know that there can be some valuable time-saving tools that come from AI. But also I think that when we rely on AI for expression we lose that sense of aliveness that comes through in our own authentic voice – our own authentic expression – because that is also part of the element of Fire.

(14:52) And it might not be perfect. It might have spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, but it’s true and essential, wild and untameable. And I think we’ve all seen the absolute flood of AI content everywhere. So much of it feels lifeless and dead. And I think that this Year of the Fire Horse is an opportunity for all of us to be vessels for this divine force of Shen-spirit-consciousness that is coming through us, and to cultivate that through practices like meditation, Qigong, and even contemplation. So: sitting outside and contemplating a tree, or having a slow & meditative grounding walk outside, connecting to that energy, that living energy that is all around us, getting our feet on the earth, putting our face to the sun, charging up with that life force energy.

It can also be things like observing our own impulses and getting curious and getting to know ourselves more deeply, so that we can start to clear out conditioning and allow our truest self to shine through and flow through.

And this is where the Snake year has been such a gift, because it’s been a continual (for me anyway!) sloughing off of old skins… of looking at where I was still in old habits of giving away my power externally, rather than looking to that wild untameable source within. And also perhaps shedding limiting habits of thought, and limiting perceptions.

(16:42) So all of those, or many of those (I’m sure there might be others lurking in the corner!) were challenged and were able to be shed. And there’s still time for all of us to do this in the next few weeks as well. You might be actually experiencing this for yourself as well.

Maybe there’s old triggers coming up, things that felt like that you feel like you might have already dealt with in the past, and yet they’ve resurfaced again. So I feel like we’re actually going through a purge at really the deepest levels, as we are readying ourselves for this influx of Double Fire energy that is coming our way. Now in Chinese medicine and Taoist medicine, Taoist thought, we are all about balance and moderation and the middle path.

And so a Double Fire year, a double Yang year, like we are having upcoming in the Year of the Fire Horse, can bring with it really strong energies that require moderation and grounding, so that we can absorb the best of them – and so that we don’t get burnt up in the flames. If we were to go straight out of the gate into theYear of the Fire Horse, without grounding and anchoring, we could become burnt out.

Another aspect of the Fire element when it’s imbalanced is mania. It’s like this ungrounded mental energy, someone talking a million miles an hour, or maybe laughing inappropriately, jumping around with thoughts. It’s going to be really important as these energies come through with the Year of the Fire Horse to bring a moderation and capacitance to hold those energies.

So this will be things like a daily grounding practice, like a somatic body practice, moving practice to open up and course and flow the meridians in the body so that our circuitry is well primed to receive that influx of energies.

(18:40) I like to think of the work that we do with cultivating and grounding our Qi in work like Qi Gong, or slow walking meditation, seated meditation, any kind of contemplation, getting into Mother Nature. All of this work is about connecting with our earthly vessel, so that we can provide a container for that energy to come through us. And the more grounded we are, the more of that beautiful Fire energy we can actually receive and work with in a productive way so we don’t get burned up.

And I think of this like shoring up the banks of a river, so that if there is big flow coming through in this Year of the Fire Horse, it can contain it. This is why we do these daily cultivation practices of Qi, because – rather than having to be controlled externally – it’s a way of internally cultivating that flow, so that we can hold more of that power and become more powerful, more vital, more vibrant and more radiant. And we can use that towards our enduring health as well. The extent to which we can ground and hold these energies of the Fire Horse, will also in part dictate how much of that energy we have available to launch our own dreams passions and desire this year- to manifest them into physical reality.

(20:11) The Year of the Fire Horse will give us the power to create changes if we want to – to transmute into a newer version of ourselves if that’s what we choose – and just to hold more of that energy for our own personal power and our own self-expression.

Now I mentioned before that the Fire element shares a polarity with the Water element, and it’s one of the fundamental balancing polarities of Chinese medicine. So in this coming Year of the Fire Horse, we can bring in more water into our lives – maybe it’s swimming, surfing, being around bodies of water, or maybe just bringing more awareness to how we connect to our water.

I’ve talked a lot about structured water, and the information-carrying capacity of water in other episodes, so you can have a listen to those. And perhaps it’s a more intentional connection to the water already in our lives – and it’s also about bringing qualities of Water to this Year of the Fire Horse. Water can be still, it’s steady, it’s slow, it’s persistent, whereas fire likes to flare quickly, it likes to create rapid change, it’s more impulsive.

In this Year of the Fire Horse, it’s about also bringing moderation or just checking ourselves with our impulses. And it’s about balancing out periods of productivity, speed and dynamism with periods of slowness. And this is definitely a note to self because I am a horse, and I have a habit of getting carried away when the energies are there!

(21:51) It’s a reminder that this Year of the Fire Horse, as every year – it’s a marathon not a sprint. A reminder to rest before you’re tired, to put little periods of rest and stillness (those qualities of the Water element) throughout the day, so that you can then have more access to lasting aspects of that Fire energy. And again, grounding, getting your feet on the earth, getting your body on the earth is so vital.

The Year of the Fire Horse might be a beautiful time to get started on a Qi Gong practice if you haven’t got one already. This is why I created my beautiful Qi Gong program, Coming Home to You – in preparation for this powerful year, so that we can really work with these energies and ground them into our earthly bodies.

It’s a beautiful, simple, accessible program, just 10 minutes a day. We go through a seven day sequence looking at the secrets of each energy center, and the different Qi Gong flows that cultivate our Qi – our energy – for that center. And then we put it all together in a beautiful flow, and we go deeper into two other classic Qi Gong sets as well.

Qi Gong doesn’t have to take a lot of time, but the benefits are profound. And the more regularly we practice it and over a longer term, as we practice it, the more benefits we reap. You can actually feel that energy moving through your meridians. So that invitation is there for you.

(23:22) The Year of the Fire Horse is a beautiful time to get into this practice. It’s on my website at drmaz.earth.

(23:29) And before I wrap up, one other hint froms ome feng shui practitioners about how to moderate Fire energies of this Year of the Fire Horse is to bring more Water and Metal element into your space. The color of Water is a deep blue or a black, so we might bring in these colors in our clothes or in our environment. And the Metal element is associated generally with white, but also with Metal textures like gold or silver. So these can be colors or textures that we can bring into our surroundings or into our wardrobe, and even into our awareness, our meditations and visualizations, to balance out those impulsive, powerful qualities of this Double Fire Year.

I hope this has been interesting, enlightening, exciting perhaps. I think that this coming Year of the Fire Horse is just such a powerful portal for reclaiming that wild, untamed nature within all of us. So I’m wishing you all the very best for this coming Year of the Fire Horse.

Please feel free to share this episode if you found it interesting, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

We continue our exploration from the previous episode, and consider: how does the human body self-heal?

How are symptoms actually an indication of the body’s infinite wisdom & self-healing power, and how can we support these processes to move to completion and healing (rather than suppressing them)? What happens if we do suppress them?? How does the human body self-heal then?

Unlike modern medicine, Chinese Medicine supports the body’s self-healing processes, helping them to move towards their completion. In this episode, I share perspectives on health through the lens of the oldest science in the world, Chinese Medicine. A science that has persisted for over 5,000 years (some say 8,000… and it may be older still!) and is all about living in harmony, both within and without.

Listen for simple ways that we can cultivate these vital aspects of ourselves, for radiant health and self-healing.

(00:00) Welcome to the podcast

And if you’d like my guidance in building daily rituals and habits for radiantly robust health, I have created something simple yet powerful for you. As we know, our daily habits are the foundation for our health and “immunity”. Every moment, meal, drink, thought, habit, etc. can bring us into greater alignment and can charge up our Qi – the life force energy that fuels every aspect of health.

This is why I created the Radiant Energy Reset. A gentle, self-guided path of ancient health rituals to cultivate Qi, Yin, Yang and connection – guided by the wisdom of your own body. A real solution for those ready to ditch the fads & feel clear, energised and in control again. Backed by ancient wisdom, not wellness trends. Instant access for you here.

And, as we learned in episode 47, “when the Qi and Shen are present and sound, no pathogen can invade a person, even when the cycles of nature are disruptive, and plagues are near”. I show you how to cultivate and boost your Qi and your Shen – your spirit, soul, consciousness. Just 10 minutes a day of Qi Gong & Emotional Alchemy to connect to YOUR innate wisdom & guidance – and feel grounded in YOU. You already have all you need within. A gentle embodiment journey – Coming Home to You. Instant access.

(00:00) Hi everyone, welcome to the Balanced Natural Health podcast where we share insights from the ancient science and timeless wisdom of Chinese medicine. Information from the old natural ways of healing can support us in leading more beautiful, more vibrant and more vital lives today. In this podcast I share simple, natural and accessible tips that you can incorporate into your everyday life for more vibrant health and wellness. I’m so glad you’re here.

(00:32) Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Maz and welcome back to episode 48 of the podcast. In today’s episode, we are continuing on from our exploration in the last episode about what it is that makes us sick, from a Chinese Medicine perspective, and does the human body self-heal.

And it is not invisible baddies, or germs / bacteria / microbes / viruses that we “catch” from other people that make us sick. From a Chinese Medicine perspective, the main causes of disease are a loss of harmony and balance, both with our world within – our inner world of emotions – and the world without – the environment, the climate and conditions around us. So in Chinese Medicine, staying balanced and in harmony with our inner world and our outer world is what maintains health, and allows our brilliant system to heal itself.

(01:25)We understand that emotions can be a major contributor to disease because we are energetic beings, and emotions are simply energy in motion. And when they’re not in motion – when our emotions aren’t moving, when they’re stuck or repressed or ignored – they can snag our energy body, our biofield, our aura. And when our energy field and our Qi meridians are not flowing smoothly, and they’re not communicating as ideally as they should be, then we can start to see disease: this is because things aren’t moving where they need to be moving, and information isn’t being passed in a timely manner.

(02:05) And we learned that another contributor to disease is an imbalance of our bodies in relation to the external environment. So for example, in Chinese Medicine, we say that Wind is the “spearhead of 1000 diseases”. This is why we bundle up against winds, we protect against drafts, we don’t sleep under fans, and we wear scarves in windy weather, because the neck is where Wind can get in. And when Wind and Cold get into the meridians that traverse our neck (and also our lower back, we like to keep that covered and toasty as well), we get frozen and flow is trapped on the surface.

And that is when an early stage “Cold” can arise. So, we might get tightness in the muscles of the neck, we might get that achy feeling that might indicate that a cold or flu is brewing, we might feel lightly flushed, and we might have some light sweating or fever. And all of this is, in fact, the body’s wise response to that Cold, and the resultant freezing of the surface: the body is trying to bring warmth to the surface to push that cold back out.

(03:18) So we can see that these disruptions to internal harmony and outer harmony provide a very different view of health than the militaristic mindset of being constantly on edge against invisible baddies and “germs” that we need to defend against. I love that the focus is on harmony and balance, rather than waging war. And I think that that shift alone really benefits our nervous systems in the long run, too – that focus on what we’re creating, rather than what we’re fighting against, especially when it’s not the true cause of disease.

And I think it’s also interesting that this microbe idea or germ theory of disease is relatively recent, whereas Chinese Medicine has held its view of health for millennia, at least 5000 years, if not longer. And it has stood the test of time, so there is so much we can learn from it!

(04:12) In this episode, we’re going to look at a Chinese Medicine perspective on what happens when we do manifest symptoms. What does it mean, for example, when we get phlegm on the lungs or in the sinuses, or when we have a fever, or diarrhoea? How do we explain that from a Chinese Medicine perspective – and how does the human body self-heal?

We will also look at the Eight methods or the Eight Strategies of herbal medicine, and they describe different ways that we use herbs – and tastes and flavours – to support the body’s processes of restoring balance when it has been disrupted. So, for example, if we have constipation, we will use a certain treatment strategy, and if we have phlegm on the chest, we use a different treatment strategy. So we’ll learn more about that as well.

(05:03) Recapping on what we learned in the previous episode, staggeringly and amazingly, we humans actually have more microbial cells than human cells. So we have more bacteria and fungal (including yeast) cells than actual human cells. And together we live in a community which comes together in symbiosis that supports life (this also forms a big piece of the answer to “how does the human body self-heal?”)

And while it might seem that bacteria or microbes are the “baddies” when we look at the fact that they might be present, for example, in phlegm or mucus cultures when there are symptoms of disease (when there is, say, bronchitis or a chest infection, we can see that there are certain bacteria that might be more prevalent) there is actually a different view that paints these little friends in a different light. And what if, in fact, they were not the problem, but they were the cleanup crew? And that is how I see it – that our friendly helpers come to the party and help us restore balance.

(06:09) Let me explain a little bit more. But firstly, I’d like to bring to mind the image of a compost heap – and what happens in a compost heap.

Those of us who’ve had a garden or a compost heap before, we know that we throw food scraps on a compost heap, and then there are worms and microbes that help to break down these discarded bits of food, and help to break them down into something that will nourish the earth, which then feeds into the next stage of the cycle of life. So it’s a way of digesting the remnants, the leftovers, into a form that is usable by the soil, and by the next generation of plants – and which then nourishes us in return. So we can see that life cycle is continuing.

And this is how I see our microbial helpers. As I see things, our bacterial friends not only do important tasks – like synthesising vitamins, for example, which they can do for us in the gut – but they can also be on call to process and compost and recycle damaged cells and tissues.

For example, imagine that we’ve been somewhere where we’ve been inhaling air that has something that’s challenging to the lining of the lungs. Maybe we’ve been by a busy road all day, and we’ve been inhaling a lot of diesel and petrol fumes. Or maybe we’ve been in a building in which there’s inadequate airflow, and maybe off-gassing from new plastic products, or carpet or paint or something. Or maybe we’ve been exposed to certain non-native frequencies that can upset the particular cell types or particular tissue types in the lungs. There can be many reasons for disruption to cells or tissues anywhere in the body. 

(08:04) So, assuming that people have been exposed to something that’s disrupted function, how does the human body self-heal? If the body is not well resourced to process that disruption, we may need to call on some extra help. Our bodies are amazing and so adaptive, and they help us adapt to so much and process so much. And that’s why I always talk about prioritising optimal nutrition with whole foods, getting adequate rest, drinking structured water, aligning with the cycles of nature, moving our Qi, limiting how much we have in our toxin bucket, and so on, so that we can be well resourced to adapt to and respond to these challenges.

But, if for whatever reason our vitality is a bit low – maybe we’ve had some stress or snagged emotions that are stagnating our Qi, or maybe there’s been a little bit more toxins in general recently – then we can’t respond as robustly to that challenge. And perhaps, in the example I gave earlier, the lining of the lungs gets a little bit upset and damaged by that exposure to toxins or fumes. Then we have degraded cells, that ideally the body wants to replace with fresh cells that are functioning optimally. So how does the human body self-heal in this situation? Well, it’s with a little help from our microbial friends.

So what does our brilliant body do? It sends in the cleanup crew. As we’ve seen in a compost pile, that veggie scraps can get degraded into something that nourishes the life cycle. And in our case, when the cleanup crew, the microbes, the bacteria, arrive on the scene, say in the lining of the lungs, they start to digest that degraded tissue. And in the process of doing so, we might get phlegm and mucus because that is how that degraded tissue can get either recycled or expelled out of the body. So we can cough it up and get it out. And what can be reused will be reused. 

(09:55) If we were to do a culture of the mucus or phlegm at this time, we might notice that there are greater numbers of certain bacteria types. But what if they are not the cause of the problem? What if they are there because they are actually cleaning up the damage – because they are a part of the greater whole’s self-healing mechanism? And so then when we throw an antibiotic at them, then that process of cleanup, remediation and recycling is halted. And that compromised cell and tissue in the lungs doesn’t get a chance to be repaired completely.

In such a case, we might have suboptimal repair of the tissue, and eventually, suboptimal function of the lungs. We’ve killed off our helpers – and some others probably have fallen by the wayside as collateral damage – and yet we haven’t solved the problem. So how does the human body self-heal then? Well, what if instead we took extra care to nourish the body at this time? What if we really doubled down on rest, on nutrition, on food that’s easy to digest? 

This means warm food, which is not adding to further Dampness. This is where nourishing the Spleen, which I talk about so often, is so important. Because if we’re eating in a way that we’re digesting completely, and we’re not adding to further phlegm and Dampness within the body, then the body can really focus its efforts on resolving the local inflammation in the damaged tissue and getting back to balance more quickly.

(11:22) We can speed this process with herbs that can dry the area and help to expel that phlegm. So, rather than suppressing the helpers, in Chinese Herbal Medicine we’re actually supporting the body in completing the process of self-healing that it is attempting to do. And this expelling, or reducing, approach is one of the Eight Strategies that we use in herbal medicine.

It’s called the “reducing” strategy – Xiao Fa – wherein we support the body in eliminating what is obstructing flow and function. So it might be phlegm on the chest. It could also be stagnant Blood, in the case of really painful periods with dark blood and blood clots, and here we would give herbs that support the movement of Blood. For the chest phlegm situation, we would give herbs that dry out Dampness, that help to break it up and help it to leave the lungs.

And we might also use this strategy in a situation that we call Food Stagnation, which is when we have eaten too much rich food and overloaded an unsupported digestive system. And then the food just sits there and ferments, and people might get stinky farts, maybe stinky burps, there can be reflux, bloating, or a yellow or thick tongue coating. How does the human body self-heal in this situation and how can we support it? One way is to give herbs that strongly move digestion, they stoke that digestive fire, so that the body can move through that backlog of stagnated food, and bring relief in that way.

(12:48) So you can see that we’re not actually suppressing the symptoms. We’re not giving, say, antacids for indigestion, which would further dampen that digestive fire. The digestion is already overloaded, it is already dealing with stagnated food. But instead we support resolution – with our treatment methods and our herbs, we move in the same direction that the body is moving, and we support self-healing and balance in that way.

Another example of a treatment strategy that we use is “sweating”. As I touched on earlier, we say that Wind is the spearhead of a thousand diseases, and it is one of the most common triggers or causes of an early-stage Cold. And here, we might experience that tight neck, that flushed face, achy muscles, we get fatigued, there might be a light headache, there might be sneezing as well. The sneezing is just the body trying to expel the Wind and Cold through the nose, trying to get it out of the body. So how does the human body self-heal a Cold?

The ways that the body will try to expel this “Cold contraction”, this freezing at the surface, is through a fever or breaking a sweat. So if you have ever woken up in the night with sweats, and especially if you’ve been exposed to cold or a draft during the day, then it’s very likely that this is your body doing its magic to restore balance. Because when we can sweat Cold out (or return warmth to our body surface), then order is restored, that Cold and / or Wind is pushed out, and then the muscles get to soften, flow is restored, headaches ease, that flushed feeling can go because now it’s done what it needs to do.

(14:23) In the modern view, we might be tempted to throw some Panadol or Tylenol at this – something to reduce that flushed feeling, that headachy feeling. But what that actually does is that it stops that body wisdom response of heating up to push things out. And so then that process isn’t completed – it is suppressed instead – and the body’s attempts to self-heal are interrupted.

And because the healing process has been interrupted, then the imbalance that has come from the surface gets to sink deeper into the body – this is because we have worked against the body, we’re not helping it in its process of pushing things up and out. Whereas in Chinese Medicine, we have a sweating method, where for these kind of Cold presentations, we take herbs that help to promote light sweating. We also take some really nourishing, easily digestible warm foods, and then we bundle up and rest, and allow the body to break a light sweat. So this is the directive given in our oldest medical text, and it still works to this day.

(15:22) We often use a formula called Gui Zhi Tang, or Cinnamon Twig Decoction. This is cinnamon and ginger, licorice root, peony root, and jujubes or red dates, for a bit of gentle sweetness to help to support the energy so we can build that sweat, and have that fever. Those warm, spicy, pungent flavours of cinnamon and ginger push open the pores, they push out that Cold and Wind. And so. we might break a light fever – we’re already bundled up, we’ve had some easily digestible food.

If we take this approach, then we can return to balance and harmony the next day. But If we don’t – if we don’t rest, if we don’t listen to our body’s messages, the messages that it’s telling us that Cold has come in – then what can happen is that the imbalance goes deeper into the body. And then we might start to get a sore throat, or phlegm in the sinuses or in the chest.

(16:19) And this is another way that we can arrive at that phlegmy cough situation I gave as an example earlier. What’s happened here is that the circulation and the Qi mechanism – the Qi circuitry – has been compromised by Wind and Cold initially, and the body wasn’t able to “expel” it. This can be because we’re low on Qi because we haven’t stopped, or maybe we suppressed it with something else, or maybe the body was dealing with other things. And so then it’s gone another level deeper, and there’s been more tangling of (16:49) the energy networks.

And so, lymphatic circulation is affected, fluids aren’t moving so much in the micro-circulation, and we can start to get water-logging and fluid retention in tissues within the body. So say, for example, the lungs aren’t draining as well as they normally would, and they can start to collect bits of phlegm and mucus. And so now we can see that if circulation and Qi – the energy mechanism – isn’t restored, then that phlegm is going to collect and sit there.

When the bacterial friends come in to help digest and compost the damage that has been done to the tissues, if we throw antibiotics at them, then that phlegm doesn’t get to be resolved. And what I love about this perspective is that it reminds us just how wise and powerful and amazing our bodies are!

(17:48) They don’t do anything by mistake, they don’t get sick by accident, they don’t have symptoms by accident, they don’t do things to be annoying. Everything that they’re doing is an attempt to complete a process, and move towards health – they are always moving towards health. So my question is always, how can we support that movement towards health? How can we help, rather than obstruct or suppress?

(18:11) I’d like to share another story that I think illustrates this really beautifully. I’ve shared this before in my Candida episode. In that episode, I talked about a patient who had been erroneously given an iron transfusion, and it shot their iron levels way up high. And this is a real concern, because our bodies don’t have a pathway for excreting excess iron – because we’re not designed to receive iron by transfusion in such vast amounts. So when this excess iron is accumulated in the body, it can start to deposit in the organs, and one of the concerns is that it can cause cancer.

So, it’s very important to get excess iron out of the body. And we were very keen, when this happened, to get that excess iron out of the body as soon as possible. There are herbs that we can use to support the process of chelation – getting metals out of the body. But what happened next just shows the amazing wisdom and power of the body. 

What happened was that this person developed a full body rash, which was a yeast or Candida rash. It smelled like a brewery, or fresh bread baking, and it was oozing this orange liquid, which incidentally was the same colour as the iron transfusion. It was incredibly uncomfortable – It was a whole body rash. It was very depleting, it came with a lot of brain fog and just general malaise and low energy. But what was happening was that our little Candida friends were doing what human cells are unable to do, or what human systems are unable to do without help from our little friends.

Candida can process metals – heavy metals. And what these little helpers were doing was providing an exit strategy to exude that iron from the system in the most efficient way. And in fact, what happened was, we retested this person’s blood again, a few months into this process, and the iron had dropped dramatically. It was almost back to normal, and then it returned back to normal shortly afterwards.

Now, this was very uncomfortable for the person. But we also knew that there was a body wisdom reason behind it. And if we’d been to see a Western medicine doctor at this time, we would have been given anti-fungals, and a whole host of possibly antimicrobials to shut down the processes that the microbes were carrying out, effectively shutting down their activity.

(20:43) And, yes – that would have probably reduced the symptoms at the skin level. But it wouldn’t have supported the process of excreting that excess iron, which was much more damaging. And this brings me also to another point, which is that sometimes discomfort is part of the process, unfortunately. But, if we support the body in its process, and allow it to complete that process to its fullest expression, then we actually get to enjoy greater health at the end of it. So this person was very stoic – they stuck with it. Everything got pushed out, or excreted, from the body, balance was restored and the skin returned back to its beautiful original state.

So again, we’re offered a different perspective here on what happens if we deeply trust the wisdom of the body and the processes that it’s going through. We see that the human body is infinitely capable of self-healing – if we don’t stifle its process.

This idea of occasional discomfort as sometimes being part of the healing process is something that we might see in another of our treatment strategies, which is the “purging” or “downward draining” treatment strategy, which is basically purging and expelling things through the intestines, like in the case of constipation.

What can also happen sometimes if someone has, say, a lot of Damp or inflammation in their digestive system, then when we give certain formulas that move Damp, there can initially be diarrhoea, and it can be somewhat explosive and sudden. But then generally, what we feel afterwards is ease and relief, because that’s been a really efficient way of quickly moving a large lot of Dampness out of the body. It might not feel amazing for a short time, but sometimes it really is the quickest way of moving things out. 

(22:29) Another way, which we don’t use much these days, because it’s much less appealing to modern humans, is vomiting. This was one way of getting things out that were sitting above the diaphragm. So, we’ve got the sweating method, we have the vomiting, the draining, we’ve talked about the reducing method. And then, we also have tonifying.

This is where we build up what is depleted. This is one of the more common strategies that we use. We can build up Yang – the spark of life – with warming herbs, we can build the Blood and nourish the Blood. We do this with our food as well, using specific foods for building both Blood and Yang.

Much less so in Classical Medicine than in Traditional Chinese Medicine, we nourish the Yin. This is because we’re much more interested in nourishing the spark of life from a classical perspective, which is by restoring function and the Qi mechanism first..

We might also look at harmonising. That’s another treatment strategy, and one that we very commonly use – in fact, it’s probably the most common method that I use in clinical practice.

And this is one that I often use when we have flu-type symptoms or lingering unresolved inflammation and infections, for example, or even unresolved past instances of flu or glandular fever. These are often presentations that involve the lymphatic circulation, the glands, the interstitial fluids. When we’re harmonising, we bring harmony to the interior and exterior of the body, by regulating and harmonising all the spaces in between.

And the final two treatment methods are “warming” what is Cold – and nourishing the Yang – and “clearing Heat” – the goal of which is actually to ultimately preserve the body’s Yang, even though we are clearing it in an acute situation. Clearing heat is not one that we use that often, because in Classical Chinese Medicine, we are very much about maintaining and preserving theYang – the heat, the spark of life.

(24:13) But – if we have a extremely high fever, and the person is losing a lot of their Yang through sweating and fever, then we will use the clearing heat method for a short, acute situation. We do this to preserve their life force – to stop them losing too much life force – before we then go in and keep resolving things further.

Now, before we finish up, I’d like to offer one more example. And this one is about mould.

This is something that we’re hearing more and more about these days, where people are having mould sickness, or they’re thinking to attribute their symptoms of say, fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, pain, to living in a mouldy environment. And yes, absolutely, we want to live in a well-ventilated environment! We want sunlight, we want circulation -that’s absolutely part of it.

But my question is – why can some people be unaffected in the same environment that other people are affected by?

This points to something different in the internal environment of the people involved.

If someone has a warm and sunny, and well-circulated and dry environment within, then they have more capacity to withstand Damp and mould externally. Whereas someone who’s already Damp, inflamed and wet inside – with compromised Yang or circulation – is going to be more easily overrun by external Dampness.

One way that I like to explain this is this. If we have a wet towel and put it out in the sun, it’s going to dry and will be fine, no problem. But if we have a wet towel and throw it in a dark cupboard with no ventilation, then we’re going to get mould.

(25:59) I had a person speak to me recently who had been diagnosed with mould issues, and they were being treated with some pretty intense protocols to kill off the mould. This person had been experiencing crushing fatigue, inflammation, not feeling like themselves, brain fog, a lot of weight gain as well, there was a disruption to hormones and metabolism, a whole host of things – and everything had been pinned back to mould that had been found in a diagnostic test.

But to me, I see things differently,, because I think that the mould is only there because the internal environment was too Damp to begin with. It had gotten out of whack, perhaps from improper diet, like maybe there’d been a lot of cold foods or a lot of fruit that contribute to that state of internal Dampness, for maybe eating foods that don’t support the Spleen in maintaining a warm and toasty, dry environment internally. So then the mould comes in to remediate the situation.

We know that moulds degrade, say, wet wood or wet organic substances – they help to break them down and compost them. And this is what I see was happening – waterlogged, Damp tissues were being worked on by mould to continue that process of recycling in order to keep the life cycle going. Viewed from the perspective, the mould is a self-healing or remediation process.

To give another analogy, if we think of a house that has received water damage, and we see that the ceiling is starting to get mould spots on it, if we just paint over the mould or spray them with bleach – but don’t fix the root cause of that leak – that’s kind of like the Western medicine approach. They just spray the surface with things that are going to kill the mould, but they’re not looking at why has that mould occurred? And how can we restore balance at the root? Because we can kill off the mould in that one area, but there’s going to be imbalances down the track because we still have not resolved the root.

(27:54) So for example, we could paint over that water stain on a ceiling, or we could even seal it with something that doesn’t allow further water to come through, but then that water is going to leak elsewhere – it’s going to have even less movement, there’s going to be more rot happening in the background, rather than if we just got in, dried everything out, patched up the leak, and restored balance and harmony.

Instead, we could view that symptom of say a mould-damaged ceiling as a message from the house, that there is an imbalance somewhere internally, in the same way that we can look at a body with mould as sending us a message to say that there is an imbalance somewhere internally as well. Maybe fluids aren’t moving well, maybe toxins aren’t excreting as well as we’d like and therefore, more fluids are amassing to buffer those.

What if instead we ask, how do we nourish the body to allow it to complete the process that it is moving towards doing already? How can we support our brilliant human body in self-healing? So we might, once again, nourish it with foods that build Qi, that build that spark of life. We take food and herbs that create a warm and dry ventilated environment, we promote circulation with gentle movements, we work with emotional alchemy to help the whole Qi mechanism work efficiently – so it can communicate and make sure that everything is functioning optimally as we move that process to completion. 

(29:24) So I hope this has been interesting and helped to open up a different perspective of how we can work with our bodies rather than against them. A perspective of how we can listen deeply to symptoms as the messages that they truly are; of how we can support our beautiful body-mind-souls in their processes of transmutation; of alchemising what’s happening and of supporting those processes, and of understanding that our bodies are always doing what is best for us.

And if you’d like to learn more about how you can support your body in these processes of transmutation and moving towards ever-greater wholeness, this is the major topic of my Radiant Energy Reset. In this beautiful reset, I guide you through – at your own pace – self-paced modules that explain how to nourish your energy, how to choose foods that are warm and drying, and that promote a balanced internal environment; how we can choose herbs and foods when we get certain different “messages” from the body, we also talk about emotional alchemy, processing our emotions and moving our body with some basic Qi Gong. That is all on my website at drmaz.earth.

If you have found this interesting, please share with someone who may benefit and I look forward to seeing you next time!

Why do we get sick?

Why do some people seem to get everything going, while others happily keep on going?

We might be tempted to answer, “it’s the immune system”, but the “immune” system is both merely a working theory and a relatively new concept – one that has not been tested and proven over the course of millennia. And in its short existence, many holes and inconsistencies have already been uncovered.

A view that:

• has persisted for over 5,000 years (some say 8,000… and it may be older still!)

Wouldn’t that feel so much better – more easeful, joyous and lighter – than being on constant alert for the next invisible germ or baddie out there?

And what about the fact that these invisible “germs and baddies” are actually a vital part of health? They already exist on and in us, to the extent that the number of microbial cells outnumber human cells by an estimated factor of at 10:1 (some sources now suggest that it’s closer to 100:1). In either case, we “humans” are more a community of bacteria and other microbes than anything else. Which then makes me consider – why the obsession with killing off all of the invisible microbes that we ideally live in symbiosis with us? And what IS the answer to “why do we get sick“?

This is the Chinese Medicine view.

In this episode, we look at the causes of disease through the lens of the oldest science in the world: time-tested over centuries – and millions of patients – and delivering powerful clinical results to this day.

• Loss of balance, connection and harmony

• Emotions

This lens sees us humans as primarily energetic, electromagnetic beings, and when we cultivate our Qi and our spirit-soul-consciousness, health is the natural result. This is summed up beautifully in the quote from our ancient medical book, the Huang Di Nei Jing (Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine, circa 200CE):

…when the Qi and Shen* are present and sound, no pathogen** can invade a person, even when the cycles of nature are disruptive, and plagues*** are near.

Listen for simple ways that we can cultivate these vital aspects of ourselves, for vibrant, radiant health.

(00:00) Intro

* Shen = spirit, soul, consciousness, awareness – the spark of life in someone’s eyes

Our daily habits are the foundation for our health and “immunity”. Every moment, meal, drink, thought, habit, etc. can bring us into greater alignment and can charge up our Qi – the life force energy that fuels every aspect of health.

This is why I created the Radiant Energy Reset. A gentle, self-guided path of ancient health rituals to cultivate Qi, Yin, Yang and connection – guided by the wisdom of your own body. A real solution for those ready to ditch the fads & feel clear, energised and in control again. Backed by ancient wisdom, not wellness trends. All the details here.

And, as we learned in this episode “when the Qi and Shen are present and sound, no pathogen can invade a person, even when the cycles of nature are disruptive, and plagues are near”.

I show you how to cultivate and boost your Qi and your Shen – your spirit, soul, consciousness. Just 10 minutes a day of Qi Gong & Emotional Alchemy to connect to YOUR innate wisdom & guidance – and feel grounded in YOU. You already have all you need within. A gentle embodiment journey, instant access and at your own pace. Details here.

(00:00) Hi everyone, welcome to the Balanced Natural Health podcast where we share insights from the ancient science and timeless wisdom of Chinese medicine. Information from the old natural ways of healing can support us in leading more beautiful, more vibrant and more vital lives today. In this podcast I share simple, natural and accessible tips that you can incorporate into your everyday life for more vibrant health and wellness. I’m so glad you’re here.

(00:32) Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Maz! Welcome back to episode 47 of the podcast. In today’s episode I’d like to share a different perspective on why do we get sick Why do symptoms arise and why do we experience dis-ease? And why is it that some people seem to catch every bug, every flu or cold or gastro that’s going around and others seem to be totally fine? Or why is it that some people have asthma or allergies or reactions to mold or certain environments whereas other people in that same environment or around the same triggers seem to be totally impervious to any outside input? So what is behind that?

(01:22) Now if we think with our modern mainstream mindset, we might answer it’s the immune system. But there are two things to consider about this answer and that is that the immune system theory is just that. It’s a theory, a working hypothesis that has some pretty major holes. So there’s definitely some issues, it’s not airtight, it’s just a working theory. 

And the other thing to consider is that it is also a relatively new idea – a relatively new construct that hasn’t had the opportunity to be proven out over thousands of years like the other view that I’m about to share with you.

So ,the modern idea of an immune system is say 100 to 150 years old, and prior to that we had a very different idea of why do we get sick – and therefore, what we can do in order to cultivate vibrant wellness, and also how to look after our health preventatively. And this other view that I’m going to present to you is a beautiful contrast to the current view of the immune system, which has us constantly on guard, on high alert, on defense for invisible baddies and all of the invisible pathogens / bugs / viruses / bacteria that are out to get us. This means that we always have our back up: our nervous system is never truly at ease or at rest because we’re in this militaristic mindset of being at the ready, to spring into attack or to defend ourselves.

(03:06) But this other view is actually about harmony – it’s about trusting the wisdom of our brilliant, brilliant beings, our brilliant body-mind-souls. It’s about trusting that we are so powerful to cultivate vibrant health, and also to rebalance from whatever ails us – and also trusting in the power and the wisdom of Mama Nature, and trusting in the power of our connection to the web of life, to the natural world around us. Because the fact of the matter is that we are woven in to the web of life, and we live in community and symbiosis with the world around us – and this is particularly true when we consider our own human environment.

You might have heard me or others talk about the idea of the microbiome, and this refers to the beautiful collection and living community of microbes. These are the tiny little organisms, like bacteria, yeast and fungi and so on, that live in and on our bodies. And this is why people love selling probiotic supplements – because they are meant to make our microbiome healthier. But there’s actually other ways to do that, that are much more lasting.

(04:26) This community of beautiful little friends is vast, richly textured and layered, and if we count the microbial cells within that whole community, they actually outnumber our human cells by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, by current estimates. This is pretty mind-blowing when we ponder, what is it that makes us human? What IS a human? And when we consider that we, as human beings, are more microbes than human – more community than human – then how does this modern militaristic view of killing microbes and defending against invisible baddies make sense?! It has us killing the very organisms that are helping us to live and thrive, and that are performing essential functions within our body.

And when we’re constantly at war with them, in a way, we’re at war with ourselves – and at war with connection to nature herself. Because the fact is that many of the bacteria or microbes that have been blamed for certain diseases and illnesses actually live in – and on – us when we’re in a healthy balanced state too. So it’s not about the microbes themselves as being baddies, but rather it’s actually about the whole symphony of all of those microbes within the context of our human selves. Are they in balance? Are they out of balance? Are they coherent? Are they supporting life?

This is why waging war on microbes is not going to lead to thriving good health. Instead we need to look at how we can bring coherence, harmony and balance to our inner world, and harmony to how we interface with the world around us.

(06:21) This other perspective that I’m about to share with you on why do we get sick, and how we can maintain vibrant wellness, is not focused on doing war or fighting off invisible nasties. or constantly having our back up. Instead, it’s about surrendering that and having faith in the wisdom of our bodies – and trust in the wisdom of nature. It’s about living in harmony with the world outside us, and also living in harmony with the world within us. That includes microbes – but it also includes all of our inner workings, our entire mind-body-soul, our emotions. We’ll get into that in just a minute.

This worldview that I’m about to share with you is the Chinese Medicine view of health, and it is a view that has persisted for at least 5,000 years – if not longer. There’s different opinions on its age – it might be 8,000 years or more – and as such, it is the oldest surviving science in the world. And it is a science that still offers us powerful ways of bringing about balance, of bringing harmony and cultivating health in this modern world. So it has truly stood the test of time, and it can be applied to the whole range of diseases and sicknesses that we experience as humans, whether it’s a dis-ease of body, mind or soul.

(07:48) So let’s take a look at what Chinese Medicine offers us as to “why do we get sick”. Why do we experience sickness and dis-ease, and what can we do to maintain health.

From our perspective, the things that can lead to dis-ease and suffering are fundamentally a loss of balance and harmony: a loss of connection to and alignment with the living natural world around us. This is because we are living beings, and we depend on connection to the web of life around us to regulate our rhythms, to synchronise our flow, and to exchange Qi – energy – with as well. So a loss of balance and harmony, a loss of connection and balance are the answer to why do we get sick. 

Fundamentally, within our bodies we are always looking for a balance of Yin and Yang – which is the fundamental polarity of this material existence – as well as the flow of Qi and how charged up, or how abundant our Qi is. So. are we well resourced with energy, and is that energy in integrity? Is it flowing everywhere it needs to go? Because this is how information moves through our body, and how all of our vital functions and body systems get to regulate and optimise. We need to make sure that information or Qi is moving freely through the body. 

(09:14) I like to visualise that we exist within a field of energy, or Qi: a field of our own energy that interacts with the world around us. Our own energy or Qi field has energy superhighways – these are the meridians, or channels, and it also has microcirculation of that. I like to think of this field as almost like a mesh or a weave, and when we have different snags in that energetic mesh or circuitry, then things don’t move and information, vital substances and Qi doesn’t get to go to where it needs to go. 

This is summed up beautifully in one of our ancient texts, the Huang Di Nei Jing, or the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine. This book is over 2,000 years old and this is what it says about the aetiology or the causes of disease – an ancient answer to “why do we get sick”:

“when the Qi and the Shen are present and sound, then no pathogen can invade a person – even when the cycles of nature are disruptive and plagues are near”

Qi is our life force energy, that charge that I talk about and how well it’s flowing and circulating; Shen is our spirit, our consciousness, our present awareness, our spark of life. And in this book, when they talk about pathogens, they talk about it in the literal sense of the word as it is originally intended – not as invisible baddies: “pathogen”, meaning literally “pathos”, suffering, and “gen”, so bringing about or generating that suffering. So this does not have to be invisible germies or anything like that. And also when they talk about plagues they just talk about in the sense of suffering as well.

(10:59) So we see very clearly how cultivating harmony within, and charging up our inner energy, can provide us with a robust grounding to hold steady no matter what the outside world throws at us, whether that’s physical, emotional, energetic – on any level. The more resourced we are within, the more we can hold firm and keep our centre.

So now that we know what the ideal is – what can disrupt that harmony, that balance between Yin and Yang, and that beautiful charge and flow of Qi? Why do we get sick? Well, in Chinese Medicine we say that there are both internal and external causes of disease. The internal causes are the emotions. Emotions are literally energy in motion, Qi in motion, and if they’re not allowed to move, metabolise or alchemise through the body, then they will snag that beautiful network – that circuitry of Qi – and they’ll obstruct the flow.

And then, maybe circulation will be impeded, or maybe certain cells or tissues in an area don’t get the information that they need and they become deranged, and don’t grow or multiply in the way that they should, and they lose their coherence. Maybe we accumulate too much fluid in one area because there’s not enough Qi flow to keep metabolising fluids there. When we’re suppressing emotions – or if we have stored trauma in the body as well – this can impede the flow of Qi, and this is why we have somatic practices in Chinese Medicine to move that Qi.

(12:41) Like Qi Gong, which literally means energy work. This is a somatic practice in which we move the meridians – we move that energy, or Qi, network – and we include our breath and our intention. When we work with these different meridian systems, we will titrate or discharge small manageable amounts of emotions that are trapped. So before and after a Qi Gong session feels very different.

We can move frustration, we can move heaviness or depression, grief, anxiety, ungroundedness and so on. By bringing harmony to that energy network of the body we also, over time, bring harmony to our inner emotional state. And in Chinese Medicine we have a deep understanding of the different effects of different emotions.

I’ve talked about this in other podcast episodes, (and also here, in relation to the Five Elements and their associated emotions). but, for example, we can say we say that shock can scatter the Qi, or worry can knot the Qi, or anger causes the Qi to rise up. Each emotion has a specific effect on the direction of Qi – or on the tangling of it, or the dispersal of it in certain ways. So this is why making sure that we’re, as I said, moving those energies through / out of the body is so important.

I’m also such a big fan of stream of consciousness journalling. This can be so helpful because it allows us just to witness the clutter that’s in our body, mind and soul, and get it out. We get to write it down onto paper, without projecting it onto someone else. It’s a pressure release valve for those emotions, and the more that we let them stream out of us – it’s like peeling off the layers of an onion. We start to see actually that there are other emotions or other energies beneath that.

So that’s one of the main internal causes of disease. The other is a secondary internal cause of disease, because it’s to do with lifestyle. It stems from what the ancients would call “improper living:, and that means not living in a way that is in alignment with our brilliant beings, and with how they desire to be cultivated.

(15:00) That can mean having an imbalance of work or movement, and inadequate rest or too much rest. Maybe it’s foods that are distanced from nature – or non-foods even, like processed foods, seed oils, artificial sweeteners, chemicals, preservatives. These are not things that we are meant to digest, so they’re going to snag our energy and contribute to blockages or Damp / inflammation within. Another improper way of living can also be not dressing ourselves properly for the environment.

In Chinese Medicine, we’re such big fans of scarves, and protecting our feet and covering our kidneys – no crop tops when it’s Cold! This is because the Bladder meridian crosses these areas, and the Bladder meridian is our first layer of interaction with the outside world, and it is easily affected by Cold and Wind, for example. This is why we treasure and nourish that Bladder meridian / channel, and make sure it’s warm and protected. (I share an acupressure tip for how to get Cold out of the Bladder meridian here, and a herbal tea option as well).

Not wearing sufficient clothes would constitute an improper way of living, as it could allow Cold to penetrate deep inside the body, where it can then interfere with different organ functions, and lead to things like, for example, gastro (or what appears like food poisoning), painful periods, joint pain. The list is endless and this is why we live in alignment with the outside world, as far as protecting ourselves and what we wear.

(16:33) There’s also improper living in things like “bedroom activities”, or sex. For men, excessive ejaculation can deplete the energy as well, as it’s depleting the Essence, or Jing, which are our deepest reserves of energy. The state of our Essence determines how we move through each stage of life, how vital and resilient we are, so depleting the Essence means that we’re less resourced within.

Another aspect of improper living is a lack of connection to – and harmony with – the outside world. This can contribute to an internal accumulation of Cold or Dampness (if we’re not dressed appropriately), or other things that obstruct the movement of Qi, Yin and Yang in the body. The external causes of disease are the Six Heavenly Qi, so-called because they describe six types of weather, or atmospheric and environmental Qi. They’re sometimes called the Six Evils or Six Pathogenic Qi. They’re not germs, but rather changes to do with the temperature and air pressure around us. They are Wind, Cold, Dryness, Damp, Heat and Summer Heat – which is a particularly annoying mix of Heat and Dampness together.

(17:39) Of these, Wind is the primary one. It opens the door for all of the others to get in, which is why we’re always looking after that Bladder meridian as I just mentioned, with scarves – and looking after our lower back / kidneys and making sure our feet are protected as well. As you know, we say that wind is the spearhead of a thousand diseases, and this is why we’re always looking after the exterior or surface of our body, making sure that there’s good circulation there, that we’re not cold, that we’re not goose-bumped – and this is why we are definitely not fans of air con, especially on that Bladder meridian area, and also why we definitely don’t sit in ice baths.

I’ve done a podcast episode on that and also several posts if you’re interested in learning more about that, because in Chinese Medicine we are always revering the spark of life – the Yang, the fire within. It’s like a metabolic pilot light that allows all of our body functions and systems to operate optimally, and this is why we don’t take in cold food or drink, we don’t put ice on injuries, we don’t ice bath because that all steals life. You can’t have too much Yang – you can’t have too much of that spark of life, that fire – and icing, taking in ice, or ice cream as well, it kills and dampens that vital spark.

(19:04) And finally we have miscellaneous causes, like trauma, poisoning, injury and so on. So you can see that in this whole list of ALL the causes of disease, we don’t have any mention of invisible nasties, baddies or germs, which is pretty eye-opening isn’t it? And it’s also pretty empowering, because it takes us out of that position of fear and victimhood, and feeling like we have no power to effect any changes on our health.

It returns us to – and reminds us of – a state of empowerment, where we remember that we have the power to cultivate our Qi, to cultivate our Shen, to charge up our batteries so that we can remain balanced no matter what’s happening externally. As our ancient text mentioned – when our Qi and Shen are full, then nothing external can touch us, because we are well grounded and well resourced within ourselves.

And this brings us to the goal of Chinese Medicine. Our overarching goal is always to bring harmony and coherence: to restore it where it has gone awry, to restore flow, and to remove blockage and stagnation. And, to cultivate and nourish our Qi – our spark of life – so that we can always maintain our centre – our balance – no matter what’s going on in the world. We are always focused on creating harmony within, with that flow of emotions, making sure that we’re not accumulating pathogenic factors within, like Cold and Damp (from Cold and Damp foods, or indigestible foods), and making sure that we’re also living in harmony with the outside world.

This means living in harmony with the seasons, with the daily cycle of Yin and Yang, and day and night: going to bed at the right time and rising at the right time – because this gives our systems important information. It tells our hormones what to do, tells our whole body how to organise itself through the day; and the same with the seasons – aligning ourselves in harmony both externally and internally is key.

(21:23) And so practically, what this looks like are habits like managing our energy expenditure and our energy restoration – energy in and energy out – making sure that we’re not overworking or underworking, and making sure that we’re having that beautiful balance of Yin and Yang. We’re always mindful in Chinese Medicine of not frittering away that precious Yang, that Qi, that life force – making sure that we allow sufficient time for that Yang to rebuild and recharge, making sure we get to bed by 9 p.m.ideally and making sure we take rest.

And on the flip side, also making sure that we are moving our bodies sufficiently – that our meridians are being flexed and that all of our organs are getting massaged by movement, and that our blood is getting moved through the body. In Chinese Medicine, there is always a “Middle Path” of moderation: that is always our ideal, we’re never about extremes, but rather a middle path of moderation that is sustainable as a way of life, for a whole beautiful, vibrant and well lifetime. 

As I mentioned, practically we are also aligning with the daily cycle and seasonal cycles, and environmental factors around us, making sure we’re attired properly. It’s also choosing foods from nature – and from the nature around us specifically – so eating local; caring for our precious digestive fire, that precious spark of life, by choosing foods that are from nature, that are digestible, and taking those foods cooked and warm. There’s much more on this topic in the episode just before this one, about how important it is to choose cooked and warm foods and drinks – and what a difference it makes to gut health, cognitive health, sleep, depression, anxiety and a whole host of other presentations. 

In practice, It’s also about allowing the free flow of emotions – and this doesn’t mean spraying our emotions out on people, but rather it’s about acknowledging that they’re there and allowing them to move through our body, whether it’s somatically or onto paper. It’s also about beginning to befriend those perhaps neglected, suppressed or hidden parts of ourselves – looking at what’s behind our various bindings, addictions or limiting beliefs, and then integrating and embracing those.

(23:54) In this way, we’re bringing together that Yin and Yang of self, that wholeness of self, bringing our shadows in, embracing them as well, so that we’re not at war with ourselves within. And further, on the topic of energy, cultivating health is also about being meticulous and discerning with our own energy within: looking at that whole energy or Qi circuitry and consideringL are we in integrity with what we think? what we say? what we believe? what we feel? what we do? Because wherever we’re not in alignment, it takes energy to hold that misalignment or that mismatch: we’re using up energy to hold that untruth.

But instead, if we’re in alignment with everything that we think, feel, say and do, then everything’s in harmony. It’s like the whole orchestra of our being is in tune, and that amplifies our life force – our Qi, everything flows freely, whereas if there are snags and kinks and hidden bits, then that drains our energy.

So, for example if we tell someone that we’d love to do something but actually we really don’t, then that drains our energy, because we have to hold that tension, that disconnect and we force ourselves to do something that doesn’t feel good. Again, we’re denying our own inner wisdom and that is a betrayal. It’s actually a double whammy, because it’s a betrayal of our own inner wisdom and then we’re also forcing ourselves to feel drained by being in a situation that’s not in alignment. And so, coming into ever greater integrity, refinement, fullness of self, and coherence of self, is such a vital part of becoming more and ourselves, so that we can hold our centre no matter what goes on around us.

Another external way that we practically cultivate our health is making sure that we’re dressing appropriately. This means not overdressing when it’s hot and also making sure we’re protecting from cold and wind – especially Wind, as the spearhead of a thousand diseases. As we said, it opens the door for all the other pathogens. So, protecting our beautiful meridians with scarves and keeping our feet warm.

This one’s also really important for women who have painful periods, or even people with back and hip pain – because the meridians that traverse the reproductive organs and also the back, hip, leg, knee are all connected – they come up from the feet, And so. if that meridian is cold and contracted at the very root, then Qi is impeded and energy doesn’t flow as freely. This is why getting our feet in a foot bath, making sure we wear socks and slippers is also a really important aspect of preventative health, and cultivating health. 

(26:51) And finally, externally we’re also about moderating extremes, and always looking for that middle path as well. This means protecting from extreme weather, protecting from wind, avoiding air con (that’s such a big no-no!), and not sitting around in damp clothes for example. And as I mentioned before, no ice baths or draughts or any of these externally disruptive factors. So, to illustrate this view a little bit further let’s take a look at what being out of balance can look like, and how this can explain why we get sick.

For example, if we are eating foods that don’t digest, or we’re not nourishing our digestive fire – so let’s say we’re eating lots of smoothies and cold drinks, slushies, raw food – or maybe we’re multitasking or skipping meals, then that precious digestive fire becomes really weak. And if we’re not cultivating it over time, if we’re not caring for it, then it starts to die down and this can lead to Cold and Damp internally, because that food is not being digested efficiently. This means that we end up with undigested food, which then festers and ferments into Dampness – which is somewhat equivalent to inflammation. This in turn can lead to chronic inflammation, body-wide inflammation, things like sore joints, arthritis; it can lead to congestion, cysts, bumps and lumps – all sorts of presentations.

The other thing also that can happen if we have not tended to our precious digestive fire, is that then our digestive system can become easily overwhelmed when we travel. For example we might easily get travel bugs or”Bali belly”, “Delhi belly”, whatever you want to call it, and also we might succumb to gastro. Whereas someone who has tended to their Spleen – their Earth element, their digestive fire – is going to be more robust, and more resilient to those external energies of Cold and Damp, and their digestive fire will be able to withstand that. They might feel maybe mildly unwell, or maybe have a reduced appetite, but they’re not going to have such a violent response necessarily. Therefore, it’s really important preventative health care to look after that Spleen, that digestive fire. 

Another example is If we consider perhaps what suppressed emotions, or packed-away trauma, unacknowledged trauma or rejected parts of self, can do to our Qi mechanics. What they can contribute to is what we call Qi Stagnation. This is where the Qi is not moving freely through the body, and what we can notice here – on a very minor level – is sighing, or someone who’s huffing and puffing a lot, or maybe shallow breathing because they’re armouring withi; because a deep breath would actually bring them into contact with those feelings they don’t want to acknowledge. So we might have shallow breathing, and we might have maybe depression. We can also have irritability, mood swings, anger outbursts. And because we’re not breathing as deeply and completely, and we’re not pumping that Qi, we might then get impeded blood circulation, and painful periods, things like PMS or PMDD. All pain is related to a lack of flow, and these symptom are all related to the Qi not moving freely.

Yet another example is what can happen if we’re not living in balance from a Yin and Yang perspective: if we’re maybe going too hard, running in Yang mode and running down our life force energy – our spark of life, our Qi. If we’re doing that for a prolonged period of time, then we can start to deplete our Yang. And healthy Yang lives in the lower abdomen – between the kidneys – and it’s likened to our adrenal energy, our life force, and our very essence. It’s meant to be consolidated and anchored deep in the lower body.But what happens when we keep running on empty – and keep running on adrenal hormones, on stress hormones – is that the Yang gets more and more depleted. And rather than being anchored deep within the body, where it can warm us and mobilise us from within, that Yang starts to rise and float away to the surface. 

We call this “Floating Yang” – and guess what can happen here? Hot flushes. This is why hot flushes are so common at that time that is called the perimenopausal time, because this represents a time in a woman’s life where she has probably been running on empty a little bit. Maybe she’s been multitasking for decades, looking after family and work, looking after others at the expense of self. And her Yang can take a little bit of a beating. Perimenopause is a time to double down on nourishing Yang, especially because if that Yang floats up, it makes us feel hot. And it can be tempting then to throw cold into the system, but actually this only exacerbates the issue, because it dampens that poor little Yang even more and pushes what’s left of it even more to the surface.

Other ways that we can experience Floating Yang are things like anxiety, restlessness; like twitching, not being able to sit still; it can be insomnia, trouble falling asleep, racing thoughts, ADHD – all of these are symptoms of that Yang not being grounded, or not being steady and held deep in the body.

It’s very important to know that the body will never call for cold (the weak Yang just gives the illusion of needing cold). The body always needs more Yang – you can’t have too much life. So, as tempting as it might be to go jump in an ice bath, what we actually need to do in hot flushes (or other symptom of Floating Yang) is to look at ways of anchoring that Yang.

One simple way that we do that is with hot foot baths, because they are hot, and they’re at the opposite end (the feet) of the meridian or channel to where the Yang floats away (the head). And they bring that Yang down, while also boosting it a little bit as well. I like to add Epsom Salts to my hot foot baths, and I love doing them before bed – they can be really deeply grounding. And in Chinese Medicine, minerals and salts are deeply anchoring and grounding as well, so they can help to anchor that Yang deep in the body where it needs to be.

Another example also is that, if Yang is depleted, then we are not full of it from within – this means that we can easily be affected by Cold externally. Because if our whole being is full of Yang and/or Qi, then normally that Cold Wind will only affect the outer part of the body, and we can kick it out. So a healthy person will be able to kick it out with a sneeze – that’s often why we sneeze in cold environments, because we’re clearing the Cold from the exterior.

But – if we don’t have enough Yang to keep us full of it, and to protect us from external Cold and Damp, then that Cold can go deep within, and we can end up with Cold deep within the body, like deep Cold in the lungs, for example. We might see this in cases of chronic chest infections or recurring pneumonia, for example. And then once again, we’re looking to warm and nourish.

And finally, another example that we can experience when we’re not living in harmony externally – if we’re disconnected from nature, from the web of life that we are forever woven into – is maybe a lack of circadian rhythm. Maybe our sleep-wake cycle is out of whack, because we’re existing in artificial lighting, and we’re not getting those cues from Mama Nature, from the sun first thing in the morning. It’s so vital to get sunlight before phone light, or artificial light, in your eyeballs. It sends a lot of important signals.

And this can also be behind things like seasonal affective disorder (SADS) – a lack of sunshine, which is leading to mood changes. This is also why practices like earthing are so vitally important. There are so many studies now that show just how powerful earthing, or grounding (getting our feet or body on the ground) is: it connects us to nature’s rhythms. It has beautiful anti-inflammatory effects, as well as other regulating effects on hormones and the nervous system: it brings us into alignment with the world around us.

Now on that topic of connection with nature, and the living web of life around us, there are some beautiful quotes from the Huang Di Nei Jing, again. (9:59) And one is this:

“the Qi of the body flows in accordance with the changes of Heaven and Earth”.

We are always connected to the world around us, to the cosmos above and to the earth beneath our feet.

And the other beautiful quote is the reminder:

“every individual’s life is intimately connected with nature. How people accommodate and adapt to the seasons, and the laws of nature. will determine how well they draw from the origin or the source of their life”

This refers to the practices and foundations for preventative health and for radiant wellness that I have shared here. And I sometimes feel like a broken record on repeat, because when people ask me “what to do for symptom X”, the answer is very often the same. This is because whilst these dis-ease presentations, or symptoms or sicknesses, are very diverse, it’s like they are the branches of one tree, where the root or the trunk is the same. They might look different or present differently, but they all come from the same root cause. 

When we look after that inner and outer harmony, the balance of our Yin and Yang, making sure our Qi is resourced, that we’re nourishing our spark of life, and that everything is flowing – then everything else stems from there. And that is why, when I look at all of these modern disease names in modern medicine, I actually see all the common underlying threads that they share.

So for example, is it ADHD or is it Floating Yang? Or is it hot flushes or is it Floating Yang? Is it painful periods or is it Qi stagnation from unexpressed rage or frustration – which, I mean, rage or anger is such a healthy response to a lot of what’s going on in the modern world. or a lot of what we force our body-mind-souls into? Is it gastro or is it just that the Stomach and Spleen have not been tended to for decades, and now they can’t withstand external input as robustly as someone else? Is it asthma, or is it just a backlog of Damp and Cold within the body?

This is what I love about this Chinese Medicine perspective on health – it reminds us that we have the power. As our ancient text says, when our inner environment is resourced – when we tend to that – then robust health stems from there. I love this perspective because it reminds us just how powerful we are, and just how much we can do each and every day – with every thought, every mouthful, every drink that we choose. Maybe we can add in some beautiful herbs in a tea.

Each time we choose to speak, or think, or move with integrity; each time we honour our own impulses; each time we connect with Mama Nature as well – all of these things are adding to the piggy bank, the great reserves of energy within us.

Now, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll notice I’ve had an outfit change, and that’s because I needed to add this little extra bit to this episode – and that is that I’m going to do a part two in our upcoming episode (on the next full moon after this one). And we are going to talk about what happens when we DO manifest symptoms of disease -we’re going to translate what the body is doing.

For example, if we’re having a chest infection and we’ve got phlegm coming out of our lungs or out of our nose, if we’re having a sinus infection, I’m going to share the Chinese Medicine perspective on what’s going on there. If we’re having a fever, or for example, if we’ve got what presents as gastro, we’ll explain what’s going on there

I’ll also share the Eight Strategies, or therapeutic methods, the Ba Fa of Chinese Herbal Medicine – ways of eliminating imbalance from the body.

So – I hope this has been interesting, helpful, enlightening. Please feel free to share this with anyone else who you think might benefit from it. 

If you’d like more support and guidance in implementing a lot of these foundational rituals and health habits into your life, I have created the Radiant Energy Reset, which is available on demand and is self-paced. It’s got a whole lot of beautiful video modules and a gorgeous guidebook and a journal. and a guided pathway to help you integrate these beautiful practices into your everyday. I also show you how to understand what your body is calling for, and share simple ways that you can bring balance to each and every day, through the foods that you choose, the herbs that you might choose, the movement you choose. We’ve got some beautiful breathwork and Qi Gong – energy work, meditation, acupressure points in there as well, as well as ways to look after our psycho-emotional health. It is a total foundation for mind, body and soul health, at drmaz.earth. (15:14) 

I also have a mini-offering: cultivating the coherence and integrity of our energy, our Qi, our life force energy. 

You can also find me on socials -drmaz_qi on Insta and YouTube, and drmaz.qi on Facebook. I’m always posting more of this beautiful wisdom from Chinese Medicine on there. I hope that what we’ve shared today brings you some more lightness, ease and liberation as well! Wishing you the very best of health and looking forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Imagine if simply choosing warm food and drink could help:

• depression

All these benefits, without biohacking gadgets, expensive supplements and exotic superfoods!

This powerful tweak is something that we all can access today – and something that Chinese Medicine has been talking about for several millennia. So simple, and so empowering: each mouthful can move us towards ever-greater health.

A new study from the British Journal of Nutrition confirms what Chinese Medicine has known for well over 5,000 years.

In this episode, we learn why this works, and how you can apply it for yourself.

And if you’d like me to show you how to utilise the power of Chinese Medicine is other daily habits and tweaks, I have created the Radiant Energy Reset for you.

Cold and hot consumption and health outcomes among US Asian and White populations

Drinking water temperature affects cognitive function and progression of Alzheimer’s disease in a mouse model

Effect of cold stress on ovarian & uterine microcirculation in rats and the role of endothelin system

Visceral hypersensitivity following cold water intake in subjects with irritable bowel syndrome

Hot Water Swallows Improve Symptoms and Accelerate Esophageal Clearance in Esophageal Motility Disorders

The Pressor Response to the Drinking of Cold Water and Cold Carbonated Water in Healthy Younger and Older Adults

Hypermobility (including hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, hEDS) is an area which is gaining more acknowledgement, but the solutions within the conventional space are a little thin on the ground.

Hypermobility can mean a whole lot more than being double-jointed and having a selection of party tricks at your disposal 🤣 Because it involves the connective tissue – which is more stretchy in hypermobile individuals – it is not only joints that are affected, but also anywhere that we have connective tissue. Which is… our whole body!

This means that many systems can be impacted – digestive, nervous, cardiovascular and fluid metabolism – and that hypermobility can masquerade as other “symptoms” or “conditions”, like irritable bowel, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. If these are treated symptomatically, rather than being addressed at the root, we are only ever “managing” the situation, but not resolving or healing it.

But there is a simpler solution.

Every aspect of how hypermobility presents is ruled by the Spleen: upright posture, firm limbs, abundant energy, clear thinking, feeling grounded. Looking after the Spleen can take care of all of these manifestations of hypermobility.

Hypermobility often also presents with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). MCAS includes excessive immune cell response, leading to itching, hives, flushing, mood changes. POTS describes changes with posture, such as dizziness, palpitations, elevated heartbeat, nausea and even bladder changes. And, through a Chinese Medicine lens, both MCAS and POTS can involve the Spleen, as well as the Liver (MCAS) and Heart / Kidney / Yang deficiency (POTS).

As a “floppy” person myself, this is a topic close to my heart, because nourishing my own being with the Spleen-led approach has resolved diagnoses of:

• fibromyalgia

…as well as intense panic attacks.

Many “diseases”, one solution.

So ultimately, this episode is about much more than hypermobility – it’s also about bringing balance to all of the “symptoms” I’ve already mentioned here (and more!). And it is also why every single one of us can benefit from giving our Spleen extra love and care.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Episode 5: Beat the Bloat – Chinese Medicine digestion secrets!

Episode 14: Late Summer Diet & Lifestyle Tips

Episode 23: What is DNS, and how can it revolutionise your strength & movement for more enjoyment of life?!

Episode 29: What is the Meridian Clock, and how can we align with nature’s cycles?

Episode 42: Fasting – helpful or harmful? A Chinese Medicine perspective

What if perimenopause – our Second Spring – is not something to be suppressed, vilified or medicated away??

What if it is a portal into a more essential, more exquisitely-aligned version of ourselves?
An invitation to re-examine how we do life, and to witness and heal parts of ourselves?
An initiation into our wisdom and power?

In Chinese Medicine, perimenopause is considered the “Second Spring”. A second puberty, a second metamorphosis. When we reflect on what a wild ride that first puberty was, we can begin to see the grace, space and compassion that we can offer ourselves in this transition.

Patients have shared with me that they have felt gaslit by the mainstream system, where their various concerns were instantly dismissed as “just perimenopause”, and HRT was offered as the only solution. But it is no coincidence that symptoms like fatigue, low moods, irritability, low libido, poor sleep and weight gain can show up at this time of our life. These symptoms can also be a reflection of decades of caring for others at the cost of ourselves: of self-abandonment, people-pleasing, over-giving and under-receiving.

In our medicine, we see “symptoms” as wise messages from the body. An insight into what desires to be balanced or healed. And I see common underlying patterns in women at this phase of life, which also explain the common “symptoms” of perimenopause.

In this episode, I share what those patterns are, and simple ways that we can support ourselves to move most easefully through this powerful portal!

For more info on the courses I mention in this episode, go to “OFFERINGS, or click here.

More on Hormone Health

Episode 2: Happy hormones naturally, for general health, easier periods and optimising fertility (Part 1 of 2)

Episode 3: Happy hormones for all (not “just for the ladies!”), and the role of inflammation (Part 2 of 2)

Hi everyone, welcome to the Balanced Natural Health podcast, where we share insights from the ancient science and timeless wisdom of Chinese medicine. Information from the old natural ways of healing can support us in leading more beautiful, more vibrant and more vital lives today. In this podcast, I share simple, natural and accessible tips that you can incorporate into your everyday life for more vibrant health and wellness. I’m so glad you’re here.

Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 44. In today’s episode, I would like to dive into something which feels particularly relevant to me personally, due to my age and demographic, I’m now 47 years old. And also in response to what I’m seeing a lot of on social media, in mainstream, in the world around me, and that is the perception of menopause as a pathology to be medicated. And the perception of perimenopause as the cause of all ills, and also the attribution of all of the different symptoms or vital body messages that women might be experiencing at this time, the attribution of these always to, oh, it’s just hormones and you need HRT.

Whereas, as you probably know, if you’ve been listening to me for a while, I have long retired from the position of doing battle with my body. And I now see all symptoms as vital messages from the body, mind and soul as to what my system wants me to know and what is coming up for me for integration and harmonizing at that point in time. And so in today’s episode, I would like to talk about some of these, what I see as misconceptions about perimenopause and menopause. And I would like to dispel some myths. And I would also like to share a more empowering perspective on this powerful transition – traditionally called the Second Spring – and how I personally am choosing to navigate it and step through it.

In Chinese medicine, perimenopause and the whole process of moving through menopause is viewed as the second spring. So it’s viewed as a second puberty because we are literally in the process of metamorphosing ourselves into a different version of ourselves.

We are moving from a period of our life where we are creative in the material realm, where we can create life, we can create humans, whole new human body, which is such a miracle. And we are moving into a stage of life where we create energetic gifts to the world at this time. So all of our resources, all the resources that were formerly distributed to the womb, now start to move towards the heart, which houses the Shen and our consciousness.

And together, that portal of womb and heart can bring forth and birth so many powerful energies and ideas and so much wisdom into the world. In so many cultures and over eons of time, the crone or the wise grandmother was viewed as an archetype who had so much wisdom to impart. It was a really revered and respected archetype.

And yet in our current iteration of society, we are being continually broadcast to that this is a burden, it’s a inconvenience, it’s the end of our relevance, that it’s all downhill from here, that we will put on weight, that we will have brain fog, that we will be fatigued, that we’ll have vaginal dryness, that we’ll lose our libido and our moods, and that we’ll go crazy and lash out those around us and a whole other litany of ills. And it doesn’t have to be that way. I do think that there is a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy when we keep being broadcast this message from so many angles, that it is something to be feared.

And that adds another dimension to this process of transition because stress can very much influence how we move through this really powerful period of our lives. So while I always honour and celebrate the choice of women to take HRT, I think it’s amazing that people have choices to do what they want to with their body and their health. I also think that there are other ways to move through this transition and it’s definitely not the only way to move through it.

I don’t think that mama nature makes any mistakes. And we, when we look at the world around us, there are seasons and cycles to everything and our bodies, minds and souls are no different. So while it might be touted in the mainstream that it’s protective to the body, to your bones, to your cardiovascular system, to keep pumping your body full of these external hormones, which your body is no longer producing, I really question what the long-term effects of that are.

Because as I said, mama nature doesn’t make mistakes. So if we’re meant to sustain this level of circulating hormones and hormone production, our body would be producing it, right? And when we look into the literature around the potential side effects of supplementation, external supplementation like this, we can see that there definitely are risks. So this is a conversation for another time.

In this podcast, I just want to share a different perspective on how we might be able to view perimenopause and second spring and this second puberty. And I love this idea of this transition, this perimenopausal transition as a second puberty, because when we think about what a wild transition our first puberty was, then it gives us an inkling of how much grace and spaciousness and tenderness, compassion, patience, we might want to give ourselves as we move through this second transition. Like think how wild the ride was with fluctuating hormones back in our teens when we were going through that transition and all the different emotional landscapes that came up and how we responded to different things, how we were finding our own power and expression into the world.

And this period is no different. I think it’s a really exciting invitation to look at how we’ve been living, what kind of beliefs and assumptions we’ve had about ourselves, what kind of life habits we’ve fallen into and how we might want to live our lives going forward. And one symptom that is a symptom that is often talked about with regards to perimenopause is the mood swings.

And this is often attributed to the fluctuations of specifically estrogen, but also progesterone because estrogen is our buffering hormone. It is soft and juicy making, and it is what allows us to put up with shit basically, or put up with things that are maybe not in alignment with our highest good. It allows us to put up with self-sacrificing situations or enmeshment.

And what I have found as my estrogen has dropped throughout this transition is that I have had to look at where I have been people pleasing, where I have been giving away my power. And also having less estrogen has made me less inclined to self-abandon and sacrifice my energy to compromise my boundaries. And just to say no to things that are leaking my energy or things that are no longer serving me.

So whether that’s activities or relationships or certain types of emotional bonding, for example like bonding over drama, it’s just not available for that anymore because it’s such an energy drain. So to me this Second Spring has been a gift. To me having this drop in estrogen has shown me where I’ve been compromising my own energy, where there’s been leaks.

If I was supplementing with that hormone then perhaps I wouldn’t have had that clear vision of seeing where I’ve been self-abandoning and what I can do to live my life differently and what I can do to call back that energy to myself.

I also think that these mood swings that are talked about or irritability and anger can be a sign of where our boundaries have been transgressed and whether now or in the past. And they offer an opportunity for witnessing, for feeling and ultimately for healing those experiences whether now or in the past.

So when we look at mama nature and expressions of what seems like anger say in the animal kingdom, it’s only happening where the animal feels threatened or encroached upon or like their personal safety or boundaries are encroached upon. So us humans are no different and think about as women in this society, I know I can certainly attest to this and I wonder if many of you can relate as well, but how many times have we just swallowed back our words or just put up with poor behaviour, say sexualising us or inappropriate comments. It’s like oh well he didn’t really mean anything by it or maybe just ingrained patriarchy or judgment of women that I’ve even noticed within myself from my very repressive Polish religious upbringing.

It’s like I found some things in deep dark corners there, so things that were unexamined because we didn’t have the capacity perhaps or the space or we weren’t resourced enough to have a look at those until now. So I think sometimes these life will present us with opportunities to heal those things that haven’t yet been healed. So we might feel flashes of sacred rage about how the divine feminine or how the feminine expression has been mistreated, how we’ve experienced that or how we’ve seen that in the world around us or we might feel grief about self-abandonment, about places maybe where we didn’t stand up for ourselves or about where we judged our own bodies harshly.

So all of these feelings might move through our bodies and sometimes even with the anger we might get things like hot flushes, but I see this as energy being metabolised and processed. Emotions are energy in motion, so being able to sit with these feelings and sensations and witness what they might be telling us can be a way to integrate them back into our system. And every woman’s experience of this will be different because we have all walked different paths, different journeys, we’ve had different responses and different life experiences.

Some might not experience the rage or the irritability or the hot flushes at all or someone else might feel more grief or dissociation or low moods or low libido. So everyone’s experience is different and I think that the overarching takeaway of what I’m talking about here is that it’s an opportunity to get to know ourselves on a deeper level, to sit with the feelings, to be like a best friend to ourselves and listen to what our body, mind and soul is telling us. And I have a different perspective on many of the messages of perimenopause.

Symptoms, and I’m using inverted commas here, like for example fatigue, brain fog, low energy, low libido, irritability, hot flushes, poor sleep, insomnia, dissatisfaction with life, weight gain, all of these things are a complex that are lumped under the umbrella of perimenopause and the menopausal transition. I have a different view that these are symptoms that pop up at a period of life when we have been living a certain way and our body resources are taxed, our spiritual and mental resources are taxed because we have been spreading ourselves too thin. So perhaps rather than laying the blame at the feet of perimenopause, maybe we can look at, as we do in Chinese medicine, at what things might be out of balance that are causing these symptoms. And then we can look at gently supporting the body, mind and soul to recreate balance and to ease our path through this transition of the Second Spring.

What I have seen in clinic and in my own experience, but certainly in clinic, what I’ve seen is that a common thread with many of the messages of perimenopause is that there is low yang, low spleen. So yang deficiency and spleen deficiency, often the liver is backed up or stuck and liver is related to anger and expression and frustration, and there’s often dampness as well.

What we might hear even in the Chinese medicine mainstream is that it is a yin deficiency time that we are deficient in yin and that’s why we are having those hot flushes. But I’ll just go on a quick little sidebar here that is absolutely not what I have seen. And there is another way of looking at it too, because in classical Chinese medicine, we don’t really believe that in this modern world where nutrition is abundant, that there is such a thing as yin deficiency.

It’s not possible. If you have a body, if you have substance to your body, then you are not yin deficient. And in fact, if we were to believe the mainstream, one of the common symptoms associated with perimenopause is weight gain.

So where there is substance, there’s no yin deficiency, but what there is a deficiency of around this time is yang. So we can have substance, we can have fluids, we can have body flesh, but if we don’t have the spark of life, the yang to animate and metabolize and move those fluids and actually make that fluid useful and physiological, healthy to the body, then that fluid and that dampness just stagnates. And we do get weight gain, we do get heaviness, we do get low mood.

It’s not the yin, it’s the yang that needs to be cultivated.

When we look at how in our society, women have lived through the last few decades leading up to perimenopause, we see that there is often, you know, compromised sleep because they’re looking after kids. They’re often having a job and looking after the family as well. There’s, the women are always go, go, go. So they’re always in yang mode, using up that vital force, that spark of life and not having enough time to replenish it because of the demands of life. And when yang is deficient, when yang is low, it can, it isn’t anchored as it needs to be.

When yang is floating and unanchored, we see things like night sweats, insomnia, restless sleep, vivid dreams. These are really common yang deficient presentations. And when we start to nourish the yang by cooked and warm foods, by yang tonifying herbs, by prioritizing rest and time to recharge the yang.

So we’re not just spraying out yang all day. We’re not just being boss babes and just smashing it and going hard. This is also something where heavy exercise or sweating too much, going too hard in the gym can also drain our yang.

And it is really important to nourish our yang as we go through this transition at all stages of life, but especially as we go through this transition of the Second Spring. So our yang is also burnt up by things like – famously – ice baths, as I love to talk about, but also stress.

Stress squeezes our adrenals – that is our kidney yang energy. And when we are running often in a state of fight or flight, so when we’re multitasking, eating lunch at the desk, dealing with things on all fronts, dealing with stress at work at home, then this is draining our yang. And so this perimenopausal portal is an invitation to look at how we can nourish our yang a little bit more, how we can carve out a little bit of time, a little bit more time for ourselves to nourish our yang, to just rest and replenish.

So it might even be bookending your day with five minutes of deep belly breathing. So I’ve talked about this before on my socials, but when we breathe and breathe deeply into the belly, into the whole abdomen, allowing the breath to just flow in, allowing our body to be breathed by that cosmic breath. And then we allow a long exhale that’s unhurried, allowing that longer exhale compared to the inhale is replenishing of our yang because it’s a yin type of breath. It’s not using up our yang to maintain. Whereas if we take short, sharp inhales, we’re not allowing sufficient time to exhale. That’s really putting us in that fight or flight, that stress yang mode.

Slow, deep breaths, yin breaths with a longer exhale can be a great way to replenish. We can even lie down while we’re doing this with our hands on our belly or our ribs to feel how we are expanding and releasing. You can pop also a pillow under your knees to support your lumbar spine, which is where the kidneys live. So then they’ll feel nestled and supported as well. So that is one aspect that I see commonly throughout this transition is that of that yang deficiency or kidney yang deficiency. And another one I see is of spleen deficiency.

The spleen is our great nurturer. It’s our organ of nurturing, and it is affected by worry and affected by overgiving and over-caring as well, which is so many mums, right? We’re taking care as women as well of our families, of people at work, of our community. We naturally have that caring, I think, nourishing life impetus within us.

And coupled with estrogen that accompanies that fertile period, I think it can sometimes lead to self-abandonment where we’re not nourishing ourselves as well. So interestingly, in the mainstream, if you listen to it, perimenopause is associated with weight gain around the belly and thighs. Now, this is a pattern that we see with spleen deficiency.

When the spleen is deficient, this is where weight tends to deposit. And if we start to tend more carefully to the spleen at this time, then we don’t have to necessarily see that transition or that change in our bodies. So I have worked with a lot of people who have certainly not experienced that, and I haven’t either, because I have taken this time finally to look at my boundaries and look at where I was over-stretching, over-giving and prioritised caring for myself at this time.

Because that is another invitation of this perimenopausal transition is after decades of caring for others, how can we ourselves at this time? What do we need? How can we tune more and more deeply into the desires and whispers of our body, mind and soul and do what feeds ourselves and our souls at this time? So if we’re looking after our spleen yang and our kidney yang at this time, then that definitely supports a smoother transition through perimenopause. So the other two areas that I talked about were liver and damp.

I’ll briefly touch on dampness. That’s often related to presentations like weight gain, brain fog, perhaps like depressed or low mood, low libido, low excitement about life, because damp can be like a heavy blanket or fog that just suppresses the spark of life. It suppresses the yang. It is the opposite to yang because it’s dense fluid. So it’s part and parcel. It’s usually linked to the generalised yang and spleen deficiency. But things that we can do to support both our spleen and metabolising damp at this time are absolutely cooked and warm food and drinks.

Every time you eat or drink something, it’s an opportunity to put warmth and yang inside your body. So when we have drinks that are warmer than our mouth, food that is warmer and well cooked and uses less energy to digest, it boosts our qi, boosts our energy and supports the spleen in doing its work and can stop the backup of dampness. And also at this time, we might want to take particular care with the foods that we do choose. Always leaning towards whole foods, minimally processed. I’ve talked about this a lot on socials, so you can look back through my posts, but avoiding things like seed oils, preservatives. So many grains these days are sprayed with glyphosate, which is Roundup, which has already had many lawsuits awarded against it as a carcinogen.

And unfortunately, unless you’re eating completely organic or regeneratively farmed grains like wheat, corn, soy, they are sprayed with glyphosate. And this is not only a hormone disruptor, but it causes inflammation by interrupting digestion and overburdening our liver as well. So definitely looking at, personally, I’m gluten free.

I see a lot of benefits for patients when they go gluten free because they avoid a lot of those grains that are sprayed with glyphosate and Roundup.

On the nutrition front, I would also add having adequate time to eat.

So it’s not just what we eat, but how we eat. So taking time to eat away from stress, away from other distractions. The spleen also digests the life experiences. So if we’re eating at the desk, then our spleen isn’t really devoting all of its or not able to devote all of its attention to the task at hand.

So how we eat is important and also ensuring that we have protein and fats with our meals as well. So we need that consistent energy. However, I’m not one for micromanaging macros. I’m not one who’s counting my protein at all costs or my fat intake or carbs. I don’t count any of that. I’ve come to a point now where I listen to my body and allow my body to tell me what it needs and take it from there. It changes day to day. So some days I want more protein, other days I want less.

And this has been a journey for me because when I was in my twenties and thirties, I had such a poor relationship with my body that I was willingly starving myself and suppressed all connection to what hunger felt like or even ignoring my cues for what I felt like eating. I was a vegetarian and later raw vegan at the time I was having such cravings for protein, for animal protein, and I was suppressing and ignoring that as well. So again, it’s coming back into alignment with the whispers of our body, mind and soul, because our bodies are always talking to us about what we need and what would best serve us, but it’s an invitation to come into greater alignment with that. And that is something that I am covering in an upcoming course that’s coming out this year about getting into a deeper conversation with yourself, befriending yourself, coming home to you.

And also while we’re talking about the spleen stuff, there’s another course coming on that topic as well. So all of that information is packaged up in one package, guiding you through how to construct your own meals, how you can customise meals to your needs day to day, what kind of foods might boost yang, which ones might be more damp causing, what herbs and spices we can use and so on. And there’s plenty of this also, this information in my old podcasts and on my socials and website as well.

So feel free to have a look through there. Now, the final area that I see commonly out of balance is liver.

Liver is the wood organ. It’s related to the emotion of anger and frustration. So when we think of wood, it likes to spread its wings or spread its branches and leaves and fully express its full potential. And when it is thwarted, then we have anger and frustration or resentment. These can all be emotions related to the liver. And there are emotions that commonly show up in perimenopause, irritability, restlessness as well. And the wood element and liver gallbladder also rules cyclical things – things that come and go. So at this time, the liver is managing fluctuating hormones, our cycles might change in length or duration. So the liver is really dealing with a lot.

And at all stages of life, I suggest keeping our toxin bucket or our toxic load small so that our body can do what it knows how to do, which is heal and rebalance. But especially at this time when we are processing extra hormones, potentially hormone spikes, I think it’s really important to give the liver some love.

We can do this with things like movement. The liver loves to move. Obviously it likes to spread its branches, but also things like because the associated gallbladder channel runs down the lateral aspects of the body. So even things like swinging our arms side to side, so rotating at the waist, sidebands, things that open up that side area of the body can be really wonderful to open up circulation to that area.

I also love leafy greens and the brassica family for supporting the liver. So lots of broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, mustard greens, bitter flavors. These are really important in supporting the liver, supporting its function, supporting bile production as well.

Bile is such a powerful antioxidant. So we need to make sure that that is functioning in our body as well. So looking after the liver in that respect, I find also stream of consciousness journaling can be helpful for supporting the liver because it helps us to offload certain stored or repressed emotions that might be lingering or too many browser tabs that are open in our minds.

So just dumping all of that can free up the liver. And the liver is also charged with coursing energy through the body and energy and emotions are linked. So the more that we can sit with emotions as they come up will also help to free any constrained liver chi or liver energy.

And the other big thing for liver with the toxic load is looking at what we put in and on our bodies. So I go into great detail in this in episodes two and three, but basically if you wouldn’t eat it, then I wouldn’t put it on my body. So that has very much changed what kind of body products I use like toothpaste, deodorant, moisturizer, hand soap, body soap, what we use in the home as well.

Big culprits are synthetic fragrances. So these often pop up in like room sprays and perfumes. That’s another big culprit.

Essential oil perfumes for the win every time and scented candles, car, scenty things, anything scented basically and in detergents and different like laundry liquids and so on. They often have a lot of synthetic fragrances, which are endocrine disruptors, their hormone disruptors. So they’re disrupting us at already potentially a bit of a wild rollercoaster time with our hormones.

And also they overload the liver. So I recently did a post about low tox and no tox beauty products. There’s so many options.

We’re so spoilt for choice these days and it doesn’t have to be all done in one fell swoop. So you can even just choose to replace old products with products that are no tox each time as you go forward. So it doesn’t have to be throwing everything out all at once, although it can be if you want as well.

So definitely looking at the liver and how we can support in that way too. I will also add with liver, you might want to experiment with how it feels if you reduce or eliminate alcohol because the liver is obviously heavily involved in processing this.

And also fructose. So this is the fruit sugar that’s in fruit. In Chinese medicine, we are not big fans of vast amounts of fruit. It’s a seasonal treat at best and fructose is metabolized differently to glucose, which is why in my spleen programs that I devise for patients, I advise sweeteners like rice malt syrup or pure glucose because they are glucose, not fructose. So it metabolizes through the body quite differently.

That’s something we might want to play around with and see if we feel any differently. Personally, I stopped drinking alcohol and I have absolutely noticed a difference with my cycles and also just a few kilos of weight dropped off that I wasn’t even doing anything specific about. I think at the same time also as I stopped the alcohol, I have also been going on a deeper dive in somatically feeling.

So on a body level feeling and releasing a lot of trapped emotions. So that has also allowed my energy to flow more freely and I think it’s metabolized some stuck things that were literally weighing me down. And to support all of these little lifestyle changes and diet changes, habit changes that we can make to support yang, to support spleen, to clear damp and support liver, I would also add the importance of elimination.

I noticed at this time, sometimes elimination bowel movements can get a bit sluggish for some women and this is where the belly breathing can be really powerful. So in Chinese medicine, the lung and large intestine are linked as the metal element. So when we breathe deep belly breaths, when we breathe into the whole abdomen and we gently inquire about tight areas and we allow the breath to expand and release those tight areas, then we’re also supporting peristalsis and digestion.

We’re supporting the function of the intestines. Just think like if you put your hands on your belly right now and take a deep breath right down, we’re actually massaging the intestines. So many patients find that just with some deep breathing or some really simple qigong movements that support large intestine and lung or that metal element, that that’s enough just to get their bowels moving regularly.

It’s important that we’re eliminating regularly so that those toxins can get eliminated from the body so our liver isn’t backed up and pissed off. And I would also add the importance of joy and cultivating play and lightness and prioritizing those things that make us feel good, that give us pleasure, that light our hearts up.

I’ve spoken before about how in Chinese medicine, the heart and womb are intimately linked They’re linked under the fire element. And interestingly, just a little sidebar, they’re linked to the fire element, which is ruled by the bitter flavor. And did you know that both the womb and the heart have bitter flavor receptors in them? It’s pretty wild, isn’t it? So when we cultivate joy, we are feeding the fire element, we’re feeding the heart, we’re nourishing it.

And this can be such a wonderful remedy for low libido, low moods, fatigue, because if there’s nothing pleasurable or fun or joyful to focus on, then of course we’re going to feel less excited about life. So this can be as simple as a daily gratitude practice and picking, say, five things every day that you’re grateful for, but not just listing them, also somatically feeling them. So somatically just means in the body, actually cultivating the feeling of gratitude while you’re also thinking about those things.

It might be a warm and fuzzy, glowing feeling in the chest or a softness in the body. So the more we can practice that, the more the body becomes accustomed to feeling that way. And it doesn’t have to be major things.

It can be simple things that we’re grateful for, like the fact that we have fresh air coming into our lungs or that there’s sunshine outside, or we can reflect on, say, a beautiful interaction we had that day or the food on our plates. There’s so much to be grateful for in each moment. And we can also cultivate this in thinking about a favourite memory or someone that we love dearly and cultivating that love and that beautiful feeling of joy in our hearts.

I hope this has been interesting, maybe thought-provoking, maybe a different perspective on how we can view this time, which I think is an exciting and empowering portal. I’m excited for it, and I’m excited for who I’m becoming and who we all get to be on the other side. And I will add to that, even if you’ve already moved through menopause or you’ve had a hysterectomy, or maybe you’ve had medically-induced menopause of whatever kind, that it’s still an invitation for you now, if it resonates, to incorporate perhaps some of these tweaks into your life, because this second spring transition isn’t only a material one concerning our physical reproductive organs, it’s a whole energetic metamorphosis. We are moving from creating on the material plane to creating on the energetic plane. We are stepping into our wisdom era. It’s really, really exciting.

So it’s never too late, we can incorporate some of these observances and things to get curious about at any stage of life, even if we’re younger than the perimenopausal transition. It’s never too early to come home to ourselves and develop that relationship with ourselves. And I hope that this has shone a different light on this transition where perimenopause is not the scapegoat for everything that is going on in a woman’s life.

I’ve had so many patients share with me their stories of gaslighting within the mainstream system, where they’ve gone for help with things that have popped up around this time, and it’s all been lumped under the hormone umbrella, and oh well, just have to take HRT or get over it, rather than a deepening and a curiosity into that connection to self. So that is available to all of us. We can all come out of this transition more connected, more empowered, more ourselves than we were coming into it.

So I would love to hear your thoughts if you have any on this, if you have any questions, please let me know over on socials, and please share this message with anyone who you feel might benefit from this perspective, or who might feel empowered or unburdened by a different perspective on this beautiful portal that we are walking through. It’s something that I feel so passionate about changing the narrative on, or at least offering a different voice, because I feel like as women, we are so often, so many of our natural processes that mama nature has wisely created within us are pathologized. So childbirth and periods are pathologized and suppressed and medicalized, and menopause is no different.

I think it’s actually on a bigger scale, it’s an important way of reclaiming our feminine power, and stepping into that feminine power as well.

So please share, and thank you so much for joining me, I look forward to seeing you next time.

Have you heard of the Three Treasures, and how they relate to feeling great, aging vibrantly, manifesting your destiny and living your soul purpose?

Together with our Qi, our Jing (Essence) and our Shen (Spirit) make up the Three Treasures – treasures, because they are the precious substances that form the foundation for our health and longevity.

Jing can be translated variously as our DNA, our genetic endowment, our constitution.

Qi is the total of all of our energetic and metabolic processes that govern daily function, like digestion, respiration, circulation, cellular function, tissue structure and integrity (more in episode 41).

Shen is our spirit, our presence, our consciousness – the spark of life in our eyes.

Jing-Qi-Shen are interrelated and dependent upon each other. When they are in coherence and harmony, we manifest our destiny in this lifetime – our soul purpose. We feel lighter, clearer and more vibrant – and are well resourced for life’s adventures.

Many of our Chinese Medicine health cultivation practices centre around preserving and refining the Three Treasures. In this episode, Dr. Maz shares simple practices that you can incorporate into your everyday to boost your Qi, protect your Essence and help your Spirit shine bright!

The simple Qi Gong move, practised slowly, with intent and slow breathing, can be a powerful way to connect the energies of Heaven and Earth. Bonus points if you do it barefoot outside!

In Chinese Medicine, we are adherents of “The Middle Way” or “The Middle Path” – a path of moderation. Rather than opting for extreme or dramatic health practices, we opt for a gentle, daily nourishing of Life. Each moment is an opportunity to nurture health. Our amazing bodies already know how to heal, how to detox, how to repair – sometimes, we just need to get out of the way.

When I was asked my thoughts on fasting, the answer, while tending to alignment with The Middle Way, had some nuances that I share with you in this episode.

We touch on:

• the view of our ancient medical texts on fasting (scroll down for a quote)

• eating close to nature and the seasons vs. processed foods, preservatives, seed oils and, frankly, non-foods that pop up in the modern “diet”

• intermittent fasting, the Chinese Medicine Organ / Meridian Clock and circadian rhythms

• the “hollow” organs – what even are they, their relationship to health (and consciousness)

• how fasting can cause our systems to dip into our Jing – the vital “Essence” that we come into this world with, and that nourishes us throughout our lifespan.

Huang Di Nei Jing (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine), Chapter 18: Pulse Analysis; circa 200CE