Health as Balance

Understanding the traditional Chinese medicine principles of yin and yang has helped me learn the importance of balance in establishing good health. They express the idea of opposing forces that need to be balanced for life and health. However, the best introduction I had to this principle didn’t come from studying Chinese medicine. Rather, it came from reading about the Western concept of polarity in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, Compensation. In it he describes the duality of polarity:

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals [...]

Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

The Chinese use the words yin and yang to describe this polarity in the universe. Yang is the active, contracting, masculine force, and yin is the receptive, expanding, feminine force.

So assimilation, building, nourishing, and supporting structure are yin principles, while elimination, cleansing, detoxifying, and supporting function are yang principles. Health is maintained by the balance of these forces. For example, rest and sleep (yin) must be balanced by activity and exercise (yang). Assimilation or building up the body (yin) is balanced by elimination and detoxification (yang). Heat, metabolism, and oxidation (yang) are kept in balance by cooling, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory processes (yin). Dryness and tension (yang) are balanced by moisture and relaxation (yin).

Extremes in any direction throw the body out of balance. Maintaining health is not a rigorous effort in any direction, but rather a continuous, thoughtful balancing act.

Cleansing and Building

When I first started learning about herbs and natural healing, the focus was almost entirely on cleansing and detoxifying therapies. The reason for this became clear to me when Subhiti, the herbalist who introduced Nature's Sunshine Chinese product line, pointed out that Americans, for the most part, were overfed and exposed to countless environmental toxins. So, it would only be natural to balance this excess with cleansing to restore balance and health.

He also pointed out that the opposite was true in China, where historically many Chinese people had often struggled to get enough to eat. Chinese herbalism therefore had a much richer tradition of using combinations of tonic herbs that fortified or built up a weakened system.

I had an opportunity to observe the need for building up versus cleansing when the midwife who had helped birth my children, Joan Patton, asked me to come help out a friend of hers.

She had been ill and had been told that she needed to work on detoxifying. So she had gone on what Utah herbalists called a mild food diet. She had restricted her diet to fruits and vegetables and was taking herbs to cleanse her system.

At first she felt better, but then began to feel worse. She was incorrectly told it was a “healing crisis” and to stick with it.

When I went to take a look at her, I immediately observed that she was extremely thin and pale. She was also very low in energy. So, I told her, “You don’t need to cleanse; you’ve got nothing left to get rid of. You need to build!”

I had learned about the hiatal hernia from Jack Ritchason, and determined she had that problem, which meant she had a difficult time breaking down protein. I suggested she start making chicken soup with real stock and find other ways to start adding protein and fats back into her diet. I showed her how to work on her hiatal hernia and suggested she start taking Food Enzymes to help her digest her food.

Joan called me a couple of weeks later and told me she had followed my advice and was feeling much better.

Dietary and Lifestyle Extremes

I have seen the lack of understanding the importance of balance in health many times since and discussed it with other natural health practitioners like Ellen Tart Jensen. For example, we’ve observed that people may adopt a vegan diet and feel better on it for a year or two and then start to develop certain imbalances. A vegan diet is very much like the mild food diet I learned from herbalists like LaDean Griffin and John Christopher. It’s a cleansing diet and can help a person who has been living on junk food restore balance to their body, but taken too long, it can drive the system out of balance in another direction.

These days, I see many people going in the complete opposite direction. Some people have found that a carnivore diet, one that focuses on animal protein, helps them lose weight, increase their energy, and feel better overall, but staying on such a restricted diet is likely to throw their system out of balance if continued for too long.

I suggest you keep these words of Emerson in mind when holding to a diet: “Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life.”

Moderation is the key to balance. More is not necessarily better.

This is the second article I’m writing on concepts I’ve learned from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The first one was on qi and energy. The next article will go deeper into using the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang to help us find balance.

If you're interested in learning more about traditional Chinese medicine, take look at my course on Traditional Chinese Medicine for Western Herbalists.