In this episode we peel back the layers of Eastern wisdom with our esteemed guest, Josh Summers. Seasoned Yin teachers and novice practitioners alike will benefit from Josh's perspective in this fascinating discussion.
Josh generously shares his insights on how Yin Yoga, when melded with TCM, can prepare the mind and body for deeper meditation. But we also recognize the challenges teachers face when trying to assimilate and impart this knowledge. Josh gives some great advice for teachers who wish to honor this philosophy with authenticity while staying within their scope of practice.
In the final stretch of our conversation, we delve into the potent biopsychosocial model of pain in Chinese Medicine. We discuss how it addresses physical pain, often rooted in emotional trauma, and honors both physical and inner subjective experiences. We also illuminate how the practice of Yin Yoga can enhance the function of our integrated systems, improve circulation, reduce stress, and foster feelings of peace and joy. Lastly, but certainly not least, we examine the power of storytelling in Yin Yoga. Join us for this engaging conversation with Josh Summers, as we explore Yin Yoga and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Transformational Self Care
A Late Winter Wellness Retreat in the Dominican Republic
March 3-10, 2023
Join me for a 7 day Caribbean wellness retreat. Each day we will focus on a pillar of self care. By the end of the week you will have a group of new friends, some unforgettable memories and a personal self care strategy to enhance your life back at home. Learn More
Let's connect! Follow me on:
Facebook
Instagram
TicToc
YouTube
Free Resources:
Master the Yin Yoga Pose Repertoire: 7 Day Email Course
Introduction to Pain Care Yoga
Practice Gallery Workbook - 6 go to sequences with pictorial instructions
In this episode we peel back the layers of Eastern wisdom with our esteemed guest, Josh Summers. Seasoned Yin teachers and novice practitioners alike will benefit from Josh's perspective in this fascinating discussion.
Josh generously shares his insights on how Yin Yoga, when melded with TCM, can prepare the mind and body for deeper meditation. But we also recognize the challenges teachers face when trying to assimilate and impart this knowledge. Josh gives some great advice for teachers who wish to honor this philosophy with authenticity while staying within their scope of practice.
In the final stretch of our conversation, we delve into the potent biopsychosocial model of pain in Chinese Medicine. We discuss how it addresses physical pain, often rooted in emotional trauma, and honors both physical and inner subjective experiences. We also illuminate how the practice of Yin Yoga can enhance the function of our integrated systems, improve circulation, reduce stress, and foster feelings of peace and joy. Lastly, but certainly not least, we examine the power of storytelling in Yin Yoga. Join us for this engaging conversation with Josh Summers, as we explore Yin Yoga and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Transformational Self Care
A Late Winter Wellness Retreat in the Dominican Republic
March 3-10, 2023
Join me for a 7 day Caribbean wellness retreat. Each day we will focus on a pillar of self care. By the end of the week you will have a group of new friends, some unforgettable memories and a personal self care strategy to enhance your life back at home. Learn More
Let's connect! Follow me on:
Facebook
Instagram
TicToc
YouTube
Free Resources:
Master the Yin Yoga Pose Repertoire: 7 Day Email Course
Introduction to Pain Care Yoga
Practice Gallery Workbook - 6 go to sequences with pictorial instructions
Welcome to the Yin Yoga Podcast. I'm your host, mandy Ryle, and I am very excited to share with you this week a conversation that I had with Josh Summers. I'll give a more detailed intro of Josh at the beginning of the interview, so I wanted to treat this introduction as a bit of a reflection. As you may know, yin Yoga has its own unique flavor of subtle body. So, unlike the other yoga practices which are aligned with Indian philosophy, yin is associated with traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Chinese philosophies. So instead of the chakras, for example, we have the organs. Rather than the nadis, we have the meridians. Instead of calling the life force, prana, we understand it in Yin Yoga to be the chi. So I have to admit that, even after learning about traditional Chinese medicine and its subtle anatomy from books and other teachers over these many years, I've always had quite a bit of ambivalence about its function in Yin practice, so much so that I, honestly, have completely given it up, and I have felt strongly all this time that my ambivalence comes from a place of ignorance. So I took advantage of my status as a podcaster to invite an expert Josh to help me to understand the conversation. We had, however, turned out to be completely and delightfully different from what I had planned a much more sophisticated and nuanced discussion than what I had anticipated for sure. So we discussed traditional Chinese medicine in Yin yoga practice and how it can be utilized and how perhaps we should exercise caution, especially as Yin teachers. This conversation has the potential to ruffle some feathers, especially if the subtle body is a big part of your practice or teaching. So I want to reiterate that I support teachers bringing their unique passions and interests to their students. We each and all have something special to share, but perhaps this interview could facilitate some self reflection that could enhance your teaching or practice, perhaps bring in a new depth. And I don't want to leave you out of this conversation because I feel like there might be some strong feelings. So if you are listening on Spotify, you know now you can just go into those show notes and leave a comment, or you can find me on Instagram or TikTok. My links are in the show notes. Please enjoy this wonderful conversation.
Speaker 1:Everyone with Josh Summers, everyone to this conversation with Josh Summers. I think this is going to be a really cool conversation because for over two decades, josh has immersed himself in the practices of Chinese medicine, buddhist meditation and Yin yoga. He trained with Paul Grilly and Sarah Powers and Yin, but he has also earned a master's in Oriental medicine from the New England School of Acupuncture in Massachusetts back in 2004. At that time he had a dual focus on Chinese or biology and Japanese styles of acupuncture, and after school he even continued his studies with Kikomatsu Moto. I know of Josh because he is also the podcast host of the podcast Every Day Sublime, which I've been listening to for quite some time, and he is also the author or co-author of several books, which I will, of course, link to in the show notes. I invited Josh on because I can't imagine anyone better to help me personally grasp the connections between Yin yoga and Chinese medicine. So welcome Josh.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, mandy, good to be here, got it?
Speaker 1:Got it Okay. So one of the things that I'm discovering I really love about interviewing other Yin teachers is getting to talk about, like what really makes them tick, like what keeps you motivated and inspired month after month, year after year. Because, especially because we are both teachers of Yin teachers, I honestly feel like this is our superpower. What we love is our superpower. So what do you really value the most as a teacher? What are your big passions in Yin?
Speaker 2:My biggest passion, I would say, is the Dharma and I use the word Dharma with capital D, not so much specific just to Buddhism but just Dharma in terms of teachings that liberate the heart and mind. And you mentioned the acupuncture school a bit. But when I was in acupuncture school, my first year of acupuncture school, a Nayan Gar yoga friend of mine had registered for a silent meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society and I had never gone on a retreat before and he sort of invited me to join him and on that retreat I found I felt like I found a practice of awareness and liberating awareness from unnecessary forms of suffering. It was a very powerful experience for me. And along the way, during that retreat, I also encountered an incredible or exceptional amount of physical discomfort brought on by sitting still, meditation after meditation, and that I found that physical pain disconcerting. And it took me years to be able to articulate this. But I would say I felt betrayed in a sense because at that time I had really dedicated myself to Iyengar yoga. I had practiced probably six or seven years of that time and was doing a couple hours a day of Iyengar practice and didn't understand why, having done so much physical work that I was still encountering such discomfort in my body.
Speaker 2:And you know, as luck would have it, I came off that retreat curious about ways to sit in meditation more comfortably and a student friend of mine had herself just returned from a yoga teacher training with Paul Greeley and Sarah Powers. Her name was Christine O'Shaughnessy and she initially said to me Shosh, if you don't know about Yin yoga yet, you're going to love it. It's the, it's the practice for you. It's a meditative practice. It weaves in theory from Chinese medicine, emphasizing the channels, and it prepares the body to sit more comfortably. So I was very curious to be introduced to Yin yoga at that time. Unfortunately, the introduction didn't go very well. I went, I took one of her classes and did the polite thing of like, oh, that's really nice, it's very interesting. But back in the back of my mind I was judging the whole thing as being sloppy, lazy, malaligned, just just not safe.
Speaker 2:And I went back on a retreat a couple months later, not having done anything with Yin yoga, slam my body into the same degrees of pain and frustration and more or less made a commitment to myself on that second retreat that let me at least give Yin yoga try for a while, and so I and I was going to going through acupuncture school at the time and I would sit down with my notes and just hang out in a Yin yoga pose for four or five minutes.
Speaker 2:And after doing that for three or four months I went back on another retreat and I couldn't believe the difference, that there was a night and day difference, not just in my body and the reduction of pain that I experienced, but there was a palpable but hard to describe inner softening of my mind where I just didn't feel as reactive, I didn't feel as edgy, and at that time I also, through my friend, I, got introduced to Sarah Powers teaching and I saw the way that Sarah was just beautifully weaving Dharma themes, meditative themes, into her Yin classes and for me that opened the door.
Speaker 2:That was like the green light that said you can do this, you can bring the Buddha Dharma, the heart of the Buddha Dharma, right into a yoga studio, into a yoga class, using the format of Yin yoga. And that just really captivated me because I felt like I found the practice, the inner practice that I fell in love with, which was Buddhism, and I found an outer practice or a form in which I could both cultivate that myself and share it with others in an accessible way. So that's a long story, long answer to your question. But that's sort of what catches me on fire, and still does, is that I see Yin yoga as a great vehicle. It's sort of an open-ended, open source practice that the teacher can bring in whatever they want into it. But for me it allowed me to really channel my love for the Dharma.
Speaker 1:It's that synthesis of what's up here and also what's in the body, what's in the brain and the body and spirituality.
Speaker 2:Yes, and the cultivation of the power of awareness that can grow within the practice and start to see a more profound, almost liberative level, I think is just really unique, particularly because of the challenges that come up in Yin yoga. It's not you know, you're marinating in appropriate levels of challenge, whether it's physical sensation or the inner reactivity that surfaces, and working with that is at that edge, is, I think, what really lets, facilitates a kind of transformation of character.
Speaker 1:I totally agree with that 100%. You know when you were telling your story about, you know your first official Yin class led practice, which wasn't so great, and then maybe what helped you to fall in love was your personal practice, right that time alone on the mat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I it wasn't that the class was bad, it was a good class.
Speaker 2:It was just that I had a set of kind of lenses on that could only interpret things through those lenses and so I had certain, certain rules about what a pose should be if it's going to be properly aligned or properly sustained, and Yin yoga was smashing all those rules, yeah, and and, and so, yeah, I, I I did take classes with my friend and then I I really found my personal practice and, and I think what's what was different from me from when I was growing up as a Yin yoga or as a yoga student, was that, again, I grew up within the school of of Iyengar yoga, but personal practice was what was emphasized there.
Speaker 2:You went to classes as kind of a workshop for how to refine your own home practice. That was always the way it was accepted. So the the culture of doing your yoga in a live class as the, as the place where you do your yoga, that was very foreign to me. It still is in some ways. You know, I see classes as opportunities to get insight, get inspiration, get knowledge about how to practice, but the real practice comes at home or in the privacy of your own practice. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:No, that's actually pretty cool. I like that. You know, if I'm honest, like I'm a hypermobile person, I have a chronic pain issue. Group classes don't work for me. That is just too activating, it just sets things off. I teach group classes, I love teaching a group class. I just cannot participate. I can't. I can't participate in them. You know, for me yoga practice is is by myself. It's on my mat, switch door closed, or sometimes open, and you know a dog standing over me and that's what it's, that's what it is, and so that's kind of liberating.
Speaker 2:I guess I'll go ahead the thought I had that had started interrupting the, as you said, that is. You know, one of the challenging things is once you, once you become educated in yoga, but also particularly once you get educated about you know the implications of skeletal variation and the principles of functional practice. It's it can be outright difficult to take a public class if the teacher isn't also educated about functional alignment and skeletal variation, because then you just you're bumping heads with someone who's got aesthetic rules around how the pose is supposed to look and they're they're squawking at you that you're not aligned properly, you're ignorant about skeletal variation, so so it's that that part of it can be can be really tricky.
Speaker 1:Aha, okay, cool, yes, agree, yeah. So you kind of already answered my question a little bit, because I think that, in addition to a little bit more of connecting with what really makes us tick as teachers, sometimes it's also really valuable to determine what we're not, what we just doesn't get us excited. Because here's why I ask this because a lot of the listeners to the podcast, or you and teachers, are aspiring in teachers, and I I definitely know that when we first start out as teachers, we really feel very strongly that we just have to be everything to everyone and that there is no amount of knowledge that will ever really truly make us completely qualified, you know. So we keep adding more and more and more from all different sets of information rather than really just focusing on some things. So is there anything that you're just not into, that you just don't want to bring forth in your teaching?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I haven't been asked that or thought about that. I would say there's things I feel comfortable bringing forward because of my own time spent with those topics and, like you're saying, there's sort of that. Bernie Clark would know the name of this principle in science the more you know, the less you're, the more you realize you don't have little you know like study something the Dunning Kruger effect or something like that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, that said, you know, the more I look at, say, chinese medicine, or the more I look at the Buddha Dharma, the more you can look at, you know, the evolving science of fascination, the more I realize. Oh well, I don't. There's a lot more questions coming now.
Speaker 2:But you know, I would say, if you, the thing that I have found that I got tired of teaching was sort of alignment or aesthetically based alignment in in Asana and taking people through more active classes, where something I don't like active yoga, or I love practicing active yoga, but as a teacher I felt exhausted from just giving verbal, verbal, physical cues and in yoga opened up the doorway that I could, just I could get people into poses and let them figure out the best form of the pose for themselves.
Speaker 2:And then there was this wonderful time in the pose where I could address something that was of interest to me. You know the thing, that something that I would be interested in, say something from Chinese medicine or something from meditation, or how they interact and speak to each other, and both those fields, those two fields, chinese medicine and Buddhism have. I haven't feel, I don't feel like I've begun to even exhaust either one. I mean, they're just, they're inexhaustible fields, and I've been teaching now 20 plus years and feel like I'm not the well hasn't run beginning to run dry, and so if I had, I think I would have stopped teaching. If I hadn't discovered this, like I would have gotten too bored, I would have probably just focused exclusively on being an acupuncturist and let go of teaching, just because taking people through posture with anatomical cues was not very interesting to me at a certain point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel that. I mean, anybody who's been teaching for a long time has certainly either had to rediscover their practice through a new lens, or they just quit teaching. I mean, I've kind of been there myself.
Speaker 2:Can I say one thing too, because you mentioned about teachers and the maybe the sense of the phrase that comes up in our practice community is imposter syndrome, because there's a sense of feeling of inadequacy. People study and study and study and try to take on more information, get more information from this person, this source or that domain. And you're speaking to that dynamic. My partner and I really feel and I'm not, we're not the only ones that will say this but the real deepening work is one's own practice. The textbooks are like all the domains of books, are like menus in a way, suggesting what's available, and it's the practice that really makes the menu become a meal that can be digested, assimilated and absorbed. So deep practice, whatever form that takes for the individual, I think is where A teacher's own authenticity is going to emerge.
Speaker 2:I often quote in my training so I used to quote my trainings a line from the jazz trumpet player, clark Terry, who famously said jazz is a process of imitation, assimilation and then innovation. And it took me a while before I realized that was sort of what was going on in my own process of development as a teacher, where I could see myself imitating Paul Greeley, imitating Sarah Powers, imitating Joseph Goldstein, imitating Sharon Sells, just imitating the teachers that inspired me the most, borrowing their phrases, learning their lines, getting their licks in a way. And then after some time it starts to become part of your thing, and then suddenly insights about how you could expand on it or develop it or be more creative with it start to come, and that's what I find it gets fun to teach from that. You know your own creative synthesis of the material.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to say that for the teachers that are in your audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:The pattern from jazz is helpful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really really good, Thank you. The reason I bring up the things that you know we are or want to be an aren't don't want to be as teachers is because, if I'm honest, I have never really connected with the subtle body. It's, I mean, I just I've tried. You know, as a yin teacher, of course, I had to learn the names and the locations of the meridians and the organs and, you know, study their qualities and their potential for disharmony. It's just, it's not the kind of information that I get excited about, and I think one of the issues is that I never, I never fully got the link between the meridians, organs and the physical practice, practice Like. To me it just never quite fit. I felt like we were trying to put something together that either was already together and therefore didn't necessarily need specific attention, or wasn't together. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just never had connected.
Speaker 2:There's two maps that they're being juxtaposed over each other. One's getting juxtaposed over the other and it feels like maybe at times forced or disjointed in that juxtaposition. Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 1:That sounds about right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, and also I'm a very I'm a sciencey person. I mean, if you talk about like what I am as a teacher, I love data, I love evidence, I love making it simple and experiential for people. I just I just love that. I love data. What can I say in research? So I mean, I would really love for you to help me connect those dots, if you can, of, like, how do we get from Chinese medicine meridians all this imbalances to the postures? Yep, would it be okay, because there are probably many people who aren't familiar with this link, especially if they're only exposed to me because I haven't heard about it at all If we just start with the basics, start with the foundations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the pre-foundation would be I just empathize with what you're feeling and expressing the subtle body. I would say that was, even though I studied acupuncture. It was also the one, the dynamic of the practice that I felt. Personally, I was also a little bit out to see with and that goes even back to how it what it felt like going through acupuncture school, you know, and being immersed and saturated in that theory and then trying to unpack it or assimilate it into into my Western-lensed consciousness, and that was I saw all of my colleagues go through this sort of struggle of how do we in a sense open our mind and understanding to a very different model of looking at what a human is? Yeah, and one of the things I think would be helpful, just as we parse this out in a conversation, is, you know, you mentioned science and Western science and a lot of times, for the most part, western science is looking at things with the eye or instruments of the eye like microscopes or telescopes, and looking at objects out there and the subtle body is a phenomenological experience in here. And so the methodology of how we understand or kind of look at it, the subtle body, I think will be endlessly frustrating if we're looking, trying to use the eye or instrument of the eye, and which would lead to a kind of reductionistic analysis of what's going on with Chi or what's going on with the subtle body. So that's a little bit of a preamble just to say that it's.
Speaker 2:It's sort of the direct is-ness or the direct experience of what you're feeling that speaks to the vibrancy of Chi. So, for example, you know, I got a poor night's sleep a couple nights ago and we were talking about before the call that whether swings have come in, suddenly fall, it's getting colder and I'm feeling like there's a hurricane coming in and I feel like my Chi is a little bit suppressed, my throat's a little scratchier, my energy's lower. That's a feeling I have which would be described in Chinese energetic terms of Chi deficiency. There's a depletion of Chi. I'm not feeling as vibrant as normal. Now, if you know, a doctor, a Western doctor, is not going to put too much into my subjective feeling or all those conditions I just named. That's not significant to them.
Speaker 2:But from a Chinese perspective, there is this very profound understanding of the internal climate, the internal microcosm of an individual as it intersects with macro climates, macro conditions outside of them and looks at those relationships in quite a sophisticated degree of detail. So let me try to put it in a very simple terms for you. You're a Yin yoga practitioner and teacher. So something happened when you did Yin yoga that said inside of you that said, yes, I like this. How would you quantify, or I should say, how would you qualify that feeling? What was the Yin effect on you that said this yes, more of this, please.
Speaker 1:What was the? Hmm, I will say that a little bit like you, when I first started Yin, I did not love it. It was like my introduction to Yin was online. You still have a yoga glow membership and there are great Yin teachers on there at the time and I'm hyper mobile and so like just kind of being, for example, in a dragon or something, for an extended period of time excruciating does not feel relaxing. It feels like I'm falling apart, right. And also I came from like Vinyasa, like an Ashtanga Eve and Yasa background and education.
Speaker 1:And then I think maybe it was something one of the teachers said at some point about Yin being mild and not needing to have so much sensation and go so deep, and so I just backed off, I just chilled out. You know, I supported myself a lot so that I could sit in comfort. You know well, maybe not comfort. I want to be comfortable in my pose. I do. I want to feel good. I don't really want to encounter discomfort. Personally, that's just not my practice or my teaching. So, yeah, I think it was learning. I think it was learning something different Learning to let go.
Speaker 2:And I guess this may not have been your experience, but did you feel at some point so what you're describing there? What I just heard was you, mandy, the Ashtanga Vinyasa based practitioner, encountering in yoga and having going through a phase of adaptation to the practice. You had to figure out how to adapt the practice to suit your body and the conditions in your body and the way that worked for you. Once you made that adaptation, you sort of came to like and if this wasn't the case, I'm just wondering did you feel greater ease? Did you feel a sweeter kind of release? Does any of that touch the cord that you were feeling?
Speaker 1:I would say so yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that was it for me, and in that I found a particularly delicious relaxation. And when I coupled it with my meditation practice from Buddhism, what I was finding personally was that when I did yin yoga and then meditated after so let's say I practiced for an hour of yin yoga and then sat for a half hour I found that the yin yoga prepared me physically, energetically, such that when I sat there was a real, effortless development of samadhi or a unified, open stillness, and that's sort of a precursor precondition in Buddhism for the development of insight or wisdom. When the mind is gathered, when there's less dispersive, discursive, fragmented attention, awareness can really see into the nature of the body and mind in a way that does liberate it from unhelpful or unskillful forms of clinging and grasping. So that feeling of being calm, collected, open, relaxed, at ease, curious, aware, all of that together is sort of what I refer now to as the experience of harmonized chi. So when your energy feels unified, smooth, calm and present, that is sort of the I guess the strike zone in a way of what, as a teacher or a practitioner, I'm looking for my practice to help me do so that I can then really look at things clearly or see things in a powerful way, and that's the connection between, that's the experiential taste of what yin yoke does to the subtle body is what I'm trying to say. So if you know the experience, my sense is you have the experience. Most people have that experience. If they take to yin yoke, they find it eventually, or sooner or later, I should say. And it's that experience of just feeling internally cool, relaxed, soft and easy, less irritable, more compassionate, all of those things together that to me speaks to the development of one's energy, harmonized flowing, just functioning better.
Speaker 2:And we can get into specifics of what's from a Chinese perspective.
Speaker 2:If we look at that experience of going from, say, a fragmented, stressed, inflamed, irritated state to a calmer, clear, gathered, unified state, that transition is a movement from disruptive G flow G is not moving as well or as smoothly as I could to a more optimized state of energy flow.
Speaker 2:And I think, if I want to just jump into it, I think probably the stumbling I imagine the stumbling block for you and many others is the level of detail in the Chinese model around the descriptions of the channels, the anatomical location of the channels and the many, many points on those channels that have particular actions and effects for manipulation of the energy. That overwhelms me as an acupuncturist, having worked with it for a long time. I was a practicing acupuncturist for 20 years or so and it's just a lot of material and I think if anyone hasn't gone through three or four years of acupuncture training it's just a lot to absorb and a teacher doesn't need to have that acupuncture degree to teach you in yoga. But because the subtle body seems to have been taught through the lens of Chinese medicine, I think people get hung up about A not feeling like they understand it enough to share it in a way that's helpful to the students. But they also get sort of confused and overwhelmed by are they on the right meridian, say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's something we can get into.
Speaker 1:And this is one of the issues that I have struggled with with regard to the subtle body and Yin is that I don't. If we are indeed after this specific influence on this specific meridian or organ, I don't think any of us are qualified, necessarily right, to address it with that level of certainty and or authenticity, and so that's one of the places where I get stuck too. Yeah, the issue of scope of practice Sure.
Speaker 1:Scope of practice and yeah, you know and like, when you're talking about this, the feeling that you get this inner softness and this sweetness and the feeling like this energy is harmonized. You know it's so interesting because, like, I have language for this too, based on my passion right like this is parasympathetic activation. This is, you know, ventral vagal heart rate variability. You know we could go, we could do all the terms there too, so I just thought that was really interesting. Is like this feeling of embodiment, right? You like? Yes, maybe we. It is a phenomenological experience when we consider the meridians, but we can actually point to data of what it looks and feels like to be embodied, right?
Speaker 2:There are physiological signals. I would challenge you just slightly. Yeah, please. Parasympathetic activation doesn't the phrase doesn't tell me what it feels like. It can be. You can, you can measure it, you can, you can point to it, but it doesn't so it's like it's like dopamine. Doesn't tell you what love feels like. There's a, there is a biochemical expression of love, meaning there's a biochemical phenomenon occurring when someone feels love and that can be quantified with neurotransmitters.
Speaker 2:But the feeling of love, the meaning of love, the impact of love is a subjective experience that language of poetry and literature and music try to capture. So I would say that's what the Chinese medicine is in some ways. This is where it's tricky is that where I try to say it's a poetic descriptions for pointing to patterns of what it's like, not what it is Western scientific eye of the sense organ of the eye or an instrument of the eye, but from the subjective experience of what is it like? What's it like when your energy feels like it's sinking? What's it like when you feel like you have low energy? What's it like when you feel like you have scattered energy?
Speaker 1:Yes and it's I mean, okay, I like that, I do that really connects, because it is so comforting and reassuring and validating to have language for the things that we experience, Like there's almost nothing better. I mean, and that's maybe somewhat the role of philosophy, to what does it feel like With yoga philosophy, much of that? I kind of really super dig the Koshas because I feel like this is such a beautiful expression of this constellation of self, or, for my terminology, the biopsychosocial self. Right, I think where I get stuck is there's Richard Freeman says you know, it's like confusing the map for the territory.
Speaker 2:Perfect Love that.
Speaker 1:Right, and I that's where I'm getting stuck, because we got all of these things we're supposed to memorize this morning and I'm like it's all just those are maps.
Speaker 2:The channels, the pictures of the meridians, the pictures of the points, the pictures of the descriptions of the organs, the patterns of disharmony, the patterns of harmony, yin and yang itself. These are symbolic maps. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 1:That's what I needed someone to say to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah yeah, and I think so one of the things that I have been trying to articulate better and it's an evolving attempt to articulate this better is this goes back to when I first was exposed to yin yoga. So I was coming, I was going through acupuncture school and got introduced to yin yoga and then so I'm still grappling with all of Chinese medicine theory, just having gone through, got a masters in it, and after my training and a formal training that I took my first teacher training with Sarah Powers and she was talking about how poses were influencing I think she may have used meridian at the time. She's talking about how the poses were influencing the meridians. And at the time I knew enough that there was a broad evolving theory amongst acupuncturists contemporary acupuncturists that the channels of Chinese medicine which had kind of eluded Western anatomists when they would dissect cadavers, they were like we just see connective tissue or we see veins or we see nerves. We don't see any evidence of these channels. But amongst acupuncturists when I was going through school there was a view that and it's a theory that the energy system, the channels of Chinese medicine, are embedded in the fascia, that the fascia, the extracellular matrix, is the biological substratum of this subtle energy. And so, having that hypothesis in the back of my mind and then encountering Sarah Powers' work, the way she was talking about the poses and stimulating channels to harmonize one's energy, I tacitly signed on and taught for a while that, yeah, in the yin pose, when we have the legs wide and drag and fly, we'll be stimulating the inner yin channels of the leg. Or when we do a back bend, we'll be compressing the kidney channels as it comes up through the lumbar. And I taught like that for a while.
Speaker 2:And as I was teaching like that, I should say because I was in acupuncturists, I was careful when I taught like that, not to do the kind of overreach of scope of practice that you were hinting at earlier, in that I knew I was not treating anybody's conditions.
Speaker 2:If someone had renal disease or someone was dealing with cirrhosis of the liver or depression or heart palpitations, I wasn't saying, well, oh then you simply need to do these four poses that are going to target these four channels and you need to do them every day. That is in my mind, both Mickey Mouse Chinese Medicine and Mickey Mouse yin yoga. But I kept seeing that, that there was a way that the game of telephone that was getting played in the yin yoga community that at least the parts of the yin yoga community that I was in touch with seemed to. More and more people were reducing the energetic effect of yin yoga to correctly stimulating a particular plane of tissue. And by virtue of seemingly in that particular plane of tissue they were, they were optimizing the flow in that channel that was housed in that tissue. And by optimizing the flow through that channel the organ would suddenly be miraculously pristine and healthy.
Speaker 1:Pristine organ.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the healthy. The word pristine comes because I was reading a book where Dr Daniel Keown was talking about the gallbladder ensuresa spotless, pristine and spotless environment for the fascia through cleansing of the of the lymph. But anyway that that view started to take root, that, and whenever I gave a yin training that would talk about Chinese medicine, almost invariably somebody or several people would come up after and say how can I learn more about the channels? And I just want to clarify I'm speaking about these channels or these rivers of energy, using the word channel because I think it conveys more of what it is versus a meridian. Meridian is sort of a solid line on a map that we're just already going to create, an abstraction that isn't true to what really is going on, that the fascia and the spaces within the fascia and the spaces that the fascia, the potential spaces the fascia creates, seems to be a likely candidate for the location of the, the, the Chinese anatomy of the channel.
Speaker 1:And I remember reading quite if you don't mind, I'll interrupt just for so I remember reading a long time ago when I was bound and determined to connect with this. I think it was something. Maybe that was in Bernie Clark's book about the Japanese visit, matsumoto and how they. The theory was that the connection between the fascia and the channels was in this hyaluronic acid, chains of hyaluronic acid, right? I haven't read that in a while, so I don't know if that's still like the prevailing theory.
Speaker 2:Those are the buzzwords I was introduced to. I think that was Paul. I think was Paul really teach? One of his teachers was Hiroshi Motoyama.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Japanese acupuncturist and physician, I believe, and spiritual adept, and I think he was involved. Motoyama was involved with testing the conductance of chi, the electrical conductance at the end of channels.
Speaker 2:And and I believe he may have been comparing like how conductant was a channel before a long held pose was performed and then after? Okay, now I've talked about that. For anonymity sake I want to keep his name to my close in. I'm not going to say out him, but I for I had a colleague in Boston who was one of the Rolfer, who had trained with Ida Rolf and he was involved in some of the research done at Harvard in connective tissue and mechanisms of connective tissue response to different kinds of stresses. And whenever I'd go see him for a roughing session, he and I would just, you know, gab shop around latest stuff. What are people saying?
Speaker 2:And I remember him saying to me that that these skin conductance tests are of greater chief flow or not. It were just inherently very problematic in terms of determining what they're actually showing, and I've used some of those tools myself. I got a Japanese tool that was measuring skin. It's like depending on exactly where you put the probe and how much pressure you put on, you got wildly different readings and I became suspicious on the significance of what that meant. But you're right, there was this, I think, the idea, which I think carries water literally.
Speaker 2:The idea is that you know these long chains of hyaluronic acid which are molecule. They're very hydrophilic molecules, meaning they love water, they attract lots of water to them and so if you get these chains, these watery crystalline chains, through the body, the more water you attract. The water is very conductive of electricity and currents of electricity are likely. I would say part of what our Qi is, what we're indicating when we use the word Qi. Again, I'm not going to say Qi is electricity, because that would reduce the Chinese concept to a single phenomena, and I think there are multiple phenomena overlapping within the concept of Qi. But I think consciousness, I think emotions, I think neurotransmitters and hormones and tissue health and conductance all come together in terms of the way that our felt experience of our aliveness comes forward.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I really took from. There's a book called the Web that has no weaver. Maybe Ted Kappchuck, yes.
Speaker 2:And gosh.
Speaker 1:I love this and it's been so influential for me because I mostly work with people who live with chronic pain, and he was talking about biopsychosocial in this book really, and how there is an absence in these philosophies. I mean, we talk about traditional Chinese medicine, which is one in the same in many ways as the Chinese philosophy, just like our philosophy is very strongly bound to our medical system, and one of the best ways of really starkly seeing the difference to me anyway, was that in the Chinese philosophy there is an absence of an origin, there is an absence of a creator, there is an absence of a beginning, there's only patterns.
Speaker 1:There's a constellation as well. I didn't say it's Ted Kappchuck. I follow a lot of the stuff he does. He's pretty cool. Whereas in the western medical and philosophy systems it's all about the origin, from our religion to our medicine. I work with people with chronic pain and they are obsessed with finding out what is that thing that is causing this. Except, hardly ever we get a really true answer and even if we do, it's usually not actually the origin and maybe where we get. I mean, I don't know what this theory looks like in other places, but here in the west we keep trying, like you said, to make it concrete and understandable to our western mind. I need to know the origin, I need to know that meridian so I can fix it.
Speaker 2:That's part of it. It's definitely part of it. So let me paraphrase it back In the west, we're looking for the causal X that's creating the problem of Y. What's X? What is the X causing the Y? And in Chinese medicine there is no X, there's patterns, as you're describing. This is where, again, I think failing to understand the difference between these two models is where I think Yin yoga teachers will often say oh, if you have back pain, then that's your symptom, then you need. Well, back pain is associated with the kidneys, therefore you need to do the kidney poses. That's why I'm calling it the X, because that's not the way.
Speaker 1:I have a formula for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or the simple formula, or one of my teachers used to say a push button system, the symptom, then just use that point. It's not how the medicine works. I say this so much frequently. One of my theory teachers in Chinese medicine school would. He's like a Baptist preacher up on the pulpit and he would pound his fist.
Speaker 2:He says one sign or symptom doesn't mean anything. The sign or symptom only means something when it's put into a constellation of other signs and symptoms from which a pattern of disharmony can be discerned or understood by the practitioner, usually the acupuncturist. So for back pain, for depression, for insomnia, for indigestion, irritable bowel, whatever the symptom is, there might be on average five to seven potential patterns of disharmony, whether patterns of disharmony that involve biology, diet, lifestyle, psychology, sociology, interpersonal relationships. You know the collective, the world. I mean the world, the metacrisis of the world. Right now I can definitely feel that impact on my cheek. So Chinese medicine looks at all those influences and discerns what kind of pattern are we talking about? And then from there using the tools of the medicine to rectify the disharmony within the pattern. But this is where it becomes hard to study from a Western lens, because the gold standard for Western research is the double-blind randomized trial and.
Speaker 1:That's reductionist yes. It can only study one thing, as opposed to all the things.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, because most of the time I thought you were telling me you were reductionist and I thought no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:sorry, the Western double-blinded yes, randomized trial.
Speaker 2:Did I describe the reductionistic style of Western medicine as in a reductionistic way? That wouldn't be very fair. But I think what you're saying is that they're looking for the one variable. What's the influence of one thing? Does this medication work or not against a randomized trial? I don't know how you can.
Speaker 2:The clinical trials I've seen where they've tried to do acupuncture study. I haven't looked at all of them, but some of them either use sham points as the control and use real points, but use only four points on everybody that say head hypertension. Now there's two problems there that sometimes the sham points are used in another system of acupuncture. There's multiple systems of acupuncture, like yoga. There's so many different ways of stimulating the body or balancing our energy. There's different systems of acupuncture and the sham points that were used in those trials where it turned out in another person's system, the very points used for hypertension.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing problem is that just because someone has hypertension doesn't mean they will be treated with the same points, and that's this is the problem. I think most people would think that, oh, if you have hypertension, what's the formula for points for hypertension? That's not how an acupuncture sinks. The first thing that acupuncturists is going to do is figure out what is the pattern of disharmony, that is, that within which this hypertensive symptom is arising. Once we get the pattern, then point prescription flows out of addressing the pattern. You could have six people with hypertension and six different patterns, therefore six different point prescriptions, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:But this.
Speaker 2:It's got me.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking about this in my. Again, I have a parallel. But I had a client who was seeing me for neck pain and she says, you know, it's driving really flares me. It's driving, driving is the worst thing. Driving it does something to my disc or whatever, which couldn't be corroborated on a scan, unfortunately. And she's like, yeah, because, like a couple years ago, I was driving all the time. It was like, you know, I would drive on the weekends like eight hours, and I was like, wow, why were you driving? And that was when the pain really got bad, that was when it really set off and I said, well, gosh, why were you driving eight hours, four hours there, four hours back, what were you doing every weekend?
Speaker 1:She goes, oh, my mom was dying. And it's like, okay, so is it the disc or is it the bio-psycho-social experience, the constellation of factors that your mom was dying? Right. But we're just not. We just need a quick and simple answer in our culture, right? And so she couldn't even contemplate that the reason that the pain manifested was due to something other than a disc issue which could not be shown in any scan, right? And so Are you familiar with the?
Speaker 2:work of John Sarno. Dr John Sarno.
Speaker 1:Sarno, s-a-r-n-o. Yes, what's the book that everyone always tells me to read?
Speaker 2:His original one was Healing Back Pain and then the more recent one was called the Divided Mind. I think he was head of rehabilitation medicine at NYU for a number of years. He's passed on but he sort of brought to light his own theory of addressing pain and highlighted analysis that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, like must have going back 20 years now, where they ran an analysis of people who had pain and they compared people with pain to the scans that they could see on their back, the MRIs. What could we see organically going on in the spine? And essentially there was zero correlation between organic abnormality and physical pain.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that only slightly predisposes you to a pain issue.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. He really came up with, I think, if I get the phrase right, a psychogenic model for pain. He felt like, oftentimes, when there was a repression of anger or rage, that the brain essentially distracted the self that had that rage from the overwhelm of it and would kind of create a form. He described it in a level of ischemic, transient ischemic condition, in the point that in an area of the body that would cause pain, but addressing the emotional level or the psychological dynamic, just illustrating what you were saying, was a way to rectify the pain problem.
Speaker 1:Indeed, you know even.
Speaker 2:That was Chinese. That's Chinese medicine.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I. I reckon when you mentioned his book, I immediately remembered who that is and why I've maybe this is we shouldn't like dive into this can of worms, but why I reject his, his work in some ways? Because, even though I agree with the biopsychosocial model, I really have seen the effect that this has on people speaking of biopsychosocial to say, okay, a back pain. So you need to address your longstanding rage toward this person who did something to you, who was unforgivable. And I see how that ramps up. The pattern is disrupted, right, the harmony is obliterated by this process. I think that there are kinder, nicer processes, but, and again, is it reductionistic? That's right, thank you for.
Speaker 2:Thank you for saying that. No, yes, I share the same caveat as you do, which is just as we can go too far and say everything is biological, which would be reducing the internal experience and our subjective experience to biological correlates, we can reduce everything to that. That's what one, the philosopher Ken Wilber, called flatland. The whole complexity of inner understanding and meaning is compressed and reduced to biological bits. That's flatland.
Speaker 2:But it can go the other way. He doesn't use this word. This is my version of but to say everything is inner emotion, everything is in our subjective state. The outside only is a mirror of the inner world. That's reductionism, as you just said. In the opposite direction, I call it space land.
Speaker 2:You can get you know that the physical it doesn't matter, it's all about the inner, inner subjective dynamic. That that's what really matters. Or the inner subjective experience doesn't matter, it's all only about the physical manifestation that we can see. Both are, both are partial, and the question, I think the beauty of Chinese medicine is that it honors both without reducing one to the other and, and I think, sets up ways that a more integral map of a human can bring greater insight to addressing patterns of disharmony and produce vital, vibrant beans.
Speaker 1:I think that that is a pretty cool I'm I'm kind of falling in love with this philosophy. From your perspective, it definitely like is like meshing with where I'm at and I think we're maybe both in agreement. Tell me if I'm wrong In that perhaps the way that this system has been treated in yen yoga is potentially reductionistic as well and not really fully respecting or utilizing this kind of full spectrum capacity, the possibility of it. Are we in agreement on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think you didn't say it like this, but what I would. The difference in how I'm trying to communicate what's going on in yen yoga now from a Chinese medicine perspective, is that in the early days, as I said, there was this sense of hold the body in a certain position and the tissue that's being stimulated, the targeted tissue in that position, will influence the energetic channel located in that tissue to influence the organ. And I have no doubt that something's going on there, that there's some, there is some. There will be some relationship between that channel and how the organs responding. But I think that again, that led to a kind of reductionistic view that, okay, you know, everyone's trying to build their sequences around getting certain channels stimulated. I think, more broadly, what's going on is that a systematic practice of yen yoga that, at least, as Paul really really emphasizes that targets all of the main quote, unquote target areas, the areas of functional mobility in the body. Targeting these broad planes in all these different directions ultimately is optimizing the fascial health in combination with other forms of fascial training.
Speaker 2:Not yin yoga is not the. I want to just go on record, at least make it clear that yin yoga is not the only yoga that works influences the fascia. Any physical yoga is going to be influencing the fascia. It's a question of what's the influence of particular ways of holding the body and its influence on the fascia. But from the fascia up then, the manner in which you're breathing in the pose is going to influence the biochemistry of your body and the way you are because of mobilizing intentions of your heart and mind in relationship to what you're encountering in your practice, ie the way you're meditating in the pose. All of those together. So it's the posture, it's the breathing, it's the mindset, the meditative approach. All those together, I suggest collaborate with the internal, the main five yin organs, the internal organs of Chinese medicine that are the holistic expressions of our being, from physical, energetic to psychosympathy, psychospiritual levels. So an organ in Chinese medicine is not just sort of a filtration system or a digestive system, it is a. They call them organ systems because each organ has a particular relationship to particular relationship to tissue in the body, a particular relationship to an energetic substance in the body and a particular relationship to psychospiritual capacities of our being. And all of that is influenced, in my opinion, some, you could say, directly or indirectly get into a debate about that. But all of that gets influenced in a holistically informed yin yoga practice or holistically informed yoga practice Does that? So that's my.
Speaker 2:The model I'm trying to move to is like less from. We optimize our energy, not so much from just targeting a specific channel, but we optimize our energy through a multi-directional way of making sure the body is coherent, the physical tissue of the fascia is coherent, through reducing inflammation, increasing hydration to the tissue. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense is there's some pretty good studies that are indicating both of those to be true. And so with less inflammation which from a Chinese perspective would be referred to as a heat toxin, heat in the system. Heat disrupts the flow of Qi. So if we come bring our inflammation down, our Qi is gonna flow better and it can go from there.
Speaker 1:Okay. So if here's I'm having trouble articulating how I wanna ask this question. What I am curious about is how, if a Yin teacher who has previously had a more reductionistic view of the meridians and the organs and the Qi, is interested in potentially looking to a more holistic model, something like this, where we're looking to all of the influences, which don't exclude science, which are actually very much I mean, we're speaking the same language, just with different vocabulary, right? So I mean, you're such an experienced teacher of teachers. I mean, how do you soften the breakup between the reductionistic view and toward a more holistic view? Where's a good place to start?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I'm not sure I have the best answer for this. I can tell you what I'm, how I'm trying to communicate it. I think the best place to start is and this is self-serving because it's is the best place to start the way I'm sharing it is to start with understanding how the Yin organs work together, and there's different ways you can look at that. But five element theory is one model of organ interrelationship. But just from a basic TCM, chinese medical perspective, looking at how the Yin organs work together, I try to describe them and I borrow this phrase from again this Dr Daniel Keown, who's a Western physician trained in acupuncture. I think he's written some of the best books on the interface between Western science and Chinese medicine to really get them to communicate beautifully together, and one of them is called the Unchartered Body. That might be a book to link to in the show notes.
Speaker 1:I think that's on one of my lists.
Speaker 2:Great, great book, unchartered Body. But he uses the word teamship to describe the organs when they work well. And he says when you watch a football team play, how do you know the team's doing well? Well, they get the goal, they get the ball on the other net and they prevent the ball from getting into their own net. So there's good offense and good defense and but you can't necessarily see the communication be happening between the players.
Speaker 2:But when a team is practiced for a while together, there is a subtle level of communication, through gesture, glance, positional knowing. There's a kind of communication that starts to occur between team players. That is an intelligence that allows them to function well and that comes from training. So the way I look at all yoga and meditation together is that we're training, at least on our energetic level. We're training the organs to communicate and operate well together as a team. And I emphasize that teamship because far too often again, the reductionistic mind wants to say if you have X, then you have to do something for Y. If you have X say I've used the example of back pain if you have back pain, then you have to do something for the kidneys. If you're stressed, then you have to do something for the liver. That ignores the interrelationships between the organs. So when a student comes to study Chinese medicine and understands how the organs work together, right then that prevents them from thinking oh, I have to only stimulate one channel to get one organ.
Speaker 2:It's about all the organs being harmonized, and some of the ways the organs are gonna be harmonized is through postural work perhaps, like, I really think, the liver for example, and we can talk about why, but I think the liver really responds well from a Chinese perspective to Yin yoga, because the tissue of the liver is the sinews, the dense connective tissues, and when the dense connective tissues are relaxed, the liver relaxes, the energy of the liver flows better and the liver's function of circulating Qi throughout the whole body in a relaxed, easy way is improved, and that brings stress down.
Speaker 2:So what I'm trying to say is when the organs function better, there's greater communication between them, then the organs are able to produce energy, store energy and circulate energy, and the result is, as we sort of indicated at the beginning, when that's when team ship is working well, we feel harmonized, we feel collected, gathered, balanced, calm, peaceful, joyous, loving, et cetera. The difficult emotions are attenuated, the aches and pains are less and there's just greater optimized Qi flow. So it would be helpful, I think, if more Yin students could understand A a basic overview of how the organs function together, like who's the quarterback of the team, who's the offensive manager, who's the defensive manager, who's the general?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And then in understanding the functions of the organs, which gets to what are the tissues that they're involved with, what are the emotional states that they are involved in, what are the energetic functions that are involved with. From there I think a more holistic model or consciousness starts to emerge of how the practice collaborates with those organs. It's not rocket science, like if you just take your body through a holistically informed group of postures, meaning not just focusing on, say, back bends the whole time, but doing. You know, paul used to say bend people forward, bend them backwards and send them home. Where we can add do things for their hips, do things for their shoulders, do things the six movements of the spine, moving the body in all directions that it's built to move. That's going to be the foundation of greater Qi flow. But then when you add in the breath work and then you layer on top of that the meditative work, I think what I've found there's a more powerful synergy in terms of its influence. So the breath work thing I'd like to speak to about for a second cause. This is kind of a pet theory I have, please do.
Speaker 2:We mentioned briefly that there's some research suggesting that the long held postures of yin yoga improve the hydration of the connective tissue, reducing inflammation. One of the things that seems to happen as well is that the watery, viscous gel or the ground substance of the connective tissue changes phase, meaning it goes from a more solid turban, like a stiffer phase, and changes to a more watery, soluble state as a function of either being heated or receiving a pressure for a long period of time, a mechanical force. So we're working with mechanical forces over a long period of time in yin yoga. My hypothesis is that in the watery state, in the increased hydration state, the medium of the ground substance permits diffusion or it makes diffusion better or more available, meaning things can migrate into the ground substance and come out. So nutrients from the vascular system can diffuse through the ground substance to get to the cells.
Speaker 2:As Tom Meyer says, the goodness in our blood needs to diffuse through the ground substance to reach the cell. So if the ground substance is dirty and if there's a lot of cross fiber, of collagen and the tissue's drier, it's harder for the nutrients to get to the cells and it's harder for waste to be extracted and reabsorbed by the lymphatic system, the circulatory system, to be excreted. So if the ground substance is in a more watery, hydrated state. I would think that would enhance chief flow, which part of chief flow is the goodness of the blood getting to the cells and the waste being extracted. More recently, I'd say in the last five years, I've come across the work of the breath expert Patrick McKeown in Ireland, who has a breathing thing but he's basically popularized butteco breathing calling it, the oxygen advantage, and James Nester's book Breath Gets Into this Too, but it's something that I didn't learn when I learned more active forms of Pranayama.
Speaker 2:But the basic premise is that if we really wanna get oxygen to the cells and there's a science on this, that if we wanna get oxygen to the cells, we need to preserve carbon dioxide. Have you heard this? Yeah, so right. If we over breathe, if we do big gulpy breath, big deep breaths from the chest, we over breathe, we exhale and off gas too much carbon dioxide and the carbon dioxide that we're off gassing is no longer able to. We need to preserve a certain amount of carbon dioxide to act as a kind of a messenger molecule so that the hemoglobin will release oxygen in circulation. So if we off gas too much carbon dioxide, we can have circulating oxygen that doesn't get released. This is like a simplistic way of describing that. So the answer for how to optimize carbon dioxide preservation is to breathe lightly on the inhalation, to sip the inhalation, have a slow timed exhalation and to do it deep from the belly. They call the LSD breath Light inhalation, slow exhalation, deep from the belly and breathing through the nose, nasal breathing. Breathing that way will also preserve carbon dioxide, increasing oxygen delivery, ie chi delivery to the tissues and cells. But nasal breathing also increases the paris sinus, sinal production of nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator. Nitric oxide has many functions. I think it's a communication molecule within the immune system, but as a vasodilator it's going to lower blood pressure, it's going to help improve circulation and again, the delivery of the goodness in the blood. So that's just an example of just a breath practice.
Speaker 2:But you put that into. What I'm trying to set up here is that you can imagine that yin yoga is optimizing the terrain for exchange I'm just coined that phrase just here on air with you the terrain of the exchange. The fascia is the terrain of the exchange, goodness getting in and waste coming out. And if we add in the biochemical optimization of the blood through good breathing, that and I haven't even mentioned its effect on the vagal tone or the parasympathetic nervous system, which is all happening too that's where I say, okay, yin yoga is going to help the kidneys from Chinese this is beyond what we can get into now, but it will help the kidneys from a Chinese perspective. It's going to help the liver from a Chinese perspective. It's going to help the lungs from so that these organs are functioning better. Their functions are being. The practice is collaborating with those functions of the yin organs to optimize the production, circulation and storage of our chi. That's my thesis in a broad nutshell.
Speaker 1:And what I love about that is all of this information, both from Chinese traditional medicine, from Western science, from your depth of experience and training, very well founded. I agree with all the things that you said. For sure, Really boils down to distills, to the most simplistic possible type of practice, Right Like move around some, extend your exhale, you know relax.
Speaker 2:Calm your mind, calm your mind. I. There's a new translation I forget the author's name, I feel badly, but there's a new translation of a very seminal text in Chinese medicine called the Huang Dinei Jing. It's the Yellow Emperor's Classic on Medicine, and in one of the early chapters there's a description of what the ancients did to regulate themselves, and the description is they did a practice called Daoyin, of a practice of stretching, massaging, eating, well, calming their mind so that they could bring themselves into harmony with the universe. You know, it's just what you said. It is simple, it's, and so here's the thing though it's simple, it is what you just said, but where I think the Chinese medicine helps, the theory, and it has to be titrated properly. But the theory becomes motivating, and that's what I. This is where I think some knowledge of it goes a long way in terms of this might wrinkle or feel weird, but it goes a long way in terms of the sales pitch for yin yoga and what I mean by that.
Speaker 2:As a teacher, I always told my students to be a good yin teacher. You have to be able to sell this practice, in the sense that when you stay in a pose for five minutes, you know it's not always comfortable, you know to get that the stress on the tissue it's going to does bring a tolerable, appropriate level of mild discomfort is the way I try to articulate it. It's sort of a mildly, slightly bitter, slightly achy sensation during the pose, but then that yields when you come out to a more sweet experience. No-transcript, maybe the yoga culture is maturing, but when I was first starting to teach you in 20 years ago, most people wanted to go to a faster-paced class. They wanted to get their workout on kind of, and so having good stories for what's going on in the Yin practice makes it compelling, I think, for people to practice.
Speaker 2:I know that Sarah Powers said the same thing when she started to consider this with practice that could help optimize her energy state. I noticed that for me that was what did it too. It was like I saw how well it balanced me and how imbalanced I was on multiple factors, only working in a young way. So the stories that kind of support what is going on in Yin yoga in relationship to the energetic state of our being that the map of Chinese medicine can point to, I think, become a compelling story. That is part of a motivation, the necessary motivation for someone to stay with the practice, at least initially.
Speaker 1:Yeah, got it.
Speaker 2:But I always say to my students we're not treating symptoms. And if someone comes up at the end of class and says, well, I have this, which pose should I do? You say I don't know, here's an acupuncturist that I recommend you go see. That's referred out. A good Yin teacher should have a good referral list for acupuncturists or therapists that they don't get into this issue of transgressing scope of practice boundaries.
Speaker 1:So you know, interestingly, we kind of came full circle because we sort of had a discussion about how the danger of this is becoming too reductionistic in the way that we do as Westerners. That's just our DNA.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:But then we ended up with, you know, settling on something that, even though it has nuance and complexity, is reduced right Less movement, less, you know prescribing less diagnostic kind of intent. So in a way I mean that is a bit reduced as well.
Speaker 2:How do we understand that a little bit more. I'm not quite. I may have lost the thread when you said that I don't quite understand what you're meaning there.
Speaker 1:That the beauty of the practice and a skill in imparting it in many ways is less complicated than we try to make it. I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, okay, I got you now. Yeah, yeah it. I mean, look, I forget the workshop I did with Paul Greeley. But this may have been something he said off the cuff after the workshop, but it was something to the long lines. He said I can't believe people pay me money just to have them go into a post for five minutes and be quiet with them. He didn't, he didn't put up, he didn't say a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he just had his classes for just postures and and that can be the ultimate minimalism- in a way, and I think maybe that's the direction of a personal practice to be able to be in silence by yourself, and I think I think the refinement that we've come to in the world is bringing in tools, practices and maps of of of how to use tools to help people help support people to be with them and understand what's happening to them.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, I mean the more I know, the more information I absorb, you know from different sources and disciplines, the more simple my teaching becomes. Yeah, because you're right. I mean take a pose. Let let me use my wealth of experience, my extensive education, to help you sit in that pose in a way that is best for you.
Speaker 2:That's what it comes down to. Does that Zen teacher Iqiu had a student that came to him and and said, I guess I think that the Zen teacher had written a book of poems or something. And and the students said, would you mind writing something for me in your book of poems? And so the Iqiu took the book, the poems, and on the first page just wrote the words pay attention and handed it back. And he said, could you say just a little bit more? And so the master took it back and wrote pay attention, pay attention. Just reiterated the set, the first line, and it went on a third time.
Speaker 2:Is that ultimately the teaching was pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. You know, and that's the maps. If we get only see the map, we lose. We're not paying attention to our experience, which is the terrain. And and so the maps, the best they can do is help us connect to and understand and make sense of and then really experience our own terrain. And from our own terrain, whether it's the limitation of your acetabulum, or whether it's, you know, a sense of hamperedness or, you know, stuck she that's making you irritable, or whatever it is like, the more you understand what's happening and you explore a variety of tools for how to work with what's happening. That's just to reiterate that's when you're the creative intelligence of your own, she, I think, starts to find novel solutions to things.
Speaker 1:Thank you, that's great.
Speaker 2:My pleasure.
Speaker 1:This has been like a very vastly different conversation that I thought we were going to have just full disclosure, but really, really edifying for me, like really educational. I definitely feel like I have a new avenue to explore for these concepts and I really, truly thank you for that.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:If people want to learn more about you, or maybe they're interested in you know, learning more in a training setting from you, where can they find out more?
Speaker 2:My website is joshsummersnet. That's where my partner, terry, and I have our classes. We have our weekly classes, we have online trainings and I just mentioned we have a new series of trainings called Yin Yoga and Chi Cultivation. So it's specifically looking at not just Yin Yoga but using the kind of the creative approach, the creative functional approach of Yin Yoga to cultivating the Chi with acupuncture based massage, mobility and yang, motion and stability training with Pranayama and meditative work as well.
Speaker 1:Wow, talk about holistic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, try to move that direction.
Speaker 1:Very cool, awesome. Well, again, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. Thanks for having me.