Depression: A Traditional Chinese Medicine Perspective

All the great Chinese physicians of the past have talked about the healing of the spirit as being one of the highest forms of medicine. Now this sounds like a cute kind of trite phrase, but what does the healing of the spirit really mean and why is it so important? In this video I want to share a little bit about what I think healing the quote inner child is and how you can actually do that, but most importantly, why you should do that. Hey, I'm Alex Hine, author of the health book, Master the Day. So I've included the first link below is a free case study, this biography of a man who supposedly lived to 256 years old. I don't think he did, but he shared these four practices when he was interviewed for Time Magazine in the early 1900s. Now the first link is for an actual article on this man's four longevity practices. So why is this idea of the healing of the spirit and the healing of the psyche or the child, why is that considered so essential? You know, all of these great physicians and all of our most ancient medical texts talk about the shin or the healing of the spirit to be one of the most important and one of the highest forms of medicine. Now one of the reasons this is so important is because in Chinese medicine, there's this idea that everything material we see, including material structural changes in our body in terms of illness, begins with a non-material or energetic, if you want to use that word, origin. So energy precedes matter. And building off of this, what is one of the most fundamental ways that something non-material affects our physical body? Our emotions, our thought patterns. So if I'm getting repeatedly triggered by something in my life, it is setting off an emotion which sets off a cascade of biochemistry. And there are then physiological changes, and if those go on for long enough, structural changes. So the psyche, I tie in with that idea of the invisible architect or the invisible scaffolding of the body. Just like the universe is built up of subatomic particles and is built up of all these kind of things that we can't see, like we can't see wind, we see the effect of the wind. In the same way, we can't see the psyche, but we can see the effect of the psyche. Now I love this quote, I don't know who it's truly attributed to, but it says, There are no incurable diseases, only incurable people. So let's talk about this idea of dysfunctional patterns and loops. So most of us have some kind of dysfunctional pattern in our life, right? It's related to one psychological or emotional aspect, and then typically a habit or physical action we do. My aunt, once around the Thanksgiving dinner table, called it loops, because you're looping back in the same direction. You're dating the same guys, eating the same foods whenever you're stressed, take the same high pay but low fulfillment job. It's just like we're going looping on our lifeline and our timeline in our biography. You can see the patterns. But with loops, especially with psychological or emotional loops, we keep repeating the same patterns because we're being triggered in the same exact way. So these kind of loops are the ways we set the upper ceiling, the upper limit on our potential in life. When the person comes to me and says she's been dating the same guys that don't value her over and over and over for decades, that loop has the action, the habits of dating the same men, choosing them, staying there, and the emotional or psychological precedent, the thing that comes before that makes that so enticing. Or the person that as soon as they earn money and get a paycheck, they have to blow it all because, you know, life is short and you better live now. Or the person who, again, either self-sabotages all the time or they know they're sick, they know they're diabetic but they can't stop eating donuts, can't stop getting burgers and fries every night. Or that person who drinks the three-quarter bottle of wine or a bottle of wine or a bottle and a half a night to sleep, they know that's damaging them but they can't stop it. For me, the fundamental act that begins the healing of the psyche is really tracking our loops, tracking our dysfunctional patterns. So really the action step for this is to have a little notebook or have your phone and write down all the dysfunctional patterns in the quadrants of your life. For me, it started by tracking the pieces of my life, for example, finances when I was young, dating, not having enough friends, just the general areas where I was performing the lowest and was the most unhappy, those were the first areas that demonstrated I had loops, I had dysfunctional patterns that were not allowing me to get the results that I wanted. So I tracked them. And the second thing for this healing of the psyche or healing of these dysfunctional patterns and loops in the spirit is if you've begun tracking your loops, you know, for example, that anytime I get a paycheck, I blow it all right away because I feel safe when I do that and I feel like life is short. The second part is being aware of the psychological root of it. Do I spend money because I grew up in a household where there just never was enough and so if I had food or money available, I just grabbed it and held on to it and then used it? You know, you can have a person who spends all their money or saves all their money with the same psychological root behind it, this kind of one is like a little bit scarcity minded and one is I guess you could say scarcity minded in another sense that life is short, screw it. The other one is money is short, I'm going to hold on to it forever and the same shows up in dating. There's plenty of people, you devalue them. This is the best person ever, then you cling on for dear life. So for me, the healing of the spirit begins with you track your patterns, which you may already have some awareness of, but then you really, really go deeper to track how many times this has happened and what is the psychological root of this? What do I feel emotionally when I fulfill that habit or fulfill that pattern? And by doing this, you can begin to bring to light some of that subconscious material that's been lingering there and that's been kind of unresolved. So I hope this helps you begin that very, very important phase of healing that darkness in life that no one wants to go into, that feeling of if everyone's going to leave me, why don't I just, you know, why don't I not care? If I'm going to lose all my money anyway, why don't I just burn it all now? Or I probably am not going to have all these awesome things in my life, so I'm going to be a little bit detached from them and I'll probably lose my job and they'll dump me and lose all my money. Being aware of those is the first step towards healing. I hope that helps. Again, the first link below is for the case study of Li Qingyun and his four keys to longevity and living a long life. And then before you go, check out these related videos right here.