Say qi-eese

Qi (pronounced like the 'chee' in cheese) is found everywhere in Chinese medicine. Tai Qi, Qi Gong, Da Qi, Zhen Qi, Bin Qi, Wei Qi. Spend 5 minutes with an acupuncturist and you'll hear more qis than you would in school on photo day. But what is it?  Well, as with most topics in Chinese medicine there are a few answers. My favourite? Qi is… everything! 
The Tao Te Ching, a seminal Taoist texts explains that "from one came two, from two came three and from three came the ten thousand things [which means everything else]". The 'two' in this sentence is Yin Qi and Yang Qi, dark and light, female and male. In nature these two polar opposites can be seen to give rise to creation (thanks Mum and Dad!).
The more yin a thing is the darker, denser or colder it is; the more yang, the brighter, sparser or warmer it is.
Yin qi and yang qi govern everything and are relative to one another. Things are really only more yin or more yang. You can't ever get to the end of one or the other. When you do they transform into their opposite. That's why there's a black dot in the white half and a white dot in the black half.  
With all this qi about it becomes necessary to rename some of it for the sake of clarity. The differentiation of Qi is similar to  Water. Ice, water and steam  is all H2O but if we just called it water we'd struggle to get our Baileys at the right temperature. Qi in the body can also be understood as a trinity called the 'three treasures': Jing, Qi, Shen:

• Jing is the densest qi in the body and is what makes up the oiliest, muckiest, darkest bits of us - body fluids, semen, eggs, etc. The real building blocks.  
• Qi is the motive force that moves blood and lymph fluid around our body, it is nerve conductivity, digestion, respiration - all those things that, if they stopped moving, would cause discomfort, disease and decay.  
• Shen is spirit. It is the parts of us essential to our identity and relationships that will never appear on the dissection tray. Our emotions and the spiritual aspects of us are all summed up by shen. However, as there are different forms of qi, likewise there are different forms of spirit, or shen.

Also from Yin and Yang come the qi of the wu xing or five phases. These are the five phases of nature and of the body.
In the body, the wu xing govern the organs of the body. Each organ has its own form of qi. These qis govern certain movements and functions of the body e.g. Liver qi is upwards and expansive, it governs the free flow of emotions, when blocked it leads to anger; Kidney qi descends and grasps, it governs Will, when blocked it leads to fear. Now here's the kicker: the definition of health is the movement between the phases. 

From the  diagram above we can see that the movement runs around the outside: 'the generating cycle' and as a 5 pointed star on the inside: 'the limiting cycle'. These indicate the two primal forms of change of growth and destruction. Where the body is allowed to grow without limits pathologies such as cancer develop. Where the body is limited without the ability to grow or expand constrictive disorders like stroke or COPD develop. 
Change therefore is not just beneficial, it is essential to human health. 
However, when most of us are confronted by change we feel anything but healthy! Instead our feelings may range to fear, lack of control and grief. This resistance to change, in some thinkers opinions, is the root cause of all dis-ease. 
So, next time you feel fretful, anxious, scared, angry, resentful or generally insecure about change simply repeat to yourself: 

"All change is good"

The more this plays on your inner iPod the smoother and healthier the transition will become.

Love it or Leave it

An article that trended a while back by Miya Tokumitsu opined that the 'creed' of do what you love (DWYL) devalues work. That for every Steve Jobs-ian Creative doing what she or he loves, there are 1000 or so disempowered minimum-wage grunts doing the heavy lifting. That DWYL is a bourgeois sentiment espoused by MacBook-wielding frappucino-drinkers and that nobody who actually works for a living can maintain such entitled sentiment. Well of course they can. And of course they should. In fact I believe that far from the sentiment being bourgeois, taken to its fullest expression, it is a revolutionary statement that's as Marxist as an iron bull. 

I admit that a word like love is hard to define and, regardless of its definition, often at odds to the hard-nosed business world, but also to 'carey-sharey' professions (I know many physical therapists, including myself, who have to be very careful with the language they use on websites and marketing material in order to clearly separate themselves from those in the business of 'negotiable affection'). So love is apparently a word that has no place in any business or  contractual relationships.  But I have a question for the 20 and 30-somethings who are being told "just be grateful if you've got a job". Why be grateful for a job where no-one cares about you? You wouldn't settle for a relationship with a person who didn't care about you (hopefully). Transactional analysis understands human relationships as a series of transactions, the purpose of which is to receive 'strokes', or units of attention. Emotionally and psychologically we derive meaning and an understanding of our world from the reactions of those around us. 

Admittedly romantic love or infatuation is not a helpful model of love to apply to business scenarios. This is because romantic love is about as robust as a paper trampoline - you may have noticed that in no rom-com ever has the budding lethario brushed his teeth in the bathroom while the woman of his dreams enjoys taking a poo. But what about Beatles-love? You know: "Love is all you need", "G-d is Love", "Love is all around us" (admittedly that wasn't The Beatles). What about love in its grandest sense - as the motivation for, and the power behind creation?
  

This summer I met the insanely awesome Professor Laurie Zoloth at Limmud in the Woods. Professor Zoloth directs the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago. Her reduced biography covers more pages than my university dissertation. Main point of relevance: her service on the NASA Planetary Protection Advisory Committee (apparently that's a real thing!). When I asked her what being on a Committee that sounds like it's from a Joss Whedon movie entailed, she explained that she was responsible for "advising on the ethical issues around terraforming" - and probably wearing her knickers outside her tights. Now if you can think of any level of technological or creative power that exceeds the ability to reshape an entire planet then please, do share, because I can't. This is literally a Godlike level of power (if you believe the literature) and  it's refreshing to see that the President of the United States of America considers there may be ethical implications to its use. 

Now, if you wish, imagine that the twin strands of DNA are a metaphor for power and love. With every growth in power, true evolution occurs when there is a corresponding growth in the compassionate, or loving, application of that power; and here's where I finally explain why DWYL is at least a little bit Red. Marx argued that there is a fundamental conflict between the Bourgeoisie, who own and control the means of production in society, and the Proletariat, who simply sell their labour power in the market place of Capitalism. Because the proletariat are divorced from the fruits of their labour, he argued, there is no common interest in the work place. This is kind of the opposite of what happens in the best case volunteering projects, self-employment and, it could be argued, in the best families. 

Parents, on the whole don't enjoy changing nappies. On the whole though they appreciate it as part of the wider picture. Self-employed people, Steve Jobs-ian Creatives included, don't enjoy vast swathes of their jobs - be it weathering the rash of predatory SEO-ranking cold calls, filing tax returns, marketing or any of the other parts of the job other than the one they're actually trained for. They do these things out of a belief that it benefits the purpose of their business. This could be because that self-employed people have what your 'average' workers may not: an identity that includes the work that they do. They are fulfilled.

When you're at a house party and you ask some random what they do, I think you can pretty much tell whether they enjoy their job from the way they tell you about it. Rarely does someone enthusiastically gush that they are in telemarketing. But what if the workplace could be transformed into an arena where, when the most menial, the most distasteful tasks need to get done, they are done with a loving intent? What would this do to us as human beings? Put aside for a moment the need to eat, what would happen if we refused to do work for any reason apart from fulfillment, whatever our needs were. Some people are fulfilled by succeeding in the material arena. They are genuinely happiest with big houses and shiny cars. And, critique of the whole Capitalist system aside for a moment, if it doesn't hurt anyone else, why not? But some people are not completed by those things, even if MTV tells them they should be. Maybe they need committed relationships or someone who pays their thoughts and feelings attention (possibly even approval). Maybe they need statues in their honour, power or the ability to shape the world around them in a tangible way. Maybe they need to care for others. Maybe they just need bacon . Whatever, it takes all kinds of kinds.  

The sociology of education examines school as the training ground for work life. Educational guru, Sugata Mitra explains that the systems we use in the UK is a hangover from Victorian times. That nothing would get done if we all went around expressing what we really, really want (thank you Spice Girls), and that expressing and integrating emotions slows down productivity, is IMO also a fallacy passed down by repressed Victorians.  And, to be frank Britain can't really slow down its rate of productivity much more without ceasing to attend work at all. 

However, when education and  work start to genuinely celebrate diversity it will have to acknowledge that we all learn differently and that we are all fulfilled by different environments. The quest, by the people for the people, to create work environments that actually get them what they most need is a radical transformation that is not just Marxist but utopian in its fullest sense.