The Yin-Yang of People, Geography, and Health (article)

Life evolves as a force that dynamically transforms us without our awareness. Freudian psychotherapists and traditional Chinese medical practitioners are likely to agree on that. That force is psychic energy for Freud and qi for the Chinese. Freud used an iceberg to explain the interplay of the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious. The Chinese think of the body as a landscape full of five elements: fire, metal, wood, earth, and water. Just as a psychodynamic therapist would examine a person’s intrapsychic conflicts, a Chinese healer would manipulate a person’s qi through, for example, the placement of a potted plant or an aquarium. In discussing people or earth or sea, the Chinese focus on the issues of yin-yang (or opposing forces), the five elements, and the dynamic relationship between people and environment.

Throughout my childhood in Hong Kong, I heard from adults which “dry and firey” food I should not eat, what “yin and damp” place I should not go, or with which “yin and damp” person I should not associate. I did not really understand how a dehydrated person could be called “damp,” or why a catatonic individual could be “windy,” or how one could be “woody,” living in a plant-free concrete jungle of high-rise apartments full of metal furniture.

My main question was: Why are people described in geographic terms? Now, years later, I am still examining what they said from the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine and beginning to try to understand it from the Western psychological perspective in which I am trained. I am quite intrigued by the body-geography link and the body-mind-soul connection, and have begun to name myself “sealandsky” or “bodymindspirit” in cyberspace.

Psychology, as we know it in the West, does not exist in the traditional Chinese worldview. It has not been popular in Chinese universities or bookstores. To many modern Chinese, psychology is only for the serious mentally ill. Some psychological insights, however, are introduced by way of other fields such as philosophy, religion, ethics, and medicine.

In lieu of Western psychological concepts, yin and yang are major concepts in the Chinese psyche. Including concepts of geography, meteorology, environment, and health, yin and yang encompass the concept of opposites such as between hill and valley, sun and moon, light and shade, hot and cold, active and passive, positive and negative, expansion and contraction, clear and unclear, and masculine and feminine. I was and still am puz-

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zled about the assignment of all these qualities to people, landscapes, and health.

Another concept is tien-jen-hsiang-ying or microcosm-macrocosm correspondence. This concept originated from the Taoist naturalist worldview that the microcosm and the macrocosm maintain a correspondence. The microcosm refers to the person comprised of internal organ functions, sensations, and emotions — roughly the body and the psyche. The macrocosm is the environment including geographic systems such as weather, seasons, and time. According to the Chinese, there are six body/psyche-environment parallels: feng (wind), han (coldness), shu (hotness), shih (dampness), tsao (dryness), and huo (fire). Each of these states in both the body and the environment can cause harm when they are excessive. For instance, a Chinese person may describe himself as having kan-huo, or “liver fire.” “Liver fire” is regarded as the cause of a syndrome including symptoms such as dizziness, blurred vision, bad temper, and fatigue, rather than a fever as measured by a Western thermometer. Such terms are not just cultural idioms, but address culture-specific health concepts.

How does yin-yang relate to microcosm-macrocosm correspondence? According to Taoism, everything is constantly changing to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between the person and the geographic environment. Yin-yang is the process of constant cyclical transitions, as shown by the yin-yang diagram, indicating the cycles of water-ice, day-night, summer-winter, and heat-cold. Health in traditional Chinese medicine is maintaining a balance between yin and yang.

Besides the concept of yin-yang, wu-xing, or the five phases or elements, also suggests a steady sense of change. Wu refers to the number five; xing refers to the five major inorganic elements in the geophysical world: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. Each element corresponds to an internal organ system and psychological functioning. Metal corresponds to the lung and large intestine, and is responsible for anxiety. Wood corresponds to the liver and gall bladder, and is responsible for anger. Water corresponds to the kidneys and the urinary bladder, and is responsible for fear. Fire corresponds to the heart and small intestine, and is responsible for happiness. Earth corresponds to the spleen and the stomach, and is responsible for desire. Excesses of any one of the five elements will upset the balance in the person’s environment and disrupt his health. To restore physical and psychological health, treatments are given to manipulate the person’s qi or life energy, or feng-shui (wind-water) is practiced to control the external environment. Feng-shui is the correct placement of houses and furnishings or the geographic modification of a person’s location.

To a Western psychotherapist, manipulating geographic factors may seem unrelated to a person’s psychological and physical health. Body, mind, and geography seem contradictions. But history is full of contrasts, and cultures deal with antithetical forces directly or indirectly. Throughout Chinese history, statues of different religions coexisted in the same temple. In 1997, Great Britain returned colonial, capitalist Hong Kong to communist, socialist China. Thereafter, China added to its constitution a “one country, two systems” clause. How can the antithetical forces of market capitalism and a command economy coexist? I believe it’s the acceptance of ambivalence and contrasts, and the ability to let go of the urge to categorize and compartmentalize.

To balance yin and yang, my mother still tells me not to drink too much beer because it’s too “cold,” or not to eat too many fried or spicy foods, such as potato chips, because they are too “hot.” For the practice of feng-shui, my family buys only houses that face south and my friends still place an aquarium strategically in their houses to maintain the right flow of qi. My fellow Americans, of Chinese origin or not, use acupuncture to restore proper qi-flow and maintain their health.

Frankly, I do not always understand it all. But I know that if I use only Western science and empiricism to try to understand traditional Chinese medicine, I can never achieve a fully objective understanding or subjective experience of it. Whether or not we can deny its validity and its proposed relationship between the person/psychology/health and the environment/geography/macrocosm, we need to understand how the concepts of balance and dynamic equilibrium have allowed contrasting thoughts — for example, Buddhism and Taoism, capitalism and socialism — to coexist in Chinese culture literally under the same roof. For thousands of years, China has been a pragmatic culture with concurrent, opposing values. A short-lived science alone is not adequate for furthering knowledge and achieving health.

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