Harmonizing Body and Mind: The Relationship between Yin Yoga and Traditional Chinese Medicine

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.

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Free Resources:
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Yin Yoga Podcast.
I'm your host, mandy Ryle, andI am very excited to share with
you this week a conversationthat I had with Josh Summers.
I'll give a more detailed introof Josh at the beginning of the
interview, so I wanted to treatthis introduction as a bit of a
reflection.
As you may know, yin Yoga hasits own unique flavor of subtle

(00:27):
body.
So, unlike the other yogapractices which are aligned with
Indian philosophy, yin isassociated with traditional
Chinese medicine and traditionalChinese philosophies.
So instead of the chakras, forexample, we have the organs.
Rather than the nadis, we havethe meridians.
Instead of calling the lifeforce, prana, we understand it

(00:48):
in Yin Yoga to be the chi.
So I have to admit that, evenafter learning about traditional
Chinese medicine and its subtleanatomy from books and other
teachers over these many years,I've always had quite a bit of
ambivalence about its functionin Yin practice, so much so that

(01:11):
I, honestly, have completelygiven it up, and I have felt
strongly all this time that myambivalence comes from a place
of ignorance.
So I took advantage of mystatus as a podcaster to invite
an expert Josh to help me tounderstand the conversation.

(01:31):
We had, however, turned out tobe completely and delightfully
different from what I hadplanned a much more
sophisticated and nuanceddiscussion than what I had
anticipated for sure.
So we discussed traditionalChinese medicine in Yin yoga
practice and how it can beutilized and how perhaps we

(01:56):
should exercise caution,especially as Yin teachers.
This conversation has thepotential to ruffle some
feathers, especially if thesubtle body is a big part of
your practice or teaching.
So I want to reiterate that Isupport teachers bringing their
unique passions and interests totheir students.

(02:17):
We each and all have somethingspecial to share, but perhaps
this interview could facilitatesome self reflection that could
enhance your teaching orpractice, perhaps bring in a new
depth.
And I don't want to leave youout of this conversation because
I feel like there might be somestrong feelings.

(02:37):
So if you are listening onSpotify, you know now you can
just go into those show notesand leave a comment, or you can
find me on Instagram or TikTok.
My links are in the show notes.
Please enjoy this wonderfulconversation.
Everyone with Josh Summers,everyone to this conversation

(03:03):
with Josh Summers.
I think this is going to be areally cool conversation because
for over two decades, josh hasimmersed himself in the
practices of Chinese medicine,buddhist meditation and Yin yoga
.
He trained with Paul Grilly andSarah Powers and Yin, but he
has also earned a master's inOriental medicine from the New

(03:25):
England School of Acupuncture inMassachusetts back in 2004.
At that time he had a dualfocus on Chinese or biology and
Japanese styles of acupuncture,and after school he even
continued his studies withKikomatsu Moto.
I know of Josh because he isalso the podcast host of the

(03:47):
podcast Every Day Sublime, whichI've been listening to for
quite some time, and he is alsothe author or co-author of
several books, which I will, ofcourse, link to in the show
notes.
I invited Josh on because Ican't imagine anyone better to
help me personally grasp theconnections between Yin yoga and

(04:07):
Chinese medicine.
So welcome Josh.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Thanks for having me, mandy, good to be here, got it?

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Got it Okay.
So one of the things that I'mdiscovering I really love about
interviewing other Yin teachersis getting to talk about, like
what really makes them tick,like what keeps you motivated
and inspired month after month,year after year.

(04:35):
Because, especially because weare both teachers of Yin
teachers, I honestly feel likethis is our superpower.
What we love is our superpower.
So what do you really value themost as a teacher?
What are your big passions inYin?

Speaker 2 (04:52):
My biggest passion, I would say, is the Dharma and I
use the word Dharma with capitalD, not so much specific just to
Buddhism but just Dharma interms of teachings that liberate
the heart and mind.
And you mentioned theacupuncture school a bit.

(05:13):
But when I was in acupunctureschool, my first year of
acupuncture school, a Nayan Garyoga friend of mine had
registered for a silentmeditation retreat at the
Insight Meditation Society and Ihad never gone on a retreat
before and he sort of invited meto join him and on that retreat

(05:34):
I found I felt like I found apractice of awareness and
liberating awareness fromunnecessary forms of suffering.
It was a very powerfulexperience for me.
And along the way, during thatretreat, I also encountered an
incredible or exceptional amountof physical discomfort brought

(05:58):
on by sitting still, meditationafter meditation, and that I
found that physical paindisconcerting.
And it took me years to be ableto articulate this.
But I would say I felt betrayedin a sense because at that time
I had really dedicated myselfto Iyengar yoga.
I had practiced probably six orseven years of that time and

(06:22):
was doing a couple hours a dayof Iyengar practice and didn't
understand why, having done somuch physical work that I was
still encountering suchdiscomfort in my body.
And you know, as luck would haveit, I came off that retreat
curious about ways to sit inmeditation more comfortably and

(06:43):
a student friend of mine hadherself just returned from a
yoga teacher training with PaulGreeley and Sarah Powers.
Her name was ChristineO'Shaughnessy and she initially
said to me Shosh, if you don'tknow about Yin yoga yet, you're
going to love it.
It's the, it's the practice foryou.
It's a meditative practice.
It weaves in theory fromChinese medicine, emphasizing

(07:04):
the channels, and it preparesthe body to sit more comfortably
.
So I was very curious to beintroduced to Yin yoga at that
time.
Unfortunately, the introductiondidn't go very well.
I went, I took one of herclasses and did the polite thing
of like, oh, that's really nice, it's very interesting.

(07:27):
But back in the back of my mindI was judging the whole thing
as being sloppy, lazy,malaligned, just just not safe.
And I went back on a retreat acouple months later, not having
done anything with Yin yoga,slam my body into the same

(07:47):
degrees of pain and frustrationand more or less made a
commitment to myself on thatsecond retreat that let me at
least give Yin yoga try for awhile, and so I and I was going
to going through acupunctureschool at the time and I would
sit down with my notes and justhang out in a Yin yoga pose for
four or five minutes.

(08:08):
And after doing that for threeor four months I went back on
another retreat and I couldn'tbelieve the difference, that
there was a night and daydifference, not just in my body
and the reduction of pain that Iexperienced, but there was a
palpable but hard to describeinner softening of my mind where

(08:29):
I just didn't feel as reactive,I didn't feel as edgy, and at
that time I also, through myfriend, I, got introduced to
Sarah Powers teaching and I sawthe way that Sarah was just
beautifully weaving Dharmathemes, meditative themes, into

(08:51):
her Yin classes and for me thatopened the door.
That was like the green lightthat said you can do this, you
can bring the Buddha Dharma, theheart of the Buddha Dharma,
right into a yoga studio, into ayoga class, using the format of
Yin yoga.
And that just really captivatedme because I felt like I found
the practice, the inner practicethat I fell in love with, which

(09:15):
was Buddhism, and I found anouter practice or a form in
which I could both cultivatethat myself and share it with
others in an accessible way.
So that's a long story, longanswer to your question.
But that's sort of what catchesme on fire, and still does, is
that I see Yin yoga as a greatvehicle.

(09:37):
It's sort of an open-ended,open source practice that the
teacher can bring in whateverthey want into it.
But for me it allowed me toreally channel my love for the
Dharma.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
It's that synthesis of what's up here and also
what's in the body, what's inthe brain and the body and
spirituality.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yes, and the cultivation of the power of
awareness that can grow withinthe practice and start to see a
more profound, almost liberativelevel, I think is just really
unique, particularly because ofthe challenges that come up in
Yin yoga.
It's not you know, you'remarinating in appropriate levels

(10:18):
of challenge, whether it'sphysical sensation or the inner
reactivity that surfaces, andworking with that is at that
edge, is, I think, what reallylets, facilitates a kind of
transformation of character.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
I totally agree with that 100%.
You know when you were tellingyour story about, you know your
first official Yin class ledpractice, which wasn't so great,
and then maybe what helped youto fall in love was your
personal practice, right thattime alone on the mat.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, I think I it wasn't that the class was bad,
it was a good class.
It was just that I had a set ofkind of lenses on that could
only interpret things throughthose lenses and so I had
certain, certain rules aboutwhat a pose should be if it's
going to be properly aligned orproperly sustained, and Yin yoga

(11:22):
was smashing all those rules,yeah, and and, and so, yeah, I,
I I did take classes with myfriend and then I I really found
my personal practice and, and Ithink what's what was different
from me from when I was growingup as a Yin yoga or as a yoga
student, was that, again, I grewup within the school of of

(11:44):
Iyengar yoga, but personalpractice was what was emphasized
there.
You went to classes as kind of aworkshop for how to refine your
own home practice.
That was always the way it wasaccepted.
So the the culture of doingyour yoga in a live class as the
, as the place where you do youryoga, that was very foreign to
me.
It still is in some ways.

(12:04):
You know, I see classes asopportunities to get insight,
get inspiration, get knowledgeabout how to practice, but the
real practice comes at home orin the privacy of your own
practice.
That's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
No, that's actually pretty cool.
I like that.
You know, if I'm honest, likeI'm a hypermobile person, I have
a chronic pain issue.
Group classes don't work for me.
That is just too activating, itjust sets things off.
I teach group classes, I loveteaching a group class.

(12:41):
I just cannot participate.
I can't.
I can't participate in them.
You know, for me yoga practiceis is by myself.
It's on my mat, switch doorclosed, or sometimes open, and
you know a dog standing over meand that's what it's, that's
what it is, and so that's kindof liberating.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
I guess I'll go ahead the thought I had that had
started interrupting the, as yousaid, that is.
You know, one of thechallenging things is once you,
once you become educated in yoga, but also particularly once you
get educated about you know theimplications of skeletal
variation and the principles offunctional practice.
It's it can be outrightdifficult to take a public class

(13:27):
if the teacher isn't alsoeducated about functional
alignment and skeletal variation, because then you just you're
bumping heads with someone who'sgot aesthetic rules around how
the pose is supposed to look andthey're they're squawking at
you that you're not alignedproperly, you're ignorant about
skeletal variation, so so it'sthat that part of it can be can

(13:49):
be really tricky.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Aha, okay, cool, yes, agree, yeah.
So you kind of already answeredmy question a little bit,
because I think that, inaddition to a little bit more of
connecting with what reallymakes us tick as teachers,
sometimes it's also reallyvaluable to determine what we're

(14:12):
not, what we just doesn't getus excited.
Because here's why I ask thisbecause a lot of the listeners
to the podcast, or you andteachers, are aspiring in
teachers, and I I definitelyknow that when we first start
out as teachers, we really feelvery strongly that we just have
to be everything to everyone andthat there is no amount of

(14:35):
knowledge that will ever reallytruly make us completely
qualified, you know.
So we keep adding more and moreand more from all different
sets of information rather thanreally just focusing on some
things.
So is there anything thatyou're just not into, that you
just don't want to bring forthin your teaching?

Speaker 2 (14:58):
That's a good question.
I haven't been asked that orthought about that.
I would say there's things Ifeel comfortable bringing
forward because of my own timespent with those topics and,
like you're saying, there's sortof that.
Bernie Clark would know thename of this principle in
science the more you know, theless you're, the more you

(15:18):
realize you don't have littleyou know like study something
the Dunning Kruger effect orsomething like that, yeah.
Yeah.
So, that said, you know, themore I look at, say, chinese
medicine, or the more I look atthe Buddha Dharma, the more you
can look at, you know, theevolving science of fascination,
the more I realize.
Oh well, I don't.
There's a lot more questionscoming now.

(15:39):
But you know, I would say, ifyou, the thing that I have found
that I got tired of teachingwas sort of alignment or
aesthetically based alignment inin Asana and taking people
through more active classes,where something I don't like

(16:00):
active yoga, or I lovepracticing active yoga, but as a
teacher I felt exhausted fromjust giving verbal, verbal,
physical cues and in yoga openedup the doorway that I could,
just I could get people intoposes and let them figure out
the best form of the pose forthemselves.

(16:20):
And then there was thiswonderful time in the pose where
I could address something thatwas of interest to me.
You know the thing, thatsomething that I would be
interested in, say somethingfrom Chinese medicine or
something from meditation, orhow they interact and speak to
each other, and both thosefields, those two fields,

(16:42):
chinese medicine and Buddhismhave.
I haven't feel, I don't feellike I've begun to even exhaust
either one.
I mean, they're just, they'reinexhaustible fields, and I've
been teaching now 20 plus yearsand feel like I'm not the well
hasn't run beginning to run dry,and so if I had, I think I

(17:03):
would have stopped teaching.
If I hadn't discovered this,like I would have gotten too
bored, I would have probablyjust focused exclusively on
being an acupuncturist and letgo of teaching, just because
taking people through posturewith anatomical cues was not
very interesting to me at acertain point.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yeah, I feel that.
I mean, anybody who's beenteaching for a long time has
certainly either had torediscover their practice
through a new lens, or they justquit teaching.
I mean, I've kind of been theremyself.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
Can I say one thing too, because you mentioned about
teachers and the maybe thesense of the phrase that comes
up in our practice community isimposter syndrome, because
there's a sense of feeling ofinadequacy.
People study and study andstudy and try to take on more
information, get moreinformation from this person,

(17:57):
this source or that domain.
And you're speaking to thatdynamic.
My partner and I really feeland I'm not, we're not the only
ones that will say this but thereal deepening work is one's own
practice.
The textbooks are like all thedomains of books, are like menus

(18:20):
in a way, suggesting what'savailable, and it's the practice
that really makes the menubecome a meal that can be
digested, assimilated andabsorbed.
So deep practice, whatever formthat takes for the individual,
I think is where A teacher's ownauthenticity is going to emerge

(18:44):
.
I often quote in my training soI used to quote my trainings a
line from the jazz trumpetplayer, clark Terry, who
famously said jazz is a processof imitation, assimilation and
then innovation.
And it took me a while before Irealized that was sort of what

(19:06):
was going on in my own processof development as a teacher,
where I could see myselfimitating Paul Greeley,
imitating Sarah Powers,imitating Joseph Goldstein,
imitating Sharon Sells, justimitating the teachers that
inspired me the most, borrowingtheir phrases, learning their
lines, getting their licks in away.

(19:27):
And then after some time itstarts to become part of your
thing, and then suddenlyinsights about how you could
expand on it or develop it or bemore creative with it start to
come, and that's what I find itgets fun to teach from that.
You know your own creativesynthesis of the material.

Speaker 1 (19:47):
Yes, I agree.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
I just wanted to say that for the teachers that are
in your audience.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
The pattern from jazz is helpful.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, that's really really good, Thank you.
The reason I bring up thethings that you know we are or
want to be an aren't don't wantto be as teachers is because, if
I'm honest, I have never reallyconnected with the subtle body.

(20:19):
It's, I mean, I just I've tried.
You know, as a yin teacher, ofcourse, I had to learn the names
and the locations of themeridians and the organs and,
you know, study their qualitiesand their potential for
disharmony.
It's just, it's not the kind ofinformation that I get excited

(20:41):
about, and I think one of theissues is that I never, I never
fully got the link between themeridians, organs and the
physical practice, practice Like.
To me it just never quite fit.

(21:02):
I felt like we were trying toput something together that
either was already together andtherefore didn't necessarily
need specific attention, orwasn't together.
Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, I just never had connected.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
There's two maps that they're being juxtaposed over
each other.
One's getting juxtaposed overthe other and it feels like
maybe at times forced ordisjointed in that juxtaposition
.
Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 1 (21:32):
That sounds about right.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yes, yes, and also I'm a very I'm a sciencey person
.
I mean, if you talk about likewhat I am as a teacher, I love
data, I love evidence, I lovemaking it simple and
experiential for people.
I just I just love that.
I love data.
What can I say in research?

(21:55):
So I mean, I would really lovefor you to help me connect those
dots, if you can, of, like, howdo we get from Chinese medicine
meridians all this imbalancesto the postures?
Yep, would it be okay, becausethere are probably many people

(22:20):
who aren't familiar with thislink, especially if they're only
exposed to me because I haven'theard about it at all If we
just start with the basics,start with the foundations.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, and the pre-foundation would be I just
empathize with what you'refeeling and expressing the
subtle body.
I would say that was, eventhough I studied acupuncture.
It was also the one, thedynamic of the practice that I
felt.
Personally, I was also a littlebit out to see with and that

(22:57):
goes even back to how it what itfelt like going through
acupuncture school, you know,and being immersed and saturated
in that theory and then tryingto unpack it or assimilate it
into into my Western-lensedconsciousness, and that was I
saw all of my colleagues gothrough this sort of struggle of

(23:20):
how do we in a sense open ourmind and understanding to a very
different model of looking atwhat a human is?
Yeah, and one of the things Ithink would be helpful, just as

(23:41):
we parse this out in aconversation, is, you know, you
mentioned science and Westernscience and a lot of times, for
the most part, western scienceis looking at things with the
eye or instruments of the eyelike microscopes or telescopes,
and looking at objects out thereand the subtle body is a

(24:07):
phenomenological experience inhere.
And so the methodology of howwe understand or kind of look at
it, the subtle body, I thinkwill be endlessly frustrating if
we're looking, trying to usethe eye or instrument of the eye
, and which would lead to a kindof reductionistic analysis of

(24:34):
what's going on with Chi orwhat's going on with the subtle
body.
So that's a little bit of apreamble just to say that it's.
It's sort of the direct is-nessor the direct experience of what
you're feeling that speaks tothe vibrancy of Chi.
So, for example, you know, Igot a poor night's sleep a
couple nights ago and we weretalking about before the call

(24:58):
that whether swings have come in, suddenly fall, it's getting
colder and I'm feeling likethere's a hurricane coming in
and I feel like my Chi is alittle bit suppressed, my
throat's a little scratchier, myenergy's lower.
That's a feeling I have whichwould be described in Chinese

(25:21):
energetic terms of Chideficiency.
There's a depletion of Chi.
I'm not feeling as vibrant asnormal.
Now, if you know, a doctor, aWestern doctor, is not going to
put too much into my subjectivefeeling or all those conditions
I just named.
That's not significant to them.

(25:43):
But from a Chinese perspective,there is this very profound
understanding of the internalclimate, the internal microcosm
of an individual as itintersects with macro climates,
macro conditions outside of themand looks at those

(26:04):
relationships in quite asophisticated degree of detail.
So let me try to put it in avery simple terms for you.
You're a Yin yoga practitionerand teacher.
So something happened when youdid Yin yoga that said inside of

(26:25):
you that said, yes, I like this.
How would you quantify, or Ishould say, how would you
qualify that feeling?
What was the Yin effect on youthat said this yes, more of this
, please.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
What was the?
Hmm, I will say that a littlebit like you, when I first
started Yin, I did not love it.
It was like my introduction toYin was online.
You still have a yoga glowmembership and there are great
Yin teachers on there at thetime and I'm hyper mobile and so

(27:12):
like just kind of being, forexample, in a dragon or
something, for an extendedperiod of time excruciating does
not feel relaxing.
It feels like I'm falling apart, right.
And also I came from likeVinyasa, like an Ashtanga Eve

(27:32):
and Yasa background andeducation.
And then I think maybe it wassomething one of the teachers
said at some point about Yinbeing mild and not needing to
have so much sensation and go sodeep, and so I just backed off,

(27:56):
I just chilled out.
You know, I supported myself alot so that I could sit in
comfort.
You know well, maybe notcomfort.
I want to be comfortable in mypose.
I do.
I want to feel good.
I don't really want toencounter discomfort.
Personally, that's just not mypractice or my teaching.

(28:16):
So, yeah, I think it waslearning.
I think it was learningsomething different Learning to
let go.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
And I guess this may not have been your experience,
but did you feel at some pointso what you're describing there?
What I just heard was you,mandy, the Ashtanga Vinyasa
based practitioner, encounteringin yoga and having going
through a phase of adaptation tothe practice.

(28:48):
You had to figure out how toadapt the practice to suit your
body and the conditions in yourbody 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 justwondering did you feel greater
ease?
Did you feel a sweeter kind ofrelease?
Does any of that touch the cordthat you were feeling?

Speaker 1 (29:12):
I would say so yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah.
So that was it for me, and inthat I found a particularly
delicious relaxation.
And when I coupled it with mymeditation practice from
Buddhism, what I was findingpersonally was that when I did
yin yoga and then meditatedafter so let's say I practiced

(29:37):
for an hour of yin yoga and thensat for a half hour I found
that the yin yoga prepared mephysically, energetically, such
that when I sat there was a real, effortless development of
samadhi or a unified, openstillness, and that's sort of a

(30:01):
precursor precondition inBuddhism for the development of
insight or wisdom.
When the mind is gathered, whenthere's less dispersive,
discursive, fragmented attention, awareness can really see into
the nature of the body and mindin a way that does liberate it

(30:24):
from unhelpful or unskillfulforms of clinging and grasping.
So that feeling of being calm,collected, open, relaxed, at
ease, curious, aware, all ofthat together is sort of what I

(30:48):
refer now to as the experienceof harmonized chi.
So when your energy feelsunified, smooth, calm and
present, that is sort of the Iguess the strike zone in a way
of what, as a teacher or apractitioner, I'm looking for my
practice to help me do so thatI can then really look at things

(31:10):
clearly or see things in apowerful way, and that's the
connection between, that's theexperiential taste of what yin
yoke does to the subtle body iswhat I'm trying to say.
So if you know the experience,my sense is you have the
experience.
Most people have thatexperience.

(31:30):
If they take to yin yoke, theyfind it eventually, or sooner or
later, I should say.
And it's that experience ofjust feeling internally cool,
relaxed, soft and easy, lessirritable, more compassionate,
all of those things togetherthat to me speaks to the

(31:54):
development of one's energy,harmonized flowing, just
functioning better.
And we can get into specifics ofwhat's from a Chinese
perspective.
If we look at that experience ofgoing from, say, a fragmented,
stressed, inflamed, irritatedstate to a calmer, clear,

(32:15):
gathered, unified state, thattransition is a movement from
disruptive G flow G is notmoving as well or as smoothly as
I could to a more optimizedstate of energy flow.
And I think, if I want to justjump into it, I think probably

(32:37):
the stumbling I imagine thestumbling block for you and many
others is the level of detailin the Chinese model around the
descriptions of the channels,the anatomical location of the
channels and the many, manypoints on those channels that

(32:58):
have particular actions andeffects for manipulation of the
energy.
That overwhelms me as anacupuncturist, having worked
with it for a long time.
I was a practicingacupuncturist for 20 years or so
and it's just a lot of materialand I think if anyone hasn't
gone through three or four yearsof acupuncture training it's

(33:19):
just a lot to absorb and ateacher doesn't need to have
that acupuncture degree to teachyou in yoga.
But because the subtle bodyseems to have been taught
through the lens of Chinesemedicine, I think people get
hung up about A not feeling likethey understand it enough to

(33:42):
share it in a way that's helpfulto the students.
But they also get sort ofconfused and overwhelmed by are
they on the right meridian, say.
Yeah, and that's something wecan get into.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
And this is one of the issues that I have struggled
with with regard to the subtlebody and Yin is that I don't.
If we are indeed after thisspecific influence on this
specific meridian or organ, Idon't think any of us are

(34:17):
qualified, necessarily right, toaddress 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 ofpractice Sure.
Scope of practice and yeah, youknow and like, when you're
talking about this, the feelingthat you get this inner softness

(34:41):
and this sweetness and thefeeling like this energy is
harmonized.
You know it's so interestingbecause, like, I have language
for this too, based on mypassion right like this is
parasympathetic activation.
This is, you know, ventralvagal heart rate variability.

(35:02):
You know we could go, we coulddo all the terms there too, so I
just thought that was reallyinteresting.
Is like this feeling ofembodiment, right?
You like?
Yes, maybe we.
It is a phenomenologicalexperience when we consider the
meridians, but we can actuallypoint to data of what it looks

(35:27):
and feels like to be embodied,right?

Speaker 2 (35:31):
There are physiological signals.
I would challenge you justslightly.
Yeah, please.
Parasympathetic activationdoesn'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'slike dopamine.

(35:51):
Doesn't tell you what lovefeels like.
There's a, there is abiochemical expression of love,
meaning there's a biochemicalphenomenon occurring when
someone feels love and that canbe quantified with
neurotransmitters.

(36:12):
But the feeling of love, themeaning of love, the impact of
love is a subjective experiencethat language of poetry and
literature and music try tocapture.
So I would say that's what theChinese medicine is in some ways
.
This is where it's tricky isthat where I try to say it's a

(36:33):
poetic descriptions for pointingto patterns of what it's like,
not what it is Westernscientific eye of the sense
organ of the eye or aninstrument of the eye, but from
the subjective experience ofwhat is it like?
What's it like when your energyfeels like it's sinking?

(36:54):
What's it like when you feellike you have low energy?
What's it like when you feellike you have scattered energy?

Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yes and it's I mean, okay, I like that, I do that
really connects, because it isso comforting and reassuring and
validating to have language forthe things that we experience,
Like there's almost nothingbetter.
I mean, and that's maybesomewhat the role of philosophy,

(37:21):
to what does it feel like Withyoga philosophy, much of that?
I kind of really super dig theKoshas because I feel like this
is such a beautiful expressionof this constellation of self,
or, for my terminology, thebiopsychosocial self.
Right, I think where I getstuck is there's Richard Freeman

(37:49):
says you know, it's likeconfusing the map for the
territory.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Perfect Love that.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
Right, and I that's where I'm getting stuck, because
we got all of these thingswe're supposed to memorize this
morning and I'm like it's alljust those are maps.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
The channels, the pictures of the meridians, the
pictures of the points, thepictures of the descriptions of
the organs, the patterns ofdisharmony, the patterns of
harmony, yin and yang itself.
These are symbolic maps.
Okay, thank you.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
That's what I needed someone to say to me.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah, yeah yeah, and I think so one of the things
that I have been trying toarticulate better and it's an
evolving attempt to articulatethis better is this goes back to

(38:47):
when I first was exposed to yinyoga.
So I was coming, I was goingthrough acupuncture school and
got introduced to yin yoga andthen so I'm still grappling with
all of Chinese medicine theory,just having gone through, got a
masters in it, and after mytraining and a formal training
that I took my first teachertraining with Sarah Powers and

(39:11):
she was talking about how poseswere influencing I think she may
have used meridian at the time.
She's talking about how theposes were influencing the
meridians.
And at the time I knew enoughthat there was a broad evolving

(39:32):
theory amongst acupuncturistscontemporary acupuncturists that
the channels of Chinesemedicine which had kind of
eluded Western anatomists whenthey would dissect cadavers,
they were like we just seeconnective tissue or we see

(39:53):
veins or we see nerves.
We don't see any evidence ofthese channels.
But amongst acupuncturists whenI was going through school
there was a view that and it's atheory that the energy system,
the channels of Chinese medicine, are embedded in the fascia,
that the fascia, theextracellular matrix, is the

(40:16):
biological substratum of thissubtle energy.
And so, having that hypothesisin the back of my mind and then
encountering Sarah Powers' work,the way she was talking about
the poses and stimulatingchannels to harmonize one's
energy, I tacitly signed on andtaught for a while that, yeah,

(40:43):
in the yin pose, when we havethe legs wide and drag and fly,
we'll be stimulating the inneryin channels of the leg.
Or when we do a back bend,we'll be compressing the kidney
channels as it comes up throughthe lumbar.
And I taught like that for awhile.
And as I was teaching like that,I should say because I was in

(41:07):
acupuncturists, I was carefulwhen I taught like that, not to
do the kind of overreach ofscope of practice that you were
hinting at earlier, in that Iknew I was not treating
anybody's conditions.
If someone had renal disease orsomeone was dealing with
cirrhosis of the liver ordepression or heart palpitations

(41:29):
, I wasn't saying, well, oh thenyou simply need to do these
four poses that are going totarget these four channels and
you need to do them every day.
That is in my mind, both MickeyMouse Chinese Medicine and
Mickey Mouse yin yoga.
But I kept seeing that, thatthere was a way that the game of

(41:51):
telephone that was gettingplayed in the yin yoga community
that at least the parts of theyin yoga community that I was in
touch with seemed to.
More and more people werereducing the energetic effect of
yin yoga to correctlystimulating a particular plane
of tissue.

(42:11):
And by virtue of seemingly inthat particular plane of tissue
they were, they were optimizingthe flow in that channel that
was housed in that tissue.
And by optimizing the flowthrough that channel the organ
would suddenly be miraculouslypristine and healthy.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
Pristine organ.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
Yeah, the healthy.
The word pristine comes becauseI was reading a book where Dr
Daniel Keown was talking aboutthe gallbladder ensuresa
spotless, pristine and spotlessenvironment for the fascia
through cleansing of the of thelymph.
But anyway that that viewstarted to take root, that, and

(42:51):
whenever I gave a yin trainingthat would talk about Chinese
medicine, almost invariablysomebody or several people would
come up after and say how can Ilearn more about the channels?
And I just want to clarify I'mspeaking about these channels or
these rivers of energy, usingthe word channel because I think

(43:13):
it conveys more of what it isversus a meridian.
Meridian is sort of a solidline on a map that we're just
already going to create, anabstraction that isn't true to
what really is going on, thatthe fascia and the spaces within
the fascia and the spaces thatthe fascia, the potential spaces
the fascia creates, seems to bea likely candidate for the

(43:36):
location of the, the, theChinese anatomy of the channel.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
And I remember reading quite if you don't mind,
I'll interrupt just for so Iremember reading a long time ago
when I was bound and determinedto connect with this.
I think it was something.
Maybe that was in BernieClark's book about the Japanese

(44:02):
visit, matsumoto and how they.
The theory was that theconnection between the fascia
and the channels was in thishyaluronic acid, chains of
hyaluronic acid, right?
I haven't read that in a while,so I don't know if that's still

(44:22):
like the prevailing theory.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Those are the buzzwords I was introduced to.
I think that was Paul.
I think was Paul really teach?
One of his teachers was HiroshiMotoyama.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
Japanese acupuncturist and physician, I
believe, and spiritual adept,and I think he was involved.
Motoyama was involved withtesting the conductance of chi,
the electrical conductance atthe end of channels.

(45:00):
And and I believe he may havebeen comparing like how
conductant was a channel beforea long held pose was performed
and then after?
Okay, now I've talked aboutthat.
For anonymity sake I want tokeep his name to my close in.

(45:22):
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 ofthe research done at Harvard in
connective tissue and mechanismsof connective tissue response

(45:43):
to different kinds of stresses.
And whenever I'd go see him fora roughing session, he and I
would just, you know, gab shoparound latest stuff.
What are people saying?
And I remember him saying to methat that these skin conductance
tests are of greater chief flowor not.
It were just inherently veryproblematic in terms of

(46:06):
determining what they'reactually showing, and I've used
some of those tools myself.
I got a Japanese tool that wasmeasuring skin.
It's like depending on exactlywhere you put the probe and how
much pressure you put on, yougot wildly different readings
and I became suspicious on thesignificance of what that meant.
But you're right, there wasthis, I think, the idea, which I

(46:27):
think carries water literally.
The idea is that you know theselong chains of hyaluronic acid
which are molecule.
They're very hydrophilicmolecules, meaning they love
water, they attract lots ofwater to them and so if you get
these chains, these waterycrystalline chains, through the
body, the more water you attract.

(46:48):
The water is very conductive ofelectricity and currents of
electricity are likely.
I would say part of what our Qiis, what we're indicating when
we use the word Qi.
Again, I'm not going to say Qiis electricity, because that
would reduce the Chinese conceptto a single phenomena, and I

(47:14):
think there are multiplephenomena overlapping within the
concept of Qi.
But I think consciousness, Ithink emotions, I think
neurotransmitters and hormonesand tissue health and
conductance all come together interms of the way that our felt

(47:38):
experience of our alivenesscomes forward.

Speaker 1 (47:44):
One of the things that I really took from.
There's a book called the Webthat has no weaver.
Maybe Ted Kappchuck, yes.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
And gosh.

Speaker 1 (47:57):
I love this and it's been so influential for me
because I mostly work withpeople who live with chronic
pain, and he was talking aboutbiopsychosocial in this book
really, and how there is anabsence in these philosophies.
I mean, we talk abouttraditional Chinese medicine,
which is one in the same in manyways as the Chinese philosophy,

(48:19):
just like our philosophy isvery strongly bound to our
medical system, and one of thebest ways of really starkly
seeing the difference to meanyway, was that in the Chinese
philosophy there is an absenceof an origin, there is an

(48:44):
absence of a creator, there isan absence of a beginning,
there's only patterns.
There's a constellation as well.
I didn't say it's Ted Kappchuck.
I follow a lot of the stuff hedoes.
He's pretty cool.
Whereas in the western medicaland philosophy systems it's all

(49:07):
about the origin, from ourreligion to our medicine.
I work with people with chronicpain and they are obsessed with
finding out what is that thingthat is causing this.
Except, hardly ever we get areally true answer and even if
we do, it's usually not actuallythe origin and maybe where we

(49:34):
get.
I mean, I don't know what thistheory looks like in other
places, but here in the west wekeep trying, like you said, to
make it concrete andunderstandable to our western
mind.
I need to know the origin, Ineed to know that meridian so I

(49:57):
can fix it.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
That's part of it.
It's definitely part of it.
So let me paraphrase it back Inthe west, we're looking for the
causal X that's creating theproblem of Y.
What's X?
What is the X causing the Y?
And in Chinese medicine thereis no X, there's patterns, as
you're describing.
This is where, again, I thinkfailing to understand the

(50:26):
difference between these twomodels is where I think Yin yoga
teachers will often say oh, ifyou have back pain, then that's
your symptom, then you need.
Well, back pain is associatedwith 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 (50:41):
I have a formula for that.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
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 inChinese medicine school would.
He's like a Baptist preacher upon the pulpit and he would

(51:07):
pound his fist.
He says one sign or symptomdoesn't mean anything.
The sign or symptom only meanssomething when it's put into a
constellation of other signs andsymptoms from which a pattern
of disharmony can be discernedor understood by the
practitioner, usually theacupuncturist.
So for back pain, fordepression, for insomnia, for

(51:33):
indigestion, irritable bowel,whatever the symptom is, there
might be on average five toseven potential patterns of
disharmony, whether patterns ofdisharmony that involve biology,
diet, lifestyle, psychology,sociology, interpersonal

(51:56):
relationships.
You know the collective, theworld.
I mean the world, themetacrisis of the world.
Right now I can definitely feelthat impact on my cheek.
So Chinese medicine looks atall those influences and
discerns what kind of patternare we talking about?
And then from there using thetools of the medicine to rectify

(52:22):
the disharmony within thepattern.
But this is where it becomeshard to study from a Western
lens, because the gold standardfor Western research is the
double-blind randomized trialand.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
That's reductionist yes.
It can only study one thing, asopposed to all the things.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
Well, yeah, because most of the time I thought you
were telling me you werereductionist and I thought no,
no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
sorry, the Western double-blinded yes, randomized
trial.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
Did I describe the reductionistic style of Western
medicine as in a reductionisticway?
That wouldn't be very fair.
But I think what you're sayingis that they're looking for the
one variable.
What's the influence of onething?
Does this medication work ornot against a randomized trial?
I don't know how you can.

(53:15):
The clinical trials I've seenwhere 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 anduse real points, but use only
four points on everybody thatsay head hypertension.
Now there's two problems therethat sometimes the sham points

(53:39):
are used in another system ofacupuncture.
There's multiple systems ofacupuncture, like yoga.
There's so many different waysof stimulating the body or
balancing our energy.
There's different systems ofacupuncture and the sham points
that were used in those trialswhere it turned out in another
person's system, the very pointsused for hypertension.

(54:01):
And then the other thing problemis that just because someone
has hypertension doesn't meanthey will be treated with the
same points, and that's this isthe problem.
I think most people would thinkthat, oh, if you have
hypertension, what's the formulafor points for hypertension?
That's not how an acupuncturesinks.
The first thing thatacupuncturists is going to do is
figure out what is the patternof disharmony, that is, that

(54:25):
within which this hypertensivesymptom is arising.
Once we get the pattern, thenpoint prescription flows out of
addressing the pattern.
You could have six people withhypertension and six different
patterns, therefore sixdifferent point prescriptions,
if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
But this.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
It's got me.

Speaker 1 (54:50):
I'm thinking about this in my.
Again, I have a parallel.
But I had a client who wasseeing me for neck pain and she
says, you know, it's drivingreally flares me.
It's driving, driving is theworst thing.
Driving it does something to mydisc or whatever, which

(55:12):
couldn't be corroborated on ascan, unfortunately.
And she's like, yeah, because,like a couple years ago, I was
driving all the time.
It was like, you know, I woulddrive on the weekends like eight
hours, and I was like, wow, whywere you driving?
And that was when the painreally got bad, that was when it
really set off and I said, well, gosh, why were you driving

(55:32):
eight hours, four hours there,four hours back, what were you
doing every weekend?
She goes, oh, my mom was dying.
And it's like, okay, so is itthe disc or is it the
bio-psycho-social experience,the constellation of factors

(55:53):
that your mom was dying?
Right.
But we're just not.
We just need a quick and simpleanswer in our culture, right?
And so she couldn't evencontemplate that the reason that
the pain manifested was due tosomething other than a disc

(56:16):
issue which could not be shownin any scan, right?
And so Are you familiar withthe?

Speaker 2 (56:25):
work of John Sarno.
Dr John Sarno.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Sarno, s-a-r-n-o.
Yes, what's the book thateveryone always tells me to read
?

Speaker 2 (56:34):
His original one was Healing Back Pain and then the
more recent one was called theDivided Mind.
I think he was head ofrehabilitation medicine at NYU
for a number of years.
He's passed on but he sort ofbrought to light his own theory
of addressing pain andhighlighted analysis that was

(56:56):
published in the New EnglandJournal of Medicine, like must
have going back 20 years now,where they ran an analysis of
people who had pain and theycompared people with pain to the
scans that they could see ontheir back, the MRIs.
What could we see organicallygoing on in the spine?

(57:18):
And essentially there was zerocorrelation between organic
abnormality and physical pain.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Yes, and that only slightly predisposes you to a
pain issue.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
Exactly so.
He really came up with, I think, if I get the phrase right, a
psychogenic model for pain.
He felt like, oftentimes, whenthere was a repression of anger
or rage, that the brainessentially distracted the self
that had that rage from theoverwhelm of it and would kind

(57:52):
of create a form.
He described it in a level ofischemic, transient ischemic
condition, in the point that inan area of the body that would
cause pain, but addressing theemotional level or the
psychological dynamic, justillustrating what you were
saying, was a way to rectify thepain problem.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
Indeed, you know even .

Speaker 2 (58:20):
That was Chinese.
That's Chinese medicine.

Speaker 1 (58:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
And.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
I.
I reckon when you mentioned hisbook, I immediately remembered
who that is and why I've maybethis is we shouldn't like dive
into this can of worms, but whyI reject his, his work in some
ways?
Because, even though I agreewith the biopsychosocial model,

(58:47):
I really have seen the effectthat this has on people speaking
of biopsychosocial to say, okay, a back pain.
So you need to address yourlongstanding rage toward this
person who did something to you,who was unforgivable.
And I see how that ramps up.

(59:08):
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 (59:24):
Thank you for saying that.
No, yes, I share the samecaveat as you do, which is just
as we can go too far and sayeverything is biological, which
would be reducing the internalexperience and our subjective
experience to biologicalcorrelates, we can reduce

(59:45):
everything to that.
That's what one, thephilosopher Ken Wilber, called
flatland.
The whole complexity of innerunderstanding and meaning is
compressed and reduced tobiological bits.
That's flatland.
But it can go the other way.
He doesn't use this word.
This is my version of but tosay everything is inner emotion,

(01:00:08):
everything is in our subjectivestate.
The outside only is a mirror ofthe inner world.
That's reductionism, as youjust said.
In the opposite direction, Icall it space land.
You can get you know that thephysical it doesn't matter, it's
all about the inner, innersubjective dynamic.
That that's what really matters.

(01:00:29):
Or the inner subjectiveexperience doesn't matter, it's
all only about the physicalmanifestation that we can see.
Both are, both are partial, andthe question, I think the
beauty of Chinese medicine isthat it honors both without
reducing one to the other and,and I think, sets up ways that a
more integral map of a humancan bring greater insight to

(01:00:56):
addressing patterns ofdisharmony and produce vital,
vibrant beans.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
I think that that is a pretty cool I'm I'm kind of
falling in love with thisphilosophy.
From your perspective, itdefinitely like is like meshing
with where I'm at and I thinkwe're maybe both in agreement.
Tell me if I'm wrong In thatperhaps the way that this system

(01:01:35):
has been treated in yen yoga ispotentially reductionistic as
well and not really fullyrespecting or utilizing this
kind of full spectrum capacity,the possibility of it.
Are we in agreement on that?

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
Yeah, so I think you didn't say it like this, but
what I would.
The difference in how I'mtrying to communicate what's
going on in yen yoga now from aChinese medicine perspective, is
that in the early days, as Isaid, there was this sense of

(01:02:16):
hold the body in a certainposition and the tissue that's
being stimulated, the targetedtissue in that position, will
influence the energetic channellocated in that tissue to
influence the organ.
And I have no doubt thatsomething's going on there, that

(01:02:38):
there's some, there is some.
There will be some relationshipbetween that channel and how
the organs responding.
But I think that again, thatled to a kind of reductionistic
view that, okay, you know,everyone's trying to build their
sequences around gettingcertain channels stimulated.
I think, more broadly, what'sgoing on is that a systematic

(01:03:02):
practice of yen yoga that, atleast, as Paul really really
emphasizes that targets all ofthe main quote, unquote target
areas, the areas of functionalmobility in the body.
Targeting these broad planes inall these different directions
ultimately is optimizing thefascial health in combination

(01:03:28):
with other forms of fascialtraining.
Not yin yoga is not the.
I want to just go on record, atleast make it clear that yin
yoga is not the only yoga thatworks influences the fascia.
Any physical yoga is going tobe influencing the fascia.
It's a question of what's theinfluence of particular ways of
holding the body and itsinfluence on the fascia.
But from the fascia up then,the manner in which you're

(01:03:52):
breathing in the pose is goingto influence the biochemistry of
your body and the way you arebecause of mobilizing intentions
of your heart and mind inrelationship 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 thebreathing, it's the mindset, the

(01:04:14):
meditative approach.
All those together, I suggestcollaborate with the internal,
the main five yin organs, theinternal organs of Chinese
medicine that are the holisticexpressions of our being, from
physical, energetic topsychosympathy, psychospiritual

(01:04:38):
levels.
So an organ in Chinese medicineis not just sort of a
filtration system or a digestivesystem, it is a.
They call them organ systemsbecause each organ has a
particular relationship toparticular relationship to
tissue in the body, a particularrelationship to an energetic

(01:04:59):
substance in the body and aparticular relationship to
psychospiritual capacities ofour being.
And all of that is influenced,in my opinion, some, you could
say, directly or indirectly getinto a debate about that.
But all of that gets influencedin a holistically informed yin

(01:05:22):
yoga practice or holisticallyinformed yoga practice Does that
?
So that's my.
The model I'm trying to move tois like less from.
We optimize our energy, not somuch from just targeting a
specific channel, but weoptimize our energy through a

(01:05:42):
multi-directional way of makingsure the body is coherent, the
physical tissue of the fascia iscoherent, through reducing
inflammation, increasinghydration to the tissue.
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense is there's some
pretty good studies that areindicating both of those to be
true.
And so with less inflammationwhich from a Chinese perspective

(01:06:07):
would be referred to as a heattoxin, heat in the system.
Heat disrupts the flow of Qi.
So if we come bring ourinflammation down, our Qi is
gonna flow better and it can gofrom there.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
Okay.
So if here's I'm having troublearticulating how I wanna ask
this question.
What I am curious about is how,if a Yin teacher who has

(01:06:50):
previously had a morereductionistic view of the
meridians and the organs and theQi, is interested in
potentially looking to a moreholistic model, something like
this, where we're looking to allof the influences, which don't
exclude science, which areactually very much I mean, we're

(01:07:11):
speaking the same language,just with different vocabulary,
right?
So I mean, you're such anexperienced teacher of teachers.
I mean, how do you soften thebreakup between the
reductionistic view and toward amore holistic view?
Where's a good place to start?

Speaker 2 (01:07:36):
That's a great question.
I'm not sure I have the bestanswer for this.
I can tell you what I'm, howI'm trying to communicate it.
I think the best place to startis and this is self-serving
because it's is the best placeto start the way I'm sharing it

(01:07:58):
is to start with understandinghow the Yin organs work together
, and there's different ways youcan look at that.
But five element theory is onemodel of organ interrelationship
.
But just from a basic TCM,chinese medical perspective,

(01:08:19):
looking at how the Yin organswork together, I try to describe
them and I borrow this phrasefrom again this Dr Daniel Keown,
who's a Western physiciantrained in acupuncture.
I think he's written some ofthe best books on the interface
between Western science andChinese medicine to really get
them to communicate beautifullytogether, and one of them is

(01:08:42):
called the Unchartered Body.
That might be a book to link toin the show notes.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
I think that's on one of my lists.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
Great, great book, unchartered Body.
But he uses the word teamshipto describe the organs when they
work well.
And he says when you watch afootball team play, how do you
know the team's doing well?

(01:09:11):
Well, they get the goal, theyget the ball on the other net
and they prevent the ball fromgetting into their own net.
So there's good offense andgood defense and but you can't
necessarily see thecommunication be happening
between the players.
But when a team is practiced fora while together, there is a

(01:09:37):
subtle level of communication,through gesture, glance,
positional knowing.
There's a kind of communicationthat starts to occur between
team players.
That is an intelligence thatallows them to function well and
that comes from training.
So the way I look at all yogaand meditation together is that

(01:10:06):
we're training, at least on ourenergetic level.
We're training the organs tocommunicate and operate well
together as a team.
And I emphasize that teamshipbecause far too often again, the
reductionistic mind wants tosay if you have X, then you have
to do something for Y.
If you have X say I've used theexample of back pain if you

(01:10:29):
have back pain, then you have todo something for the kidneys.
If you're stressed, then youhave to do something for the
liver.
That ignores theinterrelationships between the
organs.
So when a student comes tostudy Chinese medicine and
understands how the organs worktogether, right then that

(01:10:50):
prevents them from thinking oh,I have to only stimulate one
channel to get one organ.
It's about all the organs beingharmonized, and some of the ways
the organs are gonna beharmonized is through postural
work perhaps, like, I reallythink, the liver for example,
and we can talk about why, but Ithink the liver really responds
well from a Chinese perspectiveto Yin yoga, because the tissue

(01:11:13):
of the liver is the sinews, thedense connective tissues, and
when the dense connectivetissues are relaxed, the liver
relaxes, the energy of the liverflows better and the liver's
function of circulating Qithroughout the whole body in a
relaxed, easy way is improved,and that brings stress down.

(01:11:39):
So what I'm trying to say iswhen the organs function better,
there's greater communicationbetween them, then the organs
are able to produce energy,store energy and circulate
energy, and the result is, as wesort of indicated at the
beginning, when that's when teamship is working well, we feel
harmonized, we feel collected,gathered, balanced, calm,

(01:12:02):
peaceful, joyous, loving, etcetera.
The difficult emotions areattenuated, the aches and pains
are less and there's justgreater optimized Qi flow.
So it would be helpful, I think, if more Yin students could
understand A a basic overview ofhow the organs function

(01:12:26):
together, like who's thequarterback of the team, who's
the offensive manager, who's thedefensive manager, who's the
general?

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
And then in understanding the functions of
the organs, which gets to whatare the tissues that they're
involved with, what are theemotional states that they are
involved in, what are theenergetic functions that are
involved with.
From there I think a moreholistic model or consciousness

(01:12:58):
starts to emerge of how thepractice collaborates with those
organs.
It's not rocket science, likeif you just take your body
through a holistically informedgroup of postures, meaning not
just focusing on, say, backbends the whole time, but doing.
You know, paul used to say bendpeople forward, bend them

(01:13:18):
backwards and send them home.
Where we can add do things fortheir hips, do things for their
shoulders, do things the sixmovements of the spine, moving
the body in all directions thatit's built to move.
That's going to be thefoundation of greater Qi flow.
But then when you add in thebreath work and then you layer

(01:13:40):
on top of that the meditativework, I think what I've found
there's a more powerful synergyin terms of its influence.
So the breath work thing I'dlike to speak to about for a
second cause.
This is kind of a pet theory Ihave, please do.

(01:14:02):
We mentioned briefly thatthere's some research suggesting
that the long held postures ofyin yoga improve the hydration
of the connective tissue,reducing inflammation.
One of the things that seems tohappen as well is that the
watery, viscous gel or theground substance of the

(01:14:24):
connective tissue changes phase,meaning it goes from a more
solid turban, like a stifferphase, and changes to a more
watery, soluble state as afunction of either being heated
or receiving a pressure for along period of time, a
mechanical force.
So we're working withmechanical forces over a long

(01:14:44):
period of time in yin yoga.
My hypothesis is that in thewatery state, in the increased
hydration state, the medium ofthe ground substance permits
diffusion or it makes diffusionbetter or more available,

(01:15:12):
meaning things can migrate intothe ground substance and come
out.
So nutrients from the vascularsystem can diffuse through the
ground substance to get to thecells.
As Tom Meyer says, the goodnessin our blood needs to diffuse
through the ground substance toreach the cell.
So if the ground substance isdirty and if there's a lot of
cross fiber, of collagen and thetissue's drier, it's harder for

(01:15:35):
the nutrients to get to thecells and it's harder for waste
to be extracted and reabsorbedby the lymphatic system, the
circulatory system, to beexcreted.
So if the ground substance isin a more watery, hydrated state
.
I would think that wouldenhance chief flow, which part
of chief flow is the goodness ofthe blood getting to the cells

(01:15:59):
and the waste being extracted.
More recently, I'd say in thelast five years, I've come
across the work of the breathexpert Patrick McKeown in
Ireland, who has a breathingthing but he's basically
popularized butteco breathingcalling it, the oxygen advantage

(01:16:22):
, and James Nester's book BreathGets Into this Too, but it's
something that I didn't learnwhen I learned more active forms
of Pranayama.
But the basic premise is that ifwe really wanna get oxygen to
the cells and there's a scienceon this, that if we wanna get

(01:16:43):
oxygen to the cells, we need topreserve carbon dioxide.
Have you heard this?
Yeah, so right.
If we over breathe, if we dobig gulpy breath, big deep
breaths from the chest, we overbreathe, we exhale and off gas
too much carbon dioxide and thecarbon dioxide that we're off
gassing is no longer able to.
We need to preserve a certainamount of carbon dioxide to act

(01:17:06):
as a kind of a messengermolecule so that the hemoglobin
will release oxygen incirculation.
So if we off gas too muchcarbon dioxide, we can have
circulating oxygen that doesn'tget released.
This is like a simplistic wayof describing that.
So the answer for how tooptimize carbon dioxide

(01:17:27):
preservation is to breathelightly on the inhalation, to
sip the inhalation, have a slowtimed exhalation and to do it
deep from the belly.
They call the LSD breath Lightinhalation, slow exhalation,
deep from the belly andbreathing through the nose,

(01:17:48):
nasal breathing.
Breathing that way will alsopreserve carbon dioxide,
increasing oxygen delivery, iechi delivery to the tissues and
cells.
But nasal breathing alsoincreases the paris sinus, sinal
production of nitric oxide,which is a vasodilator.
Nitric oxide has many functions.

(01:18:12):
I think it's a communicationmolecule within the immune
system, but as a vasodilatorit's going to lower blood
pressure, it's going to helpimprove circulation and again,
the delivery of the goodness inthe blood.
So that's just an example ofjust a breath practice.
But you put that into.

(01:18:32):
What I'm trying to set up hereis that you can imagine that yin
yoga is optimizing the terrainfor exchange I'm just coined
that phrase just here on airwith you the terrain of the
exchange.
The fascia is the terrain ofthe exchange, goodness getting
in and waste coming out.

(01:18:53):
And if we add in thebiochemical optimization of the
blood through good breathing,that and I haven't even
mentioned its effect on thevagal tone or the
parasympathetic nervous system,which is all happening too

(01:19:13):
that's where I say, okay, yinyoga is going to help the
kidneys from Chinese this isbeyond what we can get into now,
but it will help the kidneysfrom a Chinese perspective.
It's going to help the liverfrom a Chinese perspective.
It's going to help the lungsfrom so that these organs are
functioning better.
Their functions are being.
The practice is collaboratingwith those functions of the yin

(01:19:33):
organs to optimize theproduction, circulation and
storage of our chi.
That's my thesis in a broadnutshell.

Speaker 1 (01:19:45):
And what I love about that is all of this information
, both from Chinese traditionalmedicine, from Western science,
from your depth of experienceand training, very well founded.
I agree with all the thingsthat you said.
For sure, Really boils down todistills, to the most simplistic

(01:20:11):
possible type of practice,Right Like move around some,
extend your exhale, you knowrelax.

Speaker 2 (01:20:22):
Calm your mind, calm your mind.
I.
There's a new translation Iforget the author's name, I feel
badly, but there's a newtranslation of a very seminal
text in Chinese medicine calledthe Huang Dinei Jing.
It's the Yellow Emperor'sClassic on Medicine, and in one
of the early chapters there's adescription of what the ancients

(01:20:47):
did to regulate themselves, andthe description is they did a
practice called Daoyin, of apractice of stretching,
massaging, eating, well, calmingtheir mind so that they could
bring themselves into harmonywith the universe.
You know, it's just what yousaid.
It is simple, it's, and sohere's the thing though it's

(01:21:14):
simple, it is what you just said, but where I think the Chinese
medicine helps, the theory, andit has to be titrated properly.
But the theory becomesmotivating, and that's what I.
This is where I think someknowledge of it goes a long way

(01:21:38):
in terms of this might wrinkleor feel weird, but it goes a
long way in terms of the salespitch for yin yoga and what I
mean by that.
As a teacher, I always told mystudents to be a good yin
teacher.
You have to be able to sellthis practice, in the sense that
when you stay in a pose forfive minutes, you know it's not

(01:22:02):
always comfortable, you know toget that the stress on the
tissue it's going to does bringa tolerable, appropriate level
of mild discomfort is the way Itry to articulate it.
It's sort of a mildly, slightlybitter, slightly achy sensation
during the pose, but then thatyields when you come out to a
more sweet experience.
No-transcript, maybe the yogaculture is maturing, but when I

(01:22:28):
was first starting to teach youin 20 years ago, most people
wanted to go to a faster-pacedclass.
They wanted to get theirworkout on kind of, and so
having good stories for what'sgoing on in the Yin practice

(01:22:49):
makes it compelling, I think,for people to practice.
I know that Sarah Powers saidthe same thing when she started
to consider this with practicethat could help optimize her
energy state.
I noticed that for me that waswhat did it too.
It was like I saw how well itbalanced me and how imbalanced I
was on multiple factors, onlyworking in a young way.
So the stories that kind ofsupport what is going on in Yin

(01:23:18):
yoga in relationship to theenergetic state of our being
that the map of Chinese medicinecan point to, I think, become a
compelling story.
That is part of a motivation,the necessary motivation for
someone to stay with thepractice, at least initially.

Speaker 1 (01:23:35):
Yeah, got it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:38):
But I always say to my students we're not treating
symptoms.
And if someone comes up at theend of class and says, well, I
have this, which pose should Ido?
You say I don't know, here's anacupuncturist that I recommend
you go see.
That's referred out.
A good Yin teacher should havea good referral list for
acupuncturists or therapiststhat they don't get into this

(01:24:00):
issue of transgressing scope ofpractice boundaries.

Speaker 1 (01:24:08):
So you know, interestingly, we kind of came
full circle because we sort ofhad a discussion about how the
danger of this is becoming tooreductionistic in the way that
we do as Westerners.
That's just our DNA.

Speaker 2 (01:24:27):
I agree.

Speaker 1 (01:24:28):
But then we ended up with, you know, settling on
something that, even though ithas nuance and complexity, is
reduced right Less movement,less, you know prescribing less

(01:24:51):
diagnostic kind of intent.
So in a way I mean that is abit reduced as well.

Speaker 2 (01:25:03):
How do we understand that a little bit more.
I'm not quite.
I may have lost the thread whenyou said that I don't quite
understand what you're meaningthere.

Speaker 1 (01:25:18):
That the beauty of the practice and a skill in
imparting it in many ways isless complicated than we try to
make it.
I guess that's what I'm tryingto say.

Speaker 2 (01:25:40):
Yeah, you know, okay, I got you now.
Yeah, yeah it.
I mean, look, I forget theworkshop I did with Paul Greeley
.
But this may have beensomething he said off the cuff
after the workshop, but it wassomething to the long lines.
He said I can't believe peoplepay me money just to have them

(01:26:01):
go into a post for five minutesand be quiet with them.
He didn't, he didn't put up, hedidn't say a lot.
Yeah, he just had his classesfor just postures and and that
can be the ultimate minimalism-in a way, and I think maybe
that's the direction of apersonal practice to be able to

(01:26:25):
be in silence by yourself, and Ithink I think the refinement
that we've come to in the worldis bringing in tools, practices
and maps of of of how to usetools to help people help

(01:26:45):
support people to be with themand understand what's happening
to them.

Speaker 1 (01:26:50):
Yes, yeah, I mean the more I know, the more
information I absorb, you knowfrom different sources and
disciplines, the more simple myteaching becomes.
Yeah, because you're right.
I mean take a pose.

(01:27:11):
Let let me use my wealth ofexperience, my extensive
education, to help you sit inthat pose in a way that is best
for you.

Speaker 2 (01:27:23):
That's what it comes down to.
Does that Zen teacher Iqiu hada student that came to him and
and said, I guess I think thatthe 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

(01:27:46):
just wrote the words payattention and handed it back.
And he said, could you say justa little bit more?
And so the master took it backand wrote pay attention, pay
attention.
Just reiterated the set, thefirst line, and it went on a
third time.
Is that ultimately the teachingwas pay attention, pay attention
, pay attention.
You know, and that's the maps.

(01:28:08):
If we get only see the map, welose.
We're not paying attention toour experience, which is the
terrain.
And and so the maps, the bestthey can do is help us connect
to and understand and make senseof and then really experience
our own terrain.
And from our own terrain,whether it's the limitation of

(01:28:29):
your acetabulum, or whether it's, you know, a sense of
hamperedness or, you know, stuckshe that's making you irritable
, or whatever it is like, themore you understand what's
happening and you explore avariety of tools for how to work
with what's happening.
That's just to reiterate that'swhen you're the creative

(01:28:52):
intelligence of your own, she, Ithink, starts to find novel
solutions to things.

Speaker 1 (01:29:00):
Thank you, that's great.

Speaker 2 (01:29:03):
My pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:29:04):
This has been like a very vastly different
conversation that I thought wewere going to have just full
disclosure, but really, reallyedifying for me, like really
educational.
I definitely feel like I have anew avenue to explore for these

(01:29:24):
concepts and I really, trulythank you for that.

Speaker 2 (01:29:30):
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:29:34):
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 theyfind out more?

Speaker 2 (01:29:45):
My website is joshsummersnet.
That's where my partner, terry,and I have our classes.
We have our weekly classes, wehave online trainings and I just
mentioned we have a new seriesof trainings called Yin Yoga and
Chi Cultivation.
So it's specifically looking atnot just Yin Yoga but using the
kind of the creative approach,the creative functional approach

(01:30:06):
of Yin Yoga to cultivating theChi with acupuncture based
massage, mobility and yang,motion and stability training
with Pranayama and meditativework as well.

Speaker 1 (01:30:20):
Wow, talk about holistic.

Speaker 2 (01:30:23):
Yeah, try to move that direction.

Speaker 1 (01:30:25):
Very cool, awesome.
Well, again, thank you so much.
I really enjoyed this.

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.