 Traditional Chinese medicine has a very, very different way of looking at health and disease. It's a way that on one level is both scientific and intuitive, where you don't need to study to say that coffee is good for you or coffee is bad for you. Because after 200,000 years, human beings as animals, we have our built-in barometer for what is good for us and what is not good for us. Now in this video, I want to share five Chinese medicine philosophies or practices that can help you understand whether or not you're healthy and how to be healthy in this modern world. Hey, I'm Alex Heine, author of the book Master of the Day, Current Doctoral Student in Traditional or Classical Chinese Medicine. Now I've included the first link in the description right there, is actually a free PDF on how to add 10 years to your life with five Chinese medicine practices. So that's a little print-off, a little infographic you can download in the first link in the description. Now the first Chinese medicine longevity practice in understanding is that in Chinese medicine, everything is about flow. Flow is the number one principle in nature. Things are always changing, and when they're not, that's a bad sign. So we all know that when you drink from a stream of nature, I mean, at this point, they're all contaminated, but theoretically speaking, at this point in human history, you want to drink from flowing water because there's less of a chance of bacteria, viruses, mold, anything that's going to make you ill increases in stagnant water. The human body is the same way. It's a micro reflection of nature, where the human being that is stagnant is more likely to build arterial plaque, is more likely to get a whole host of modern day illnesses and diseases. But in the same token, this is the reason why Chinese medicine flow is more important than is this diet good for me? Is that diet good for me? Is this clinically proven? Is that clinically proven? We don't need a study to say coffee's bad for you, coffee's good for you, because if coffee improves the flow of your body for some people that's constipation, for some people that helps you digestion, but for other people like me, coffee gives me indigestion and will give me acid reflux. So flow is the number one criteria in Chinese medicine that we use to evaluate foods, diets, herbs, lifestyle. All of that indicates flow or lack of flow. Now the second practice is that, yes, number one, longevity is all about flow, but the very specific way of understanding how all things in your life affect flow are also key. So for example, emotions, diet, weather, sleep and work, all of these affect the flow of Qi or energy in your body. For example, a diet that is more raw vegetables is energetically cold in Chinese medicine, which is almost considered across the board bad for people, but especially people with weak digestion. Emotions like anger, which is like, oh, I'm gonna like smash your head in, is obviously an upward-outward energetic move. So people that already have too much upward-outward are contraindicated at one level from expressing that emotion. They need to express more of the emotions that are grounding and settling and withdrawing. So for example, an emotional state, you could say, that's more settling is the state of surrender or allowing. So that's why we see, for example, the high-powered ambitious entrepreneur like myself who's like this, like, let's go, let's go, let's go. They have too much of this, this pattern in their life. And so very often they're prone to illnesses and diseases that have this kind of energetic quality to it. You feel it in the pulse. You can feel it sometimes with wirremias or pounding. You see it in the insomnia because there's too much up and there's not enough down. You can think of it just like a pharmaceutical drug. We take uppers and we take downers, right? Some people pop coffee in the morning and they take Xanax at night or alcohol. This kind of forward motion is an upper. And so a person that is too up can't come down. They can't sleep. They can't be less high strong. They can't be less angry. And so everything related to their diet to related to their lifestyle related to sleep to exercise should all be more downer in their quality. The third thing is that in Chinese medicine, health comes from the balance between all things. The systems in your body and the systems in your life and the systems in nature as opposed to just focusing on the reductionist one thing like your hurt toe. So in California, there's been this epidemic going on where there's an overgrowth of these sea urchins over spawning that's eating the kelp. And the kelp forests are key for so many factors in the natural biome there. And so you could think, okay, the biomedical view is do we just kill the sea urchins, right? Let's just like get divers, pluck them all out, kill them, eat them, whatever poison them, put something in the water to get rid of the sea urchins. Or do we just plant more kelp, right? We plant more kelp. Maybe the sea urchins take longer to eat them. But what they did was brilliant. Instead, they introduced the natural predator of the sea urchin, which is otters. The otters ate the sea urchin, less sea urchins, but more kelp. This is a word-for-word analysis of how Chinese medical five-phase theory works. Because in Chinese medicine, it was observed over thousands of years that certain organ systems are more related than others. So for example, earth is called the mother of metal. The earth organs are spleen in your stomach. You could think digestion. The metal organs are your lung and your large intestine. So in ancient times, these physicians learned that a person who has excess in the stomach, excess in the digestive organs, it'll impact the metal organs, the lung, the large intestine. So maybe one ramification of that is a person is overeating, all is bloating, and then is producing mucus and saliva. And that reflects not only in like clearing the throat. This is the lung, almost, that mucus. Or you can look at it in terms of how it affects the colon. Obviously, your large intestine is affected when you're overeating, you're bloated, you've got smelly gas and weird stools. So in Chinese medical theory, the point is that instead of attacking the serogen, instead of trying to fix the colon, sometimes what we do is we go to the mother, we go to the sea otter, and we reintroduce something that establishes the balance at a higher order or level. The fourth thing here is that in Chinese medicine, we always treat the spirit or the consciousness first. Now, there's a lot of very interesting research on how people that are happy, unrushed, unhurried, they love their lives. That is as much of a reduction in heart disease risk factors as diet and exercise. That's pretty crazy. That's pretty insane because according to biomedical science, humans are material. Therefore, the only thing that matters is diet, exercise, cholesterol, lipids, et cetera. But it just is not true. And in Chinese medicine, 3,000 years ago, we have a medical text that said first and foremost, above all, treating the Shen, the spirit of the patient is the most important thing above all before you treat anything else. And so you can look at that in your own life in terms of, okay, I've got this illness, this chronic illness, or I'm burning out as an entrepreneur, or there's all of this stuff going on with my digestion. And of course, Americans, the first thing we think is, what diet do I do? What diet do I change? But in my opinion, that's the wrong question. And it's important to think the higher level, the higher order is, what about my spirit in terms of the state, the quality of my life, my thoughts, my hurried approach to life? How can I change that first? The last quality here, our last understanding, is that in traditional Chinese medicine, we're always trying to bring things back to the middle. And you can almost have this kind of fun transliteration exercise, because in Chinese, the characters for Chinese medicine are zhongyi. So zhong means middle, which is also the same character for zhehua in China, middle kingdom or middle country. And you can almost think of it as the medicine of the middle. If the pulse is too weak, we try to bring the pulse up. If the pulse is too excessive, we try to bring the pulse down. If the patient's too hot, we try to cool them down. If they're too cold, we try to warm them up. If they're too weak, we try to build them up. If they're too excess, we try to clear the excess. And so everything we do, like one of my first mentors said, if you can get the patient to have good sleep, regular appetite and good diet, regular bowel movements daily, and to be in a good, settled mood daily, that by itself is sometimes 70, 80, 90% of the work of healing from illness and disease. So if we can bring things back to the middle, that by itself allows the body's natural healing response, the consciousness to direct the body, to figure out what it needs to do to bring itself back to a state of homeostasis. And that at the end of the day is really what medicine and healing is. So I hope that helps. Five unconventional ideas from Chinese medicine on healing and wellness. Now, of course, I've included that free download, the five daily rituals that add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine, classical Chinese medicine. It's the first link right in the description box there. You can also check out my last two videos right there and right there.