Flourishing in the wild heart of medicine : Fire

Water freezes, Wood spreads, and Fire? Fire explodes onto the scene in a blaze of glory, consuming all that’s gone before, dazzling us, then fading to ashes and leaving us blinking away retinal afterimages wondering what just happened. What did just happen? Someone probably got burnt. And it was a heck of a show. Fire ain’t like the other elements. It’s in a class of its own–an exclusive, volatile club of one. The rest of the five phases (a more apt translation of wu xing) are basically earthbound: Earth is an obvious case, but take the other three: Metal descends, cools, clarifies. There’s something of the sky about it, but something earthly as well: it’s momentum is decidedly terrestrial, its manner sober. Wood is lively and full of life; like Metal it spans Heaven and Earth, this time in the upward direction. It is rooted down below even as it stretches upwards toward the stars. Hence still earthbound. Water is a beast of another color: the essence of stillness, the lurking subterranean potential awaiting rebirth. It’s otherworldly, but not in a transcendental sort of way. Water has depth and mystery. Water has Soul. Fire, on the other hand, has Spirit. As humans we crave fire: its warmth, its beauty, its ineffability. We speak of the flames of passion; of being on fire, in the sense of ‘in the zone,’ somehow unstoppable, as if sponsored like a blazing NBA jam character by an unseen force that unerringly guides our ever...
Source: Deepest Health: Exploring Classical Chinese Medicine - Category: Alternative Medicine Practitioners Authors: Tags: Foundational Science Source Type: blogs