The medicine of east Asia is based on a science that does not hold itself separate from the phenomenon that it seeks to understand our medicine did not grow out of Petri dish, experimentation, or double blind studies. It arose from observing nature and our part in it. East Asian medicine evolves not from the examination of debt structure. But rather from living systems with their complex mutually entangled interactions, welcome to qiological. I'm Michael max, the host of this podcast that goes in depth on issues, pertinent to practitioners and students of east Asian medicine, dialogue and discussion have always been elemental to Chinese and other east Asian medicines. Listening to these conversations with experienced practitioners that go deep into how this ancient medicine is alive and unfolding in the modern clinic Welcome back to qiological. I am delighted today to be sitting down with chip chase chip graduated from the new England school of acupuncture way back in the dark ages of 1984. He is the author of numerous articles. I'm not even going to try to list. As the list would be longer than your arm. Other than to say that the latest one, he co-authored in the most recent edition of the lantern, it's worth your time and his Tremaine to today's conversation as well. Chip is the translator, or he has, co-authored a number of books, including the yellow emperor's classic of acupuncture. And moxibustion a chin bow, a anthology, and he's done books, both on the extraordinary vessels and the channel divergences. I don't know how he has time for all this. As he also maintains a busy practice and he wanders off into the wild for days or weeks at a time, maybe it has something to do with his inquiry into Daoism and the internal cultivation arts. We're going to get into that a little bit later. Additionally, chip is part of the group that teaches engaging vitality. This is a series of tools and methods that explores the overlap between Chinese medicine and osteopathic sensing and Papa. We're sitting down here today for a discussion of the engaging vitality work along with a look at the eight extras, the divergences and how we might be able to sense into some of the Chinese medicine concepts that are otherwise really heady chip. So glad to have you here on qiological. Thanks for having me. It's really fun. Yeah. I always love hanging out and talking with you, man. We could just go on forever. We've had some discussions on the side before we've sat down here today. So in some ways our listeners are, are jumping in, in the middle. I want to start today talking about palpation incensing. You know, we have a lot of theory in Chinese medicine, these mental models, if you will, these ideas of things like junky this stuff, and it can get kind of heady. And in addition to being Hetty, we're talking about something that's outside of our particular cultural point or. You, and I have had discussions about this and one of the things that you come back to, again and again, that I think is helpful and you say is helpful as well is having these palpatory landmarks to have a way of sensing that can compliment the mental models in our head. So I'd like to begin today with talking about these palpatory landmarks and how to learn to sense and utilize this kind of information. If we take key seriously, then, you know, virtually any way that she expresses itself in the body. From my perspective, it should be palpable to one extent or another. I mean, that's part of our story that we tell around traditional east Asian medicine, like even emotions are linked with the. Directionality of the chief, uh, for instance, you know, so for the, if that's true, then that should be a palpable. And, uh, you know, the pulse we do pulse diagnosis is bedrock a palpatory reference for us and in Chinese medicine. And, uh, you know, if the pulse is a reflection of that, she is a whole then should be palpable globally, right? Whatever that she is coming through the pulse should be something that is palpable globally in one way or another. And if she is, uh, mediated through more than just the vascular system, then, you know, there should be many different, uh, palpatory, uh, reference for T and, and, uh, you know, each of these will give us another angle on what's going on with. So that's the premise. How do we actually do it? I mean, what, what are you actually doing? What are you attending to? What are you experiencing? I mean, what part of the, the part that sort of senses and knows is being engaged here? How do we do this stuff? Well, what we're drawing from is many of the palpatory tools, and maybe even more importantly, the overall palpatory sensibilities that are coming out of, you know, manual osteopathy, uh, particularly, uh, cranial, uh, and visceral currency can osteopathy. There's a whole repertoire of palpatory phenomenon that they attend to in those disciplines and to, you know, they're very learnable and they translate very well into traditional east Asian medicine. They make tangible many of the passages in the medical and even the internal cultivation literature that is seemingly, you know, kind of abstract, otherwise mystical, maybe more like a philosophical premise than something is you can actually do something with, well, I mean, in some ways, and I've had a little experience with this and done a little study of my own, but some of this osteopathic type listening, it's pretty subtle stuff subtle until you learn it. I don't think it's intrinsically any more subtle than post-diagnosis or anything like that. And, uh, I mean, it, it's eminently learnable, you devote a couple of years to it and if I can do it, anybody can really, I think I don't, I don't, that's funny. That's what I signed. Right. Well, you know, it's just a matter of being persistent, right? It, and you know, it's transmissibility into traditionally station medical practices. It's fairly fluid. And it actually, I think makes a lot of intuitive sense in a moment. I want to ask you some more specific questions about some of these palpatory references for some of these ideas that we have in Chinese medicine. But before that, and I know that you guys teach this over the course of like weeks and months, and this is a show that lasts roughly an hour, but for our listeners that might be interested or at least to get kind of a sense of what we're talking about here, how would someone begin paying attention and sensing into some of the stuff that you guys listened to feeling? The pulse is one thing, you stick your fingers on it, and this is thing going, boom, boom, boom. Right? You could even put a machine on a person where their pulses and, and, and you would feel. But the stuff that you're talking about is a little bit more subtle than that. So if somebody wants to begin to approach this kind of thing, how do they begin? You know, the first thing we say is you got to get your yourself out of the way, you know, any expectations you might have about what you should be feeling or could be feeling or can't feel it's got to let that go. And then I think the quality of the contact that you have with the chief is a crucial as well. That I'm a bit of a stickler on this point that, you know, we don't say that our hands are like water. Our hands are water. And that, you know, that fluid, receptive quality it's bedrock to being able to feel much of anything. And just not having an agenda about, oh, I can't. I feel that. And that sort of thing. Those are, those are two, uh, uh, fundamental things that have to be in place. And then once they're in place, then very quickly, the issue is not, oh, can I feel something? The issue is all I'm feeling all these different things and which ones of these things that I'm feeling are significant, how much of this is signal and how much of this is noise. We've trained enough people in this now that if they practice it all after, you know, the first weekend that we do the issue is not that they're not feeling things. The issue is that, oh, they're, they're feeling things that maybe are not significant for us, but they're definitely feeling things. It's not that there's not enough information coming in, but maybe there's actually so much, and we don't quite know how to make sense of it. Not sure what's important. Like you said, signal versus noise, right? The, the tendency is to go, oh, I feel one side is warmer than the other or something like that. Is that what you're talking about? You know, and that may or may not be significant, but that's not anything that we particularly do anything with in the work that we do. You know, it's like, oh, that's the first thing I feel. Is that what you're talking about? No, you have to, it's alert. It's a process. I think of learning how to filter for these things. That takes a little time, you know, on one hand, I think we all know that it takes time to cultivate ourselves and it takes time to learn this medicine. You know, it takes years, maybe decades. And then there's this other part of us. That's like, I'm going to this weekend workshop and I want to go in Monday morning and I want to make a difference to my patients right now. So in some ways there's work for us to do in our clinic. And then at the same time, you know, what I'm hearing is there's a way of settling and quieting and listening and sensing. And that takes time. And we may not even be able to use that information for a period of time until we get a little deeper into it. How do you work with that gap where you're learning something new it's going to help you, but it might not help you for another few months or maybe a year or so. It's just a question of investment. You do anything that has a long-term payoff. You have to make an investment in it. I think, I think if you sit down to meditate and you think you're any good at it, you're so bad at it. You don't even realize how bad you're out. I think that's a great example that it's, it's something that's cultivated over a long period of time. I've recently been practicing Chinese calligraphy, you know, and I just laugh at how bad I am at it. Right. But I could see myself getting better. Right. But, you know, taking a weekend calligraphy class or working with my tutor for, uh, you know, a weekend is on the face of it. Not going to get me anywhere. It's one of those kinds of things. And it's not to say that we shouldn't be also taking classes that have, you know, some sort of immediate payout, but, you know, I think if we're serious about working with. She in broadening and deepening our experience achieve. And it's, it's worth just doing this. You do it. And when you can't feel something, you don't, there's no sort of emotional charge around it or frustration, you just kind of move on, but it happens faster than you would think that you start to feel things. And you guess you interested in what's going on? You know, I mean, it's not that different from learning post-diagnosis as far as I'm concerned, a lot of this Eve stuff is based on, like you were saying, the cranial osteopathy that really came to the fore, I guess, that was developed or maybe discovered or rediscovered, depending on how you want to look at it in the last century, some interesting stuff there. And you guys have a way of having some of these osteopathic sensing things and ways of looking at things line up with some of the things that we're familiar with in Chinese medicine. Could you go into a little bit of that for us? Well, and let's start with how we talk about a balanced pulse, right? We say, you know, like that's, that's our, one of our benchmarks for the she being balanced, his pulse is balanced. Well, that's also a global phenomenon and we break that down. We say, well, that she is settled. It's subtle, it's integrated and it's open. And those are four interrelated qualities that we can discern in the pulse, but we can also discern those in the system as a whole. And those are palpatory reference for the cheese settling and, uh, reaching that place for it can begin to balance itself out. That's the first step on a pathway to, you know, deep and transforming. Dynamics stillness. You know, another palpatory referent is when we talk about the young rhythm, which if you, people are familiar with cranio work, you need to talk about the cranial rhythmic impulse. And that that young rhythm is for us. Uh, respiration, that's independent of the pulmonary respiration, you know, six to eight or 12 cycles a minute. That is a measure for us of the young aspects of the cheek. And of course, you know, you don't have pure young, you have yin aspects within that and young aspects within that. That's a brilliant tool for us in a variety of different ways to get assessed to the overall vitality and also where that she is the most restricted least open to an immediate measure. It locks up if you're starting to over-treat someone. You know, the next kind of layer down that has more to do with yin aspects and in particularly aspects that are more reflective of how essence is informing the she in blood, the fluid tide is a much slower and typically more longitudinal rhythm has a fluidic quality, no immensely helpful there. Uh, for a, you know, you want to say, oh, we're working with essence G that sort of thing. You know, if the fluid tide isn't happening, I question how effective one's engagement of the essence really is. If, if the overall fluidity in the system isn't engaged. And I think, you know, that is a premise that comes both from the osteopathic tradition, but you also see that in the internal cultivation, literature is really fascinating how they talk about these things in very similar way. I'm curious to hear more about that. The Dallas literature, I mean, I've read the Dao de Jing or I attempt to read on occasion, the Dao de Jing, you know, I open it up and I'm often more confused than enlightened by it. Although on occasion it does seem to speak, you know, again, this is one of these things, Dallas, we didn't grow up with any of this. We haven't had that much exposure to it. I mean, I'm this guy from the Midwest, you're this white guy from Colorado. How do folks like us? How can we start to make sense of some of these things that are so far away from our culture? And if we haven't engaged in the original language, or we haven't studied it in some deep way and some sort of setting, how can we start to sort of drink from that? Well, you've done a couple of books that seemed to touch on this, you know, in particular, the one on the extraordinary vessels. The daddy thing is, is what it's the, the second most translated book on the planet. I think after the Bible, I think that's right. And, you know, I think part of the appeal of that book is that it does transcend culture. I, you know, I don't know how those ideas are, you know, certainly arise out of a particular culture. They arise out of a culture that is nearly as foreign to a modern Chinese national growing up in the people's Republic of China than it is an aging hippie in Colorado or the Midwest. I think we don't want to give short shrift to the capacity to resonate on that level. And I think where that capacity comes from is just the willingness to get still shut up and pay. If you do that, then a lot of that stuff starts to make sense. That's how that works. As far as I'm concerned, you know, you just have to actually get quiet and pay attention. And the truth of a lot of what that book is talking about does become apparent. Yeah, I hear you say it and it makes sense. And the piece of out, if you can quiet down and get still that there's something in there that shows up as well. I remember reading a book, uh, sometime back that guys named Brad something, he's a Zen guy. It's got a great title to his book on dog and it's called sit down and shut up. Or was it shut up and sit down, sit down. Which are really simple instructions and simple doesn't mean easy. Well, let me give you an example, though. We were talking about the fluid tide and the, the importance of that fluidity as the first expression of form in the body. Cause you know, you brought up the doubt etching and the earliest version of the doubt aging, uh, came from and it was unearthed in the nineties and there's actually a new chapter. And the title of the chapter is great. Unity gives birth to water or fluidity, and it's a new cosmology. It's not like the one gives birth to the two. The two gives birth to the three of the standard one that we all know from loud. So this is the first way in which unity becomes. Embodied in the world is in a quality of fluidity and then heaven and earth show up. And it's also this kind of recursive kind of bootstrapping thing where fluidity is what helps. Unity then produce heaven and earth and whatnot. There's a separate chapter. is the, uh, on that. And that's probably the base level, uh, expression of how this concept of fluidity being a precursor to form and structure. I'm calling it our literature. I'm not saying, oh, I'm some foreigner to this literature. I, this is my literature. This is my tradition. At this point, you know, I spent 40 years swimming around in these waters and may be, uh, in the shallow end of the pool. But nonetheless, I consider it mine. It's part of the medical tradition and, and we see it. It's right here. It's not this foreign thing that we're, we're importing from, you know, some Western osteopathic idea about fluidity. So, well, it's interesting too. Especially to hear this, Taiyang try that this aspect of fluidity. I mean, this is the very first thing in the, in the, the osteopaths they're really into the fluid ties. I mean, especially those biodynamic eyes, as I understand it, my limited understanding they're really into these different aspects of both fluidity and stillness. Those are two currents in the overall sea of internal cultivation in, in Asia. And particularly in China that are of great interest to me. And you see these, these people, it's fascinating to watch them kind of appeal to Asian experiences of these phenomena. To explain it to themselves. They may go to India. They may go to China, but they're, they're looking for some language. And in fact, the combination of, well, they can talk, you know, much more explicitly and clearly about the palpatory experience. And then what we have coming out of Asia is all the larger conceptual framework that makes a lot of. To them and they appeal to that. So there's this mutual informing this of experience that is, uh, it's really wonderful. And we're, and we can take that and really apply that in a very pragmatic way in Chinese medicine and acupuncture and herbal medicine as well, especially with the fluids, especially with the fluids, just hearing you a few moments ago, talk about that. You've been swimming in these waters. You've been reading these books. You've been swimming in these waters. That might be the shallow end of the pool, but you're in the pool. And I remember a conversation with the guys at Eastland press some months ago when I was in Seattle, it's actually one of the shows, the one on the early history of Eastland press. And one of the things that Dan and John talked about was that Chinese medicine. Isn't just something that's over there and we're kind of grabbing pieces of it over here, but it it's actually something that's ours as well. And we have our piece to contribute. It's not like it's someone else's. It's also our tradition and it's our job to take what we have and blend it with what we're getting and evolve it along. And in fact, I think when you look at the history of Chinese medicine dynasty to dynasty place to place, we see this blending and this incredible. Evolution that happens in all kinds of different ways. I mean, it's more like a weedy garden than it is a cultivated field. You know, there's just so many different currents and ways of taking some very basic principles and applying those first principles and seeing how does this work and how can I help people with. You know, a great example of that, the engaging vitality work and coming out of the osteopathy is two principles that know more than the techniques. It's very explicitly stated that that self-regulatory mechanism in the body. What we, you know, we talk about is cheap in all its manifestations that that's inherently intelligent, that it's smart. And that what we fundamentally have to do is to listen to that. It's very explicitly use the word, listen, that if we listen to that, it'll tell us what the problem is. It won't tell us necessarily what to do about it, but it will tell us what the problem is. And this is explicitly laid out in the osteopathic tradition. Now I think that is not. A particularly foreign idea to most practitioners of traditional east Asian medicine that that's like, oh yeah, they're on board with that. But where exactly in our literature, does it say that? Well, we think about it most often, we say. The key is excess or deficient. We're using active verbs to do things to the T we're tonifying we're draining. We're not really talking about the inherent intelligence of the chief. And yet one of the, you know, the fundamental premises of Daoism, uh, Dallas philosophy, you know, coming out of is this notion of scissor on, you know, the self. So nature, the spontaneity, the naturalists, that, what is that in the naturalness of the Dao, the expression of that in the body, but in intelligence. And this is a great example of how, you know, we have. These two different kinds of traditions having a similar insight and they can inform one another and create something new. And that's also been happening in medicine, particularly medicine in Asia for millennia that Indian ideas have made it to China. Chinese ideas have made it to India and Tibet and that sort of thing. And it's just happening at a faster and more, a nuanced rate than ever before in history. Like everything else. I want to talk about the extraordinary vessels. You've done a little book on that. I think it's only what about two inches thick? Just a little one in that book, it seems like there's some chemical aspects to the extraordinary vessels. I want to get into that in a moment. The other thing that I've been hearing, just, I talked to lots of different people on the podcast, and I've been hearing this idea lately about the eight extras as being very helpful. For psycho emotive issues as well. And it sounds like traditionally they've also been used for different kinds of Al chemical transformations. I was wondering if you have some thoughts about that. The teaching, my cow, the Leasher Jen's book on the eight extraordinary vessels was literally the first text that I studied. When I got out of acupuncture school, I had a little bit of Chinese and it Kikkoman Moto had been at the school when I was there. Not only taught me some Japanese acupuncture, but just really got me interested in the whole process by which we look at texts and do things, something practical with them. So as I'm trying to become my own practitioner, I pick up this teaching Bama cow and in the first couple of introductory chapters, it becomes very clear that at least Jen makes it clear that we have to really understand the medicine and the alchemy that these are very separate. They are definitely separate. But they are overlapping domains. So that I think is where I got interested in the internal alchemy aspects of things, you know, through the teaching Bama cow. And you know, then when Mickey FEMA and I started to do a formal translation in the late nineties, Done that for many years, I had this idea that, oh, I'm going to do some research on this. And what's going to happen is that I'm going to figure out some sort of extraordinary vessel Qigong that, uh, Leasher Jenn was doing. And it he's actually quoting from a wide swath of the internal cultivation literature in a way that makes it difficult to nail down any one tradition. It's sort of the common property of the tradition as a whole, as opposed to any one particular current of it. But the fascinating thing for me was that in literally every passage that leisure Jenn quotes in his discussion of the extraordinary vessels, it's about stillness. It's about this idea of dynamic stillness and that he may be talking about primal Yong or essence Xi. But when he's bringing in the a L chemical aspect, it's all about stillness and that we see. Is a common thread throughout the internal cultivation traditions. You may be doing whatever you're doing, moving the cheer around all that sort of thing, bringing she up the back, down the front, you know, microcosmic orbit it's happening in a ground of stillness. And the end place is the ground of still. Whatever we're going to say about the extraordinary vessels in relationship to the internal cultivation tradition has to acknowledge the central polity of that principle in what we're going to do with them. You know, if we're going to say, okay, we're going to use the extraordinary vessels to access primal chief will. That actually happens in a ground of dynamic stillness. If we're going to say that we are going to be helping somebody with their anxiety or making them 10% happier, or whether we're going to be helping them become enlightened or whatever, all of that, whatever our engagement or the cheese through the extraordinary vessels is, is really happening in a ground of stillness. It's really easy to kind of acknowledge that and then set it aside because it. Easier to go, okay, I've got this protocol for this. This is how I'm going to access the primal key, or I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. And that this sort of gets overlooked. So, yeah. So this brings up a question for me. I feel like my 13 year old niece, she's always coming to me and going to, I have a bunch of questions on that order, but so stillness action happening against a background of stillness, stillness as the ground for action arising. I mean, in some ways we can look at that and go, well, that's a way of looking at your basic, how yin and yang interact with each other. As practitioners we are paid and our patients expect us to do something, to be active, to get something done, right. That's implicit in the agreement of someone coming to a practitioner for the most part. And what I'm hearing you say is that any action we do comes from this ground of stillness. So, so a couple questions on that. How do I get to this? Is it the patient that needs to be still? Is it the practitioner that needs to be still do they both need to be still as, as practitioners and we need to be doing something right? Cause I mean, people are paying us and they want results, but it sounds like it's helpful. And in my experience, I have found it to be helpful as well, that if I can come from that place of quiet, then something else can happen, but it's not necessarily coming from doing. I mean, this really gets into that whole paradox about, you know, doing, not doing I'd like to get your thoughts from the practitioner side, where it is helpful for us to be in relation to stillness, as we're busy going about our day, helping people. I don't wander around my office like a zombie, you know, with my arms out front, you know, trying to be really still, right. I think there's the capacity to get yourself out of the way. And down-regulate your system in a demonstrable way that is part of the tool kit of being an effective practitioner. You know, even if that's, to the extent that, well, you're able to work past the three cups of coffee you had before you see your first patient in the morning, even if it's only on that level. So, I mean, for sure we have to do stillness, but you know, if we think about it, what we're doing is we're doing what we can to help create the conditions of that. Moving from settling, settling, integrating, and opening to something deeper, some deeper level of stillness, especially if we're talking about working on an emotional level, You know, some sort of a transpersonal level, uh, with the extraordinary vessels that we're helping our patients kind of in train to our own stillness, our own capacity to do that. And it can occur in a very workaday kind of an environment. It's, it's something that you learn how to do. It's one of the things that for years, I had to make sure that my students could do before I'd let them be in the office with me and be in the, in the clinic with me, with patients that they could come in from being out, making sure. Prescription got filled or something like that and come in and then down-regulate get themselves out of the way and at least be able to pay attention to what's going on and not be adding their own turmoil in their cheek to things. So, I mean, as soon as we're actually talking about something like clinical practice, where we have to do something, we have to accomplish something in a finite amount of time. Then this stillness practice, actually, it makes us okay. What are the palpatory reference that we have for stillness within ourselves? And where is my patient in that whole continuum of getting quieter and quieter and quieter? You used the term downregulation. I've heard other people use it as well, but I'm not sure that I completely understand what it means. The first thing is, is your breathing is going to slow down heart rates going to slow down, can use your breathing to voluntarily be a way of slowing your heart rate. And you can slow that. And you can reduce that, that sort of ambient buzz that you have going on in your nervous system. Again, like you use a coffee analogy, like, well, how do you feel after three cups of coffee? Great. Okay. Well, yeah. Yeah, you feel good, but that's not the key being turned on. As a matter of fact, that's a thing that actually happens as we feel the system start to downregulate that you say, okay, the person's settling into the table for instance. And yet after a little while you start to feel this, this is, and that's more like that's not the Chibi. Activated. That's just like, offgassing, that's like, you know, lying in bed at night next to your partner and you're all snuggled up. And then all of a sudden they Twitch and wake you up as their nervous system is like discharging. That's all that is, it took me a while to really realize that, uh, that, that the, you know, finger in a light socket is not what what's happening when the cheese is really activating in a self-regulatory way. That's true. EPA phenomena at best that this quieting is where the system's going to be able to go. Okay, now I know what to do with this input that I'm either getting or not getting I can self-regulate, you know, it, it seems to me, if someone's going to approach this work, it's probably really important to have your own personal senses of what it is to be down regulated, what it is to be quiet and what it is to be still, because if we can't experience it for ourself, how would we possibly recognize it in someone else? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I learned this stuff in a. Been a meditator all my life. And yet when I learned this in a formal context, in a cranial capacity, you know, we're, we're learning to palpation for all these different kinds of rhythms and tides and things that are even much more subtle than anything we've talked about, but it's all happening in the first place. We experienced it as it is in ourselves. And the thing is that this goes to, to like working with patients, it's not just a thing between you and your patient. It's a field phenomena in the room. And that that's one of the reference actually, whether that's actually a palpatory phenomena, but it is an experiential reference where the entire room gets quiet. You know, there's no less traffic moving by outside there's people outside the door talking or whatever, but somehow the room is quiet. That's a reference. That, that level of self-regulatory stillness happening. You know, my, one of my favorite illusions to this, uh, in the, the Nate on literatures, by, uh, Wu Chung Shu, you know, he talks about the Tigie, this Supreme ultimate is still and pure, and yet seems to stir that it's a stillness that deep and profound, and yet it's alive. It's not like, oh, okay, we've all just died. And somehow we can, right? It's not static, not static. It is a lie. That passage for me is, is such a, a rich illusion. What the ground of. You know, real deep transformation is in the internal cultivation tradition. You know, the, the NEDA on tradition, it's that, that's where primal G is primal. Gee, isn't this Kundalini thing. That's blasting up your, your central vessel and fire coming out of the top of your head. It's this deep primordial, quiet that then informs the entire system. It informs the room and it, you know, we could say, well, you get all cosmic around. It forms the universe, but that's the palpatory reference for primal Chi, right? So like, yo I'm needling the source points. I must be accessing the primal chief and, or I'm needling the source points deeply because, so I must be accessing the primal cheek. I have a different take on that. It depends on what you feel in the room. I suspect there's a context for that is what that is. Like, whatever you do, kind of mechanically performatively, it has to happen in that context. Well, I am definitely familiar with that sense, especially if coming back into the room where I walk into the room and it's just different and you use the term field phenomenon, and that makes sense. I've done some reading on Rupert Sheldrake work with morphogenic fields and such. And, you know, I think as human beings, we know the power of these fields because we can sometimes just walk into a room and go, ah, and there's other times we walk into a room and go, I'm getting at. Phil phenomenon is true. And then I don't think he used the word intention. Maybe you did, but it came up in my mind. And I wanted to ask this question because I hear this a lot that, that intention I'm using air quotes here. Intention is important. We have to have intention in our work. A practitioner's intention is somehow germane to a good treatment. And I mean, I just don't know about any of that because often for me as a practitioner, I mean, I want my patient to do better. I want them to feel better. I want them to hear whatever healing might be for them, but my idea of what might be right for them. And what's actually right for them might be two really different things. So I'm not sure really what I think about intention. It's a big question for me. It's it's got a giant question mark. After. Certainly people can project their own cheat. Right? I'm going to project my cheese with such force that I, uh, you know, knock you across the room without touching you, you know, we see she'd go masters, do that kind of thing. And that's an intentional manipulation of cheek, which is fine. That's like yo way, that's using activity, right. That's, that's an active engagement. Right. You know, so, oh, I'm going to needle this point and with an intention to do something else. And that there's certainly a place for that. I want to, before I say anything else really acknowledge the place for that, that, that if we're going to talk about something like, oh, effortless activity, Wu way, that's not that we're not doing it anything, but what we're doing is we're doing the most appropriate thing at a given moment. And that may in fact be something very intentional. But the aspect that really interests me, that I've really tried to cultivate in myself. And what I have to say about this has much more to do with kind of what underlies that intention, which is attention. It's just simply the capacity to attend that in many ways is much harder to just be there and, and just be present and just be present, really present and not thinking about what's your next move, going to be. What point are you going to do? What has to happen? What's happening with the office, laundry or lunch, just to be present and attentive. And to really listen to what's going on that, you know, for me is far more powerful in many ways. And it's a context for getting myself my own agenda out of the way and trying to listen to what the system's trying to do rather than have some idea about, I am doing an extraordinary vessel treatment, for instance. I don't so much do extraordinary vessel treatments, you know, I'll say, oh, is this, does this look like an extraordinary vessel presentation? And I may start that process and see that, oh, no. In fact it is not an extraordinary rest of the process. It's something else. It would have been very cool if I could have made it about the extraordinary vessels or the channel divergences or something, but oh, maybe it was just a channel center thing. And I had just had that experience the other day. I wanted to make it all really elaborate and complex, and it was actually the thing that was happening was something that's much simpler. And that I'm trying just to respond to that. And part of the way you do that is by attending. Tell us about that. Tell us what happened in that treatment. You're going in a certain direction. Oh, I think it's this. What caught your attention? What made you realize as you were attending that, oh, it's not this it's that where you using some of these palpatory findings, were you, what were you paying attention to? You know? Cause I know often I've got an idea in my mind, I've got like a map I'm going from here to there and I know these points do this and that. And it's very easy to get stuck in that map in my mind. And yet I also have had moments, luckily enough when I just catch something, I put a needle in and go, oh, that's so not. Right. So I'm just curious to hear what your process was around catching. It's actually a very simple case at the end of the day. And the patient had come in and he had been sick and had some lingering sinus congestion occurring in a larger constitutional context of, uh, you know, his, uh, some pretty weak lungs and that sort of thing. So I was doing some of the, the cranium. Assessment that we do in the engaging vitality work assessing for cranial based strain patterns and seeing, well, okay, fine. You know, I'm factoring all that into my flam heat in the lung orifices and thinking about my herbs and you know, what channels go through there and whatnot, and feeling his cranium. And as I'm doing this assessing also his ethmoid and going, wow, there's, it's, it's sticking on the left side and this is maybe a little embarrassing to say, but like, I know this guy, he's actually my personal trainer and he's also a wrestling coach. And, but part of it is it's really easy for me to forget background information until it's immediately necessary when I'm palpating, you know, so I'm just palpating and going, wow. This guy's ethmoid is really stuck and that's significant. And then I'm really, oh yeah. Three weeks ago, he got clocked by one of his high school wrestlers in the nose. And it jammed up as nosy. I mean, he still has a scar there, but I'm just all feeling what's going on there. And like, you go like, oh wow, your Neff moist. That's significant. You know, so I, I didn't intellectually bring that in and. Something, it was just something I felt. So I was trying to figure out how to get his F boy to, to, to release. So I'm actually up, you know, kind of on the bridge of his nose there thinking, well, what, what is that? And how do I do that? And one of the things that Dan Becka and I have done is we kind of mapped out the channel. Divergence is through the nasal pharynx in the throat, up through the cranial base and looking at where their Terminus is, are in the head and thinking about those in terms of cranial strain patterns. So I'm thinking, oh, is this, you know, second confluence or third confluence? And that's going to be the thing that, or maybe first confluence, is that going to be the thing that, that really releases that? And we have a way of checking that. And none of that is actually significant. And I go back and I take his pulse in his room. No, his left proximal position. Superficially. It's just a little hard. Oh, maybe it's a bladder channel thing. Oh, wait. The bladder channel starts at bladder one. Oh. So do channel listing and the manual thermal technique that we use for picking points and oh, bladder 67. So this is like a channel center thing on the opposite end do bladder 67 and his ass Lloyd releases, you know, and then everything else, you know, the clouds parted out, you know, so that I can breathe. Now I can see clearly now, whatever, but it was an example of where I wanted to make it something, you know, kind of, kind of a little cool, but actually it was something much simpler and I just had to really pay attention to that and go, Nope, Nope. That wasn't right. That's a great example. And it brings up another thing that's kind of near and dear to my heart, which is, I am so often wrong about so many things. And in-clinic I'm often wrong or hopefully I'm wrong in ways that are helpful to my patients because it gets me back on track to something. That might be more helpful. Well, I mean, we're taught to want to be helpful and we want to be helpful in God, love us. We want to be right. But so often we're wrong. It's great hearing what you've just described. You've got these different ways of paying attention and attending to what's going on so that you can course correct as you go through your. Well, I mean, I think, you know, the more palpatory tools you have and that you are attending to the less likely that you are to go, oh, I'm the pulse person and the pulse must be right. Right. Cause we know the pulse, isn't always right. I mean, they've known that since the Nanjing, that's a, that's a thing in the non-judging, that's how they kind of developed abdominal diagnosis. So sometimes the pulse does, why doesn't the pulse always tell us the right information. So it's kind of like a willingness to prove yourself wrong. That's really the basis of scientific method. Right. And you have to be kind of fearless about that. And it's funny, like, you know, patients actually, they come to really appreciate that when you go, no, no, we can do better than that because they don't know whether you're BS, seeing them when you go. That's great. Right. But if you go, no, no, I think we can do better than, ah, I like that better. It very least it means that you're taking the time to pay attention. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, sometimes I'll, I'll take a needle out of somebody after I put it in and they're like, why'd you take it out? I go, it wasn't right. Yeah. Oh, wow. This guy's paying attention. You mentioned the divergent channels. And I wanted to get to that. I know we're getting a little close to the end of our conversation today, but I wanted to touch on the divergences a bit. You mentioned it here in this treatment that you were just talking about. It's something I wanted to speak with you a bit about today. I don't know about you when you were in school, but I know that for me, the divergence has seemed kind of like a footnote. We got a little bit about it, but not much. And I can't say that I really know much about the divergences at all. And you've written a whole book on. I think that, uh, the reason that you haven't seen much on the channel divergence is, is, is because there isn't much, you actually got me thinking about this not too long ago, but really this is the golden age of channel diversions therapeutics. The last 30, 40 years prior to that, there is very little in the literature. There's only one chapter in the naming that really explicitly speaks to the channel. Divergence is the other places where people say, oh, that's a channel divergence reference. You're really reading into the literature in, in very questionable. Ways, uh, you know, this notion for instance, that a chapter five of the link shoe, when they talk about extraordinary pathogens entering the separate channels is a, is a reference to the channel. Divergence is, is just, uh, you know, really indefensible on psychological terms. Like it doesn't work grammatically, it doesn't work in the context of the passage itself. It's incoherent on lots of different levels. And that's not to say that you can't do something with that, but it's an example of how we've really had to read into the literature kind of, uh, with, uh, many grains of salt in order to come up with anything more about the channel divergences than what it says in links, U 11, where they just lay out the jet trajectories and you have to infer from there what they do. So there's not much in the literature. And you say in the past 30 years or so, there's been much more of a look at it. I'm curious about your particular perspective on these. What are your thoughts on, on the divergences in terms of the kind of pathologies that might show up with them? And how would you know, I mean, you mentioned in this just a moment ago in this treatment that you thought maybe there was something to do with the divergences, what kinds of things are you looking for when you're thinking about the channel divergence as being an issue, and then how do you go about treating that stuff? Well, okay, so let's start with the channel. Divergence is, are union Perez is bladder, kidney, gallbladder, liver, that sort of thing. There's six union pairs and the pairs communicate with their associated viscera. And then they all go through the chest. Uh, some of them go through the heart. Some of them just go through the chest in a more general area in a more general way. And they transit the throat and terminate as a single unit on the young channel, in the head they're associated young channel in the head. So that's all we can really say about them, to the extent that what kind of key they contain. I think the most reliable thing we could say is, well, they access his own key that she, of the chest, which is, you know, kind of the sum total of all the different sheet in the body, really that, because they all go through there, that's a reasonable infer. I think most of my exposure to the channel difference has really come out of the stuff I did with Nikki shame around the Japanese approach, where they really downplay like a lot of the theoretical inference. They're much more interested in trying to come up with ways of using them and, and playing with that. Their goal was to use the channels of urgencies as part of a larger project of just making full use of the channel system. It is plausible to say, oh, they, they are a deeper pathway. I mean, I, we, we did use the word deeper pathways in the book we did. So I have to cop to that. And it is a deeper, it is a deeper pathway in some, in some respect or another, but they do come superficial. They go surface and they dive deep. Right. So, so that, I think that there's, that, you know, I think if you see a deep problem, that's a plausible question. Oh, could this be a, you know, something that's more about the viscera than the, the channel itself, that's a possibility then, you know, something where you have, oh, I think this is a kidney problem, but it's actually somehow related to something that's going on in the chest, the throat or the head. That's an obvious question to ask. Could that be a channel divergence thing now, you know, I spent a lot of time trying to lay out these different diagnostic criteria that Mickey was into in the eighties, in the book, you know, with, uh, kind of the Monica style bias based methodology. And Mickey liked to do a lot of stuff with ACA Bonnie around picking channel divergences and that sort of thing. And for me, I keep it much more simple than. Over time. It seemed like, oh, there is a pulse quality that I also associate with the channel divergence is, and that is like a lack of consolidation. Like a pulse could be big and strong even, but you don't, you can't feel the borders that whether that is something that is at the end of a treatment, you you've improved the pulse, but it's unconsolidated in that way. Or unconsolidated could also in this context maybe mean overly con consolidated as well. It's like the border is, is unhealthy in some way. That's something that makes me think, oh, could this be a channel divergence treatment? You know, I don't want to oversell it as the palpatory reference for the channels version six, because I think there's a lot more, a lot of people are talking about the channel. Divergence is now much more than ever before, but not many people that I know ever say, oh, I have a palpatory reference for the channel divergence when I feel this. And I can transmit that palpatory reference to interested and committed individuals recipients. Then I'm interested in that because I don't think we have, uh, an optimal set of palpatory reference for the channel. Divergence is nothing near what we have in terms of the extraordinary vessels, where you have two different systems of, of, uh, of abdominal diagnosis, uh, uh, virtually two different systems of post-diagnosis, uh, coming through the teaching Bama cow. And, uh, the both lead these estrogens. And then, you know, some of the other things that we do in engaging vitality work, where we listened to the extraordinary vessels through the fluid body, that's an inference drawn on how the surgeon put everything together for the extraordinary vessels. We really have nothing like that in the channel's version says, well, maybe it's our job at this time. Since there's so much interest to start to find these patterns and share them, see if they hold it. Right. You listeners out there, you could get on that and Michael heavy on the show. Is there anything else that you'd like to leave our listeners with Michael? I would really like to paste in a little earlier, uh, a definition of what I think the alchemy piece is and how. Works and how it relates to everything else, because I mean, one of the things that we kind of skipped over was, well, why are we talking about internal cultivation and why are we talking about to some extent, why, why am I interested in the Nate on current, in particular? Uh, and you know, this really does come through the teaching bomber cow where that's the current that Leasher gen is, is presenting to us. But the Nate on itself is really, you know, inextricably connected to all of the other internal cultivation practice. Is there are many of them that are probably going to be of interest to traditional east Asian medicine practitioners in the west. Zen is a great example. Like you can't really talk about the development of that alchemy tradition. Acknowledging the conversation that it has had with the Chon current, the Zen current in China, and it's a filter through which we can access. Many different currents of internal cultivation practice. And the thing about it is, is that it is among the most embodied fundamental premise of that is that it is an embodied process of transformation that, you know, we don't just work for with cheesy as a means for making our physical vessel ready for something more real, something more subtle, something more transcendence that, you know, we're always working with key and, you know, because we, or always orienting to chia on some level or another particularly, you know, through the extraordinary vessels, for instance, that those ideas are at least potentially translate to the medicine that was Leisha Jen's idea about that. So, you know, it's, it becomes a matter of saying, well, if I understand the principle. Of what is being transmitted in this, this, uh, Nate on current. And I understand that principle, how that principle works in my own body. I can experience it in my own body. Then why shouldn't that principle be? Operable on some level or another in another person's body. Uh, and that then the, the, the trick is will. How, what means do we have for actually tracking that, you know, as you said, the first thing we need to do is we need to be able to experience these things in our own body, but then beyond that, we need a vocabulary, really a consensual vocabulary of palpation to say, oh yeah, I feel this going on. You know, so you have some capacity for inter examiner, uh, a cord on what we're feeling and, and, you know, that's where some of these osteopathic palpatory skills really provide a, a great link for translating these, these ideas and internal experiences into something that's, you know, much more clinical. And that's, uh, a big part of, uh, you know, my interest in this I'm, I'm not trying to be a historian or present myself as an authority, a certainly not an authority in any particular current of, uh, NEDA. And as a matter of fact, I'm more, much more interested in the larger current, uh, because I think if, if those are there and those, those transcend any particular take on NEDA, I think they're more likely to be real. And those are the ones that we want to really be looking at in terms of our engagement of that literature in medicine, like stillness is, uh, a great example of that. In essence, could I say we should put down the Facebook feed and sit down on the cushion instead? Well, what's Facebook. Oh man. Hey chip. I always enjoy our conversations. Thanks so much for being here today.