What the heck is chi?

If you are reading this, you hopefully found your way to theacupuncturestudio.com, the site of the only community acupuncture clinic in the Glens Falls, NY area. At the Acupuncture Studio, we are passionate about providing affordable complementary health care to people in our community. But enough about that-we'll leave the advertising to the website. I wanted to take a minute on my first blog to thank everybody that has made the Acupuncture Studio possible. We have existed for almost three years, not because of insurance companies or fancy grants, but because of you, our community. Thank you.

In this first blog, being the "free your chi" blog, I thought I would ask-what the heck is chi anyway? This question bugged me for a while, especially since I deal with chi and the effects of chi everyday. So I decided to give a lecture on it so I could learn more about it. I learned a lot. I learned that nobody really knows what it is, it's not mystical, and it has to do with cooking rice. But I digress. We were always told in acupuncture school that chi is "vital energy." This sounds nice, but it doesn't really give me a definition I can use, so I looked up these two words in the dictionary.

Vital-Necessary to the continuation of life; life-sustaining:
Energy- Energy is often defined as the ability to do work. Energy is converted from one form to another, but it is never created nor destroyed. Energy is the ability to make something happen.

It turns out that vital energy is the Life sustaining ability to make something happen. This made it interesting, but I still wasn't sure what energy itself was. Thus, it was reassuring to learn that nobody really knows what energy is either. Sources I looked up said that "We only know how to describe the characteristics of its various manifestations. The same is true of other physical phenomena, such as gravity. The "ability to do work" , or “making things change” is more of a characteristic of energy than a definition. However, without energy, nothing would ever change, nothing would ever happen. We can't define it, but we can say that energy is the ultimate agent of change.

Change is very important to Chinese medicine and Chinese philosophy; the I Ching is literally-“The Classic Book of Change.” It describes the flow of change in nature, the flow between Yin and Yang.

This was the link I was looking for. We all know about change, and change is what I'm trying to facilitate when I am doing acupuncture. Change is what allows night to become day and day to become night. Change is actually at the heart of everything we do, and it is also at the heart of the character for chi (as I learned it). The character for chi simply describes rice cooking over fire. The deeper meaning, however, is that chi is what allows hard dry rice to become cooked rice. Chi allows rice (and everything else) to change.
There's a profound thought behind this simplicity. We can't force dry rice to become cooked rice. We can't force a seedling to grow. However, with the proper environment, the right conditions, the changes in these things happen all by themselves. As Ted Kaptchuk says, "Chi allows things to become other things."

This is pretty powerful stuff. This life-sustaining energy, this life-sustaining ability to make things happen is a power to affect something without any direct or apparent effort. All we have to do is set the right environment and change happens by itself. This is the chi I know in the treatment room. Sometimes people work so hard to get well, to get healthy, and they just can’t seem to do it. People ask me, What else can I take?, or What else should I be doing? I try to tell them, the question should be "what should I be not-doing?" What should I be doing to allow things to happen to me with no apparent effort? The Chinese have a word for this-wu wei-do nothing. That is a hard sell to Americans. We like control, we like to be in the driver's seat, we like to get things done. It's hard to convince people that "not-doing" will have a greater effect on their health than "doing."

It's interesting to look at this concept through the lens of Western Medicine. Western medicine is miraculous, many of us would not be here without it, but it is very hesitant to embrace mystery, and mystery is the very basis of how our bodies work.

Western medicine and Chinese medicine look at the body very differently. Western medicine likes to cut things apart, down to the DNA, and see how it works. Chinese medicine likes to put it all together and see how the different parts relate to each other. Chinese medicine works not so much on form than on functional relationship.

Lonny Jarrett says:
"Chinese medicine does not study “things” but the “functional relationships” that exist between things. For it is in the empty space between things-not in the things themselves-that the eternal … is found.”

So chi, or energy, is just a relationship, not a thing.

Acupuncture begins to make more sense when put in this context of relationships instead of things. I'm not treating your Gall Bladder; I'm treating your Gall Bladder's relationship to everything else in your body. People ask if chi or "meridians" are real in the body even though we can't see them. We could as easily ask, is the relationship with your child or spouse real, even though we can't see it? But we know it's real, because we can see the effect of the love, the manifestation of the relationship over time. We can see how the relationship changes with certain influences in the environment.

With acupuncture, we treat pathways of chi called meridians. If we consider these meridians to be pictorial sketches of the relationships in the body, then putting a needle in certain places can be considered affecting the relationships. Acupuncture points are places where I have the best chance of influencing the relationship already established between different parts of the body. If I put a needle into a point, I have a better chance of influencing another part of the body, because I’m affecting an already existing relationship. The needle is providing information to build a healthy relationship.

So when I’m treating someone with acupuncture, I’m treating chi. I’m treating the functional relationship of different parts in the body. I’m treating the ability of your body to change. And not random change, but change in a way that is specific to your person, your body, dare I say it, your destiny…When we allow the subtle influences to work in our body, not caught by social conventions, past traumas, and ego stuff, we find health just waiting there for us. Without us even trying.

So hey, go ahead, take a break. Start a healthy relationship with your body. Free your chi.