Flow and Counterflow: Health, Humans and Natural Environments

Rhythms in Nature

We are constantly interacting with the rhythms of our natural environment.

The cycles of day and night (circadian rhythm), the four seasons (circannual rhythm), and the monthly lunar phases are the three fundamental cycles for life on Earth. We know that creatures of all kinds, from birds to insects to mammals, change their behavior based on daily, monthly and seasonal cycles.

As for those weird animals called human beings, those cycles continue to affect our physical and mental physiology, even when we try so hard to fight against them.

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If you were to take in all of the biological and psychological rhythms of living things, you would perceive what in music is called a polyrhythm: a complex layering of multiple different rhythmic cycles. If the cycles are harmonious, the music is beautiful. If they are disorganized, panick or chaotic, the sound is painful.

The polyrhythm of all life on Earth is mind-bogglingly complex. Scientists and philosophers from China’s classical period (500BCE-200CE) devised a framework to see unity in the complexity. To begin to understand how our bodies interact with these rhythms we swim in at every moment, let’s start with this:

Rhythms in the environment resonate in real-time with rhythms in our body.

Human physiology uses cyclical movements all the time—when it is working well. Some cycles are daily, monthly, or seasonal. And some cycles have even smaller expressions. The circulatory system, the digestive system, respiration, hormone levels, emotional expression, temperature regulation, reproduction, you name it, all of them rely on cyclical rhythm to function well.

Blood circulation, for example, has many levels of rhythm. It thrives on a nice steady beat from the heart which has a rhythmic contraction-expansion cycle every second or so. It is also influenced by the lungs, which has its own rhythmic contraction-expansion 12-20 times per minute. Blood circulation also has cycles in the constriction and dilation of blood vessels, which cycle as needed in response to the external environment and the body’s internal state. These rhythms in the circulatory and respiratory systems change (or should change) to resonate better with daily and seasonal cycles.

Emotions are also specific movements: anger is a surging upward, fear sinks down, sadness disperses, joy fills. They cycle in how an emotion emerges and then fades. And they are rhythmic in how they feel in our body and mind. For example, anger is a quick, hard rhythm, while sadness is slow and soft. These are healthy rhythms for these feelings. If anger slows down but remains hard, it is resentment. If the softness or gentleness of sadness thickens and becomes heavy, it is one kind of depression. (There are multiple ways to get to that thing we call 
“depression”.)

Peristalsis in the intestines is a beautiful example of an internal rhythm. The intestines also give us a simple example of what happens with disorganized movement. The regular, coordinated rhythm of smooth muscle contracting and relaxing is how food moves from one end of the intestines to the other. If the rhythmic contraction-relaxation cycle goes off, then you get constipation or diarrhea.

This brings us to the next major principle:

Living things do better when the cycles are regular.

It’s like being a musician in a band (I love a music metaphor, if you couldn’t tell). It is a whole lot easier to play along if the beat is predictable, and it usually sounds a lot better. If the drummer is slowing down one minute and then speeding up the next, or stopping and starting off beat, the song is going to fall apart.

Pollution is like this. Unmanageable amounts of greenhouse gases, plastics, air pollutants, soil contaminants, electromagnetic radiation, noise pollution and artificial light each mess with the beat in different ways.

The more polluted our environment becomes, the more disorganized its rhythms get. When the natural rhythms become disorganized, then so to do those inner movements in our own bodies. Disorganized movement is the very definition of sickness.

This connection between humans and their environment is the heart of classical acupuncture.

Classical Chinese Medicine and Cycles in Nature

Two and a half thousand years ago, there was a lot going on in China. This was the “Classical Period” of Chinese culture. Laozi, Confucius and a hundred other schools of philosophy were all taking a hard look at what was working for people, and what wasn’t. The spirit of revolution was in the air, and a revolutionary idea took root:

Living things are not tossed about by supernatural forces, but are actually affected by forces of nature. These forces can be observed, studied and understood according to definable laws and principles.

Philosophers and natural scientists meticulously observed patterns in nature, trying to understand the ways that the natural world affected human affairs. (People all over the world were doing this long before classical China, only with a different interpretational framework and different language.) Their goal was to predict the outcomes of their interventions, hoping to have more agency in the ups and downs of life.

In ancient Greece, at the same time, this same idea took root but over time it changed and people found ways to separate themselves from natural rhythms, to overcome and subsume nature. In ancient China, at least for some, it was the opposite. The question they asked was how to align oneself with the movements of nature. They saw that the forces that create stars, that make the seasons change, that turn the planet and create snow and wind and rain, these are bigger than human beings. And they do what they do regardless of human beings. The work is then to create as little friction as possible between a person, or society, and the natural environment that they hoped to thrive in.

When physicians got a hold of these theories, a new approach to medicine was created. They started writing down their ideas likely around the early Han dynasty (200BCE-9CE). Their study of the ways human health resonated with natural cycles gave birth to the granddaddy classic of East Asian medicine: the 黃帝內經 Huangdi Neijing “Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic”.

The Neijing is not the only classical text in East Asian medicine, but it is the oldest surviving medical text that continues to support and influence the way acupuncture and herbal medicine is practiced, even up to modern times.

The heart and soul of acupuncture is coded into the sparse characters of the Neijing.

It was the manual for a new approach to medicine, which used metal needles and moxibustion to harmonize the rhythms in our physiology with the rhythms in nature.

Over the centuries, other ideas began to influence the way medicine was practiced. In China, acupuncture became devalued and the medical community believed it to be based on superstition. (Japanese practice is a different story.) Ultimately, acupuncture was expelled from the Imperial Medical Offices in 1822 and spent a few centuries in relative obscurity.

For centuries, medicine was herbal medicine. When acupuncture came back into fashion in the mid-20th century, the Neijing was no longer guiding how acupuncturists used their tools. In standardized acupuncture practice, climate, season, time of day, sometimes even the basic principles of yin and yang, are downplayed or neglected. Even when it is looking closely at the “whole” patient, it often ignores the world the patient moves through.

Why Bring It Back Now?

This moment in history is a transition. For hundreds of years, the most powerful and influential people in the world have shared one kind of relationship to nature: Nature is a resource to be used to make human lives easier. It does not have agency of its own; it does not have value of its own; it is expendable; and humanity is both independent and superior to everything else on Earth.

This relationship (plus greed, selfishness and all the rest) has brought our world, with us on it, to a fork in the road. The choices we make over the next 100 years will very likely define the future of our species. If you think this sounds a bit much, I don’t blame you. It is, but it is also true. Two central questions of the 21st century are:

How will we relate to our environment?

How will we relate to others in their relationships with their environments?

At this moment, there are disorganized movements all over in society, politics, commerce, and ecosystems around the world. The authors of the Neijing studied disorganized movements like these as the key to understanding how a disease develops. They looked into the principles behind the manifestations and symptoms, and they found ways to harmonize humans with the rhythms of the natural world. Strategies for harmony between humanity and the natural environment are exactly what we need right now.

Times like the Chinese classical period are rare. I think (hope) that we are at the beginning of a similar period of life-saving innovation sparked by the catastrophe of climate change. It only makes sense to look back to the works of people who asked the same questions we are asking. The Neijing is the syncretic wisdom of generations of such people.

Neither they nor I are saying our world should be like the China they lived in. It’s the underlying principles that we are both after. As the Neijing says, the manifestations of a problem are infinite, but the principle behind them is simple. Power, or skill, comes from knowing the principle.

A Theory of Everything

The Neijing offers us a unifying framework to understand phenomena at different levels—in the natural environment, in culture, in politics, in medicine, in engineering, and so on—through the lens of rhythmic cycles or movements. It often uses the language of the four seasons to organize types of movement: spring is an upward rising movement, summer is expression and outward manifestation, autumn is descending and harvesting, and winter is contracting and inward. There is also the centering or balancing movement.

Up, down, out, in, center. Incredibly simple and also fundamental to every living thing.

At any given moment, a living thing is doing one of these five movements. In a healthy system, the movements of all living things in that system create a harmonious polyrhythm. (Perhaps the easiest way to know if a polyrhythm is harmonious is by observing the health of trees in that system.)

The philosophy that underpins most Western scientific disciplines is excellent at separating a things and events into their smallest parts. Because of that, we have achieved incredible things in science, engineering and medicine. We are now even looking to things like gene editing, which manipulates the tiniest parts of biology, one piece at a time.

Those achievements came at the cost of the whole. We lost sight of the interactions between parts and the way the parts can be seen as one.

Classical Chinese medicine balances this dominant perspective. It approaches every illness, injury and imbalance with this oneness in mind. It is well suited to address our health and promote wellness in the age of climate change.

The generations of scholar-physicians who wrote the Neijing understood something vital about human beings: an individual’s mental and physical health is immediately and fundamentally linked to the health of their environment. Where they then took this idea may help us find solutions to get through the chaos that lies ahead.

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Photo Credit: Image by Ama Dam Vila from Pixabay

Research and sources:

We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-have-no-reason-to-believe-5g-is-safe/
Human Responses to the Geophysical Daily, Annual and Lunar Cycles. https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0960-9822%2808%2900865-8
Breathing around the clock: an overview of the circadian pattern of respiration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14569400
Circadian rhythm of heart rate and heart rate variability. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10906034
A circadian rhythm in heart rate variability contributes to the increased cardiac sympathovagal response to awakening in the morning. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22734576
Chronobiology of Vascular Disorders: a ‘‘Seasonal’’ Linkbetween Arterial and Venous Thrombotic Diseases? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roberto_Manfredini/publication/43529583_Chronobiology_of_Vascular_Disorders_a_Seasonal_Link_between_Arterial_and_Venous_Thrombotic_Diseases/links/0912f5125b51868ae0000000/Chronobiology-of-Vascular-Disorders-a-Seasonal-Link-between-Arterial-and-Venous-Thrombotic-Diseases.pdf
The lunar cycle: effects on human and animal behavior and physiology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16407788
Seasonal Cycle Shifts in Hydroclimatology Over The Western United States. https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-1747-2005.29.pdf
Shifting Seasons. https://climatechange.lta.org/climate-impacts/shifting-seasons/
Acupuncture: Its Place in the History of Chinese Medicine. https://institutpsychoneuro.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Acupuncture-in-the-History-of-Chinese-Medicine-2000.pdf
Hundred Schools of Thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Schools_of_Thought