Four Pillars

I certainly had my day zoom by fast as always on Wednesdays. I'm in my fourth quarter at school now over at Mueller and two of my classes this quarter are assessment classes. The first one being Asian Assessment and right after that Body/Mind. So I'm getting the perspective on Chinese Medicine in how they look for disease and disharmonies. Body/Mind we are learning body types, emotions and where we store them in our bodies and how to better read a client while assessing them.

I will first start off with Asian Assessment. We are learning what is called the Four Pillars of Asian Assessment which include:
1. Observation/Looking
2. Listening & smelling (these two words are the same in Chinese)
3. Touching/Palpation
4. Asking

We are observing and looking at the face and tongue and palpating pulses. So this class is all about some tongue observations and pulse readings which take years and years of practice. There is no way to learn everything there is with this in 12 weeks, but I'm getting my feet pretty wet with Asian body work. This is now my third Asian body work class I have been introduced to since attending Mueller and I wish I could take them all! I love the looking at the body as a whole instead of looking at the body and mind as two separate parts. In the very short weeks of this quarter and well since this summer taking Asian Theory I have come to my own conclusions that you just cannot separate mind/body/spirit. Over the last three to four weeks I have been doing more observing of people, randomly asking friends to stick their tongues out and just looking for clues as to if they have Qi Stagnation (which is by the way where the normal movement or flow of Qi is impaired.) a possible deficiency in their stomach/spleen or perhaps blood deficiency which is usually caused by a spleen deficiency... don't know what exactly I'm talking about? Well look it up and educate yourself. lol.. It's some really amazing stuff! Tongue diagnosing is becoming pretty fun. We all even are going to bring our cameras in next Wednesday to take photos and get a Tongue page going for Mueller's facebook page. That would actually be pretty cool and would probably help promote other students in taking this class. It's really important in going into Asian body work to really get as many basics of how to read clients if your going to specialize with this particular body work. I wouldn't be able to just go in work on some points where my teacher tells me to work on without understanding what the flow of Qi is or why is it that the tongue is so important in assessment. It actually, what I am learning is probably the most reliable way to tell what is going on with someone. Even in Western Medicine a medical doctor has to look at your tongue to get some observation as to what is going on with their patients. Pulse however is just something that is going to take years of practice... kinda like hand rolling and I have only been practicing that for about four months!  Anywho there are 28 Chinese Pulses and that just blows me b/c I'm sitting here palpating classmates and I'm just like "umm huh.... " I get it but it's so suseptable to change that it is a little more hard to determine an illness. So we do a pulse intake and then do some Tui Na body work on each other which I LOVE! After we do that we check the pulses again to see any changes. We even check pulses after some Qi Gong exercises which is something else I'm absolutely in love with!

For those who wonder what the heck is Tui Na? "Grasp/Pull" It's a dispersion/tonifying technique used along the Meridian Channels. Today we worked on the legs... My favorite body part to work on! I was able to add Spleen 2,3,4 now to my list of knowledge on points! Tui Na is really good to get energized. It is compared to Shiatsu. Shiatsu is sedating points. So lets say if you really need to go to sleep or perhaps have too much Yang in ya like I do, you may want some Shiatsu! However, over the two, I will take Tui Na any day!