In keeping with this month’s theme of Green, this week we’re going to talk about wind! What does wind have to do with green you ask? Well, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Traditional Chinese Medicine is deeply rooted in Five Element Theory. In this theory, each element has multiple associations including a yin organ, a yang organ, a season, a climate, an emotion, and even a color! Green belongs to the Wood Element, which includes the Liver (yin) and the Gallbladder (yang) organs. Wood’s emotion is anger, its season is Spring…and it’s climate is WIND! I was always able to make sense of this because Spring Time is always windy (yay for pollen!), and it’s the time of year where it’s very easy for us to get stressed and feel the need to de-clutter our lives – Spring Cleaning is GREAT for your Liver Qi. But I’m going to focus on the wind portion for now, we’ll have plenty of Spring Cleaning tips and nuggets coming out over the next couple of weeks.
So what’s the big deal with wind? Well, when practitioners of TCM like Hardin and myself are looking at various states of imbalanced Qi in the body, the first thing we try to figure out is whether or not your condition is a result from something internally generated (i.e. from diet and emotion) or if it was externally contracted (i.e. catching a bug). If it’s something that’s externally contracted, we call it an “exterior condition” with the presence of “Xie Qi” (Evil Qi!). There are 5 types of Xie Qi, and all are associated with climate:
- Heat: fever, redness, irritability, sore throat
- Cold: chills, stuffy nose, stiffness,
- Dampness: runny nose, mucous, swelling & heaviness
- Dryness: dry skin, chapped lips, dry cough etc.
- Wind: hmm????
Wind is kind of tricky, but what’s the first thing you think of when you think of wind? Movement and motion! Xie Qi is “wind” when we see symptoms that appear to blow themselves in quickly, and cause symptoms that may move around various parts of the body – think of when you catch a bad cold, it may start with some chills and aches, then it will move to your nose, then down your throat, and eventually down into your chest. Often what happens is another one of the Evil Qi’s will piggy back itself onto wind to hitch a free ride right into you! We call these conditions Wind-Heat, Wind-Cold etc. And how does it get in?? We TCM practitioners have a term for this, and we call it the “Wind Gate”, and this is literally how Evil Qi makes its grand entrance and causes all kinds of ruckus in the form of various viruses and upper respiratory infections.
“Wind Gate” or “Feng Men” is the literal translation of an acupuncture point (UB-12) located on your upper back (on either side of your 2nd thoracic vertebrae), but it generally refers to your entire upper back and neck region. This is why it’s so important to keep yourself covered up when the weather is temperamental – so listen to your elders and your acupuncturists when they tell you to keep a scarf on! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had parents feel that moment of rejoice when I tell them they are right to keep their kids bundled up — even their 50yr old kids.
With the weather like it’s been in Lexington lately, it’s even more important to keep yourself covered up, even on beautiful days like today. When the weather keeps fluctuating as drastic as it’s been, your wind gate and your “Wei Qi” (immunity Qi) start to become a little spastic because they don’t know what kind of weather they should be performing for. When it gets warm and sunny, it opens your pores to ventilate all that stagnated Qi; but when it gets cold again right away, the pores on your wind-gate area are sitting ducks waiting to be shot at by Wind and that evil Qi.
So the moral of the story? Keep yourself covered, wear your scarves, utilize hot tea and soup, and keep that wind gate protected until this weather decides to make up its mind and stay warm for awhile; then you’ll be free to run around in your tank tops and eat all the watermelon you want.
