Wood Element in Traditional Chinese Medicine

It's time for the wood element. Please pause and read this. The letter for wood has a trunk, deep roots, and spreading branches, and the oldest version, oracle bone versions, look like that, bronze versions look like that. The branches were more obvious, but what is interesting is that there's always equal importance on the stems and the roots. It's easy to forget until we see a tree like this, just how big and powerful the roots are. The nature of wood is that it grows upwards and outwards. It grows to fill any available space that it's got, and if it doesn't have available space, it will grow to take up the space that it has got. In order to grow healthily, a tree needs obviously water and nourishment for nutrients. The water feeding into the wood needs space to grow into, needs light to head towards. Trees plants always grow up towards the light, and it needs cyclical patterns of growth and rest. You can also see the wood element is like a seed that bursts up into growth as the potential, a blueprint, and representing vigorous life force and movement. A healthy expression of this wood and movement is that if it hits an obstacle, it can grow around it and carry on growing. Wood is fed by water, nourished by water, and in turn engenders fire. It also controls the earth element, and it can easily over-control and invade the earth. It's controlled by the metal element, but because of the expansive nature of the wood, it can easily flow the wrong way and insult the metal element. Other associated with wood element is ching, which is blue-green. The character shows us vigorous growth on the top and an alchemist's crucible on the bottom, and this can represent like a colour pigment, or it can represent alchemical change. So it's the colour associated with vigorous growth and alchemical change. So this is the first flush of spring, that lovely vibrant colour of spring. Sound is to shout, so we have a mouth and free upward and outward movement. A shout in a voice might be shouting loud or assertive. It might be clipped, precise, abrupt, and there might be a lack of shout, like a downtrodden teenager. Odour is rancid, and this might be like rancid fat, like a chip pan or crisps. It might be an animal smell, foxy or goaty or skunky. It might be sour or acidic, making your nose wrinkle up, like freshly mown grass, or if you're a country boy like me, wet sheep. The emotion associated with wood is anger. So the character gives us a curtsying woman, a controlling right hand, and together a woman that's been controlled is a slave. And if we add to that the bottom part, which is a heart, it's the feeling of being enslaved. If anger is excessive, we might get rage, belligerence, being over dominating. If it's stuck, we might get frustration, irritability, bitterness. If it's lacking, we might get timidity, lack of direction, depression. So a perfect expression of anger would be being appropriately assertive, maintaining growth and maintaining boundaries, but not overstepping them. An association with wood is spring, so we have plants growing in the sun, and that represents this vigorous life force, and the flush of ching, the flush of green that we've talked about, and also the tension that you get with that vigorous growth from winter when everything is dormant and inward to a sudden surge of energy in the spring. The two in the Siwen, it says spring's three months. This is called effuse the old, or effusion and spreading. Heaven and earth together engender life. Engender is that character, vigorous growth that we've seen. The 10,000 things thereby flourish. Sleep at night and rise early. Take broad steps into the courtyard. Let your hair hang and your appearance be relaxed. In this way, bring about the mind to be alive. Engender and don't kill. Give and do not take. Praise and do not punish. This is the spring's way of resonating with life. So this is the spring cheese resonating with yangshen. This is nourishing life's dao, the way. It's this character again, sheng, which is birth or growth. So vigorous, vigorous growth. And this is the same that we see in the sheng cycle, the engendering cycle of the elements. And what's important with the growth of wood, which we see perfectly in the grain of wood, is that we need periods of growth and then periods of rest. So for wood to be healthy, we need a surge of growth and then a surge of rest, and then a surge of growth and a surge of rest. The sense organ or orifice is the eye. The eye has just been turned around horizontal. And this represents, on a physical level, our vision and also on a metaphorical level, our sense of direction, our vision for ourselves, the movement, the thing that we're heading towards. The body part is the tendons or the ligaments. So the character gives us bamboo, telling us about flexibility, flesh telling us it's a body part, and a plough representing strength. Our wood is in good form. Our tendons will be strong, flexible, and loose and relaxed. The taste associated with wood is a little confusing. It's sour, and sour has a contracting, gathering, astringent nature. And it basically takes this upward-outward nature of wood and relaxes it and soothes it. So things like citrus, vinegar, leeks, dairy products, and tea. It's the spring of our lives, and wood elements are particularly active, especially around two or three. And again, in the teenage years, we see children needing to insert themselves and separate from their parents, claim their independence. And they often do this by toddlers saying what they won't do, and a certain amount of anger and frustration around in order for this change to happen. The organ associated with the wood element is, of course, the liver. And in Si Wen chapter eight, it says that the liver holds the office of the army general, and strategies derived from him. So we have to plan, scheme, advise, counsel, and we have to carry out a well-thought plan, which can also mean to consider or even to overthink. So the liver's often regarded as being the planner. This army general role in a number of ways. We can think about having the big picture, having the strategy, having control and responsibility in equal measure, making the big and often difficult decisions, and also protection and maintaining the boundaries. This spirit associated with wood is the Hun, the ethereal soul. So this is yang in nature, has an outward exciting direction. So it should excite and inspire the Shen, it should give the Shen its sense of vision, sense of direction. And it arrives from the father, this is metaphorically, it comes from, it's yang, and it comes from the heavens. It arrives, said to arrive three days after birth when there's a naming ceremony. So this is metaphorical, again, for it being the last. So the Po, which is our soul, arrives shortly after conception, whereas the Po arrives much later. So it's much more insubstantial and it's the first to return. And when you die, it returns to the heavens, whatever that means for you. It's rooted in the yin blood of the liver. And if it's not working, then we get lack of direction, lack of inspiration. It gives us our artistic and creative aspects, gives us our ideas and our lateral thinking. It's also responsible for our dreams, both physically in terms of dream sleep and metaphorically in terms of our daydreaming and drifting off or our dreams and aspirations. It helps us separate reality from imagination and gives us our imagination. Again, we see this is particularly active in young children, where the divide between real and imagined is much thinner. It's balanced, we can appropriately assert ourselves, we can have a clear vision for our life, we can have appropriate structure and boundaries, and we can make plans and decisions. Issues with wood tend to be around boundaries, around who's got the power, about being correct, around personal growth and development. Think of perfect balance as being somewhere in the middle. A yang expression might be overly assertive, overly direct, seeking justice, seeking out what's wrong, being overly rigid, overly organised, frustrated or defiant. Whereas a yin expression of our wood might be to be passive, too passive or indirect, to be apathetic and not care about things, to be overly flexible, to be disorganised and to be overly compliant. Thanks for listening, thanks for the wonderful photos, and here's some source text and further reading.