I first encountered Lorie’s work in her book, Five Spirits: Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing. This text became the source of a synchronicity: only two days before my meeting with Lorie, a friend came over and mentioned that she was reading Five Spirits.

The spirit of this synchronicity is a dynamics of resonance—as Lorie and I already share roots in Worsley five-element acupuncture, depth psychology, and alchemy. If the unconscious is the Other’s discourse, then in this conversation I heard my own pathways coming back to me in new points of connection.

In this conversation, Lorie shares her experience and inspiration with listeners, as we move across fields in an exciting exchange of ideas. From five-element acupuncture to the spirit of human potential. From field dynamics to rapport, transference, and the alchemical third. From Jung to Lacan, archetypes to signifiers, and the structures of the unconscious.

We conclude by re-framing human potential and individuation into rhizomatic networks of becoming, where desire realizes destiny.

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Chapter Annotations

0:00 — Synchronous Currents

Opening with a synchronicity

03:28 — Five-Element Acupuncture

Studying with J.R. Worsley

06:48 — Acupuncture and Human Potential

Esalen; the mystery of acupuncture intervention

10:18 — Source Points

Teaching five-element treatment; less is more

13:27 — Field Dynamics

Subtle energetics; the joy of treatment; rapport and transference

20:35 — Knowledge and Collaboration

Breaking the epistemological divide; treatment as collaboration

24:32 — From Jung to Lacan

Tracing the move from Jung to Lacan; depth psychology and psychoanalysis

34:00 — Structures of the Unconscious

Preverbal experience and the a priori unconscious

40:23 — Spirit of the Points

Points as archetypes and signifiers

50:35 — Co-Individuation and Rhizomatic Becoming

Beyond the heroism of human potential and individuation

53:49 — Desire, Destiny, and the Real

Desire as the force of destiny; the Real to be continued

About Lorie Dechar

I’m an acupuncturist, psychotherapist, teacher, and author whose passionate focus is on the intersection of traditional Chinese medicine, depth psychology, spirituality, and Taoist and European alchemy. I touch the bodies, souls, and spirits of human beings with needles, moxa, plant medicines, poetry, stories, images, tears, laughter, and dreams.

I have studied with human teachers in this dimension – European Five Element Acupuncturist Professor J.R. Worsley, Zen Peacemaker Priest Claude AnShin Thomas, Focusing Founder Eugene Gendlin, Jungian Analyst Nathan Schwartz-Salant, and trans-public intellectual and post-activist Bayo Akomolafe. I have studied with more than human teachers – the quarry ponds, ocean tides, songbirds, fir trees, lady slippers, puffball mushrooms, sphagnum mosses, burdock weeds, and ice age stones – of the cove in Downeast Maine where I live. These, as well as teachers from other dimensions – the sages of ancient China, the revolutionary European mystics of Kabbalah and consciousness, wise wimmin whose names have disappeared like white feathers in the clouds – have guided me in the development of the work I call Alchemical Healing.

www.anewpossibility.com

In this conversation, I sit down with my friend and colleague, Paul Arellano, to explore the Year of the Fire Horse. We examine the Horse as a symbol of desire and drive, and Fire as an element of sovereignty and spirit. Paul unfolds the ecological and astrological dimensions, which I infuse with psychoanalytic and medical reflections. Together, we traverse a symbolic terrain of correspondences to better grasp the cautions and catalysts stirring this year.

00:00 - 09:23 The Ecology of the Fire Horse

Energetics of the Fire Horse, Chinese astrology, and cycles of change.

09:24 - 13:39 Heart, Fire, and Consciousness

The Heart as the seat of shen; fire element as warmth and relationality; centers of cognition in Eastern and Western medicine.

13:40 - 18:09 Horse Power

Horse as symbol of speed and power; horse power as amplification of energy.

18:10 - 27:20 Desire, the Unconscious, and the Libidinal Horse

Ethics of desire; the unconscious repression of desire; the horse as libidinal symbol.

27:21 - 30:57 Equestrian Therapy and Heart Fields

The heart field of horses; equestrian therapy and autism; horse as symbol of relational attunement.

30:58 - 38:42 The Sacrificial Horse

Vedic and Upanishadic conceptions of the horse.

38:43 - 42:17 The Heart as Sovereign

Horse as sovereign; Heart as Emperor.

42:18 - 49:08 Sublimated Sexuality

Reining in Fire Horse energy; Daoist deity Wen Zhe as general of negotiation.

49:10 - 54:38 Relational Conflict and Pericardium Gate

Potential for conflict; forgiveness and community; Pericardium as Heart Protector.

54:39 - 1:00:10 Tones of Excess Water

Fear; Water controlling Fire; freezing desire.

1:00:11 - 1:03:40 The Alchemy of Liberated Desire

Fire and Water as alchemical pair; nirvana as extinguished desire; moksha as liberated desire.

1:03:41 - 1:09:51 Historical Shifts

Fire Horse as solar fire; avoiding burnout; retrospectives on the previous Fire Horse year (1966).

1:09:52 - 1:13:18 Heart as Yin Fire

The wisdom of allowing; embodied speech.

1:13:19 - 1:20:24 Crystallizing Destiny

Forging fire; deepening connections.

About Paul Arellano

Paul Arellano is an acupuncturist and herbalist working in Portland, OR. He studies the interplay of climate and human health through the Wuyun Liuqi system of ecological health science. In addition to studying and writing about seasonal dynamics in nature and health, Paul offers BaZi natal chart readings, which uses the 5-Element system to create a “landscape map” of personal constitution and character. In these readings, Paul explores how each individual can harmonize with their own inner nature and enter into resonant, healthy relationship with the living forces of our world.

https://www.willamettevalleyacupuncture.com

Meridian Mappings: Symbolic Anatomy and Global Medicine

I was honored to sit down with Z’ev Rosenberg for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of anatomy, tradition, culture and more.

Our dialogue oscillates around Lan Li’s publication, Body Maps, an anthropological study of the “graphic genre” of meridian drawings in Chinese medical history. In the preface of the text, Li writes:

It was from the visually absolute inscription of a line and a dot that physiologists grew to question whether knowing where meridians lay defined what constituted them. Place somehow presumed essence. Meridian tu manifested the uneasy relationship between aesthetic practice and ontological judgment. Conflating what meridians were to where they appeared on paper gave anatomical images power. Reading meridian tu as body maps pinned meridians to a place on the page. It confused the sign with the signified. (Li, xiii).

Z’ev and I open the field by discussing this quotation. As we move through its meanings, we touch upon the symbolic and the empirical, medicine as a map of relatedness, the path of the scholar-physician, the ecological dimension of medical knowledge, and the evolution of medicine in a changing world.

In the afterglow of speaking with Z’ev, I found myself reflecting on the resonance of shared networks, classical thinking, and intergenerational dialogue. How we are still discoursing meridians, centuries after they were first written.

This conversation also follows my recent essay, Méridiens du Parlêtre, where I explored meridian lines as symbolic structures of the unconscious.

Chapter Annotations

00:00 – Meridians as Body Maps
Lan Li’s Body Maps, the problem of mapping meridians onto nerves, and how anatomical images confuse the sign and the signified.

07:30 – Symbolic Anatomy as Empirical
Symbolic structures as palpable and knowable; meridians as multi-dimensional structures; meridian drawings as structured like a rebus.

17:30 – Chinese, Tibetan, and Ayurvedic Anatomies
Comparing meridians with Indo-Tibetan nāḍīs and humors; why Tibetan medicine never developed a true meridian system; five-element paradigms; plural medical canons.

26:30 – Pulse, Metaphor, and the Scholar‑Physician
Pulse as “movement in the vessels”, natural imagery in the Mai Jing, and the distinction between technician and scholar‑physician.

36:00 – Chemicals, Ecology, and ‘Engineering’ Medicine
Chemical medicine, toxins, and the limits of the engineering model; quality of life, chronic disease, and the environment.

47:00 – Ethics, Home Clinics, and Medical Freedom
Working from home, patients as family, and the ethics of not subordinating a symbolic–ecological medicine to throughput and billing.

56:00 – Worsley, Five Elements, and Neoclassicism
Worsley tradition as syncretic and neoclassical; the Nanjing as a source-text of acupuncture; the discovery of style.

1:04:00 – Epidemics, Climatology, and Warm Diseases
Warm diseases, climate change in the classics; Tibetan medical views of epidemics as ecological violations; wu yun liu qi and host–guest qi in a disrupted world.

1:12:00 – Circadian Rhythms and Ministerial Fire
Circadian biology; nature as medicine; Li Shizhen on petroleum and fire; Z’ev’s upcoming book A Room Without Mirrors.

1:18:00 – Global Medicine and Medical Pluralism
Silk Road medicine; medicine as inherently global and plural.

1:23:00 – Closing Threads: Jing as Classic, Thread, and Meridian
Medicine as a way of life and what it means to weave a living fabric of medicine today.

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About Z’ev Rosenberg

Z’ev Rosenberg, L.Ac., began his studies of Asian schools of medicine in the early 1970’s, with studies in macrobiotics, shiatsu, and theory of Chinese medicine.

He received a degree from the Santa Fe School of Natural Medicine in Western herbal medicine and body therapies in 1976, Kushi Institute (Boston, Massachusetts) in 1979 in macrobiotic counseling, Southwest Acupuncture College in 1983 in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, and Emperor’s College of Oriental Medicine in 1989. He worked as a macrobiotic counselor and shiatsu practitioner throughout the 1970’s, and has been in full-time practice in acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine since 1983. At present, Z’ev maintains a private practice in herbal medicine and acupuncture/moxibustion with a specialty in chronic autoimmune disorders.

Z’ev terms what he practices as ‘full-strength Chinese medicine’, designed to manage and treat difficult conditions. He also directs the Alembic Institute, where he teaches advanced seminars in medical classics, pulse diagnosis, and treatment of autoimmune disorders.

Z’ev has written articles for several professional Chinese medical and macrobiotic journals, and is a consultant and product developer for Kan Herb Company in Santa Cruz, Ca. He continues to write articles for professional journals and has published several books:

• Returning to the Source: Han Dynasty Medical Classics in Modern Clinical Practice

• Ripples in the Flow: Reflections on Vessel Dynamics in the Nàn Jing

• Afterglow: Ministerial Fire and Chinese Ecological Medicine

• Humming with Elephants: A Translation and Discussion of the “Great Treatise on the Resonant Manifestations of Yīn and Yáng” with Sabine Wilms

References

Flaws, Bob. The Pulse Classic: A Translation of the Mai Jing by Wang Shu-he. Blue Poppy Press, 1997.

Gyatso, Janet. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Gyatso, Desi Sangyé. Mirror of Beryl: A Historical Introduction to Tibetan Medicine. Translated by Gavin Kilty. Wisdom Publications, 2010.

Li, Lan A. Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine. John Hopkins University Press, 2025.

Manaka, Yoshio. Chasing the Dragon’s Tail. Paradigm Publishers, 1995.

Unschuld, Paul U. Nan Jing: The Classic of Difficult Issues. University of California Press, 2016.

The astrological zodiac signifies a 360-degree circle that circumscribes a relational field. If we understand the zodiac as a signifier rather than a thing, then its function as a symbolic order becomes available to us. What Ernst calls the “Aditya circle” is thus a meta-structure of meaning that reveals a new field of astrological inquiry—the question of what it means to incarnate love in the law of our being.

There is yet so much to explore in the Adityas from astrological, philosophical, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The Adityas are not only symbols in and of themselves, they are a symbolic structure that contains other signifiers. As Ernst notes, each Aditya travels with a Rishi that extends the paternal law of that Aditya, or what Lacan would refer to as the “Name-of-the-Father”. How do we incarnate the love we are here to give, so that love is no longer the egoic phenomenon of giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it? Is this the import of an astrology that unchains the symbolic order and encounters the real? We explore the Adityas as aspects of love, the purpose of astrology readings, and what it means to incarnate love.

For more on the Adityas, see Ernst’s introductory video here and his series analyzing the Trump cabinet using the Aditya zodiac here. Those interested in seeing their natal charts with the Aditya zodiac can access Ernst’s Aditya calculator here.

The audio recording and edited transcript of our conversation are both given below.

Neeshee Pandit: Hi Ernst, welcome, and thank you so much for being here with me to have a conversation about astrology, zodiacs, and whatever else we get into!

Ernst Wilhelm: Thanks for inviting me. It’s been a long time since we’ve hung out together, so it feels good.

Neeshee Pandit: I know you’ve been pushing the boundaries of zodiacal astrology as usual with this new concept of the Aditya zodiac, so I thought you could introduce that notion for people.

Ernst Wilhelm: In the Puranas (which are the mythological textbooks of India), a few of them, including the Srimad Bhagavatam, give this arrangement of Adityas, which are solar divinities related to different parts of the circle. And they basically tell us that a solar month corresponds to an Aditya.

The interesting thing about this circle of solar months is that the first month doesn’t start at the vernal equinox (where we have the first degree of Aries), but 30 degrees before that. That’s a very, very different thing. And these Puranas are old texts—the Bhagavatam is from the time of the Mahabharata. In these old books, they never mentioned zodiac signs. Instead, they are taken in 12 sutras.

They are talking about the Sun God traveling through the sky, and in each part of the year, he takes on a certain guise, a certain divinity, and that is the Aditya. One of the beautiful things about it is that it doesn’t stop there. Each Aditya (and there are twelve of them) is spending time with six other celestial beings. One is a rishi, one is a rakshasa, one is a gandharva.1 So there are these other beings there. This means we have a symbolism of six beings for every 30-degree portion of the sky, which adds a lot to that part of space. The first Aditya starts before the vernal equinox, and the second starts at the vernal equinox. And then it just goes around the circle.

What is really interesting about the Adityas is if we reflect on what they mean. “Aditi” means “the undivided”, or “the whole”. She is the wife of the Rishi Kashyapa, and they had these twelve children called the Adityas. If we think about this in mythological and astronomical terms, we have Aditi—the undivided. That is a perfect circle. It’s just this undivided circle. We can look at the circle as a symbol of love, of unity. We have the full circle of connection. A circle represents connection, right? I say we have this circle of perfect divine love, and Aditi is this unbroken circle of divine love. And then we’ve got seven planets to throw around in that circle. We are not going to cover the entire circle.

Then we take the circle, and there are twelve Adityas, twelve children, which are really twelve different aspects of love. So each of us has a way that we can love. Each of the Adityas, as a child of Aditi, represents an aspect of love.

We are really here to live that type of love in our lives. If we have healthy planets in a particular Aditya, we will be using that love in a healthy way, and through that we will be productive to ourselves. We’ll be productive to other people, and we’ll really be doing what we’re meant to be doing. But, of course, if we have afflicted planets in an Aditya, then we’re struggling with how to make that love work in our life. And then we’re having problems.

One of the things I love about the Adityas is that when we look at it, we’re looking at what love are you here to express? You are not going to express perfect love—because it’s mathematically impossible. There are seven planets and twelve Adityas, twelve parts of Aditi only. The circle is perfect, but we don’t get to be the whole circle. Even when we take the perspective of the Kālapurusha2: one of the most basic divisions of the circle is that it’s Vishnu, and each part, each rashi3 of 30 degrees, is one of Vishnu’s body parts. So every one of Vishnu’s body parts is going to do something useful. But every body part is not going to be in use.

In our charts, we have seven planets. At most, we’re using seven body parts. Same with the Adityas. At most, we’re using seven Adityas. No one can give complete perfect love and every type of love that somebody might need or want, or that we might need or want.

It’s really interesting to start looking at this whole circle as what kind of love are you giving and what kind of love are you needing back, because maybe you don’t have an Aditya, and so not having that, you are thinking “that’s love coming to my life that I could really benefit from”. Of course, the Aditya on your seventh house is a love that is the most remote from you unless you have planets in there. We have to look at everything as the context of the type of love that a person is capable of expressing.

One of the things I love about the Aditya symbology is that we go around and we tell people there’s this big thing going on these days that “we should live as ourselves”. We shouldn’t be programmed entities. We shouldn’t be following cultural programming, television programming. We have to find out who we are and live with ourselves.

I don’t know what other people hear when they hear that, but when I hear that, I feel like I have to be this badass at something. I can’t just go draw. I have to be an amazing artist. I just can’t go write a novel. I have to be on the New York Times bestseller list, otherwise, I’m not living as myself. If I want to get into politics, I have to be the president. Being the mayor is not going to cut it. When we start thinking this way, it feels like living as yourself is this big thing in the world. But if you think about that, that’s mathematically impossible—because if that were the truth, and everyone who got into politics was meant to be president, it wouldn’t work. Everyone can’t be president. The New York Times bestseller list is only so long—everyone can’t be on it. You know what I mean? There are only so many museums. There are only so many galleries. Everyone can’t have their art in there because they’re all the best artists. If everyone is the best artist, it doesn’t work.

None of those things means living as ourselves. That is just what we’re doing, in this movie, in this role. So imagine this Western movie. We have one guy who’s a sheriff. We have one guy who’s the outlaw. We have one lady who’s the lone woman on the farm. We have one guy who’s a roaming bandit. We have one guy who’s a Civil War veteran, wandering across America—hopeless. We have all these different characters doing completely different things.

Yet none of that is living as themselves. Just like being president, being a doctor, being an astrologer, being an artist—none of that means we’re living as ourselves. Living as ourselves on the deepest level means to express the love that is contained within us. And that is seen as the Aditya. It’s living out this Aditya.

One of the Adityas is Varuna. He is the fourth Aditya, and he falls where tropical Gemini would fall. Varuna is the all-encompassing sky. It’s the force that can encompass everything. And it is essentially the all-encompassing love. It’s the love that can accept everything. People might have lots of planets there, but how healthy are those planets? They might need some work. But let’s take the example of a person who had this pure. They could just sit there, and somebody could come up to them who’s done severely evil things and say, “Oh, I’m a horrible person, this is what I did”. They explained everything they did. The pure Varuna person’s response to that would be so all-encompassing. They could embrace all the horrible things that person had done—without giving any signals of what’s wrong with you, without any judgment, without anything except pure sheer acceptance. In that, the person would find healing. It’s that level of all-encompassing love. It’s not a love that does anything. It’s the love that just encompasses everything. It gives room for everything under the sun that happens to happen.

Now, if that same person went to anyone else, to any other Aditya, that Aditya wouldn’t have that love to give. Say it came to Tvastha. Tvastha wants to build something; he wants to build forms. That is the seventh Aditya, and where we would have tropical Virgo. He wants to build forms, and he is all about making a workable, real life that contains real things that have form and value for yourself and others. This person feels horrible and evil about what they’ve done to such a point that all they can do is continue to do evil things. Because when someone is at that level, the way they feel about themselves only makes them do more evil things. So the minute they’re told, all you have to do is this and make up for it, they’re going back to do evil things because they just can’t even begin to see themselves doing good things. They just can’t live with themselves enough to do anything good. They came to a Tvastha person, and the Tvastha person listened. He’d be showing micro-expressions in his unconscious, but he would be responding with, “Man, you really could have done something useful down here, and you did this and you were self-indulgent and you weren’t building anything”. He’d be thinking these thoughts—“You weren’t building, you idiot”. A person’s unconscious would register all that stuff and not be able to forgive himself as a result. That would be the wrong person to go to. Each of the Adityas has a love. Tvastha is the love of building. Somebody comes and you say, “Hey, how about we just build this?” You build something with someone, and they heal because they’re building something.

I remember when I was a kid, one of my dad’s friends visited from overseas, came for a week, and while we were there, we built this amazing kite together. I was seven years old, and that was one of the most helpful phases of my development. Just having someone building something with me, just showing up saying, “Hey, let’s build this together. We can build this thing”. It was extravagant—it wasn’t like this simple little thing. It was an amazing thing. To develop this confidence in building and to have an experience of brotherhood and building, that one week really was one of the most impactful weeks of my childhood. He was giving this seven-year-old a love of building, giving the love of let’s build something, let’s make something, see how that feels, see what that does to us. The love of the Adityas has a way to transform us, and living as ourselves essentially means living out that love.

Any of those guys in the Western movie, it doesn’t matter what the role is. The outlaw could be the guy with the all-encompassing love. He’s meeting people along the journey and just being so accepting of them. They heal. They get better. They make shifts. And the Civil War vet who’s wandering in dissolution doesn’t know where he goes. Maybe he’s got the love of Tvastha, and when he shows up somewhere and that barn is in disrepair, he just can’t help himself. He has to just build it.

Living as yourself essentially means living out our Adityas. Now we actually have a focal point. What does that actually mean? Live as myself? It’s to live as an Aditya. Are you living out this thing?

What’s really interesting is this psychic I know. He doesn’t use astrology or anything, but people take pictures of themselves or other people. I’ve heard about a few readings from people who have gone to this guy, and he effectively tells them their Aditya and says, “This is where your strength comes from. Live this way. This is how you have to be. This is how you live”. He just sees the Aditya in these people, and he approaches it from a very spiritual point of view. He had visions of Christ coming to him at age three, so he is a mystic. And the things he’ll say are like he’s talking about their Adityas and how this is where your power comes from. This is where your strength comes from. This is where your love comes from. And it’s just very clear to him.

So there really is a way of living to live as ourselves, and that’s living out the love that we embody, because that’s the only thing that’s really doing any good for ourselves or other people. It’s a whole different way to look at the astrology of it. There is also lots of practical value to using the Adityas. The symbology can just be so practical. For instance, the second Aditya, Aryaman, is the companion. So, how qualified are you for companionship? I’ll get to your seventh house and your karma with the opposite gender. I’ll get to that. But first, how capable are you of companionship? Because if you’re not, it doesn’t matter.

You have a wonderful seventh house, and a wonderful person shows up. The love of companionship—do I have that kind of love to give or not? It’s really interesting to just see the circle this way.

Neeshee Pandit: It just brings up so many things for me. And for the record, you and I haven’t actually had a discussion about this.

Ernst: No, we’ve never talked about this.

Neeshee: I think you’re bringing in a cultural symbology. We talk about Vedic astrology, but we’re using the Greek language a lot of the time. Here, you are actually looking at the Indian symbology. I think that makes absolute sense. But, even more important, is that we’re getting at something much more profound and even philosophical, which is that you’re looking at the zodiac as a structure through which we actually incarnate love and who we are­—in a way that is even prior to the roles we might play. Something that brings up for me is a quote from Lacan, who says, “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it”.

And I think that that very much describes the dynamic of lowercase “love” that human beings engage in. They go to the place where they don’t have the thing, they try to give it to somebody, that person doesn’t even want it. And there you have the ritual of human ego-based love—which is seeking. On the other hand, you could actually say, well, where do I actually have love to give? We’re going to actually offer something that is truly mine to offer. When you do that, you’re no longer in this reciprocal game of I need something from somebody else to validate who I am, where I’m really just reaching for myself in the other person. What would it mean to actually access love itself, as something that’s even a spiritual phenomenon?

I think this is what you are getting at that with the Adityas. And you pointed out the meaning of the word. The root in there is “Adi”, which means “primordial”, “first”, “original”. We can think about the zodiac as a constitution: what is our true constitution? Not just in the sense of an Ayurvedic constitution of doshas and elements, but what about something even more fundamental than that? You are actually describing the fact that we all incarnate love in a unique way. And that is what there is to realize.

Ernst Wilhelm: It’s really true. And you know, this whole thing of love versus need. Most people approach relationships from a point of need, like you said, they are trying to give what they don’t have to somebody who doesn’t want it. That’s one way of looking at it, and that’s a whole other discussion, of course. But that’s basically the love of me. People say, “I love you, I love you”. What they’re saying is, “I need you. I need you. I need you most of the time”.

But see, when a person is expressing love, they don’t need love because they have it already. And that’s really what the Adityas are. By expressing this part of yourself, which is really your most primal part, your most truthful part, then you don’t need back—you’ll get back because that’s how life works. But you don’t need back. If people come from a need point of view, that they need something back, and they don’t get that, they get upset. A lot of things they need, they have not even voiced to the people around them that they’re supposed to get back from. It’s just this unconscious, unqualified expectation, and when they don’t get it, they create drama.

When we’re in a state of expressing love, we’re fulfilled in that state. And that’s the beautiful thing about it. So when we say live as yourself, it means live as a fulfilled being who’s expressing love. Rather than living as an empty being who thinks they have to be on the New York Times bestseller list, and when they’re not in front of the camera and looking great, they’re having drama with their loved ones.

Neeshee Pandit: That brings up the issue of what we are even using astrology for when we give people readings or when people study it? I certainly have seen my fair share of people who use it in a way that I think they’d be better off not even engaging with it. It’s just building up ideas and a sense of self that may be somewhat accurate, but it’s actually delusional. It’s using symbology to avoid actually incarnating yourself. And I’ve always thought of astrology as something that actually helps an individual become who they are, actually helps them incarnate themselves.

Astrology shouldn’t be an abstracting modality. It should actually be an incarnating modality. You’re getting to the core of that with this articulation of the Adityas, and maybe you are describing a circle that is getting at the very essence of what it means to be embodied.

Ernst Wilhelm: I think so. I think that Adityas really spell out what we are on a really truthful level. I’ve really come to see the zodiac signs, those 30-degree portions, to be more important than the planet. It’s not “Okay, what planet is strong?”. It’s, “What Adityas are really prominent here? Are they healthy or unhealthy?”

If you have a prominent Aditya and it’s unhealthy, your life is not going to work until you turn that around, until you heal those planets in there. But if your most prominent Aditya is a healthy Aditya, then you’ve always been expressing a kind of love. And you’ll only get better at it, and it’s going to make a big difference in your life. It’s not possible to be happy if our prominent Aditya is our most afflicted Aditya. And our afflicted Aditya will always be the one who’s causing us the most stumbling blocks. That’s why we have to develop a more truthful love, because love is a very confusing thing.

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Everyone who does everything we are making fun of about people and being in love, well, they are not trying to cause trouble. We think this is how it works; we simply are playing the game wrong, and that’s why we have the Lajjitaadi Avasthas.4 Are you using this planet in the way that you win at the game, or are you going to lose every time because that’s not how the game works?

If we have trouble in our chart, it doesn’t mean that person is mischievous and trying to ruin everything around them. It’s that they’re sincerely trying to play by rules that they believe and think are going to work. They feel like they’re working so hard to make life better for themselves and others, and then when it doesn’t, they feel so cheated, and they’re trying to figure out why. You must have done that wrong, and this person did this. From their point of view, they’re trying their damnedest to do the good, beautiful, loving thing. But they have ideas about love they have that simply aren’t true and that aren’t the way things work.

It’s really, really sad when humans are putting so much energy into this love thing. If we approach it with ideas that aren’t true, we’re going to muck it up. We need a model of what really works—what kind of love is really there, and what does that love look like? And, second of all, are you seeing this clearly, or do you have wrong concepts about it? Why? Because when you’re raised in certain environments, you learn from your environment. In this day and day and age of Earth, we’re not really getting a lot of great examples of what works for people; what working love is, what working family is, what working anything is.

The astrology with the Lajjitaadi Avasthas gives us a perfectly working model of how love works. We can look at a planet and say, “Oh, I’m using this planet in a way that every time I lose”. Every time somebody gets hurt, including me, everyone gets hurt. As opposed to, every time I touch something, it’s gold because it works. And we’re all capable of making everything we touch gold, if we just learn and look in our charts to see where we’re confused about what works, what’s going to create love and connection, versus what we think will create love and connection but doesn’t.

Neeshee Pandit: You’re really digging into the 30-degree portions of the zodiac circle in a way that’s more fundamental than the planets.

What is it, and how do we understand it? How do we structure it? How do we read it? Your whole movement from sidereal to tropical, and now the movement from tropical to the Adityas. Some might wonder, what’s right? What’s correct?

My view on it is that you can really draw the circle however you wish. It’s a 360-degree circle, and there are patterns of twelve in all kinds of ways. There are twelve meridians, too. So you can take the solar value however you want and put it into 30 degrees times 12. This is a basic mathematical pattern of reality, you could say.

Somebody might say, “Well, how come you’re getting rid of zero degrees Aries?” You can think about that. In the traditional notion of seasonal dynamics, there’s always the idea that a season begins before it actually manifests its energy. We have this ebb and flow, and you can either place the beginning of a season at its manifestation or you can place the beginning of the season before its manifestation—

Ernst Wilhelm: In seed.

Neeshee: Yes. So you can put 30 degrees before and say that’s where the zodiac starts. It is just as valid as putting it at the vernal equinox.

Ernst Wilhelm: How I see it all lines up is that we have this circle, and that circle is created by the apparent motion of the Sun around Earth. There are four times when that motion is unique. That is, at the vernal equinox and the autumnal equinox, where we have equal day and night and the Sun crosses the equator. At the summer solstice, the Sun reaches its peak, and then it begins to descend and move more south. At the winter solstice, the sun reaches its lowest point relative to Earth, the most southern point. And now it’s going to begin to move north.

We have these four points, this axis. We have to take this model of zodiac signs, the twelve Adityas, and relate them to that axis in a way that essentially works. Because we are working with that axis, the Adityas are tropical divisions of that circle using that axis. This is very clearly mentioned in the old books—they relate to axes differently than the Persians and the Greeks did, who put the first sign at the vernal equinox. What they do instead is they have the first sign here, the equinox here, second sign. The equinox divides the first and second signs, but that’s because the first and second signs are seen as reflections of each other.

So we have this axis. Imagine we put a mirror up, and we can see this reflection along this axis. These are reflections, and so they reflect across the axis, and we can just fold the whole chart along these four axes to see how different signs of the zodiac, different Adityas, are reflections of each other.

Rashi aspects are based on this axis. There is also some Greek astrology based on this idea of reflections. Jaimini astrology is so much about reflections. We have the ardasha rashi, which means the reflective rashi, which is a rashi that is on another part of the zodiac from another one.

We have to look at it in the structure of what these signs really are. What are they? How are they interacting? And then it becomes clear how to put them against this axis of the equinoxes and solstice.

Neeshee Pandit: That’s exactly the word I was thinking of: structure. You are really structuring the zodiac and looking at what its intrinsic dynamics actually are. It’s a movement. And the fact that that movement has vectors and an axis means that it also mirrors itself. This is the structure of reality.

That also reminds me of something I thought earlier, which is how do we move beyond looking at astrology in our charts as something narcissistic? And I think the only way you can really do that is by seeing the ways in which something that’s actually beyond you can move through you, which we are talking about as love. Rather than just sort of analyzing yourself in a mirror, in the sense of personality, you are actually analyzing yourself in a functional way.

Rather than thinking, well, I guess I should do this, I should do that, I’m this kind of person, I’ll never be happy, and my seventh house is trashed. People get these ideas about themselves and their life, and then they try to structure themselves inside that, and that’s not healthy.

Ernst Wilhelm: One of the tricky things about dealing with astrology as a language of symbols is that whenever somebody looks at their chart, they’re approaching their chart with all these ideas about themselves already. When they look at the chart, the first things they’re going to see in that chart are things that support those ideas of themselves.

The problem with that is we’re all walking around with a lot of ideas about ourselves that simply aren’t true. We think we’re a certain way, but we’re not. We think that we don’t care about this, that we’ll never have that, and this is what we really need. But if we watch our lives develop over decades and we get the maturity, we more and more have the ability to observe our lives and observe ourselves, and start saying, wait a minute, I was really never that thing. And it’s proven because now I’m fifty years old and none of that even happened. And then this thing over here happened, and I didn’t even try. It just kind of just happened.

There are always parts of ourselves that need to prove ourselves to mom, to dad.5 In our imaginations and our ideas of ourselves, we see ourselves as this thing that will please mom or dad. And then we think we’re that thing. We identify with that thing. And then you realize, I’m really not that thing.

One day, you finally start allowing yourself to exist as yourself. And that’s when you can really start seeing the horoscope working. Until then, we’re using it in a very limited capacity in that we’re only allowing ourselves to see the stuff in the chart that supports our perception of ourselves, our preconception of ourselves, which may not even be correct. How much of what we think about ourselves is true? Compared to what is false, you can say on average it’s 50/50. That’s if we take the world as an average. Statistically, on average, half of what you believe about yourself is true, and the other half has nothing to do with who you really are.

Of course, one person might have 10%, one person might make 90% of something. But collectively, we’re at 50%. So you need to realize, as you look at yourself and you look at your chart, that you need to observe—don’t just believe shit about yourself until it’s proven, until you see it actually happening. You need to stand back and say, I’m going to watch and see, does she really have the Sun in Aries? Or is this something else I’m seeing? Or do they have Saturn in Aries, and they’re trying to prove that they’re strong? The difference is that the Sun in Aries, one day, will have just done things that show they are strong, and the Saturn in Aries person will die trying to prove that they’re strong. But in their mind, oh, I’m strong. Because they need to prove that. And the only way to prove it is to start with positive thinking. You have to see yourself as that, but maybe you’re really not, and it’s not that you’re not strong, but maybe it’s not Aries strength. You have a different strength. And all the Adityas take great strength to express, so we have to always keep that in mind.

It’s been really, really interesting to look at charts of people who don’t have an observational attitude about themselves and about astrology and so on. And how they’ve been very stuck in the astrology. I mean that they don’t learn a lot of new things. Because they don’t spend time learning to go deeper and deeper. They’re like, okay, I’ve got the structure explained. My preconceptions of myself are working, and I don’t want to observe more than that. I can function in this place. Then you’ll see people who are observers, who are watching themselves, watching their lives going, wait, something’s not adding up. I need to go deeper into the astrology.

I’ve just had hands-on experience with this, with people, and having them look at different things in their chart without them knowing it was their chart. And they are seeing really profound things and realizing that it’s sort of like me. But then not wanting to follow up on those deeper techniques because they’re happy living in this paradigm of what they are, and for them life is not about going deeper, it’s about, “I want to make more money,” or “I want to be more famous,” or “I want to go on more vacations”, whatever. They want to focus on other parts of their lives besides self-knowledge.

But when you start digging into it from a self-knowledge point of view, it doesn’t take people long to realize the limitations of their astrology techniques, other astrology symbols. Because of what they know about those so far, and they really see themselves, something’s not adding up. But it’s so easy, like you said, just to have to walk in there, explain yourself away, and get stuck. And that’s not how we want to do it. We have to have a good Mercury to use our astrology, which means we want to observe. That’s the use of Mercury we watch—we observe and we learn and we don’t come to any conclusions, any opinions. We’re just gathering information, and then we’re seeing if it adds up. That’s step one.

And we need to do that very much in regard to observing ourselves and everything. “Oh, I’m really great. I’m a great guy. I treat all the girls right”. Okay, now stand back and observe yourself. And see, how are you really treating the girls? What happens after two years? Seemed like you were treating well, but where weren’t you? Just take that step back and gather information about ourselves. Or, “I’m really a loving person. I treated my husband so well for so long”. All right. You’re in divorce court—step back. Observe. Really watch your behavior. Drop this idea. Just drop all your ideas of how you were and observe: how were you in your five years of marriage?

Neeshee Pandit: When we’re looking at our natal chart, we’re looking at the past in so many ways. It’s at the moment of birth. It’s this idea we also find in psychoanalysis of needing to retrace our memories. But you can also challenge that and say, you know what? It’s all actually evident right here, right now, in your actual life. We don’t even need to go into this retro-regression to discover what’s actually going on in your unconscious. You’re unconscious is speaking right now, and with everything that’s happening in your life. Same with astrology. As you’re saying, we can actually understand astrology by just looking at our actual life, and not just going into the abstract. I think that’s so key.

Ernst Wilhelm: Our life is a symbol of everything we’ve done right here, right now. This is you. This is what you’ve created. This is what you’ve done. This is what you’ve screwed up.

Neeshee Pandit: In that sense, there is no objective truth to astrology. And that’s why I always start my readings by letting the client talk for a while. What’s going on in your life? Where are you at? What’s your actual query? Because what’s the point reading a chart in abstract to somebody—it doesn’t really make sense on that level. I need to read to the actual person in the moment in their life in which they’re coming to me for a reading. At that point, it’s improvisational. I’m just looking into the mirror for them—I’m reading their chart for them, and there’s benefit to that. It’s the function of an astrologer. You can have that third-party perspective. You’re not looking at it with your own perceptions.

That’s the value of a reading. Then you have students of astrology, who are ideally studying the way you’re describing—to actually understand themselves, how they function, what’s real about it.

Ernst Wilhelm: I think the thing with using astrology in readings, there are so many different ways we can help people.

I remember once when I was first doing readings, a woman came in. She came in with her boyfriend, actually. She was just holding, like the whole time she had her hands clasped way down low by her womb. Usually, people across their arms here. She had it way down here, and I didn’t really think much of it. I just got into reading the chart, and I just noticed that she’s not looking very comfortable for some reason. This is like a weird way to watch, having your arms crossed across your womb. I didn’t think about it because I didn’t really read body language back then. This is when I was starting. But during the reading, I said, Oh, it looks like y’all had an abortion a year ago. And, you know, I didn’t ask, I didn’t let them talk. I didn’t say, What are your questions? What are you talking about? I just jumped in and started reading it. “I’m sorry to say it, but it looks like you had an abortion a year ago”. And the minute I said that, her arms just came off her womb.

The fact that, without any information, I just said, Hey, this happened in your past, made her feel like, Wait a minute, maybe I don’t have to feel so responsible. It’s in my chart; it was destiny. I’m holding all this pain and guilt. This was destiny. You know, it’s in your chart. Sometimes that really helps people. So there are times when I think it’s better not to have any interaction with them. You just go in. And then there are other times that I figure we always have to be so sensitive to the person because sometimes the person will come in, and they have to express before they can be in a place of receptivity to anything. And so you just have to kick back and say, okay, and then jump into it. And of course, those people can be easier to read because, you know, they give you enough cues to know where to focus. That’s always nice—it makes our job easier.

Neeshee Pandit: Those people who come in and they say, “I don’t really know why I want an astrology reading. I just know that I’m here asking for that”. And you just have to respond.

Ernst Wilhelm: The beautiful thing about astrology is we can work with someone who’s trying to figure things out, but who’s running around in circles. We can talk with them, have them open, and then we can say, “Hey, there’s a door here. There’s a door here. You can stop running in circles”. We can do that. Or we can just blast them with information and they’re like, “Holy shit, that just totally makes sense”.

I remember one of the funniest readings I did. A lady came in, just bowled over her for an hour—just read her chart, and she goes, “Well, that feels so good to hear all that. And now I know I’m not going crazy”. Then she says, “It feels good to know I’m not going crazy”. Because there was so much stuff that she was going through and thinking and feeling. And for someone just to say, Hey, and just explain all that.

Astrology is so validating, you know? Because it’s not you going crazy. It’s the universe making you go crazy. It releases you from the judgment and, in that, lets you take the next step in being yourself. That’s all we can do. We take another step towards ourselves and astrology. There are millions of ways it can help. I think we have to be very fluid, and somehow I think there’s a talent. I don’t even know how to teach it, but I think we astrologers all have to develop it, of just knowing what the person is going to need when they show up. And there are no rules to that. In modern counseling, they have different ways. The reality is that only works for the client who needs to be handled that way, you know?

Neeshee Pandit: Exactly.

Ernst Wilhelm: One day, I had a lady come in for a reading, and the day before, I had learned a yoga that makes a person poor and not good with money. Right before she walked in, I said, Let me see if she has that yoga. I just learned this yoga yesterday in a book. I looked up there, and she had the yoga. So she comes in, I say, “Hey, I know you’ve told me you’ve been to lots of astrologers”. She goes, “Yeah, I’ve been to a lot of vague astrologers”. I said, “I know they all said that you are wealthy”. She goes, “Yeah, they all said that”. I said, “And when you said, No, I’m not wealthy, they all said, You’ll certainly be wealthy one day. She goes, “Yeah, they all said that”. And I said, “Well, I’m here to tell you you’re never going to be wealthy”. Which is a totally inappropriate thing to say. And she just lit up. She goes, “That feels so good to hear, because I’ve been going to Vedic astrologers for twenty years. And I feel like I’m doing something wrong because I’m not wealthy. In fact, I don’t even care about money. I never think about money. I’m focused on these other things that matter to me. So it’s such a relief to hear I’m not doing something wrong, because I’ve been thinking, what have I been doing wrong this whole time?”

Neeshee Pandit: The other interesting thing in that story is the fact that you learned that yoga, and then somebody showed up with it.

Ernst Wilhelm: It was the only time I’ve used that yoga my whole life. I know the yoga by heart because it was such a profound moment with the client. But I’ve never felt the need to look that yoga up again. It’s just what she needed to hear. It’s not that she was poor in the sense of destitute. She owned a house in a town where real estate has gone wacko. That house she bought years ago must be worth over a million now. It’s not that she was poor. She had every financial yoga there is. She had all the money yogas in the chart that you can.

Every astrologer, from the best to the worst, was going to say you’re wealthy. That’s the first thing I thought too. I was working on donation at the time. I’m like, oh, finally a wealthy client, because I need some good donations this week. And then I go, oh, let me check that yoga.

Neeshee Pandit: It speaks to the fact of just how much an astrologer has to cultivate themselves. Because I’ve often noticed the same thing—that my clients reflect something to me. I’ll have a client who really somehow is just right on par with something that I’ve been going through or processed in myself. And now they’re coming and asking that query.

And that’s why we really, like you said, have to study and dig deep into the astrology. Not just take it as a mere technique or at a surface value, or get comfortable with it.

Ernst Wilhelm: Totally true. And also, if we’re dealing with something, we have an idea of what the right thing to do is. When that client shows up, we have an idea of what the right thing for them to do is. But maybe if we really focus on their chart, we might find the right thing for us to do, you know?

It’s pretty much a two-way street. We learn something about astrology every time we handle the chart. Sometimes the thing we’re learning about astrology applies to our own charts. It’s back to the mirroring situation.

Neeshee Pandit: And also being able to hold that ethical position as an astrologer, like you’re saying, where you actually can voice their truth to them. It may not be yours. You may advise them in a way that wouldn’t be appropriate for you, that you may not even totally agree with, because that’s not your design, really. But it is true for them, and it should be voiced to them.

Ernst Wilhelm: All we’re here to do is inform them. One time, I had a client who was referred by a woman who had had readings with me, and she had a really nice chart. I never actually met her, just did phone readings before video. She had a nice chart, though, when it came to a person that’s livable with, that you can go out and have a nice time with, and a free-from-drama life. So this guy is like, “I’ve been spending time with this woman and this woman, and I’m not really sure what to do”.

One woman was this nice client who referred him, and I said, “Yeah, she’s a great girl. You’ve spent time with her, you know what a quality person she is. And this other girl, she is a total hellcat. I mean, nothing is going to be easy with this girl. It’s going to be full of drama. She’s never going to be happy with whatever you do or give”. This is the girl I say run from her. And I said, “You know, but looking at your chart and the dynamics you have going on, I think you’re going to pick the hellcat”.

And he goes, “You know, I think I’m going to”, because he had to explore that part of his seventh house at that time of his life. But I told him the truth. That’s what he needed to do. It wasn’t going to be the road to instant gratification and happiness, but it was just going to be an experience that he was going to have to go through to develop into the person who could be happy with a girl who wasn’t going to be sticking knives in him.

Neeshee Pandit: We put a burden on astrology to try to save us from all that. I remember you saying this to me a long time ago that we’re here to have the experiences that we need to have. And sometimes they hurt. A lot of times they hurt, mostly even. But that’s what it’s about. That takes you deeper into your incarnation. It takes you deeper into the discovery of what love is. This whole Aditya revelation that you’ve brought forward is a powerful way of relating to astrology, relating to the zodiac, relating to who we are and how we can actually learn and become and incarnate ourselves, fruitfully.

Ernst Wilhelm: I think that is the best thing about people jumping into the Adityas a little bit, not that you have to do the whole Adityas circle thing, but just the basics of Aditya symbology: which is the twelve Adityas, twelve Sun gods, and twelve Rishis. Each Aditya travels with a Rishi, and the Rishi is the law.

For instance, for the law of Tvasta, the Rishi is Jamadagni, who is the father of Parashurama, the sixth incarnation of Vishnu. And Jamadagni represents the paternal law that what the father says, that’s God, that’s the law. If someone has that Aditya full of terrible stuff, all you have to say is, you were raised in a household of extreme paternal law, that if you didn’t do what dad said, you were in trouble. He was God in the house, and you were miserable because of it. And they’ll go, oh yeah. Or, if you have beautiful planets in that sign, you can just say you’ve had really big benefits from your father and your family, and they’re like, yeah, I’m doing the same business my great-great-grandfather is doing, and I love it. You’ll see there’s this huge paternal influence for good or ill, that builds them into something beautiful if the Aditya is healthy, or which is the foundation of everything going wrong in their lives if it’s unhealthy.

There are very practical things we can pull out from these Adityas. Between those two things, everyone has an idea of Aries towards Gemini before they even start astrology. You know what I mean? They’ve already got some brainwashing in about what they’re supposed to be like just from their Sun sign and the newspaper, and from bad TV shows. The beautiful thing about Adityas is that you’re approaching this circle now without any idea. Nobody knows who these people are. We don’t have these deities being explained in terrible, useless ways all around us. People aren’t tattooing them on their bodies. But we have to change that. My wife’s working on the artwork right now!

So anyway, it gives you an opportunity, if you just learn these symbols, to look at your chart and learn something new about yourself, and to be able to see, is that true or not? Without any mind nonsense getting in the way. And that’s the coolest thing about me having taught this class.

I just got done with this first part, where we just talked about these twelve Adityas with the twelve Rishis. So many people have emailed me, and they said, Oh, now I really see that. I never really grasped that I had all these planets in this sign. It opens up a whole new world of being to them, a whole new validation of their being. And it’s not that if they didn’t understand that tropical sign more, they wouldn’t have come to a similar conclusion. But they only understood that tropical sign to the ability and brainwashing that they had experienced, a lot of which is not correct.

What’s a Scorpio supposed to be like? “Oh no, I’m a Scorpio. I don’t want to be that”. I have people do anything to make sure they’re not a Capricorn lagna now. “Oh, I hate Capricorn”. Let’s make you this Aditya. And we talk about that Aditya. And they’re like, oh yeah, I’m totally like that. I love being that one. I’m like, well, that’s kind of where Capricorn is, you know?

It gives you a fresh start to really learn something about yourself without anything in the way. So I think it’s really good for every astrologer or student of astrology to take a circle around this, the Aditya circle, to see what you can learn about yourself without prejudice.

Neeshee Pandit: It strikes me that the Aditya zodiac is a metastructure. It accommodates all of the tropical signs, but it is also giving you a broader meaning-field to participate in.

Ernst Wilhelm: I think it looks at the 30-degree spaces on a deeper level of what it really means to be human, where humans really get joy, what humans are really here for. Not that the zodiac signs don’t show the same thing—they do. It’s the same portion of space. It’s just that we haven’t looked at them in that context. Whereas with the Adityas, we’re looking at those parts of the space in that context.

Neeshee Pandit: It also reminds me of the fact that, in ancient cultures, the most primordial form of astrology was worshiping the Sun. The rising and the falling of the Sun was a ritualized event.

Ernst Wilhelm: The basis of all religions was the Sun.

Neeshee Pandit: Yes, agni.

Ernst Wilhelm: That’s what’s happening in us—the rising Sun. The Sun is the energy movement along our spinal chakras, developing us spiritually every year. And so it’s all about the Sun.

I remember a friend of mine was with this very advanced yogi hanging out one day. He was lucky to spend some time with this person. And they happened to hit a really beautiful sunset. My friend commented, “Wow, it’s such a beautiful sunset”. And this very advanced yogi said, “When you really learn to do those techniques right, you will really understand the beauty of the Sun”.

And so it is about the Sun. The Aditya is the Sun God that has to do with you. So it’s really a beautiful thing to learn.

Neeshee Pandit: This whole idea that the energy of the Sun is the energy of incarnation, of being alive—the vital force.

Ernst Wilhelm: It is. It’s all the intelligence that makes us what we are. All the other planets just reflect that light. The only planet that emits any of its own light is Jupiter. So Jupiter is giving some of its own intelligence, but it’s a very small amount.

But if we turned off all the other lights. Jupiter would still show a light, whereas Moon and Mars, we wouldn’t see them. They’d be black. All the other plants are reflecting the light of the Sun. Jupiter’s mostly reflecting light of the Sun, adding a little mix of his own individual spark.

Jupiter is that individual spark of soul in ourselves. And one of the names of Jupiter is jiva, which means living—that little individualized soul of creative spark in everyone. But most of everything is the Sun. I think that really makes the Adityas powerful.

Neeshee Pandit: That’s also the meaning of jyotish, the illumination.

Ernst Wilhelm: Right, exactly.

So what do we call it? A zodiac? I try to call it the Aditya circle. By definition, “zodiac” comes from zoology, which means it has to do with animals and earthly creatures. But we’re dealing with heavenly beings now. As a joke, I call it the Aditya “Godiak”, as in Gods, because we’re looking at the signs, not as these earthly creatures anymore, these zoological beings, which include humans. We have three humans in this zoo of the astrology circle. We’re really looking at the circle in the context of divinities now, so it’s definitely a different perspective. It raises the perspective of what we’re doing with these portions of space.

Neeshee Pandit: You’re moving beyond the animal and plant level and into the human level because the gods are often depicted as human incarnations of a sort.

Ernst Wilhelm: We’re looking at our essence. What is it really to be human? Is it being a doctor? No. The gardener can have a greater love than the doctor and often does. The gardener could be living more as himself than the president because he gardens with love, as himself with the love that he is.

And that’s really what it means to be human—to be a loving creature. That’s as close to God as we can be while we’re on Earth, to be a loving being. That’s really what it’s about—bringing that God, which is love, into our daily lives as ourselves. And living the human truth of being a spiritual being versus an earthly being.

Neeshee Pandit: That’s why it’s so fascinating that you’ve brought out such an old doctrine, but you’re applying it in a modern context in a very evolutionary way to point out that we can even move beyond the animism of astrology and into a truly human engagement with it.

Ernst Wilhelm: Exactly. And it makes sense if you follow Sri Yukteswar’s yugas.6 It was at the end of the Dwapara Yuga that we have the Adityas mentioned in the books. Then the Adityas disappear, and we replace them with the tropical zodiac. We replace them with zodiac signs with earth-dwelling creatures. And now we’re at the beginning of the Dwapara Yuga, according to his calculations. So it makes sense that we’re going to bring back an astrological symbology that really hasn’t been used in a widespread fashion since at least 300 BCE.

There are no astrology books that mention the Adityas. It’s only the philosophical and spiritual books that mention these beings and connect them to different parts of the sky. In the Jaimini Sutras, Jaimini uses the names of the zodiac signs, but tells us to ignore the names when he says them, and to take the name and turn the letters into a number. And that number will indicate the sign he is talking about. So he’s talking about the signs, not as Aries, Taurus, but as sign number one, sign number two.

Sometimes I wonder, did he do this because he wants us to use the Adityas? I don’t know. But why did he do this? Why did he go through all this trouble when it’s not necessary? He specifically tells us he’s going to do it this way. It’s not like it’s part of the mysterious hidden code. He tells us very clearly he’s going to do it this way. And so he’ll say Sagittarius, but he doesn’t mean Sagittarius, so I think that he was definitely trying to tell us there’s another way to use these portions of space beyond the zoological worldly creatures. Maybe the tropical zodiac creatures are more Kali Yuga manifestations of the symbology. Because the last time the Adityas were being used in any way was in the last Dwapara Yuga.

So it’s pretty cool to be diving into them. And it’s really been wonderful to see people develop a relationship with this part of their horoscope.

Neeshee Pandit: It also makes sense because, if you think about it, today we don’t really relate to the animal world as we once did. We don’t have totems in the same way. We don’t see animals as an entry point to the spirit world. We need an astrology for where we are now.

Ernst Wilhelm: It’s true, we don’t live with animals anymore. We don’t watch animals. Some people know about animal omenology, but if we were living close to nature, we would have a completely different relationship to those animal signs—we would have a much deeper relationship to those animal signs than we’re going to have living up here on our cell phones.

Neeshee Pandit: But in a way, there’s also something positive to be said about moving beyond a certain element of naturalism. You can idealize nature, but at the end of the day, it’s still samsara. It’s still a cycle of birth and death. We’re just—

Ernst Wilhelm: trading one illusion for another. One that’s going to work better for the people born at this time.

Neeshee Pandit: Right. But as you’re getting into the idea of divinity and the Sun God, I think we’re getting closer to something that’s actually in our destiny as a human species—to evolve, to become fully conscious.

Ernst Wilhelm: Astrology is going to evolve as people evolve. And it’s going to decline as people decline. There’s a reason why it was only predictive astrology. Every culture was only predictive because all people cared about was the concrete reality.

Now, we’re realizing more and more that we just want to feel good, that how we’re feeling matters. In the concrete reality, everyone has too much food in their fridge. We can’t get away from people. No one has any reason to be lonely. There are crawling all over the Earth. People in most of the world have jobs. People don’t have to work eighty hours a week and still be hungry. We live in a different reality now, where things aren’t as important because we already have access to them. It was a very different thing when the majority of humanity went to bed hungry every day.

Our needs are not as physical anymore. It’s the emotional needs that we’re desperate for now because we have fat stomachs and empty hearts, even though we’re living in a world where you can’t go out without meeting a million people. We’re surrounded by people, yet there’s more loneliness than ever. Why? Because we’re not living out the love that we are. We have our physical needs met, and so now we’re recognizing the greater need of the emotional stuff.

Food, you just go out there, you hunt it, you shoot it, you pick it, you get it, and you swallow and you eat it, and you make it yours. Love doesn’t work that way. It only works from being a loving being. And the Adityas show us what that means for us.

Neeshee Pandit: What we need in the world today is meaningful connection.

Ernst Wilhelm: Which starts with ourselves.

Neeshee Pandit: We have all this connectedness, but we’re not connected.

Ernst Wilhelm: Exactly. We’re missing the part we need to be connected to first, and that’s our true self, what we really are. And not selling that out or avoiding that and chasing food. Bodily food starts with the outside. Emotional food starts with the inside.

Neeshee Pandit: Thank you so much, Ernst, for taking the time to hang out and talk, and as always, you give me a lot of inspiring thoughts and something to really consider.

Ernst Wilhelm: My pleasure. I hope people check out the Adityas. It’s just another layer of fun.

Ernst Wilhelm has been a Vedic astrologer and teacher for over thirty years. His research into the philosophy and techniques of classical Vedic astrology, alongside his published translations of traditional texts, has been influential for a generation of practitioners. His prolific course content can be found at www.astrology-videos.com.

Conversation provides an opportunity for a discourse of free associations. When conversation becomes collaborative, it becomes a dialectic. In this conversation, Paul Arellano and I explore the energetic dynamics of Late Summer and the Earth element, through the lens of Chinese medicine. In the agency of an unstructured dialogue, we found ourselves speaking and structuring a meaning-field of medical, ecological, and alchemical associations. We hope you enjoy the terrain we traversed.

What follows is the first part of an edited transcript of our conversation. Section headings have been given to aid the logical flow of topics discussed. Audio is given for those who prefer to listen.

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Neeshee: Paul, thank you for joining me today. We are here to discuss and consider the energetics of the Late-Summer season, which is a time associated with the Earth element in the five-element system.

I thought this would be an interesting discussion to have because Late Summer is a unique season identified in Chinese medicine. It is not really discussed as such in Ayurveda or in Tibetan medicine. So I think this is something very much tied into Chinese five-element theory. And it's also one of these surprising seasons because you already have Summer, but now we have a Late Summer. There is really no other season that has a division this way, if you want to consider it as a division.

So, what is Late Summer?

Paul: Thank you for having me again, Neeshee, it is always great to talk to you. As you said, Late Summer is this interesting division of one season into two parts. And I think there are a few different ways to look at that. Of course, we're looking at it through the sense of Earth primarily. But I think it's also interesting to note that before the Heart was described as a Fire organ in the Mawangdui manuscripts,1 it was described as an Earth organ.

And that's a little esoteric, but there are four Fire organs in the Chinese medicine system: Heart, Small Intestine, Pericardium, and the San Jiao. There is a very physiological component (with the Heart and the Small Intestine) as well as a more energetic aspect of the physiology (which is the Pericardium and the San Jiao).

The importance of Late Summer is that summertime is the peak of yang energy. In the course of the year, it is when the transformative, invigorating potential of something that is invisible but strongly changing the world around us reaches its peak. There is the greatest amount of change and transformation happening.

And right as it hits its peak on the Summer solstice, it begins to decline back into yin. So all of that potential energy is then turning back into form. I think what Late Summer emphasizes is that there really are two aspects of that great energy and potential that we feel in the summertime: the excitement to be engaging in activities but also how that winds down into the Fall.

We really begin to see things as all that energy is brought into form. It's brought into plants, fruits, and into our own life. It's brought into tangible projects or products. And so the Late Summer is emphasizing that second part of how all this energy of Summer comes into crystallization, into form.

Ultimately, all the yang energy that is poured into material becomes what sustains us through the rest of the year until the next Summer. It becomes what we preserve through the Winter and the Fall. It becomes what creates seeds for the next Spring. So Late Summer is this really important moment when all of the yang energy—all the potential of the world—is crystallizing into form.

Paying extra attention to honor that and to understand what we can learn from it is why I think the Late Summer is important, and I'd be interested to know your thoughts on that.

Neeshee: Something I'm thinking about while you're speaking is how Late Summer is a midpoint between the Summer solstice and the Autumn equinox.

We don't usually identify the midpoint with a season. There is also the additional issue of seasonality that is not necessarily astronomically defined. It can be but, for example, in the five-element system (especially the Worsley style), the focus is more on the seasons as something that arrives in a regional context.

It may be Late Summer here, but it's not yet Late Summer somewhere else. There is an emphasis on the relativity of it, as opposed to saying, “Oh, it's Summer solstice, now it's Summer”. It might have already been Summer. So there are two things going on (which we may or may not need to get into), but its interesting to note that Late Summer falls at this midpoint, at this intermediate point in the year where we are pivoting.

With the Summer solstice, we are already pivoting towards the yin, which seems so counterintuitive, but it's so valuable to note that paradox of how it seems so bright, the days are so long, and yet we're actually decreasing. And the power of the Earth element is decrease. You produce something, you harvest what's been ripened through all of this yang energy, as you noted, and that results in a decrease, even though it's a form of nourishment.

That highlights the yin-yang cycle that is so intrinsic to the Chinese way of looking at life. I also reflect on it regionally in the sense of how medical systems come out of certain places in the world and very much reflect the weather patterns of those places. I can't recall the specific example now, but there are some variations in the classification of tastes in Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine where they say this taste has this quality, whereas this taste has this quality. There are some slight adjustments on that across the two systems (which otherwise share that entire paradigm) because the climate is different.2

The Tibetan plateau is one thing. India is also a vast subcontinent of its own. I find those variations interesting and even moreso the division of Summer into Summer and Late Summer by the Chinese. In contrast, the Tibetans have divided Winter into “Upper Winter” and “Lower Winter”.3 Of course, it makes sense—they must have long winters in the Tibetan plateau. Lhasa is at 12,000 feet. Much of Tibet is in the tundra, above the tree line. We are looking at a long Winter, so it makes sense to have a division of Winter.

So how do we come to this division of Summer? Does it apply universally? Is it a theoretical construct? For example, Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine talk about six seasons. Why is that? Is it because they literally have six seasons or is it because it's convenient since they rely on a tridoshic paradigm? There's three, and two times three is six. It's just a convenient numerology. With five elements, of course it makes sense that we would need five seasons, even though a lot of people talk about a four-season climate. How do we understand that?

The Alchemy of Earth

Paul: I think because we are looking at the Chinese medical system and the cosmological system, there are the five elements. And so five seasons is sensible. And I think what the teaching is there—if we're looking at it to try and learn something, to glean into our own lives—there is that transition between Fire and Earth, which, as you say, is a reduction. The way I think about that is the famous equation of E = mc², how energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. As you are creating mass, it takes a huge amount of energy to create material.

So it's a decrease of this vast amount of energy into a very small piece of matter, which is the process of nuclear fusion. It's a decrease, but it's also a storage. It's holding onto that energy and bringing into a state where it can be sustained and held and kept for later use—which is the process (not in a nuclear sense, but in an energetic sense) of the Late Summer.

That applies to everybody, and I think it applies in every climate as well to different degrees. It is the process of all this massive amount of energy that exists in the environment during the summertime. Long days, lots of heat, lots of transformation coming into a form where that energy can be held and preserved and passed along to the next year, which is really an alchemical process. We're getting energy from the Sun every year and the Earth is capturing that energy, creating form to store that energy. and retain it here on the Earth so that abundance can proliferate, so that things can begin to develop and grow.

Where if there wasn't that transition into material? The heat would come and then it would leave again and we'd be in the Winter. It would be cold, but none of the heat would be preserved. None of the yang energy would be preserved if there wasn't this moment when we are (consciously or unconsciously) bringing that wealth of yang energy in Summer into form, into Earth, into something very tangible that we can see and feel and hold and even eat.

Neeshee: It makes me think about how the decrease that's happening is, as you say, a consolidation. And that consolidation is a digestive process, and that's very much a reflection of the Earth element and its association with Late Summer and its correspondence with the Spleen and the Stomach.

Earlier you mentioned the Heart. Of course, the traditional idea now is that the Spleen and the Stomach are associated with Earth. There is also an Earth school of thought that really emphasizes treating the Spleen and the Stomach as the gateway to health.

I'd even say that Ayurveda is largely an Earth school, with its emphasis on digestion and digestive health being the source of well-being and the prevention of disease as well. That strikes me as very much a focus on Earth as a central entity, the central element, the homeostatic principle even of all things.

There are other emphases that we can find. There is a Fire school of thought. I think the five elements, as it was taught by Worsley, seems to emphasize Fire more. Fire is given the Roman numeral I because the clock starts there in the Worsley style.4 There are other ways to do the clock. There's no reason it has to start at Fire, except that is the sovereign. In TCM, they start the order of the organs with the Lung. Its an emphasis on the etheric—Metal as source. You can also have Fire as source. You can also have Earth as source, because it's only through digestion that anything can be created. And that's why the body part associated with Earth are the muscles, because it's only through digesting—through this decrease that we need to engage in, where food is reduced into its refined essence—that we're able to build the body, that we have a body.

Paul: I think that's a really important thing to point out, that Earth is literally the transformation of other things we take into our body, into us. How is it that we can eat food and then our body has created our nerves, our muscles, through things we take in?

I think of Fire being the creative principle, the Heart being the sovereign that directs the organization of everything, but Earth is really how that creative principle comes into being, comes into matter. You could look at either one as the most important. From a very tangible way of how we impact our own health, how we work with our physical bodies, it makes a lot of sense that the creation of our physical bodies through the Earth element, through digestion, is a great place to work on any kind of physical disharmony.

Neeshee: Absolutely. And this whole idea that our health is an alchemical process of digestion. From an Ayurvedic point of view, proper digestion allows for the transformation of all of the seven tissues of the body into a refined essence, which is called ojas. We can also call it the jing-qi-shen transformation process, which is discussed in Daoism.5

The idea is that you take physical food and it actually becomes a subtle essence over time. So our digestive process isn't just physical, it also has an energetic component, also has what we could call a spiritual component, in the sense of that more refined vitality, the shen that Daoism talks about. All of that is related to the digestive process. That's why, in Ayurveda, we are very concerned if someone doesn't have good digestion. Not only are they going to be physically compromised, they are compromised in their metabolic process altogether.

Paul: There are different aspects of Earth: Earth being the position of Late Summer but also the intermediary that all other elements flow into. We're able to eat food and from the food (if we have strong digestion) to be able to glean actual spiritual essence or something of that refined creative principle that doesn't just form the matter of our body, but also gives us the capacity for transformation, for evolution in a sense, because that pure yang that can be liberated from the food in the sense of jing-qi-shen transformation in our bodies.

Neeshee: Exactly. And that also speaks to Earth as stability, as ground, as a throughline through everything. If it's an intermediary—if we're looking at the five-element cycle with Earth depicted in the center—that is very much the idea of Earth as ground, Earth as basis, Earth as what links everything together in the cycle too.

It is a linking substance, and that makes sense also because here we are in a human body. As Daoism points out, the purpose of the human being, even anatomically, is to stand between Heaven and Earth, our head oriented to heaven, our feet on the ground. That allows us to be this alchemical vessel. All of this is even tied into the way that the number five has been depicted in Chinese culture. It shows a human being as an alchemical vessel (X).6 So this is very much the import of five-element theory, you could say.

But the reason I'm bringing it up is to show that this alchemy is not something that happens in an ethereal sense only. If we talk about spirituality, we talk about transcendence of the body, of the material—there are all these motivations, all of these fascinations with something beyond all of this. And Earth brings us back to where we really are, on the Earth in our bodies, that we are embodied in fact, that there is a real value in that embodiment, even an alchemical process to go through in that embodiment that our practice. Our spirituality is something that happens in and via the body. It's not reduced to that, but it certainly requires the mechanism of that.

The Body Ecologic

Paul: What that makes me think of is how even the medicine that we practice relies on the physical body, that the physical body is the access point to all these other energies, to the organ systems. Acupuncture points are all located on the physical body, but at the same time, they have their own particular elemental associations and more refined functions. I think that highlights what we were talking earlier, how this idea of Late Summer is not a familiar concept to most people, and how do we understand it if it looks different in different places.

I'm living here in Portland, Oregon, you're in Colorado. How does Late Summer land differently? It's an energy, but as it's brought to bear on the Earth where we are on the Earth, it will manifest differently based on the the energetic composition of our ecologies and locales.

You can also visualize that on the body too—how there are Fire points on the channels, there are Earth points, there are Water points. On the physical body, there is an understanding that different elemental energies are concentrated in different places. So trying to access the Earth energy through a Fire point, it's possible, but you're going to be better off accessing it through an Earth point.

Similarly, there are different ecologies. Through my study of bāzì—which is taking a natal chart of somebody to understand their elemental composition—it evokes a landscape, it evokes an ecology for me. In other words, the elemental makeup of somebody is like an ecology in the world where if, for example, somebody is very heavy in Fire—maybe they have all Fire and all Earth—that is like a dry, hot desert.

The desert differs from a tundra or from a watershed or from a big dense forest, so the Earth energy is going to manifest differently there. This is a universal energy of Earth. But at the same time, on our physical bodies, on the planet we live on, the microcosmic and macrocosmic Earth energy is not evenly distributed.

There is a purpose for that. A desert is like a Fire point on the body or maybe even a Fire channel—it is representing and emanating Fire energy, it's consolidating Fire energy in a particular environment and then radiating and emanating it to the rest of the world. This creates weather systems that then go and affect the entire globe. If we don't have any deserts, that will be a problem. If we have too many deserts, that will also be a problem. There is the need for this differentiation of ecologies because they all refine the particular essence of their elemental composition.

What is important about Earth is that, in all of these cases, environments need to be renewed. They need to be sustained and even transformed as climate shifts, as the Earth changes. That all occurs through the medium of the Earth, through the medium of the soil changing the properties of moisture, and the minerals and the water stored in the soil allow things to grow or create a desert. Again, there is this physical structure underlying everything that Late Summer really invites us to engage with and notice in our environment, whatever that might be.

Neeshee: I think that's a huge point in linking what five-element theory and Chinese medicine is about: to look at the human body as something structured like an ecological terrain, that we are in many ways a natural landscape and unique in that just as every landscape is unique.

Here in Colorado, we have so many microclimates. I'm up here on the mountain and it's different in Boulder proper, 2000 feet below. I experience a different range of climatic phenomena that wouldn't even be noticed in Boulder. It can snow up here and not snow down there, at the same time. And what is interesting about altitude is that the ecology is stratified vertically, which is such a phenomenon to be aware of and present with.

But I'm also thinking about the body again. As we've been saying, that Earth expresses itself uniquely when it reaches the immanency of the material plane. It's even a misnomer to discuss any element in isolation, which we're doing simply for the sake of meaning, but we also know that Earth depends on Fire, because the Mother of Earth is Fire, the Child of Earth is Metal. And Wood controls Earth. All of these dynamics are essential in making Earth what it is as a functional process.

Also, in the body, there are these different zones. I have the image of ST-36 because it's an Earth point on an Earth meridian. Here it is by the knee. When you're locating it, you feel this zone that it is. It is a he-sea point after all, a large point, and it's in this part of the body just below the knee. I think that is such an earthy area for that point to be.

The assignments of elements to points or the meridians and the elements is not random. Here we are on the leg. It's the knee articulation, where we stand and how we move our bodies. And so much weight is bearing on the knee. It is just such a physical zone.

Paul: I think we're getting to the essence of Earth here. I love what you said because, yes, it's where we bear our weight. Where we bear our physical structure is also close to where we bend the knee, which allows us to articulate through space and move.

And I think that's the key to understanding why Earth is the Child of Fire. So Earth is a process of transformation. Earth is what allows something to change into something else. It's what allows Fire to change into Metal. It's what allows Metal to change into Water through Earth as the intermediary. It's also how yang energy is consolidated into a fruit. It's how the soil is gathered and all the nutrients are enriched into a physical strata of soil. So it allows transformation but, at the same time, it is a physical structure.

It’s a process of transformation, which would be the position of Earth in the generative cycle. But it's also a physical structure, which is more like Earth in the center of the cycle, where all other elements are anchored to Earth. If there wasn't the Earth, the elements would all disperse.

So Earth is the physicality, like standing firm on the ground. It's also that energy of transformation where the ability of things to change is the signature of Earth, but it's also a singular, solid material.

Neeshee: I can go even further: Earth and even all the elements are primarily signifiers, which means they function archetypally to accommodate a number of resonances in a number of realities in various dimensions of experience. So Earth is all of the things we can say about it.

Why are there two conceptions of the five elements cycle, Earth in the center and then Earth as a supposedly distinct element? And it just struck me that Earth is very much emblematic of the five element cycle itself. The generative cycle is the Mother-Child dynamic. In a way, Earth signifies that dynamic, as a Mother principle, even as a basis. Earth is very much the Mother of the Mother.

Earth is the Mother that creates the Child of the generative cycle of the five elements, but it also appears within itself. There is this constant birthing, and I don't see it as only metaphorical. I see it as even being very literal. There is no possibility that you and I could exist if we had not grown in a womb in a Mother. We all come from the Mother. The Mother is an irreducible principle of life.

Paul: And I like what you said that it occurs within itself.

It is the fractal nature of reality where life can perpetuate. Materialization allows for another process of materialization to occur and so on. And that is this wonderful mystery of how something can be created. As the saying goes: within the seed is an entire forest. A tiny bit of material has the potential to replicate and to grow more material.

I'm excited we're talking about this now because the more I think about it, the more I see how Earth is really foundational to all the other elements.

Neeshee: Earth is such a unique element to consider for all these reasons.

No other element shares that functionality—of being placed in the center, of being an intermediary, and also being part of the cycle. Again, the fact that it's so emblematic of the Mother-Child dynamic, the generation itself, the making manifest of something. That is very much what the five elements are showing us—something in the range of manifest observable phenomena.

That's why five-element theory—which I think may surprise people to think of it this way—is an empirical movement in the history of Chinese medicine, because it moves away from demonology and apparently superstitious and invisible notions of health and illness and into the observable world. Of course, it is because of agricultural phenomena as well that five-element theory was derived. But it is a movement toward empiricism, toward observability.

Paul: There's the function of Earth and the form of Earth.

Earth is interesting because its function is form, its function is to bring things into form. It's function is to transition and transform between forms. So it's the transformation of form and the bringing into form. We talked about Fire and the Fire school and how, in a way the form of Fire is function.

The way that Earth works is by bringing things into material form and the way that Fire works is by bringing things that are material into life. And so they're really closely linked together in that way, both as the Mother-Child but also as this principle of Late Summer of that bringing the Fire into material.

Neeshee: This juncture of form and function for me is fascia. This idea that the body part corresponding to Earth is muscles—I would modify that a bit and say we're looking at fascia.

That is where form and function intersect. It is arguably where the meridians are located, if we can even say such a thing. It's somewhere in that realm of the body where form meets function, where structure meets process. As acupuncturists, we are very interested in that nexus, because that is precisely what we're working with. We're working with something that's simultaneously anatomical and structurally embedded in the body that has functional consequences. That's such an interesting revelation of what health is: it's not just form or function, it's a nexus between them.

We were talking a while back and I posed a query of what is really happening when we needle somebody. We have this physical object in our hand, this needle. It's very thin, but it still exists physically. And we are puncturing the skin into what exactly? A meridian—which is an invisible thing.

But why would we need a material object to accomplish that? The whole ritual is so interesting to consider for that reason—that what is really happening is a kind of a nexus between form and function. I'm using an invisible tool to somehow invoke something invisible yet palpable, structurally locatable but fundamentally energetic.

This is so much about how Earth contains. It has this function as containment. It holds the reality of form and function. It's also something that allows things to exist in simultaneity.

Paul: We talk a lot about the Earth being the middle of the five-element cycle and the go-between.

But I think, as you're saying with the container, it holds all the others within it. It's not that the others are on the outside. It's that Earth holds everything within it. There are energetic pathways in our body, like the meridians. But they exist in a physical structure, and you can't deny that physical structure is important to the cohesion and making sense of these energetic structures.

Just as I've been talking about the physical body and the acupuncture points being like the Earth and the different ecologies, acupuncture points themselves are convergences of energies. The one commonality in my understanding of where acupuncture points are on the body is that they are at intersections of different tissues.7 It's where energies are converging and likewise different elemental energies, different principles of function are converging at these points that we can activate on a physical system. We can activate function at a point where different functions are converging. Earth is what holds that together.

We can think of our body like an acupuncture point. Our body is like a convergence of energy. The Earth itself is a convergence of energies that then are given form so that it can develop and grow. The whole universe is a convergence of energies that's being stored in a physical form so that it can develop and grow and unfold. That's like the Earth element—holding everything within it so that there's a place for these other energies to be contained. They are not just ideals or concepts with no way to access or understand or relate to them.

Neeshee: That's right. It's another version of the dantian concept in this sense of there being a vital center. Earth, in many ways, functions as a vital center. That's a significant concept. It means that our treatments could be really informed by this fact.

I think you can treat Earth on anybody because of this fact that it is the very source and process of containment and cohesion. It also makes me think about the pathological side of the spectrum—symptoms and where things go out of balance.

I also think about the oral stage of our development.8 Eating. Our relationship to nourishment through eating, through consuming, through taking in. Our ability to take in and consolidate things is so critical then. And I think we see a lot of breakdown in that process. There are so many digestive disorders—people are struggling to process foods. There are more and more specialized diets. And, really, we need to be able to take in and digest. If we can do that, we can reap the harvest that we're here for in our lives. Our unique individual harvest, our purpose.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. That was what I was thinking of in treating the Stomach luo channels, the pathology and also the physiology in the system that I study is to be able to follow your gut, to be able to actualize your essential intention in a natural way.

Generally speaking, the pathology of Earth is that the Stomach gets hot, the Spleen gets cold and damp. So it's either too much materialization without enough function to animate it or excess of function which destroys the ability of form to develop and to house that function.

In both ways of looking at it, there has to be a harmony of form and function in the Earth element for it to allow us to exist in these bodies as alchemical vessels for transformation and healing.

Stomach Qi

Neeshee: Exactly what you just said reminds me of why I love the concept of Stomach qi, why I think that's such an important way of articulating something.

When we say Stomach qi and this idea that you can feel the state of the Stomach qi in the overall pulse quality of the patient and even their affect and the way that they are all together. It’s not only looking for the shen level—are their eyes bright? Are their eyes clear? Do they connect with you? It's this question of Stomach qi that I'm finding more and more fundamental these days. And I explored this idea in relationship to Possession because of the fact that Worsley’s Possession protocol is mostly on the Stomach meridian, aside from CV-15.

Why is that? This is a question worth asking because it directly suggests that there's a relationship between possession and Stomach qi—that our ability to consolidate, to process, to be embodied is, in fact, what keeps us grounded, what keeps us present, what keeps us home in a certain way, and gives an anchor for the spirit.

If you don't have an anchor for the spirit, you are liable for what we could call possession, which we can think about in the superstitious sense of invisible pathogenic influences. But in today's world, it's ADHD, it's all the autoimmunity, it's the whole gut-brain axis disturbance—which you could also discuss as being an Earth issue on some level, not to oversimplify.

Paul: I'm just digesting. I've been interested more in Wind lately and hearing teachings that one way to address wind is tonify Blood. If there is enough substance in the body to substantially fill the meridians and the vessels, the Wind can't stir. In the same way, Stomach fluids are so important to the body. Stomach is what is generating fluids, what is generative of that material basis of the body. Possession is not giving us that ability to perfuse our body with ourselves, basically to fill up our physical vessel with our own being.

Even the use of CV-15 in the Possession treatment being on the Ren channel is descending into the material, much as the consolidation of Late Summer. The intention is to bring everything back into the material and make sure that material is you and serving the postnatal mandate of your being.

Neeshee: Exactly. I don't know if this has been fully explored but I talked about it in my thesis, that the Possession treatment is called “Internal Dragons” or “External Dragons”.9 So we have this symbol of the dragon and, if I'm not mistaken, that is the animal corresponding to the Stomach.

So the whole Possession treatment, the way it is articulated, is telling us this is about Earth, this is about Stomach qi, this is about this inner dragon, this ability for you to alchemically transform. If we think about the dragon as also being a symbol of destiny, in the sense of ming, then it is your ability to actualize, to reach your postnatal mandate.

About Paul Arellano

Paul Arellano is an acupuncturist and herbalist working in Portland, OR. He studies the interplay of climate and human health through the Wuyun Liuqi system of ecological health science. In addition to studying and writing about seasonal dynamics in nature and health, Paul offers BaZi natal chart readings, which uses the 5-Element system to create a "landscape map" of personal constitution and character. In these readings, Paul explores how each individual can harmonize with their own inner nature and enter into resonant, healthy relationship with the living forces of our world.

Writings on Seasonal Resonance
Wuyun Liuqi Climate + Health Map for 2025

I first met Paul in Portland. It was 2021, and we were both studying Worsley Five-Element Acupuncture at the Worsley Institute. In the last year or so, Paul and I started getting together for friendly chats on acupuncture, astrology, and related topics. Our conversations were mutually thought-provoking and created space for an ongoing dialogue. A few weeks ago, we finally decided to record one of our free-ranging conversations. The edited transcript of this talk became “Acupuncture, Ecology, Spirituality” (text and audio below).

In “Acupuncture, Ecology, Spirituality”, Paul and I share perspectives on the nature of health and disease through an exploratory dialogue that spans five-element acupuncture, astrology, alchemy, and psychedelics. The central thread of our conversation reflects an ecological orientation toward health and voices a concern for our relationship to the natural world.

In conversing with Paul, I was reminded of the value of dialogue amongst colleagues. In traditional contexts, practitioners engaged in lively debates and scholarly explorations that brought forth tremendous innovation over the centuries. Medical tradition thrives in dialogue, where conversation invokes an oral episteme and a collective ethic of practice.

About Paul Arellano

Paul Arellano is an acupuncturist and herbalist working in Portland, OR. He studies the interplay of climate and human health through the Wuyun Liuqi system of ecological health science. In addition to studying and writing about seasonal dynamics in nature and health, Paul offers BaZi natal chart readings, which uses the 5-Element system to create a "landscape map" of personal constitution and character. In these readings, Paul explores how each individual can harmonize with their own inner nature and enter into resonant, healthy relationship with the living forces of our world.

Read Paul's writings on seasonal resonance here
Wuyun Liuqi Climate + Health Map for 2025 can be found here

Acupuncture, Ecology, Spirituality

Paul: Good morning, Neeshee.

Neeshee: Good morning, Paul.

Paul: We are here today to talk about the nature of healing from our perspectives, and I would love to hear what your perception of health is. What is health to you, and what is healing?

Neeshee: That is a big question. If I were to approach that question universally, I would say that health is a very individual matter. “What is health” is something that you can consider in the context of a unique individual. What is health for me may not be what is health for you. I may be able to engage in activities in my life that might be imbalancing to you and other people. So I think health is all about discovering who you are, and then realizing what it means for you to be healthy, what it means for you to be a vital human being. Health is very relative. The traditional medical systems point out that health is very much determined by our environmental relationships.

For example, I am here in Colorado—it is relatively dry compared to Portland. I have to take into account different things because of that fact—the climate that I live in, the environment and the elevation are very different. There is also my own constitution in relationship to the environment. So I think of health as being relative, environmental, and personal in the sense of the uniqueness of the individual. You can think about that astrologically and with systems like human design. Who are you? What is your nature? What is your design? That is what health is relative to.

Paul: What I'm hearing you say is that healing is discovering who you are. There’s also the aspect you mentioned of change. I was just seeing the release of a new commentary on the Yijing and reflecting on how the Yijing is a foundational text for an entire culture. Also, the medical lens of Chinese medicine is based on how things are constantly changing and transforming.

I'm hearing that there's both an essential nature that we all have to discover in ourselves, and then how we relate in that essential nature to the changing world around us and the changing environment we find ourselves in.

Neeshee: Yes, exactly. I think of the relationship between ourselves and the environment as a bidirectional reality. On the one hand, there is this blueprint of who we are. For example, I look the way that I do, for the most part, but I've also changed. In this sense, my structure and personality will develop and emerge, but it has a foundation-pattern, you could say.

The Book of Changes is pointing out that everything is constantly in flux, including who we are. We just need to discover the resonance between our flux and the so-called outer flux, right? We need to come into relationship with the reality of nature, the reality of the cosmos and the cycles of things. And there are many levels of the cycle. We have our own life-cycles that we go through, as astrology points out with the Saturn returns and the midlife period being a nodal decade. There are all these periods that we go through that are developmental. And there is also everything that is cycling outside—the season and everything that is happening in nature. Depending on where you live, that cycle is different. So there is a lot of strata to it, I would say, in us and in reality.

Paul: You know, working with Bazi,1 a big part of what I'm looking at is also the changes and the nested cycles of yin-yang—how we have day and night, a yin-yang cycle. We have full moon, new moon, we have summer and winter—we have all of these cycles that are playing out with different aspects that become very, very complex as you see them all nested together and moving at different rates. In that sense, to move to “what is disease”: what I'm feeling (and I think we probably share this) is that we are constantly changing and the world is constantly changing around us in so many different layers. Disease is when we are either changing in a way that is not resonant with the world around us or when things are changing around us and we are not changing with them.

So either we are changing in a direction that isn't coherent with our environment or our environment is changing and we are not moving with it, which I think is two ways to say the same thing. Even in the early chapters of the Su wen,2 when it discusses how early on the cures for diseases were just instructions or shamanic incantations to realign that resonance.

We live in a world where more and more is managed—we have air conditioning, we have all of these conveniences that allow us to change, to make changes to our micro-environment, which means that our body is less in contact with the environment. Our consciousness is less in contact with the global, the cosmic consciousness of the changes happening on Earth. And that means we need more and more. And it says so in the Nan Jing that more and more invasive healing processes or procedures are needed because people's connection is becoming further and further estranged from that core resonance.

Neeshee: I agree with that. Building on the resonance idea: health is resonance and disease is disharmony. I think that brings us into the paradigm of circulation. When you are in resonance with reality––with the cycles of things in yourself and in nature—then the vital force circulates. (You can call this vital force, qi, or whatever you like. I like the phrase “vital force”—it is a European phrase that I think is accurate.)

There is a vital force, a vital impetus, an intelligence that circulates as a connecting factor between our bodies and what is happening in the natural world. These are not separate realities. We realize that they are not separate through the circulation of the vital force.

If the vital force is circulating, that is itself the harmony of life. Something would have to interrupt that in order for disease to arise. Disease is very much a superimposition on what is otherwise already the case—which is the circulating motion of the life force. This raises the issue of adaptability—our ability to adapt and meet the changes of life. For example, to consult the Yijing, because we are feeling like we don't know, that we need to inquire relative to what is happening. What should I do? There is this inquiry in the Book of Changes around divining health and what the correct course of action would be, so you can maintain your correctness with everything.

As you said, industrialization and modernity have created this kind of capsulization of our life. Our sense of the body is not related anymore. We are living in controlled environments and even increasingly virtual contexts of communication. Communication, in its essence, is the vital force itself. As soon as you establish a virtualization of communication, you lose the spirit of life.

Paul: Very, very literally too—it disrupts the bio-rhythms that sync us to the environment.

Neeshee: Yes, the blue light and whatnot. We have abstracted the human experience. I think it's interesting what J.R. Worsley said, that when he was growing up, there was less provision for protection from climatic factors. In Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and Tibetan Medicine, there is so much focus on climatic factors. If it’s damp outside, you don't want to get rained on and cover your necks in the wind so you don't get wind invasions. There is this whole idea that disease is primarily an invasion by climatic factors. I think that is partly an old idea. It is still true, but at least where we live today, we are rather protected from those realities—and we even have the option of insulating ourselves from it in a useful way.

But, at the same time, Worsley points out that even though we have all these modern provisions and protections from climatic factors, we are more ill than we ever have been. And that illness is a spiritual illness. Spiritual illness is precisely this virtualization, this disconnection, this non-communication, and the fact that our bodies are not vital anymore.

Paul: Yes, and when you say spiritual illness, I think of “spiritual” as the vertical access of something above us looking down. It is like the metaphysic we bring to the world, how we perceive the world. I think a lot of our attitude towards that is the same attitude that Western colonialism has had for hundreds of years, which is that nature is inherently dangerous and bad and evil. Now, I don't think that is what is being said in the medical classics, that wind is bad or damp is bad. They have consequences, but they also have a beautiful balancing effect where the wind comes in the Spring and moves things that are stuck.

The alternating dry and wet of the Shaoyang season of Spring helps to break open the soil and aerate things. The wind dries damp, it comes along and it can impart health to us as well. But again, when these things are out of balance—as climate change and other phenomena that create extreme weather that we are seeing so often—those extreme weather patterns really accentuate whatever that dynamic is.

So there is that lack of communication. There is a lack of even communication between the weather patterns. We see that health is not just a personal process of humans being sick—the environment becomes sick, and the weather becomes disrupted and abnormal and unhealthy.

To bring it back to the Book of Changes, the advice it gives is a lot about behavior, as you were saying. So much of health is not necessarily taking a drug or a medicine, but it's the question of how we comport ourselves. How do we relate and behave in response to what's going on around us? I think that is a real challenge of our times, for all the reasons we've said. We have a lot of insulation when there is something we don't want to engage with—we have a lot of ways to disconnect, to remove ourselves. The muscle becomes a little weaker regarding how we face something challenging and discover how to relate and have the flexibility to respond to it.

Neeshee: Exactly. One of the things you're pointing at is this age-old axiom that the causative factors of disease are also the causative factors of health. They are the same thing. They are the exact same process or entity or force—whether that is a climatic factor or a dosha or qi or blood or body fluids, or however you want to think about it. These things maintain the body. They maintain the mind and the spirit. They maintain our vitality. They are expressions of the vital force. They are not problematic.

In past conversations, we have talked about the five elements and the emotions that correspond to the five elements. These are not necessarily pathological. They are just showing you the natural cycle of change and growth—the ripeness and the decomposition. It all creates this beautiful cycle of health and healing and therapy.

But the factors of health can also become the factors of disease. So there are two ideas in there. One is the idea of disease as an excess pathology, meaning something accumulates that naturally exists and that imbalances you, such as damp accumulation or wind invasion. Second is five-element thinking (which is homeopathic thinking), where health isn't an excess of a substantial process of any kind but a deficiency in the natural cycle of things. The idea of pathology as excess is more humoral—it has more to do with the idea of a physiological substance or an environmental substance accumulating in you.

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Ayurveda, for example, has a significant emphasis on this notion. Its primary modality is to advise patients on diet and lifestyle—behave in this way and eat in this way during this time of year. And that is largely the medicine, I would say. As you said earlier, given the times we've developed the need for more invasive procedures, and I think acupuncture is significantly more invasive, because now we are not just advising the patient, we are intervening in their physiology. And that is a different kind of event. It is a different kind of therapy. I think it is a lot closer to shamanism, which is the origin of medicine to begin with. That makes acupuncture a really interesting phenomenon that is resurrecting the past while bringing us into the present reality and the kind of therapies we need today.

I faced this frustration myself in the clinic, originally being an Ayurvedic practitioner, and realizing that just advising patients wasn't quite enough. Even more, their ability to make use of advice was also limited in many ways by the nature of their imbalance, which was a very real thing. I always thought that if I could just effect a change for them, a shift in their physiology, in a more immediate sense, they would have a greater capability. And not even a capability. I wouldn't even have to advise them. Their own bodily intelligence would emerge of its own accord. They would know what to do.

Paul: Absolutely. For me, that connects to what you were mentioning: the link between a process of disease and a process of health often being the same. So much of what interests me in the lens of Bazi and the Wuyun Liuqi is how we see our own body’s processes of health reflected in the environment. They are not actually separate, as you were saying. They are happening in tandem. The more we communicate between those two, the greater the impact on health for both ourselves and our community, our environment. For example, there is a big patch of Ivy outside of my house, and I’ve been cutting down the Ivy. I was talking to someone recently, and they were mentioning the health benefits of Ivy. We think of it as an invasive plant, but it binds soil to prevent erosion.

And how beautiful that is, that it can in some ways be seen as a disease process, as an invasive plant coming into an environment where it doesn't belong and creating an imbalance. But that process is trying to return to a homeodynamic state of health, where it is balancing out what is imbalanced. What I find, personally, and through applying acupuncture to patients, is that people come in to seek relief from a symptom, but in the process of engaging with their disease or their disharmony or imbalance, there is an important lesson to be learned, an important healing that is going on through the arising of disease. I don't know if that is true in every single case, but I think in many cases, that is a part of the healing—the person's engagement and learning, rather than just removing a symptom where the person does not get the opportunity to understand what is being taught or what is being presented as an opportunity to grow.

Neeshee: That reminds me of a quote by the famous Parisian psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who said, “Love your symptom as yourself”.3 That also reminds me of one of the earliest Eastern medical definitions of health, which is in the Caraka Samhita, an Ayurvedic classic. It says, “Health is not the absence of disease”.4 The idea being that, when we're talking about health and healing, we're not necessarily saying that there are no symptoms.

This is a critical point: sickness is part of health, too. The experience of symptoms is, in many regards, positive and part of a process of transformation and healing. If you do not ever have symptoms, then you are very repressed. We can think of that psychologically. The homeopaths say that it's good to have symptoms, it means that the disease is being expressed, and that is better than having disease moving into the central areas of the body where it no longer has a capability to express itself, where it no longer gives you a distress signal, it no longer has a sign or any kind of significance associated with it. Thus, you can think of symptoms as signifiers, as a sign you can read and decipher and uncover in order to deliver a treatment. The symptom is a communication, and there is so much wisdom in it.

I think we're way too quick to just eradicate the symptom, to attack the symptom as problem. It is the idea that delivering a therapy that is opposed to the symptom is going to engender a cure. Whereas I think cure is the exact opposite of that phenomenon.

Paul: I really like the idea of listening—that there is a communication going on, and to respect that communication, to not shut it down. It is the same as if a child is expressing themselves and being open to what that is—maybe it's not clear at first, maybe it's a little chaotic, but encouraging that expression allows the child to grow. It allows the body to be able to communicate more clearly when there are issues going on or something to present—the body will have that pathway for clear communication.

Neeshee: Exactly. It also means that a patient's own relationship to their symptoms and their body and their process and their content and their psychology and their dreams and their overall experience of who they are can shift from becoming a problematic. As a practitioner, I do not want to enforce the sense of problem for someone. I want them to experience a shift in their relationship to that. For me, that is healing.

Paul: Yes, coming into right relationship. This segues into something that I'm interested in from the five-element perspective as well, that we touched on a little bit before—which is the nature of the five emotions and how the five emotions relate in a lot of ways to behavior, to affect, to how we relate to the world. These behaviors can bring us out of balance and they can also bring us into health—not just as a pathological expression of something we need to eliminate but as a process of relationship, of behavior, of expression that can connect us to health that can also become imbalanced from an overuse or an underuse, an over-communication or an under-communication of that particular emotion. Is that how you see the five emotions as well?

Neeshee: You can have a deficiency or an excess. But given the nature of the five elements as an interdependent cycle, the root-etiology is always going to be a deficiency that leads to excess somehow or another. Everything needs to maintain its natural order. As long as it's maintaining its natural order, there is an appropriateness to things.

I think Worsley's emphasis on appropriateness here is crucial because he says that the way you diagnose the issue in somebody is by sensing what is inappropriate in the sense of incongruent. This is not the root-diagnosis is color, sound, odor, and emotion. But as a practitioner, you are sensing where something is inappropriate.

Why is this person expressing this emotion? It doesn't quite match with the reality of what's happening for them, the reality of their experience. It is something that is out of place, or conversely, they are not expressing the emotion that would otherwise be indicated. Such as grief when discussing the passing of a family member. That is a very cliché example, but it works. There is a disharmony in their affect. This emotion either isn't showing up—there is a lack—or an emotion is manifesting that doesn't seem to have a relationship to reality, so to speak. Again, I think that just points out that there is a disharmony, or a failure of transformation in the five-element cycle, that is leading to the person being stuck in a certain emotional mode. Trauma or shock can leave us in a fight-or-flight mechanism where we are effectively experiencing an event constantly. We don't move on to the next element, to the next emotion, in the cycle of things. If we did, then everything keeps transforming itself endlessly.

Paul: The curiosity for me with everything you're saying is how these two processes come from, to use Leon Hammer's phrase, “like contact to stay intact”—ways to try and remain in contact or avoid some kind of negative experience they've had in the past keep their living process going, keep their vital force flowing. It can be an attempt to reach for something that they can't access.

There is the overreaching and then the avoidance of things. All of that is colored by the idea that (going back to what you were saying earlier) that health is so much about our behaviors being in contact with what we're feeling and what's really going on for us. How we are resonating with the world around us—whether we don't want to resonate and there's some process that's going on around us we don't really want to feel—but that inevitably we are, and to be able to sync up with that, or if there is some experience we really want to be having, some connection we really want to be making that's not as accessible in the world around us.

Coming into resonance with that, bringing it all back to how we can behave more appropriately. Not to say that we need to be censoring or chastising ourselves about inappropriate behavior, but just recognizing how that itself is a vector of health, as much as any intervention. As you were saying, a lot of the interventions we're using as holistic health practitioners are to help people achieve that state internally of this ongoing resonance where their body is maintaining a state of health, even when disease arises, even as processes of death are happening. To be in relationship to that, to be in rapport and dynamic connection.

That is something that I also think about a lot with my patients: how to not create that for them but how to see what's going on and try to witness a process going on for a patient from a lens of compassion and understanding that there is some learning going on here. The patient is seeking some kind of fulfillment, and it can't be pushed aside. We have to find a way to relate to it and find the fulfillment that is being sought after.

Neeshee: I would say an essential statement here: health is relationship. That relationship is also evidenced in the patient-practitioner relationship, which is a therapeutic relationship. Symptoms arise as indications of where relationship is being inquired of, where it might be avoided, where it may need to be reasserted or reestablished. Where it has been repressed. Therefore, when you have the event of healing (or the law of cure is initiated in that process), you will have symptoms. You will experience sickness as part of the process of healing because there is something within us that is not transformed, that is stagnant. You could think about disease in a very simple way as just a form of qi stagnation, which means that once it gets moving again, there will be purification, there will be a rebalancing process.

And that is such an exciting sign to see in the clinic because you know that the patient is healing, you know that they are being cured, so to speak. Here, cure is not a final event. It is an ongoing process. That is why when we talk about appropriateness, we have no sense of a Judeo-Christian value judgment. We have a Daoist sense of the harmony between things. The appropriate form of action. The Book of Changes says the superior man does this or the superior man does that, and it's another way of saying that when you're in harmony with yourself, you behave appropriately in respect to what is happening. You are in relationship—you are related fundamentally to your own body, and your body is existing in the relationship that it exists in to the world, to society. As you've also been hinting, there is a cultural and collective component of health and healing and, therefore, an environmental one.

Paul: Yes, and bringing it back to astrology, the cosmic: if you think of the universe as being a perfect encapsulation of dynamic health, it is always changing. There is no cure-state because new things are always happening, shifts are taking place. It is that process that allows health to move and balance. It is not always so smooth, but I think there is also the ability to see in the five-element model through these healing events or these symptoms or these emotions, exactly how they are relating. If somebody, for example, in the instance of somebody not grieving or not displaying grief for a family member, having the appropriate grief might be absolutely heartbreaking and a terribly intense emotion to feel. But we can understand that that is an appropriate response to help the person come into relationship with a process that is true. Whatever other supports might need to take place in that person's life, just support that.

The other instance I can think of is when we think of excess Earth element or the seeking of sympathy and care, and the excess seeking of support and affirmation. In the five-element cycle, Earth controls Water. When we take away that excess, we have the Earth trying to hold onto the Water, which is fear. In the absence of a kind of affirmation and sympathy, there could be a great deal of fear and loneliness that I'm not connected as I want to be. I don't have this big holding loving community in the same way that I'm really looking for. That could engender a lot of fear. But, at the same time, we can even see how somebody coming in, experiencing a great deal of fear after the previous session, maybe being lovey.

It isn’t always a bad thing, and it's not our place to ascribe who should be feeling what emotion—but we can understand, as they present themselves, where they might be coming from. I think that is a beautiful way of relating to emotions.

Neeshee: What you said is that the symptom is like a homeostatic process. The symptom is not a deviation, it is an attempt of the body to reassert a natural order. What we can do is look at that and say, Oh, this is what is trying to happen. There is a reason for it. It is very rational. We can assist that motive to complete itself, to fulfill itself. Therefore, the symptom is the key, but it is not the object of the treatment. The symptom is the message—so you can really listen to your patients and learn so much. Applying this more clinically, I will share some of my recent thinking on five-element practice and Worsley’s concept of the Causative Factor (C.F.), which is the one element that is constitutionally out of balance in someone.

I think about the C.F. as a relational imbalance, and the whole five-element cycle showing us the relational nature of health. You were just giving the example of Earth and Water, the control relationship. There are so many relationships in the elements. We have the generative relationships, the Mother-Child relationship, which is the most basic relationship in reality. We come from mothers. There is no other way that life exists. There is so much to be said about birth trauma and the early stages of infant care in setting up the psychological foundation of a child to be an adult. I think of the Mother-Child relationship between the elements in a metaphorical and alchemical sense, but also in a very literal sense.

I would propose augmenting Worsley’s idea, or sort of creatively playing with his idea of the C.F., by saying that you can offer five-element treatment that is not solely focused on the C.F. element (which would be his method), but that you can treat the C.F. in the context of its relational reality. You can treat the C.F. as a relational imbalance, not as an individual imbalance. Because there is no individual, really. It is all relationship. For example, say you diagnose a Wood C.F., you can do a Water-Wood treatment. This is very much like Japanese Meridian Therapy, although they arrive at their diagnosis through pulse and not through the color, sound, odor, and emotion. And they have a very specific way of doing the treatment.

I'm saying you can use any points on Water and Wood to transfer the relationship, to reinitiate the Mother-Child relationship, to bring in the context of the Wood element again, and give it an opportunity to rebirth itself, so to speak. You can also take this idea and look at the control cycle and be attentive to when that is needed, when that relationship needs emphasis. Because if everything is being controlled properly, it is being maintained in check. When would you need to assert control? When something is excessive or when it is being over-controlling, then you need to relax.

If we think about the C.F. as an element, then we're necessarily thinking about a dynamic of relationships. Korean Four-Needle Technique operates on this idea too. It is bringing in these relationships between the elements, again, in a very specific way. You use certain element points, the horary point, etc. I’m broadening that whole idea and saying we can use any points on any of these meridians to re-enact the relationship. So that is an idea I am playing around with.

Paul: The work that I do with Bazi is based in the same five elements, and a lot of it is diagnosing from a different perspective, a similar idea of the Causative Factor where we're looking at somebody's chart. And the way I perceive the chart, it creates a natural landscape. There are all the natural elements of Fire, Wood, Water, Earth Metal in different combinations in different organizations and structures. Thus, it elicits the image of a landscape. In that landscape, there might be something really excess, there might be something really deficient. It’s thinking about what elements we need to bring into that landscape to balance the system. It might be more than one, it might be a little bit of one, a lot of another. There are certain Bazi charts we look at where if somebody's born on the right day of the right month, they're born in the summertime, let's say, and their heart's full of fire—that is not necessarily a problem because the summer is the time of fire.

We have to understand what is appropriate for one person. Partial people might have a strong partiality to a certain emotion, a certain kind of display. That is also part of the human experience. Some people who are just more gregarious, more intense, more compassionate. And that can also be part of the human experience. There is a beauty to that. Even recognizing within each individual that there are still things we need, but at the same time, there are things we offer. We have gifts to return to the world.

That is such an important part of healing, and why relationality is part of healing. Because we do need the assistance of the world for our causative factor or for our deficient elements, something that we need to bring in to help support us. At the same time, we have something to offer back to those who seek it, who need it in the world around us. And the stronger that web of relationship is, the greater the exchange of health across the entire network.

Neeshee: Exactly. And I think that's why methods like Bazi and astrology are great—they show you where you are eccentric. We all need to discover our eccentricity because, when we do that, we also discover our genius. That means we are not only discovering our character, but we are realizing the calling that exists in us. That is what individuation is about, in the Jungian sense.

My colleague, Howard Chen, has thoroughly applied the Bazi methodology to five-element acupuncture. In his system, the Day Master is the C.F. So you center treatment around the Day Master element, and you look at the four pillars as a whole, and all the elemental relationships.

On that basis, you can derive the elements that are most indicated in treatment, to support the CF, so to speak. Now, my revision of that is to say that the Day Master is not the Causative Factor; it is the Constitutional Factor. The CF is an imbalance. In some cases, they are the same. In other cases, they are not the same. This is a very Ayurvedic idea, that there is a constitution and then there is an imbalance. I think the Day Master is a constitutional factor in the true sense of that phrase. Does it need treatment? That is a question. You can support it, for sure. But I also think the CF that Worsley is getting at is slightly different from that. It is arrived at through different means, and it has a dynamic relationship to the constitutional factor. That is the whole prakriti-vikriti5 idea in Ayurveda, which I think is the original constitutional medicine. Ayurveda has a strong theoretical explanation of constitution and its relationship to imbalance.

Paul: I think that also, and I wonder if this is what you're saying as well, because it makes me think about plants again:

A big fascination of mine is how the herbs we ingest, whether Ayurvedic, Chinese, or Western, the way that they function in the body is a mirror of their function in the natural environment. There is a resonance between what we are ingesting the herb to do for us and what they do naturally in their community. We are ingesting that relationship to take that relationship in. Similarly, we have constitutions that are partially what we give. But those can't exist on their own. We need to have a healthy community where we are getting what we need. Again, that whole relationship dynamic where our constitution isn't necessarily what we need more of, there could be something different we need that supports our ability to express our constitution.

The emotion that has always made me most curious in the five-element system is the emotion of joy. Because I think that is such a sought-after emotion in Western culture—the experience of joy. So much of our consumer landscape is centered around what will impart joy, what will give you an experience of joy, of levity, of ecstasy. Maybe ecstasy is wrong because I think that it is not always a joyful experience. We mentioned this before as well, thinking about the idea of health being held in relationship and held in a whole network of community relationships. I've been fascinated lately by the idea that the root system of any ecology is like the brain of that ecology.

The behaviors of an ecology, how things grow and relate, are based on the interconnection between all the roots that are going on unseen, and mediated mostly by mycelium. So all the roots are down in the earth, and then filaments of mycelium, almost like a neural web, are connecting all these, and they're all sending chemical signals the same way our brains send chemical signals, and they're being passed to one another, communicating, sharing information, sharing resources. That is creating, on a macro-level, behaviors and responses. My interest in this is the fact that serotonin, before it was ever in an animal brain, was in the root systems of plants. Serotonin is being synthesized by plants and shared among them.

A lot of attention in our culture is paid to SSRIs, to depression being a function of a serotonin imbalance. These chemicals are also present in the environment. Therefore, we can think of the environment also having joy, having that same emotion. We can understand more about ourselves by looking at the natural environment. What we see is that a lot of psychedelic chemicals are derivatives of serotonin. So there is some kind of modulation of this experience of joy or openness. What these chemicals do is they encourage diversity of root growth—and, if we're imagining roots like the neural network, that is encouraging neuroplasticity, encouraging a new response to an existing situation.

When the stressor comes on to an ecology, there is an uptake, an increase in the production of these chemicals that allows the root system to grow in new ways, to synthesize new chemicals, to respond to a trauma or an unexpected event. I think that's a really interesting way of conceiving of joy as well. That joy isn't always a response to something happy or a joyous experience. Joy can be an opening to something that otherwise is very painful. That through grief, through fear, through anger, there can be an experience of joy, which literally in our brain allows a new relationship to an existing situation to open up to possibilities other than being stuck in this one loop, and that literally can create new connections, new structures in our brain. That is a beautiful part of the whole system, that we do have these more challenging emotions that we tend to think of as fear, anger, or grief. Joy is a much more pleasant one, but it's a really necessary part of our growth, our adaptation, and that relationship to what's going on, to take a new stance, develop a new way of relating, and the environment reflects that back to us.

Neeshee: It's another way of recognizing the mechanism through which psychedelics can help us grow. That is how I think about psychedelics: they offer tremendous growth potential for the right person in the right context (obviously set and setting, etc.). But I also think that you're pointing to the fact that health is an ecological phenomenon. And that takes us into the realm of possession.

When we lose relationship (or health as relationship), we become unrelated and dissociated. That is possession. Possession isn't some other entity coming into us. That is an old idea. It is a symbolic way of saying it. Most fundamentally, possession is the experience of the “I”. The experience of oneself as separate is possession because now you are possessed of yourself.6

You are not related. That is why the Tibetans talk about possession as an ecological issue. If you start cutting trees down, you disturb the spirits that live in the land, and they will possess you. You invoke the wrath of nature. The Tibetan medical texts say that epidemics arise from environmental destruction. By devastating the natural environment, we create epidemic diseases. We provoke the wrath of nature. We become possessed by viruses. Our whole gut-brain axis becomes a form of dysbiosis rather than an ecological intelligence. So this whole thing about healing as relationship is healing as ecology.

I'll give you an example. What you just said reminds me of something my spiritual teacher, Adi Da, talked about, which is that the tree is the most fundamental natural structure in existence, and that the human being is the mobile realization of the tree structure.7 This means our verticality, but also the relationship between Heaven and Earth. The tree is rooted in Earth, and it's open to receiving Heaven through the crown. Adi Da specifies the metaphor by saying that the brain is like a root ball, and that the body is underground. Spiritual awakening is growth above ground, overhead, into the domain of the sunlight, so to speak. I think that metaphor is also quite literal. He is pointing to the structure of the human being and saying that we haven't merely co-evolved with the plant world, we are an evolution of the plant world. We are plants in a mobile consciousness.

We are plants. So it makes sense that we would use them for healing. As you were saying, there are derivatives of serotonin, and I think these are all things science has discovered as a language for this relationship. But it is just the language of ecology and, really, the language of our medicine.

Paul: Yes, what I hear you saying is that cows are vegetables, so it's okay for vegetarians to eat a burger.

Neeshee: <Laughter>. That's right. You have gotten my point.

Paul: I love extending that a little bit, that we are plants, but we're also not just a tree getting up and walking around, but we bring our entire ecology with us. We are talking about the gut-brain connection. We have a whole flora, we call it the gut flora. We have a whole ecology within us. I love the idea that when we lose healthy relationship with the external environment, that reflects in dysbiosis, that reflects in psychosis, that reflects in a loss of healthy relationship on the internal level, which is also in ecology. We take for granted the idea of possession, that there's one “I”, but it is a collective of all sorts of beings that need to be kept in harmony and in relationship.

And if they're not, we see the immediate effects. The more we are in healthy relationships with the external world, that will reflect in our own internal state. For example, brain chemicals are released when we're in healthier relationships, such as oxytocin, serotonin, etc. When we are in a good relationship with the seasonality, the appropriate dynamics are immediately reflected in our internal world. Of course, there are always storms, there is always sickness. These things happen on the inside and out, but those aren't signs of illness. Those aren't signs of a lack of harmony. Those are events that we then need to respond to.

Neeshee: I think that this allows us to look at the phenomenon of neurosis. We can appreciate the neurological component of that. We can also appreciate the psychological component of it and the ecological component of it. Freud used the word “neurosis” to indicate a psychological imbalance. Jung’s definition of neurosis is “one-sidedness”, a partiality of consciousness. So I think neurosis is an interesting word because it targets the zone that you're talking about—the brain, the nervous system, and the way that is a reflection of the plant world—but also the psychological, ecological, and the reality of relationship. If we are one-sided in any way, we are missing the picture of our wholeness in relationship. We're capsulized again.

Paul: One-sidedness was always a curiosity for me as well. What does it mean when there is an excess of joy? We can see mania in the world, but joy seems like such a good thing. Why should we be worried about an excess of joy? It’s helpful to understand that through the lens of brain chemicals and psychedelics.

Psychedelics in the plant world help to promote a diversity of new neural connections through the root structure and the death of old structures that are no longer in service. So it helps to cleanse old patterns, it helps to promote new, healthy patterns of relationship.

However, to ingest psychedelics to continue to be in a state of constant joy would not support long-term harmony. That will become too partial. It will become too one-sided without the other side of really drawing those roots down. Whatever these new connections are, we have to establish them. If we discover some new insight, making sure we can bring that out into the world and bring that into relationships and enact that in a way that becomes more visible, more solid.

A lot of the fear I hear people talking about with psychedelics is psychosis, neurosis. The relationship between internal and external is a really important aspect of health. We need to be connected to our internal world, but we also need to be connected to our external world. When we favor only one, we create partiality that can lead to disharmony.

Neeshee: I think that this points to the age-old exploration of the relationship between schizophrenia and mystical states of consciousness. The original idea of schizophrenia is a loss of vital contact with reality. That is the original psychiatric definition. I think that is accurate, but at the same time, it has been observed that the schizophrenic experience shares features with religious experience, with mystical experience. Yet, the schizophrenic is not relating to those experiences in a way that could produce realization, but they're having transpersonal experiences, even though they're actually in a pre-personal condition. Psychosis shares features with mystical phenomena, such as Kundalini.8 You can exploit the nervous system in the higher centers of esoteric physiology and have these experiences.

That is the question of integration. Psychosis is the inability to integrate these experiences, to bring them back into the ego structure. Now I'm using ego in a psychological sense, not as the “I”, but as the medium of relational connectedness. You take psychedelics and you have this ego dissolution, but it's not from doing Spiritual practice. It has no context. You are given access to something real, but it's not necessarily usable.

That is why I think psychedelics need a context. Like anything, they need a therapeutic context. This is one reason I'm in favor of MDMA, because it doesn't dissolve the ego structure. It actually brings ego integrity in the sense of bringing you into a somatic relationship with yourself, and it has a strong relational element.

I think that is more the zone of healing than having strong visionary experiences or ascended experiences. Maybe we don't need to go to Heaven. We need to have an alchemical flow between Heaven and Earth. If we look at the illness of our day, we are really not in our bodies. How powerful would it be to really be able to feel like you're in your lower dantian,9 that it is the center of gravity, that the hara is the centrifugal area of the vital force, somatically? To be able to relate to the world and other people from that place of centeredness and embodiment. Not as a self, but as a functional unit.

MDMA, because of what it engenders, is anti-possession. It is pro-relationship and pro-ecological. LSD and psilocybin, obviously, they're useful, but they're also very unpredictable, and they are really taking you into the transpersonal. If we are going to go to the transpersonal, we need to make sure we've really established the interpersonal. You can't just blip into the transpersonal when you haven't even come into relationship to your body, to your environment.

Paul: That reminds me of what Carl Jung said in his introduction to The Secret of the Golden Flower10. He says that the greatest mistake that any Western practitioner can make is to forsake their own epistemological underpinnings to pursue some mystical other experience. And related to that, he says that the goal is not to have visions of light, but to enter into the darkness and illuminate it, which is what you're talking about—going into our body, this place that we don't have a relationship with, it seems dark and scary and unknown. If we can bring illumination to that, that is more valuable than its pre-personal envisioning of these beings of light and whatever else might be that can't do anything if we can't bring that then into our body. That is like reestablishing the connection with our true epistemological underpinning, so to speak. Where are we? Who are we really in the world? If we can illuminate and inhabit that, then I think that gives access to the ability to potentially access these higher states of visionary experience. But there's nothing to do with them if you can't bring them back down.

Neeshee: It's a search to escape the body. Spirituality has been built around that in certain traditions. For example, the Kundalini tradition is about that. That is the goal—to raise the life-force to the point that you merge into a higher realm of subtlety. It’s a visionary realm. It also has a formless component when you reach the highest of the high. The idea is very much to subordinate the body to that. My bias is more towards the Daoist sense of yoga, in which you appreciate that everything needs to come down first. If you're going to practice the microcosmic orbit, first, the vital force comes into the dantian. First, everything flows down into the body. You are anchored in the dantian.

Only when the dantian is full can you circulate up the spine. Even then, the idea isn't entirely to leave the body and to establish yourself in a higher consciousness. It is to circulate. That is the secret of the golden flower. It becomes a complete flow in the circuit of the body. Honestly, that is what I experience when I do Qigong. That is what I experience when I'm with patients. And that is what I try to be. That is what I mean by the vital force and the flow of it being health. I want to feel that I'm in the microcosmic orbit. That is what is keeping me alive. It’s also an alchemical and Spiritual process. For me, MDMA amplifies that very mechanism and process. It's a tonification of the microcosmic orbit, rather than a shooting up of the Kundalini. We need somatic therapies—acupuncture has an advantage here.

Paul: When you said the “ego structure”, I had misheard you as saying “eco structure”.

Neeshee: That's a good mishearing.

Paul: Either one works!

Thinking about this web of relationship and also bringing things back into the transpersonal and psychedelics: when there is an environmental stressor on grasslands, grasslands are mostly held together in part by psilocybin mycelium, and they release psilocybin into grasslands when there's an environmental stressor, which promotes diversity of root growth. It even promotes the synthesis of novel chemicals to respond to environmental stressors. So it promotes a whole new way of relating that some plants might experience while others don't. When that experience happens, that is like the individuation process. That is creating a new kind of being who is capable of new things. Whether psychedelics are involved or not, that is potentially how all diversity of life occurs, through different responses to environmental stressors, different creative solutions that all life (including plants, human beings, bugs, and minerals) brings new responses, new adaptations to the environment.

That creates this beautiful diversity. If we're keeping that to ourselves or are not able to share that, then it dies with us, it goes away. But if we're able to put that back into the environment, whatever experience, whatever adaptation we have synthesized, to send that back into the root structure, to send that back into our community, to share that promotes the diversification, which we know is health in so many ways. It also promotes the ability to heal others.

I think that's a really necessary component of finding our own calling—both what we have to offer, but also how what we offer to the world is so much determined by the illnesses, by the stresses, by the ways that we encounter the world. That is something that we can only impart if we're willing to have access to a community, to a place to share that back with one another. We're existing in a world where homogenization is becoming so much the norm, where things are dying off, everything's becoming you know—

Neeshee: Mono.

Paul: Sterile. Mono and sterile. This diversification that needs to happen again can even start on the individual level, recognizing the value in our own challenges and struggles and illnesses. What we've learned from that being something that is more than just a personal process. It's something that we can and should be sharing with each other.

Neeshee: What you're saying points to the fact that the human process is one in which we have a responsibility for everything that we're related to, especially the natural world, and that we should be stewards of the world. We have this alchemical ability within us, as you said, to synthesize something novel, to increase diversity, and in a certain way refine it in our own bodies and put it back out in a way that serves its generation.

I'm reminded of an exchange between Terence McKenna and Sasha Shulgin, where Terence was going on about how the plant psychedelics are where it's at because they're natural, and things that aren't natural don't have a history of intelligence. They don't exist in a morphogenetic field that these plants have accumulated through generations of use. He says these synthesized chemicals are soulless. Sasha Shulgin was in the audience when Terrence McKenna said that, and he responded, “Terrence, I'm as natural as they come”. Which I think is such a great remark for somebody who synthesized so many novel compounds that were, in many regards, plant derivatives. Just that idea that “I'm as natural as they come” is so true. The human being is as natural as it comes—what we can synthesize in our relationship to nature, is the most natural thing that there is.

Paul: The last thing to tag onto that is, in doing some research, I saw that there were studies where people would introduce to a mycelium colony a novel chemical that didn't exist anywhere in nature. And by introducing it, the mushroom would begin to synthesize a parallel chemical. So, again, as natural as it comes. Things come from everywhere, and the more diversity there is, the more that gives us the opportunity to have a natural response, to develop that ability to create our own natural reflection and resonance with that.

Neeshee: I think that's beautiful.

Paul: Well, this has been so much fun. I've learned a lot, and I just really appreciate talking to you. Thanks for taking the time, Neeshee, to share this conversation.

Neeshee: Likewise, Paul. I really enjoy our conversations and I always learn a lot. I think it's a good dialogue to be engaged in, as a kind of invocation of health and healing and of our purpose.

Paul: I feel really enlivened and called to my own purpose through these conversations, and I hope people who listen or read feel the same, that it resonates with their own purpose to go out and heal themselves in the world and to do so in a way that's full of joy and community.

Be sure to check out Jonathan’s two-part interview with me, and subscribe to his substack for a wealth of interesting writing!

Interview with Neeshee, Part 1

Interview with Neeshee, Part 2

NP: Jonathan, you are a diverse practitioner, with training in Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and Vedic Astrology. How did you find your way to medicine and to these systems in particular? 

JHE: Like most young people, I had no particular interest in medicine until life forced me to take one. That began with personal health issues and also with watching my father's painful decline with an early-onset dementia. For both of us, Western medicine seemed to have very little to offer. In my dad's case, the treatment consisted of sedatives to keep him docile as he became more unpredictable. Part of me thought, "there's got to be another way." 

Around the same time I was developing an interest in Asian religion and culture. I spent a college semester in India, and Ayurveda and Tibetan Medicine both came onto my radar screen (the latter through a lecture by medical anthropologist Barbara Gerke, who was based in Kalimpong where I was studying). I learned about some basics like the three doshas and the concept of agni or digestive fire. That metaphor of a fire in the belly really landed. It empowered me to begin understanding my body and at least to start moving in a healing direction. 

Around the same time, my inner landscape and priorities were shifting for reasons I didn't understand, and I felt this stirring need to find—or make—meaning. At an age when most of my friends were happy to be partying, I found myself on a kind of spiritual quest. It was weird and lonely but I thought "I've got to follow my weird." (I only learned later that weird comes from wyrd, meaning fate, in the three fates or "weird sisters" from Greek mythology.) I eventually learned that I was going through a huge astrological transition during those years, from the daśā or major period of Jupiter to that of Saturn. It was like entering a completely different ecosystem. 

After college, I hit a few dead-ends and then enrolled at the Ayurvedic Institute (then in New Mexico), thinking it would be good to pick up some practical skills while I figured out what I actually wanted to do with my life. As an aside, I was first exposed to Jyotish (Vedic astrology) at the Institute--the first person to look at my chart told me I might want to study astrology, and I took some interest, but it didn't become a focus. What was really piquing my interest was herbs, botanical medicine. I'd always had an eye for plants and loved being in nature; now Ayurveda gave me a framework to start understanding how plants and people might interact for healing.

I became fascinated, but it still wasn't something I considered as a possible career path at that point. 

Then I ended up in Nepal on a Fulbright grant in 2008-9. Wanting to get back to that part of the world, I'd written a project proposal on something outside of medicine. It didn't much matter, because I got acutely sick to my stomach right off the bat, my very first day in the country. I dragged myself to the old bazaar to ask for help. Someone took me to what turned out to be a highly respected Ayurvedic clinic. The vaidya there took my pulse, asked a question or two and gave me some herbal medicines I'd never heard of. Things turned right around, at least in terms of that particular illness. I started to think that maybe the reason I was there had more to do Ayurveda and herbalism after all. 

Not that things unfolded in a smooth or linear way. First I had to orient to the Ayurvedic landscape in Nepal, which was a lot more varied than the rather sanitized Ayurveda I'd learned stateside. There were jharphuke vaidyas (tantric healers) doing divination to diagnose illness and conducting spirit de-possessions; alchemists making formulas out of minerals and metals; folk healers who were practically illiterate, and classical philosopher-physicians who spoke such highly Sanskritized Nepali that I could hardly understand them. I spent a couple of months just learning the lay of the land and getting oriented. 

Eventually I realized I was drawn to the traditionalists: lineage-based herbalist/physicians who didn't have have white coats or a college degrees, but who were doing things as their teachers or fathers had done for generations on back, both in terms of making medicines and treating patients. They turned out to be something of an endangered species, unfortunately. And many of the ones I met weren't interested in sharing their traditions with a bideshi (foreigner). I was twenty-three, twenty-four and not super aware of myself or my naive entitlement. Saturn was slowly humbling me, one might say. 

It was an interesting but grinding winter in Kathmandu, with a lot more illness and a lot more dead-ends in terms of my attempted research. Then sometime in the Spring of '09 I made one more attempt to connect with a traditional vaidya, and fate smiled on me. It's a story I tell elsewhere, so I won't go into great detail. But basically I found my way to this practitioner, Keshab Lal Vaidya, who opened his home and heart to me. We spent just a few days together, but they were intense ones. He would tell me clinical anecdotes, show me medicines he'd made or was working on currently. By that point his alchemical workshop where they made the rasa ausadhi (mineral and metallurgical preparations) was closed; he was over seventy-five, with a failing heart. I learned that he had no one to carry on his lineage, since his son had decided to pursue a career in engineering. I think he was dying of heartbreak, in a way, to see his beautiful lineage coming to an end. And there I was, this random hopeful, showing up on his doorstep. It was weird, not in a bad way. 

We connected. There was no way I could become his apprentice or his student, there wasn't time. But there was this emotional transmission that happened, I guess you could say. I was moved by his generosity, by the predicament of this beautiful tradition that was hitting its own dead-end. And something in me said "yes" to carrying on whatever I could. Not of his specific lineage, but of old-school herbalism more broadly. 

I only saw Keshab-ji one other time, a few weeks later; he died later that year, after I'd returned to the States. (I still have some of his medicines, things like shilajit, shankha bhasma, hand-rolled yogārāj guggul pills). But by that summer then I was re-orienting to pursue herbal medicine as a practitioner. So that's how I got started. 

NP: You had rare and precious opportunities to learn Ayurveda in its own cultural context. Your story gives a rich perspective of a tradition that has only been partially transmitted in the West, if that. From Nepal and Ayurveda, how did you find your way to Chinese medicine?

JHE: Chinese Medicine was a natural continuation, in the sense that here was this incredibly deep herbal tradition that came with possibilities for licensure and a more established profession (as compared to Ayurveda). I didn't have any interest in acupuncture at first, it was just something that came along for the ride as part of Chinese herbs school. Most people think of it the other way around, that herbs are something you maybe pick up while at acupuncture school. But where I went, the School of Classical Chinese Medicine within what's now called NUNM (National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, OR), herbs were the main strength, since the program was founded by a serious herbalist, Dr Heiner Fruehauf. Anyway, I absolutely loved learning ancient Chinese cosmology and the herbs and formulas that fit so beautifully into that holistic paradigm. There's such incredible wisdom there. I use classical Chinese formulas all the time, sometimes just as they were written two thousand years ago, sometimes with modification. We may be seeing novel viruses, but human physiology hasn't changed––at least not much.

Eventually I did embrace acupuncture as another, elegant application of theory I'd fallen in love with. But that didn't happen until a few years into clinical practice, when I discovered a Korean acupuncture style called Sa'am.    

NP: I'm intrigued by how your journey took you through Ayurveda, Tibetan Medicine, and finally into Chinese Medicine, with astrology interspersed. It is unique and very valuable for a practitioner to have significant exposure to all of these systems. How would you summarize the differences between Ayurveda as practiced in the Himalayan context from contemporary Ayurveda taught in the West? 

JHE: For one thing, the Ayurveda I encountered in Nepal was much more diverse. There was just a whole lot going on under the umbrella of "Ayurveda," which after all means "knowledge of life." That's a pretty broad scope!  A good example is practices pertaining to bhuta vidya. 

Sometimes glossed as Ayurvedic psychology, bhuta vidya means "knowledge of beings" or spirits. Probably for reasons of not scaring people off, that whole side of the tradition has been minimized in the West. But In Nepal, it was and is alive and well. There are specialized practitioners who make use of tantric and mantric methods; these guys (mostly men, from what I saw) are basically somewhere between physicians and magicians. The point is that ritual is part and parcel of Ayurveda just as it is arguably part and parcel of every healing tradition, biomedicine included.  Another example would be rasa shastra, Vedic alchemy. This barely gets mentioned in the West, because of its associations with toxic compounds such as mercury. But rasa shastra as a discipline is well aware of mercury's toxicity and has developed ingenious ways to work with it safely. Still, on Western soil the whole subject becomes taboo and is just not part of the conversation. Which is a shame, because in throwing out the bathwater of toxicity, the baby of classical formulas also gets tossed. 

On some level the question is: are we trying to introduce a sanitized, truncated form of holistic medicine that can fit into existing societal parameters? Or are we opening ourselves up to radically different ways of being and doing medicine? It's the same question that East Asian Medicine has had to face in coming to America. And in both cases, it seems the first movement is towards shrinking to fit the cultural mold, as happened with TCM. But then there's a countermovement, and I think maybe we'll see that with Ayurveda just like we have with Chinese or East Asian Medicine, where new (actually very old) dimensions have been opened back up. In my view, it comes down to not giving all the power to the rationalist/materialist paradigm which is really a child, or maybe a rowdy teenager, in the scope of things.  Precocious but immature. These other ways of knowing are the elders in the room. 

NP: I couldn't agree more. The spiritual / shamanic aspects of Asian medical traditions have been lost in the West, because of a difference in cultural paradigms. I think practitioners in the West face the burden of becoming aware of these lost aspects and finding ways to apply them in the modern clinic. Returning to your herbal background, how do you integrate your knowledge of Ayurvedic herbalism with Chinese herbalism, if at all? 

JHE: I'm somewhat eclectic and do stock several dozen Ayurvedic herbs in addition to those that are already part of East Asian herbalism (there's a lot of overlap in the materia medica, as you know). I'll bring in some of those Ayurvedic medicinals in some of my tincture formulas, or incorporate them into someone's custom formulation. But in truth I don't draw on Ayurvedic herbs all that heavily, because my work is based on formulas, and classical Chinese formulas are so beautiful and brilliantly constructed. As alluded to above, Ayurveda has its own classical formulas, but many of them are inaccessible here due to concerns around metal and mineral content. And frankly I've never been handed the keys to the castle with Ayurvedic herbalism the way I feel I was with East Asian herbalism. These subjects were always intended to be passed down through oral instruction, and my Ayurvedic clinical training didn't ultimately go as deep. 

NP: What drew you to the Sa'am style of acupuncture, and what are its cornerstones? 

JHE: I found in my first few years of practice that I would help some people and not help others. That's to be expected, but the thing was I didn't have any idea how to improve. When a treatment wasn't effective, how much should I change? How could I test out my ideas? There were way too many variables. When I heard about Sa'am, this classically-based acupuncture system from Korea, the first thing that struck me about it was how powerful the treatments sounded. And not just powerful, but directional. The word was that you either helped someone considerably, or you made them worse. And while that can sound scary, as a practitioner it's very empowering because you have a way of learning from your mistakes and course-correcting. 

From a theoretical perspective, Sa'am beautifully ties together the five phases with the six qi / six conformations in a way that's elegant and efficient. Basically it pairs the organ channels in a unique way, cross-linking the normal pairs with one another in a dynamic way. For instance. the Heart channel is fire in the five phase classification and fire in the six confirmations (being a shaoyin organ). That's double fire. The Urinary Bladder is water in the five phases and water in the six confirmations (being a taiyang organ). Double water. One is yin, the other yang. Thus these two organs are opposites, and Sa'am recognizes them as a counterbalancing pair, like two ends of a see-saw, because that's how they function. 

Clinically, we look for excess patterns and then typically treat by supplementing the counterbalancer. So someone who's nervous, fearful and chilly with a slow heart rate and tight abdominal midline, that's a Bladder excess presentation; we might supplement the Heart to thaw them out, soften them, help them open. We can also drain the Bladder directly instead of supplementing its counterbalancer, but that's a riskier and more advanced strategy with less margin for error. And there are certain organs that we never drain at all. 

The treatments themselves are typically just four needles. The needles work with the five phase transport points to powerfully tonify or sedate a given organ. Continuing with our example, to supplement the Heart we would tonify the Wood point on the Heart Channel and the Wood point on the yin Wood channel, since Wood feeds Fire. These two needles we insert in the direction of channel flow with clockwise rotation. In addition, we would sedate the Water point on the Heart channel and Water on yin Water (Kidney). These two we insert against the channel flow and with the opposite rotation. That's it. Then we watch and see if the patient settles on the table and how their complexion responds. That initial response is very telling. 

It sounds simple and elegant, but of course in practice it's not so easy. We have to be ready to admit our ideas were mistaken, otherwise we risk doing someone a real disservice. So you have to stay on your toes. For all the challenges that the clinic can bring, Sa'am is a beautiful system that can really move the needle (pun intended, I guess) quickly for a wide range of potentially severe conditions. I expect to be deepening with it for a long time to come. 

NP: Do you feel your practice is enhanced by using both herbal medicine and acupuncture? 

JHE: I do, yeah. I may have started out as an herbalist, but I've come to really value hands-on modalities like acupuncture and moxa (also cupping, guasha, and subtle hands-on work). And of course they have different strengths. Acupuncture and moxa can make a profound impact, but not only is it limited to the people one can see in person, it's also very time-bound. Sometimes we can obtain a lasting shift, but other times there will be recurrence after a few days, and the patient has to come back. With herbs, the patient can keep taking them over time, which is a huge plus. Herbal consults can happen remotely without too much loss of clinical precision, so that opens up possibilities. That said, there's nothing like interacting with folks in person, at a bodily level. I wouldn't want to lose that dimension or to work only virtually. Pulse, abdomen, even odor/ aroma can all be such rich sources of information. I doubt tech will ever fully replace the most advanced technology, which is the human organism itself. 

Thank you, Neeshee. It's been a real pleasure.