Common concerns
心神不宁
A heart that races over nothing, a chest that will not fill, and a hum of dread with no object are described in the Chinese literature as the spirit, 神 shén, with nowhere to rest. The tradition houses the mind in the heart, and reads an unsettled mind as a heart too thin, too hot or too tightly held to house it. Anxiety is the word most people arrive with; a reading asks what the body is doing underneath.
心神
The tradition does not divide the person into a body and a mind and then wonder how they talk to each other. It houses the mind in the body, and specifically in the heart. The Suwen’s phrase is that the heart is the sovereign, and the spirit — 神 shén, the word that covers awareness, mood and the sense of being at home in oneself — issues from it. A mind that will not settle is therefore, in the tradition’s grammar, a heart that cannot house its spirit, and the questions that follow are about the heart: is it thin, is it hot, is it being held too tightly?
The heart holds the office of sovereign; the brightness of the spirit issues from it.
The same book describes what fright does, and it reads like a description written from the inside: the heart has nothing to lean on, the spirit has nowhere to return, thought has nowhere to settle, and so the qi is in disorder. That is the racing heart, the shallow breath, the mind that cannot land on anything, set down two thousand years ago in twenty characters.
In fright the heart has nothing to lean on, the spirit has nowhere to return, thought has nowhere to settle, and so the qi is in disorder.
Four centuries later the Jingui Yaolue described a person — the text says a woman, though the clinic has never found it to be only women — who is sad and weeps for no reason, as if moved by something outside herself, and yawns and stretches without rest. It called this 脏躁 zàng zào, the organs restless, and what is striking is what it did next. It did not argue with her. It answered her with a kitchen: three sweet, mild things simmered together. The principle behind that — a frightened heart is to be fed and warmed rather than reasoned with — is still the principle a reading works from.
The organs restless: she is often sad and wants to weep, as if moved by a spirit, and yawns and stretches again and again.
焦虑
Most people who find this page arrive with one word, anxiety, and it covers three different things: a feeling everyone has, a state some people live in, and a name a clinician may have given. If you have the third, the person who gave it to you has seen you, and nothing here replaces that. We do not use the word in a reading, because the tradition has no equivalent for it and would not want one. It never gathered all restlessness of the mind under a single heading. It asked what the body was doing while the mind was doing this.
That is the honest translation: not a Chinese word for the one you arrived with, but a set of questions about the heart that houses it. Does it race, and when? Do you wake at three, or fail to get off at all? Are your hands cold or your face hot? Do you startle easily? Is it worse hungry, tired, or in the week before a bleed? Those are what the thirty questions ask, and a photograph of the tongue answers what the questions cannot.
辨证
Three pictures account for most of what the clinic sees, and they are almost always layered.
The reading’s job is to say which is underneath, because the food for the thin picture and the food for the hot one pull in opposite directions, and the wound-tight layer sits on both. That is the reason a page cannot do what a reading does. A page has to describe all three; a reading is allowed to choose.
起居
The things that make an unsettled mind heavier are the ones that thin the heart or heat it. Short nights, first and by a distance. Coffee, which the tradition reads as pungent and rising, and alcohol, which it reads as hot and which settles the evening only to unsettle the night. Skipped meals, which starve the blood the heart is trying to hold. Screens after dark, which keep the spirit out in the world when it should be going home. And the thing nobody wants to hear: lying awake trying to think your way out of it, which is the mind using the heart it is meant to be resting in.
食
The kitchen’s answers here are sweet, mild and old, which is exactly what the Jingui reached for.
Jujube: it calms the centre and nourishes the spleen … for great fright, for heaviness of the four limbs, and it harmonises the hundred remedies.
None of this is fast, and none of it is a promise. The tradition counts a thin heart in months, and it says so. What the kitchen offers is a direction, and the reading’s job is to say which direction is yours.
穴
The tradition gives the heart an outer wall, the pericardium, 心包, and reaches the heart from the outside through that wall’s channel rather than directly. The point on it everyone learns first is Neiguan, Pericardium 6, 内关, the Inner Gate, on the inside of the wrist between the two tendons, three finger-widths above the crease. Its entry shows you how to find it on your own arm.
Hold it with the thumb, a minute each side, on the out-breath, when the racing starts or before bed. It costs nothing and needs nobody, and it is what a physician in our clinic would show you with her own hand across the desk. It is not a claim about outcomes.
慎
Once those have been looked at, the rest of this page still stands. A thin, hot or tightly held heart is a fair description of most unsettled minds in people who have been seen; it is not a reason for anyone to go unseen.
Questions
It declines the question. The tradition houses the mind in the heart and reads an unsettled mind as a heart that is too thin, too hot or too tightly held to house its spirit. That is why the questions a reading asks about the mind are mostly about the body: sleep, appetite, temperature, and what the tongue looks like.
Because the tradition’s oldest instinct about a frightened heart, written in the Jingui Yaolue around 200 CE, was to feed and warm it rather than argue with it. A spirit that cannot settle is read as lacking the blood or the cool it needs to rest on, and both of those are made in the kitchen and in the small hours of sleep.
No. Anxiety is a Western word that covers a feeling, a state and a name a clinician may give, and the tradition never grouped restlessness of the mind under one heading. It asked what the body was doing underneath: thin blood, dry yin with heat, or a liver held tight. A reading names that picture rather than the word you arrived with.
It can describe, in the tradition’s own words, what your thirty answers and your tongue suggest is underneath, and what usually eases that picture: food, hours, one point. It cannot see you, and it says so on its first page. If a clinician has given you a name for this, keep it and keep them; a reading sits beside that, never instead of it.
The others
Broken sleep and an unsettled mind share most of the clinic notes they appear in. Long tiredness and unpredictable digestion share a spleen. Skin that flares and a head that aches both rise with heat. If more than one of the six is yours, read the nearest neighbour next, and notice how often the same picture is underneath both — that picture, rather than either complaint, is what a reading is written about.
Every page here hands over to the same three places: the five patterns, which are the pictures these complaints sort into; the food pages, where the shared-origin list is sorted by what each ingredient is traditionally understood to do; and the three points, which you can press with your own hands. All of it is free, and none of it needs anything from us first.
The reading
Every page in this section is written for everyone who arrives with the same complaint, which means it is written for nobody in particular. A reading is the opposite: thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, and a document written in English for you alone by a physician licensed in China, sent within 48 hours.