Baby Puke Trilogy Pt.3: Acupuncture Channels

In the final episode of this three-part series, Dr. James takes you on a tour through the acupuncture channels. We talk about the primary channels, the extraordinary vessels, and some of the classical channels that have been glossed over in the annals of time. We ask - what is an acupuncture channel anyways? On the way, Plato’s theory of recollection comes up, as well as Daoist meditation and shamanic dancing, and we ask ourselves about the special connection that babies have with their moms, and what that relationship could mean about God.

Babies - they’re cute. But why are they so bad at doing everything? Join Dr. James Mohebali, new dad and doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, as we take a deeply philosophical and unexpectedly practical look at what’s the deal with our favorite tiny humans. And, of course, try to ask some questions about their digestion.
 
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COOL STUFF I MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
Acupuncture Channel Chart
Large, Color-Coded Acupuncture Channel Chart

Detailed Pathway of the Stomach Channel

Eight Extraordinary Vessel Pathways, Part 1
Eight Extraordinary Vessel Pathways, Part 2

Detailed Pathway of the Ren Mai

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Music Credit:
"Let Yourself Be Huge" - Cloudkicker (under Creative Commons License)

Transcript

Greetings and welcome to “Classic of Difficulties: Difficult Questions in Medicine, Acupuncture, and Beyond”. I am your host, Dr. James Mohebali. I’m a doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and I will be your armchair-philosopher-in-residence and your tour guide as we try to ask some difficult questions about medicine, health, alternative medicine, and maybe  the meaning of life. My goal in this podcast is that, by asking and unpacking these tough questions, we will maybe leave with a couple of answers, but we will definitely leave with more questions than we had at the start.

This is our final episode on this fascinating question; the last episode of this three part inaugural trilogy. All of us once began as babies, so it seems only appropriate for this show to begin with the beginning, as it were. Babies, and also, why they puke so much. For most of us, myself included, our central question was really a question that we didn’t even know we had. Me, I didn’t know that I had this question until I got projectile puked on. And i’m not talking about spitting up, that’s all well and good, and that’s also explained by some of the same things we’ve talked about. I’m talking about projectile, all the way, firehose of milk type puking. The first time that happened, and I hope that, years from now, when my daughter is a teenager, she will hear this - the first time she puked, I was like - whoa that’s a really intense thing for a person that small to do. And it’s a lot of liquid. I was just totally scrambling - like “what’s happening?” Your first instinct is like to get rid of her. It’s wild. You’re getting soaked with half-digested milk and you’re like “GROSS GET IT AWAY.” But the thing is, you start to react that way and then some part of you is like “OH MY BABY.” So you have this dual desire to hold onto her tightly and to like, chuck her as far away as possible. Now, my wife and I are both accustomed to it, so we just have this quick, super-parent reflex of like getting her over a hard surface and turning her to the side. Yes, a hard surface. Because cleanup is a lot easier.

The funny thing is that she doesn’t look bothered at all when it’s happening. She just looks perfectly normal, and then all of a sudden - milk tsunami. And there’s rarely just one tsunami. I mean, really, who pukes just once and then is done? But then afterwards, it’s like nothing happened. Just the same contented little baby smile.

Now that I’ve regaled you with my tales of parenting - which sounds pretty glamorous, doesn’t it? - let’s talk about our question. The big question. So, up until this point, the Chinese medical theories we have examined have either been based on herbal medical theory, or based in the mutual foundations of herbs and acupuncture. But here’s the thing, acupuncture has its own theoretical foundations. Which makes sense, right? Acupuncture and herbs are pretty different things. In fact, acupuncture and herbal medicine were really considered to be separate disciplines for most of Eastern medical history. So, herbs, for example, are classified by how they taste, and whether their nature is warming, or cooling, or neutral - like black pepper is warming, mint is cooling, all that kind of stuff. But acupuncture points - well they just don’t taste that different from each other. So just like herbs have their own theory, which deals with their innate attributes, acupuncture theory deals with the innate attributes of the acupuncture channels. 

So what are the innate attributes of the channels? Well, to understand that, we have to understand a little bit more about what an acupuncture channel is. The acupuncture channels, what you might know as meridians, they’re not just imaginary lines on the body surface. The classical texts characterize them as irrigation ditches. They’re like a waterway system for irrigating the body, and each waterway has specific characteristics. Some rivers are raging rapids, some rivers are huge, wide, and slow; and each does something a little different.

So each of these rivers, each of these channels is associated with one of the organs, so there’s a Stomach channel, a Spleen channel, a Small Intestine channel, and so on.

So let’s think about the stomach for a second. It’s a pretty high powered organ. It’s muscular, and it contracts, and is full of literal acid. Like, burn your face off acid. And when your stomach hurts, it really lets you know. You bend over, you grimace, it’s a big deal. And when the stomach wants to get rid of what it’s got, it vomits. And, as I mentioned earlier, this vomit isn’t like a slow trickle like a mountain creek. We’re talking about Niagara falls. So, translated into Chinese Medicine speak, we can already tell based on the attributes of the stomach organ that the channel, the irrigation system for the organ, is going to have a lot of qi and a lot of blood.

So in many ways, the acupuncture channels aren’t esoteric, magical invisible lines. They’re really a physical description of empirical observations. Same thing with acupuncture points. If you just scoot your hands around on the body, paying very close attention to the little crevices, for a long enough time, you’ll inevitably find most, if not all of the acupuncture points.

All this discussion of “qi” and channels can seem pretty esoteric and abstract, even to new acupuncture students. But it’s important to remember that qi cultivation practice is what underlies many traditional martial arts practices. The strength of these practices really lies in the ability of the practitioner to use his qi, or even the qi of heaven and earth, to deliver blows. And that’s how those skinny old guys can still beat up those young muscular guys. Qi really doesn’t seem so abstract once it’s punching you in the face. It’s a real, physical, phenomena.

But here’s what makes the channels and the points so special. They’re not just physical. They’re also super esoteric and mystical. Just like the Chinese encode information in their written language, the channels can be viewed as an encoded piece of information. So, when I say that the Stomach channel encircles the sensory orifices of the face, that implies something about the function of the Stomach. That means, for example, that not only is the Stomach responsible for digesting the food we put in, it means that it’s also responsible for digesting the information we take in through our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It’s all encoded in the pathway of the channel.

And then there’s the points.

The location of points can also be thought of as encoded information, and then on top of that, the names of the points, written, of course, in Chinese characters, have a tremendous amount of information as well. It’s like your body becomes a memory palace, where you can tuck away truth into every nook, cranny, and fold. A memory palace, for those who don’t know, is a memory device that helps people remember lots and lots of information without needing to write it down. So, in the Chinese view of the body, the body is already innately like a memory palace Which, by the way, makes learning the acupuncture points to be an interesting process. It’s like, whenever you take an exam, you have your cheat sheet right in front of you, because your cheat sheet is literally your own body.

So it’s really handy, because you can encode tremendous amounts of information into the body. And this is exactly what has happened throughout history, clinicians have encoded more and more information into these channels, writing little poems about points and what to use them for, and passing this information primarily through oral traditions. But the idea of encoded information gets even crazier when you think about the channels themselves as already being encoded information - information that we just kind of stumbled upon and we’re only, over the course of history, starting to decode that information that’s written into the channels. So, if you think of it that way, your body already is a memory palace, and you just don’t remember what it’s for… Or even how that encoded information got there in the first place.

That starts to sound a little like Plato’s theory of recollection… In fact, the Chinese medical word for channel isn’t the same as the word for a ditch, trench, river, or canal. The word “jing” actually means “scripture.” Like “holy scripture.” Like the buddhist “lotus scripture” or “lotus sutra.” Or, what the Chinese call the Bible, the “God scripture.” So, the channels are just like these seminal texts for understanding deeper spiritual truths. They have this deeply encoded information, whose truth is only revealed through a lifetime of study. And one way to study them might just be called “living life.” Like how can we really know what it means to take in food, and all the subtleties of flavor and texture and all the wonderful things about food, if we’ve never tasted it before? Or if we’ve only eaten like one thing? 

So it’s easy to see why babies’ channels don’t work well. Because they haven’t lived life yet. They have this complex system of drainage ditches and water pumps and springs and wells, and they’ve never used them. Not once. They don’t even know which way the water is supposed to go.

So we have this complex system of channels, each associated with an organ, and the channels have physical reality, but they also are, in a way, some kind of download from spiritual and mystical reality, and they happened to appear in relatively full form in China in ancient times, with no real explanation of its origin. Pretty wacky. What’s more, the diagram of the channels that most of us are used to seeing, well that’s really only some of the channels. Most diagrams have the 12 primary channels, and they have two of the “Extraordinary vessels.” The primary channels are the ones that are most tightly related to the organs, like we were talking about before. But on top of the 14 channels I just mentioned, there’s 12 sinew channels, 15 luo channels, 12 divergent channels, and 6 more extraordinary vessels. That’s 59 different channels, and many of them have multiple trajectories. Like the Stomach channel actually has 5 trajectories! So the body has a pretty complex irrigation system; it has to, really, because the body is an incredible thing. And each of these channels, and even each of their trajectories, have a bit of a different role in human physiology.

So why don’t we hear about these other channels that much? Well, there have been some attempts throughout history to merge acupuncture theory with herbal theory; most recently TCM, but it’s certainly not the first time. There have been major attempts since at least the Song dynasty, which is like the 1000s to 1200s. Usually it involves a simplification of both, but usually, acupuncture takes the hit more. Why does acupuncture get ignored? Well, for one, back in the day, the needles were huge. I mean, metallurgy just wasn’t that great in 200 BC. So, it was kind of an intense, surgical experience to get acupuncture. A more interesting reason, though, is that acupuncture is fundamentally a physically rooted discipline. Just like I was saying earlier, the SCRIPTURE of the acupuncturist is right in front of you. You just need the hands and the training, the internal and external cultivation, in order to be able to read it. And every time you do a treatment or make a diagnosis, you’re working from scripture, teaching on scripture, and learning more about that scripture.

Herbs are different. They’re weird little plants that people find in exotic, mossy forest valleys. Sometimes they come from really far away, and you really have a lot of trouble imagining where they even came from - like what even is frankincense? Little gooey rocks? Although the plants and substances do have innate wisdom in them, it’s not HUMAN wisdom. It’s like plant wisdom. And plants don’t speak english. Or chinese. We need to write books, and read books, and talk about it a bunch, and compare notes, and argue, and do all sorts of intellectually driven activity in order to understand what these plants are doing and how to do herbal medicine. Which, by the way, people loved doing all this type of intellectually driven scholarly stuff back then, and we still love doing it, so talking about herbal medicine became one of China’s favorite pastimes for intellectuals.

So intellectuals like herbs, and intellectuals are writing lots of books, and no one likes getting stuck with giant rough needles. But all of these intellectuals still know that the channels are cool and useful. They’ve probably seen acupuncture help their wife, or their mom or something. So what’s an intellectual to do? They decide to keep only the ones that they think you really need to understand the body, and get rid of the rest. As a result, a lot of these other channels have been ignored, or abridged, or otherwise glossed over.

OK. So that was a lot of background. But you need it. The channels are crazy. I mean, they’re so interesting and unusual that its hard to believe that some Chinese guy, or group of Chinese guys, or whatever figured this out thousands of years ago.

So, back to babies. Why do they puke so much? Well the short answer is that asking babies to eat without puking is like putting the bible in front of them and asking them to decipher the finer points of theology. Or putting the lotus sutra in front of them, and asking them to find nirvana. It’s just not going to happen any time soon.

A lot can be said about the way that babies get acquainted with their channels, and that’s really the meat and potatoes of Chinese medical child development theory. And there’s a lot of different theories, focusing on different sets of channels, and different progressions (because order, by the way, is really, really important when it comes to the channels, and when it comes to encoded information in general. It really matters what order things come in). Anyways, a lot can go wrong in children’s channel development, but it can also be fixed, especially if you catch it soon enough. Kids are known to heal very quickly; like I have said before, they’re adaptable.

But out of all channels, the single most important channel for newborns and for the first year of life is the Ren Mai, or conception vessel, but we mostly just call it the Ren mai. Why is this channel important? Well, as the name indicates, the baby kind of lived in the mom’s ren mai the whole time she was pregnant – the ren mai goes to the uterus. And the ren mai is the channel that goes up the midline of the front of the body, the main pathway at least. There’s images of the pathway in the shownotes below. There’s also diagrams of the other channels as well. So the Ren mai goes up the midline. And what’s one of the most important landmarks on the midline? The belly button. It’s a point. Ren-8. No, you don’t needle it. But it’s a point!

So in the womb, the baby lived in the mom’s ren mai, and baby’s ren mai was connected to mom through the umbilical cord. The one thing tying baby to life. The one source of nourishment. And then, all of a sudden, one fine day, birth happens. And the cord is cut. And mom isn’t attached to your ren mai anymore.

It’s tough. It’s really tough. But it’s not just tough for baby. We’ve got two people whose respective ren mais, whose definition of comfort and nourishment, just got cracked wide open, both mom and baby. Thankfully, they still have eachother, but they’ve got to get used to being separate for the first time. And if it goes well, then everyone is happier than they ever could have dreamed of before. And if it goes poorly, it’s a recipe for a lifetime of a difficult relationship between mom and baby, and a recipe for postpartum depression.

So why would such a cruel thing happen? Well, as a result of this process, babies and moms have a special relationship, unrivaled by any other relationship that humans will experience in this life. For that first, sweet year when the baby’s ren mai is wide open, baby has an opportunity to experience unconditional love. And moms do too. And, as a dad, I get to catch some of this on the side. I have a ren mai, too, you know.

And then babies start walking. And they’re grabbing stuff, and breaking stuff, and sticking their fingers in stuff. And mom is like “No no no no.” And babies are like “what’s all this about? I thought love was unconditional.” A type of heartbreak. But, they take it in stride. Because they can walk now! Walking is the activation of the Du mai, the channel that runs up the spine, that dominates year two of life (think: terrible, independent twos)

So all these discussions of scheduled feedings, of letting babies cry it out, of trying to make sure baby is independent from the get-go: all of these are foreign to the concept of the Ren mai, of unconditional love until the baby starts to develop the upright posture, the Du mai. And the reason this is important is because there’s a second pathway of the Ren mai that runs up the spine, along the du mai. Without a strong maternal bond, without a strong foundation of nourishment, trust, and love, we don’t develop a healthy relationship to independence and to our ability to manifest ourselves in the world.

But, just like any channel, there’s two sides to the ren mai, deficiency (not enough love) and excess. And it’s not excess love that becomes a problem, per se. Usually it’s just the wrong kind of love that creates excess in the Ren mai. Like overfeeding a baby who is just tired and needs to go to bed, like giving the baby food every time they’re stressed out, instead of trying to comfort them some other way. And let me tell you, this excess in the Ren mai, that’s a recipe for some pukes. Like projectile pukes. Like elevator sequence from the Shining, but instead, it’s milk.

But the parent learns not to do that, hopefully. And the baby learns that they shouldn’t eat too much. And hopefully, after everything, everyone is happy and still deeply, madly in love.

The ren mai is about developing a healthy relationship with nourishment. It is not about restoring or replacing the umbilical cord; that’s never going to happen. It’s about finding that deep nourishment that the umbilical cord used to offer within yourself, of realizing that you have the inherent power to nourish yourself.

Pretty heavy stuff. But it’s not just armchair philosophy, that Chinese scholars who had never seen a baby before, came up with while sitting at their desks and twiddling their calligraphy brushes. I see it every day with my little baby. My baby has this beautiful, funny little habit. She’ll clamp onto the breast, and as soon as she does, she’ll stare right into my wife’s eyes. Like directly at them. She started doing this before she could even really see. And probably 90% of her visual field is just a mountain of breast, and that remaining 10% is aimed right squarely at mom’s eyes. And this is reflected in the pathway of the Ren mai; it goes up the belly, up the chest, wrapping around the mouth (to let her suckle), and then from there goes to the eyes. But it doesn’t go to BL1 – which is this major eye point that has to do with envisioning the future, and synchronizing to the sun and moon (which, by the way, my baby has no idea what time it is, and I’ve tried repeatedly to talk to her rationally and say, “baby it’s 3am, I need to sleep”, but she won’t listen). The point that the ren mai goes to near the eye is ST1, which is called container of tears. It has to do with the fluids of the eye, with that goopy pathetic look that newborns have, like only really young newborns. My baby is still very much a baby, but I already miss that look. That look in their eyes before they really know where they are. It’s that searching stare that they have when they can’t see anything, but they know mom is out there. So they stare right at her, and try to take the image in.

That film of fluids, well, it acts like film in a camera. It captures the image and stores it for later. Somewhere inside of each of us, we are deeply and profoundly aware of this image: a figure who we can’t make out the feature of, shrouded in light, and the feeling of being cared for and nourished. Sounds familiar? Many near death experiences from around the world involve reports of exactly this image, and the same with many extraterrestrial experiences, but we also see the imagery in Christian iconography – like, the halo around the virgin Mary, and around other saints. There’s this light, and the feeling that someone out there really cares for us. More than we can even know. So that image is really burned into us, deep into our minds and hearts.

And from the etching of this image, people start to make all kinds of different arguments. Some would say that it disproves God and the reality of the spiritual world – “it’s just an imprint from when you were a baby.” Whereas other people view it as a proof of the reality of the spiritual world as it echoes through our reality, as it ripples and causes minute waves. Each of these waves barely resembling the source, but somehow immediately recognizable as participating in the source– think Plato’s theory of the forms.

So it’s a big deal, being a baby. And the ren mai is a big deal, because it sets the tone for our relationship with food for the rest of our life, the tone of our immune system, the tone of our relationship with our mom, and really all other people for the rest of our lives, and our relationship with higher, divine truths. So why are babies born with cracked open, dysfunctional ren mais? Well, because it’s a tremendous opportunity to develop an intimate relationship with mom, and to develop a profound relationship with the divine that only human beings are capable of.

So what happens after age one? Well, the ren mai is kind of finished, and it moves on to the du mai - time for independence, and mobility - time for dad to shine. And then after that? Well, after two, the fontanelle is closed, and the main extraordinary vessels (ren, chong, and du) - well they’re finished, at least in part. The door doesn’t totally close on them until age 7 or 8. You know, the age when kids stop having imaginary friends, and stop living in their own weird little world as much, and when they start to act a little more like adults.

So after age 8, you’re stuck? Not exactly. There’s a great text from Li Shi-Zhen, this incredible scholar and physician from the 1500s, that’s entirely about the extraordinary vessels. Here’s a piece of the text, translated by Stephen Birch, an amazing acupuncturist who does a lot of work in pediatrics: “All people have these eight vessels. They belong to the yin shen. They close and do not open. Only the Daoist adepts can push them open with their yang qi. Therefore, by this means they are able to grasp the dao.”

Grasp the Dao? That’s pretty serious stuff. So reopening the extraordinary vessels is tantamount to grasping the dao, which could be thought of as achieving enlightenment, or other similarly magnanimous spiritual feats? According to Li Shi-Zhen, yes. So what exactly are we reopening here? Well, the question becomes what was closed?

The most significant thing that literally closes for little babies is their fontanelle. The soft spot that babies have on their head. Chinese medicine doesn’t just think of the soft spot as a weird evolutionary mistake that allows babies to squeeze their head out of an almost too tiny pelvic opening. Chinese medicine thinks of it as a portal into the brain. And what goes into that portal? Like everything. Like the baby’s soul, and destiny, and all that stuff. To be clear, they don’t believe that the baby is born without a soul and only gets it later; but it’s like this process of finishing. Like your creme brulee is all ready, and you just need to put the sugar on top and finish it by burning the sugar with the torch.

So right now, my baby’s brain, and consequently her soul, is literally wide open to everything in the universe. She’s just surfing the cosmic grooves all the time. She is totally radical, man. And our goal, or at least the goal of those Daoist adepts, is to blast open their brain-holes to experience everything in the universe just like babies experience it. This is also the goal of shamans, shamans from lots of different cultures the world over. They do what they do because they want to experience a different, somehow more complete reality.

So why does my little baby girl puke so much? It’s because she’s a shaman. And my desire for her to not puke on my clothes is actually just a sign of how spiritually not advanced I am. If I was more woke, I would just be fine with it.

BUT, out of discomfort comes innovation; and out of this particular discomfort came the innovation turned out to be this podcast! None of it would have ever happened if it weren’t for my perfect little puke-monster. 

Do you guys feel like you have a handle on this question? Let me know in the comments. And let me know which explanation is the one that seems most compelling to you. I think they’re all pretty cool, but I think I definitely have my favorites. Something just tickles my fancy about imagining my little baby girl dressed up like some kind of animal and doing a rain dance. This concludes Episode three, and marks the conclusion of our very pukey trilogy. So, until next time, keep asking questions, and stay difficult.