Introduction
From April to October 2019, I studied East Asian Medicine. The course ran at Kei.K Aroma Studio in Kanagawa, Japan — six days in all, two sessions a day, twelve sessions altogether. The teacher was Masamichi Abe, an acupuncturist based in Sapporo who runs a clinic called Kazenone.
This article sets out what I learned over those six days. The material itself is covered in four separate articles. Here I want to describe why I took the course, what kind of a room it was, and what stayed with me afterward.
Why would someone trained in Rolfing spend six months studying East Asian Medicine? That is where I want to begin.
Why I Took the Course
It started the previous November.
Since 2015 I had been studying with Hiroki Sato — Hiro, as everyone calls him — who runs TEN in Kitahama, Osaka. His course is called IMAC, and it works by measuring range of motion to assess where the restrictions in a body are. In November 2018 I attended the class on the viscera.
Participants pair up to practice what has been taught, and my partner that day was Abe. We were meant to be practicing. Instead, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, Hiro and Abe started running experiments. They measured the range of motion of muscles lying along a meridian, then stimulated acupoints to see how the body would respond. I’ll spare you the details, but I felt substantial changes in my own body.
Until then, East Asian Medicine had been something I knew about from books. An idea. That afternoon was the first time I found it interesting as a physical experience rather than as a theory.
Around the same time, meridians were entering the IMAC curriculum itself. Six of them appeared in the lower-limb class of March 2019, and by the upper-limb class that April all twelve were in place. Measure range of motion, and you can get a reasonable indication of which of the five organs the body is being affected through.
That raised a question.
IMAC measures meridians using a Western instrument — range of motion. But what are the meridians being measured? What do the five organs actually refer to? I wanted to understand what IMAC was measuring, from the side of East Asian Medicine itself. While I was thinking about this, Abe sent word about a course. That was January 2019, and I signed up immediately.
Before it began, I wrote down three things I hoped to get from it. To understand yin-yang and the five elements (also called the five phases). To understand the relationship between the organs and the meridians, and so grasp the theoretical background of what IMAC was doing. And to understand East Asian Medicine from the side of Western medicine.
What Kind of a Room It Was
Six days, two sessions each, from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. The venue was Kei.K Aroma Studio in Kanagawa. Kei Kobayashi provided the space; Abe taught.
All six days fell on a Sunday.
| Session | Date | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | April 7, 2019 | Yin-yang and the five elements |
| 2 | May 12, 2019 | The phases: wood and fire |
| 3 | June 2, 2019 | The phases: earth and metal |
| 4 | July 7, 2019 | The phases: water / qi |
| 5 | September 8, 2019 | Blood and fluids / meridians |
| 6 | October 6, 2019 | Pattern differentiation |
The handout on the first day was twelve pages. Open any book on East Asian Medicine and you will find yin-yang and the five elements described at length. What you will not find is which parts matter. Abe’s twelve pages were only those parts.
There were a lot of questions, and the class went off on tangents regularly. Even so, it finished on time, every single day. Taking an enormous body of material and drawing out only what is essential — that one thing happened, in the same way, across all six days.
This is what I look for when I choose where to study. Hiro at IMAC. Takashi Haitani of Innochi Glass. Pedro Prado in Rolfing. When you learn from someone who can put things into words, the amount you come away with changes. Abe was the fourth of them.
West and East Locate the Standard Differently
The biggest thing from those six days was not the knowledge of the five elements, nor the pathways of the meridians. It was a single question: where does the standard sit?
Western medicine looks for its measures outside. Blood test values, imaging, statistics. It takes the average across a population and searches for principles that hold for everyone. The criterion is statistical significance — if something holds for ninety-five people out of a hundred, it is taken as true.
East Asian Medicine reverses this.
Abe said it on the first day. Yin and yang are a comparison, made after you have decided what the basis of comparison is. So what counts as yin and what counts as yang shifts depending on what you are comparing. You get to decide the basis yourself. That, he said, is what makes East Asian Medicine interesting, and what makes it useful.
The measure sits inside you.
I heard the same thing at a separate course on food. What you use to judge whether a food suits you is three things: appetite, taste, and how you wake up. What do you want to eat? What tastes good? How do you feel the next morning? The answer is not on the side of the evidence. It is on the side of your own body.
I did not take this difference as a question of which is right. It is not a rejection of Western medicine. It is a second measure, added to the one I already had. Medicine has another scale. Learning that was the largest thing those six days gave me.
What I Learned
I have written it up in four articles.
Yin-Yang and the Five Elements
East Asian Medicine deals with qi, which cannot be seen. Since qi itself is hard to get hold of, the tradition built something imaginable in its place: yin-yang and the five elements. Five categories — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — each with an organ and a bowel assigned to it. The organs are solid, the bowels hollow, passageways. Put the five organs in order and the five bowels fall into order by themselves. Because the elements stand in generating and restraining relationships, a disturbance anywhere moves the body back toward balance of its own accord.
That idea startled me. Western medicine separates emotion, temperament, and physiological function and handles each on its own. East Asian Medicine sorts them into the same group and treats them as one thing. Order that group and the balance comes back. You do not need fine-grained anatomy or nutrition to work in that direction. Rolfing, Source Point Therapy, and IMAC are all facing the same way.
Qi, Blood, and Fluids
Three basic substances sustain life. Qi, which cannot be seen; blood, which can; and the body’s fluids. Qi is viewed from four angles — original, gathering, nutritive, and defensive. Blood is produced, circulates, and is stored and cleaned. Fluids move through the triple burner, an organ with no anatomical form. The state of each shows up in concrete signs: complexion, muscle tone, skin, hair, nails. Not numbers on a lab report, but inference from what is visible.
Meridians
Twelve primary channels. They are arranged by position on the body — front, back, and side. The hand channels connect to the organs in the chest, the foot channels to the organs in the abdomen. Here I learned something significant: the five organs do not reach the head or the neck. The organs that govern the senses are not connected to the head. Something else must therefore carry that information, and that is what the bowels are for. The reason the two are separated is to distinguish a problem of passage from a problem of insufficiency.
Then the governing and conception vessels. One manages all the yang channels, the other all the yin. Order these two first and what remains can be narrowed down. Abe had arrived at this through his own clinical work. The governing and conception vessels put the center line of the body in order.
Pattern Differentiation
This is what corresponds to diagnosis. There are three approaches, and they come in a fixed order. You do not begin with the five organs. Start with the fine detail and you lose the whole. First yin and yang, then deficiency and excess, cold and heat, exterior and interior. You narrow from there. Causes divide into three — climatic, psychological, and social — and the psychological sits on the same level as the season.
Afterward
The question I came with — what is IMAC measuring — did get an answer.
The meridians are arranged by position. Front, back, side; hand and foot. To measure range of motion is to look at the state of the meridian corresponding to that position. IMAC can measure meridians with a Western instrument because meridians have always been handled as a shape the body has.
The point about the governing and conception vessels landed in the same place. In Rolfing, the sleeve sessions organize the surface, the core sessions reach the core and the center line, and the integration sessions bring it together. Source Point Therapy’s diamond points and stick figure are also there to organize the center line. Traditions that came from entirely different places were pointing at the same thing.
The other thing that stayed with me was the order.
Do not start with the organs. Begin with the eight principles, look at qi, blood, and fluids, narrow to the five elements, and only then look at the organs. Enter through the whole and descend into the detail. IMAC begins with range of motion. Rolfing begins with body reading. The same shape. And each carries the same warning: start with the detail and you will lose the whole.
I no longer think East Asian Medicine is better, or that Western medicine is. Each has its strengths and its angle. Holding both, there is more you can say about the body in front of you. That is what six months gave me.
Conclusion
I took this course because I wanted to know what IMAC was measuring. I got that answer, but it was not the only thing I came away with.
That the standard can sit inside you. That you enter through the whole and descend into the detail. And that the body moves toward balance on its own. None of these turned out to be far from what I had been learning in Rolfing.
Taking an enormous body of material and drawing out only what is essential — Masamichi Abe did that for six months. My thanks to him, and to Kei Kobayashi for providing the space.
Related Articles on This Course
- The Five Elements as a Way of Dividing — The Body Moves Toward Balance on Its Own
- Qi, Blood, and Fluids — Dividing the Invisible into Three
- What the Meridians Are — Channels for Qi and Blood, and the Center Line
- Pattern Differentiation as a Procedure — Why You Don’t Start with the Organs