Fei – The Lungs
Next up in our tour of the Chinese internal organ system comes the Lungs. This October issue is the ideal time to discuss the Lungs, as autumn is well upon us and all things in nature are energetically contracting and moving back inwards. The Lungs are connected to the metal element and their principal energetic movement is to contract. This can clearly be seen in the manner in which they draw air and energy into the body.
As with all the organs, and most things in Chinese philosophy for that matter, the Lungs have a physical, energetic and spiritual component. Physically there is a similarity to the Western view, in that they breathe Oxygen in to the body and release excess Carbon Dioxide. They also have a strong connection with the blood and there is a Chinese saying that ‘all blood vessels lead to the Lungs’. This highlights the fact that all of the blood within the body must pass through the Lungs in order to become oxygenated, or in other words ‘fill up Chi’.
On an energetic level the Lungs are in control of the circulation of Chi and are in charge of dispersing and maintaining Wei Chi. Wei Chi can be best described as our protective energy and can loosely be translated as our immune system. It stands to reason that the lungs should be in control of the immune system as it is through our lungs that we interface with the outside world. Every breath that we take is generally full of airborne microbes and it is our Wei Chi that keeps these pathogens out. If our Lung Chi becomes deficient or impaired then our Wei Chi is diminished, allowing one of these bacteria to take hold resulting in an infection and leaving us with a cough or a cold or even something worse.
This idea is explains why some people catch every bug going whilst others don’t ever get ill. If you look after the health of the Lungs then the whole body will be protected. Indeed this notion is taken further in that our body’s actual physical barrier, the skin, is seen in Chinese medicine as an extension of the Lungs. This idea may resonate with us in the West as the skin is said to need to breathe, (remember that poor painted woman in the bond movie Goldfinger). You can also follow an unbroken line from the skin into the mouth, down the throat and into the lungs. In TCM it is therefore seen as one continuous organ and problems of the skin are often treated via the Lung meridian.
Looking at the ‘spiritual’ aspect of the Lungs, things start to get a little more interesting. Essentially the Lungs house the part of our consciousness known as the Po. These are our Earthly souls and they (all seven of them) look out in to the world via our senses. They are concerned with the day to day survival of the body. They give us our animal instincts and desires and they are very much of the dense material world. They encourage us to enjoy the physical plane of existence and the finer things in life, while we can. However theirs is not always a happy lot, as they are aware of their untimely demise and their impermanent nature. For it is said that upon our death the Po, unlike the Hun of the Liver, dissolve back into the Earth from whence they came. Hence the emotion associated with the lungs is that of grief.
Occasionally, if someone were to die with a great deal of shock or trauma, then enough negative energy was said to be created, that one or more of the Po could feed of this and live on for a while after the death of the physical body. This was said to create the phenomenon of ‘hungry ghosts’, which in some of the more esoteric systems of Chinese medicine, were then able to enter another person, if they did not have sufficient Wei Chi, which could result in energetic parasites and even possession.
This maybe a little too far out for many of us here, but the correlation between Lung health and the health of the rest of the body is quite evident and they clearly need to be looked after, especially in this season of contraction.