A Pebble in the Cosmic Pond Sabine Wilms PhD

Welcome to the first episode in Season Three of the Pebble in the Cosmic Pond podcast. For the next few months, we shall consider a variety of perspectives on “Nurturing Our Nature” 養性: Cultivating health and longevity from ancient China to today. 
This project is inspired by two things: First, Leo Lok's and my research in the volume on this topic in the seventh century text Beiji qianjin yaofang 《備急千金要方》 (Crucial Formulas to Prepare for Emergencies Worth a Thousand in Gold) by the famous medical author Sun Simiao. And secondly by our preparation for a course we will be teaching on this potent topic starting in September.  In this podcast season, and the course, we shall both present early and medieval Chinese writings and practices authentically and, at the same time, make sense of this material in our personal lives and in the contemporary clinical context.
Our first conversation on this topic in the present podcast episode, titled “The balanced person doesn’t get sick” 平人者不病, starts with a critical exploration of the topic of yangxing in general, and specifically of the meaning of xìng 性 (“innate nature”). As usual, we try to balance the presentation of generalized default ideas with a more nuanced and textually rigorous way by differentiating between specific texts and contexts, authors, periods, and even passages within a single text.
To demonstrate the importance of this approach, we look at the role of the emotions, and joy in particular, in self-cultivation and how this might have changed between the Han and Tang periods, and between the authors of the Neijing and Sun Simiao. Fortunately, our background in Chinese medicine can help us make sense of the complicated linguistic material by grounding the textual evidence and abstract ideas in the concrete physiological responses in the body, through pulse, Qi flow, complexion, the shine of the shen, and other markers.
At the end of the day, we can evaluate the effect of any emotion by asking: Does it bring us closer to the ideal of píng 平, the healthy state of balance and dynamic equilibrium, or does it take us away from that? For this reason, we titled this episode 平人者不病 “The balanced person doesn’t get sick.” Isn’t this phrase from Suwen 18 a beautiful way to describe the essence of our medicine?
I am your host, Dr. Sabine Wilms, and I am joined, as usual, by Leo Lok, Resident Purveyor of Multiple Perspectives at the Pebble in the Cosmic Pond podcast, where we share old and new stories about China's healing traditions and about medicine in Heaven and on Earth... ...and in the sweet spot in between.Additional Information
Nurturing Our Nature CourseSubscribe to my newsletter!Imperial Tutor Mentorship by Dr. WilmsHappy Goat Productions (Dr. Wilms' website)Leo Lok's courses - All Courses - Voices of Our Medical Ancestors

This episode, titled "What Do Love, Qigong, and Christ Consciousness Have to Do with Healing," is the second half of our conversation with Cynthia Li, a biomedical doctor in the Bay area who specializes in functional and integrative medicine. She is also a practitioner of what she calls “qigong consciousness healing” or “collective field qigong” and the author of two books: “Brave New Medicine: A Doctor’s Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Disease”, and “Mingjue Awakening: Teachings on Pure Consciousness, Collective Field Qigong, and Energy Healing.”
In preparation for publishing this interview, I listened to our conversation again and took five pages of notes, which I find impossible to condense into a paragraph for this introduction. I really hope you take the time to listen closely.
Cynthia has such a beautiful healing presence and deep deep wisdom about healing, from her religious upbringing to her professional training, personal journey through suffering and healing, and Qigong practice. All these strands come together in her work of creating this healing cosmic consciousness space of oneness, or physiological coherence or Christ consciousness or, ultimately, unconditional love and peace and happiness, merged hearts, total acceptance and endless creativity.
And to add the cherry on the top, Leo was able to connect Cynthia’s descriptions to some beautiful Buddhist concepts, from Nirvana to descriptions of breath cultivation to the Buddha’s command to stop the discursive, differentiating, analyzing mind and embrace emptiness. You are in for a real treat!
Additional Information
Mingjue Awakening: Book by Cynthia Li MDBrave New Medicine: Book by Cynthia Li MDCynthia Li MD – personlized medicine testChanneling the Moon, A Translation and Discussion of Qí Zhòngfǔ's "Hundred Questions on Gynecology," Part One — Happy Goat ProductionsSubscribe to my newsletter!Imperial Tutor Mentorship by Dr. WilmsHappy Goat Productions (Dr. Wilms' website)Leo Lok's courses - All Courses - Voices of Our Medical Ancestors

Cynthia Li, our interview partner for this episode, is a biomedical doctor who I have been dreaming of asking questions for several years now, ever since our mutual friend Michael Lerner introduced me to her work. She is a biomedical doctor, specializing in functional and integrative medicine. She is also a qigong practitioner who studies and performs what she calls “qigong consciousness healing” or “collective field qigong.” She is the author of two books: an incredibly honest and courageous biography of her own intense healing journey published in 2019 and titled “Brave New Medicine: A Doctor’s Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Disease”, and the recently published “Mingjue Awakening: Teachings on Pure Consciousness, Collective Field Qigong, and Energy Healing.” I hope you note down these titles and get a hold of both of them when you are finished listening to this podcast. I find them incredibly relevant to many of the most salient conversations in the field of Chinese medicine as practiced in the West. The links are also in the shownotes.
This episode is the first half of our interview with Cynthia, with the second half to follow in two weeks. It seems to me like this whole conversation circled around Cynthia’s quest for the root: for the root causes of her patients’ conditions in her medical practice, for the root in her own healing journey, for the root in her qigong practice, and, in an unexpected turn, for the root in the Christian teachings she received from her Chinese parents. Most importantly, in the context of true healing, she suggests that we track down the sometimes hidden threads in each of our lives, including our traumas, that lead to our true inner work, in a playful way, like a scavenger hunt.
Being both a traditionalist and a scientist who appreciates long-term observational study, her work seems to dance between the pursuit of the true, enduring essence and the creative manifestation and application thereof in the moment, whether she is looking at her medical or qigong practice, her life journey, her spiritual interest in Christ consciousness, or the authentic transmission of her teacher’s wisdom.
Additional Information
Mingjue Awakening: Book by Cynthia Li MDBrave New Medicine: Book by Cynthia Li MDCynthia Li MD – personlized medicine testChanneling the Moon, A Translation and Discussion of Qí Zhòngfǔ's "Hundred Questions on Gynecology," Part One — Happy Goat ProductionsTraditional Chinese GynecologySubscribe to my newsletter!Imperial Tutor Mentorship by Dr. WilmsHappy Goat Productions (Dr. Wilms' website)Leo Lok's courses - All Courses - Voices of Our Medical Ancestors

Today’s episode titled “Relax! You are Okay!” is the second part of Leo’s and my conversation with Cara Conroy-Lau, a Kiwi with a Chinese mom now practicing Chinese medicine and Buddhism in Canada. For this portion, we focus more specifically on the female perspective, both on the giving and on the receiving end of caring. I really appreciate Cara’s insistence on approaching Chinese medicine more light-heartedly as a playful exploration, as part of her culture, family traditions, and just life, rather than as “A THING” (in the sense of a big, serious, very special intellectual endeavor that we all have to get stressed out over). Her training in a Buddhist lineage of direct teacher-student transmission has taught her to just relax into her spiritual practice and leave the ego at the door. As a result, she experiences a “heart-to-heart transmission of joy, confidence, peace, clarity, humanity, and humanness,” as she puts it. In the context of what she calls the “healing friendship” with her patients, she reminds us of the therapeutic effect of food and encourages us to “be our own grandmother to ourselves” and rely on our particular culture’s traditional comfort foods to alleviate the heaviness of human suffering. When Leo asks Cara about the emotional entanglements that women often experience when caring for and worrying about others, Cara introduces the notion of nervous system attunement to establish connection, which she balances with the Buddhist realization that each of us is responsible for our own karmic journey.
Later on in the conversation, we also consider the holes in the transmission of Chinese medicine to the West. Especially in the context of gynecology, so much of the healing work happened behind closed doors, within the family as part of traditional practices, and beyond the written word. We ask ourselves: What would Chinese medicine look like in the West today if we were to plug the holes left by this lack of cultural transmission not with biomedical theories and practices, as Giovanni Maciocia, Bob Flaws, and the other early Western pioneers of Chinese medicine have done, but with the embodied wisdom of Asian grannies?
In the very end, Cara offers a glimpse of an answer in three parts: First, she speaks of her mother’s transmission of a nonverbal quiet presence of “You are okay. You have a right to be here.” Then she mentions the acuity of her Chinese female relatives about food and what is good and not good for the body. And lastly, in terms of menstruation, it’s as easy as “Just let it flow!”
Additional Information
Clear Sky Meditation Center - A Space For Inner & Outer GrowthCara Conroy-Lau's websiteChanneling the Moon, A Translation and Discussion of Qí Zhòngfǔ's "Hundred Questions on Gynecology," Part One — Happy Goat ProductionsSubscribe to my newsletter!Imperial Tutor Mentorship by Dr. WilmsHappy Goat Productions (Dr. Wilms' website)Leo Lok's courses - All Courses - Voices of Our Medical Ancestors

In today’s episode on “Olives and Porridge,” Leo Lok and I are talking to Cara Conroy-Lau. Cara is a beautiful global border-crossing practitioner of Chinese medicine and Buddhism who has ended up in Canada at the Clear Sky Meditation Centre in Cranbrook, after growing up in Singapore, New Zealand, and Japan. I loved our conversation for how it revealed Cara’s courage and humility and dedication to her healing work, both within herself and in her community and family.
Here are some of the questions that Cara shared some pearls of wisdom about, which I believe are relevant not just to those of our listeners who happen to be female, of Asian descent, or medical practitioners: How do we tease apart the individual strands that made us who we are today, or in other words recover the precious ingredients that went into the melting pot before modern life took the stick blender to it? How do we heal the cultural ruptures and broken transmissions to link us back to our maternal lineages and recover what she calls “knowledge that is in our bones”? How do we overcome decades of internalized racism and attempted assimilation to the dominant White culture, to share something as simple as hot water and goji berries on a first date with a fellow Asian woman? Inspired by Cara’s life history, our conversation ranged across multiple fertile intersecting identities, between being White and non-White, colonizer and colonized, female and non-female, straight and queer, Chinese and non-Chinese. When I asked her at the very end to reflect on the influence of her maternal Asian heritage on her current practice of Chinese medicine, her answer was as simple and profound and powerful as her healing work, from what I can tell. To find out what her answer was and what all this has to do with olives and porridge, you’ll have to listen to the podcast!
Additional Information
Clear Sky Meditation Center - A Space For Inner & Outer GrowthCara Conroy-Lau's websiteSubscribe to my newsletter!Imperial Tutor Mentorship by Dr. WilmsHappy Goat Productions (Dr. Wilms' website)Leo Lok's courses - All Courses - Voices of Our Medical Ancestors

For today’s episode on “Living and Teaching the Way of Yin,” Leo Lok and I are once again joined by Kris González, Chinese medicine practitioner and herbalist, whose personal experience of motherhood has been influenced by her Korean mother and her Mexican mother-in-law. In addition to her clinical practice, she is also an educator offering evocative courses on topics like embodied menstruation, holistic breast care, the alchemy of perimenopause, spirit-heart-womb transformation through the somatic womb path, and sacred vaginal ecology, to name just some of her juicy offerings. Check out her gorgeous website “Thewayofyin.com” to get a sense of the beauty she weaves into being in her corner of the universe.
In this second half of our conversation with Kris, we considered a Yin approach to Chinese medicine. How do we shift out of the heady, Yang space and the intellectual models of Chinese medicine as currently practiced and taught in the West, into the sensorial, embodied experience that serves as such a potent alternative doorway to healing? How can we manifest a more expansive, softer, deeper, gentler, and less rigid healing practice that aims to lean into and support what feels good rather than fighting what is wrong? How can we express the Yin way of weaving community and nurturing health instead of the Yang way of solving problems? Ultimately, how can we change this extractive culture of ours through the authority and power of our medicine, to restore the valuation of Yin in all aspects of society, from menstruating and giving birth to cooking and caring? What a conversation! Oh, I am really happy that I get to share it with you and hope that this will in turn inspire you to engage in similar conversations with your community of family and friends.
Additional Information
The Way of Yin - Nourishing Life WisdomTraditional Chinese GynecologySubscribe to my newsletter!Happy Goat Productions (Dr. Wilms' website)Leo Lok's courses - All Courses - Voices of Our Medical Ancestors