A Pebble in the Cosmic Pond

Sabine Wilms PhD
A Pebble in the Cosmic Pond

Tune in every other week for inspiring, joyful, and informative conversations on transforming ourselves, our communities, and the world, in the spirit of ancient Chinese medicine, spirituality, and philosophy. Separating fact from fiction, we aim to bring you medicine from China's distant past, translated here to meet YOUR needs today, in clinic and beyond. I am your host, Dr. Sabine Wilms, medical historian, recovering university professor, and author and translator of more than a dozen books on the Chinese healing arts, from gynecology and pediatrics to medical ethics and materia medica, published by Happy Goat Productions. In addition to writing, I teach and mentor at https://www.imperialtutor.com/, about the roots of Chinese medicine and its larger cultural background. In addition, I will bring in insights from my checkered past as a biodynamic goat farmer and musician, all under the banner of my favorite phrase, “cosmic resonance,” a.k.a. the Chinese ideal of harmony between the three realms of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. I really love to inspire people and spread around some good vibrations, which is what I aim to do in this podcast, with the assistance of some of my favorite clinical and academic colleagues, friends, and guides, like Leo Lok (our self-proclaimed "Purveyor of Multiple Perspective") and Dr. Brenda Hood, master physician and specialist in all things Daoism. New episodes will generally drop twice a month, with a free one on the new moon and a bonus one for Imperial Tutor members on the full moon. Check out https://www.imperialtutor.com/membership for more information on my mentorship. Episodes will be roughly an hour long and will follow the format of what you may already be familiar with as the Imperial Tutor’s Tea Time Talks: loosely structured conversations that provide education, inspiration, and connection. If you want to be notified of new episodes, why don’t you subscribe to my newsletter at https://www.happygoatproductions.com/connect? Here are our three main goals: 1. Bridge-building: We gather to explore the liminal sweet spot, in between Heaven and Earth, the distant past and the present moment, East and West, the clinic and the academy, the healer and the scholar, the discernible and the unfathomable, oral lineage and written text, and, ultimately, between Yin and Yang. 2. Collaboration: The treasure house of traditional Chinese medicine is bigger than any single person's expertise, no matter how vast. We actively pursue and embrace a diversity of opinions so that we can collectively deepen our understanding. 3. Authentic Transmission: Translation, from the past to the present, from Chinese to English, from texts to clinical application, etc., invariably involves an alteration and adaptation of the original message. How do we stay as true as possible to the insights expressed in the ancient Chinese texts while still making sense to our listeners? We invite you to consider the creative challenges of this task with us. Potential future topics include: Meditation Sickness and Qigong Psychosis; The Difference Between Responsibility and Fault; Daoist and Confucian Perspectives on Humanity's Role Between Heaven and Earth; The Creation, Development, and Transmission of Medical Knowledge and the Dangers and Benefits of Lineage; Buddhist Perspectives on Reality and Expedient Means; The Wuwei Way; The Weasel and the Yak, and The Frog in the Well; Simple Questions: How to Read the Classics; The Cosmos in Six Lines: The Yijing as a Tool of Healing; Translation, Transmission, Transcendence, Transcreation; Pointing to the Moon: How to Name the Unnameable; Should Return and A Hundred Meetings: What's in a Name; The Fish’s Delight: The Limits of Sense Perception; Clear Talk: Creating Light in Dark Times; Reverberations of the Valley Spirit; Lotus in the Mud: Buddhism and Medicine...

  1. 5일 전

    The Sweet Spot for Calibration

    How do we decide in each moment on the best path towards píng 平 (“equilibrium” or “balance”) in the spirit of Chinese medicine? How do we calibrate our responses to external factors and decide between action and non-action? What do we use (and teach) as criteria for this process of actively cultivating or passively nurturing our True Nature? How do we promote an ever-growing self-awareness in our multiple roles as individuals, family and community members, and healers? Today’s episode on “The Sweet Spot for Calibration” is part of Season Three where Leo Lok and Sabine Wilms consider a variety of perspectives on “Nurturing Our Nature” 養性, to explore cultivating health and longevity from ancient China to today on the basis of Sun Simiao’s writings from the seventh century. In this episode, we uncover yet another layer in the wisdom found in Sun Simiao’s work. We start out considering the relationship between the three teachings of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Rather than seeing them as competing schools, we discover their power as a thick braid woven from three different yet beautifully complementary strands in early medieval China. Stay with us, if you want to find out how this braid helps me decide whether to watch the sunrise wedged in bed between my dog and cat in dreamy stillness or to get up and vitalize my qi and blood in the crisp fall air with an invigorating qigong session under the magical maple tree! And last but not least, Leo always reminds us to find joy and curiosity in this calibration process! Additional Information Subscribe 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

    1시간 4분
  2. 9월 3일

    Finding Balance Between Stillness and Action

    How can we get better at listening to our body and aligning with the Dao? How can we compost harmful emotional energy into life-giving Qi in service of physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation? How can we use the tool of curiosity as an antidote to judgment and thereby change the flavor of our inquiries? How can we complete our nature through a hundred daily actions while at the same time allowing our spirit to settle in stillness? How can we steer away from exhaustion towards not just sustainability but restoration? Welcome to 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. I am your host, Dr. Sabine Wilms, and I am joined, as usual, by Leo Lok, Resident Purveyor of Multiple Perspectives. Today’s episode on “Finding Balance Between Stillness and Action” is part of our Season Three where we consider a variety of perspectives on “Nurturing Our Nature” 養性, to explore cultivating health and longevity from ancient China to today on the basis of Sun Simiao’s writings and in preparation for the course we will be teaching on this topic this fall. Listen in, as we discuss some of the gems from Sun Simiao’s introduction on the topic and their application to Leo’s clinical practice and Sabine’s current physical issue of an overworked body. We follow Sun’s lead to pursue the sweet spot in between too much and too little, between action and non-action, between exposure to and protection from seasonal change, between activity and rest, between Yin and Yang, and between innumerable daily acts of virtue and quiet contemplation. Reading this powerful synthesis of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism that comprises the core of Sun Simiao’s brilliance, we ask for his guidance. 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

    58분
  3. 8월 4일

    Singing as Yangsheng

    Are you curious about the theme music for Season Three of our podcast and the sharp contrast to the obnoxiously gregarious Mexican accordeon music of the previous two seasons, which, I must admit, are a reflection of my own German heritage and decades spent in Hispanic culture? Do you recognize Leo’s beautifully serene voice and grasp the meaning of some of the words, but can’t quite catch what the whole passage is supposed to say? Are you fascinated by Leo’s multicultural background as a person of Chinese descent from Malaysia, so vividly reflected in his singing, from Chinese lullabies to Indian love songs to Krishna and Malay nursery rhymes? Or do you just feel a warm and fuzzy sense of elemental stillness and well-being and want to know more about the origin of this musical gift and how that might relate to the role of music in yangsheng and healing? Well then, listen to this conversation between Leo Lok and myself on “Singing as Yangsheng.” It is part of our Season Three where we shall consider a variety of perspectives on “Nurturing Our Nature” 養性, to explore cultivating health and longevity from ancient China to today on the basis of Sun Simiao’s writings and in preparation for the course we will be teaching on this topic this fall. 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

    49분
  4. 7월 10일

    The Balanced Person Doesn't Get Sick

    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

    58분
  5. 6월 20일

    What Do Love, Qigong, and Christ Consciousness Have to Do With Healing?

    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

    58분
  6. 6월 6일

    Looking for the Root, in Medicine, Qigong, and Religion

    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

    54분
  7. 5월 22일

    Relax! You're Okay!

    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

    1시간 12분
  8. 5월 8일

    Olives and Porridge

    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

    55분

예고편

5
최고 5점
15개의 평가

소개

Tune in every other week for inspiring, joyful, and informative conversations on transforming ourselves, our communities, and the world, in the spirit of ancient Chinese medicine, spirituality, and philosophy. Separating fact from fiction, we aim to bring you medicine from China's distant past, translated here to meet YOUR needs today, in clinic and beyond. I am your host, Dr. Sabine Wilms, medical historian, recovering university professor, and author and translator of more than a dozen books on the Chinese healing arts, from gynecology and pediatrics to medical ethics and materia medica, published by Happy Goat Productions. In addition to writing, I teach and mentor at https://www.imperialtutor.com/, about the roots of Chinese medicine and its larger cultural background. In addition, I will bring in insights from my checkered past as a biodynamic goat farmer and musician, all under the banner of my favorite phrase, “cosmic resonance,” a.k.a. the Chinese ideal of harmony between the three realms of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. I really love to inspire people and spread around some good vibrations, which is what I aim to do in this podcast, with the assistance of some of my favorite clinical and academic colleagues, friends, and guides, like Leo Lok (our self-proclaimed "Purveyor of Multiple Perspective") and Dr. Brenda Hood, master physician and specialist in all things Daoism. New episodes will generally drop twice a month, with a free one on the new moon and a bonus one for Imperial Tutor members on the full moon. Check out https://www.imperialtutor.com/membership for more information on my mentorship. Episodes will be roughly an hour long and will follow the format of what you may already be familiar with as the Imperial Tutor’s Tea Time Talks: loosely structured conversations that provide education, inspiration, and connection. If you want to be notified of new episodes, why don’t you subscribe to my newsletter at https://www.happygoatproductions.com/connect? Here are our three main goals: 1. Bridge-building: We gather to explore the liminal sweet spot, in between Heaven and Earth, the distant past and the present moment, East and West, the clinic and the academy, the healer and the scholar, the discernible and the unfathomable, oral lineage and written text, and, ultimately, between Yin and Yang. 2. Collaboration: The treasure house of traditional Chinese medicine is bigger than any single person's expertise, no matter how vast. We actively pursue and embrace a diversity of opinions so that we can collectively deepen our understanding. 3. Authentic Transmission: Translation, from the past to the present, from Chinese to English, from texts to clinical application, etc., invariably involves an alteration and adaptation of the original message. How do we stay as true as possible to the insights expressed in the ancient Chinese texts while still making sense to our listeners? We invite you to consider the creative challenges of this task with us. Potential future topics include: Meditation Sickness and Qigong Psychosis; The Difference Between Responsibility and Fault; Daoist and Confucian Perspectives on Humanity's Role Between Heaven and Earth; The Creation, Development, and Transmission of Medical Knowledge and the Dangers and Benefits of Lineage; Buddhist Perspectives on Reality and Expedient Means; The Wuwei Way; The Weasel and the Yak, and The Frog in the Well; Simple Questions: How to Read the Classics; The Cosmos in Six Lines: The Yijing as a Tool of Healing; Translation, Transmission, Transcendence, Transcreation; Pointing to the Moon: How to Name the Unnameable; Should Return and A Hundred Meetings: What's in a Name; The Fish’s Delight: The Limits of Sense Perception; Clear Talk: Creating Light in Dark Times; Reverberations of the Valley Spirit; Lotus in the Mud: Buddhism and Medicine...

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