REMOTE GROUP SESSIONS - JAN/FEB - HEART

After the Spleen in the meridian cycle comes the Heart. I'm going to focus here for the sessions from 31st January through to 28th February, just from my first explorations it's looking like we have an amazing journey ahead...
What do you think of first when you hear the word "heart"? Emotions, personal traits, love, courage, strength? or maybe you're more aware of the physical blood circulation work it does for you. We're going to be exploring all its connections from the point of view of Traditional Chinese Medicine, everything we've discovered using microscopes and scanners, and also some very out-there ideas - I'm hoping we'll even get some insight into how our hearts might evolve as humankind evolves. Here's a couple of ideas for starters...

THE HEART IS NOT A PUMP
This isn't an idea that's filtered down to our Anatomy and Physiology books just yet, but it's a fascinating one to look into. Check out Dr Thomas Cowan's book, "Human Heart, Cosmic Heart", for a thorough exploration. There's an article by the author here. Our blood circulation may rely as much on a hydrophilic action of the capillaries, and the heart may be a vortex generator as much as anything else.

Here's a link to the work of Frank Chester, who devised a seven-faced form, the chestahedron, which mimics the heart and generates a vortex. In Frank's words, "The heart is not a pump, but an organ in which etheric space is created, so that the blood is sucked into the heart rather than pumped”. Do have a look at that site, there's many great ideas there, we'll be exploring all that much more over the next few weeks.

A FIFTH CHAMBER?
An idea that resonates with me a lot is that we may be developing a fifth heart chamber as part of our human evolution, a chamber that enhances our perception of and ability to work with energy fields. That's definitely something to focus on in one of these sessions.
MUSIC OF THE HEART
And how is it that a few pieces of wood gathered together into an instrument 300 years ago can give such a resonance to a piece of music, maybe a violin concerto, that it can pierce right through you?

2019 - THE MERIDIAN CYCLE - A YEAR OF FLOWING ENERGY

Through January this year, I've focused our Thursday remote group sessions on the Spleen Meridian. It's been fascinating and opened up a wonderful new way of exploring how our physical and energy bodies work together, combining our modern understanding through microscopic study with ancient wisdom gathered from thousands of years of observation.

SPLEEN 2

I stayed with the spleen focus for a second session on Thursday the 10th January 2019 - it's just getting more and more interesting and it's made me think of keeping our focus here for all the January sessions. It's giving me time to look into this amazing organ from a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as well as a Western Medicine viewpoint. The brilliant book by Ted Kaptchuk, "The Web that has no Weaver," has been really helpful in studying TCM - on ebay here. 

The 10th January session was very powerful and did indeed seem to be about transformation. Change is never really comfortable but we can't really avoid it. I feel we have an opportunity to learn how to operate at higher energetic frequencies, become clearer and stronger, understand energy phenomena and perform all kinds of energy work more easily, not just healing-facilitation but also global communication and awareness, and peacemaking.

The Spleen Meridian

A YEAR LONG TOUR OF THE MERIDIAN SYSTEM

I'm finding it much easier to get my head round the meridian system by taking the time to study just a channel a month. For example, I didn't even understand that the spleen channel runs up both legs, and that the meridians are in fact all paired. One meridian flows into another so there's a natural flow which we can follow over a year: Spleen - Heart - Small Intestine - Bladder - Kidney - Pericardium - Triple Burner - Gall Bladder - Liver - Lung - Large Intestine - Stomach... (then back to Spleen). Somewhere along the line we'll take in the Governing Vessel and Conception Vessel.

RED BLOOD CELLS

In Western medicinal understanding, the spleen is an important part of the immune system and also the circulatory system. For all my twenty years in healthcare I was still amazed to read about its work with red blood cells. 70% of our 37.2 trillion cells are red blood cells and they only live for about 120 days. Their iron-rich haemoglobin picks up oxygen in the lungs then delivers it to tissues everywhere in our bodies. Their membranes get damaged by being pumped through our capillaries and they are very cleverly removed from circulation by cells in the spleen. They are broken up and the useful components stored away for use in making fresh red blood cells. That's enough to take in for now I think, let's look into the spleen's immune system function next week...

SPLEEN - FIRE - TRANSFORMATION

My focus for the last remote group session, Thursday 3rd January 2019, was the spleen - surprising really that after all these years of hosting these sessions I've never thought of exploring this little organ's roles before. It's been really interesting to find that it's very much an organ for our crazy times...

Fire of Transformation