In this final module, Physician Goh shared about the Kidney and Urinary Bladder organs. She provided a broader perspective on how Chinese Medicine views the kidneys as the organ of vitality. Kidney is the power house that store vitality essence – “Jing” (精), and this explains why healthy kidneys govern vitality and our ageing process.
Healthy kidneys also give us stronger bone and teeth, better memory (肾主骨生髓), and healthier hair (其华在发) . You can also see the link with common kidney related diseases such as osteoporosis, infertility, libido, hair loss, diabetes, and alzheimer among others.
She also shared on the Chinese Medicine perspective of ageing, mainly through 1. exhaustion of fundamental substances (物质亏耗), 2. degeneration of organs (脏腑虚衰), and 3. accumulations of metabolic waste (代谢物囤积). One of the biggest take away from the session, I felt, was not to be overly obsessed with taking tonic (进补), in this case nourishing the kidneys 补肾. Although it is important to nourish the kidneys, we should also look at how we can effectively eliminate metabolic waste from our body (补和泻都一样重要).
Dietary recommendation: Among the many herbs she recommends to address various diagnosis of our kidney, I thought it is interesting to share on “mai dong” (麦冬) as above. You can soak it in hot water and drink it like tea IF you have Kidney Yin deficiency (肾阴虚)。
Yin Yoga recommendation: Sphinx/Seal (as shown above) is great to nourish the kidney lines which run along the inner legs, through the tailbone and along the lumbar spine. I recommend this pose (~5-8 min) before bed, if you have difficulty slight insomnia problem. This pose calm your mind down, and nourishes the water element in the body. This could balance the excessive fire in the heart – in TCM we call this 水火既济.
The Be.Live Practice 