Eyes That Drift, a Head That Shakes, and Jumping Around the Belly Button — What Do They Mean? Doctor Ni Haixia on When Wind Prevails There Is Movement, and the Great Yin-Yang Method, from the Huang Di Nei Jing

Patient search terms: eyes drifting and floating / head shaking on its own / hiccups that won’t stop / anemia that never gets better / I don’t like to sweat in summer / my body started going downhill at forty / an overweight person who fears heat and drinks iced water / joint pain / happy to the point of going crazy

Corresponding medical names: the Yin Yang Ying Xiang Da Lun · yang prevailing generates heat / yin prevailing generates cold · extreme cold generating heat / extreme heat generating cold · qi injury causing pain and form injury causing swelling · wind prevailing causing movement / heat prevailing causing swelling / dampness prevailing causing loose stools · emotional disease · fright overcoming joy · injury by cold in winter, warm disease in spring · the sweating method and releasing the exterior · the seven-and-eight rule · treating the same pattern the same way · heaven insufficient in the northwest

Opening: when disease reaches its limit, it turns back on its own

Doctor Ni Haixia opens the Huang Di Nei Jing to pages 33 and 34 and first makes clear the law of the waxing and waning of yin and yang:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Yang prevailing generates heat; yin prevailing generates cold. And then: extreme cold generates heat; extreme heat generates cold. This “extreme” means very severe — when it reaches the limit, it instead produces a cold pattern — it turns back, it does not run endlessly in one direction. Someone will ask: what happens when cold reaches rock bottom? The patient does not freeze over completely — that is what happens to someone who freezes to death in the wilderness. Unless you are stranded in the mountains, that never happens. When yin reaches its extreme, a heat pattern is produced; extreme heat produces cold. Cold — when it is too cold, it injures the heart.

Are fat people always hot? Thin and fat alike, don’t jump to conclusions

Following the logic of cold and heat, Doctor Ni brings up what the Nei Jing says about body types:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: This type — one is the rapidly thin person, the other is the fat person. You must never say “always fat, right?” Yes, the vast majority of fat people have heat patterns — but there are also cold patterns — because they are just too fat.

The secret of pain: qi injury causes pain, form injury causes swelling

When the body is injured, how do you tell whether the qi or the form has been hurt? Doctor Ni gives the general rule first:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Heat injures qi, and qi injury causes pain — when the qi is injured, pain is produced. So wherever there is pain, the qi cannot get through. When the form is injured, the patient swells up. For example, when you sprain your ankle playing sports and the flesh around the ankle swells, that is form injury; if it is both swollen and painful, both form and qi are injured.

Doctor Ni verifies this principle with acupuncture: after the needles, the pain goes away — that was qi pain; but the swelling remains, taking two or three days to subside.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: So if pain comes first and swelling later, the qi was injured first, and only afterwards the form; if swelling comes first and pain later, the form injured the qi. As for qi injuring form or form injuring qi, when we make a diagnosis we do not need to separate them so finely — because the Huang Di Nei Jing wants to explain the cause of disease in detail; it tells you how the cause came about.

Eyes drifting, head shaking: when wind prevails there is movement

Each of the five phases in excess has its own pattern of disease, and Doctor Ni lists a string of them:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When wind is excessive, a movement pattern is produced; when heat is excessive, the person swells up; when dryness is too strong, there is dryness; when cold is too strong, there is floating — the color is very pale, light and clear; when dampness is too strong, the stool shows ru xie (loose, watery stools, diarrhea).

What does a movement pattern look like? Doctor Ni describes it vividly: some people shake their heads, some people’s eyeballs move — not deliberately; try to do it on purpose and you can’t — it just drifts naturally, sometimes one eye drifts.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When one eye is drifting, we know it is a movement pattern. The eyes belong to the liver — liver wind! Once you understand the cause, the prescription comes out — when wind prevails there is movement, and we have wind-dispelling herbs; when heat prevails there is swelling, and we have heat-clearing herbs; when dryness prevails there is dryness, and we have moistening herbs; when cold prevails there is floating, and we have cold-expelling herbs; when dampness prevails there is loose stool, and we have dampness-drying herbs. These are the choices of the materia medica.

Shrinking heaven and earth onto the navel: palpitations in four directions, each belonging to an organ

Doctor Ni says Chinese medicine must not be learned rigidly. Just now we magnified the human form several times; now let us shrink it — heaven and earth can be gathered very small:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: If this is the navel — you have studied acupuncture, so you know it is called shen que (Spirit Palace, CV8). When there is palpitation to the left of the navel, we know it is liver wind; palpitation below the navel is the heart; palpitation to the right of the navel is the lungs; palpitation above the navel is the kidneys. Later, when we introduce this disease — “palpitation below the navel” — teacher, below the navel, because the heart has already been covered. You see what I mean? A person can be large or small, and can never be separated from nature. Whenever you see “movement” — whatever the disease name, bi syndrome or anything else — it is moving back and forth; a movement pattern!

Heaven has four seasons and five phases: why do people get sick? Two sources

At the end of page 34, Doctor Ni sums up “why people get sick” into two great sources:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Heaven has four seasons and five phases — there are the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and wood, fire, earth, metal and water govern growing, developing, harvesting and storing: spring generates, summer grows, autumn harvests, winter stores. At these times it generates cold, heat, dryness, dampness and wind: cold is winter, heat is summer, dryness is autumn, dampness is late summer (the turn of the seasons), wind is spring. Man has five organs transforming five qi — what we speak of is the emotions: anger, joy, worry, fear. Chinese medicine holds that there are two places that make people sick: the wind, cold, heat, dampness, dryness and fire outside (the five qi of heaven), and the emotions inside the body. The true people, sages and worthies of antiquity could cast the emotions away — we all have this phenomenon, but it must never be excessive; only excess harms, and moderation is fine.

Fan Jin passes the exam: joy carried too far drives a man mad

How do the emotions injure people? Doctor Ni tells a classic story:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Long ago there was a man named Fan Jin. He had taken the examinations for a long time, and one day he suddenly passed the provincial exam. He was overjoyed — too much joy — and he went mad. There was no way to cure him, so the family went to find the woman Fan Jin feared most. That woman went out, shouted at the top of her voice, “Fan Jin!” and Fan Jin woke up at once — because fright overcomes joy; water can overcome fire, and he woke in an instant. So it is good to have someone you are afraid of, so that when you are overjoyed there is someone to restrain you. Heaven has arranged things well — there is yin and there is yang: if you marry a fierce wife, one shout from her and you wake up. Who knows, that may be a blessing in disguise — better than going mad!

Joy and anger injure qi; cold and heat injure form

The emotions injure people according to fixed rules:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Joy and anger injure qi; cold and heat injure form. Violent anger injures yin; violent joy injures yang; rebellious qi rises upward, fills the vessels and casts off the form. Rebellious qi is turbid qi — yin qi should stay below the diaphragm and must not travel upward — but the emotions can affect this too, letting turbid qi rise. When joy and anger are not moderated and cold and heat are not avoided, life is not secure. If a person’s emotions are unstable and he is often enraged, and on top of that he does not avoid cold and heat, his life will be affected, and he will not live so long.

Injury by cold in winter, warm disease in spring: the age-old misunderstanding of the Warm Disease school

Reaching the extreme of yin necessarily produces yang, and reaching the extreme of yang necessarily produces yin. From here Doctor Ni draws out a controversy he returns to again and again:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Injury by cold in winter, warm disease in spring (dong shang yu han, chun bi wen bing). The Warm Disease school only reads the second half — “warm disease in spring” — and that is all it knows to avoid. But there must be a premise: injury by cold in winter. If you were not injured by cold in winter, you will not have warm disease in spring. So when you get warm disease in the tropics, it is not because of the tropics — it is because you were injured by cold in winter, and only then does warm disease appear. Hence the Cold Damage school and the Warm Disease school. After the Cold Damage (shang han) idea, you can see it very clearly from the Huang Di Nei Jing! Yet the Warm Disease school still says “there is no cold damage in the south.” The place where I practiced was hotter than Taiwan — in the middle of a scorching summer day, an obese patient was gulping iced water desperately, sweating all over, and even sitting in the air conditioning he was still hot. I prescribed raw aconite (sheng fu zi)! He took it on the spot and turned cold; from then on he was not thirsty either, and he slimmed down. He was so happy — before, he was the hottest one; now in high summer he wears short sleeves and she — he — wears a jacket. If I were wrong, why did the patient get better?

Spring, summer, autumn, winter: every disease has a source

Following “injury by cold in winter,” Doctor Ni links the chain of disease sources through the four seasons:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Injury by wind in spring produces sun xie in summer — injured by wind in spring, and in summer there will be diarrhea with undigested food. Injury by summer heat in summer produces intermittent malaria (jie nüe) in autumn — summer heat injures the fluids of the body; the lungs hold a great deal of fluid, like clouds in the sky, heavy with water vapor; when the fluids are injured and the lungs have too little fluid, coughing appears. Injury by dampness in autumn produces coughing in winter — autumn should be dry; if you sit long in damp places, winter will bring problems. So a problem in spring comes from winter, a problem in summer comes from spring, a problem in autumn comes from summer, a problem in winter comes from autumn — there is always a cause, always a source of disease.

Qi Bo teaches Huang Di: can the channels be trusted?

On page 35, the Nei Jing enters “discoursing on the human form”:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: The sages of antiquity discoursed on the human form, arrayed the organs and bowels, traced out the channels and networks, joined the six unions, each following its own channel; where the qi points emerge each has its own place and name; the valleys and ravines attached to the bones all have their origins; the divisions and their compliance or reversal each have their order; the four seasons and yin and yang all have their warp and woof; the correspondences of outer and inner all have their exterior and interior. Every place has a name, every place has an exterior-interior division — the eight principles of our diagnosis all come from the Huang Di Nei Jing.

Huang Di then asks Qi Bo: there are so many channels and so many organs, divided into exterior and interior — can we trust them? How does Qi Bo answer? In the east, wind is born, and generation proceeds in a chain:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: In the east wind is born; wind generates wood; wood generates sourness; sourness generates the liver; the liver generates sinews; sinews generate the heart; the liver governs the eyes — generation linked all the way through. In heaven it is mystery, in man it is the Way, on earth it is transformation; transformation generates the five flavors, the Way generates wisdom, mystery generates spirit. Spirit is wind in heaven, wood on earth, sinews in the body, the liver among the organs, and in color it is green — the true correct green is green with a little yellow first; in movement it is grasping, in the orifices it is the eyes, in flavor it is sour, in the emotions it is anger, and anger injures the liver. In the south heat is born; joy injures the heart; fright overcomes joy — this section resembles what came before, mainly matters of the emotions; it is all in the book, and everyone can read it.

The handshake test: is the liver good or not? One grip tells you

With the three characters “the liver governs grasping,” Doctor Ni teaches a clinical test on the spot:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: For example, suppose someone has liver disease — cirrhosis or whatever — you ask him to squeeze your hand, and he cannot, there is no strength — because the liver governs grasping; if a person can grip, it means the liver is still fine; in a dangerous state, he cannot grip. A word in passing: in the Chinese medical view, the reason we live on this earth and are suited to survive here is that this environment looks just like a person — that is why we live in it. If it looked like the moon, you would live permanently on the moon.

Hiccups that won’t stop: old cold in the stomach

On page 38, in the passage on the center generating dampness, Doctor Ni stops specially to explain “yue”:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: The center generates dampness; dampness generates earth; earth generates sweetness; sweetness generates the spleen; the spleen generates flesh; flesh generates the lungs; the spleen governs the mouth — the fluids in the mouth are managed by the spleen. In movement it is yue — this “yue” is hiccups, eructation, belching. What is the cause of yue? Because there is old cold in the stomach — “old cold” means cold that has been there for a very long time, year after year, the spleen and stomach being somewhat cold. When this cold meets newly eaten food, the stomach is too cold to digest it, and the two collide, producing yue. When you know the cause, one is to remove the new food, the other is to remove the stomach cold. When removing the new food we must be very careful — you cannot say “let the food stagnation go” and remove it violently; this patient is already in danger. Why is this brought up here? Chinese medicine holds that the spleen is the root of the acquired constitution, and the kidneys are the root of the prenatal constitution. If the root of the acquired constitution is lost — if the qi of the spleen and stomach is gone — danger follows.

The five elements in hot-and-sour soup: why anemia can’t be cured

On page 40, the mutual overcoming of the five flavors:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Heat itself, when excessive, injures qi; cold, when excessive, injures blood; saltiness injures blood. The five flavors overcome one another — when saltiness is excessive, we use sweetness to treat it; this is the state of mutual restraint among the five flavors. For example, if we want something spicy, we eat hot-and-sour soup — the sour would reach the liver, so we put the spicy in, and pungent controls sour, and the liver is not injured. The Huang Di Nei Jing tells us from the very beginning: heat injures qi, cold injures blood. In the Shang Han Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage) and the Jin Gui Yao Lue (Essentials from the Golden Cabinet) many hot herbs are prescribed. Today if someone is anemic and our diagnosis is a cold pattern, and you still prescribe cold, cooling herbs — are you not injuring him? How can anemia ever be cured? We must remove the cold, and only then does the blood have a chance to recover. The Warm Disease school is wrong — the Jin Gui also has cold, cooling herbs, and we use them in very large amounts, but we are not saying everything should be cold and cooling.

Yin within, yang as its guard: neither can do without the other

All things between heaven and earth live in the middle of heaven and earth:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Heaven and earth are the upper and lower of all things; yin and yang are the male and female of qi and blood; left and right are the roads of yin and yang; water and fire are the signs of yin and yang; yin and yang are the beginning of all things. Yin is within, yang is its guard; yang is without, yin is its envoy — yin stays within because yang is fixed on the outside, so yin is not lost; yang can hold firm outside because yin supports and directs it within — the two check and balance each other.

Heat with no sweating: in summer you must sweat

Huang Di then asks: how exactly do we regulate the waxing and waning of yin and yang? Qi Bo begins from the principles of treatment — when yang is too strong, heat is generated, and at this time the interstices (the space between muscle and pores) are closed:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When yang is too strong, the interstices close, and when it penetrates inward there is wheezing — the breathing becomes very short, and the body uses posture, leaning backward, to find a way to breathe; heat with no sweating, because the sweat cannot come out. If it develops further and the heat is too strong, even the teeth dry up — the teeth are surrounded by much fluid in the mouth; the fluids of the teeth are managed by the spleen and the kidneys, for the kidneys govern the bones and the teeth are the surplus of the bones; at this point, with vexation and oppression and abdominal fullness, death follows. If the pores of the skin can sweat, the yang is dispersed and there is no problem; if the pores do not sweat, then inside is very hot. This is why “able to survive winter but not summer” — in a cold place one naturally does not sweat easily, so there is no danger; in summer, not sweating — that is the problem. And today such people are everywhere: raised from childhood in air conditioning, and they do not like to sweat — they think sweat smells bad and do not want to sweat. They do not know sweating is necessary! According to the law of heaven and earth, if a person can follow the seasons and follow the way of nurturing life, in summer he must sweat — sweating disperses the heat of the body, and new fluids replace the old fluids, so sweating is a normal state; a normal person sweats.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: From childhood until the twenties, not sweating at all — then you get very tired, you cannot catch your breath, and the moment you exercise your whole body burns and it is hard to breathe. Why? Because we breathe with thirty-six thousand pores plus two nostrils together. Relying on only two noses, though they are comparatively large, is still not enough! At this point you need herbs that release the exterior — Chinese medicine has herbs that resolve the exterior; after you take them, sweat comes out and you are cured. The sweating method (han fa) was established right here. What if there is no medicine at hand? We just introduced that the extreme of yang generates yin, and the extreme of yin generates yang. In a hot, dry state, if you have no releasing herbs, or you take releasing herbs and still do not sweat, what do you do? Wash in cold water! Because cold — does extreme cold necessarily generate heat? Sweat inevitably comes and it resolves. This is yang heat being too strong generating heat; if it is yin prevailing, the body feels cold inside — yin prevailing generates cold — and when cold is generated, the sweat comes out very clear and watery, indicating interior cold. Cold then causes reversal (jue); reversal causes abdominal fullness, fainting, death; when interior cold is very strong, if the outer environment is hot, the person can still live, but when winter arrives and heaven and earth are also cold, and inside is also cold, this is very dangerous — able to survive summer but not winter. This is the earliest method Qi Bo proposed for balancing yin and yang.

The seven-and-eight rule: woman’s seven, man’s eight

On page 42, on how to regulate yin and yang, Qi Bo hands over a key:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: He who knows the seven-and-eight rule can regulate the two; he who does not know it will age early. What is called seven — woman is ruled by the number seven — one-seven, two-seven, three-seven, four-seven, five-seven; man is ruled by the number eight — one-eight, two-eight, three-eight, four-eight. You must know the state of growth, development, harvesting and storing, and regulate the body according to this state, and you can live long; if you do not know it, you age very fast. At forty, yin qi is half spent — this is the earliest definition in the Huang Di Nei Jing: from forty onward, yin and yang are each half, and the body’s qi begins to weaken; past fifty, the body grows heavy, the ears and eyes are no longer acute, yang slowly declines and yin slowly rises; at sixty, impotence, the great decline of qi, the nine orifices blocked, lower deficiency with upper excess, tears and mucus flowing freely. If this patient walks in — or you see a person on the street — walking as if drifting, about to fall, like a tumbler doll about to topple, it is lower deficiency with upper excess, the root unstable — that is not good. You can walk, but you must not drift; drifting means trouble. He who knows this becomes strong; he who does not know it grows old — so we must understand the waxing and waning of yin and yang and the condition of men and women.

Here Doctor Ni inserts his own health-preserving experience:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: As for me, now that I have reached this age, I have started taking kidney-tonifying medicine — because the age for tonifying the kidneys has arrived; after fifty, the kidneys begin to fail, the kidney qi begins to fail. We covered this before: man at five-eight, six-eight, seven-eight, eight-eight — the later passages all speak of the kidneys — the kidneys govern how long a person’s life is, so tonifying the kidneys is very important.

The wise examine the same: never mind the disease name, treat the same pattern the same way

Age levels differ and disease names change, but the principle is one and the same:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Because the age levels differ, different names are produced; on the surface the names differ, but they come from the same place. The wise examine the same, the foolish examine the differences (zhi zhe cha tong, yu zhe cha yi) — in the Chinese medical view, treating the same pattern the same way comes from right here: as long as the symptoms are the same, never mind what is inside. For example, some prescriptions look as if they are for wind-damp arthritis; now a patient comes in, he has joint pain, he says “I just have joint pain,” and you begin treating the pattern — and it turns out he actually has bone cancer. You need not bother about bone cancer; if you think of bone cancer you won’t be able to write a prescription! Just treat it as arthritis. Chinese medicine treats the same pattern the same way; later, when we introduce the Shang Han Lun and Jin Gui, when we write prescriptions we look for the same symptoms and prescribe, whatever the disease name inside, we do not care. The wise examine the same, the foolish examine the differences — I am not scolding anyone; the Huang Di Nei Jing is scolding Western medicine: a mountain of names, a whole pile of them, and not a one is reliable; they all look alike, yet the names are all different. The wise have surplus, the foolish have deficiency; those with surplus have acute ears and eyes, a light and strong body, the old become young again and the young are even better managed. Therefore the sage does the things of non-action (sheng ren wu wei) — ordinarily we should keep a calm mind, be placid and free of desires, happy and at ease; these are all ways to long life. The way to longevity lies right here — absolutely never spend all day thinking about what I want, what I don’t want, contending over the long and the short.

Closing: heaven is insufficient in the northwest

On page 43, Doctor Ni brings out that chart of the human form again — east, west, south, north, nose, mouth:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: This passage speaks of heaven being insufficient in the northwest, so the northwest is yin…

The northwest is deficient, the southeast is full — how does the human body correspond? The next lecture continues.

Based on Doctor Ni Haixia’s Ren Ji · Huang Di Nei Jing lecture series (Lecture Eight)