Episode 4

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Published on:

23rd Apr 2024

Living and Teaching the Way of Yin

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.

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About the Podcast

A Pebble in the Cosmic Pond
Old and New Stories from China's Healing Traditions
Tune in every New Moon for inspiring, joyful, and informative conversations with Sabine Wilms and Leo Lok on transforming ourselves, our communities, and the world, in the spirit of traditional 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 your personal practice, in your community, and in the clinic.

Sabine Wilms, PhD, is a 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, she runs the only advanced 2-year classical Chinese training program for practitioners of Chinese medicine and contributes insights from her checkered past as a biodynamic goat farmer and musician, all under the banner of her favorite phrase, “cosmic resonance,” a.k.a. the Chinese ideal of harmony between the three realms of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. Leo Lok, our "purveyor of multiple perspectives," is a practitioner and independent scholar of Chinese Medicine. A native speaker/reader of Chinese languages, Leo is one of the rare clinician-scholars in the world who excels in researching and translating ancient Chinese medical literature into the English language.

Together, we offer courses on the Chinese healing arts and run the "Frolicking Fish Community" to provide deep, sustained engagement with our work and play. In a lovingly curated themed collection, we present you each month with the introductory "moongate," original translations, creative expressions, and audio and video recordings on the Chinese healing arts, culture and history, food and art, philosophy and religion, Qi cultivation, and more. In addition, the community forum offers connection, education, and inspiration.

We both love to inspire people and spread around some healing and loving vibrations. 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, 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. We always aim to approach our disagreements with curiosity and mutual respect, instead of defensiveness.
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 true to the wisdom and spirit of the ancient Chinese texts while still making sense to our modern English-speaking listeners? We invite you to consider the creative challenges of this task with us.

In addition to subscribing to this podcast, we invite you to sign up for our newsletter (at Happygoatproductions.com/connect), where we share resources like free articles, announcements of new courses or publications, updates on our work and life, little glimpses of love and joy and beauty, and occasionally Sabine's poetry and farm pictures.
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About your host

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Sabine Wilms

I am the producer, manager, director, and (whether I like it or not) person in charge of this podcast. I take full responsibility for this project and vision but do not necessarily agree with anything anybody else says on my podcast, whether it is framed as an opinion or a fact. You can find out more about my books at happygoatproductions.com, my mentoring at imperialtutor.com, my classical Chinese offerings at translatingchinesemedicine.com, and my gynecology courses at traditionalChinesegynecology.com.