today we were, are going to talk about how do we support sleep in Chinese medicine.
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Hello. My name is Moshe Heller, and I’m from the Moshen Center in New York and also representing the Moshen Herbs which is a company that produces formulas. And I’d like to first thank the Acupuncture Council for letting me present today. And today I’ll be speaking about supporting sleep with Chinese medicine part one.
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So let’s go to the slides, and we can start. So a- as I said, today we were, are going to talk about how do we support sleep in Chinese medicine. And we’re going to talk about in part one about the ma- mechanisms and and how can we look at sleep from a Chinese medical perspective and support it.
And then in part two, we’re going to talk about patterns and formulas and points for the treatment of sleep disorders So I think there are two important substances that we need to discuss or remind everybody when we talk about the physiology of sleep and those are blood and yin. And so these are two important aspects of maintaining sleep.
The first of all b- in– The w- first of them, blood is the one that governs falling asleep. So blood as a substance in Chinese medicine is understood not only that it is the red fluid that travels in your arteries and veins, but also your ability to transition from an active mode to a more relaxed mode.
Therefore, for example, when if we have blood deficiency, then we tend to have muscle spasms because one, the transition between activity and relaxation is not smooth, so you get muscle cramps. The same way goes with sleep. If we have abundant blood, then the transition between being awake and going into sleep is smooth, and we will fall asleep easily.
In general, blood is this– the enables the transition from a yang state of being, from an active state of being, to a yin state of bl- b- being, so it lets us relax into sleep. Whereas yin, on the our other aspect, is actually supporting the staying asleep. So it’s about enabling us to maintain or stay asleep or go into deeper sleep.
This is the yin aspect of our th- that is in charge of that. So in fact, if we have a yin vacuity but not necessarily a blood vacuity, we’ll fall asleep easily and then we’ll wake up frequently during the sleep or not go into a deep sleep. So yin enables us to easily or stay asleep and then and go into deeper states of sleep, and we’ll see why in a second.
The generally speaking, we’re saying here, what we’re saying is that falling asleep easily but waking frequently usually points to a yin vacuity. But if we are having difficulty falling asleep but then we sleep better, then that’s more of a blood vacuity. So that’s a clinical clue for us to always remember.
So the blood has actually two roles in its ability to sleep, and it has to do with it, its relationship with two organs. One is the heart and the other one is the liver. In the first part, the blood enables relaxation into sleep, meaning it it enables us to relax into sleep, as I said in the previous slide.
But it also has this ability to house or enables the housing of the shen in the heart and then, and the housing of the hun in the liver. So when blood is full and abundant, it allows the shen and hun to rest peacefully in their relative organs. And therefore, if we have deficiency or issues with blood, liver blood or heart blood, then we will have either a difficulty of the shen to rest peacefully or the difficulty of the hun to rest peacefully, and that will look slightly different.
If so we’ll… And we’ll talk about that in a second There’s another point that I have to point out, which is very important. Sleep is part of a rhythmic aspect of our qi circulation, and we always need to take care of this or try to remember that qi circulation is part of this awakening and going to sleep rhythm.
So as we know in the Ling Shu it says that the wei qi circulates 25 times on the surface mainly through the jing jingjin sinews channels and maintains muscle tone and mobility. And in the evening, it penetrates the body at the ankle tran-transitioning from the surface to the interior, and at night it circulates 25 times through the zangfu organs following the Ke cycle and then it emerges in bladder one jing ming at the corner of the eye, allowing for the eyes to open.
So this wei qi circulation is really an important aspect that we need to remember and see if there’s blockages anywhere in that process and which allow– will allow us to understand how to treat it better. And so we can see a reflection of that wei qi circulation with our body temperature as we see here that during activity when we wake up, our body temperature usually goes down, but as we fall asleep towards the evening, then the body temperature will will be reduced and as we s- we sleep at a lower body temperature and that also reflects the yin yang activity.
So when we have more yang, we have higher temperature. When we are in a more yin state, we will have lower temperature. So there is also this ability for the blood to help us with this mental relaxation, the spiritual aspect of that. And and, during sleep, we say that the Shen retires into the blood.
If the sh- the blood is not full, then we will have a Shen not being able to rest quietly, as I mentioned before. Whereas also this kind of waking or ability to wake is managed by this kind of liver qi regulation of the circulation of qi throughout the body, including the Wei Qi’s circulation.
And so when we are having movement in the muscles when we’re trying to sleep, we should definitely look at this kind of relationship between qi circulation, the liver, and what we might call liver qi constraint, and the, in order to resolve that disturbance. This is really important to remember the relationship between the liver, the blood, the Shen, and the Hun so generally speaking, we also say that there is a lot of relationship between the Hun and dreams.
So the Hun, when the Hun moves inward drawing Qi away from the mind, then it hel-helps us or it will allow for, or it will create these dreams and the Hun wanders that’s when we c- what we might call when the Hun wanders it produces dreams and observes it’s observed as rapid eye movement or REM sleep.
Dreaming is necessary for health, for our healthy both la- function of our body. This really REM sleep is considered a very important part of not only sleeping and getting deep sleep, but also helping the body reje- rejuvenate and heal itself. When we talk about blood vacuity the heart blood is causing…
When the heart blood is deficient, this is causes what we might call fun or vexation, or when the liver blood is deficient, we might call it as restlessness and we call that jiao or agitation. So those are two different aspects of blood vacuity
So we also have to remember that our relationship between the different Zang organs and the eMoshens, and so how they the, the eMoshens affect the organs and when the organs can imbalances in the organs can affect our eMoshen. When we have too much heat or in, in the heart that might cause a lot of irri- a- anxiety and anxiousness.
Whereas when we have some disturbance in the liver, that can cause anger and and, a- and stress. And worry of course also affects the spleen, but then it can also affect the heart blood. And then when we have fear and fright, that is usually a relationship between the heart and kidney, and a lot of that is more than fright, it’s very
It’s fear and irritability, and that is associated with the kidney and heart balance. This is, summarizes very quickly what we are talking about or what different aspects that we need to look at when we look at insomnia. We have to look at what the issue is, where it’s l- the issue is located.
Is it falling asleep? Is it staying asleep? What are the eMoshens associated with it? The flow of qi and circulation, which we can assess by feeling the pulse and palpating different points, and therefore we can create a, a more clear picture of what needs to be done. So this ends part one and in part two we’ll talk about different formulas and patterns that are associated with insomnia.
But I wanted to thank again the American Acupuncture Council for letting me speak today, and I hope that we will, I will see you soon in part two. Thank you very much.