Cultivating Your Inner Garden

Episode 115

We visited with Baylen Slote, poet, acupuncturist and gardener and discussed how maintaining good health can be like cultivating a garden. We wanted to challenge your view of health and disease and look at some of the philosophical ideas found in Chinese medicine. What is health? How do you define it? Also, what is disease and how do you define that?

Life Occurs In the Context of Nature

In eastern philosophy, especially Taoism, all life occurs within the context of nature. Everything is connected and mutually dependent on each other, basically what we would call an eco-system. This process is a state of constant motion and change. In this context health can be defined as balanced, life is harmonious and flourishes.

When its out of balance you have disease or imbalance which can be the precursor to disease. In contrast, many people in our culture view health as the absence of disease, but their lives can be totally out of balance, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. In the Chinese medical paradigm, health is really about harmony of body, mind and spirit. And the image of the body as a garden and the doctor as a gardener is a good analogy for how we as practitioners help guide our patients back to balance.

For example, we might use herbs to moisten or dry an area of the body, to fertilize (tonify) an organ or organ system, we might use acupuncture to build fences, dig ditches and channels for irrigation adjusting the flow of water and wind. Sometimes you may need to use poison to control insects and weeds, but we must be careful not to hurt the ecosystem in the process. Pharmaceutical drugs can end up doing that.

Also, I think, this is a way to make important distinctions to Western medicine which really views the body as a machine. What works in the garden may be inappropriate for the factory. Compost doesn't nourish a machine and oil and gasoline don't benefit the soil.

East Versus West, Both Can Work Together

Chinese medicine readjusts balance, enhances self-healing and helps chronic long term problems. Western medicine affects structural components, suppresses and eliminates pathological problems and intervenes in life threatening situations.

Both have strengths and weaknesses and they can work well together when you understand what these strengths and weaknesses are. Western medicine is concerned with diseases and pathogens, issues of structure. There is no real basis for functional disorder. It views disease as a linear progression.

Chinese medicine is concerned with patterns of dysfunction. How the event affects the eco-system. The goal is not to just eliminate the problem, it is to restore the delicate balance that life requires to thrive. And this is why it is strong in the area of prevention, because it seeks to do this all the time, not just when it is already too late.

There is an old adage in Chinese medicine, "Treating a disease after it is formed is like digging a well after you have become thirsty." This can also apply to our world, now. We are a point in our history when we can influence the world in dramatic ways, good or bad depending on what we do.

Our Inner Garden

Let's look at a garden and at our own inner gardens. A garden is a self-regulating system that transforms (yang energy) sunlight and (yin energy) water into the living tissue of vegetables, fruit and herbs. Within the cycle of seasons, you have the whole gamut sprouting, maturing, ripening, harvesting, and composting. Throughout this process the garden constantly re-creates itself. And the interplay of yin and yang is what enables life to flourish.

 5 Element Theory

Another philosophical construct in Chinese medicine is the 5 Elements. Basically, these are images from nature which are used to describe the interactions in the body's ecosystem. The five elements are: wood, fire, earth, metal and water.



Wood represents wind, spring, expansion, sprouting, executing. The genesis of ideas. Anger is its expression, it includes the liver and gall bladder and a sphere of influence that includes: eyes, nails, ligaments and nerves. Tears are its essence.



Fire represents heat, summer, awareness (shen), intuition, joy is its emotion, laughter, it includes the heart small intestine, the pericardium and san jiao (roughly analogous to the immune system). It's sphere of influence includes the tongue, arteries blood and sweat.



Earth represents late summer, the middle, sweet flavors, absorbing/digesting, yellow-ochre, intention , it includes the spleen/pancreas and stomach. The mouth, lips, gums, muscles collegen and fat and saliva.



Metal represents autumn, spicy, deductive reasoning, sorrow, sobbing, it includes the lung and large intestine, skin and pores, body hair, lymph vessels, veins, mucous.



Water represents winter, death/consolidation, instinct, withdrawal. It includes the kidney and urinary bladder, the ear, bones, teeth and marrow, the sexual organs, cerebrospinal fluid.

Check out the show for a more in depth discussion on the five elements and help in understanding them in the context of our lives.

Finally, take what inspires you. Go to an external garden and experience your own inner garden. Explore what this might mean in terms of physical, emotional, and spiritual balance.


How do you know what you need to work on? Take some time to get to know your body's eco-system. If you do, in short order, you will learn where the problems lie and I can guarantee, it will be time well spent.

Your intrepid host,

Marc Ryan, L.Ac.