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A Pebble in the Cosmic Pond: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Sabine Wilms PhD
Tune in every other week for inspiring, joyful, and informative conversations on transforming ourselves, our communities, and the world, in the spirit of ancient 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 clinic and beyond.I am your host, Dr. Sabine Wilms, 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, I teach and mentor at https://www.imperialtutor.com/, about the roots of Chinese medicine and its larger cultural background. In addition, I will bring in insights from my checkered past as a biodynamic goat farmer and musician, all under the banner of my favorite phrase, “cosmic resonance,” a.k.a. the Chinese ideal of harmony between the t
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- 2 weeks ago49 min
Three Friends Springrolls: Sustainable Agriculture that Harmonizes Heaven and Earth
In today's episode, which actually was recorded with both of us on the same continent, and even in the same area, near Danang, Vietnam, we consider ancient agricultural traditions. In the spirit of our new season, this is again more of a travelogue than a nerdy Chinese medicine podcast. Let us know how you like this direction for our podcast.After a quick stop in the Swiss Alps, we explore specifically the sustainable organic farming practices that have been celebrated for centuries in the vegetable island of Tra Que near the ancient Vietnamese port city of Hoi An. From crop rotation to fertilizing with seaweed and buffalo "poo" (as my local guide called it), raising fish in the watering ponds, and extensive shading with palm fronds or loofah trellises, the fecundity of the place really impressed us. For Sabine in particular, the skill and expertise in tending the ubiquitous flower and vegetable gardens just made me so happy and truly showed the value of an unbroken farming tradition. It also gives us hope for the future of humanity that there are places all over the world where humans have lived and, more importantly, CONTINUE to live in a way that does not destroy our natural environment but treasures and shapes it sustainably. We have so much to learn from such places and cultures!So what's the story of the Three Friends Springroll that Sabine learned to make in her cooking class? Well, you'll have to listen to the podcast to find out (:And if you want to learn how to make rice pancakes and hear more about our travel adventures, Vietnamese cinnamon, and the benefits, dangers, and treatments for overconsumption of raw fruits, why don't you check out our new Frolicking Fish Community? There we offer a monthly selection of educational, inspiring, and joyful videos, translations, and discussions for the Chinese medicine community and beyond...
- Apr 17, 20261h 6m
Expressing the Spirit of Springing and Sprouting
Welcome to this first episode of our new Season Five on “Expressing the Spirit of Springing and Sprouting”! While we haven’t settled on a formal name for this season yet, we want to focus on renewal, play, joy, and paying attention, as a counterweight to the heaviness, suffering, and fiery chaos that is affecting so many of us these days, directly or indirectly!How can we uplift our spirits while also showing up to the best of our ability in these dark times? What is the appropriate place for joy in the midst of suffering, and how and where can we find it? What’s your own source of joy and wonder and magic? Where do you find pleasure, share love, provide comfort, create beauty, and elicit smiles in your circles of family and friends?For Leo and myself, food and connecting to nature are two easy places to start, so that is what we are focusing on in today’s conversation. In particular, we are playing with the Chinese theme for the spring season, namely “sprouting.” Leo shares some deeeelicious suggestions for northern and southern East Asian bean sprout dishes, while I am busy picking and chopping and processing my beloved nettles, to go into noodles, soups, pickles, and my daily evening tea. Beyond that, our conversation meanders casually to explore the need for personal calibration as each of us adapt the standard written advice in Chinese medicine and calendrical arts to our local environment and lifestyle. We compare notes on what spring rejuvenation looks like in different parts of the world, from east to west, north to south, and even high mountains to the sea. Ultimately, we want this conversation to inspire you to pay attention to the small sources of joy in your corner of the universe, whether it is the first wiggly earthworm of the season, delicious local sprout dishes, ecstatic dancing, or a goose sitting on eggs. Basically, we want to lift your spirit a bit, share a couple of stories, and remind you of the need to smile and love and eat and breathe, no matter what you are confronting in your daily life. Hopefully we succeed in sending out some healing vibrations, which you can in turn pass on to your local folks, like the pebbles in the cosmic pond that we all are.If you want to dive deeper into some of these topics and explore the traditional Chinese cultural background, foods, clinical gems, medical Chinese language and literature, and more springtime musings, we invite you to join our brand-new Frolicking Fish Community. Here we offer you the opportunity for a deep, sustained engagement with our work and play in a lovingly curated themed monthly collection with the introductory "moongate," original translations, creative expressions, and audio and video recordings, plus a community discussion forum as a space for connection, education, follow-up, and inspiration. Please check it out at happygoatproductions.com and, while you are there, sign up for our newsletter to get notified of new episodes and other offerings. And, as always, please rate, review, and share this podcast wherever you can, and check out the show notes if you want to learn more. Thank you for listening!Additional InformationSubscribe to our newsletter!Frolicking Fish Community — Happy Goat Productions
- Mar 19, 202648 min
Frolicking Fish: Our Vision for Adding Joy, Love, and Curiosity to Chinese Medicine Education
What do you see missing in Chinese medicine education? How can we, Leo Lok and Sabine Wilms, with our unique combination of skills and resources, best support you as part of our beloved Chinese medicine community? What is the right and ethical balance between academic education, joyful entertainment, curious exploration, and creative play? And last, but not least, how can we harness the wonders of technology to create a community that spans continents, languages and cultures, medical and religious paradigms, and millennia of textual resources?A tall order this is, indeed, but we had fun tossing these questions around while we are in the final stages of building our new project, the "Frolicking Fish Community." In this podcast, we are inviting you to join us for a brainstorming session, in the spirit of integrity, connection, curiosity, and play.Of course we hope to entice you to join our community and give us constructive feedback on the answers we are looking for.Additional InformationFrolicking Fish Community
- Feb 17, 202645 min
New Year's Joy: Whales, Spring, and East-West Transmission in Pregnancy Care
Happy new year of the Yang Fire horse to everybody!In this conversation, recorded on the eve of the Chinese New Year, Leo had set out to share his excitement about the work that we have been doing on our upcoming course on "Nurturing Pregnancy." Sabine got distracted right at the beginning of our recording session by two grey whales passing by and then returning to feed outside her window, as the biggest (literally!) and most amazing sign that spring is truly arriving here on Whidbey Island. So this podcast meanders a bit, between Sabine's attempt to share the joy and love of a spring day, Leo's desire to share some insights on pregnancy care with Chinese medicine, and our serious contemplation of the challenges in this specialized field that Western practitioners of Chinese medicine encounter: We discuss the very unfortunate lack of access to the precious primary sources, historical and contemporary, that reflect the top quality of care that is common in East Asia. Then we explore the difficult clinical reality for practitioners in the West, surrounded as they are by a culture that considers both traditional Chinese medicinal treatments and acupuncture either as dangerous or as ineffective. We lament the unnecessary suffering resulting from the fact that patients in the West are reluctant to lean on their Chinese medicine providers during this tender period, when there is so much Chinese medicine can do! This stands in sharp contrast to China, where pregnant patients often turn to traditional Chinese medicine for addressing common pregnancy symptoms as a safer and more effective alternative to biomedical treatments. Inspired by our close collaboration these past few months in building our upcoming course on "Nurturing Pregnancy," we truly want to help our listeners see the clinical potential in this area as a very potent path for alleviating suffering and sharing "tender loving care," which is ultimately what all of our work is about.May we all spread the love!
- Jan 19, 202656 min
Nurturing Pregnancy: Modulating the Center
Most attention in the medical care of pregnancy focuses on preventing miscarriage in the tender first trimester, on the one hand, and on preparing for a smooth and safe labor and delivery in the last trimester. But what about the middle?In this episode, Leo and Sabine delve into over 2000 years of medical literature on this topic in China to look at the therapeutic potential of the middle trimester in pregnancy. We start out by zooming in on the two formulas for the fourth and fifth months of pregnancy cited by Sun Simiao "in case of injury to the fetus/pregnancy," analyzing their key ingredients title for the intended treatment strategy: "Modulating the Center Formula" and "Making the Center Peaceful Formula," respectively.We then explore ways to achieve these goals by more accessible and possibly safer means, such as by substituting maiya (sprouted barley), breath work, and daoyin to facilitate the free flow of Qi through the channels.Lastly, we take a step back to discuss the unique challenges of caring for not just one but two bodies during pregnancy, as two distinct constellations of Qi, which in turn are interacting with the external environment as mediated through the mother's body. It gets pretty complex but then again, "shaving off mounds and filling in sinkholes," as Zhang Lu puts it so succinctly in his commentary on the formula for "modulating the center" (tiaozhong) is actually not rocket science. It truly is our greatest joy and passion to show practitioners at all levels that you've got this and there is truly something that every one of us can do to support our pregnant friends.
- Dec 19, 20251h 2m
The slippery slope between discernment and judgment
As we all know, when somebody passes judgment on another person, regardless of the validity of that judgment, it will close the door to effective communication and connection. At the same time, one way of defining any healer's role is to serve as a guide who helps the patient on their path back to health and balance. And an important aspect of most clinical sessions, at least in the context of traditional Chinese medicine, is to discern the patient's current condition and determine the causes of any imbalance or deviation from perfect health, so as to choose a therapeutic intervention that will address those. In this process, it is all too easy to slide into judgment. To complicate matters further, one could argue that in some cultural or social contexts, such as Sabine giving critical feedback on the homework of her classical Chinese students, judgment may even be a necessary part of a person's role.Have a listen as we explore the slippery slope between discernment and judgment in an effort to understand and promote effective practitioner-patient communication. Using diet as just one example, we realized the importance of aligning the practitioner's goals with the patient's needs and wants and the power of practicing from the heart and cultivating compassion.Additional InformationVirtue-Power: Traditional Chinese Medical Ethics
- Nov 20, 202549 min
Playing with Qi and Other Tools of Self-Care
We start off this episode by exploring the meaning of "tiao qi" 調氣, which is the title of one of the chapters in Sun Simiao's volume on Yangxing (self-cultivation and longevity). Inspired by Sun Simiao's writings and our work in translating and teaching this material, we start within this context of yangsheng but end up exploring much broader clinical practices. We reject the judgmental tone of "regulating," as a translation of "tiao" 調, in favor of the playful curiosity and flexibility of "modulating," "calibrating," or "playing with." As a side note, it delighted both of us to discover the significance of embodied experience and of discernment rooted in the five senses as we have both been practicing this art of calibration in the tradition of Sun Simiao's teachings over the past couple of years.To understand our own and patients' behaviors that get in the way of healing disease, avoiding suffering, and improving wellbeing, we then looked at the difference between inability and unwillingness to "do what is good for us." But we quickly got more nuanced and changed the direction of our inquiry: To avoid judgment, which is a dead end in useful communication between any two people, we considered searching for obstacles and blockages instead. Could this perhaps be meaningfully expressed in the concept of "Qi stagnation," since this concept goes beyond just physical lack of flow, to include mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions?In the end, we discussed the unaddressed need for specialized training in Chinese medicine so that practitioners can more easily slip into the role of skillful communicator and coach. At the end of the day, what practitioners need, beyond technical expertise, to truly help their patients, are the qualities of equanimity, patience, and more than anything, loving kindness...Additional InformationYangxing — Happy Goat Productions
- Oct 21, 202547 min
Confucian Willfulness?
In today's conversation, I asked for Leo's help in exploring Confucius' teachings on social cohesion, authority, and the creation of harmony in self, family, society, and the world, on the one hand, and on ethics, on following our "mandate from Heaven," and standing steadfast by our values, on the other.What does the classic Confucian pair of virtues, ren "Humaneness" or "compassion" and yi "justice" or "righteousness," mean in today's world and how can we possibly use it for guidance in this moment?Does it change Confucius' message on hierarchical relations when we realize, as Sabine reminds us, that Confucius did not address his teachings to those in the lower position (servants and common people, women, younger men, and children) but to the elite men in charge, or in other words, the rulers, elders, and male heads of households?Most importantly, how did Confucius himself respond in situations where the men in power above him did not act in accordance with the values he held? And how do we apply that to today?Whether you are a person who grew up in a traditional Confucian household and culture or are somebody who is looking at traditional East Asian culture from the outside in, we sincerely hope that this conversation is helpful. Right now, it feels to me that Confucius is once again relevant for this dance between self-realization and service to others, through the prism of personal cultivation. For more details on Confucius' original teachings and some literal quotes from the Analects, please read this article by Sabine:Additional InformationConfucius and Willful Peacekeeping — Happy Goat Productions
About A Pebble in the Cosmic Pond
Tune in every other week for inspiring, joyful, and informative conversations on transforming ourselves, our communities, and the world, in the spirit of ancient 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 clinic and beyond.I am your host, Dr. Sabine Wilms, 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, I teach and mentor at https://www.imperialtutor.com/, about the roots of Chinese medicine and its larger cultural background. In addition, I will bring in insights from my checkered past as a biodynamic goat farmer and musician, all under the banner of my favorite phrase, “cosmic resonance,” a.k.a. the Chinese ideal of harmony between the t
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