Beyond the familiar interior-exterior pairing of the organs, Korean medicine keeps a second map — jangbu byeoltong, or organ-to-organ communication. Its clearest lesson: why the heart steadies the gallbladder, and why a timid patient is treated at the gallbladder.
Comparing Yourself to Others: The Kind That Reveals Your Talent
We are told that comparing yourself to others is the start of unhappiness. Here is a different reading: used well, comparison is one of the most reliable ways to find your own talent and calling.
How to Actually Tell If You’re Lonely: A Simple Formula and What Korean Medicine Adds
Loneliness is not simply being alone. There is a clean way to think about it: loneliness equals the relationships you want minus the relationships you feel you have. Understanding that gap — and a Korean Medicine idea about unmet wishes — is itself part of feeling less lonely.
The Secret of Reverse Aging: Stillness, True Qi, and Why Happiness Begins with Unhappiness
The Huangdi Neijing locates healing in a state of mind: yeomdam-heomu, jin-gi-jong-ji — when the mind is quiet and empty, the true qi follows. The same stillness holds both the secret of happiness and, in my reading, a kind of reverse aging: hold the brief calm after each problem and true qi gathers into essence (jing). Happiness begins with unhappiness, but renewal lives in the stillness that follows.
Feeling Less Lonely: The Gap Between the Connection You Want and the Connection You Have
Loneliness is the gap between the connection you want and the connection you feel you have. Seeing it that way turns a heavy feeling into something you can examine and adjust — and in Korean Medicine, an unmet longing (so-won-i-bu-deuk) whose easing is much of what contentment means.
Singing for Mental Health: Why the Body Calms When You Sing
Singing is one of the simplest things a person can do for their mental health, and the body has clear reasons for responding to it — the vagus nerve, the quieting of the brain’s alarm centers, and a vibration that resonates inside the skull. In Korean Medicine, it is also a way to move stagnant qi.
What Sleeping on Your Stomach Tells You About Your Body
Sleeping face-down is often discouraged, yet many people can rest no other way. In Korean Traditional Medicine it points to a chest empty of qi in the heart and lung — the body asking for the weight of the mattress to press against an emptiness it can feel.
Why Some People Can Only Sleep on Their Back: A Korean Medicine Reading
Sleeping on your back has real benefits — spinal alignment, even weight distribution, easier breathing. But in Korean Traditional Medicine, needing to sleep on your back, unable to bear any other position, often means the heart, lung, or stomach is packed with qi and heat.
What Your Sleeping Position Reveals About Your Body in Korean Medicine
The position you fall asleep in is not random. In Korean Traditional Medicine it reads as a signal of where qi is gathering or running short — a chest full of heat that needs to lie open on its back, or an empty heart and lung that wants the weight of the mattress against it.
Insomnia and the Colonotonia Constitution: A Sensitive Gut and the Sweat Trap
Colonotonia’s sleep trouble has two drivers: a strong but touchy large intestine, whose low-grade inflammation and weak digestion unsettle the night, and sweating — which for this type pulls qi and blood into the colon and lung so the blood can’t return to the liver at night. As the professor says, little actively helps this type; not doing harm is what matters.