Lothar Ursinus - The Body Clock in Traditional Chinese Medicine: Understanding Our Energy Cycles for Health and Healing

This book is dedicated to my two children, Daniel and Katharina.

Preface

After the first edition of Die Organuhr (The Organ Body Clock) was published in 2009 in German, many readers wrote to me in agreement with the links outlined in the book between the organs and their associated mental and emotional aspects. Their reports of recognizing themselves in descriptions of a particular phenomenon motivated me to complete this revised and expanded edition of the book.

One of the questions I was asked most frequently concerned the switch to summer time: when the clocks change, do our organs follow suit? And if so, what are the effects? Anyone who has taken a long-haul flight across several time zones and suffered from jetlag will know how important, and challenging, it is to adapt to a new sleep/wake cycle. Your inner clock is unable to sync with local time overnight, and a range of complaints and conditions can be caused by the change in the rhythm of darkness and light.

Humans are creatures of light and adapt to sunlight via the pineal gland (sometimes known as the epiphysis). We witness this phenomenon in the animal kingdom too. The first rays of the sun in the morning cause the birds to stir and launch into song. These constant updates to sunlight also exert an influence on the rhythm of our organs, and we adapt to summer time rhythmically. Any initial problems generally resolve after a few days. Farmers allow their cows about a week to become used to the new biorhythm.

I completed my book Mein Blut Sagt Mir (My blood tells me) in January 2015, following several years of research. The subject was very close to my heart. I did not write the book for doctors or alternative practitioners as I felt it was important to explain laboratory data and the links between the organs in a way that lay readers could understand. The third edition of this book has now been published, and I have included in this expanded edition many of the findings about our blood discovered during that research.

I hope you enjoy reading this new book.

Introduction

Human beings are part of the universe

Rhythms are visible everywhere in the natural world: night and day, summer and winter, waxing and waning, life and death. In all Natures processes with a beginning and an end, the end also heralds the start of something new. All things that rise must fall again; breathing out requires breathing in. Polarity and exchange are an expression of vitality. Nothing is lost in the universe; things with a beginning and a definitive end would not be possible in the cosmic order.

We accept cycles such as day and night or the seasons as a matter of course. We experience them repeatedly and arrange and schedule our lives around them. Human beings are not autonomous creatures on this Earth; we are all part of a greater whole, with all its processes and transformations. We are woven into the solar system and are subject to the transformations that result from the cosmos as it rings the changes.

The cyclical nature of events in the universe is also reflected in our bodies. Your skin renews itself every four weeks; a skin cell lives for only 28 days before being sloughed off. This period of time corresponds to the rhythm of the moon, and when the rhythm of skin renewal is interrupted, by psoriasis for example, it is described by traditional medicine as a rhythmic complaint expressed in the skin, so psoriasis should be treated via the endocrine system and not the skin.

The menstrual cycle also corresponds to the moons rhythm; the lining of the uterus is expelled in order for a new one to be formed. Examine your breathing closely and the link with the universe becomes clear: humans take around 18 breaths per minute, which in 24 hours amounts to a total of 25,920 breaths (18 x 60 x 24). Expressed in years, this figure corresponds to a period that Plato described as the Great Year, and the lifespan of a human who can expect to live 72 years (x 360 days) comes out at the same figure. A human life is to a certain extent one breath of the cosmos. If we think of ourselves as part of the greater whole, we are aligning ourselves with the cyclical behaviour of the universe, and it becomes easier to grasp that the physiological and organic processes within our bodies are subject to a higher order.

We have been devising specially fine-tuned dietary schedules based on the metabolism for our patients at the Naturopathy Center in Hamburg, Germany, for many years now. For the personalized dietary program I formulated, close analysis of vital processes and the metabolism is used to determine which foods are best suited to a particular individual. Patients who are not extremely ill or overweight frequently reported that we hit upon the foods they like to eat, but this is rarely the opinion of those patients with metabolic complaints or carrying excess weight. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that each individual has a different sensitivity when dealing with his or her own body; those who listen to their inner voice will feel better, as a rule, as they are consciously or unconsciously aligning with cosmic laws, sensing their own selves and finding their own paths.

The organ body clock has its origins in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). This millennia-old method of healing is based on holistic thinking and is underpinned by the rhythmic system of the universe. It considers human beings to be closely interlinked with cosmic principles and the laws that govern the Earth. Chinese medicine sees the energy system of human beings as a network between inner and outer worlds; it draws all its vital power from the two polarities of Heaven and Earth. This vital energy is also known as Qi and refers to both the material and spiritual nourishment that the body obtains to create energy. These ideas are not unfamiliar in the Western world; the view of the 16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus was that anyone who failed to incorporate the environment and the position of the stars in a diagnosis of disease had no right to call themselves a doctor.

But who sets our inner clock? What keeps time and where is the master clock? We all have a natural biological rhythm that aligns itself with sunlight. Researchers have established that we have both this master clock and individual movements, clocks that run on the periphery. This sounds both simple and exciting on the face of it, but very few people nowadays live in sync with the rhythm of the sun, and not to do so can have fatal consequences. The master clock no longer sets the time and rhythm for the clocks and rhythms of the individual organs and regions of the body. If every member of an orchestra were to play whatever music took their fancy, cacophony would result, a word that aptly describes what it would sound like in the body when we are no longer in biological harmony.

We experience a loss of synchronization after a flight, for example, irrespective of the direction in which we have crossed the time zone(s). Typical symptoms of jetlag include drowsiness, upset stomach, sluggishness during the day, sleep disruption at night, hormonal disturbance, and more. After a few days in the new time zone, the bodys rhythm adapts to the new arrangements with the sun. Experience suggests that the greater the dislocation in relation to the bodys usual time, the longer it will take us to adapt, but here too, the inner flexibility of the individual body system plays a role; young people generally adapt more quickly to the new situation than older individuals.