Biggest tip for 1st year:

No external information collections.

If you’re in a formalized curriculum and have access to one (or all) of the major three books in the western hemisphere: Manual of Acu, The Foundations of Chinese Medicine, or Handbookd of Oriental Medicine, you really do not need, in my opinion, anything more outside of these. I’d argue that you won’t even have the time to take on more than the contents within these texts.

Farming for more resources usually means you haven’t wrestled with the texts (uncomfortable yes, but something you have to do when learning anything new), or you’re being distracted by shiny-object-syndrome.

I do encourage new students to consider the fact that 1st year is an adaptation phase. By this I mean that you’re likely (if not already immersed in TCM prior-to) uploading an entire new way of thinking. From my observations, it will feel especially foreign to you if you are monolingual as the switching of different medical models is similar to that of speaking different languages. Give yourself grace though, as I have never seen it not “click” eventually to those that stick through it.

Also, drills. Drills, drills, drills.
Establish a ritual as early as possible.
There is no workaround.
(I personally made this mistake early on and experienced the domino-effects this has in class and during clinic discussions.)

I created a study ritual that is first and second-year student friendly so you can check that out here. Repetition is the only way with much of TCM’s content, so do have a way of going through the special points, natures, elemental relationships, etc, even if it means you sit down to recall them for just five minutes a day.

Most life-changing thing from studying TCM?:
It’s a close tie between two.

Traditional Chinese Medicine treats patterns, not diseases. This means that it takes little interest in the name of an illness (i.e: psoriasis), and more into the patterns of its presentation (i.e: plaqued skin, silver/gray scales, on extensor body surfaces, etc). This framework, of detaching from the name of something, has equipped me with one more vantage point of understanding reality.

When you rid the name of something, you have nothing to hinge its essence on except the way it presents itself. Observational drawing does this by the way - without words. It trains you to draw things for what it is and does not permit room for personal interpretations/ preconceived notions/ ideals.

I think this is an honest way to understand things for what it is. Not what you think you know of them or want it to be.

And then there’s the spirituality part.

Before I was ever a student of Traditional Chinese Medicine, my earliest encounters with illness all happen to be addictions. I’m sure this has influenced me in how I view things, especially the intersection of health and the human condition.

The connections TCM makes between the soul and body showed me a way to make sense of things in a way that I’ve never encountered through other materials. Naturally, I’ve always been curious about the spiritual aspects of mind-body connection but materializing it through a TCM treatment leaves me feeling like there is much more to be explored.

What school do you go to?
I currently don’t share this.

A large part of this is for personal privacy, and the other reason is due to how I view the intersection of education and social media.

I can only assume that this is a well-meaning question to help narrow down school-selection. To this, I don’t wish for short media bites to reflect a formal program or to increase the allure to any one specific institution. While I’m glad my content has served as a touch-point to this medicine, what I share in my current season of being a student reflects my own flair, curiosities and presentation-style. Much of this is drastically different from the structure of a rigorous professional curriculum.

Out of respect for institutions that train practitioners, as well as those that are looking to shell out to an education that requires serious investments (of time and money), I don’t wish to have that distinction blurred.

If my content is something that has prompted a curiosity for TCM, my hope is that the intrigue is towards the subject first and an institution (selected for personal resonance) second. Not the other way around.

One suggestion I can offer to those that are in search of a school, is to attend the student-clinic or a student tour. This is not to judge the student’s professionalism by the way - this would be an unreliable way to gauge the school itself. Yes- bedside table manners and patient etiquette can be taught to a certain extent, but I personally wouldn’t hinge a school’s integrity on that.

The facilities of the school (herb preparation room, moxibustion stations, etc) and the range of modalities offered in the clinic service-list will give you an insight into what you’ll have access to upon enrolment. I bring this up because schools will sometimes list different modalities in the curriculum, but these aren’t always practised in an actual practical setting so they only get studied in theory.

If you value regular interactions with different methodologies, this is worth looking out for. If you’re a straight-shooter type and solely interested in honing in on acupuncture, then this suggestion doesn’t carry the same weight as that is the primary modality in any TCM school.

That’s all for this post.

Move, don’t outsmart the sun and the moon, eat foods (not the kind playing pretend), and feel your feelings or life will force you to.

-MJ

This is a series where I answer some questions that were asked from Instagram Q&A in stories. This essay will be a response to this question:

Ok, let’s get into it.

1. Get radical with your phone.

Not “mindful.” Radical.

You already know the dangers of unregulated social-media use. It’s the least original observation of the decade and I don’t need a citation for its consequences because you actually carry the proof in your own body: a diminishing attention span, unactualized goals, rounded shoulders, poor sleep, mental and physical sluggishness. If you’re asking me this question in earnest (genuinely wanting to be reconnected to your body and your spirit) and you haven’t set a single real boundary with your phone, stop reading and go set one now as these things cannot co-exist.

You are one woman with a nervous system competing against a team of engineers, behavioral psychologists, UX/UI designers who deliberately studied variable reward schedules, negative neural wiring, and consumer trends. This is not a matter of “willpower-ing” through it.

Women embody Yin, and the capacity for creation is woven into that. Yin is the fertile, receptive ground that takes in raw material and makes something new of it: a home out of an empty room, a child out of two cells. Fastmedia apps works directly against this. It feeds you constant input, gives you too many choices and simulated experience after simulated experience, until your senses are too exhausted to gestate anything at all. A quiet kind of spiritual sterilization.

My suggestions on this topic aren’t novel but that’s okay, since novelty is what keeps an overstimulated body thriving:
1. A tech sabbatical.
2. Use tools.
3. Have a commitment that makes unregulated screen-time feel incompatible with who you are .

1. A tech sabbatical.

An overstimulated mind only grows louder with more noise, so silence is a non-negotiable. Sign off of social media for one full day or pick one four-hour window this week where the phone doesn’t touch your hand. The last time you experienced this, you probably didn’t own a phone yet, so let there be some nostalgia in it.

The sequence is simple: turn the phone off, put it in a room, spend four hours doing something that actually matters to you in another room.

2. Use tools.
I’m not against the assistance of tools so long as the tools don’t become a lineup of temporary collectibles (a dumb phone, an app blocker, etc). Boundaries are allowed to be mechanical before they become instinctive.

So play architect with your own environment:

Non-physical: turn on grayscale.
Physical: give the phone a designated place (I call this my phone coffin) to tuck away for part of the day.

Make the phone the least interesting and visible thing in the room.

3. A commitment.
Honestly, this is the one that will actually work long-term but also the one least likely to be tried, because it actually asks something of you.

A genuine commitment or a project to something makes doomscrolling feel offensive.

We naturally protect what we value, so when you have something you’re actually building toward, unregulated phone time starts to feel like an insult to both the project and yourself.

Just a personal observation, but the people I know who went through the initiation of becoming a parent are the ones whose relationship with their screen changed permanently and well. It just loses its pull fast when your child’s most formative years are unfolding right in front of you.

I’m not saying you need to become a parent to establish a good relationship with technology. But a narrowing of choices and roles, the elimination of options, a commitment with constraint, these are the common threads among the people who manage to form the most intentional relationship to their devices.

Observe where you can decrease the amount of options in your life to eliminate noise. You can begin somewhere as simple as your closet, or something more grand like a career trajectory.

2. Be with nature.

Overstimulation is a kind of malpositioning and severance from the present. Nature simply does not participate in that state because it isn’t concerned with anything but its own flourishing. If you happened to notice, distraction isn’t compatible with growth, so you won’t find it anywhere that life is actually thriving, say a forest.

It’s also one of the last remaining spaces left that wants nothing from you.

Spend time in it and around it.

There is power in proximity.

3. Touch your breasts.

Any real conversation about women’s health in this medicine has to include the Liver (*the TCM organ, not the hepatic one of biomedicine). The Liver governs the smooth, unobstructed flow of qi, and it’s also the storehouse of Blood, which is why it’s so central to women’s health given how tied the menstrual cycle is to that same Blood. The relationship runs even deeper because Liver-Blood is understood as the precursor to breast milk. So when qi’s flow gets constrained (by stress, by suppression, by overstimulation) it shows up easily since the Liver meridian runs directly through breast tissue, and it can affect both lactation and the health of the tissue itself.

For all of that, the Liver meridian holds a particular importance for women.

A self-touch massage or a gua sha ritual for your breasts is an intimate way to connect yourself to your feminine. It’s also a sacred area as it surrounds the midline meridian of the meridian known as Ren Mai (任脈), regarded as the Sea of Yin.

Here’s a super simple ritual you can do tonight. Avoid making it clinical and don’t treat this as a breast-exam chore or some sort of assignment. Typically gua sha is to “raise the sha” (bring red marks to the surface) but this is simply to encourage flow:

1. Warm up first. With a little oil, rub your hands together to warm them up and place your palms on your chest.

2. Start sweeping gently side to side just below your collarbones, starting from the center, out toward your shoulders. If you’re using a gua sha tool, stay close to flat against the skin here (avoid using the sharp angles on your tool). A few passes on each side is enough. This just wakes the area up before you go further down.

2. Circle the breasts. Using flat fingers, make slow circles around each breast, moving clockwise because this moves with the qi rather than against it. If you’re using gua sha, try to avoid contact over the nipple on larger motions. Stay light as this isn’t a deep massage, just enough pressure to stimulate flow.

3. Sweep the side. Finish by gently stroking along the outer edge of each breast, where it meets your side, moving downward toward your ribs. A few slow passes here and you’re done.
   

   

If you enjoy this kind of touch, you can invite it into the more sensual moments between you and your partner. During foreplay and intimacy, guide your partner’s hands to your breasts and have them be gently squeezed. This is an intimate way to keep the Liver qi flowing.

4. Lean into Yang.

This may sound counter-intuitive but lean into the counterpart: the Yang.

Yin is the receptive, still, dark, internal. Yang is the active, moving, outward-facing. A lack of momentum (Yang energy) only makes the mind even more susceptible to negative emotions.

Overstimulation often tips a woman into Yin-dominance. Unfiltered ideas, too many sensations, unclosed thoughts, with no way to release them, all this sensory overload turns into a kind of paralysis and stagnation. It mirrors what this medicine calls “Yin rejecting Yang,” where one force grows so dominant it refuses to let its counterpart back in. This lack of harmony is what Traditional Chinese Medicine views as the root of most illnesses as healthy Yin energy can only exist through a well-integrated Yang.

So move your body to give your yin a way to move.

Exercise.

5. Return to your hands.

Soil, the interlocking of a lover’s hand, detecting the danger of hot coal, the specific temperature of a ceramic bowl, this is what fingertips are for. They are, physiologically and energetically, some of the most densely innervated real estate on your entire body. In TCM terms, this is where several of your major channels terminate or begin: Lung, Heart, Pericardium, Large Intestine, Small Intestine, Triple Burner. All of these have their opening or closing point at a fingertip. Hands are instruments of immediate perception, wired directly into how your body reads the world and metabolizes it into feeling.

I remember when humanoids were being pumped out and nearly all of the major robotics companies were delaying production due to the sheer difficulty of engineering the hands. The programming involved just could not capture the neural choreography that humans have the natural capacity for. The hands are human’s (and other animal’s) greatest tool.

Start handwriting as a ritual for 5 minutes in the morning. This is a visual expression of the cadence of your thoughts and feelings - I like to think of this as the fingerprint of your soul. Flatten that motion down to the identical tap of a keyboard, and the connection to yourself is not the same.

So to recap:

1. Don’t be lenient with your phone. It is not a neutral device until you make it so.

2. Spend time in nature.

3. Touch your breasts.

4. Exercise.

5. Hand write (or draw), often.

That’s all for this Q&A.

Thank you for reading.

-MJ

None of this leaves me focused and I suspect the same is true for anyone whose work and life both live on the same device.

Traditional Chinese Medicine has reframed these distractions for me not as a willpower problem, but as a digestion problem.

一 The Spleen-Mind Connection

Organs in TCM carry functions different from biomedical ones. In TCM, a healthy Spleen is responsible for the digestion as this is the process that largely generates the body’s Qi (氣 — the vital energy that makes up all living things) and Blood (血 — a nutritive substance that takes on both a material and conceptual meaning in this medicine). Each organ also governs an emotion. The one native to the Spleen is particularly cerebral as it dominates pensiveness, an activity that is fuelled by the things it generates: Qi and Blood. When thoughts are exercised in excess: overthinking, excessive rumination, obsessive contemplation, and mental clutter — these are all said to weaken the Spleen system. Injury can also happen through other ways such as sitting too long, irregular eating habits, cold drinks and food, and poor nutrition, which can all worsen the mind in return. A Spleen under strain can show up as difficulty concentrating, mental fatigue that sleep doesn't fully resolve, and a heaviness of thought that makes even simple decisions feel like a project.

The ancient physicians obviously did not live in the age of infinite scrolling, autoplay videos, algorithmic outrage, and push notifications. But I sometimes wonder what they would say about the body’s systems consuming hundreds of fragmented thoughts before noon.

Because Qi and Blood are not generated from visual and audible consumption the way you may treat them as though they are.

Information is not inherently nourishing.

Just as eating constantly does not mean the body is well-fed, constant consumption of even high-quality content does not mean the mind is strengthened.

二 Plus and Minus

One thing I appreciate about Traditional Chinese Medicine is that treatment is rarely approached with brute force. There is usually a balance between tonification and reduction, meaning, you strengthen what is weak and you reduce what is excessive.

I approach my digital life the same way. Some inputs strengthen the system. Some deplete it. The medicine would not treat these differently from food.

I’m starting with the content I reduce, drawn from personal experience and from what people around me and patients in student-clinic have expressed.

三 The Digital Diet of Reduction

1. News and politics

I understand the importance of staying informed but modern news rarely functions as information. It functions as emotional provocation.

The body was never designed to process the suffering, corruption, disaster, and conflicts of the entire world before a morning bowl of congee.

Certain forms of knowledge can exist quietly in the mind without consequence but politics rarely behaves that way. It asks for emotional involvement. It demands reaction, allegiance, outrage, vigilance. And when that energy has nowhere tangible to go, it begins to stagnate.

That does not mean apathy. It means recognizing that stagnant energy — energy with nowhere useful to go — has a physiological cost regardless of the righteousness of its cause. The mind and body do not make exceptions for noble outrage.

Whether that is clarity or just a comfortable excuse depends entirely on what gets done with the energy that's freed up.

2. 2x speed

I know 2x speed is efficient.

I still use it sometimes.

But I also notice it subtly trains the mind to expect all information to arrive in compressed form. Eventually, normal conversations, reading, and contemplation begin to feel unbearably slow. I back off from this function from time to time to reclaim a normal pace of patience.

3. Informed helplessness

“The cost of living is rising.” “AI is coming.”

Yes.

I know.

You know.

We all know.

But hearing twenty different people narrate collective anxiety every single day does not strengthen the ability to navigate reality. It compounds the thought and seals it deeper into the nervous system, with zero resolution to the initial problem.

In both Daoist thought and Traditional Chinese Medicine, health is not rigid control but adaptability. The strongest systems are not the ones that tense against every shift, but the ones capable of moving with changing conditions without collapsing internally. That kind of flexibility is only possible when the nervous system is not perpetually trapped in survival mode. A contracted system simply cannot perceive opportunity, creativity, or possibility.

4. Short-form therapy and the flattening of people

I think consumption of short-form relationship psychology has quietly damaged a lot of real-life connections.

Interpersonal relationships are deeply nuanced so no person speaking into a front-facing camera truly knows the individual you are contemplating at 11:43 PM.

Attachment styles.

Narcissism.

Avoidance.

Manipulation.

Red flags.

Some of these concepts are useful.

But when stripped of context and turned into algorithmic entertainment, they can muddy genuine intimacy. Show me a person who isn’t simply imperfect, tired, awkward, maturing, inconsistent, stressed, learning, or human. There is none.

Not every conflict requires clinical interpretation or psychometric branding.

5. AI slop

This one speaks for itself.

四 The Digital Diet of Tonification

Reduction alone is incomplete in TCM and it is incomplete here.

The Spleen is not strengthened by long periods of fasting. It needs quality, regular inputs.

And by that I’m saying: slower forms of attention and creation.

Reading that requires the mind to chew on an argument. Listening that isn't curated by an algorithm optimizing for retention. Media that doesn't use flashy jump-cuts and treats you like the human you are and not a goldfish. They are the digital equivalent of warm, cooked food — easier to digest and functional to the mind and body.

五 Where attention goes, Qi follows

This is not another article trying to hand you another anti-tech manifesto.

Modern people are not lacking awareness. Most intelligent adults already know their attention is being fragmented. There really is no shortage of screen-time blockers, physical phone-lock capsules, gray-scale phone settings, or productivity systems available around the internet. Information about the problem has become its own genre of content.

And strangely, that excess of advice can become another form of mental clutter.

I think lasting behaviour change often begins somewhere quieter than discipline. It begins with perspective. A different vantage point can completely alter the relationship a person has with a habit without requiring endless force against it.

People just naturally protect what they believe has value.

A person who genuinely understands the importance of sleep stops seeing rest as laziness and a person who understands the effects of poor nutrition begins looking at ultra-processed food as energetically and physiologically expensive.

Memes. Sport. Comedy. The genuinely stupid videos that make you laugh out loud alone in a room. These are not the problem. I don’t think social media is evil or that digital distraction is morally wrong. And I also don’t think this comes down to pure willpower. If anything, I’d find it more pathological if there wasn’t any negative outcome from interfacing with designs which are deliberately engineered to weaken cognitive restraint.

This is not a problem I’ve solved.

I’m simply offering a perspective that has helped me see digital consumption differently through the lens of nourishment.

That the mind can also become weak from poor nutrition, not only through what feeds the mouth — but through what feeds the eyes and ears.

What shows up on your plate does not have to be eaten.

So when you do eat, eat well.

-MJ

I am actually not going to define it in this first paragraph. I want to earn the definition first, because definitions handed out too early tend to get filed somewhere and forgotten and this one is worth much more than that.

What I will tell you is that major civilizations that thought carefully about the body arrived at something that is remarkably similar, without having conversations with each other. This convergence is where I want to begin, because it is the thing that stopped me when I first encountered it, and I think it is the thing most worth stopping at.

I am a student of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Not a practitioner. I want to be precise about how I am inside the education, not past it. I am writing from that position deliberately because I think there is something useful in the view from the middle that gets lost once a person is credentialed and moved into the role of practice. I am still in the part where things surprise me and that is the part I want to write from, while I still can.

I’m going to start with what you probably already know, even if you don’t know you know it.

You know what it feels like to be depleted in a way that has no clean explanation. Feeling tired after a full night of sleep, a mind that is working double the effort for the same tasks, not sick in the way that a diagnosis explains. You feel like you’re dragging along a fifth limb along and are operating on less than you had before.

Most people I know in their thirties have felt this. Most of them have been told it is stress, or that it’s the normal marker of aging. Bodily resources diminish over time, for sure, but there is something different at play when the body just never feels restored.

TCM has a framework for this and while it is not a perfect framework, it’s one that takes the experience seriously rather than reclassifying it as a symptom of “adulting”.

The framework is built around Jing.

Jing is the closest thing Traditional Chinese Medicine has to a concept of vital essence (fyi: this is a reduction of the term as the Chinese language is much more elaborate in its native context). This is a foundational substance that underlies everything the body does, that governs the quality and trajectory of a life from its beginning to its end. The classical texts treat the Pre-Heaven Jing (先天之精, xiān tiān zhī jīng) as finite. Meaning, you are born with a fixed amount, inherited from your parents at conception and while you can slow how quickly it depletes, you cannot make more. Like a candle, when it’s burned, it’s gone.

There is another category.

The Post-Heaven Jing (后天之精, Hòutiān zhī jīng), which is cultivated across a lifetime through what you eat, how you sleep, how you move, how you manage the expenditure of your being.

This can be built.

It partially compensates for the depletion of what you were born with. It is the part of the equation that is still under your influence, which is why it tends to be where Traditional Chinese Medicine focuses its attention, especially on the topic of diet and digestion.

The Kidney system in TCM is understood as the organ that stores Jing. Not the kidney of nephrology — the biomedical organ that filters blood and produces urine. In TCM, the Kidney system governs the bones, the brain, the reproductive capacity, the depth of a person’s vitality, and the rate at which a person ages. When classical texts describe someone aging rapidly, losing their hair, losing their mental acuity, losing their drive and their resilience and their ability to recover they are describing a Kidney system under strain.

I want to stay here for a moment because I think the concept itself deserves more than a sentence before we start extracting practical information from it.

What TCM is describing when it describes Jing is something that sounds, in translation, like metaphor. Vital essence. Foundational substance. These are words that the contemporary reader processes as poetic approximations of something that probably has a biochemical correlate if you look hard enough. But doing so would be an error of attempting to contain a system into the logical framework of another. Researchers have made interesting arguments in that direction through connections to mitochondrial function, to telomere length, to the neuroendocrine system. I find those arguments interesting. I also think the impulse to immediately translate this into biomedical language is worth examining, because it assumes that the biomedical language is the more real of the two, and that the classical framework is only valid if it can be made to correspond to the one we are more familiar with.

So here is what stopped me.

The ancient Greeks had a concept they called pneuma. The vital spirit, the animating force carried in the breath and concentrated in the seed. Aristotle wrote that the body’s vital principle was most concentrated in semen and that excessive loss of it weakened a man’s constitution in specific ways. Of course, whatever moral conclusions his broader work invites, this particular observation was physiological in its framing, not moral condemnation, based on observation.

Ayurvedic medicine, developed on the Indian subcontinent without meaningful contact with classical Chinese thought, has a concept called Ojas. A subtle essence that underlies immunity, vitality, mental clarity, and the quality of consciousness itself and like Jing, it is finite. It is depleted by excess of various kinds. The texts that describe it understand this to be the most refined product of digestion.

Early Western medicine - before it was reorganized around germ theory and the cellular model - treated what it called vital spirits with a seriousness that has since been largely edited out of the history. The expenditure of vital force was considered a legitimate clinical concern. Physicians wrote about it with the same matter-of-fact authority they applied to other observations they considered settled.

These traditions were not talking to each other or reading each other’s texts. They were not operating from the same cultural assumptions or the same cosmological systems. They arrived at the same observation through entirely independent routes, across different continents and different centuries, because they were all watching the same thing: what happens to people who spend in excess, and what distinguishes people who don’t.

Frankly, I do not know how to interpret this convergence cleanly as these traditions share no common category. It is much less tidy than that. It seems to be a consistent observation across time and through enough people that patterns become visible in a way that it becomes impossible to dismiss.

The forms of Jing are a longer conversation, and something I will return to in writing that follows this one but for now, TCM identifies several primary sources of Jing expenditure - sexual and reproductive releases (ejaculation for men and childbirth for women), dietary, emotional, physical (or lack thereof), environmental exposure, chronic fear (the primary emotion the classical texts associate with the Kidney system) which in the contemporary world rarely arrives as actual terror but almost universally arrives as low-grade ambient dread (the background radiation of a life lived under sustained uncertainty), poor sleep, stimulants in excess (coffee, substances, energy drinks, etc).

What the classical texts could not have anticipated is one addition to that list that is entirely modern: 24-hour access to pornography. If you found this essay through my reel on that specific topic, you already know where I'm going with this.

The reason this medicine concerns itself with ejaculation so explicitly is not due to favouritism but a matter of mechanisms. Jing leaves the male body through semen in a way that has no direct female equivalent. This is why pornography represents an accelerant that is a male-specific liability in this framework. Frictionless, unlimited access to ejaculatory release at any hour, at no cost, with infinite novelty, is something the classical texts never encountered. The pixelated delivery system is entirely new. The cost to Jing is not.

Jing, in the end, is a concept about finitude. About the fact that the body is not a renewable resource in the simple sense that contemporary wellness culture tends to imply. This reserve is not bottomless and how you spend it is not any more (or less) important than how you don’t spend it.

There is a particular kind of man this framework speaks to most directly and I want to name him plainly because I think he deserves to be taken seriously rather than marketed to. He is not unhealthy by conventional measures. He trains. He is intentional about what he eats. He has read enough to know that testosterone, sleep architecture, and recovery capacity are not incidental concerns but central ones. He is, in the language his culture has given him, trying to perform at the highest level available to him.

What TCM offers this man is not a rebuttal of that instinct but rather a longer timeline for it. The medicine would not argue with his commitment to improvement. It would ask whether his framework for optimization is accounting for the right variables and whether he is tracking the inputs and outputs that matter on a twenty year-long scale, or only the ones that show up in this week’s wearable metrics because Jing depletion rarely announces itself in the short term.

And then there are the women reading this. Not for themselves alone, but with someone specific in mind. A partner who pushes through everything and calls it discipline, a father whose energy quietly changed over a decade in ways nobody named or a son who is only 18 and already running on empty. Women often notice depletion in the men they love before those men notice it in themselves, and they rarely have a language for what they’re observing that doesn’t get misread as worry or interference.

Jing is a way of understanding what the body signals when it begins to spend faster than it can restore and why those signals get overridden by the very qualities we tend to admire most in the men in our lives. Drive. Endurance. Yang to our Yin.

The medicine does not ask you to seize on life’s pleasures and physical needs. It asks you to understand what over-expenditure costs, so that the spending is at least conscious.