調理 Regulate and Harmonize
Dec 29th, 2006 by Michael Max
Regulate.
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind?
Control?
Forced compliance?
Shackling the invisible hand of nature’s innate wisdom and balance?
In English regulate often times connotes control.
In Chinese 調理, often translated as regulate has a slightly different meaning.
It means to bring balance to a system.
It’s less about forcing, and more about encouraging.
Less about control, and more about flow.
It’s about bringing out the underlying harmony in a system.
Here in the west, with our foundational myths that include a fall from grace, and sense that there is a perfection we have lost. Our medicine is often about trying to return to a pristine state. Some purity that existed before that car accident, flu, or bout with cancer.
As if we can go backwards in Life.
Eastern medicine, with it’s interplay of the 10,000 things, has no such concept of a pristine state from which we fell. It is always about the muck and mix of how life unfolds. Indeed, there are such states as Illness and Health, but they are more contextual, seen against the constantly changing background and complexity of life. It’s not so much about returning to a pristine state. It is about finding balance in the constant course and change of life.
調理is not about control. It’s more like a wood carver who knows how to work with the grain of the wood to bring out it’s beauty and curve. The massage therapist who understands the texture and motion of muscles, so her movements and pressure glide along already established pathways of movement. It’s like the teacher who sees where a student is stuck, and applies the right encouragement to his weaknesses, to bloom them into strengths.
This is 調理。
This is Chinese Medicine!