Understanding Shen: The Heart-Mind Connection in Chinese Medicine

Shen reflects the quality of one's mind and self-awareness, deeply intertwined with heart health and blood flow.

### Understanding Shen: The Third Treasure in Chinese Medicine
* 🧠 Shen, often misunderstood as spirit, is actually the **quality of the mind and conscious awareness** in the context of Chinese medicine, emphasizing its interrelation with the **heart and blood**.
* 💔 "Shen is not spiritual, but it relates to our **intellect, sense of self, and conscious awareness**," which are all tied to the **heart's functioning**.
* 💧 The quality of one's Shen can be weak or disturbed, leading to **dullness in mental clarity or mild psychosis**, highlighting the importance of **blood quality and circulation** in overall health.
* 🔥 Internal arts training aims to enhance the **Shen** by allowing the mind to **permeate the body**, akin to a fluid soaking into a sponge, which subsequently improves **health and vitality**.
* ⚠ The acquired self often manifests as **pathogenic Qi**, which can hinder the mind's connection to the body, leading to **health issues that many people are unaware of**.
* 🔄 Traditional practices focus on purging this Sha Qi to restore balance, as the mind's reaction to **stressors is a significant contributor to physical ailments**.
* 🌌 While Shen can eventually lead to spiritual experiences, most individuals remain **trapped in their acquired selves**, lacking the necessary preparation to **handle deeper states of consciousness**.
* 💡 The journey towards true understanding of Shen involves recognizing the **nuances of one's mind and body**, ensuring that practices like meditation are approached with the **right foundation to be genuinely beneficial**.

Alright, so in this video we're gonna talk about the concept of Shen, which is the third treasure, and again, this is not separate from the first two; they are all interrelated. And I guess the first thing that we need to understand is that

Shen is not spiritual. Shen is not spirit. It's nothing to do with it, but it does actually, in certain contexts, but within this context, when the context of Chinese medicine, it doesn't mean spirit. And this is oftentimes what people will get real googly-eyed and glaze over it, 'cause they're like

'Oh, Chinese medicine is spiritual. I am the Shen. They have our heart, which is like our soul, which is like our true self, and our highest expression. It's just like self-help, and it's just like New Age philosophy.' It isn't, it isn't, it's all actually because Chinese medicine

and Chinese philosophy doesn't give a  about your highest self or your highest expression. There's a quote from the Daodejing which says that the Dao treats people like straw dogs, which basically, there's a bit more to it, but basically what it's saying is that if

you're a person and you go off of your being too far, you'll just be killed. The Dao won't give a . The Dao wasn't God. The Dao isn't some divine being, but it's just pointing to a deeper underlying mechanism of reality

that they discovered through thousands of years of research. So that's why we kind of have to set our idealisms and our vague, like, wishful thinking and googly-eyed-ness aside a little bit and try to understand maybe more what they mean, or more what, like, I mean, or someone

else means when they're trying to explain a bit more what this is actually referring to. So Shen is not spirit or spiritual, although it can be, but we'll get to that. But I would say for most people, in the vast majority of their life, they will not contact the actual

spiritual aspect of it because there's a crystal clear sign-in process that one goes through when that happens, that pretty much no one goes through. And I guess I'll talk about how that relates to it. It's a Shawn, another favorite buzzword. So Shan is not spiritual, but at the same

time we have this concept of the woosh, in which just basically means five spirits. So what people have done, it's like, 'All the five spirits, it's like, is the spiritual nature of ourselves?' Well, no, but we'll come back to that. So what is what it shouldn't actually mean

in this context? Well, mostly what they mean is the quality of your mind, of your conscious awareness, of your intellect. That's kind of what's more so what they mean and closer to the point. So if someone's Shen is weak and dull, that'll be kind of like dull and stupid, and like

a like you're like, 'No, I what what happened?' Or you could say someone is Shen disturbed, that's like mild psychosis, meaning the quality of their mind and their nerves and their sense of self is really like, really disturbed because the the Shen

relates to what we would say like mind, intellect, sense of self, conscious awareness, but actually in their view, that's all associated with the heart and what they call the shin or the xin. Because we think we're we think we're up here because that's our cultural bias.

whereas pretty much all the other cultures, all the Asian cultures, at least Chinese philosophy says we're here, this is our sense of self, this is actually where that resides, and they called that the Shen or Shin, Xin and talked about how it relates to the Shang

or the fire, we talked earlier about the Ming and Jing and how that's more lower base of the body, you call that water, this is water area, this is like fire area, so fire has its own qualities to be healthy, water has its own qualities to be healthy, but

so yeah, we would associate the sense of self here, they're saying it's more here, so this has a huge inner relationship with the quality of our blood and to be honest it's almost shocking - at least for me when like as I got deeper and

deeper into training internal arts, I started to literally feel my blood flow and the quality of my blood flow in my circulation all throughout my body, and then I started to become really aware of how my mind, the state of my mind, was affecting that blood flow, how my sleep, how my movement

how my food intake was affecting the quality of my blood flow, I mention this because tons of people have no conceptual awareness of this whatsoever and it's my opinion that most people don't feel their body at all, like you'll see people doing things and I'm watching

and I'm like they have no clue that what they're doing is like creating negative effects in their body because they don't feel it, they're not in their body whatsoever, well that's a bit of a stretch, well they're not as sensitive to

their bodies they could be like they're eating this food and I'm like sure about that food oh yeah it's I feel great I don't know if you're talking about meanwhile they're like mucousy and congested and literally getting inflamed

while they're eating the food and I'm like well you are think to this but your body is actually doing this they're like oh it's fine okay people have categorically cold hands and cold feet and all these cold patches all over their body it's blood and chi man blood

and she so if our if our Chi is flowing evenly throughout our body then the blood will be there with it because they're kind of interrelated and then of course there's a whole conversation of the quality of those things which we talked about in the subjective Chi Angie

so we're talking about Shen talking about the quality of our hearts or the quality of our sense of self it's this is another place where people get it wrong and understandably so and I did for many years is they're like oh well the key is

to think good thoughts or to be a good person or be nice or like follow these codified generic like homogenized models and that's good well if you're like an actual evil person then yeah that's probably better but most people aren't most people are pretty good

most people are generally just good people so really what they're doing is is on themselves denying all their creative capacities denying really responsibility or investment and just trying to like jump on board with something else like I'll just do that because it's good I mean it's better

than nothing, but at the same time the quality of mind behind that is still a bit dull, is still a bit disengaged and not involved. So, for example, to illustrate this, a lot of internal arts, their basic foundational stages, is just to be able to get your mind to

completely soak through your body, so where if you, if you imagined your body was this empty sponge and your mind was a fluid, the fluid of the mind soaks up and fills the entire sponge, and then the quality of the Shen goes way up, the

quality of the blood goes way up, the quality of the Qi goes way up, your health goes way up, everything just kind of tends to improve, but it's really uncomfortable because prior to that, your mind has to be rearranged and cleansed of, let's say we would call it Sha Qi,

which is pathogenic Qi, pathogenic information. So, I think I guess it was this, I think it was this video where I said, Chinese, and yeah, there was this video where I said this philosophy doesn't give a about your higher self or your sense of importance or from

you fulfilling like your highest good or following your bliss, really doesn't, it's never been in poor, never been a part of the tradition whatsoever. This is all nonsense that people have added afterwards because basically the idea is anything you can really know and be aware of isn't

actually who you are. And there's, like I said, and with Qi, there's the prenatal and the postnatal. Well, if this is kind of the Shen is associated with our sense of self, there's another concept which we could call our acquired nature, acquired, and our congenital, con Jin, it's all or

original or after birth pre-Earth, so pretty much what we all know and what we all operate in the vast majority of the time is the acquired self. That's just facts. So when people are like, "I'm being spiritual, I'm being this, I'm being that..."

like I said in the earlier video, the one with "Friend is Icon" and all this like journeying and processing for spiritual blah blah blah blah blah, and I'm like, "Well no, because literally nothing changed in the actual functioning of your self and system. All they did was"

just take aspects of their acquired nature and like rearrange them. But ultimately to illustrate the causal chain, they had this thing here and then they just like moved it around and they're like, "Oh wait, it's different now. I like healed it in a journey and"

they're processed." Well no, you're still just in this thing, and the same causal factor, the same "not of Shia Chi" that motivated you to take that action in the first place is still there and it's still motivating your actions. So literally nothing changed except for

your disembodied sense of self had some sense of satisfaction and pleasure from self-indulgently masturbating for however long you did. And then when people operate like this, the quality of their blood and Qi change, this goes way down, and their ability to actually manifest and follow their Jing

in their life path goes way down. And from the view of this philosophy, that's just the natural functioning of all of us. If we just never really did much of anything, that's pretty much probably what we'll do. And this is kind of what these traditions and spiritual teachings

actually we're saying but they're harsh and people don't like them because they want to say like Chinese medicine is spiritual and I'm a healer so I do Chinese medicine and Chinese medicine doctors are like they're like Jesus kind of like Buddha they're just here to like

help and save people there's literally no no that's not true that's just your projection these traditions are pretty harsh to us but actually if you just listen and pay attention and follow the causal chains or just like yeah that's right two plus two is four

two plus three is five it kind of doesn't matter what we think or feel or hope about that it pretty much it just is so the choice is do we want four or do we want five it's up to us I guess so the purpose of a lot of these

traditions was to get rid of this acquired self so the acquired self usually manifests as a big correlation with pathogenic Qi or Sha Qi so this is this was a whole school of medicine and thought which is mostly gone now and now Chinese medicine just

about likes treating symptoms or like formula formulas formulas prescriptions like do this for headaches do this for this and really the deeper aspects are just completely gone because this could be hard work for people because people are kind of so rigid and stuck and uptight that wanting to grow in a real

way is generally not not want it I don't know for a better or maybe it is because you're watching this course so basically Sha Qi pathogenic information that gets stuck inside our body that keeps our mind from being able to soak through our body completely like

the sponge that was the point of why I brought that up so recapping body like a sponge mind like a fluid the mind can soak all the way through the body and fill it up and stay there and stay just submerged in it then our health and all

these things go way up so the goal for many aspects of medicine and even internal arts is the removal of this *sha chi* because the reason why something is usually blocked and stagnant or in pain or whatever *sha chi* so people will say like chi

gong was a branch of Chinese medicine true because it was probably trying to purge and get this out of the body because it's related to the acquired nature which we're functioning from the acquired nature pretty much all the time but from the view of this system the

core nature is a disease in this is a course or is the source of a lot of our disease obviously there's some things that are karmic some things that are inherited yes but the vast majority of time it's from this and even in modern

times the number one thing that makes people really sick really stressed and really fries them out is their own mind is their own reaction to things and then it's like it's like it's like you hit a metal piece of sheet metal and it just like vibrates and it's like ah but then

it just keeps vibrating and this is like the way people's nerves are functioning it's just constantly that like jarring irritation but it's a tricky thing because there's the underlying irritation and tension but then people get clever and get into all types of

whatever modalities and they start moving and pushing around whereas the key was let's just get that out of the body and then the health goes up everyone feels better and it's a lot simpler and easier so that's a bit more of a bigger context

of Shen but it has a lot more to do with our sense of self and as it's rooted in our heart and the functioning of our blood and our Jing because again the acquired nature and the nature of our mind unless we actually do training and

do training correctly then we're not really gonna really affect the blood and the Chi in a positive way probably in a negative way which I was what I see a lot of people doing I see people that are meditators I can think of a lot of friends that I have that are

short, medium, and long-term meditators their blood is really deficient that she is really deficient their body is like following the bits or their posture sucks or negative things are happening but they don't have the right view so they don't know it their mind isn't able

to soak through their body so they don't know it so that's kind of the benefit of Chinese medicine is they have these cues to say this is what's actually happening for physicality so that we can start to address it before it gets too bad so

I said earlier sometimes Shen can be spirit so how this relates is they saw the Shen and the heart as having the ability and the capacity to eventually someday actually experience something which would be like spirit which will be Shen the big spirit the big S but most

People never get there because they are trapped in their acquired self, basically they never actually moved back towards the congenital self. They're so rife with Xie Chi and weak blood and weak Xin Li Jing that this vibration would just rip them apart and kill them, probably.

And they wouldn't, or they would just go psychotic because it would just, it's like you built a house, you put a shoddy electrical system in there and you just cranked as much voltage as you can through it, it's probably gonna go up in well, and it's

oftentimes what happens is people want to get into psychedelics or they want to get into plant medicines, which some of them actually can start to help convert Jing - Chi - Shen, so people can get kind of higher rates of conversion with these substances, but the thing is they

have no quality of container, so usually it ends up just being nonsense, or they just become lifelong junkies, or they just become like NPCs, which means like non-playing characters, kind of a meme if you haven't heard of it, but it's basically just like you're in a video

game and there's like an AI bot that you're talking to, all the responses are programmed, you pretty much know what they're gonna say and do. So I get out, people pretty much end up being like that where it's like 'mmm, you believe this, this is this, check your

lifestyle is like this, check you're probably gonna say this in response to this, check', and you're just like okay, so yeah, and it also usually harms their health over the long term because they didn't, you know, actually do what traditions always did traditionally.

which is preparation, foundation preparation, foundation organization building, right qualities, having the right skill sets in moving through a process in a linear way, not just like you man, throw up the walls, throw in electricity and let's just crank up the electricity and just like see how much

juice we can move through the system as quickly as possible, and you know, at the same time let's do it at Burning Man, let's do it at the festival, that seems great, it'll be like a really spiritual experience, no it's just literally pure

delusion and hormonal depletion, we're robbing Peter to pay Paul so to speak, but anyways, Shen can eventually be experienced as a blinding white light, which depending on if someone is this particular religious belief, it will be like, usually it manifests as whatever that belief system is, but

Taoism again is looking at the thing behind the thing, so for them, just blinding white light, and I mean blinding white light, I mean blinding white light, and they said only at that after that point because you have the blinding white light, you have Shen and then

you're actually able to go into complete stillness, and then only at that point do you actually arrive at the point of being able to practice what is traditionally called meditation, whereas when people are doing all the way up before that, it's either preparing

for meditation or just wrestling with their acquired self and making themself probably yeah, a bit more calm on the positive end, a bit more calm, more grounded, more aware, hopefully more self-awareness and honesty in these things than the other end, they make themselves just worse. Well, you know if

there can get more into denial more into psychosis more into Shen disturbance warrant achee and blood deficiency more the Qi stagnation really just depends on how you do it and it's really naive and ignorant and harmful to think I'm doing

meditation yoga so it's good I mean that's not true for pretty much anything it's like I'm drinking water so that's good right I don't know is it from the toilet is it from the gutter so from the sink is it from a fresh spring this is

from an actual clean fresh spring is it from Flint Michigan I mean it's a big spectrum of what could be so the point is that there's a quality and there's a bunch of factors that go into it that usually determine if something is

useful or beneficial or harmful not just I'm doing it so it's good right it's like well I guess breathing is pretty good so you should probably do that but anyways hopefully this gives you a bigger idea in context of Shen and I'll

see you in the next video where I'll get into something a bit more tangible which is uh elixirs

What is Shen? | Foundations of Tonic Herbalism Sample

brandon gilbert

Shen is the third treasure, interconnected with the first two.

Shen is not spiritual or related to the spirit in the context of Chinese medicine.

Chinese medicine doesn't focus on the highest self or expression.

The Dao, a deeper mechanism of reality, is not a divine being.

Most people won't experience the spiritual aspect of Shen due to a specific process.

Shen's Practical Meaning: Mind and Awareness

Shen refers to the quality of mind, conscious awareness, and intellect.

Weak Shen manifests as dullness or mild psychosis (Shen disturbed).

Shen is associated with the heart (Xin) and sense of self.

Unlike Western views, Chinese philosophy locates the sense of self in the heart.

Shen's relationship to blood flow and its impact on overall health is highlighted.

Thinking good thoughts or being a good person isn't the key to cultivating Shen.

Most people are already good; the issue lies in disengagement and lack of creative capacity.

Internal arts focus on mind-body integration to improve Shen.

This philosophy doesn't prioritize fulfilling one's highest self or bliss.

Most people operate from their acquired self, not their core nature.

The acquired self is often associated with pathogenic Qi (Sha Qi).

Spiritual practices often only rearrange the acquired self, not fundamentally change it.

Ignoring the underlying issues leads to poor blood and Qi quality.

Sha Qi, pathogenic information, blocks the mind from fully integrating with the body.

The goal is to remove Sha Qi to improve health and well-being.

Chi gong aims to purge Sha Qi from the body.

The acquired nature is often the source of disease.

Shen can potentially lead to an experience of spirit (big Shen).

Most people are trapped in their acquired self and lack the capacity for this experience.

Substances like psychedelics can accelerate Jing-Chi-Shen conversion but lack proper preparation.

Without proper preparation, such experiences often lead to negative outcomes.

The experience of spirit might manifest as blinding white light in Taoism.