In our bodies the water element manifests physically in the kidneys and bladder
- those organs concerned with the discharge of fluids from our body. The kidney is the yin aspect of the water element in our bodies because it is more solid. The bladder is the yang aspect because it is hollow.
The kidney is said to store one of the vital fluids – jing in Chinese.
This is sometimes translated as essence (though there are other translations as well).
The jing is the vitality we are born with. Birth deformities are jing problems in acupuncture.
In general we are born with a stock of jing at birth and to maintain health we need to maintain this jing as much as possible. In one sense aging is using up our jing. The art of life then is to use the energy we get from outside ourselves (food and air) and not use the energy from inside ourselves. Put as simply as possible this means not pushing ourselves to exhaustion. Those who do this (even including elite athletes) tend not to live as long. Major challenges to our health also draw onjing to overcome them – things such as a major illness or shock. (Those things which age us prematurely.)
The kind of exhaustion that is to be avoided is most easily recognised by feelings of dizziness.
For men jing is lost through excessive orgasms. This would be approximately 2 or 3 per week in winter and perhaps 3-5 per week in summer. (Jing has a role in warming the body and so is less used for this in summer). This leads to ‘Chinese yoga’ practises of inhibiting ejaculation at orgasm. We will go into jing in more detail when we get to the vital fluids on this blog.
So how are you going at maintaining your jing?
- Do you work too hard and get exhausted (or even got to burn-out)?
- Do you work, or engage in sex, to the point of dizziness?
- Do you feel that you were born with a weak (little jing) or strong (lots of jing) constitution?
- Of those you know, who do you think has lots of jing?
- What do they look like, how do they move, what kind of lifestyle do they live?
- Of those you know, who do you think has less jing?
- What do they look like, how do they move, what kind of lifestyle do they live?
