Earth-Centered Medicine
At the core of Chinese medicine is the theory of the 5 elements: wood, fire, earth, metal & water.
The idea is that these elemental properties make up the natural world, and in making up the natural world, they also serve as metaphors for how alive beings exist in physical, emotional, and spiritual ways.
This mirrors the philosophical idea of “as within, so without” — as within meaning what’s going on inside of you, so without meaning what’s going on outside of you.
It’s not a perfect theory, but it’s a lens you can use as a tool to help center where you are and how your environment affects you: for instance, do you surround yourself with people who let you stay petty, or do your people challenge you to make yourself better? Do you exist in an environment that smothers you, or is it one that allows you to thrive?
And so the idea of the elements being part of medicine was born.
because we living beings are part of the natural world, after all: as within, so without.
AT THE CENTER OF THE THEORY OF THE FIVE ELEMENTS IS THE EARTH ELEMENT.
Earth is the element of boundaries, maintenance, and practice. Earth is how everything hum-drums forward.
Earth is not glamorous. Earth is not particularly exciting.
In a world of Times Squares, Earth is about as exciting as a farm in Nebraska. (I say that, having grown up in the New Jersey suburbs…)
Our modern day priorities center convenience is king and the outsourcing all possible menial tasks, which necessarily deprioritizes Earth. We live in the modern world, damnit, and we use technology to make things easier, damnit! (There’s also social clout and socioeconomic ramifications to this: the less you do, the higher up in the hierarchy you go. Watch Ron Goes Wrong for the cartoon version.)
It’s no wonder that we call it Mother Earth. Mother Earth wouldn’t stand for exploitation.
Mother Earth would redistribute accumulations.
Mother Earth would demand maintenance to keep her healthy and vibrant.
Archetypically, mothers are givers. Mothers recirculate love, and food, and clothing. Mothers are there as the center around which business can be conducted.
Without unpaid labor, there is no capitalism. And yet, Earth-related energies are systemically derided as less than and gaslit as unimportant.
Patriarchal society is predicated on inequality: so racism, sexism, misogyny, and agism are all necessary pieces of the patriarchal puzzle.
This is why I practice Earth-Centered Medicine. Because anything else isn’t health. Anything else runs the risk of not being in our best interest.
THE GRUNT WORK IS THE WAY FORWARD.
I can’t believe that I now say that, because the Earth element, that maintenance, that practice?
People like myself with ADHD (and even neurotypical people — I see you!) simply abhor it. Some of us are born with it; some of it is trained into us. But regardless, society makes it clear that there is no dopamine in the maintenance.
For us neurodivergents, it turns out that without adequate dopamine, maintenance is really hard. Executive functioning goes in the toilet — and probably a very dirty toilet at that, because cleaning toilets doesn’t inspire dopamine for most people.
But aa Earth strengthens and more dopamine flows, you begin to see where keeping Earth weak is a social dictate: fast food, snacks, automation; driving instead of walking, call centers instead of people, robots instead of employees… the list goes on.
We all engage in the activities that dimish our Earth powers because we all exist in patriarchy. There isn’t value ascribed to doing stuff that simplifies your life. We all do it because we all have to do it!
But that’s also why I start with Earth. Rather than try to help people uncomplicate their lives (I can’t), teaching people to focus on their centers and constantly re-orient to that space begins to change the way you see your environment.
From there, you have more choice in how you decide to interact with it.
WHEN YOU START MAKING THESE CHANGES FROM THE INSIDE OUT, EARTH-CENTEREDNESS CAN ACTUALLY BE SEEN AS AN ACT OF RADICAL ACTIVISM.
In helping people become more Earth-Centered themselves, I in turn have become a peddler of a medicine that constantly reorients people back to self. I’m this mouthpiece for a medicine that teaches patients to be self-referencing and a medicine that teaches people to pause when society demands that they fracture, deplete, and inauthentically present themselves.
And that is the opposite of what patriarchy wants of people.
So those little daily practices that reinforce your sense of self and remind you that maintenance work is how human bodies and the earth we live on work?
Those end up making monumental, life-altering changes.
Fortifying that Earth energy creates big shifts.
earth energy is the anti-thesis of the patri-archy.
And y’all know how I can rail against the patriarchy.
Patriarchy is a tricky mistress. By not centering Earth, patriarchies suck out the nutritive, nourishing, and grounding energies that would otherwise be cultivated and redistributed. In their place? Overwork, individualism, convenience, and the accumulation of stuff.
Modern American Mothers don’t have villages anymore because as kids, the training begins.
As moms, we adhere — however conflictingly — to the dictate that cultivating internal energy isn’t the vibe we’re going for. Why create a vibe that can be both internally helpful to you and externally helpful for your community when actually, you can be an influencer or an it mom or the pinnacle of our third wave feminist training: a boss bitch.
So we learn that it’s not only discouraged but is nearly outright forbidden: hustle culture, baby. Grandma’s gotta work.
If you’re practicing Earth-Centeredness, cultivating that inner, self-referencing, embodied knowledge helps not just you but your community as well.
That doesn’t mean that even the most Earth-Centered person doesn’t experience something like greed.
Like anger and other maligned impulses, greed exists in humans. Of course it does! It’s just cultivated in patriarchy to make it seem like there’s no way around it.
That’s why we have an egregiously uneven financial system which ends up hurting and killing real people. But an Earth-Centered society would consciously move away from that, instead of orienting itself around the priority of accumulating as much as possible.
When you’re Earth-Centered, normal societal dictates just hit differently. You both want less and more at the same time, and being at odds with your training can feel unnerving.
IN CHINESE MEDICINE, THE CONCEPT OF ACCUMULATION IS ACTUALLY PATHOLOGICAL PHLEGM, AND PHLEGM IS OPPRESSIVE.
Have you ever had a sinus infection or bronchitis? If so, you know how literal phlegm makes it hard to breathe.
Similarly: If you have fibroids or polyps or a sinus infection or any kind of physical accumulation in your body: that’s Phlegm. (Chinese medicine capitalizes certain words to indicate that while it’s a physical thing, like, phlegm, it’s also a category of things that can show up metaphorically, too, like Phlegm.)
So anyway: that’s the prize of patriarchy. Phlegm. I’ll give you a minute to, eh, swallow that loogie.
Metaphorically, what Phlegm does is put you in your own echo chamber, so all you really end up seeing is your own point of view and your senses are dulled to the experience of others. (Sound politically familiar?)
So how could patriarchy not use Phlegm in its arsenal of tools? It’s genius. Tap into the natural human inclination to accumulate?? But rather than teach that the next step is distribution, teach to just — wait for it — accumulate more so that pile grows and grows??? Listen, bro: that pile may become toxic, but at least it’s yours. Don’t let anyone convince you to let go of the thing that’s suffocating you.
earth centered is human centered.
Considering how embedded patriarchy is in our language and lifestyle, giving form to Earth-Centeredness in a different way is also helpful: rather than conceptualizing what it is, think about what patriarchy is not.
A great way to consider what something is not is to look to the negative space: throw some metaphorical salt into the darkness to inform what that lingering outline of the unnameable but very present thing is — you know, those forces that create fields around which people and things orient — and there, you might find patriarchally sanctioned feminine traits:
Nurturing, mothering, care-taking
Niceties, niceness, pleasantness (aka social lubricants)
Community gatherings with underlying intentions of connection
Helping
Sensitivity
Supportiveness
Gentleness
Receptivity
Intuition
because traits deemed feminine in patriarchy are considered soft, they’re not valued.
But actually, I think that these elements of Earth are feared, because as Earth strengthens, there’s less space for patriarchal nonsense.
We can look to how those traits are systematically controlled and even erased. Patterns start to emerge:
The erasure of intuition from our sensory experience, both personally and collectively
Relegating beauty to a superficial level, equating it with youth and inexperience, rather than it coming from a space of confidence, rooted in self, full of experience
Deriding care-taking and nurturing; valuing it less societally
Clear devaluation of motherhood which goes along with the draining of women’s resources — we can look to the culture of American mothering as an explicit example of this, where mothers are pitted against one another, judgement of each other is encouraged, rather than existing within a village mentality of mutual helping
Encouraging “perfection” aka objectification (but i’ll say it ‘til I’m blue in the face: if something is perfect, it’s not alive)
Normalization of domestic violence
From there, we can think about what the opposite of that list would be and how it would show up in society:
What if intuition was valued?
What if beauty was considered something gained from life and experience?
What if caretaking was held on a pedestal in the workforce and in daily life?
What if we had robust social programs to support all members of a family, centered around the person who grew life in their womb and accounting for the physical and emotional impact of birthing a child?
What if instead of perfectionism, women collectively sought growth?
What if instead of shame, it was openness about what it means to be human?
What if instead of memes about how useless men are at maintaining a home, women and men both naturally and equally held domestic responsibility?
What if domestic violence was eradicated, instead becoming a social taboo?
What if greed was eradicated, instead becoming a social taboo?
What if women gathering and women’s minds were the basis of our social structure?
this sounds utopian, and Maybe it is — but it’s also the anthropological definition of a matriarchy.
Matriarchies aren’t women being in charge in the power structure; they’re circular in nature, with no top down, hierarchal power whatsoever and biological sex nor social gender construct matters to the role you play in that communal society.
So why can’t we have a utopia?
LET’S GO BACK TO AS WITHIN, SO WITHOUT.
If you think about the earth itself, and how the earth is oriented, and how the earth operates: it encourages matriarchal ideals.
Earth reinvests its metabolic energy into things that create life.
That’s the matriarchal society we’re dreaming up here.
The celebration of that which is alive and imperfect and messy is the actual joy of living.
The thinking of the natural world is creative. There are boundaries that, if you don’t abuse them, give rise to incredible abundance. There’s incredible beauty.
So the human beauty that stems from Earth-Centeredness comes from the same place that it does for the actual Earth: the fact that Earth provides strong boundaries through maintenance and practices allows for lush growth within those confines, which ends up resulting in beauty and abundance.
AKA, THE GRUNT WORK IS WHERE IT’S AT.
That abundance doesn’t get hoarded but rather, it gets used in life affirming ways. It’s sustenance. It’s oxygen-giving. It’s literally the circle of life.
It comes from a constant ability to regenerate and be renewable. It comes from the devaluing of what is toxic and disposable instead of prioritizing those traits.
so I want you to sit with me for a moment.
Circle back. Center Earth. What is Earth?
Earth is found in maintenance. Earth is found in repetition.
It’s the hum-drum. But then listen to that, because even in the phrase: there’s a buzz. There’s a constant. It’s soothing.
Humdrumhumdrumhumdrum…
Earth has boundaries and prioritizes regeneration and renewal.
Sit with those qualities for a moment. Look for them in your life.
And if you can’t find them, that’s ok. Do you maybe see the opposite? Do you see fuzzy boundaries and a lot of waste?
If so, that’s ok. Welcome to America. Welcome to the earth-space patriarchal humanity has cultivated.
There is a road back: to the actual earth, and to the Earth in you.
Circle back. Center Earth. Center your small practices. There will be big results.