Worrying about not having enough.

Or it costs too much.

I'm talking about how cheap it is and how it flows. Constantly. In our bodies. Through our bodies. Easily if we're lucky.

In Asian medicine it's called Chi or Qi.

Do you have a Chi Machine?

I do. I bought it in 1999 and have used it almost every day since. It's a lazy man's (or woman's) 20 minute meditation.

You lie on the floor on your back with your ankles on the machine and turn on the machine. It gently rotates your ankles. That's all it does. When it stops you feel like a river is flowing through you because your breathing oxygenates every one of your cells.

It was invented by a Japanese doctor from observing the motion of goldfish.

I first learned about Chi when a Korean MD hired me to write an article to explain Eastern medical practice to Western patients. (I earned ten cents an hour on that task. I had to go all the way back to Plato just to get started.)

Writers tend to have tight shoulders. By 1999 my shoulders woke me up every night shouting at me. The Chi machine shut them up for four years. Then I slipped in some grease in a gas station and turned back to Western medicine. I now have two new shoulders.

If you'd like one to cry on, let me know. But, back to ENERGY. Thanks to quantum physics proving to us that our bodies do flow, constantly, Eastern and Western medicine are merging to our benefit.

In a recent Chicago Tribune article, Ronald Kotulak writes, "Western medicine separated the mind from the body in the Middle ages when the famous French philosopher Rene Descarte agreed to accpet flesh and bone as the province of physicians, while the Catholci church claimed possession of the mind, insisting it was the creation of the soul.

"But Descartes, whose works were placed on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1667, believed the two really interacted in the brain. Using the fledging powers of observation and deductive reasoning that he was then developing, Descartes could conclude that "the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for."

"It's taken a long time, but doctors and psychologists are now bringing the mind and the body back together amid new evidence that the mind can improve the healing process in ways that traditional medicine can't.

"Unlike earlier notions about the mind-body connection, which were often based on anecdotal stories or simply "gut" feelings, scientists now can document through powerful imaging technology what Descartes could only deduce, that our thoughts are capable of producing dramatic chemical and physical changes that directly affect our health."

Acupuncture and acupressure are Eastern medical practices to balance the energy flow. Some say that the cause of all negative emotion is a disruption of the body's energy system. There's a distinction between feelings and emotion. You can have a negative feeling but it passes by much like a smelly truck. If it lingers more than five minutes it becomes a negative emotion.

A process of acupressure is now used to get the energy flowing smoothly again. It follows the meridian outlined 5000 years ago in Eastern medicine. And, evidently, it works.

It won't put gas in your car, but it will power your feet and heart.

Copyright (c) 2006 Cole's Poetic License