At the end of Enlightenweight there is the following recap summarizing the key points of the entire book:
“To warm and dry: Pungent, bland and bitter foods combined with sweating and breathing as though you are yawning.
To warm and moisten: Pungent, Salty sweet and oily foods combined with breathing like you are yawning. Continue reading
“You are made of Heaven and Earth-a delicate combination of gasses and microbial dust merged into an elegantly integrated whole….Master your microbiome and the world will become your garden, your pharmacy, and your playground.”- Enlightenweight
After 3 years and countless revisions it’s finally ready. We wanted to offer 3 versions.
Version 1: Kindle (Available now)
Version 2: Paper (Available now)
Version 3: Audiobook (Expected completion within the year.)
Enjoy,
Andrew Miles L.Ac and Qiu Xuelan Ph.D
Welcome to purgatory.
Eventually we all get stuck somewhere. Perhaps it’s a pointless meeting that carries on because some blowhard likes the sound of his own voice. Maybe it’s a high school graduation where you are subjected to a barrage of platitudes. We have all been there and you will probably have to attend more these things in the future. Think of it as an intense yoga posture. Go inward, find your alignment and use breathing to make the situation useful. There is usually something that isn’t flowing as well as it could. Relax your body, meditate with your eyes open, clap when you are supposed to and make the best of it. You can even smile, nod and give packaged responses without having to really be there mentally. In this way, you can make the experience restorative rather than soul sucking. If you don’t want to meditate, you can just sleep. We used to be active with the Lions Club. Other than the two of us, most of the Lions in our chapter were well over 70 years old. Every Wednesday at lunch, different speakers came in. Some of them were great, some had political agendas or were simply dull. When a speaker didn’t connect with the audience, you would know it. Many of the members would simply go to sleep. Many weren’t even subtle about it. Mouths agape, snoring, some would put their heads on the table. I thought there must be an epidemic of narcolepsy. As I investigated, I found that for some of them it was a conscious choice. I asked some of the members why they nodded off at times. One man answered, “Well, it beats getting upset over nothing.” Another man was over 90 years old and active in the club. He gave me the following advice. “Imagine if all the idiots and the arguments were all just gone. You are better off getting some rest so that you have more energy for the things that actually matter.” This may be sage advice, but unless you are retired, you might consider faking attention. After you retire, go ahead and sleep.
Off to my happy place.
You can make this facial expression even if no one is home. Nod occasionally and everyone will adore you.
How to Meditate Through Boring Meetings by Andrew Miles & Xuelan Qiu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at enlightenweight.com.
Reading time: 2 mins
The cold, dry air of the arctic causes life to slow to a crawl. The slow decay and sparse plant life contributes to poor soil quality. Plant life grows briefly in Summer and then must prepare for the icy hibernation of winter. Every animal in these environments must adapt. They insulate themselves in fat and burrow underground to create warmer microclimates.
In the arctic life itself seems to escape with every breath. The air pulls water and heat out of your skin. In the arctic, people need to stay warm and moist. As northern peoples eat nutritionally dense foods, it providing more metabolic heat. It creates a tropical greenhouse inside, serving as a climate barrier against the frigid landscape. To help maintain this barrier they use pungent foods such as leeks garlic or hard liquor to maintain warmth. Where pungent foods are scarce, sweat baths achieve similar effects. Smokehouses and saunas can be found throughout the Arctic circle from Scandinavia to Alaska. Continue reading
Reading Time: 3.5 Mins
Shaking
As the water flows over rocks in a river, you can see the wave rise above it. In a still pond, a pebble disturbing the surface will cause a ripple which will continue outward until it hits something solid and then the vibration reflects backwards. As waves travel through your body, you can feel for areas of tension. Use large waves and shorter waves and alter the frequency and pitch of the vibrations to find areas of hidden tension. As you begin to loosen up, your body will seek an efficient alignment. It is normal to feel some slight tension keeping you out of alignment. You may notice certain muscle groups pulling your body toward the unhealthy postures you might be accustomed to. For those who sit down a lot, Continue reading
Reading Time: 2 mins
The next time you see a child throwing a tantrum pay attention. You can learn a lot about how emotions influence movement. When kids are throwing a fit they tend to stay in one place and sort of flop about while screaming. Look at how the neck and lower back pull out of alignment. The emotional state is negative and they physically move toward the ground. They go limp as way to resist their parent’s attempt to get them under control. At some level we are all little kids. Continue reading
Reading Time: 5 mins
Mastering Movement
“People are born supple and soft. When dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant, at death they are brittle and dry. Whoever is stiff and inflexible is a student of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a student of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will endure.”
-Laozi
Where there is life, there are rhythms and waves. There is a pulsatile wave as blood moves through your body. There is rhythm to the waves of your cerebrospinal fluid which are bathing your brain and allowing you to read these words. Your brain moves and is shaped with every beat of your heart. Your cells have a rhythmic plasticity. By waves you swallow food. By waves, it travels through your intestines. You are now breathing in cycles of steady and rhythmic breaths and the vibrations in your larynx give you voice. Maintaining the flow of the forces in your body is the key to moving well.
Your body is constantly suffering shock. That’s a good thing. It’s an important part of life and these forces can help you. By using relaxation and breathing, you can smooth out the edges caused by life’s changes. It’s the difference from being brushed by someone passing you on a busy street and slamming directly into them. By keeping your body loose, you allow the forces that travel through you with every step to slide off of you rather than stopping in your joints and internal organs. Continue reading
Reading Time: 4 minutes.
Buddha taught his disciples to avoid eating after noon so they could enjoy life without illness, buoyancy of strength and a comfortable life. In Buddhism there is a saying that Heavenly beings eat in the morning, humans eat at lunch, animals eat in the evening and ghosts eat at night. This sounds really strange if you take it literally. Certainly animals eat in the morning. The point of this is not about angels or ghosts, but rather about the effects of darkness and light on the human body. This may seem esoteric, but when you think about it within the context of daily life it becomes more down to Earth. People act like jerks when they are hungry. Sometimes they act like demons. By contrast, a great breakfast sets the foundation for an amazing day.
Jesus, was a proponent of fasting. This may be why he is typically depicted with fabulous abs. While modern Catholic views on fasting are more flexible, it used to be that people were limited to one daytime meal per day. Most traditions of Christianity advocate fasting or intermittent fasting with a daytime meal. Continue reading
Reading Time 5 Min
In the year 1214, a sea of Mongols was poised outside Zheng Ding’s city gates. The citizens knew that at best it would mean seeing their parents slaughtered, friends tortured, and children enslaved. As the city walls held and the people waited in terror, they began dying. Chinese doctors began to observe that the stress was killing people. They were unable to sleep regularly, digest food and were succumbing to illnesses. At this time Li Dong Yuan needed solutions to the “modern” disorders caused by stress.
Li created new theories of Chinese medicine.[1] His theories eventually formed into a prominent school of thought based on the balance of the digestive system and its relationship to stress. Before that time, disease was thought to come mainly from bugs outside of the system. After the brutal lessons from the Mongols, Chinese doctors better understood the relationship between emotions and digestive health. Since that time, every major formula for digestion has taken the effects of stress into account. Continue reading
Reading Time (2 minutes)
SIGHING
When people are stressed they naturally sigh. This is how the body blows off steam and relaxes. The exhalation is stronger than the inhalation. When people are hot or stressed, they exhale forcefully with a “hhhaaaa” sound. It is similar to the way a dog pants on a hot day. When people are angry they tend to raise their voice of shout. This is because they are forcing out air with every breath. At a fundamental level it isn’t that different from Lamaze breathing during childbirth to alleviate pain. It’s quite literally how we vent. It’s how we expel. It’s how we cough and sneeze.If you need to “Get something off your chest.” This is a good way to do it. Continue reading
Andrew Miles, DOM & Xuelan Qiu, PhD 