HE A LTH & HEA L ING


THE MYSTICAL CHI CYCLE & THE MAP TO DESTINY Part 9 – Sleep and Astral Chi by Jost Sauer


You can’t fix insomnia once you are in bed. You address it at heart time, in the middle of the day, by consciously switching from yang over to yin. After lunch I make myself wind down and aim to be home by six. My work is not finished; it never will be, and neither will yours.


I USED TO DREAD GOING TO BED, so much so that the bedroom should have had one of those ‘tremble ye who dare to enter here’ signs hanging over the door. It was a room of pain, and not in the 50 Shades of Grey sense! Each evening I’d put off going in there as long as possible until, practically asleep on my feet, I had no choice. The minute I lay down the torture would begin: the buzzing would start in my head, my thoughts ran riot, I was jumpy, hyper-alert and bone-tired all at once. I’d toss down medicinal herbs and formulas, or chug on wine straight from the bottle in a desperate attempt to anaesthetise myself, all the while willing myself to sleep, but I couldn’t ever ‘fall’. It was so frustrating I’d get up and wander around the house, exhausted with burning eyes, and sometimes just sit down somewhere and cry. I’d finally manage to get to sleep an hour or so before I had to get up and do another 13 hour day at my health centre (definitely something wrong with that picture). Although I didn’t know it then, each


sleepless night meant I had again missed out on the most mystical and spiritually significant parts of the entire chi cycle. Sleep is what they call ‘astral chi’ in Chinese medicine. Astral chi is infinite, it is chi from Heaven, it replenishes us. This is why sleep is nurturing. When you sleep your liver cleanses your blood and your soul returns home. Sleep is so magical, so special, that the entire day is a preparation for it. Making your breakfast a cosmic dance of chi, going to work in an altered state, dining with the emperor for lunch, spending the early afternoon feeling ‘stoned’, winding down, doing


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some intergalactic travelling in a mystical meditation and forgetting everything in creativity and sex, sets you up to drift easily off to sleep. And once you do, the orbs (the divine consciousness in your organs) take over. Between 9pm and 11pm as cosmic chi floods your san jiao (an invisible organ) preparation for the journey of your hun (ethereal soul) gets underway and from 11pm to 3am, as cosmic chi activates your liver and gall bladder in turn, your soul travels home to the astral spheres. It receives guidance on your destiny from your spiritual mentors and soul family, and also the courage for you to follow your path. Then, at 3am, as cosmic chi moves to your lungs (the organ that ushers you into life) your soul returns to your body (if you always wake at 3am it means you don’t have the yin for this to be a smooth transition). At 5am, as cosmic chi activates your


large intestine (the organ which is responsible for getting rid of the old and bringing in the new) you can maximise the benefits of your soul’s overnight spiritual fact-finding mission, by doing a chi practice. Then the destiny gateways line up before you, ready to guide you through the day. Each day your knowledge of who you are and what you are here for becomes stronger. It’s a fantastic cosmically holistic health and happiness system but you need to be able to sleep for it to work, and these days insomnia and sleep disorders are rising. With nearly half the population of this country affected by this. In Chinese medicine sleep disorders are lifestyle related. Sleep is the ultimate yin activity and insomnia is due to organ imbalances, an unaligned lifestyle and over-exertion,


worrying and excessive thinking, and / or over-stimulation from too much sugar, coffee or television which overload the senses and injure what they call the ‘yin organs’. As a result your mind and soul (hun), which are supposed to be feeling snug and comfy in these organs, can’t settle and they become homeless, restless wanderers. Back in the 90s, in my insmonia days,


I was under the influence of the success gurus and my lifestyle was so unaligned that, from the perspective of my orbs, I had become like some deranged landlord who had evicted the organs’ most precious tenants – the mind and soul. So there was nothing for them to work with. At the time, of course, I thought I was doing ‘everything right’; I’d get up early, go to the gym (I had temporarily stopped doing tai-chi thinking it was too ‘slow’) and work hard all morning. I would stop for lunch, but then I’d plunge back into another eight or nine hours of highly stressful intense work. I’d eat late and make phone calls, trying to get on top of everything and build my business. I was following the instructions to do ‘whatever it took’ to get material success. Mystically though, I was doing what it took to create failure because I was being yang, yang, yang while the cosmos was descending into yin around me and eventually I could no longer switch off at night time. It all ended in tears (a couple of grand mal seizures), after which I had to sell my business – so much for ‘success’. It did make me develop a healthy respect for yin though. I got back into tai- chi, the structure for yin, and changed the way I lived – and sleep came back. You can’t fix insomnia once you are


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