Wind and Liver Blood: Using Wood Qi to Set Goals and Reach Them
Wind is energetic chaos: instead of steady, calm movement toward a goal, a hurricane. Strengthening liver blood helps only when the patient learns to use it. Here are the methods for using wood qi in practice, from setting a goal to reaching it: ten techniques and a fifteen-day plan in plain language, with your clinical reasoning in separate boxes.
- Subject
- How liver blood and wind affect the ability to plan and to finish what they start.
- Methods
- Ten techniques for everyday tasks, a fifteen-day plan and a cheat sheet.
- Format
- 84 pages written for the patient to read, with the clinical reasoning in separate boxes for you.
For practitioners, and for the patients you hand it to.
Read the first two chapters
The first two chapters take away the explanation your patient has been giving about themselves, and show you why your treatment results do not hold. Read them here, in full, before you decide.
Chapters 1 and 2: This is not a willpower problem (full text)
Chapter 1. This is not a willpower problem
Let's start with a sentence you have probably heard about yourself, and that you probably repeat about yourself.
"I have no self-discipline."
It is a convenient sentence, because it explains everything and requires you to check nothing. It is also, in most of the cases I have seen, untrue, and therefore harmful, because it points the effort in the wrong direction. Someone who believes they lack discipline does one of two things: tries even harder, or gives up and decides they are simply "that sort of person."
Both roads lead to the same place, and I will explain why in a moment.
Notice something that does not fit the willpower theory. A person supposedly lacking discipline is perfectly capable of:
- getting up at six and running, for three weeks straight,
- inventing five variants of a plan for every situation in a single week,
- starting to redecorate a room,
- reading everything on the internet about a subject in one evening.
These are not the actions of someone with no willpower. These are the actions of someone with plenty of energy for starting and very little for finishing. That is an entirely different problem and it needs an entirely different solution.
What this looks like in the treatment room
For years people have come to me with a list of complaints that at first glance has nothing to do with goals: neck tension, cramping headaches, brittle nails, dry eyes, light sleep, irritability, a tight band across the chest, racing thoughts.
And somewhere halfway through the appointment, in passing, comes the sentence: "and I never finish anything."
It is said as an aside. It belongs on the same list.
Because follow-through, the ability to hold a direction when an obstacle appears, is not a character trait. It is a resource. Resources are spent and rebuilt, and they can be spent frugally or wastefully. This is a book about how to stop spending wastefully.
Chapter 2. The car at high revs
I have an image I use in the treatment room more than any other, because it lands with everyone regardless of their background.
Picture someone who learned to drive a car at permanently high revs. Five thousand revs a minute, in every gear, all the time. Driving to the store, five thousand. Driving back, five thousand.
The car moves. It arrives. Technically, everything works.
Except that it is loud, it is unpleasant, fuel consumption is several times what it should be, and the engine overheats. After a while the fuel starts running short. Later still, the heat begins to damage the structure of the engine itself.
What does the driver do? Fills up. Tops up the fuel, tops up the coolant, takes it to the garage to have the engine cooled.
And then drives off, still at five thousand.
That is, in my view, the most accurate description of what happens to most of the people I see. Diet, herbs, supplements, acupuncture, a vacation, a weekend at a spa, all of it is topping up the fuel. It is sometimes necessary and sometimes effective. But if the person never learns to change gear, every liter you pour in will burn as fast as the last one.
A gearbox exists so that you can go faster while burning less. Most of us were never taught that we have one.
For practitioners
This is also the answer to why in some patients "the effect does not hold". The treatment supplies a quality of energy, the patient feels better for a few days, then returns to baseline. If the patient does not use that new quality in daily life, the body has no way to consolidate it. The vibration alone is not enough; repetition in practice is required. That is why recommendations are part of the treatment rather than an addition to it.
The practical consequence: a recommendation has to be small enough that the patient will actually do it between visits. A recommendation the patient does not carry out is not a recommendation; it is a wish.
That is two of twenty-two chapters. The rest of the book is what the patient does with it between your treatments.
Everything that is in the book
Twenty-two chapters across five parts, ten of them techniques, plus a fifteen-day plan and a cheat sheet. This is what each one gives you.
PART I. Why the enthusiasm dies: Why you can start anything and finish almost nothing, and why trying harder made it worse.
- 1. This is not a willpower problem: Why someone who can run at six for three weeks straight is not short of discipline, but of something else.
- 2. The car at high revs: The image I use most in the treatment room: why every vacation, supplement and course tops up fuel you burn straight off.
- 3. The cult of activity: How much time passes between finishing something and thinking of the next thing, and why the answer is usually none at all.
PART II. The three places it breaks: Where your particular version breaks, the six ways it does, and what it costs the body.
- 4. Movement has a beginning, a middle and an end: Six different faults hide behind “I never finish anything”, and most productivity advice only ever treats the first of them.
- 5. The price the body pays: The physical bill for years of open projects (dryness, tension, light sleep), and the point at which you see a doctor instead.
- 6. Check yourself: A two-minute test you fill out with a pen; it counts your check marks and sends you to the technique that fits.
PART III. Ten techniques: Ten methods, one per chapter, and the test in chapter six tells you where to start.
- 7. Invert the ratio: 80 to 20: The hardest change in the book, and the one that separates real thinking from the racing thoughts that cost just as much.
- 8. Experience, not possession: If you read one chapter, this one: why a goal you can own never satisfies you once you reach it.
- 9. Blowing out the candle: An agitated mind sets agitated goals (too big, too fast, too many at once); this is what to do before you think.
- 10. The GPS: Why you collect courses, gear and contacts that might come in useful, and why you do not need to know the route.
- 11. Determination is water, not fire: For the person the first obstacle stops: determination is not gritted teeth, and hitting more balls teaches you nothing.
- 12. Kaizen: a step so small it raises no fear: You are not lazy; the goal is too big to approach. Here the surprise is being forbidden to do more.
- 13. Chewing gum: Why “I will do it every day” means never, and what the Kaizen chapter leaves out that makes it come apart.
- 14. From when, not by when: For anyone who only works under last-minute pressure, why deadlines cost so much, and the one word to swap in their place.
- 15. The maths test: For the five-projects-at-once kind, and the chapter that argues “I cannot solve this” is a correct ending rather than a failure.
- 16. One at a time, even with many goals: What to do when you have a dozen goals at once, and why a clear goal is mainly for refusing things.
PART IV. Rebuilding the resource: What to put back, why it comes fourth rather than first, and what needs your doctor.
- 17. Sleep before midnight: If I had to pick one thing from this part, this is it, and you can test the claim on yourself.
- 18. The movement nothing replaces: The one thing I will not pretend a supplement, a herb or acupuncture can replace, and how little of it is needed.
- 19. What the Liver likes: How Chinese medicine thinks about eating for the Liver (broths, greens, fats, one carbohydrate meal a week) and the supplements I skip.
PART V. When you do not know where to go: The questions technique cannot answer, including the one where there is no goal at all.
- 20. The questions that come up most: Four questions from the course, including impossible goals imposed at work, and one I answer honestly with “I do not know”.
- 21. Powerlessness and fear: For the reader with no goal at all: why fear makes sense here, and why one very small goal is enough.
- 22. What to do with this book: The likeliest outcome is that you put the book down and nothing changes; this chapter is written against exactly that.
And at the back: A plan you can follow, and the page that says what this book cannot do.
- Appendix: fifteen days, day by day, and the cheat sheet: Fifteen days, one task each, with permission to miss a day, plus one page showing where it breaks and what helps.
- Safety, and when to see a doctor without delay: Every caveat from the book in one place: what to check with your own doctor, and what needs attention without waiting.
Who teaches
Wind and Liver Blood: Using Wood Qi to Set Goals and Reach Them
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