What Traditional Chinese Medicine Taught Marylee About Healing (EP 127)

[0:14] Of my unhealthy podcast show where we talk about all those things about what you're supposed to do when you're exhausted sick, more often than you think you should be and we're trying to fix all those things one practical step at a time and.

[0:37] I should learn how to set my music properly my guest today Marylee Calmes and before she spent 30 years helping people understand, patterns in their health through traditional Chinese medicine she was the person looking for answers herself, so today we're going to have a conversation not about a miracle cure or some five-step wellness plan it's going to be about what happens when you stop treating your body like an inconvenience and start paying attention. Larry Lee, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I am as well. And I want to start a little differently than I do with most shows. I'm going to give you what I think traditional Chinese medicine is, and then you can correct me. Okay. Sounds good. Okay. So when I hear that this is what i think most people think it is.

[1:38] Acupuncture uh herbal medicine so all the teas all the non-traditional teas not just your simple green tea but, teas that you would you know crunch up the herbs and the mushrooms and stuff like that um, tai chi is that right that's how you say right tai chi yes um and that's where my knowledge ends well you're close, you got part of it down so Chinese medicine is a very old medical paradigm, why is that important western allopathic medicine is only 150 years old, and we all hang our hat on that hook not realizing that we have really good technology.

[2:27] And that's about where it ends. You know, if you are hit by a Mack truck, or if I'm hit by a Mack truck, take me to the ER. Because they're really good with trauma medicine. But they're not so good with every day-to-day living. Why does my hip always hurt? Why do I have a headache? Why do I have constant indigestion? They don't always solve those problems very well.

[2:51] But you asked, what is Chinese medicine? It is a medical paradigm that's based on the natural order of the universe. Now, we have around 4,000 years of written records, and it's probably more like 6,000 to 10,000 years old. So if you think about what life was like, let's just say 5,000 years ago, split the difference. People were still living in caves. their ability to survive was based on their understanding of the clouds the rain the season the snow if they misread, a cloud coming in then they could die i mean this was basic to them they had to know these things they also were hunter and gatherers at that point so yes they're collecting herbs.

[3:43] They have to heal themselves. That's sort of the foundation of it. And that might sound simplistic, but I was up in British Columbia trout fishing, And I looked up early in the morning, it was like 8 o'clock in the morning, and there was just a wisp of a cloud. And I said that it's going to rain later. My husband's looking around going, what? And I said, yeah. And he goes, when? And I said, 2 o'clock. And I think at 1.55 it started raining. So you can have that level of sensitivity to your environment if you pay attention. So the Chinese medical paradigm is also based on an idea that the ancient masters really didn't believe in an afterlife. They believed that they had to do all of their spiritual work in the life that was given them. And so they viewed it like a candle. You're born with a candle. And how fast you burn up that wax is dependent upon the flame. So they figured out, how do I control the flame? And then they figured out, how do I add wax to the candle? And we have records of them living 250 years. Master Niwa Ching, who's one of the men that I have studied with, is 106 and doing really well. Has no illnesses whatsoever.

[5:09] So it's just a different way of looking at the body. They looked at the whole body. The old doctors would actually go to your home. They wanted to know, was your home cold? Was it damp? Was it dry? What was your living environment like? So when you start thinking about it in those terms, then you can see where they developed acupuncture, they developed herbal medicine. Master Nee will tell you herbal medicine is more powerful than acupuncture. Because you're reinforcing the energies in your body every day when you drink the tea. When you have acupuncture, you get a shift for a few hours initially. As you have more acupuncture, you can hold the treatment shifts longer. But you're only doing it once a week typically. They have socialized medicine in China. So if you were in the hospital, you would have acupuncture every day. And if you went to the hospital, you could choose Western medicine, Chinese medicine, or a combination of both. So you have acupuncture, you have herbal medicine, nutrition. So the foundation of everything is nutrition. Because every single time you eat, you have an opportunity to shift your health. We don't think about it that way. We think, I'm going to have that big bag of potato chips.

[6:33] Because it's bioengineered food that is designed to make you crave it. It's not a whole food. So nutrition is the foundation, then herbal medicine, then acupuncture. Then you have qigong, which you didn't mention, but it's actually the precursor to tai chi. So Qigong is an energy exercise where you are sitting quietly, usually using a guided visualization to move the energy in your body. And we teach this. Well, if you've been standing on a log for two hours, and now you need to shift your position or go to another log, because they would actually do this on standing logs.

[7:19] They developed this motion which I ll try to do in the camera like this it's done lower in your body but it's this transition that's how you got to tai chi, so that beautiful movement is you moving from one stance into the next stance, and the purpose of those stances again is to work with the energies in your body to improve the flow of what we call qi, which is your life force.

[7:51] And it's all of these things together that make up Chinese medicine. It has a very big toolbox. I like to describe it that way. Or if you think about a wheel, every spoke on the wheel. Acupuncture is just one spoke. Herbal medicine is one spoke. Nutrition is a spoke. Qigong is a I spoke. Meditation, we use a lot of meditation, and not necessarily in the way Westerners think of meditation, not so much like blanking out your mind. It's using the meditation to move the energy in your body. So all of those things make up Chinese medicine. What's significant about that.

[8:34] Is if you look at allopathic medicine, they really only have three tools in their toolbox. They can drug it. They can cut it out. They can radiate it. Those are their tools. They don't have any other tools. So a lot of my patients will go to a doctor. They'll come back really pissed off because they prescribed a drug. And I'm like, well, what did you expect? This is the only tool they have.

[9:03] Let me ask. Because I know that I've had a lot of guests on and we've all kind of acknowledged that, the limitations of our, you call it Western allopathic, others call it, you know, the insurance-based medicine and all of that. Disease-based medicine. Disease-based medicine. So I, I, I didn't prep you for this, but I'm going to ask if we had, you know, somewhere around four to 6,000 years of healing our bodies, why do you think that we, as, and I'm going to say us as Americans, because basically when people talk about Western medicine, they're talking about us, that we have. In a sense, abandon that for the system that we have now.

[9:50] Any idea? Oh, I know exactly why. That's very easy to answer. So the Rockefellers, at the turn of the century, had been to Europe. They had hospitals there with stainless steel tables. And the Rockefellers decided that we're going to fund hospitals. We're going to make money off of changing the medical paradigm. Whether they thought it through quite that articulately or not, I don't know. But the Rockefellers were definitely behind. And they put all, so this is the other thing. Think about your great-grandmother. They didn't go to the doctor. They knew how to heal themselves. They trusted their body to heal themselves. But the Rockefellers said, no, no, no. We're going to put out, push, and they did, pushed out all the nature paths.

[10:40] Almost pushed out all of, um, tried to push out the chiropractors, I can't think of the name right now.

[10:49] It'll come to me. Anyway, they put a lot of money behind building hospitals, making it shiny, using stainless steel. Nobody came to your home anymore. You had to go to the office. You had to go to a different place. And it was all about them funding what their vision of health care was. And in the process of doing that they eliminated anybody and everything else and i can remember in the 70s, when the first westerners were going to China coming back with acupuncture and everybody just freaked it's like no way we're not doing that you know that can't possibly work, but in actuality it works really really really well and so if you don't and that's why people know acupuncture. They've seen it in a movie. And I remember, I can't remember the movie it was in, but they had acupuncture. And I tell you, they had every acupuncture point on a person's back covered in needles. And that's not how you do acupuncture, but it makes for good TV. So that also provides then misinformation about what it really is. But people have seen it in the movies. Maybe they know someone that's used it. Maybe not.

[12:08] I found in my practice that people came to me after they'd been in Western medicine for 10 years, and they just were not getting well. They had a chronic disease state. They might have cancer. I treated a lot of carcinoma, And they were out of options. They'd done every, and I have to say in my own health journey, you know, that's where I was. I'll lead into that part of my story. I was chronically ill in my early 30s. I had developed asthma. I had allergies, but they couldn't figure out what I was allergic to. So my eyes were bloodshot all the time. And they gave me glasses with clear glass in them, thinking maybe not quite so much air would hit my eyeballs. I was sick constantly. I was living in Seattle at the time. And in Seattle, it starts raining around September 15th, and it rains until July 4th. And I would be sick constantly, one cold and flu after another, those entire nine months. And then I'd been in a car accident, so I was having terrible, terrible headaches.

[13:17] And as they say, I went to many doctors, I went to many specialists. Here's another drug. We don't know what's wrong with you. Good luck. Hope those glasses work. Those were the answers I was getting. And I was very, very blessed, truly. I'm very fortunate because I met Master Ni Hua Ching. And Master Ni is a 78th generation Taoist master. And the Taoist masters developed Chinese medicine. And then the last 38 generations of his family, I think now they're on 39 because the kids are coming up, they all have practiced Chinese medicine. So 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes with one of the Ni family members was equivalent to a year of medical school. They are so good. And I started working with Dr. Mao Xing Ni, Master Ni's son. And Master Knee now goes by Omni, but I'm a little behind the times in changing what I call them.

[14:20] Anyway, I started working with Mao, and I was in Seattle, and Mao was in L.A. So I did it all herbily. And every month, I would get what you described. I would get a brown paper bag, like a lunch sack sized bag, full of stuff that looks like somebody went out on the forest floor and gathered it up and put it in the bag. And I was supposed to brew that up. And it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours to brew it, depending upon how long you have to cook the herbs. Stinks to high heaven, does not taste very good. And Mal's instruction to me, I had a very young child at the time, she was three. And he said, I want you to sit down three times a day for 20 minutes with a magazine and drink this tea. Well, after about 10 days, I called him up and I said, I think I have a lifestyle problem. I cannot do this. He was very young and he laughed. He literally laughed at me and said, well, when you master it, call me back. So those are my instructions. Okay. I want to get a little timetable here. So how long had you been dealing with all of this chronic stuff? I know you just mentioned that you, you know, at the time had a three-year-old, but was this stuff that you grew up with as a child, teenager, early adulthood? I would say early adulthood.

[15:44] And one of the things that I figured out, Marv.

[15:48] I didn't figure this out until I studied Chinese medicine, but this will show you. I was a premature low birth weight baby. The last thing to develop in an infant in the womb is their lungs. The lungs are responsible for your immunity. So I had very weak immunity. And I never made that connection. I didn't make the connection until I studied all this. But that makes perfectly good sense. So in Chinese medicine, this life force that we talk about, your qi, comes from three places. There's a genetic component that comes from your parents. There's a nutritional component that comes from the food that you eat. And then there's an air component from the air, the quality of the air that you breathe. So here in Central Texas, I have a really, really good high quality air. If I was in LA or Houston or maybe Denver, the air quality is not so good. And that would affect my lungs.

[16:52] The asthma didn't start until I was in that early, well, I was 27 when I had my child. But in that time frame, so you also have to take into account, and we don't do this in Western medicine, but in Chinese medicine, when you have a baby, it changes all of your energies. And in China, when you have a baby, either your mother or your mother-in-law, comes and stays with you for two solid months. And the teas that are brewed for you during that time period are designed specifically to restore the energy loss from childbirth. Because chi and blood are married. So if you're losing blood, you're losing chi. So you can imagine in a birth, you're losing blood. You have to rebuild that.

[17:45] So at 30, then, it all started to manifest, all of these different problems. And then you have the car accident. That can also set off a whole other set of energetic problems. And that's the thing. You know, Dr. Mao wrote in an article last month, and I highlighted this for you guys so I could say it today. The disease doesn't start with one big thing. It's hundreds of little things and little behaviors that then accumulate over time so if you look at me i don't remember being sickly really as a child, however having weak lungs coming into the world that then manifested two decades later right but so apparently so you weren't an athlete i guess well, i was i was in high school i was not in college okay um, because i was very i was very athletic actually i imagine if you were an athlete that would have come up with breathing and asthma and stuff yes but it didn't come up until after i had my child okay so what was the car accident that you had, i was rear-ended okay and suffered a bad whiplash Okay, so no broken bones or anything like that? No, but I was, again, very lucky.

[19:13] I was in a BMW because the car behind me had teenagers in it that were doing 50 miles an hour. I was stopped and they literally drove their car into the back of the BMW in the truck. So it was the fact that I happened to be in that car, which is very, very well built and very safe, is why I ended up having a lot of soft tissue damage but not having any broken bones. Right. And this was, so how soon was this before? Well, that was in, I don't know, maybe 95, 96, around then. So several years before. Okay. Right. But nothing technically manifested until you had your child. Well, I had the headaches. I'd been having the headaches, you know, for a very long time. Their answer to that was a very, very heavy-duty drug, which I didn't want to take, because then you're totally sedated.

[20:16] Was that during the rainy season in Seattle? Well, that was just after the car accident. I saw a neurologist, I think. They did all kinds of nerve induction studies. Yeah.

[20:28] But that's their answer. So nobody looked at the root of all these problems. It's all symptom masking. You have a headache. Here's the drug for this. You have allergies in your eyes. We don't know what you're allergic to. So here are some glasses. You're sick and you're cold. You have cold and flu all winter long. Well, good luck with that. I don't even think we had Tamiflu then. not that I would use Tamiflu but my point is western medicine is designed to treat symptoms, it's not used to get at the root cause I'll give you another example I worked with a woman this winter, she's in her 80s and early 80s and she is part of my membership online membership, and she had chronic sinus infections and pneumonia every winter for the last 20 years. Every single winter.

[21:27] And antibiotics every single winter. And she started working with me, and I said, okay, now wait a minute. Let's back up. What happens right before you get the sinus infection? Oh, I get a migraine headache. I said, well, then let's stop the migraine headaches. She did not have one, not one, cold, flu, sinus infection, bronchitis, or pneumonia for the last winter and spring season. And it never occurred to her, ever, that she had any control over it. She just thought that was her pattern, and it was going to be like that every winter. And she braced yourself every winter to be sick. And no, it's about recognizing the pattern, understanding your body well enough, going backwards to get at the root. And for her, at least the first manifestation of this process was the migraine headache.

[22:27] And you can stop headaches. I'll show you that because you like practical tips. I'm going to move this out of the way a little bit. So on your hand, there's a point right here. And when you... In between your thumb and index finger. And your index finger. And when you put your thumb next to your index finger, there'll be a little kind of hump there. It's right in there. And you can feel...

[22:55] Mine's fine today, but for people that have headaches, a lot of times that point is very, very sore. So if you just massage your hand, you're not trying to make a bruise, you're just gently massaging. What you're doing is you're triggering that acupuncture point. You're communicating to your body, fix it right here. This particular point is the empirical point for headaches. So if you just massage this point on both hands several times a day, maybe at night when you're watching TV or you're in the car at a stoplight, you can cut your headache pattern by 50% just doing that one thing. Now, does it have to actually be a lump that you feel or is it just... No, you won't feel a lump. You can just use, when you put the thumb against the index finger, can you see how it, I don't know how, it makes a little hump right here. That's just a landmark to help you know how far, because this bone is about this long. Okay, so it's the pushed up puffy area on the top. Yeah, that's just a guide for where to start feeling for that point. Okay. And it's up against the bone, so it's not on the surface. You have to massage a little bit deeply. And what I love about that is you can cut your headache pattern by 50% and it's totally free. And nobody's ever told you that.

[24:19] Of course not. Everybody said I make money from something, right? Yes.

[24:24] So, Marylee, let me ask you, how did you come along this path outside of your personal journey? I mean, were you wanting to do medicine? Did you go to medical school first? How did all of this come about? No, I went to medical school after I met Master Nee. Okay. So I had had an interest in medicine as a child, but I didn't come from a family that could afford to send me to medical school or afford to help me do any of the things that you need to do to get into medical school. So I didn't think medical school was going to be ever in my, you know, wheelhouse.

[25:06] I was also very interested in teaching, and I did study at the University of Washington, and I have a degree in psychology. And then I studied at Seattle University and obtained my teaching credentials, and I was a certified K-12 teacher. I mean, I've done a lot of things. And I had a business called Transformations Unlimited, which was a public speaking business, and I talked to Master Nee. I decided, well, it took me three years to reverse my disease states, so let me clear that up.

[25:36] It is something that takes effort, and it doesn't happen overnight. However, it works. And I think once you give people a little taste of something that actually works, they'll stick with it So at the end of that three-year time period, I had no asthma I had learned how to not get sick.

[25:56] I had really changed a lot of things I thought, okay, I want to study And I talked to Master Nhi And he said, yes, you can do it He said, it's going to be hard, but you can do it He said, not all women can do it Because of the energetics of yin and yang It was nothing sexist, it's just energetics.

[26:16] So I said, okay. So I told my husband I wanted to go to medical school, and we refinanced our house, and I went to Bastyr University, which was in Seattle. It started out as a naturopathic school, and then they added Chinese medicine. And what that meant for me as a student was a very, very heavily Western medicine-oriented. did. So in addition to all of my Chinese medicine, I did all of the Western chemistry, general chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, anatomy lab, cadavers, pharmacology, toxicology.

[26:53] You name it. I did all of that. And it was very hard because what we discovered, I'm a very, very good student. I love to go to school. I love to learn. And we discovered in medical school that I have a massive learning disability that had never been diagnosed. So it was hard for me because at Bastyr, if you were going to medical school at the University of Washington, you would take 15 credits a quarter, which is three five-credit classes. At Bastyr, we took 30 credits a quarter. So I would take maybe 15 credits of Western sciences. I would get up in the morning and go to clinic at eight o'clock in the morning. I would do clinic rounds until noon. Then I would do Western medical classes until 6 p.m. And then I would do Chinese medical classes until 10 p.m. And I did that for three solid years. I have three degrees in Chinese medicine. Graduated with two of my degrees. And then kept going to complete my Chinese herbal medicine certification. So it was a very, very intensive program. I'm very glad I did it,

[28:03] but I don't think I would do it again. Okay. So what was your actual learning disability? Well, it's a visual perceptual learning disability.

[28:15] My educational psychologist did not want to label it dyslexic, but it is a form of dyslexia. The reason she didn't was the insurance companies wouldn't pay for any intervention for dyslexia. Again, back to the money. But I don't see things, this is part of why Chinese medicine is so good for me, because it's very holistic. I'm a global learner. I see the big picture. I don't see the little tiny detail. So we use chemistry as an example. I was in a class one day, and the teacher had done all this writing on the overhead and many, many, many pages. And, I mean, I got totally lost. And I'm an older student because I was at community college for this particular chemistry class. And I raised my hand, and I said, I'm really sorry, but I don't know how you got there. Now, she knew I had a learning disability, and some kid in the class made a really snotty comment, and she said, oh, no, it's fine. Marylee just didn't see that back here, 15 pages back, I raised this to the third power because I don't see visual detail. So if I'm reading a chemistry book and the formula is at the bottom of the page, I won't see it.

[29:32] So I had to learn to compensate for all that. And I had to figure out a way. And the whole, the page just, is it kind of like a little, I don't want to say tunnel vision, but is it something similar to that? Well, it's, it's that you're, uh, the way they describe it. And I'll give you an example. One of the tests I had to take, um, you, they give you pictures and you have to describe everything that's in that picture. Well, things would be missing. Like it would have, you would see a house and it would have a fireplace with a fire, but there would be no smoke. There would be a fence in front of the house, but five of the boards were missing. I wouldn't see that there was no smoke. I wouldn't see that there were boards missing. My mind just naturally fills that in.

[30:23] So it's, you know, I'm an avid quilter. I've quilted for decades, and many, many times I've had to go into my husband and say, I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I just can't make this fit. And he goes, well, honey, you just need to turn it a quarter of a degree. You need to turn it a quarter of the way and it will fit. So you just learn to adapt.

[30:47] And I learned to adapt. And then I learned how to do things. I'll give you an example. Dermatology. I had a whole class in dermatology, tons of rashes, tons of pictures. So I took my guest bedroom, and I took every single, Sorry, I don't want to give you feedback. I took every single picture of that disease state. I put it on the wall with the picture, with the Western description, with the Chinese description, and the Chinese diagnostics and Chinese treatment. And every day I went in and touched every picture and read everything so that I could get it into my mind. So a lot of people know, I didn't know this, but a lot of people know when you're trying to memorize a lot of information, you create like a file cabinet in your brain. And then, you know, certain information goes in the first file and the next set of information goes in the next file. I didn't have any systems like that, because for me, knowledge comes from the etheric.

[31:47] It's hard to explain. All right. Okay. All right. So I want to dig more into TCM or the traditional Chinese medicine and talk about some of the practical things that you're doing, that you learn, that you're helping people with. But I want to ask one more question before we end this first episode. Okay. So I'm going back and looking at the timeline of all the stuff that you went through. And I want to understand, was there a specific point in time or something that you were going through where you were like, I can't live this way, that led you to go to the traditional Chinese method?

[32:36] Well, it wasn't that easy. Okay, so I knew a man in Seattle who met Master Nee, and he brought Master Nee to do a lecture. And I was one of the kind of inner circle of this man. And so I helped put together everything that we needed to do to host Master Nee. And part of your speaking business that, uh well no actually he was a realtor okay i sold real estate at one time, and um so it was part of just my connections with him, and so we hosted master knee and i had actually broken my finger in the middle of the night and i sat on the front row not knowing that my finger was broken like this was my middle finger.

[33:27] And um because it was just like Vroom, vroom, vroom. And then I was supposed to work Master Nii is a prolific author, and I was supposed to work his table of books, and I did. And at the end of this lecture, he said, I'm not going to take any questions. I've got to leave right away. He was setting it up so he wouldn't be bombarded. And there was a center aisle, and then the books were on the side. But he didn't go down the center aisle. He went down the side where I was, came in front of me, and bowed to me. That just blew me away. He knew my finger was broken, and I was still doing my job. So it wasn't that I went and sought out a Chinese medical practitioner. It was that I met Master Ni, I started reading his books, We brought his son, Mao, up, Mao's specialty. He's an internal medicine doctor, but he's also written numerous books on nutrition, and he has a PhD in nutrition. And so we brought him up to do a lecture on nutrition. And again, I helped put it all together. And so those of us that helped, Mao did a personal consultation with us. And that's how I ended up in this situation of using Chinese medicine. I knew nothing about it. Truly nothing.

[34:53] I truly believe I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for Chinese medicine. All from the listeners couldn't see the gesture that you held up, but all from giving him the middle finger. Yeah, my finger was broken. And what do they do? They can only splint it. They really couldn't fix it. But I'm sure he could see the heat coming, radiating off of it. He is incredibly intuitive.

[35:22] And you build your intuitive skills as you practice. They get better and better and better. Okay. All right. Well, I knew I took us a little bit off track by asking you to correct me and my understanding from the beginning.

[35:37] So with that, let's go ahead and take a break here. We'll get ready for a follow-up episode and get more into the practical part of traditional Chinese medicine. And you can help us move from noticing the warning signs to understanding what to do with them. That sounds good? Sounds fantastic. All right. Thank you, folks, for tuning in and for listening to this episode. And in the next episode, as we said, we're going to get into the practical part, what Marylee actually means by looking for patterns and how traditional Chinese medicine approaches health. And we're going to talk about something called seasonal living. So stay tuned. Follow us in the pod catcher, and we'll see you soon. Until next time, live healthy and be happy.