We've always discussed the body through the language of our time, culture, and environment. The metaphors we choose, drawn from the world around us, have quietly shaped how we locate, name, and relate to the body's inner landscapes… Our ancestors looked inward through the lens of their worldview, seeing in flesh and bone what they knew in earth and sky.
The ancients described channels of life force flowing through us like irrigation lines through a field, like rivers winding through the landscape. They envisioned vasculature and other vessels as waterways, rivers, marshes, and brooks governed by the rhythms of elements, movements of the stars, and changes of the seasons. The body was a small reflection of the universe around itself, a part of a living ecosystem, as an organ makes up a system, makes up an -ism…
What was happening inside was a reverberation of what was happening in the environment and the larger cosmos; a dynamic interplay between inner and outer worlds that continues to shape our understanding of health, even if we've forgotten to name it as such. Organ systems could be said to be exalted or to their detriment within the conditions of the outside world. The liver, for example, was said to be influenced by the season of spring, but during the transition from the long, cold winter, this free and easy wanderer becomes cranky and agitated—Grampa Liver’s been nippin’ at the brandy again and ain’t quite ready to wake. Neither are we, for the most part, especially up here in New England, and who can blame us?
We’ve been cooped up indoors, fighting the cold, wet winds, mounds of snow on the ground; Mother Nature clearly and relentlessly calling to our circadiem to stay inside, take the season off, to slip into a long torpor… Meanwhile, we're still stuck at work after dark and dreading the traffic jam on the long commute home.
As the sun begins to re-emerge and we internally flip an optimistic switch, from standby where our vacuum tubes have been warming by the hearth, to overdrive, ready to screech and snarl in summer’s sun, only to be attenuated with more cold, wet weather. The ceaseless rains melt the snow. The snow floods the rivers. The rivers kick up the debris from fallen leaves in autumn, broken branches once glistening icicles—a beauty so laden its sheer gravity tears the limbs from their trunk.
Echoes of what was, dammed up when the river was low, are now no match for the melted snow and the tumultuous showers of “mud season.” And our debris bursts out into the world and onto the scene with us.
It's not hard to see this doctrine of signatures in our corporal temples. Our lungs look like trees, mirroring the forests that conspire with us. They have branches and twigs, even leaves of sorts. We breathe in what the plants breathe out and out what the plants breathe in—a reciprocal reflexology, an interconnectedness of communication through the element of air.
Other than in the writings of eclectics such as Culpeper and Stone, the influence of Aries over our heads and Pisces over our feet seems to exist only in vague mention in this week’s astrological column. The moon, too close to ignore, still seems to have some mysterious effect on us. As it pulls on the tides, it brings out our animalistic wilds when it's full. There are old wives' tales in the healing arts, whose origins are lost to the khronos. One such prognostication involves not harvesting plants for medicine on or around the full moon.
One could be forgiven for assuming this was some sort of superstition which became dogma long after we'd forgotten the why. It never seemed to have any substantive effect on my medicine-making endeavors, one way or another. That is, until I moved from the hot and oft dry climate of Texas to a cooler, damp one, and found that my first herbal oil extraction had succumbed to the mold.
Retracing my steps, I realized that I’d harvested the flowers on the day before a full moon, when the plant was, as I would learn, retaining more water. In addition to this "Ah, duh!" moment, I immediately came to another realization for a pattern I had noticed in my back pain clients, which only became more pronounced after the move to cold, damp New England.
Why did joint pain flare-ups, especially in the spine, seem to come in cycles or waves? Why were my lumbar pain clients all filling my books back-to-back?
I then noted that these flare-ups were within a day or so of full moons. I also started noticing a flood of last-minute bookings just before the rain rolled in. Suddenly, "I can feel the weather in my bones" was starting to click. What seemed like some kind of strange esoteric woo now had a somewhat logical explanation—or at least a potential hypothesis.
Humans, like plants, retained more water around the full moon (and less around the new). Our insides are subtly more bloated and swollen, sometimes, and more dry and contracted at others. If the sludgy synovial-filled intervertebral disks were even a bit fuller, it would pull those tiny little muscles of the transversospinalis and intersectionals a bit more taut, which would irritate or activate any latent trigger points and make things just a bit more grumpy.
Grumpy, too, might be any synovial sac creating a joint pain uptick.
Similarly, when the barometric pressure shifts outside, it changes the pressure inside our bodies—another reminder that our internal state is intimately tethered to the environment, that we are still microcosms within a greater atmospheric macrocosm, thus having a similar effect on the joints.
These are observations not learned from books. They emerge from seeing patterns in the world around us. We are pattern-recognizers now. Once we were observers. Still, further back, seekers and shamans. In the age of pocket computers, we can quickly bridge the gaps between what we observe and what we collectively know.
Our metaphors for the body are not simply poetic, though they certainly are that. They describe the structure and function of the body through the lens of the culture they came from. This helps create diagnostic and treatment methods, explains prognosis, and nudges us when it's time to change directions.
We still use volumes of metaphoric language to describe the body to this day. While our boney nomenclature doesn’t necessarily rival the names of acupuncture points, there are some such as Leg Three Miles (ST-36), Union Valley (LI-4), and Cloud Gate (LU-2) we can compare to the Cuckoo Bird (coccyx), the Little Key (clavicle), and the Raven’s Beak (coracoid process). All of these are named in a similar vein. They are telling us something about that point. Someone, examining the tailbone, named it coccyx because they thought it looked like a cuckoo bird. The clavicle resembles a skeleton key, and the coracoid process is like the beak of a raven coming off the wing of the scapula. Leg Three Miles is both located on the leg, but is also in the musculature most associated with shin splints… so by treating that area, one might be able to walk for three more miles. Cloud Gate sounds super woo, but, at least on one level, is referring to the space at the lungs' upper region. Union Valley denotes its literal location on the body, in the valley, where two ridges meet (1st and second metacarpal).
We talk about the nervous system like a forest; it has branches and twigs, but it also has well-worn pathways, and in the case of neuroplasticity, we can even forge new ones.
These metaphors, from the maps of old to the modern atlas of the body, are bridges that help us travel between what we observe and what we can prove. By learning to see the body through multiple lenses, we begin to see it more completely.
And to those who have the nerve to attempt to dissect all traces of mysticism and metaphor from the lexicon of our anatomies, you will have to pry my Achilles heel from my cold, dead malleoli.