Fire is Life

On Vitality

Yang. Vital fire. Without it we’re cold, limp bags of meat, which is a kind of rude corollary (a contrapositive, technically) to the Sanskrit slogan, “agnih ayuh:” Fire is Life. That fire is also death goes without saying. As Thom Yorke put it, “everything…in its right place.”

Of course, like so many things, vitality exists on a spectrum, with a wide band stretching between ‘burning bright’ on one end and ‘keeled over’ on the other. Most of us exist somewhere in that grey zone most of the time.

The bad news is the terrain is tilted. It’s all too easy to slump towards the lifeless end of things as we age. You don’t slump all at once (usually), but by degrees. Especially during a pandemic, or when the Southern heat keeps you indoors for months, or when…you see, there’s always an excuse for ceding a little more ground. Insidiously, you don’t realize what’s happening, like the proverbial fish in the slowly heating (or in this case, slowly freezing) pot. You just wake up one morning and realize you’re lackluster, depressed, demoralized—and wonder why.

It would be irresponsible of me as an herbalist to suggest that all depression boils down to yang deficiency (in Chinese medicine terms) or low agni (in Ayurvedic ones), i.e. a lack of basic vitality. There are other ways we can get stuck, clogged or funked up, and each requires a particular treatment approach. (The herb liver qi-disinhibiting herb chaihu, or Bupleurum sinensis, deserves its own post in this respect—a good topic for springtime, when this herb is most badly needed.) But let’s not discount low fire, as we can call it, as a major culprit.

As my main herbal teacher, the eminent clinician Dr Heiner Fruehauf insists, yang deficiency is more like a modern epidemic, a result of dietary and lifestyle factors, environmental toxicity, antibiotic overuse, and a slew of other causes that conspire to sap vitality.

Deficient yang is rarely the only factor in a given case, but it’s rarely absent, either. It’s an underlying stratum that eventually must be addressed. Fruehauf likens treating this layer to scoring a goal in a game of soccer: all the rest, the dribbling and passing, is for the sake of this.  

And that’s the good news. In their experiential wisdom, East Asian herbal traditions have shaped potent tools to restore the yang. Chief among these is Aconite.

This herb constitutes a big and interesting topic I won’t go deep into here; for those interested, Fruehauf has written several articles on the subject of this most yang of medicinals. Suffice it to say that this plant, a deadly poison in its raw state, is transformed through a series of heat treatments into a life-giving medicine capable of recharging the life-battery of the Kidney yang.

Take it from the horse’s mouth.

My own recent slump was of the yang-deficient type, as it finally struck me after a timely divination session (another topic again).

Once I realized why I’d been flagging, I went out to the apothecary and made myself a formula containing 50 grams of zhi fuzi, Aconite slices rendered perfectly safe yet highly potent. The difference was immediate and tangible: after the first dose I went, quite simply, from lackluster to lively. I’ll spare you all the physiological details, but I’ll say my complexion brightened up and I had my first good workout in too long. (Granted, my system is unusually sensitive, making me something of a canary in the coal mine when it comes to herbal effects: what I feel after one dose might take others several days to note.) Overall I was reminded of the net effect of taking a formula like this, when needed: like having your pilot light re-lit. Not a bad working definition of yang.

It’s all enough to make you wonder who ever figured out that wild Wolfsbane from the Sichuan mountainside was worth experimenting with, and how many lives were lost in the process. But such is the way with ancient wisdom traditions: the good stuff gets passed down. It’s enough for us to pay attention, and be thankful.