This photo of actor Michael J. Fox as Hotel Conceirge "Doug Irland" in the movie For Love of Money. Also featured is actor Anthony Higgins as Christian Hanover.

White Weaver Truth Tribe members are the connected people.  These people honor the code of the White Truth Clan as they hunt voraciously for truth, information and in seeking to sort chaos into understandable patterns.  What they don’t do is restrict themselves to a laboratory, subject or argument.  White Weaver Truth is on the border of Blue Sky, the gateway to it.  This close to the border, a White Truth tribe member has to be adept at dealing with the inherent chaos and mystery of life.  White Weaver Truth is a wheeler, and dealer–a mover and a shaker.  She is the mail person who knows how to score drugs; she’s the hotel concierge that has good contacts in the jewelry district; she’s the neighborhood informant who’s plugged into everything; she’s the library manager or bookstore attendant who reads absolutely everything.  White Weaver Truth makes it her business, not just to know things, but to know who to go to or through to get what you need.

White Weaver Truth strikes a balance between knowing that the world is full of mysteries that can’t all be solved, and the insatiable need to solve them.  White Weaver Truth strikes another balance, able to work hard on a chosen subject, but still remain socially available to the world.  White Weaver Truth Tribe members think well on the go, remember quickly, and discern immediately between the banal and the subtly significant.  White Weaver Truth can go to great lengths to discover, and then give up when he determines that it’s of little use to continue.  For a member of White Truth Clan, White Weaver Truth is abnormally worldly; savvy.

White Weaver Truth is not lazy, but is hardworking and consistent when he’s following a scent.  He does, however have a tribal obsession with finding the most convenient or efficient path.  His background consideration is always “what if I or someone else ever has to do this again?”  They want to make sure their efforts are leveraged for maximum return, which includes not only getting the job done but establishing how it is best done.  Over a lifetime, White Weaver Truth accumulates specialized knowledge that makes them a powerful resource to have on your support team.  They’ll know where the best deals are, who the resident experts are, what the latest gossip is, and where reliable resources are.  They won’t likely known them all, since they probably didn’t go about this in a systematic manner.  Rather, there’ll be a hodgepodge of specialized knowledge.  Get two White Weaver Truth Tribe members together in one room, who’re from the same neighborhood and in the same line of work and they’ll argue all night, each having come to a distinct best way that’s different from the other’s.

Being well-connected to other people involves knowing and using certain social skills that White Weaver Truth has or develops.  A certain adroitness is involved in connecting without that connection getting too deeply or sticky.  This natural but strange super power that White Weaver Truth may have in abundance can also result in a personal problem: a tendency to be shallow with people they care about.  The White Weaver Truth Tribe member can find themselves too on-the-go to maintain any depth to their relationships; may be too much of a wheeler-and-dealer to appear trustworthy; may seem too easy-going all the time to believe that there is any depth of feeling.  Everyone agrees that White Weaver Truth is great to know, and a go-to person when you need something unusual, but everyone may suddenly wake up to find that no one actually has them by to dinner.  Perhaps you’ve tried to get them to sit still for some friendship time, but weren’t able to entice them long enough.

There’s no trick to healing a White Weaver Truth Tribe member.  Their illness rarely has anything to do with their life purpose, although it may result from hazards of their tendencies: fatigue, injury, or exposure to uncommon elements.  Seek out healing for the White Weaver Truth person the same way you might for anyone else.  However, if you’re involved in the upbringing of a White Weaver Truth youth, encourage them to explore and advise them to remember people’s names and contact information.  Don’t press them to be thorough or deep, but help them to learn the importance of distinguishing between sources and loved ones.  Help them develop an efficient method for leaving people feeling loved.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ
Qigong Instructor
I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2011. All rights reserved.

Image "Scientist" courtesy of marianuniversityscienceblog.wordpress.com

White Cardinal Truth Tribe members get down to the business of determining truth in individual things.  In the flow of unknown data into the known, whereas White Polar Truth was more concerned with defining the line used to distinguish truth, White Cardinal Truth picks a side, so to speak, and focuses more on more intricate definitions for the incoming items.  White Cardinal Truth has an increased (compared to White Polar Truth) appreciation of finer distinctions and complexity.  White Cardinal Truth can hours of time focusing on defining or learning something.  Most of the time for them, realization is its own reward, without the need for public acknowledgement or sharing the realization with others.

In order to focus on such find distinctions, the White Cardinal Truth Tribe type can only deal with a limited amount of chaos.  Though the White Truth Clan is typically more comfortable with chaotic situations than Yellow Fire Clan or Red Blood Clan, this tribe within White Truth will only exhibit its unique behavior when surrounded by an environment that’s suitably stable.  In a pristine environment, White Cardinal Truth will become a slave to doctrine, protocol and form.  In a messy, changing environment, White Cardinal Truth will seem more like its tribal predecessor, White Polar Truth, or its tribal subsequent, White Core Truth.  Given the right tools, White Cardinal Truth will be too depressed ahead of time by expectation of failure to even give it a try.  White Truth Clan is a scalpel–very effective when used delicately.

White Cardinal Truth can apply its attention to its own life, but one more often finds these tribe members either unable to or uninterested in dealing with the details of living day-to-day.  White Cardinal Truth habitually misses meals by oversight, works late without noticing, and ignores necessary protocols with loved ones.  In humans, this quality quickly results in poor brain and body function, which inhibits the effectiveness of White Cardinal Truth‘s true calling.  This tribe, more than most, benefits from having a Red Blood Clan member in their lives, supporting and nurturing their private lives.  White Cardinal Truth Tribe is also hampered by the occasional rut.  Like the robotic vacuums that can end up in a loop, vacuuming the same 2 feet of space over and over bumping into an obstacle, the White Cardinal Truth person can become so hyper-focused that they find themselves unable to back up sufficiently to find a new route to the truth, or understand their error.  A Red Blood Clan member would in this case advise the poor, stuck White Cardinal Truth person to get some rest, and get their minds off it for a while, which is not likely to help.  The Yellow Fire Clan member would likely enumerate the many other things they could be doing, or fire away multiple ideas of what could be going wrong, which the now myopic White Cardinal Truth member isn’t likely to register.  A fellow White Truth Clan member might be able to help, but may be too focused on their own goals to get down into the detail with their colleague.  The most likely to be helpful when a White Cardinal Truth is in a rut, is a member of the Blue Sky Clan.  There’s a unique slipperiness and charm to Blue Sky Clan members that hypnotizes White Truth Clan member will weave a web of illusions that disorients a White Cardinal Truth person enough to require that they start their thought stream over from the beginning.  This reboot will usually be enough to reveal to the able White Cardinal Truth mind that went wrong in the first place and give them the space to adjust.

White Cardinal Truth is easy to make ill but difficult to kill.  Life forms born into this tribe tend to weaken quickly at first and then more slowly in an asymptotic curve that often has them hanging on for years, not getting better, but not getting worse, as everyone expects them to.  This gives them plenty of time to heal or be healed.  As with most tribes, it can help them heal to do what they’re alive to do, but in the case of White Cardinal Truth, they heal best when they are away from their main work.  Returning to work should be the last portion of their healing process, the one that sinks them back into life’s bliss.  However, you can do much for their healing by organizing and sanitizing their environment.  Everything in its place, understandable and clear, is harmonious to their best state.  The seeming contradiction is that they’ll be unusually susceptible to healing by Blue Sky Clan members.  Find a first rate mysterious healer, and you may find your normally pessimistic White Cardinal Truth healing quickly.  They’ll never believe that’s what did it, but again in this we see the strange connection between this tribe and the Blue Sky Clan.

Don’t abuse the magic Blue Sky Clan connection.  Blue Sky Clan members also have the potential to break White Cardinal Truth‘s heart and instill insidious doubt in them.  White Cardinal Truth does not handle doubt well; it’s their kryptonite.  This isn’t the same as uncertainty, which they breath in comfortably as a part of their regular work.  They know that there’s much that they don’t know; this thought thrills them.  What kills them is the thought that what they think they know may not be so.  This produces an endless loop of checking that can never be resolved.  One can never prove absolutely that one is right.  One can only believe themselves to be right, assume it, and move on to other things.  Once doubt creeps in no amount of proof will remove it; only faith.  Matters of faith irritate White Cardinal Truth.  They’d much rather believe that all thigns can be reduced to true values, beyond questions.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ
Qigong Instructor
I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2011. All rights reserved.

Image "trehuaco" courtesy of patagoniamonsters.blogspot.com

Blue Weaver Sky Tribe type is the mad dog of the Blue Sky Clan.  There’s nothing silent or unknown about this tribe member, unless you count being virtually unable to predict what he’ll do next.  This expresses itself in an odd duplicity.  Blue Weaver Sky will let everyone know exactly what he stand for, and cares about, and he’ll stick to that.  Blue Weaver Sky will stand by his choice forever, no matter what.  His loyalty is steadfast, warm and full of humor.  So, he’ll be consistent.  What he won’t be is predictable in how he enacts his values.  He prizes drama, revels in surprise, and loves to laugh.  He’ll point his thought and intellect toward inventing new and interesting ways to stick to his stated principals.  He’ll set patterns, fully planning to break them someday, unexpectedly, maybe even spontaneously, and in a way that is visible to everyone.  He’ll pride himself in the look of fear in his friends’ or enemies’ eyes, because they’re not sure what he’ll do next, or if his boast it idle.

Blue Weaver Sky people believe that life is full of wonder, creativity and unexpected events.  They’ll think of this as an excuse for behaving wildly and without consideration.  As far as they’re concerned, it’s only natural.  A Blue Weaver Sky person may have an exceptional sensitivity, concern or interest in those things that are natural or organic.  Life to her is an incredible, intricate Diaspora of wonder and excitement; the ultimate surprise.  She is fierce in all things, including sometimes in how gentle she’ll be.  This is to say that when she’s gentle it will be intense and pact with purpose and feeling.

Blue Weaver Sky Tribe is the last tribe before the outpouring that is the Yellow Fire Clan.  As such, it serves as a kind of precursor or precondition for the birth of Yellow Fire Clan traits.  Yellow Fire is creativity, and the bursting forth of the new.  Weaver Tribe is often about weaving together many traits and creating portals or gateways to other clans.  In many ways, Blue Weaver Sky exhibits traits of the Yellow Fire Clan.  You could say that Blue Weaver Sky is in love with Yellow Fire; appreciates her beauty; savors her fullness.  But, Blue Weaver Sky isn’t a member of Yellow Fire Clan.  He keeps himself empty, ready to burst forth.  He doesn’t create anything in such a way as to establish or build.  Rather, he creates brief flashes in order to suprise; anything he does consistently, he hopes to wipe out again with something unexpected.  So, he likes to keep things empty–a blank slate.  Thus, he aligns with his true clan in this behavior: Blue Sky Clan.

Blue Weaver Sky thrives on company and action.  She’ll experience discomfort, pain and ultimately illness in the absence of these.  Help heal her by offering her opportunities to regain them–the more people, the better; the more action, the better.  The people don’t have to be paying attention to your Blue Weaver Sky member; she likes drama for its own sake, not just for self-aggrandizement.  The action doesn’t have to be for Blue Weaver Sky, though if you blink twice, she’ll be in the thick of it.  Again, for it’s own sake, not for her benefit.  Still, both the company and the action will be like an infusion of fresh blood, and help whatever else is ailing her to heal.  The particular mojo, the magic elixir, will be to witness nature in the act of doing what Blue Weaver Sky always yearns to do.  Give her an opportunity to witness an active volcano, a gushing geyser, a hunting animal, a field of plants just peeking through the ground, a prison riot, a police bust, a rescue effort, and, tragic or not, you’ll invigorate and inspire her.  Another instant healer is to ask Blue Weaver Sky to help you out with some mission–the more impossible or inexplicable the task, the happier she’ll be to stand by you.  If your Blue Weaver Sky is ailing, choose that moment to take on that garage re-model you’ve been putting off, or start your ice cream parlor stand-up comedy club; tell her you won’t succeed unless she can help.  You’ll never see someone heal so fast.

Blue Weaver Sky is Disney’s Mr. Incredible; he shouldn’t be in a sheltered job pushing paper.  He’ll wither and die, or “go postal,” laughing all the way.  Get Blue Weaver Sky on a ship trawler, mining expedition, high rise construction site, even cast him as a zookeeper, particularly at feeding time.  It doesn’t have to be glorious, just active and social.  He’ll show uncommon loyalty, and valor.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ
Qigong Instructor
I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2011. All rights reserved.

Image "Blue Shaman" courtesy of stixandjones at imgfave.com

Blue Chime Sky Tribe is the “shaman.”  This individual has chosen to be born into a tribe that is haunted by intuition and a mysterious connection to deeper meaning and ancient knowledge.  What occurs writes itself upon the Blue Chime Sky Tribe member’s psyche as it occurs.  They know and understand the significance often even the interrelationships, but they never know why they know.

Blue Sky Clan isn’t only about chaos; it’s about the mysterious pattern that runs through what appears to others to be chaos.  Chime Tribe Types are about clear, clarion tones sounding and communicating out to others.  In Blue Chime Sky, the characteristic of being able to see and appreciate that pattern and sing the message to others comes to the fore.  It may end up dominating the tribe member’s personality.

This particular tribe struggles with a message that is usually too big to be transmitted through individual members.  The capacity to know without knowing runs through these individuals like a river and it can feel to them as though their Selves occupy only a comparatively small portion of their being, and one not sufficiently leveraged to take control.  They are mouthpieces for nature and meaning, singers of ancient songs and repositories of lost knowledge.  Everything that has ever occurred has been retained by nature in some very subtle hum, or rumbling at the core of reality, and this tribe is attuned to that rumble, as though they are its harmonic.  It plays them like a bell.  They’re compelled to speak these messages.

Blue Chime Sky, like its tribal siblings in the other clans, is a communicator.  Their life purpose is linked to communication.  Unfortunately, no ammount of communication is enough for Blue Chime Sky.  The universe keeps talking, spewing forth memory of everything that’s gone past.  As each moment passes, more is fed into that stream.  Blue Chime Sky may have trouble knowing when to stop communicating, or with discerning what communication is in appropriate timing or for the situation.  There’s rarely relief for this tribe type in communication.  Their mission seems endless.  Also, because the data stems essentially from nature’s recording of all that’s occurred, the communication can ultimately seem purposeless to the Blue Chime Sky Tribe member.  Like an elderly chrone, retelling mundane stories to anyone who’ll hold still, stories she’s told them before over and over again, the Blue Chime Sky person can experience a kind of choking uselessness; a condition that may be singularly mysterious to them.

Like all Chime Tribe types, healing will always begin with helping them to get things off their chests.  They must communicate.  If their communication form is a musical instrument, then the player must play.  They must find the right words, the right song, the right message–whatever is choking them must come out.  What relief they can experience will come from freeing at least the current message; there will then be piece until the universe chooses them again as a mouthpiece.  Next in importance to helping and caring for the well-being of a Blue Chime Sky person is helping them find purpose in their lives.  Help align their talents to a worthwhile outcome, even if that outcome doesn’t pay well or yield much glory.  The Blue Chime Sky doesn’t need glory as much as he needs self-respect.  His sense of himself will seem so small already in comparison to the messages that seem to compel him, that what helps him to balance is a mirror that reflects his true self to him writ large.  The third step, like the first, is communication; but in this step it is to solicit the Blue Chime Sky person to talk of his personal feelings and experiences–to let them chatter of small things, that reveal nothing more grandiose than themselves.  Let their lives fill up with more minutes in which they are just a regular human being with regular problems and feelings; minutes they can remember and lean on when the universe calls them again into service.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ
Qigong Instructor
I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2011. All rights reserved.

Blue Mystery courtesy of ettagirl.wordpress.com

They say that, “it’s always the quiet ones.”  The phrase is meant to indicate that what seems to be a quiet, unassuming, perfectly normal person can hide the deepest secrets, including the most extreme behavior.  Often this is used to identify that a person who has been discovered to be a serial killer or rapist was observed by people who knew him to exhibit no qualities that they would have taken for violent, angry or aggressive.  The illogic that someone who is quiet should be seen as a potential danger is a notion that would please a Blue Core Sky Tribe type.

The core of chaos is largely indefinable.  This tribe actively resists being defined or letting things be defined.  They may behave in a manner that is specifically designed to break with a convention they believe has been attributed to them, and for no other reason than to defy the convention.  They may obsess over research to find an exception to an assumption.  They may also behave consistently in a perfectly non-descript fashion, choosing to keep their difference hidden and to themselves, happy that they’re fooling everyone.  This tribe member is not devoted either to outer communication nor inner search, and is capable of either or both.  Thus, if the person believes that there are hidden mysteries in everything, they may opt to live for trying to convince others to look more closely; alternately, they may live a life in which they search themselves endlessly; and finally, they might choose to live their lives with that knowledge, observing the glorious chaos and mystery that unfolds in them and outside of them, without choosing to share any of their discoveries or ideas.

Given that the Blue Sky Clan is absorbent by nature, one might assume that the Core Tribe of this clan would be the most accepting of all.  Unfortunately, it isn’t that clean, since the Blue Sky Clan is also chaotic in nature.  Blue Core Sky does, indeed, have the capacity for supreme acceptance.  That acceptance, however often takes a form that isn’t expected or fully understood.  An historical figure forms a good baseline for the kind of “acceptance” that Blue Core Sky affords: Thomas Beckett.  Whatever the realities were, the story of Thomas Beckett’s impact on England and the rule of King Henry II was powerful.  By all accounts, he was born of an artisan who made good, raised as gentry, and squired to an Archbishiop for years, becoming a devoted and loving friend to the man that would be King. At one time sharing a father-to-son-like relationship with the king, once he was assigned the role of Archbishop, a role he strenuously objected to accepting, he transformed.  By accepting the role, he accepted the requirements of the position to an extreme, and took these requirements not from his King, nor from the Pope, but from the scriptures, and from the historic needs of the church in England.  He scourged himself as a sinner in the Catholic way, strenuously defended his clergy and their rights, and expertly managed the political downfall at least of his King’s reputation when it came to matters religious.  Thomas Beckett didn’t want to become the Archbishop, but once ordered to do so he accepted the position so completely that he became someone new, totally unknown to those familiar with him.

Blue Core Sky is slippery in all things–just when you think you’ve figured them out.  It is therefore difficult to describe precisely in what way they are valuable.  Nevertheless, valuable they can be: loyal, helpful, forgiving, staunch, hardworking.  The mistake would be to ever consider them reliable.  Consistent behavior over time will, for Blue Core Sky Tribe members, never be enough to indicate that they’ll continue to behave in that manner.  This tribe enlivens the notion, “what have you done for me, lately?”  Whatever they’ve done for you that’s good, consider it a gift–they may never do it again, and they’ll not even require themselves to have a reason for the change.

On the subtler side, this tribe can often be prevailed upon to communicate their own unique view on a mystery or the value of something new.  The depth and eloquence with which they can sometimes share their deep appreciation of the subtleties of creation, the joy of emptiness and peace, or the inherent pattern that remains in what appears to be chaos, can be staggering.

Don’t attept to help or heal a Blue Core Sky person, unless you’re willing to have the hand that feeds bitten.  You can never be sure if their issue or malady is real, or if they’ll accept help, though they might appear to.  If they do need help and you help them, their gratitude wouldn’t be automatic, and perhaps shouldn’t even be expected.  They’re not naturally mean; rather, there’s an open doorway in them that for most remains closed, and this doorway allows for inner acceptance of behavior that might outwardly be considered anti-social.  A better policy for those who wish to interact with Blue Core Sky Tribe members would be to figure out what is a safe amount of distance from them that you need to keep in order to be pleased by their nature, and then from that distance appreciate whatever they have to give.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ
Qigong Instructor
I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2011. All rights reserved.

Easy Rider Pop Art Canvas Print from Modern Canvas Art

With the Blue Sky Clan it’s especially important not to put too tight a definition on things.  This clan specializes in the unknown, exploration and mystery, so to define it or call it out is to remove it from the influence of the clan.  Much must remain mysterious in order to really capture the nature of the Blue Sky Clan.

Blue Cardinal Sky is the “easy rider.”  There is direction and movement but no goal in this tribe.  Rather, the velocity is determined by something they’re moving away fromor through.  For this tribe, to remain in one place for long or to become familiar with something is to die.  Thus, life is lived on the road to nowhere.  Like many Cardinal Tribe Types, the journey is the important thing, but for Blue Cardinal Sky, the focus is more internal.  The journey brings peace and joy to the soul, so as long as they’re on their way, they’re getting better.

The most beautiful journey though is through the rough and wild.  The more known, tame or sanitized the environment, the more the Blue Cardinal Sky Tribe member’s soul withers.  There’s something invigorating, therefore, to this tribe in witnessing adversity and chaos.  When voices start to rise across bar and epithets get thrown, the Blue Cardinal Sky Tribe member cracks a smile and eases their way over to the source, to be handy if a fight should break out.

These metaphors are colorful to set an idea up, but not to limit the manifestation of the tribe.  It’s perfectly possible for the Blue Cardinal Sky Tribe member to find their calling as a scientist in a lab, or a Senator’s aide; a master cellist, or devoted father.  They aren’t born masochists, psychopaths or sociopaths.  Rather, their tendency is to abhor the known and banal, and seek out constant change and challenge.  Thus, the scientist will always yearn to study new species, or go on research missions to little known places.  It’s fine if the places are at least little know to the tribe members only; better if they’re little known to anyone.  The Senator’s aide will prefer the politician who gets into more scrapes to the one who’s morally upright, or politically consistent.  The master cellist will torture him or herself to find some level of music or artistry that’s never been acheived, or perhaps seek to specialize in obscure pieces, or master dead instruments.  He or she will love to tour.  The devoted father will be up for anything, seemingly tireless to the demands of the various schedules of his family.  He’ll revel in every achievement his kids or wife make, morn with them at losses, and adjust quickly when they change their minds.  He’ll believe that we learn best from experience, and may honestly believe he doesn’t know what’s going to happen as a result.  How can he be sure?  The world’s a marvelous mystery.

You see?  The journey is the thing; the change; the action; the motion.  What should effervesce from this explanation is that there’s never any real goal, unless it’s just there for show.  Consequently, if a Blue Cardinal Sky Tribe member is raised to believe that he or she should have a purpose, or set goals, he or she may find themselves often depressed with life.  The goal often feels like too much burden for no good reason, and if they truly search and find that they have no deep-set purpose, they’ll judge themselves harshly and unnecessarily.

These negative descriptions indicate the conditions under which the Blue Cardinal Sky Tribe member can become ill or unhappy: if they are, or feel themselves to be, tied down; when normalcy begins to feel predictable; when goals get in the way of adventure; when they can’t find the rough and wild; or when forced to be definite about the future or their purpose.  The healing is the opposite: free them up; shake things up; make room for side trips on the way to a goal; help them find an unrefined landscape; remove the requirement on them that there be purpose in their actions.

It’s also important to understand that the rough and wild isn’t limited to the physical landscape of the planet.  The Blue Cardinal Sky Tribe may choose landscapes of a different kind: that of artistry, politics, morals, or mind.  If the tribe member is confined or lost he may turn his desire to sojourn in on himself, seeking adventure in self-destructive behavior.  This tribe is more prone than many to engage in excess, even to the point of suicidal behavior.  When they suicide, they’re not seeking the goal of death, but rather the freedom implied in not knowing what will happen.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ
Qigong Instructor
I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2011. All rights reserved.

Though Blue Polar Sky may choose a side, Yellow or White, it doesn’t employ the its neighbor’s inherent tools.  If, for instance, it prefers to champion spontaneous creation, it doesn’t do the creating.  Rather it would gather up pre-conditions and present them to the Yellow Fire.  The dynamic might be of clearing away distractions and building a rumbling potential, or on the other extreme destroying what was to clear the way for anything else.  This is as much as can be pinned down about the Blue Polar Sky Tribe type, who will vacillate in methods and preferences.  We intend to give you a gist only on this type, which by nature is poorly known or understood, and likes it that way.

On the other hand, the Blue Polar Sky might choose the side of White Truth, of assimilation, and just as readily create preconditions for it.  In this, Blue Polar Sky, once again, doesn’t take part in the identification or categorization.  Rather it harnesses those who are in need of structure and escorts them to those who can provide it.  In this way, Blue Polar Sky often accompanies or assists missionaries or first responders.  They throw a blanket over the cold and speak soft words of encouragement and then escort them to a shelter.  They leave them at the door and head out to find another lost soul.

Blue Polar Sky may make this choice of allegiance more than once in their lifetime, but they don’t tend to vacillate between the extremes often.  This isn’t because of desire–they do desire a change of goal–but because of personal empathy.  Once a side is chosen, the Blue Polar Sky Tribe type is strangely drawn to its choice by an inner longing, and it has difficulty steering away from it.  This tribe manifests a strange tendency to make outward choices first that resound deep within, and are then unable to make new outward choices that contradict the inner concurrence.  Over time, however, the ripples of an old choice can quiet and leave the Blue Polar Sky Tribe member free enough to choose anew.

Another duality of this tribe is its tendency toward exhaustion and over-activity.  The Blue Polar Sky Tribe type can’t sit still, or cease doing things, and yet is eternally tired, sapped somehow from the start and never fully recovering.  This tribe empathizes in a summary way, experiencing what others feel so completely that it can rejoice in its own charity.  However, it can also be devastated by the pain it encounters.

You help Blue Polar Sky heal by finding ways to appreciate them and then remaining close to them for a while.  Your own buoyancy will eventually be felt inside the Blue Polar Sky Tribe type and they will be uplifted by it.  But, don’t try to stop them taking action, which will only make things worse for them.  It isn’t in the nature of this tribe to take joy in its life choices, or to indulge.  Souls choosing this tribe to be born into are determined to resolve some repetitive issue occurring over the course of multiple past lifetimes by giving a their life to the others, or re-aligning their patterns to the needs of the masses, rather than so totally to themselves.  This tribe wouldn’t be a soul’s choice seeking happiness or pleasure.  Choosing this tribe, however, doesn’t preclude their experiencing happiness or pleasure–it’s just not the point of their life.  The Blue Polar Sky Tribe member or those who know one, rarely can discern any clear purpose to this life.  They make choices and do their best, but it doesn’t appear to have a beginning or end.  The reason is that it’s a kind of recalibration life that gets its definition straight from each experience.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ
Qigong Instructor
I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2011. All rights reserved.

Dealing with Fatigue as a First Symptom – #2

In my last blog, I began to focus on first sign indicators of trouble in your health and what you can do to intercede on your own behalf, with the symptom of fatigue.  We’re not trying here to replace or remove medical advice or intervention.  We do want to focus on how we each as individuals have the power to take positive constructive action to heal ourselves and maintain stellar health.  In blog #1 on the subject of fatigue I established what fatigue is, how it feels and how it relates to degrading health.  In this entry, I’d like to assess what can actually be done about it.  Okay, you know you’re experiencing fatigue; now what?

Initially, you will take steps to return yourself to a higher state of balance and health—steps that may not be necessary to keep up indefinitely.  But, all health maintenance involves a process or system of keeping yourself in balance that does and should involve regular habits over your entire life.  It’s likely, in fact, that you had these habits already but allowed yourself to deviate from them, the result of which is the fatigue you now want to address.  The bottom line here is that you should think of your recovery as a two-step process: step one is to restore you health, and step two is to learn or restore the habits that will maintain your balance.

First step, rest!

The first thing that people think of doing about fatigue usually is to rest.  This solution is most often appropriate; however some may have developed a skewed understanding of how fatigue relates to rest.  Perhaps you’ve experienced walking for 20 minutes, feeling a bit tired, sitting for 5 to 8 minutes, and then feeling well enough to keep walking.  Your muscles were fatigued by unaccustomed activity and when they received a little time of inactivity to re-orient their functioning and move some chemicals around, they seemed to regain functionality.  Eventually, you might have found that your muscles filled up with such a backlog of toxicity that they went limp.  At that point, a few minutes of rest were no longer enough to restore functionality and you had to scale back your activity for the rest of the day.  This whole story of how the muscles need to be treated in oscillating cycles of activity and rest, in which we all may have some experience, affords a skewed view of the relationship of fatigue to rest, because it is true mainly only for musculature.  General physical fatigue is not limited to the muscles, and thus offers a different story, altogether.  Treating the body as a whole—as a system—as though it was merely a collection of muscles, and fatigue in the system as though it were no more than tired muscles, suggests a false expectation of recovery.  If you already implemented rest as a solution, but didn’t understand why the rest you were getting wasn’t restoring you to health, consider the above suggestion that altered parameters (between your expectations based on musculature and the reality of your whole system being fatigued) may be playing a part. 

Rest can be acquired in many ways, and each provides different benefits to the body, and to different parts of the body.  Since we’re exploring the symptom of fatigue without a specific diagnosis to go along with it, we have to look at all the ways we might have become fatigued and address them.  You may get more benefits from some options than from others, but to empower you in general, I’m going to recommend trying a spate of solutions as one package of action, to make sure you’ve covered what your body really needs.

We can begin the list of rest options with the list of questions provided in blog #1 of fatigue, in which a series of seven questions were given to help identify if fatigue is an issue that needs addressing.  By resting in some manner that reverses the negative answers you may have for these questions, you address your fatigue comprehensively.  You can be creative and express yourself in such solutions, rather than to merely follow some suggested steps by wrote and rejecting the whole system if those suggestions don’t work.  However, I know that many of you like lists to follow, rather than open-ended questions to answer for yourself, so I will make suggestions now.

Question #1 addressed your assessment of your enthusiasm and inspiration, but your systemic problem may be rooted in higher functions, rather than baser ones.  Is it possible that you’re not enthusiastic because task was scheduled without first being evaluated against your highest ideals and preferences?  Even physical health may not make something you don’t want to do more appealing.  In other words, rather than your problem being physically rooted, you may be emotionally, mentally, socially, psychically or spiritually hung up on something, and as a result experiencing a loss of enthusiasm and inspiration. 

If you’ve lost your enthusiasm for what you’re doing, it should be simple enough to know you should stop doing it.  Refuse to continue until you can be enthusiastic about it.  Alternately, if for instance we’re talking about your employment, and you wouldn’t consider just not going in to work a viable solution, then you could commit right now to doing something about this enthusiasm thing, if you have to stop all of the rest of your life to do it.  Often, committing to yourself in some beneficial way can restore enthusiasm.  The reason this is so is because your assessment of your life is one thing when its negative, but it is entirely more desperate thing when you ignore your needs, wants or feel impotent to change it.  Making a promise to yourself can relieve the desperation and offer a prioritized view of your immediate future, releasing some tension that was packed in around the unaddressed problem.

Even physical fatigue tends to revolve around the same issue of taking up tasks without proper assessment.  Lack of enthusiasm is most often an internal comment on the quality of your planning; you’re pursuing a schedule that hasn’t been adequately adjusted for your stamina, whatever your current level is.  You’ll only get so far borrowing on your body’s physical “credit card” before you’ve relinquished all flexibility in your health.  It is important not to push past the realization that you’re not up to completing your schedule.  When you build the capacity to adjust your schedule, revise it as you go along, relative to your sensation of the reality of your enthusiasm and inspiration, then each task on it won’t seem like such a chore.  Often, it isn’t the task that’s the problem; it’s the notion that there is no room for mistakes or time to enjoy the task that makes it seem uninspiring.

Question #2 asks after negative internal dialogue.  We often find ourselves leery of having to wade into our own minds and take charge.  Americans in particular want everyone in their lives to act as though what’s in their minds isn’t their fault, their responsibility, or under their control and to just deal with any fallout that comes from that belief. 

This preference is a learned behavior that stems from cycles of denial and family shame that we’ve inherited, generation after generation, throughout history.  One hundred years ago, people had to develop public personas that were highly stylized and restricted, and devote every private moment in their lives to maintaining this false persona.  The fallout from this necessity was often considerable, but the social norm was to collectively share the burden; everyone collectively ignored the fallout.  People ignored what were often beastly public behavior, heavy drinking, child abuse, mob actions, infidelity, and hundreds of other vices. 

One hundred years ago was only about 4 generations, the time of the great-grands.  Just because we live 4 generations later and seem to be free to be ourselves, doing absolutely whatever we want, whenever we want to do it, doesn’t mean that we’ve learned to be healthy or wise.  It doesn’t mean that we’ve figured out who we are and are committed to being that.  It doesn’t mean that we know exactly how to treat others and respect their autonomy while preserving our public sphere of harmony.  Quite the contrary, we are much like domesticated dogs and cats, who’ve by our new found freedom from the necessity of false personas have been let out of the house. Absent any containment measures we are suddenly out of all control, treating each other in ways that often betrays deep seeded resentments, old hurts, habitual mistrust, disapprobation and lack of hope.  Domesticated animals don’t quickly revert to wild behavior—they don’t simply become their true selves—when removed from restraint, but they will express the dysfunctional behavior to which they were accustomed while they were pets.

Our desire to leave internal dialogue untouched is itself a symptom of illness; a fear that we won’t be able to make heads or tails of it; that we’ll be labeled insane and then ostracized.  If we just had a little faith in ourselves, and operated on the belief that we are each of us fundamentally a benign, powerful, spiritual being that has come here to earth to manifest in all our glory and splendor, we’d be tripping over ourselves to get a psychologist to help us clean up the dross and get at that great person that we really are.  Perhaps for some it is hard to simply make that assumption; to have that faith in ourselves.  My argument to those of you who fall into that category is:  how’re you going to know for sure that you aren’t unless you dig out the true you?

If your evidence of fatigue is negative internal dialogue, then responding doesn’t necessitate a professional, a couch, and 6-16 weeks of sessions.  It can simply start with an effort to harness your thoughts into positive statements, like “I will,” “I can,” and “I do.”  If you can’t think of what you will do, or what you’re actually capable of in any given situation, then this personal work can aid you greatly in charting your way out of fatigue.  By asserting what isn’t possible, you fail to entertain options for improving your situation.  Just because you’re fatigued doesn’t mean you’re powerless to change your situation advantageously.  Fatigue is mostly a symptom, rarely a disease; nip it in the bud before it becomes one.

Let me share a personal example.  Once, long ago, I was advised by my sister to bring the internal dialogue about an issue out into the open so that I could analyze it.  I wrote down several statements that were essentially the words that were passing through my brain while I fretted over the issue.  It was an issue of romance, and we were discussing why I tended to float around the women I loved as though they were the main thing and I merely a satellite.  Why couldn’t I be the main thing in my own life?  Why couldn’t I be the peak of the pyramid? 

One of my discovered internal statements was, “without someone with which to share them, beauty and romance is wasted on me.”  Essentially, I couldn’t relax into beautiful situations or enjoy the romanticism of an event unless I was in love with someone and they were present as well.  My sister later advised me to “flip the coins” on all of those statements, basically doing what I’m advising here about positive statements.  When I flipped the coin of this example, I had the statement, “I will absorb and represent the beauty and romance that I’ve experienced.”  There were other statements that went along with all this, but I hope the point becomes clear with just this one.  I made a positive statement, “I will,” and reversed the psychology of the inner dialogue.  I took responsibility for being an observer and a sensitive entity in situations in which I’m the only observer.  I emphasized being valuable and having purpose.  From then on, when I started thinking in the old way and recognized it, I’d recall my flipped coins and run through them mentally, to try to replace the software.  

This was about 10 years ago, and I in no way think that way anymore.  I love being in romantic situations on my own.  I get such a kick out of beauty that I often don’t want anyone else there ruining it.  Thankfully, I’ve also found the one person who can be in all of them and make it even better.  Bottom line, with steadfast attention and repetition you can replace your internal dialogue with statements that serve you and in doing so expand the personality from which you operate.

Question #3, discomfort or pain in various tissues of the body, requires several types of solutions.  If your muscles and nerves are habitually causing pains, then your actions must address these symptoms soon, because the next level of illness may involve immobility.  That’s when your fatigue really does become difficult to address on your own, because your own capacity to act is suddenly, severely limited.  At the level of discomfort or pain however, as a sign of general fatigue, you can still intervene on your own behalf.

I’ve edited out of this blog a long explanation about nerve function and processing of sensory information, but the next paragraph now seems confusing.  So, I just want to say that information registered by the senses becomes chemical and electrical and then passes through the body to be processed for an appropriate reaction.  Since we sense far more than we do anything about, if the central nervous system doesn’t get rid of that information quickly, a backlog of chemical and electrical signals can develop that sits in the body around areas where the system failed to enfold them.  Excess chemical and electrical activity can overflow out of nerve endings into the surrounding tissues and is registered as discomfort and pain in those tissues as well as the backlogged nerves.  So, the pain to which this question refers will now be considered backlogged information, and the solution involves decongesting those clogged areas of that information.

Decongesting the information backlog in nerve endings and the surrounding tissues requires deep rest, the kind you get after one or two cycles of REM-state sleep.  As you fall asleep from such a condition, you’ll find these uncomfortable areas are firing up a lot.  It can be difficult at first to get comfortable, or fall asleep.  Your body may suddenly stir or jolt so much that the movement wakes you back up.  Your thoughts may race the moment you close your eyes and allow yourself to relax.  You may remember 12 things that were on your to-do list that you never got to and believe that you have to get back up to finish them or lose tomorrow’s productivity.  I once taught a meditation class in which a new student burst out into tears within 5 minutes of the beginning of the meditation, and had to leave the class.  I later discussed her experience with her and she related that she keeps busy so that her mind won’t have time to assault her like that; that she’s basically not ready to deal with the onslaught of her own thinking, left untempered.  She affirmed that she often had trouble sleeping unless she was so exhausted she passed out, and she’d be up most of the night doing things.  She clearly needed a more gradual process of decongestion than to start meditating.

All of these responses to the attempt to rest are attempts on the part of your nervous system to relieve the backlog of information through the Central Nervous System (CSN).  All the images that your eyes took in but weren’t able to properly analyze get shuffled back into the brain for more intricate analysis or to be judged unimportant.  If you’re failing to get what you believe to be rest out of these attempts, don’t despair.  Your backlog may be so great that you’re not descending into healing sleep, but the backlog is still being addressed, because you’ve chosen to stop adding new sensory input to the backlog, and given your body time to start sifting.  I know what I’m talking about when I share your pain about this level of fatigue.  It isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t feel like its working.  You often feel more fatigued afterward than when you started.  Trust me, then, when I say that you are better off for the attempt.  The apparent increased fatigue represents a level of physical fatigue unmasked by the tension you were carrying; you’re just more aware of the rest you need.  Don’t stop!  Get back to it as soon as you can manage it.  You’ll pass through the hourglass eventually to a sense of improvement.

In addition to the cognitive sorting process, the chemical structures that harbor the remembered information can degrade over time.  As long as they aren’t resupplied by repetition of the information, your body may dump the entire store of excess input during a deep sleep by processing the chemicals out of the problem areas.  In other words, keeping up the activity may only re-supply or re-emphasize the same information that was backlogged in the first place.  So rest is partly removing yourself from situations in which the same old things clog you up.

If physical discomforts were your problem and you were able to get sufficient rest to restore fluidity, then it becomes important to address the tendency toward information overload.  Sensory information doesn’t just have to get overloaded.  Overload often results from habits in which actions are taken and environments are explored without allotting sufficient time and attention to completely enfolding the experience.

The capacity to enfold experience is an intensely personal thing.  One person will sing through a department store for hours while another may need to stop and sit form time to time, or get some quiet time later to restore their gregarious nature.  The reason for this difference in temperament is we all use our sensory system in unique ways.  We have different values, different interests, and our emotional states often inform what we feel a need to pay attention to.  If, for instance, we feel uncomfortable in crowds, because we carry a deep fear of mobs or theft or violence or whatever, then our undercurrent of fear may be directing our nervous system to absorb every bit of data it encounters, rather than to reject some of it quickly.  Blissfully foolish people, by contrast, may seem to have unlimited energy because they don’t actually pay much attention to what’s happening or what they’re doing, and their nervous systems are never filled to capacity.  Do some inner work to be sure you’re giving yourself room to be alive and have your own unique life and perspective on things.  Enfold your experience, or it will get the best of you.

Another source of question #3’s discomfort is poor structural alignment in the body.  Proper structural alignment depends on many factors operating well.  Seek the ministrations of a chiropractor or osteopathic physician to determine at least the degree of structural misalignment and what was necessary to restore it.  Then go back again in a week or two to see how quickly your body is losing some or all of the restored alignments.  This will educate you as to the scope of the problem, and isolate places to work on. 

Next, take advice from the chiropractor or osteopath concerning exercises to strengthen and tone certain muscles.  Often, the misalignments result from muscles that aren’t really doing their jobs in maintaining your structure.  By specifically addressing these muscles or muscle groups and their habituated behavior, you may be able to develop a habit of movement that does not pull your body out of alignment, so much.

Next, address the chemical or substantive health of your bones, ligaments, connective tissues and muscles.  Look this stuff up, and learn about them, but to point you in the right direction, make sure you’re getting daily doses of vitamins and minerals that specifically fortify these tissues, like potassium, magnesium, and calcium.

Next, adopt a regimen in which you relearn habituated movements in such a way as to avoid challenging proper structural alignment, or even better contributing to good alignment.  There are various modalities that specifically address this type of learning, not the least of which are the various specialists in ergonomics and physical therapy.  For variety, flexibility in your learning process, and for modalities that have stood the test of time, look into finding a teacher of Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, Qigong or Yoga.  These modalities have as their governing precepts the adoption and maintenance of proper alignment or form, and all your beginning work in classes is focused on achieving these things.  At this point, you’re not dealing with quick fixes.  It took a long time for your body to learn to break its most healthy alignments and it will take along time to unlearn those habits and instill new habits that stick.  Daily practice with no immediate expectation of success is called for.

In my next blog, I’ll continue with suggestions for activity that can reverse the negative implications of the questions asked in my first blog on fatigue, specifically questions 4 through 7.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ

Qigong Instructor

I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2008. All rights reserved.

Dealing with Fatigue as a First Symptom – #1

I want to focus today on first sign indicators of trouble in your health and what you can do to intercede on your own behalf, irrespective of medical assistance.  Bottom line is that we’re not trying here to replace or remove medical advice or intervention but rather to focus on how we each as individuals have the power to intercede on our own behalves for health; we don’t have to be victims of our circumstances or slaves to our symptoms.

But what can we do?  How do we know when we should do one thing or another in response to symptoms that could have widely different specific diagnoses?

Chinese Medicine, like Western Medicine, has many specific explanations for symptoms that different people may share in common, often more so than practitioners of Western Medicine.  That doesn’t mean that those symptoms can have no meaning for you outside of a formal diagnosis.

In this blog series I’m going to discuss several symptoms extensively in a way that a layman can make use of to both identify a warning sign of ill health and implement coping strategies to immediately take back control of their health.  Since these are general guidelines, it’s possible that by following them you’ll be doing more than you need to do to address the underlying problem.  That’s okay, because our goal here is to empower you to act even when you don’t know the underlying problem.  If we have to shoot several times to hit the target, that’s better than not shooting at all and letting the target come and maul you.

I want to clarify that my background is in Medical Qigong and as a teacher of Qigong.  Though I’m an enthusiastic studier of many subjects, and have explored many healing modalities as well as discussed varied topics with various experts, my proclivity is to show how Qigong or can be used to help preserve or attain good health.  I’m also a Taoist and, though I was born Christian, and I explore the way beliefs, faith in a benign, all-powerful entity contributes to a happy life.

I want to spend some time now on the symptom of fatigue.

Physical fatigue, it should be understood, is only one level of what can be viewed as a multi-layered phenomenon.  It’s a vague symptom—it doesn’t always have a locus, unless you think the whole body is specific enough.  Evidence of fatigue on a lower level, as in the tiredness of an organ or tissue, may not always be noticeable to you.  Contrarily, once general physical fatigue is identified by a patient, they are often aware when it escalates in magnitude.  What was merely physical fatigue, if left untreated, can become psychic fatigue, social fatigue and ultimately spiritual fatigue.  Examples of these higher levels of fatigue might be the loss of life opportunities, that cause your whole life to seem like a boring event, loss of enthusiasm even for things you know you love, loss of social standing and respect, and so on.  Just because the fatigue has manifested system-wide in the physical body doesn’t mean it has progressed as far as it can.

What’s great about fatigue as a symptom is that everyone can identify it, even without medical training in either tradition.  Most people know when they’re fatigued, and can describe its sensations to themselves.  On the other hand, some may ignore their fatigue for long periods of time, unplaying or undervaluing it even to them selves.  Others might imposing a dampening effect on themselves out of fear or despair, and call it fatigue.  Though extremes will always exist in people’s perceptions, fatigue remains easy to recognize. 

Though different people will describe it differently, generally, the way you know for sure is to observe the following behavior:

     1)  Are you doing what you’re currently doing with inspiration and enthusiasm?

     2)  Is your verbal or internal dialogue focused on negatives like won’t, can’t or don’t?

     3)  Does your musculature hurt, nervous tissues pinch, or skin or connective tissues sag exceptionally during movement?

     4)  Does your regular, repetitive movement, such as walking, sitting, doing dishes and any other long-since learned behavior, involve excessive shifting of weight or adjustment of the entire body?  Are you jiggling, swaying, switching feet constantly, adjusting and readjusting your grip or position?

     5)  Do you become suddenly frustrated or resigned at the first sign of resistance, change or challenge?

     6)  Are you experiencing indigestion within 5 hours of eating?

     7)  Do you wake up feeling exhausted or sluggish?

That last one might surprise a lot of people.  “Who doesn’t feel sluggish when they first wake up?” most Americans will likely ask. 

The answer is: healthy people.  Just because most everyone you know feels sluggish when they first wake up doesn’t mean it’s healthy.  Even if it could be called normal for the experiences that American’s have, we might also be appropriately accused of being normally unhealthy.  In fact, a healthy person will tend to experience a sense of enthusiasm about everything all day long, including going to sleep.  A healthy person can go to sleep in that excited, pleased state that we might all have experienced after a romantic evening or knowing that we’re going on vacation the next day and yet is asleep in minutes.  A healthy person sleeps deeply, dreams, whether or not they remember their dreams, and can usually get through the night without having to get up to go to the bathroom.  A healthy person, when they wake, feels a little surge of joy or excitement at the possibility of the day, a surge that repeats itself in waves as they become more and more ready to get up. 

Feeling that you retain access to that hypnogogic state in which you’re simultaneously kind of dreaming but know you’re awake, is not the same as being sluggish.  Many people cultivate the ability to get into that state of differing brainwave activity, and stay there while remaining conscious and functional.  That’s one of the things that the Silvan Mind Control method, for instance, is about, and of course many martial and healing arts cultivate an expanded mind state as well.  Sluggish means that you have difficulty make your brain or body work.

So, we look for signs of fatigue by asking ourselves questions like these that set our current state alongside the hypothetical state of a healthy, happy person, and we add up the shortcomings to determine our level of fatigue.  You might find by such an accounting that you’ve perhaps been fatigued all your life!  Don’t discount the possibility.  Western science may be steadily degrading our expectations of our own health, by publishing dry, unemotional, statistical evaluations of large populations, as though finding a common denominator will somehow automatically identify what our expectations should be.

The next step, which I’d like to address in the next blogs, is to actually do something to alleviate your fatigue. 

Don’t discount seeing a doctor!  What I’m suggesting in these blogs are the ways in which you can augment your health personally, in addition to seeking regular and qualified medical advice, not in replacement for.

Deep peace to you,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ

Qigong Instructor

I Qi You

(c) I Qi You, June, 2008. All rights reserved.