Medicine and Bazi belong to the 5 Arts of Chinese metaphysics. All 5 Arts use the basic principles of Taoist philosophy.
The Bazi belongs to the Life Arts and is called The Pillars of Destiny. The 4 pillars are, the year, the month, the day and the hour.
The upper half of the chart is the 10 Heavenly Stems. The 5 Elements doubled as yin and yang, much like the organ pairs in Medicine but more the elements in Nature.
The lower half of the chart is the 12 Earthly Branches. The extra two characters come from one of the Elements being doubled. But this is where there’s a difference between the Bazi and Medicine. With medicine, we are looking at the meridians and here you’ll notice the Fire is doubled with Imperial and Ministerial Fire. Here the focus is the Shen of heaven in its earthly manifestation.
However with the Bazi, the focus is on the Solar/Lunar calendar that starts around February 4. It’s an extremely accurate calendar that tracks time, place, cycles of the seasons and rhythms of the Earth. Which is placed in the center and allows us to track not just the seasons, but how qi comes back to the Earth in between each season.
This is a much more sophisticated and detailed calendar the common Gregorian Solar calendar. Which helps you to understand why sometimes in what’s considered Summer, it might feel like Fall.
Learn more about Tracy’s offerings at qibalance.net.
Where you can sign up for her Mentorship Program starting on August 5, 2023. Or order your dietary analysis, or send your patients for one.
Tracy Stewart, L.Ac
After completing my education, at UC Berkeley and University of Iowa, in Biochemistry, I returned to the Bay Area and worked in Medical Research at UCSF. From academia, I moved onto genetic engineering and worked for several biotech companies. I became a formulation chemist. My last job in the field was as a project manager at Genentech.
All during my scientific career, I received acupuncture treatments that proved very beneficial. Worsley Five Element Acupuncture was especially profound and I became enamored with the idea of treating the constitution rather than the condition.
I went into acupuncture practice and while treating a cardiologist, whose infant son was having febrile seizures, I discovered Korean Sasang. The doctor, himself, had atrial fibrillations which would only resolve temporarily. The cure for both of them was their Korean Sasang Constitutional diet.
Now, 20 years later, father and son are still following their diet and are well. During this time, I learned the Bazi diagnostic system to determine Sasang Constitution and have been prescribing individualized diets for over 20 years.
Two years ago I began teaching this system to small groups of acupuncturists through a 4-month Mentorship Program.
Of course there is a tremendous amount of information to be garnered from the Bazi. You can find some of this on Tracy's website, www.qibalance.net, where you can learn more about the Bazi and Korean Sasang.
Sgn-up for her Mentorship Program starting August 5th. You can also order a dietary analysis for yourself, or send patients for a consultation on how to use food for healing.