Office Hours with Angelique and Toby. Released August 26, 2026. 60 minutes.
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About this episode
Translator and teacher Sabine Wilms, PhD, joins Toby and Angelique to talk about classical Chinese medicine and the difference between literal translation and lived interpretation. She explains how her book Humming with Elephants grew out of years of teaching the Su Wen, and why small translation choices for terms like ben and gen can change how practitioners understand ideas such as the root and the foundation.
The conversation moves to Sun Simiao’s writing on the ten months of pregnancy and on postpartum care, with its emphasis on nurturing the mother and family as well as the fetus, and to Sabine’s upcoming projects on pregnancy and on self-cultivation. It closes with reflections on moderation, rest, movement, service, and listening to the body and the seasons.
Topics
Sabine’s path through East Asian studies, anthropology, and medicine
Literal translation versus lived interpretation
Humming with Elephants and teaching the Su Wen
Ben and gen: root and foundation
Sun Simiao on pregnancy and postpartum care
Self-cultivation and listening to the seasons
Key terms
Su Wen (素問): Plain Questions, the first part of the Huangdi Neijing
Ben (本): root, origin
Gen (根): root (of a plant), foundation
Sun Simiao (孫思邈): Tang dynasty physician and author of the Qian Jin Fang
A note for listeners: this is a conversation among practitioners, offered for education, not as medical advice. Patient details have been kept general to protect privacy.
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and lightly cleaned up. It may contain errors, especially in names and Chinese terms.
Toby: Okay. Sabine Wilms, thanks so much for coming to office hours and spending some time with Angelique and I.
Sabine: Thank you for having me. It's it's delightful.
Toby: Okay, great. if you wouldn't mind, I th I think a lot of p of our listeners will be really familiar with your background in your work. but would you mind giving us like a brief sketch of what you've been working on, how you came into the profession? And then if you could bring us all the way up to one of your latest projects, the pebble in the cosmic pond with Leo Lok if you could bring us through there, if you if you wouldn't mind setting us up like that.
Sabine: Okay. The five minute version? Or the two hour version?
Toby: The broad br the broad brush stroke so he can set us up for the rest of our conversation.
Sabine: So I have a I started out, I come from a family of, they're all biomedical doctors. So I went the other direction, rejected all that, and went into East Asian studies to study Chinese philosophy. And somehow came back to medicine as and anthropology as well. And medicine somehow I took some classes in medical anthropology. And my professor was like, my god, you can read the ancient stuff. This is so awesome. So I learned from my anthropology professors how to ask questions to try and understand early Chinese culture. And I happened to be pregnant at the time and the female body is a really juicy topic. So I translated a text on gynecology, and my Buddhism professor told me, there was no because I wanted to know about the relationship between medicine and or the influence of Buddhism on medicine and medicine on Buddhism. And he told me that was not a thing in ancient China, in early China. And then my other professor told me that there was no gynecology in early China. So of course I had to pick a topic that. Proved them wrong. so that was my dissertation. And then I just started over time teaching practitioners, in addition to being originally an academic, because practitioners care about what I do and what I know in a very different way from academics. So I feel like I'm really lucky because I'm not a clinically licensed practitioner. my background is as an academic and a translator, but I have an audience and students and colleagues who practice. And I think the older I get, the more I just acknowledge that I healing is like it's in my bloodline on both my mom and my dad's and all my relatives and grandparents and my daughters side. So it's ta it's been like a really long and then in the in there I was like a biodynamic goat farmer and somehow that related to fertility and agriculture and healing the land. I don't know, like nothing really makes sense, but somehow I've ended up in a place in my life which I love to share with people. It's like I just have made decisions, some of it dumb luck. But I followed my heart and I've always wanted to do something that is meaningful to me. And sometimes I haven't made any money at it. I've worked really hard. But I'm now in a place where I get to sit at a desk looking at the ocean, having my goats and my little mini farm, and teaching students, creating classes with my business partner Leo Locke. Who happens to be in Vietnam and I just got to visit him and spent a few months in Vietnam working on creating a class on nurturing the inner nature, like longevity, spiritual, physical cultivation. And here I get to have a conversation with you guys. So I really want to encourage all the upcoming people who listen to our sorts of podcasts. And then Leo and I had the Pebble in the Cosmic Pond podcast. You know, I feel like the young practitioners enter our profession with such most of them with this passion and dedication towards making the world a better place through their presence. And I really feel like if you follow your heart, it's possible. And the world depend like I don't know, there's a way in which you can maybe it'stubbornness, may I don't know, maybe it's luck. And I'm sure you too have that experience, right? Where we can create a better world with our
Toby: Yeah, I think so. especially, I mean, it'so great. Your role really helps inform what we do in clinical work. huge impact for me was your Journal of Chinese medicine article on Sun Summiao. This is several years ago, made it just a gigantic impact on me. And then one of my favorite Chinese medicine books of all the Chinese medicine books available is Humming with Elephants, which that was just fantastic. So maybe Let's l maybe if you if you don't mind, take us into your work with humming with elephants, right? What were you thinking about that? Again, just from my perspective, it's an amazing text because we get to look in Su Wen five, but not usually like a translation of it, but through the translator's eyes of Su Wen five. So did the project start out like that or how did that go?
Sabine: No. What I've really learned in that process is that, you know, none of us
Angelique: No, like
Sabine: Each of us have all this knowledge in our heads, and we think everybody around us has that same knowledge. So when I wrote that book, it actually so the book came it's a compil it's basically just a transcript of my notes based on teaching that text over many years at the NUNM, the National University of Natural Medicine, in several different classes. I was teaching a class on history of medicine. I was helping with the foundations. I was doing the classics, whatever the classical texts course. So whenever I we would cover that chapter, I would my translation and my discussion and my notes just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then it was like, all right, I'll just, you know, translate the first five chapters and turn it into a little book. And then and then I looked at Su Wen Five and it turned into a big book all in its own right. And when I published this, I was actually really worried that it was so obvious because to me everything I wrote in that book is so obvious because that's the world I live in. And then my friend Deborah Betts, I sent her a copy. The gynecology, the I don't know if it you're familiar with Deborah Betts who wrote the book on pregnancy.
Toby: Very familiar with her, yeah.
Sabine: Yeah. And she was like, Sabine this is brilliant. This is the best book you've ever written. And I'm like, what? So it was basically just a transcript of what I'd been teaching for many years in at college and at conferences and things like that. So it wrote itself actually pretty quickly. It was a fun book to just put the stuff together.
Toby: Okay, that's a that's amazing because yeah, that's not just my opinion. I was talking to a colleague the other day and they were saying, that's my favorite of your works too is that humming with elephants. Again, because we get the translation plus the translator's view while we'reading that. And it's just so valuable. Especially that particular chapter in the Su Wen So there'so much that comes out of that. I mean, that's the basis. I mean, if we only had that chapter, we could probably recreate you know a huge portion of Chinese medicine because all the basic theories are presented in that chapter and everything like that. But it's great to have your again, your looking through your eye it's like looking through your eyes at that text and it's just it's just it's it anyways really valuable. So I highly recommend that to other people. I often do.
Sabine: You know, I love that chapter. And I mean part of it is just like I just feel like it's inspiring, it's beautiful, it really is. Like yin and yang and the five agents, five phases, five elements, whatever you want to call That's the root of our medicine. And that chapter makes this argument that our medicine is so much bigger than just, you know, point prescriptions and matching patterns to formulas. Like it to me that chapter is just such a beautiful condensation of this grand vision of the medicine of it's not correspondences, it's resonances. You know the resonances and it's all about qi and microcosm, macrocosm. So I love the text and I think it's really My work is really inspired by the attempt to take the classics out of that dry academic context where if you read Su Wen Five in translation, just a text, it can be the best translation, you just don't get it. Because you there's no way you can read a sentence in English, in English words, and know all the beauty that's in that text. To me.
Toby: Okay. now I'm I have a request from the rest of the profession. What about the other eighty chapters in Su Wen? Is that is that is that is that on your you have like a big whiteboard of like projects going forward and could you put the other eighty chapters of
Sabine: Sure. I'm I'm finishing I'm finishing two books that I just I got a ton of work done in Vietnam. So I'm finishing up a book on pregnancy and then I'm doing a book on Yang Xing, on nurturing our nature, which is based on this class that I taught with Leo Locke two years ago and that we're gonna teach again starting in September. And that's about physical and spiritual and moral cultivation. self cultivation and also longevity practices for the profession to share with their community and patients. So those are priority because I figure that'Sun Sumiao and that's never been translated. And the Su Wen there are so many other versions out there. But I do have most of the Su Wen chapters in draft form with lengthy commentary. So it's totally on the list.
Toby: Okay, that that's that's that's really exciting to hear. do you mind talking about those two books or is it do you are you not able to talk to about are they still too much in flux to talk about or are you okay talking about?
Sabine: One is one is the pregnancy one is basically done. So that's a translation of the ten months the Yang Tai, the ten month on nurturing the fetus. Or it's really about nurturing pregnancy. So I've realized that Tai, the character, doesn't just mean fetus, it also means pregnancy. So it's about nurturing not the fetus, but nurturing the mother and the fetus, which is a really essential Difference.
Toby: Yeah, th something just clicked in my head about that. So yeah, that's that's really important, right? Of course, in order to nurture the fetus, you have to nurture the mom, right? That's that makes perfect sense. You can't directly
Sabine: Yes, and it's even bigger. It's it's the ultimate goal is in biomedicine. I think I don't want to put down biomedicine, but I think in our current dominant model and in our culture, the focus in reproductive medicine is on the baby. And my one of my areas of interest, and that's also why we Leo and I did a course on postpartum pampering and that's Another book on my list of almost finished manuscripts is a volume on postpartum care. but it's really it's not just about the fetus, it's about the family and nurturing life means taking care of the mothers and not just cranking out babies. So this whole prejudice that we have against early Chinese medicine being misogynistic, patriarchal, patrilineal, and you know, like people in our profession, some people still have prejudices and they say that our modern Chinese medicine is so much more superior to what's in the classics because we live in this enlightened culture where, you know, we have the integrative medicine and there's progress. And I'm like, no,
Angelique: No
Sabine: Actually When I read Sun S Miao, there's a care for the female body that I don't see in modern biomedicine or the popular culture, like concerns about menstrual conditions, whether the woman wants to get pregnant or not. And so I'm a big advocate of reproductive care, not just for the per not just with a aim of taking care of the producing babies but really the full circle of the family.
Toby: What does that look like for those 10 months then? Can you give us a overview of those 10 months? What's happening? Is that too hard to do?
Sabine: Well, for every month no we can take this con this conversation wherever you want to. Okay. so there is advice, there's information on the development of the fetus from month to month to month, and then there is for each month you get an associated channel that is in charge of nurturing the pregnancy And so each channel, each month is associated with the channel and with the five elements or dynamic agent. I like five agents better. so you go through the months and It actually matches nicely with biomedical knowledge where in the beginning it's all about avoiding miscarriage, right? So you are avoiding fright, the scattering upward, and the fear, the going downward, the sudden exposure to emotional turmoil, you'really careful about rotten foods. So in the beginning it's really important that the mother is protected and living in stillness. and then in the middle she's encouraged to be really active and move like a monkey and also with diet eat the food of eat the meat of predatory beasts and watch like lions and rhinoceroses and then and in the third month the this is the key time when the fetus after the third month the sex of the fetus is set so up to the third month you can manipulate the sex by exposing the mother to jewels to female things female associated things if you want a daughter and to male associated things if you want a if you want a male and a son and that sort of thing and then so Yeah, it's really cool. And then in the middle she's encouraged to be really active, move and shake a lot, and then in the end it's all about releasing, letting the hair down, so to speak. releasing the belt and having her wait it on and eating sweets and really relaxing and feeling safe and then in the end taking certain substances to help. The birth goes smoothly. Hmm.
Toby: What two channels do they leave off? because every all ten months have a channel and then two are left off.
Sabine: Wait. the heart? And I think that no, the Sanji is part of it. the heart is definitely left off.
Toby: That's interesting.
Angelique: Well
Sabine: You don'treat the heart, right? You treat the pericardium. So you don'treat the you never manipulate the emperor. So that makes sense from a classical perspective.
Toby: Yeah.
Sabine: Yeah. what's the other one? That's a good question.
Toby: I didn't mean to stump ya.
Sabine: Yeah, you did you did stop me. I have to think about that. Sorry. You're a channel person and I am not so much a channel person.
Toby: But anyways, so yeah, t each channel gets a month for ten months. So that just I just did a quick math there. but anyways, maybe that's a teaser for people to get the book. They can find out which channel's left off besides the heart. That's good.
Sabine: Thank
Angelique: Sure.
Sabine: You for getting me out of that one.
Toby: All right. What about can we talk about the other book too? or is that still too in flux?
Sabine: We totally can. I mean, I've been teaching it. So basically it's the translation and both of these books are so they're literal translation of two vol different volumes, different texts from Sun Tsumiao, from the Thousand Gold, the Beiji Chien Jin Yao Fang, the Thousand Gold Formula. So the Yang Xing, the Nurturing Our Nature, is volume twenty-seven, which is one of the last chapters, and it's a really complicated text because it's this it's not just medicine but it's a lot of Buddhist and Taoist concepts and terminology flowing into and merging with the medical language. So that I've been working on that people have been asking me about that for decades. And it's been really great to have Leo Locke to help me with the translation. Because he's extremely knowledgeable in Buddhist texts and in medical history in general.
Toby: And Taoist text, right? Yeah. I heard I heard him talk before about meditation sickness and it was really helpful. I have a really good friend that'suffering from meditation sickness right now. It was great to have him with all his historical perspective on all that. It's it is really valuable.
Sabine: Yeah. And then and then I'm always including the Jiang Lu, the seventh seventeenth century, I think, commentator, the only commentator on the Chen Jin on this text by Sun Tsuniao. So I've
Toby: Wow. I didn't realize that. I just ama in my mind I imagine we've you know, like the Su Wen we've got dozens or hundreds, right? Just one. Wow.
Sabine: Yeah, it's really interesting, huh?
Toby: What's the reason for that just one commentator over having it for all that time?
Sabine: I mean one thing is that it's a very different text. The Yellow Emperor's Classic, as you know, is a really complicated text. And it makes sense. And it's more it's much more of a philosophical text. so the commentary really is necessary. And it's also an earlier text, so it's more of a, you know, classic in that sense, because it's from the Han Dynasty. Whereas Sun Ts Miao Sun S Miao's text is a collection of formulas mostly. So it's much more of a clinical text. And if you're a person who knows how to read classical Chinese, for the most part, the formulas are fairly straightforward where you can read the symptoms, you read the ingredients, the indications, ingredients, and the preparation. But the juiciest part are the theoretical essays and they are pretty challenging. And especially that volume, the Yang Xing volume, it's it's it's a really hard text. It'so I've been working on it for decades, and now I've been teaching it with Leo. We did it two years ago, and then we're currently preparing to teach it again. That's been the best way. I love teaching to prepare for writing a book actually. Cause
Toby: Yeah.
Sabine: It's a little bit less hardcore, right? You're you're you're sharing drafts and you're discussing them with the students.
Toby: Direct feedback from clinicians, yeah.
Sabine: Yeah.
Toby: Wha where's that class gonna be held from? is a platform? Okay. No, but I mean a platform. Okay, great. All right.
Sabine: Yeah, you can find all my books and everything at happygoatproductions.com.
Toby: Awesome. Okay, I was gonna let Angelique ask you questions now because I got a dozen but I'm gonna try and hold back.
Angelique: I always it when I have the opportunities to listen to the discourse of two folks who've been in this profession for so long, I just I love to just listen. But I'm curious. I'm I'm newer to the profession. I'm almost two years in and it's my second profession. I was a nurse for a long time before that. wow. And so yeah, it's great. It's nice to have the merging of the two mindsets sometimes not so much. But, you know, one of the things that I mean, I feel like I'm on this little boat floating in the sea of knowledge that I'm never going to be able to learn all of. And I know I've got classmates that I speak to that, you know, we have this fantasy of being able to learn how to read classical Chinese ourselves. And I understand you teach lots of folks how to do this. And so I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that and when one should maybe delve into that or not, or just sort of any gems you have around that.
Sabine: You know, it'such a great question. And I think there are there are peop like it there are people who have a brain that is easy, that can that has a like for me and maybe part of it is that I grew up in Europe and I l I started studying Latin and Greek when I was in fifth grade. And we went to Italy and France. when I was a little kid and my parents would just leave me in France, you know, with a bunch of French kids. And so I grew up with a lot of foreign languages around. So that really helps, which a lot of Americans have not had that exposure. And that makes it I've been teaching American students now for a long time and it and it's it's hard. I think it's really important to be clear that you do not now there are so many high quality teachers and publications and online courses available for Western for practitioners who don't speak Chinese that you know don't put any pressure on yourself. It's it's a big project. It's really fun. I love teaching. I love teaching classical Chinese. It'such a weird thing. I remember being in Korea and I was at it a conference on East Asian traditional East Asian medicine in Korea like ten years ago or something. And it was all East Asian people. It was mostly Koreans and some people from Ch some medical historians from China and Japan and Taiwan. And I was the only foreigner and I was explaining to them what I do at my class at NUNM at my program with this classical text program. And they were just like, Are you insane? Like, what? You're teaching people who are learning to be practitioners. You are, in addition, teaching them how to read the classic. And I'm like, no, we are not creating translators. And that's what I tell my students. It's, you know, if you want to be a translator. of classical text. You really have to go to East Asia and live in that environment and you have to be fluent in modern Chinese and in classical Chinese and ideally in Japanese or at least be able to read Japanese secondary literature. Think practitioners can get so much clarity out of just a little bit of Chinese, a little bit of access, so that you can read the English trans or whatever Western language you use, the translation alongside the traditional classical Chinese text. And the same with texts like the Yijing or the Lao Tzu. Because we have translation projects, you know, translation software now. And I'm I'm a total dinosaur with technology, but Pleco So I the first thing I teach my students is here's how you set up your dictionaries on Pleco for classical Chinese translation, and then here's how you plop digital versions of the classics into Pleco. And then you look them up character by character by character. And then in my I run a two-year training program in classical Chinese that's very involved. And it's you know it's expensive and it's a big commitment. But even the first class, it's the foundations and it'six months or something, and we cover the basics of grammar. And if you have the very basic rules. in combination with these digital tools that like it'so fun for me to teach like a little bit and then read the text with people and that's really how what I kind of wanted to replicate with the Su Wen F with the Humming with Elephants book. That process of just looking at the English, looking at the Chinese, and then digging a little bit deeper. But there's there's you know there's no there's no need There's no urgency.
Angelique: Glad to hear that. I don't feel urgency, certainly, but just sort of like I wonder. And so that sounds like I'll read your s your translations for now.
Sabine: Yeah, and play with it. And you know, there's there's there'so much fun that you can have with just plopping digital versions into Pleco Mm-hmm.
Toby: We should we should say you think
Sabine: Toby.
Toby: About I think I think anyways what I have is just like a minute semi working knowledge of Chinese language, right? I feel like that has unlocked so many things for me to be able to directly look at things and understand what they're saying. I think is really valuable. Like you say Thai is not just the fetus, but the mother also. I mean that again, that's another unlock for me. or pregnancy.
Sabine: Pregnancy.
Toby: Pregnancy, sorry. but anyways, it'so valuable, right? Because again, right, that character's there. And then you can just add more and more knowledge on it. Whereas just the English word, I guess, I think it's kind of locked in, right? If it if it's just fetus if it's always translated as fetus and not pregnancy, then you're you're kinda you don't get that fuller knowledge. So I again I feel like that's valuable. But again, like you said, I mean, to be a translator level, which again, it's too late for me for that kind of thing, but working knowledge. I think almost every practitioner would really benefit from just some basic working knowledge of it.
Angelique: Mm-hmm.
Toby: It is Chinese medicine after all, right? So we should, you know, we should be able to, you know, look through some of the basics. And then Sabine, I wanted to thank you so much for we're we're working right now with having you come on to the Chinese Medicine Benevolent Academy and then you'll be teaching some of the basics of Chinese language for the students, right? So again, so they can start off straight out the gate having some basic knowledge about you know what they're learning so they can directly impact things. So I think that's great. Like Teaching them the tools how to they can fish later, especially with Pleco is so valuable. Pleco has that tool where you can just you can take a picture of the character and then it can import that and tell you what it is too. So I mean it is really valuable. When you know, once you get introduced to that tool, then again, that could help you for the rest of your career. Maybe you go to translator level, right? But otherwise it I think it'so valuable to have a working knowledge of that. The curriculum for California actually doesn't require that. But we were able to shoehorn that into our program because I think it'so valuable.
Angelique: Mm-hmm.
Sabine: And think it's inspiring, right? When you when you figure out that, like in Su Wen 5, like I think it's the second sentence where it's like so to treat disease, you must seek it's always translated as you must seek the root, right? And it's actually you must pursue it in the foundation. There is a you must pursue it. In there is a there is an in and then the ben is not root, it's it's the core of the it's the trunk of the tree
Toby: Mm.
Sabine: Or the foundation, which is very different from root. It's actually way bigger. So you know you can get me going. I'll talk for an hour about the difference between gen which is root, and ben, which is trunk. And what's the difference between pursuing The root. And it's always translated as in order to treat a symptom, you have to look for the cause of the disease. And it's actually way bigger than that. It's you have to look You have to look at the foundation and it is in that text it'so clear that it's talking about the foundation of yin and yang. So it's not saying you must look at look for the root of the disease, but it but it'saying you must track it through this foundation of yin and yang. So to me it's like I mean maybe I'm just like really nerdy, but it's like if you're a new practitioner, that's like gold, right? That'so inspiring. It's like you gotta study yin and yang. Like what does that mean in terms of summer and winter, being active and passive, rest and activity, male and female, sun and shade, and like there's a million ways in which you can think of yin and yang and what how that can contribute to cultivating the ability to heal whatever shows up in your clinic.
Angelique: I don't know. I could listen to you forever. Carry on. It's good stuff. Yes, it is.
Toby: But may maybe let's drill down on that just a minute because I that's that's my understanding. I forgot about that from your book is I always thought gen and ben was the same, that was root and just different ways of saying root. Can you can you tease that out easily for us or is that a too big of a topic?
Sabine: The problem is that even in classical Chinese is already used it's when you look at the character, it's the character of the tree with a little extra line in it. It's a depiction that focuses on the trunk. It's the that's the literal the original meaning of that character. But already the trunk of the tree, and I'm looking at this giant maple tree right out my window right now. There's very and I used to run an apple orchard and you know what does it take to create fertility? there's a big difference between taking care of the roots and taking care of the tree from the core. It Ben is really it means foundation in a metaphorical sense. And I think In English, you know, when you read the word foundation, you think roots or and then we go to the f to the literal roots. Whereas if you really want to be literal, you talk about the core. Like the core would be a much better translation for it. Foundation is a it's it's that's the problem when you have a Chinese character, it's like a Venn diagram, where a Chinese character means this. And the English word means this and they do overlap. So foundation is absolutely a correct way of translating ben in many contexts. And a Chinese person would absolutely agree with that. But in this particular quote, It's in the context of this of the sentence before it and the sentence afterward. It's it's really important that it's talking about yin and yang. It's it's not talking about the root of the disease, but it'saying to treat disease and even the character bing doesn't just mean disease, it means disorder, it means social chaos. Bing it is things that are not healthy, that are so it's Bing is also a political situation, social unrest, or an earthquake, or like even Bing is so much bigger. And then you must pursue it in this core of yin and yin and yang and then the text goes on and says yin yan yang are the father and mother of creation and the palace of the Shenming and all of that, right? So the whole introductory paragraph is about yin and yang and the importance of yin and yang and the whole chapter is about the resonant what is it the help me out here.
Toby: But that's what I was gonna say about why you get why you chose that I kept meaning to say that, why you chose that title for your book, because again it could mean that. The chapter of Su Wen five could mean, right? humming with elephants, right? That's a possible translation of it. Is that right, Sabine? But it's not, right?
Sabine: It is, yeah. It's a joke. I mean and that's really that's my proudest accomplishment for that book is the juicy title. I love it when I find a good title.
Toby: Okay, yeah. But I mean that's fantastic because it could be translated that way, right? But it with like the resonant images, right? Isn't it the Xiang, the L. Resonant manifest
Sabine: Manifestations of Yin and Yang, I think the great teeth tweeters on the resonant manifestations in Yang Inxiang Ta Lun, yes.
Toby: Isn'this great to have a scholar on the program we can just we can just turn to for these kind of things?
Sabine: I try and keep it keep it too And I
Angelique: And
Sabine: Didn't even know that elephants hum.
Toby: Really? Did they literally hum?
Sabine: They yes, I love this. I have students who are pediatricians and my friend Patricia pointed out to me that elephants communicate at a sound level that humans at a frequency that humans can't hear.
Toby: Yeah, fascinating.
Sabine: Over like, I don't know, hundreds of miles or something. Very cool. Yeah, it's very cool.
Toby: Wait, you knew about that before you did the title or after?
Sabine: I did not, when I created that title, I did not know that.
Angelique: That is even cooler. Yeah.
Sabine: Yeah. And humming, you know, the resonance is kinda like it's one I mean it's one it the humming is I'm stretching it, you know. the Xiang is the origin of the character, the manifestation, the image, that character. When you look at the it's a pictograph originally that depicted a elephant. So it's one of the potential meanings, but it's obviously not the meaning in the title of the chapter. And the humming I'm it's resonance. But you know, when you'resonating, that's that's humming resonance. Yeah.
Toby: Right.
Angelique: Totally.
Toby: Okay, with that's that's that's a good yeah. anyways, because otherwise people think I want to read a medical text, I won't read a like zoological text about the elephants, right? So that's good for them to know, right, where that title is coming from. But again, the whole book's like that, right? Where you just keep saying, Well, could be this, could be that, taking from this angle. I just want to circle back to one more thing. So does ben does it never mean root or it can mean root, but just not in that context for Su Wen Pi.
Sabine: It can mean root in the metaphorical sense in which we use it in English.
Toby: Okay. But don't we like the Shennong Bencao JIng isn't it talking about the roots and the grasses or no? The literal roots and grasses? I'm asking you because I have your translation of the Shenlong Ban Xiaojing on my on my shelf, so I know you that one.
Sabine: I love how you're pushing back. This is great. And I have to think about that. ben cao means materia medica. Or it mean well, you know, this is great. It's like you're throwing things back at me. yeah, what is the literal meaning of ben cao Because we are used to it as a technical term and we translate it as materia medic when it's really information about Substant natural substances because as you know, it also includes animals and minerals. So that's the first problem. But bencao most literally it refers to yes, usually translated as roots and grasses. So in modern Chinese it's always the compound genben the two together. So Yes, ben can refer to the physical root. I don't know. I did a lot of research on this years ago and I need to do another linguistic analysis or get Leo Loc roped into it to answer this. There might be contexts where ben is used to mean the physical roots as opposed to the trunk or the core.
Toby: Okay.
Sabine: Never say yes or no clearly in Chinese, right? Like all of our listeners know that, right? In Chinese medicine, it's it there's never a black and white answer. It's always like yes in general, but you know, when and the problem with Chinese language is the language changes. So even in the Yellow Emperor's classic, like the language, the meaning of a character, and this is what people ignore so often, the a single character. completely changes often from the Han Dynasty to the Tang dynasty. So between the Neijing and Sun S Miao, a character. And this is really tricky when you're translating a text like the Neijing that is composed of all these different textual layers. So which layer in one chapter, in a single chapter, Elisabeth Shu is the master of analyzing she did this with the medical the shi the biographies in the shi
Toby: Yeah.
Sabine: Where there are all these different textual layers and this is the original textual layer and then this is the commentary and this is the commentary so even within a single chapter in the Nei Jing we can't just assume that it's first century because There are and the Su Wen Five is definitely one of those chapters where there are different textual layers. And the same with the Sun Tsun Miao information on nurturing the fetus or the information on the Yangxing chapter. That it gets really messy. And then when you read a text from the 7th century, do you assume that the meaning of the character is based on the 7th century? Or Do you read it? Like, do I read it the way Sun S Miao would have read a certain character? Or do I read it in the way that it was originally meant by the third century source that Sun Ts Miao used and quoted? Did Sun Ts Miao think, like think about for you today, if you'reading an English quote from Shakespeare or whatever, and I don't really know any Shakespeare? but do you when Shakespeare uses the word heart, do you read that word heart with the meaning of a biomedical doctor, a Buddhist cultivator, or do you have any idea what Shakespeare or whatever meant when they used the word heart? Like it gets really messy. That's why I don't give straight answers.
Toby: Okay, but that's what Angelique and I are just reconsidering with all this that we're we'really happy. We thought being in clinic was hard, but I guess being at the translator desk is also really hard, right? Because you're never like you're never sure in clinic, but it sounds like you're never sure translating either.
Sabine: I feel like you clinicians have it a little bit well, no, we all have intuition, right? Like clinical practice and in a certain way, translation as well is a balance, it's like a play between the right and the left side of your brain. Where when you overintellectualize it just gets really messy. And that's where I try and encourage my students, and it's harder to do in a book. to also access the texts at some point by shutting out I guess it's the left brain, the rational brain, and really just letting those characters stand and sink in and meditate on them or, you know, go to the beach or dream or somehow access like a Laozi quote. You can analyze a quote or Zhuangzi you can analyze that. And then it's like a like a poem, analyzing a poem. I hate doing that. Because you basically kill the poem, the beauty of the poem.
Toby: You should feel a poem, not analyze it.
Sabine: Yeah. And I think the same is true for the classics.
Toby: You should feel the classics, not analyze the
Sabine: Yeah, they're they're like poetry. They're beautiful and there's a flow and a lot of times the characters are there because of the rhythm and there's you know, like there's a sound component and an and an image component to each character that just gets lost in English.
Angelique: How wonderful that you can experience that every day.
Sabine: I know. I
Angelique: Yeah.
Sabine: Know. And it and it's great that, you know, I do this work and then I get clinici like compared to other academics. I mean I haven't been an academic in a long time. But it's great that I translate something and then I have clinicians who are like Deborah Betts when I used to teach with her. We used to get together regularly in like Europe and America or Australia or somewhere and neither of us want to travel anymore. So we don'teach together anymore, but when we used to teach, it was so cool when I would like throw something out there and she would be like, my god, this is exactly like this the like the newest stand of biomedical knowledge about where the fetus is at whatever the fifth day after implantation or you know, I don't I have a totally non-scientific brain, but the overlap, it's it's really fun.
Angelique: Fascinating. Yeah.
Toby: Yeah, it'so great. Yeah, your work is academic work, but again, it's it's translated into practical clinical work. So that yeah, that must be really rewarding. It
Sabine: Yeah.
Toby: Has to be right too, right? That's what we can't just get too philosophical. We have to we have to keep it grounded in the you know clinical reality too. So that I think that's really helpful. Otherwise, if it's just philosophical, you can just kind of drift off a little bit. But again, clinic really pulls everything back because it has to be really pragmatic.
Sabine: Yeah, which is a great I love challenges. So that's you know, that's really fun in teaching because you get that feedback. It's like, okay, great. Is this just a empty intellectual exercise? Or what does what does that mean for you concretely in clinic?
Toby: Yeah. Can we apply it to help the hundred trillion cells of our patients when they come in the door, right? Yeah.
Sabine: Yeah. And where I'm at right now and I don't know like where you guys stand on this, especially Angelique, as a as a nurse, I feel like nurses are and I started out when I was young in my dad's hospital. I thought about becoming a nurse and then I was like, no, because this was in Bavaria and I didn't it was the doctors there was one male doctor. It's totally different now, but at the time the doctors were all male and the nurses were all female. And I'm like, no, I don'think that would be a good job for me. But I love the fact that nurses get to, you know, be physical with patients. And I mean, I know this is this was Germany whatever, thirty-five or more years ago. But nurses got to be present with the patient in a way that the visiting doctors in the white coat didn't get to be. and that's why I'm I'm having fun with this Yangxing pursuit in the many dimensions of healing that beyond the brain, like you know, there's the intellectual fact that a certain needle has a certain effect. that is documented and measurable or a certain herb or a certain formula. But then there's all these other dimensions. And both of you, like Toby, right? You'really inspired. You're a Buddhist practitioner. I all I know about you is that you're you're you're you've worked with the monks, the Korean monks, right?
Toby: Yeah, tha that's my first teacher
Sabine: Yeah.
Toby: Almost thirty years ago now, yeah.
Sabine: Yeah, so how has that influenced can I ask you questions too?
Toby: Yeah. Doesn't have to be and Angelique and I have to check with our corporate sponsors and see if that's okay. But let's assume it's okay. yeah, you can ask me anything. so yeah, but so like you were talking about before, the influence on Buddhism, Taoism on Chinese medicine. For me the lens is Buddhism first and then the medicine, you know, for my teacher's introduction. So now I just see that everywhere, right? Buddhist ideas. well it Sun Simiao it'so overt, but A lot of the ideas in Chinese medicine are right to alleviate suffering, especially on the mundane field. And this is such a such a such a profound way to do it, right? Have the patient produce their own medicine in their body with acupuncture needles and then alleviate suffering in the patient's body. it's yeah, I mean it'so Buddhism and Chinese medicine for me, they don'there's not a big separation between the two. They'really interwoven together.
Sabine: Yeah. And Anjalique, what do you what do you what do you like you must be a practical person. Nurses are like, you know, if you want to get anything done, you a if you have a nurse on the other side, you it happens. True.
Angelique: It's true. Yeah. it's what's interesting in listening to you talk about like the other dimensions. So there's when I approach part of part of why I think it was it wasn't easy, you know, learn Chinese medicine is not easy. There's nothing about it that's easy, but the lateral move because nursing is so patient focused and patient centered and being there with people that part of school and that part of the learning came easy to me. It was really easy for me to be with people and continues to be easy for me to be with people. It's the intellectual stuff. And so where I find my brain will get twisted is if I start seeing Western medical things, like a patient that comes in just recently was like feeling really dizzy and having some numbness in one of their legs and like has some transient headaches and like neurological things and they've had spinal MRIs and everything is fine. So then my main like no my mind starts going to like, should they have a brain MRI? Is this something else that should be happening? And then having to shift back to be like, well, what are those signs and symptoms in Chinese medicine and how do we approach it that way? So I find that I'm having a constant dialogue with my own self, you know, around patients as it comes. But it's been, it's been a nice transition. it's been, it's been good, I think. And
Sabine: Yeah.
Angelique: Then spiritually, like I'm working on the self cultivation part. I'more eclectic, I think, and working on that because Toby is my teacher's. very much letting me know self cultivation is first that you need to really work on yourself and your spirit and being able to be with people to access that dimension that you're talking about, that extra something that isn't really measurable but is palpable, if that makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah.
Sabine: Yeah, and how do we how do we cultivate that? How do we how do we even talk about it or make space for it?
Angelique: Yeah. How?
Toby: What about used to be a would it you have a personal cultivation practice?
Sabine: This kind of goes with when people used to challenge like this was decades ago. I would go to these conferences and people would say all sorts of things about ancient Chinese medicine, and I would be like, actually, that's not true, because I can read the text, and that's not what Sun Tsun Yao or the Yellow Emperor said. And it happened a few times that I would get shut down, like Sabine, Dr. Wilms doesn't know anything because she's not a practitioner. And I used to be very apologetic about that and very much aware that I'm not a practitioner. So I look at the body, you guys have an access and an experience and an intuitive understanding of the human body as a microcosm in resonance with the macrocosm, just by like feeling pulse. Like your experience of body after body after body gives you a level of knowledge that I don't have. and now I re I say very proudly that I'm a practitioner of Chinese medicine. I just don't practice I'm not clinically licensed and I don't practice Chinese medicine professionally. in the meaning of medicine in modern Western culture. But to me, Chinese medicine is so much bigger. It's about harmonizing heaven and earth. I mean it's kinda like what do you mean by Chinese medicine? It's little things like I wake up and I think about yin and yang. Do I push myself in the morning to get out of bed early to do my Qigong exercises? Or and I've spent a lot of time calibrating with my friend Leo Locke, who is my Buddhist advisor and my clinical advisor. So I learn a lot because we teach together and we teach a class on you know self-cultivation. So What does Sun S Miao talks about moderation? between rest and activity, between overeating and like overindulging, like making the body comfortable and pampering the body and giving it taxing it too much. Like as a farmer and as a person who I've really suffered from insomnia in the past because I have worked my body into the ground and I've I have the body of a farmer and I'm older now. So I'm German. I have overworked. I physically refuse to accept the limitations of my poor female body, throwing around too many hundred-pound hay bales in the days. And I have fallen off of many half-wild mustangs and done all sorts of fallen off of trees. I have not been kind to my body. So I'm like, what does Cultivation, what does moderation look like every day as I open my eyes and look at the sunrise? Do I stay in that zone and call it meditation? Or is it like lazy? I'm too lazy to do qigong this morning. Or the cold water swimming. I love swimming in the ocean every day. not every day right now. and it'so subtle. It's like five seconds are the difference between I'm pushing my body to be healthy by exposure to cold and I'm like ramping up my wei chi. It's like the I'm stoking the fire inside me and it feels so good. I get out and I'm just like roar and I run naked on the beach and the with the dog and it's like this total it's my drug, this flood of hormones. Or am I exhausting my body by exposing it to too much external cold? So, you know, in terms of food, am I eating too much sweet? Am I eating too much salt? Am I eating healthy food that is not pleasurable as opposed to the benefits of deriving pleasure from a really good piece of pie or chocolate? Like what is cultivation? when do you call something meditation? Lillian, my friend who died, Lillian Bridges used to have this joke that yeah, thank you. she used to have a joke where it's like when you'really rushed, she used to tell people to slow down and embrace doing nothing. And in our culture this there'so much pressure to and this is certainly as a German in my family, my parents get really uncomfortable when they see me doing nothing. When they see me not even reading a book, I'm studying, right? I'm doing I'm I'm increasing my knowledge. Doing nothing is they have they're they're they're they're they're around 90 years old and they have just recently embraced the fact that they can actually lie down for an hour in the middle of the afternoon.
Toby: No.
Sabine: And I was in Vietnam just now and it was super hot. And in Vietnam In the middle of the day you have to rest. So I don't know if that's cultivation. Dancing. I love ecstatic dancing. Is that cultivation? I do my I do I totally, you know, go through my kidney channels and my liver and I bang myself up while I'm doing ecstatic dancing. It'shaking, right? Like I milk my goats. I'm
Angelique: Dwink.
Sabine: Touch and cheat like when I when I like my goat loves we touch foreheads every morning we do this at the end of when I milk her. Or with my dog. I don't know. I like a lot of I think we need more play.
Toby: Hmm. W but that's your self cultivation, kind of calibrating yourself with the day, the hour, the minute, what's needed, so you don't expend too much or get too lazy and then you just sharpen that all the time, right? That's that would be your cultivation, right? To make sure you're not overdoing it or underdoing it all the time. Is that
Sabine: Yeah, and then at the same time you don't want to overanalyze it. It's
Toby: Right, yeah.
Sabine: The Taoist thing. The way
Toby: It's more of a somatic sense of my not rather than an intellectual, I wonder how many calories I should eat and how many calories I'm burning. It's more of a somatic sense of like, should I go in the water or not?
Sabine: Yeah. Really being present with Well, in the Buddhist sense, you know, we've got a human body. That's our that's our form. So we have to honor that form and take care of it but not pamper it, not over indulge it, but also not over tax it.
Toby: Yeah, there's a sweet razor's edge between those, right?
Angelique: Mm-hmm.
Sabine: It's a tricky one.
Toby: Yeah. And then like you said, then in the winter sometimes you have to you have to air more on the pampering side. In the summer you can be less on you know, so it really is changing throughout the seasons, the days and hours, what you should do.
Sabine: Yeah, absolutely.
Toby: Okay, well that's that's that's much more nuanced than I thought that answer would be. I thought it'd be strictly thirty minutes of qi gong in the morning and then you know
Sabine: You know, I've done those things as well. And yeah, I think right now I'm I'm getting older, so I know how precious I've lost, you know, my like Lillian was my soul sister. And once you lose your closest human being. It's like you just it just changes the way you are in the world because you're aware of how precious your time is. So I wanna use my time wisely. And part of that is do I want to crank out more books, right? I hear you want so when volume one to three next. And I'm like, fine, it's gonna take me a couple of months and I can do it. But at the same time, the beach is calling, the dog wants a walk. What does Sabine want?
Toby: Mm. Right.
Sabine: And then what do my students want? My students want me to be really well prepared, but at the same time, there's also I'm sure this is the same for every practitioner who listens to us. The great I feel like the greatest gift, especially in the US right now, it'so important that we cultivate a good way of being in the world. Because there are a lot of freaked out people. I mean, I don't know where it's like where you guys are. But I'm on an island, it's rural, it's very mixed, there's a lot of tension. So every here's another example. My favorite way of cultivation is I help out in the soup kitchen on Monday mornings in our local soup kitchen. I love doing dishes and I love serving soup.
Toby: Mm-hmm. That's really sweet. Yeah. Anyways, it really is a what do you give, not what you get in this world, right? For ultimate cultivation. So that's really nice.
Sabine: Well, but ultimately it's about what you get.
Toby: Well yeah, but you get by giving, right? I mean that's that'sort of the secret to the whole thing, right? you don't you don't get the mansion and all the fancy cars. That's that's not where it's at. It appears to be that would be the direction for happiness, but it really isn't.
Sabine: Yeah. Yeah. As I'm sure you and your listeners know all too well. Otherwise
Toby: Yeah.
Sabine: You wouldn't be acupuncturists.
Toby: Right. Or Chinese Buddhist in front you. This is this is my teacher. he's a wandering Buddhist monk, so doesn't even have a monastery. He just has a begging bowl. And that's he just travels around the world. So again, the happiest person I ever met in my life by several miles. And so yeah, that's I mean, there's the example. And then I known some really mega wealthy people that are just beyond miserable. So again, that's that's that's clearly not the right direction just to hoard. I got mine jack is definitely not the right direction. But also, yeah, then you can expend too much outside of yourself too. So that again, back to our razor's edge idea. You have to put something in, but then especially what are you gonna put it out for? And who are you gonna put it out for? It'such an important distinction.
Sabine: Hmm. Yeah, it's really it's really important to think about.
Toby: Hmm. But it sounds like you're thinking about that all the time. That is your cultivation, right? How to calibrate between in and out.
Sabine: Yeah. I mean part of me is like I love writing poetry and I only have so much verbal creativity. And then some days, like you know, I'm tempted like Lao Tzu to ride away on the water buffalo. And because the older I get, the more I feel like and here we are having a podcast and I teach online. And the older I get, the more I feel like there'such a limitation to verbal intellectual exchange. And what really matters, I'm sure you know this, right, Angelique? Like holding somebody's hand. Yeah. There's there's you can say something, but it's the presence.
Angelique: Very much. Yeah.
Toby: You're you're right, you're right, Sabine. Anjali's background isn't hospice, so she really knows that the medicine of holding someone's hand. Yeah.
Sabine: Yeah. And the older I get, the more the more I just appreciate silence, which is really funny for a writer.
Angelique: But
Toby: Yeah, the space between the words is important, right? All
Sabine: Yeah.
Toby: Right. Sabine, we're we're gonna thanks so much for carving out a little slice of time with us. We really appreciate it. it is a real pleasure talking to you. And then I hope it's really nice to have this nice conversation with you. And then hopefully this can just resonate out and help our fellow practitioners. yeah, thanks so much for the time.
Angelique: Yeah, thank you.
Sabine: Thank you, Angelic. It was a pleasure to meet you. Thank you, Toby. I just I'm really grateful that we keep having little opportunities to get to know each other. And thank you both for what you're doing.
Toby: Thanks so much. A real pleasure. Everyone take good care. Okay.
Angelique: Take care. Bye.
Sabine: Bye-bye.
