🌿 Folk Prescriptions

The Chinese nation boasts a five-thousand-year civilization. Throughout this long history, our ancestors, through wisdom and practice, created a splendid culture. Traditional Chinese health preservation is one of its most brilliant jewels, making enormous contributions to the nation's reproduction, health, and development.
TCM health preservation is a branch of Chinese traditional culture, sharing origins and close ties with other cultural streams, reflecting the unique characteristics of Chinese culture. Health preservation aims to cultivate vitality, prevent disease, and achieve health and longevity. TCM offers diverse techniques: dietary nourishment, medicinal nourishment, acupuncture, massage, qigong, and martial arts.
Among these, ancient practitioners believed that the best method of health preservation is cultivating one's nature, and the best way to cultivate nature is to nurture essence. Abundant essence can transform into qi, abundant qi can fully sustain spirit. With full spirit, yin and yang balance, zang-fu organs coordinate, and qi and blood circulate smoothly, ensuring physical health and strength. Thus, nurturing essence, qi, and spirit is the most important content and the foundation of human health preservation.
Below is an introduction to methods of nurturing essence:
Essence is the core substance constituting human organs and the fundamental material for growth and development. Essence comes from both innate inheritance from parents and postnatal nourishment. Stored in the kidneys, essence can transform into blood and qi—raw materials for organ construction and sources of functional activity. It is continuously replenished postnatally: after acquiring the ability to absorb food from nature, the body converts nutrients into qi and blood, nourishing zang-fu organs, tendons, and bones, and converting some into essence stored in the kidneys. Thus, preserving essence first requires accumulating, cherishing, and conserving essence.
Accumulating Essence:
Accumulating means gathering. Accumulating essence involves using various health preservation methods to continuously replenish kidney essence, maintaining its abundance. Innate essence inherited from parents is finite and predetermined. Individuals vary in how much they inherit. During growth and daily activities, it is continually consumed, making postnatal supplementation crucial.
Natural sources of animal and plant foods are the most extensive and fundamental postnatal nutrition. Fruits, flowers, leaves, roots, and stems of plants, and muscles, bones, and internal organs of animals, are products of species utilizing natural conditions. They are all products of heaven-earth yin-yang energy. Their contained nutrients can be utilized by humans as raw materials for generating their own qi and blood. However, regarding accumulating essence, ancient wisdom states: "Medicinal supplementation is inferior to dietary supplementation, and dietary supplementation is inferior to qi supplementation." More accurately, when illness is severe ("when the disease is beyond saving"), neither medicine nor food can help. Only when essence is abundant can the body's qi transform and circulate throughout the body, open the orifices, and expel pathogens, restoring health.
Health preservation is a unique Chinese method for extending life, using specific postures, guided by intention, adjusting breathing and absorbing the yin-yang energy of heaven and earth. This can also achieve purposes such as supplementing kidney essence, as seen in methods like the Static Adjustment Technique in *Green Therapy of Chinese Medicine*.
Cherishing Essence:
Cherishing means valuing. Cherishing essence means valuing kidney essence and avoiding excessive consumption to maintain its abundance. The most important aspect is restraining sexual activity, avoiding early marriage and early childbearing.
Sexual activity is a natural human relationship involving the union of yin and yang, capable of harmonizing yin and yang and coordinating zang-fu organs and qi-blood. Appropriate sexual activity benefits health and well-being. However, since it involves the fusion of male and female essence and blood, it consumes essence and blood. Excessive frequency leads to essence and blood deficiency. Thus, moderation is necessary. Excessive indulgence, pursuing temporary pleasure at the expense of exhausting kidney essence, leads to depletion of yin and yang, weakening of qi and blood.
For minors, essence and blood are not yet full, and qi and blood are not yet stable. Special care must be taken to cherish essence, avoid sexual activity, and accumulate essence to safeguard normal growth and mental health. Early sexual activity and early childbirth consume yet-unfilled kidney essence (liver blood), harming zang-fu organs, qi-blood, and overall health—thus should be avoided.
During adolescence, the reproductive system develops rapidly, and kidney essence and liver blood grow continuously. Ejaculation and menstruation are normal physiological responses. Simultaneously, adolescents begin to develop sexual awareness, becoming interested in the opposite sex, curious, and sometimes experiencing sexual fantasies or masturbation—common phenomena. Occasional masturbation is harmless, but frequent masturbation harms kidney essence and affects health. Harmful publications and videos greatly affect adolescents lacking discernment, disturbing the heart spirit, causing heart fire to rise, disturbing the essence chamber, leading to frequent ejaculation or even seminal emission—equally detrimental to kidney essence. These should all be avoided.
Conserving Essence:
Conserving means consolidating, sealing, and preventing leakage. Kidneys store essence; conserving essence means using various health preservation methods to strengthen the kidneys' sealing ability and prevent essence leakage.
Essence leakage manifests as male nocturnal emission or seminal emission, female excessive leukorrhea, excessive menstrual flow, prolonged bleeding, milk leakage, hematuria, or proteinuria—phenomena exceeding physiological norms. These are considered signs of weakened kidney sealing ability due to various reasons, leading to essence leakage and eventual physical weakness and shortened lifespan. Physiological nocturnal emission, ejaculation, menstruation, leukorrhea, and lactation are normal organ functions and do not harm health. Conversely, absence of these normal discharges during physiological periods often indicates disease.
Common causes of essence leakage are: first, constitutional weakness, inability of kidneys to seal essence; second, yin-yang imbalance, restless spirit disturbing essence and causing leakage. Thus, conserving essence requires comprehensive adjustments to strengthen constitution, harmonize yin-yang, and stabilize spirit. For example, appropriate exercise and labor (practicing Dynamic Adjustment in Green Therapy), avoiding excessive thinking, emotional extremes, nutritious diet without greasy or spicy foods, etc.
Appropriate exercise and labor promote blood and qi circulation, harmonize zang-fu organs, balance yin-yang, and enhance kidney sealing ability. Excessive thinking or emotional extremes deplete qi and blood, affect circulation, cause heart fire to rise, and disturb the spirit, impairing kidney sealing function. A nutritious diet without greasiness nourishes the five zang organs, supplements qi and blood, thus enhancing kidney sealing ability. Greasy, rich foods easily generate dampness and heat, disturb the essence chamber, block qi movement, prevent clear yang from rising, and cause essence to leak downward. Spicy, stimulating foods also generate heat and fire, disturb the spirit, and weaken the essence barrier. Frequent sexual activity or masturbation damages kidney qi, reducing sealing function—should be avoided.