Traditional Chinese Medicine & Energy Tech

Jason Prall

Well, I’m very excited to announce our next guest, Dr. Greg Eckel, author, inventor, and international lecturer. Hails from the Northwest, Portland, Oregon. Early in his career, Dr. Eckel became increasingly aware of and concerned about the overuse of medications with children while teaching preschool. And this experience inspired his entry into naturopathic and Chinese medicine. In 2001, he co-founded Nature Cures Clinic. He has developed a deep and personal knowledge of chronic neurological conditions in the recent past. His wife Sariah passed of CJD, a condition with no known cure. The deep dive uncovered regenerative medicine and the development of a brain regenerative program. This journey has reinstated his understanding of the oneness of all and the preciousness of life and its possibilities. Dr. Eckel, welcome.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Hey, thanks for having me, Jason.

Jason Prall

So you briefly told me that your wife left her body, and that’s what really kind of sent you on the new journey. Tell me about that, because that sounds really interesting.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

I met Sariah at an outdoor music festival 11 years ago in Oregon. We were the heavies on the Saturday night rock med crew, overseeing and responsible for thousands of people at a music festival. She was 6’1″ goddess, and so much so, I thought that the aliens had put this woman on a planet just for me. I had never met any being like her before. A couple years after that we had blended our families, my three kids and her two. We had two dogs. We even had a maid named Alice, just like the Brady Bunch, right? We also blended our medical practices. She was a certified nurse midwife and I’m an integrative naturopathic physician. We bought our first house six years ago and invariably things get lost when you move. But in particular, there was one orange Fiestaware plate that was kind of the harbinger of not so great things to come. It got misplaced and you might be thinking, big whoop, me too. It was an orange Fiestaware plate, but for Sariah this was, it was maddening. She would search the kitchen and the cupboards and go down the hallway where we kept the camping gear, out into the garage, and then up into the attic. And then it would just end in anger and frustration, but it wasn’t just once. It was like an eerie Groundhog Day. It became fodder for the kids and I around the dinner table of like, oh, mom’s up in the attic again. 

But we’d just moved. I chalked it up to stress, but a couple months after that, basically Chelsea, my office manager came to me and said, “Hey, Doc, Sariah just left the building.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” Yeah, she walked, strolled right through the lobby where the patients were waiting in her white lab jacket, stethoscope around her neck, right out the front door of our clinic. And it was at that moment, I was like, oh my gosh, we need to do something. This is not right. This isn’t just stress and move. So we cleared the schedule and we went looking for answers. And unfortunately, I went to all of the experts. I mean, all of them, and there weren’t any real answers. There was a ominous diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is a one in a million diagnosis, about 300 cases a year in North America, very rare, but also terminal, fatal, and as of yet, no known cure. I always knew Sariah was one in a million, but unfortunately the experts were right. It was CJD. At that point, she quickly lost her ability to feed herself. She lost the ability to speak. Juggling the practice, my kids and Sariah’s care, I needed to call hospice in. 

And we needed 24/7 support. It was quite devastating, to say the least. In such an odd way, this process has opened me up, tore me open as a human being, opened my heart, and really reinstated my faith in the oneness of all. I just thought, we must have written this story before we got here because it’s fucking tragic. Our hospice nurse said it was the most beautiful death she had ever attended. I went through, I navigated the stages of loss with her, and during the process of swinging for the fence for my dear wife, I became a brain regenerative specialist in the process. I made it through complete with my heart wide open, and really a cellular understanding of the preciousness of life and just what is possible. And I think no one should have to go it alone. I don’t want my suffering to be for not, and this, it really led me into bioenergetics and addressing health, and basically reality on all of the levels, and really brought me back to my roots in Chinese medicine. And looking at how did they come together? How did they develop this system thousands of years ago? And led me into a deeper pursuit of internal alchemy that we will talk about today, and just the wonderment and awe of what is happening here. So I don’t wish that path on anyone. It’s been mine. And I came through whole with my heart wide open, Jason.

Jason Prall

Mm, yeah. I mean, I can’t even imagine what that was like. And it is often these things that rip us open, that break us down, that ultimately send us on a path. I mean, this is the hero’s journey, right? It’s classic, but as you’re going through it, it doesn’t make it any less easy, right? Or any easier. So as you sort of engage with Chinese medicine, talk to me about that, because I think, I’m someone who understands a little bit about it. I have more of a background in Ayurveda. They share similar principles, but nevertheless, both of those frameworks are vastly different than the West. And there’s these terms in Chinese medicine, I think most people are familiar with on a surface level, but I have a feeling, knowing these Eastern cultures and how much depth there is to the understanding, that there’s much more beyond what most people think of when they hear the terms yin and yang, and fire, earth, water, air, metal, these type of things. So what are some of the high-level understandings and what can you kinda share with us on that level?

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah, one caveat that I wanna mention, because people don’t realize this, where they’ll see TCM, traditional Chinese medicine, but the other way to talk about that is traditional communist medicine. So in the 50s, 1950s, Mao, Chairman Mao drew a circle around what he deemed everything in the circle as Chinese medicine, everything outside of it is woo woo.

Jason Prall

So when we see this typically, is that what we’re actually looking at? We’re actually looking at a reduction of the whole body of work that is Chinese medicine.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

We are. And how I know this is I went to a classical Chinese medical school and studied at University of Sichuan in Sichuan Provence, Chengdu, University of Chinese Medicine in Chengdu, China. And there they teach, when they’re teaching, they write on the board. And Heiner Fruehauf who founded our school here in Portland, Oregon discovered, he said, “What is that on the board?” And they said, “Well, that’s Chinese medicine.” He said, “Well, what’s in the book?” Well, that’s communist medicine. And so, what got exported to the world in TCM is communist medicine, traditional communist medicine. So there’s a depth of knowledge that was lost in the 50s in transmission of TCM or traditional Chinese medicine.

Jason Prall

I wanna interject my assumption here because I’ve seen this in other realms, which is that when this happens, I find, it’s not just that certain content is left out, although I’m sure that’s the case, but what I see is that there’s an essence, there’s a deeper wisdom, there’s almost like a wordless understanding, as you said, a transmission, something that is more substantive that is excluded. It’s almost like ripping the soul out of something and presenting it. And I’m just curious if that’s kind of the case here.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Well, and that’s what I’m getting to, right? It is that depth of transmission, the energetics of it were basically chopped, and why we see, I mean, you would think, every day when I’m in practice and looking at meridians and imbalances of chi or energy, I just think, man, how did this, it’s such a complex system and it works, right? That’s why it’s still around on the planet today. And so, that level and depth of understanding and knowledge was lost at that point. Now, there’s a revival movement coming together now to really bring back the depth and the richness, the fullness, the full energy and the life of Chinese medicine. So I just want people to be aware of that. So a lot of times folks were like, will say, well, I tried Chinese medicine and it didn’t really work for me. It’s like, well, perhaps it was like a bad restaurant, not that the practitioner was bad, but there are multiple branches and multiple ways to do the medicine. So I just wanted to bring that up at the beginning, ’cause a lot of folks have never heard that before. And then to get in on your question on the essence. So we have the emperor’s medicine. There’s a classic textbook called the “Huangdi Neijing”, “The Yellow Emperor’s Internal Medicine Classic”. And in there they talk about practicing the Dao. People practice the Dao, the way of life. They understood the principles of balance of yin and yang as represented by the transformation of the energies of the universe. And I mean, when you read those words, you think, well, okay, yin and yang. Number one, thank you for bouncing yang properly. It’s not yang. So it is yang. 

And it is that balance. Everybody’s seen that symbol with the white teardrop going up with the little speck of black, and the black teardrop going down and the speck of white. And that is, basically, the ancients knew as internal alchemists the way of the world, and that balance between yin and yang, and the best representation for that symbol is the sun and the moon, I think. The sun creates energy. It’s daylight. It’s a fireball, right? It is yang, it’s masculine, it’s energetic. And then its counterpart is the moon. It’s passive, it’s reflective, it’s nighttime. So you have these energetics of yin and yang, and it’s always in relationship to each other. So you’ve got active and passive, you’ve got male and female, you have night and day, you have hot and cold. And so, always in the body, in health, that also is represented by a statement, which I’ve actually come to now intimately know, which is, you are in the universe and the universe is in you, and which I’ve said for 25 years now, but to actually experience it in a deep meditative state of, I said this process, this journey that I’ve been on with Sariah leaving her body really ripped me open as a human. And it has given me the ability to really understand we are truly, we’re light beings being compressed into matter, into these physical forms, into this 3D realm, but ultimately, what the science is showing us, where we’re going with in quantum discussions in physics is we truly are light beings. And you can actually, you can have a direct relationship to that statement, and the Chinese medicine system and the Daoists of the day, they had an intimate knowledge of that because that’s how they developed this really intricate, sophisticated system that works.

Jason Prall

Yeah, so with yin and yang, and maybe you can just give us some very practical, real-world ways that we can observe this in our life, and perhaps in our own system, with our personalities and our ways of being, and then what are some things that we can do to help balance these things, right? Because of course, we’ve got all kinds of modalities in Chinese medicine that we can use, be it herbs or acupuncture or a number of other ones, I’m sure that are there, but just in terms of foods or exercise or breathing, or what are some practical things that I can observe in my life and say, wow, I’ve got a lot of yang, and I know I do.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Jason Prall

That’s my constitution. And so, a lot of practices I’ve brought in are more yin practice. In fact, one specifically is yin yoga.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yes.

Jason Prall

And even some breathworks that actually activate the parasympathetic, that cool me down as opposed to heat me up. So maybe you could talk to us about that.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah, so when you think of the yin and yang symbol, you’re thinking of balance. And so, what happens in the West in particular is we get into one thing and we like, we do that thing, right? So maybe it’s power yoga or it’s weight lifting. So we’ll just use, let’s use, okay, I need to put on some muscle mass, so I’m just gonna start lifting weights, right? So I’m a dude. I’m going for it. Well, if you just do that, it’s very yang right? Or you’re doing Wim Hof breathing, which is very yang, it’s very active and engaged. But that will throw the body out of balance if you do nothing to balance it out on a more passive thing. So on the weightlifting, you need to be doing some stretching to balance that activity, or otherwise you throw your whole system out of balance. Taking hot herbs. Like a lot of times, there’ll be research on a botanical and let’s say ginseng, which is an adaptogenic botanical. And it has very great medicinal properties, but it’s also very hot. And so, if you’re just consuming a very hot substance, it will deplete you of other substances, it will burn off your yin, and then you’ll become dry. And it will cause all kinds of side effects that weren’t intended, even though there was great research on this thing. Or the breathwork is another one where you noticed on the yoga front, like you brought in yin yoga, like a lot of men, we’re more yang, we have more energy, we’re more active. So really, the reciprocal nature of that in the universe is yin. You need to rest, you need to stretch. So the yin yoga is more gentle because it is that balancing of the energetics of the body, which also happens in the energetics of the world, in the universe. So to think that it’s just happening here, yes, while it is just an inside job, it is also represented on what is out here, out in the universe.

Jason Prall

That’s a really good point. ’cause what I’m hearing from you is that, sure, we have these natural proclivities or constitutional elements, but then we have, let’s say our traumas, our character styles, our conditioning that is layered upon us throughout our childhood that essentially creates who we become, the masks that we wear, the ego that shows up. And for me, as an example, I do a lot of thinking, right? Which is a very yang type of thing, right? The doing aspect, right? The people who do, do, do, go, go, go is a very yang, right? And so, even with something like yin yoga, it is not my preference, to be honest with you. I don’t wake up and go, I’m so excited to do yin yoga, right? And so, this took some, I wanna say willpower, it took some dedication to balance and to wellbeing for me to even start to adopt these things, right? And I think, it is interesting though what you’re talking about, ’cause I think we fundamentally understand, even body builders understand this, because they’re doing so much body building, the smart ones, and I think most of ’em are pretty in tune these days, understand they need a ton of sleep, a ton of great sleep, which is probably the most yin thing you could ever do, right? And so, at least on some fundamental level, even if it’s not in these sort of terms, we kind of get that we’re doing this, but I wanna point to this idea too, maybe you can speak to this, that I’ve noticed, because one of the last things you said was that we have to pay attention to the energies around us, and our culture in North America is particularly yang. We just do, do, do, go, go, go, make, make, make. 

And so, that’s surrounding us. And I noticed that because when I was in Costa Rica, it was a big wake up call. The energy around me was much slower. And I felt it impacted my system in a massive, massive way. In other words, that’s medicine for me, that slowness, that ease of being was such medicine. That in other words, I didn’t even change anything other than my location. And my direct environment started influencing me, right? And then of course we have solar cycles. We have all kinds of these energies that get very complex. And of course, that’s why some of this astrology that has been brought in in all of these cultures kind of exists is to understand these things. But I find that in the West, in North America, even with things like yoga or meditation, we can actually come at it from a doing energy, right? And so, this is what’s kind of interesting is that even though the activity is more yin, if we bring that yang to it, we kinda lose some of the benefits, right?

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Right. Oh yeah, that’s a really important distinction because it is, if you’re sitting in meditation for an outcome, that’s a doing, versus the being of just sitting for sitting sake, and turning it off, of going into no thing, no body, nowhere, no time. And just being in space. That is so freeing when you actually do that. And maybe some people are saying like, what the heck is he talking about? But it is rather than being goal-oriented or driven, it is really just enjoying the present moment in being together, right? Of like, wow, that flower is so beautiful. It made me pause and took my breath away. If you have that intimacy with a flower or a tree or a rose bud, whatever the thing is, but getting out of the doing in here, because that’s the trap that we don’t really understand because we’ve just been brought up that way of that’s just what’s happening, for a lot of people, right? It’s a dangerous neighborhood to go into by yourself, most of the time is up in here. But if you can get it into this balance of being, of like, I remember in middle school, I had a music class and the teacher had us just close our eyes and listen to music. And it was one of the best gifts that I ever got as a youngster.

Jason Prall

I mean, the fact that you remember it right now–

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

I totally remember it. It was like fifth or sixth grade music class. I forget the teacher’s name. And I apologize for that, but it made such an impact on me of like, he just had us close our eyes and just listen to the music. When do you do that? Usually the music’s on in the background and you’re multitasking, cooking, doing dishes, whatever, watching the kids. You’re doing that, but when are you just listening? And so that, I guess I learned early on the being, and it took me kind of into the medical realm of energetics.

Jason Prall

Wow. That’s an amazing story. And I love the way you made that distinction of being versus doing. I’ve actually, it’s so simple and I don’t know why I’ve never put that together, but it’s basically just absence of outcome, absence of a goal or an objective, right? And for somebody like me, and I think for many in our culture, that alone is a very difficult conditioning to unwind because we are constantly being reminded, and told, and taught, and suggested that there’s always a goal and outcome, somewhere to go, something to become. And it’s just, let me just say, it’s very pervasive and making that distinction. And I think as much as we can, letting go of this objective, or this goal, or this end aim is really the essence of this idea of being. Now, I wanna switch goals here.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Sure.

Jason Prall

A little bit. And I wanna switch to this topic of these elements, right? So we have water, air, fire, earth, and in Chinese medicine, metal, which is a little bit different from Ayurveda. And so, maybe you can talk to me about these, because I actually was thinking about this the other day, and there’s so much wisdom in these elements that we can take. And I find them as I look at these different maps in psychology, in our personality patterns that we develop, in our constitution, in our body shapes, these elements basically appear everywhere. And so, maybe you can kinda walk me through the characteristics, the archetypes, and how these elements are essentially infused in everything that we can possibly imagine.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Right? So yeah, the five elements in Chinese medicine are, the main five organ networks. There’s 12 organ networks in Chinese medicine, 12 meridians on the body, but they’re boiled down to the energetics of these five items. And I’ll start with wood, which is the liver and gallbladder meridians. And when you look at the qualities, what I love, the basics of this is what happens in the macrocosm, the universe, happens in the microcosm, the body. There is now some studies saying that we, as human beings, are the event horizon, meaning goes for infinity out and infinity in, and the center where that happens is below the navel in the lower dantian. And it’s this energetics of the elements at interplay, so wood is the element for, it’s the spring. Well, why is wood? You’ve heard of spring cleaning. Well, what is that? That’s the liver, the liver detoxifies the body. That’s where the spring cleaning comes from. And, well, what is it? It’s the new growth, the new buds on the tree. It’s the new wood being birthed and born. And so, there’s qualities to that. There’s a color, green. The organ network is on the zang-fu organs is the liver. Then you look at what the liver’s function. It stores the blood, it cleanses the blood. And so, that growth, the new growth, and wood is the element. Then wood, when it gets too dry, will go into fire, right? We see that every summer in North America, where there are more and more fires happening in the summertime. Well, that is the heart. It’s passion, it’s joy. It’s the heart and small intestine is the linked organ network with that. But it’s the fire. It’s the summertime. 

It’s the solstice. It’s the longest day of the year. So it’s hot, it’s red, and it’s fire. As the fire burns, it then creates earth, right? So if we look at what happens in our environment, the trees and woody material burns, and that becomes rich soil for the earth. So that is the spleen and the stomach in Chinese medicine. It’s late summer. So it doesn’t get its own season, but there is a late summer component in Chinese medicine, which is the spleen and stomach, which is responsible for digestion. As an aside, that’s a link into what I do with the naturopathic medicine is it begins in the gut. So that’s how I’ve linked the naturopathic and Chinese medicine information in this vessel here, but the earth, as the earth compacts, then you get metal. So you’re now, we’re into fall. The emotion, oh, the emotions of earth are worry, pensiveness. So there’s some good qualities. And then if it’s out of balance, it gets too much into worry. Then we get into metal, which is the lung. And the lung associated with grief, fall, but it’s the earth compacting into metal. And then from metal, we get into water, which is winter. It’s very yin, it’s the kidney. Color is black there. So fall and the lung is white. And then we get into a black, which is the stillness. It’s the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, cold, it’s wet, and water. And then outta water comes to the new rebirth, we’re back into the liver in the spring and the growth of the wood. So there is that, all of the elements birth the next element, and then there’s overlapping or control mechanisms for each one of those around the circle.

Jason Prall

So name those again, just kind of in order, just so we have them.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

So we’ve got wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.

Jason Prall

Perfect. And so, I totally just gave everybody the wrong ones, ’cause I’m, again, familiar with Ayurveda, which is earth, fire, air, water, and space.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Got it.

Jason Prall

So forgive me for sort of projecting my knowledge onto Chinese medicine. It shows you, and I told Dr. Eckel, this Chinese medicine is one of those things that I just haven’t done a lot of study around, but have tremendous respect for. I’ve done a lot of acupuncture and I’ve done a little bit of looking into the herbal side, but boy, that gets complex quick. And unless you have the framework, I fundamentally believe that you’re just screwing around when it comes to herbs on the Chinese medicine, because it is, the thing that I really admire. Maybe you can just talk briefly about this. It’s the system that I’ve, I’ve never seen a system that is, I wanna say complex, but it’s complimentary. It uses a number of different herbs in a way specifically to balance. So maybe you can talk to me about the philosophy of combining nine different herbs, hitting various different systems to accomplish one objective, so to speak.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Sure. And that concept gets boiled down to a word. It’s called the zheng of the formula or direction. So it’s a very elegant way of combining, and I actually use that concept in therapeutic involvement with patients. And it’s around, there’s an emperor or empress, there’s generals and assistants all lined up to move in a direction. So in the West, we tend to do the shotgun approach, right? So I’m taking these gazillion supplements. So the analogy is, you’re just kind of treading water, which is important to not drown, right? But you’re not really moving the vital force or the innate intelligence anywhere. So this is like you’re doing the freestyle stroke is the zheng of the formula and direction. So you’re moving in a direction. So it’s intricately laid by the flavors. The different flavors have different energetic properties associated with the elements. So that’s how that gets layered together in the zheng of the formula.

Jason Prall

Hmm, I love it. And so, you’ve got kind of an interesting twist with your practice, and I love people like you who just kind of bring in whatever they want because it works and they’re figuring out new ways to combine things. And we’ve interviewed some of the team from NES Health. And I know Harry personally, and their technology is very, very interesting. Peter Fraser, the man who essentially birthed this idea and the framework for that was just a total genius. And try reading his books and they’re super dense with unbelievable knowledge and wisdom. But talk to me about how you’ve been using kind of the NES Health technology and how you’ve found it to be so interestingly successful with what you do.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah. I’d been looking, so we just came through the pandemic and I was looking for ways to reach people in their living room. And I came across the NES system and it is so fascinating. And you are right on the Peter Fraser front. I read one of his lectures from Copenhagen and I mean, it took me hours to sift through that. But when you get it, it’s like, wow, this is really brilliant. And so, to have kind of that mind and understanding systematized on a program, and it’s done so well. So I’ve been using the NES system with their voice scan, which looks at the biofield of the organs and the organ network. So Peter was a acupuncturist and Chinese medicine trained mind and brilliant being, practitioner, provider. And so, he’s put a lot of that information as one of the groundworks of how the NES remedies work and what meridians and where the linking of the internal links of the vessels. And I mean, when you start pushing on, and I have done this because that’s just the type of provider I am. I wanna know, and I wanna get results, number one. And then number two, I wanna understand what’s behind it, make sure that it’s real. So I vet it and it is so intricate. And I’ll give you a for instance. So I did a voice scan on a patient. And I do that on initial consults. We’ll just do kind of voice scans for folks to give us some framework to discuss. And we got into it and I looked at one remedy, and it said it was dealing with calcium metabolism. And what came out in the discussion was she was having, she didn’t know that she had calcium stones in her gallbladder, but she had just gotten diagnosed via ultrasound that she had a gallbladder full of stones. And one of the remedies that came up from the voice scan was around calcium metabolism. And in particular, the gallbladder meridian. I was like–

Jason Prall

Wow.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

This is just uncanny. And then to tie it together with, I’ve been a practitioner, I graduated in 2001. So I went to medical school in 1996 and I’ve been taking Chinese medicine pulses for 25 years. And I think just getting good at it. And then this system comes along and I’ve been using this system and I admit it to you, and now I will admit publicly that I think it does a better job of than what I’m doing in the room with somebody. So taking the Chinese medicine pulses, it totally correlates to what I’m finding from a physical exam from this voice scan. So the way that the NES system of dealing with the biofield and really addressing us as energetic beings and in health, it is such a different system that it has been way ahead of the curve. And finally, the rest of us are catching up to it. But I think, I’ve been saying, since this whole event for me, four years ago, that the future of medicine is sound frequency, light, right? We are those beings and we need to start addressing it, acknowledging it, and understanding it better. And then here’s this system’s been around over 21 years. And it’s like, oh, they’ve been in talking this, they’ve been so ahead of the curve, and really kind of just patiently waiting for us to catch up with them. So it is just mind boggling on how accurate the system is, and what you can get from a voice scan is, it’s phenomenal. It’s very comprehensive, let’s say.

Jason Prall

Yeah, no, that’s great. And I think what’s so cool is that you can use it to both confirm your own testing with the pulse testing, and then, and vice versa. You can use your pulse testing to confirm the machine, and you can really have confidence in both aspects of what you’re doing there. And I think it’s fascinating when we look to the future for regenerative medicine and just this consistent healthcare approach. And I mean, healthcare, not disease care like we have now, but I see it as we’re starting to develop these ways of looking at the body. And I know there’s a lot of technology going into things going into the blood and trying to measure things in real time, and all this. And while I think that is useful, it’s still using the old model, the old framework of looking at glucose and looking at ALT and AST, right? That’s a model that isn’t necessarily, it can be used, but as we move into the energetics of things, looking at some of the more Eastern ways of looking at the body through energetics, through meridians, through marma points in Ayurveda. Now, we’re starting to understand how the body is moving and flowing. And hopefully we can couple or we can combine these kind of systems together to get a more comprehensive approach. But I do think it’s gonna take some time for the Western mind to sort of adopt this Eastern philosophy because the Eastern approach is a more feminine approach, right? It’s a more entangled approach. The Western is more masculine. It’s more sort of digital, if you will, staccato, where it’s not as, it’s analog, right? Which has all these flavors. And it’s a different way of looking at the body. And so, I just think it’s interesting as we go forward, these type of tools seem to be very good at helping us kind of when we’re off track, just kind of getting back on the path again, and sort of these minor adjustments, and if we can do this successfully, then we can use these things like acupuncture, like herbal remedies, and actually, give me some more of what Chinese medicine uses to help address these imbalances, but we can use these things to kinda get us back on course without having these major interventions that are now coming online, like stem cells and all this stuff, which again are great, but how about we just do these corrections so that we’re not so far off track and need something so interventionist.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah. One of my thought processes on that is looking at fractals. And I got turned onto these a few years ago. And looking, again, at that kind of concept of event horizon, of infinity out and infinity in, right? There is no end, other than in our minds of what reality is, because it is, you can’t encase it. It’s forever expanding, but it also is going in. And so, if you look at it as just kind of a spiral going up and down, it doesn’t matter what level you address the one, because it is just one thing happening. And our mindsets get to more physiology, biochemistry, or Newtonian kind of 3D physical realm.

Jason Prall

Yeah.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah, but we also know that you can get above kind of the speed of light into a quantum understanding where there isn’t predictability. And where time doesn’t exist. And we are actually able to experience that ourselves now. And I think this is how they developed these systems, Ayurveda and Chinese medicine is that they were amazing internal alchemists and became aware of actually the potency of the human body. I mean, we’ve got chanting and sound for all of the chakras to clear and resonate. We have this ancient technology that our ancestors, it has made it through the time continuum to us, but it’s because they understood that it is an illusion of what we’re doing here. And so, when we start to wake up to that, this discussion on, well, what does Chinese medicine use? It is the energetics of the body. We can do a reductionist component into glucose or, and some of the research happening in Chinese medicine now is very reductionist of like, we’re going to impact this one thing. And ultimately, we know if you address that one thing, there’s Korean hand acupuncture that treats the whole body. There’s auriculo therapy. There’s a point for everything here. There’s hara diagnosis in Japanese acupuncture on the belly that treats the whole body. I can treat your whole body on your arm. I can treat your whole body on your hand or on your finger, because it is represented in that fashion, is that the macrocosm is the microcosm. And it is just one. And so, the only limitation that we have is what our mind in its smallness or ego-based component puts on it. So that aspect of we have qi gong, which is energy work. 

And that’s one of the gifts that I wanna share is I’ve got a cloud hand qi gong maneuver that I learned from my teacher in Sichuan Province. We took a trip early in my Chinese medical career to Chungdu, and then up into the Eastern region of Tibet called Kham. And we were passing over 14,000-foot passes. So that’s the highest mountain in the continental United States is 14,000 feet, or just around there. So this is the pass. So the Himalayas are up above that. And we were doing qi gong. We were doing sitting meditation, walking meditation, and then more of a marshal form. And Professor Wang, it’s of Jinjing School, which is the Muscle Tendon Changing School of Qi Gong. Qi is energy, gong is work. He taught me this cloud hands where he was treating people post-stroke that could not move their bodies in bed. They were paralyzed and he would show them the maneuver and have them visualize it. And just doing that, they were able to get back to walking. And we now know, we have research showing, if you’re just rehearsing in your mind, the brain doesn’t know the difference between a rehearsal and the real thing, right? So you can visualize that and actually create the neuronal connections in your brain. So I put it in my book. I have a book called “Shake it Off: An Integrative Approach to Parkinson’s Solutions”. And so, I have people balancing their brains with that, but I don’t know about you, but I think we can all use some brain benefits. So doing this maneuver, so there’s energy work.

Jason Prall

Can you share that with us real quick? What does that move maneuver look like?

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah, totally. So it is, let me see if I can back up here so I can see. I don’t like looking at myself when I do. So it’s basically, you’re doing like this. It’s a yin and yang palm. Now, you’re standing up. And so, you’re stretching as far as you can go, and then you’re slowly tilting to the left, then you’re bringing, switch the palms and coming down.

Jason Prall

Where are you placing your awareness when you do this?

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

So you are in the core, in the lower dantian, just below the belly, like right down here is my belly button. So right down there.

Jason Prall

So you can kinda feel into this with your awareness, feeling into the body, into that sort of lower, just below the belly button, inside the body, and just kind of resting your awareness or your feeling perception there, right?

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Right, yeah. And so, you start out of the universe stance, which is the horse stance or the universe stance. So you are in the universe, the universe is in you. The way that I look at that is like, you’re hugging a tree, your legs are in the earth, there’s a mountain behind you, and your head is in the clouds.

Jason Prall

And you’re just kind of like resting, right? Like everything’s sort of soft while you’re doing this, right?

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah, you’re just like that. You’re kind of perched. And I have that, I do have it in the video. I know it doesn’t quite come across in the Zoom, in the sitting interview. But you start from there, like you are in the plasma of the universe floating like seaweed in the bottom of the ocean. So you’re just breathing there, feeling it. And then there’s a slow, gentle movement of moving, and you can feel it in the, even if you do that, right? So just go, come along if you’re watching, just do that maneuver of your right palm up, left palm down, as far as you can, almost like Spiderman. You can feel it right there in the center, and then flip your palms and gently come down, and you can feel the subtle differences of the energies of the yin and the yang. So you’re feeling the earth with the palm down. You’re feeling the heavens or the stars with the palm up. And it is that transition of the yin and yang palms that you can really get in tune with that internal alchemy of really being present.

Jason Prall

Mm, yeah. Qi gong is one of these things that, I mean, it’s just amazing, first of all, and I wanna speak to something here that I think is really important because I was like this and I imagine a lot of people are, which is that it can be difficult to feel the subtleties. You talk about feeling energy. For many people, and for me at the beginning, I couldn’t feel a thing.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Right.

Jason Prall

And what I wanna say to that is that you just keep going. And the cool thing is that, again, getting out of this doing, or this objectifying, or this goal-oriented mind, we can eventually just keep doing it. And then something happens one day and you’re like, oh my gosh. I found something.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

There’s something here. Yeah, like one easy way. I’m doing it now. If you just kinda rub your hands together.

Jason Prall

I’ll do it with you.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

And then pull ’em apart a little bit. And you can feel in there, it’s almost like a magnet, right? And just see how, and if you can’t, that’s okay too. But like Jason is saying, just stick with it because at one point it will click for you. But this is like Reiki healers, the healing palm, there’s pericardium eight is a point in here. It’s called the healers palm for a reason is that there is energy coming off of our bodies. Our biofield, we’re able to register that now. And maybe you’ve noticed it even being around people. Maybe you’re like around somebody that you’re like, wow, I just feel better when I’m around them, right? ‘Cause maybe they’re doing some work with qi gong or they’re working on their vessel so that their field is actually affecting others around, right? So we have stories of high-frequency beings just walking through villages and people being healed. Well, I do think that is our capability as humans. So we just haven’t been taught. And so, I think that I’m excited ’cause that’s what I see coming forth now on the planet for us all.

Jason Prall

Totally, yeah. And qi gong is one of these things, right? And if people aren’t familiar with it, which I’m sure many people watching this probably are, but qi gong is this idea that we’re actually cultivating this energy. So there’s two things that I’ve noticed when I’ve practice qi gong. One is that I become more attuned to the subtlety. So in other words, I’m able to perceive the subtle energy that was always there.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Jason Prall

but I’m able to perceive it because I’m sort of practicing, I’m feeling into it. Secondly, through this practice, which has been developed over thousands of years, you’re actually cultivating more energy flow. And so, there’s two things, right? You’re becoming more sensitive to the subtlety, and you’re building up more energy. So it becomes less subtle. So at some point, as you build up that energy and cultivate it, and you’re feeling into the subtleties, there’s a tipping point that happens. And all of a sudden you start feeling, and you start getting better at feeling, and then you get deeper at feeling, and then it just starts to get more juicy as you go. And this is, but I find that it may take, for some, practice to even get to that point, ’cause at first, for me, I was like, okay, I’m doing these things. Boy, this is boring, right? I don’t know what’s happening here. I don’t feel anything. I don’t notice anything. It’s not showing up in my life in any way. I have no evidence that anything’s happening. This is pure trust. And so, I just wanna point to that because that can be, if we can accept that reality for a little bit, at some point that changes.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah. It’s like you’re tuning your receptor. All of these things are receptors, right? Obviously, you’ve gotta get your energy up. If you’re out of balance so much that you have disease happening, well, that has to get corrected. It doesn’t have to get corrected before you feel any energy though, because it is all in the same system. It’s just tuning your awareness into the subtleties. So it’s one way of looking at visual light. We can see colors, but we understand there are things that we can’t see, which like, ultraviolet light and all of these other wave forms that, they exist, but we can’t, they don’t register in this apparatus, right? We can have other devices. So it’s just tuning this vessel into those subtleties of really experiencing what is there and has always been there the whole time.

Jason Prall

Yeah, and the key here, I think, is the awareness, right? And so, for people listening right now, if I ask you, have you been feeling your left hand? Most people probably not. But now that I’m suggesting it, if you feel into your left hand, you can start to feel something. And so, where awareness goes, qi goes, right? And where qi goes, blood flow, right? So all of a sudden with awareness, we can guide the qi. With the qi, we can guide the blood. With the blood, we can guide the healing, and the detox and all the. So it’s brilliant, right? All it requires is awareness. And we all have awareness, even as you alluded to before, the person that’s a paraplegic, quadriplegic, virtually a vegetable, we have awareness. And this is how, if we can tap into this idea with awareness, we can heal, we can start to gain flow in the body. We can watch magic happen. And that’s what I’ve seen over and over again. And Dr. Greg, we’re almost outta time here. And I wanna ask you one final question, and there may not be a good answer here, but I’m gonna take a risk. Is there a Chinese herb that is essentially a panacea? Something that we can all, and when I say a panacea, I mean something that we can all safely kind of rely upon that we can perhaps utilize without throwing us out of balance, or it’s unlikely that we’re gonna do too much harm. Is there something that’s that magical out there?

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

It’s different for everybody, Jason. So there isn’t, I wish that, I get asked that all the time. What can I take, or what is the thing, right? What’s the pink, purple pill, or what is the herb? But there is a synergistic herb that is used herbally. So I’ll mention, it’s called gan cao, which is licorice, but this is not a lot of licorice. So especially if you have high blood pressure, don’t be taking black licorice. But they used herbally as the harmonizer of a formula, a lot of times you’ll see gan cao, which is licorice, in small amounts as a synergistic or blending herb. And so, just to use that concept of looking at your life and what you’re doing of, okay, well, what is the synergistic blending, small gan cao for you? ‘Cause it could be different for everybody depending on what their yin and yang symbol looks like, of how balanced it is. And so, we’ll leave it with that is looking for the harmonizer and the balancer of what happens in the macrocosm happens in the microcosm, and we truly are the universe. We are just pretending to be separate at this moment in time.

Jason Prall

Hmm, yeah. I love that. And that’s such a good message, especially right now, as we have sort of felt more separation, I think globally than perhaps ever, or at least in a long time. So Dr. Greg, this has been fantastic. I feel like I know a little bit more about Chinese medicine today, which is really important for me. Where can people find more of your work?

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

I am at naturecuresclinic.com, and also bevitalpc.com. So we’ve got two centers springing up in the planet, and many more to come.

Jason Prall

Cool, well, I hope people check your stuff out because I mean, clearly you’re working remotely. You can do some cool, magical Chinese medicine coupled with the NES and the voice technology. So it’s cool that we’re able to do this. And when we find great doctors like yourself, that we can do this remotely. We don’t have to be in Portland. So I definitely encourage everybody to check out his stuff, and Dr. Greg, thank you so much for coming on.

Dr. Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Thanks for having me.