Hello. Welcome to Pacific College of Health and Science Master Teacher webinars. My name is Cynthia Nypris. I'm the Director of Continuing Education in Pacific College, New York. I want to say thank you to the Pacific College team that helps make these classes happen.
From Jack Miller, who's an inspiration to us all, President of the college, to our tireless marketing team, Natalie, Miles K., etc. to the amazing Miles Exner from eLearning, who is running this whole show behind the scenes today and runs all of these webinars. Our next webinar will be Yang Sheng, Nourishing Life Solutions for Immune Health, Tuesday, April 28th, with Deirdre Courtney coming from Ireland, whose new book on that subject is the best. And then April 30th, we have John Chen, the Dr. Fauci of Integrative Chinese Medicine. in the third of his series of talks on COVID-19, which we are co-hosting with Lhasa OMS. For any of you who are not familiar with Chinese medicine, when Lillian refers to organs like the kidney or the liver in this webinar, she's not referring only to the organ in the Western medicine sense, but to the whole system represented in Chinese medicine associated with that organ.
So if she says you have a line on your face that relates to a liver, problem, that doesn't mean you need to immediately go check your liver. You don't have a problem with your liver in the Western sense necessarily. We do have a handout and there's a link to the handout in the chat box. You can also put questions in the chat box and we'll read those to Lillian if we have time for questions and answers. Speaking of Lillian, Lillian Bridges is the world's leading authority on face reading and facial diagnosis.
She's credited for bringing this body of ancient knowledge back to the field of Chinese medicine. and introducing it to the Western world. Lillian is the founder of the Lotus Institute. She trains students in her comprehensive master face reading certification program. She has nearly 30 years of experience speaking, teaching, has been a featured speaker at conferences, conventions, symposia around the world, including multiple appearances at Pacific Symposium.
Lillian learned her skills from a long line of master Chinese practitioners in her Chen family lineage. She is the author of Face Reading in Chinese Medicine, a bestseller in the genre, published in multiple languages, and her new book, Divine Chinese Cuisine, great recipes. That's not part of the title, that's commentary, but a terrific new book, Divine Chinese Cuisine.
Lillian's been featured in many publications, radio and TV shows, including her famous appearance on the Dr. Oz show. She's contributed to numerous national and international magazines and journals. as well as several Chinese medicine books on the topic of face reading and feng shui. Her website is lotusinstitute.com, and we'll put that in the chat box, lotusinstitute.com.
Please welcome a treasure of the Chinese medicine community, Lillian Pearl Bridges. Thank you, Cynthia. It makes me realize how long I've been around. I was like, well, I've been in this business a long time, and I love our medicine and our field.
So... What I wanted to talk about today is a little bit more about the immune system and how it relates to some of the Yangsheng principles that Deirdre will be talking about next week. Deirdre and I worked together at the Lotus Institute.
She's one of my teachers. And I think we're in a really interesting time, is the best way we can call it. As Chinese curse me, we live in interesting times. These are interesting times.
I think we all have an obligation to take really good care of our own health and to help those who we can help. As most of you are practitioners, a lot of you are doing telemedicine and you're doing things online. And I wanted to kind of help with some of the facial diagnosis aspects that are really simple to use to help people understand what they can do for themselves and for their patients to improve immune function.
The face is such a compact little area that has so much information. And I gave out a handout for all of you to have. that shows the organ map where all the different organs can be seen.
Now you have to remember that there is a macrocosmic organ map, there's a microcosmic organ map. For example, all around the eyes you can actually see all the organs, but we're not doing that today. We're going to do macrocosmic facial diagnosis. And what I want to say is first and foremost, I want everyone to realize that we... has a society, whether it's in America or Europe or even most of the West, I should say, have been way too young.
And the young has been so intense that the yin has really suffered. And we are being given a time to be more yin. And I think a lot of people need more yin.
I mean, I noticed personally, for example, that my dark circles are starting to go away. I mean, they're not gone. I had very depleted kidneys.
I traveled way too much. I worked too much. But I can already see, you know, a really big difference underneath my eye and both eyes, actually.
And that says to me that my body is responding to this ability to sleep a little longer or not do quite as much as I used to do. And I did a lot. So I think that we need to look at this a little bit with gratitude in a way. I think my students have told me I don't look for a silver lining. I look for a gold lining.
And the gold lining in this one is we get to practice Yang Sheng. I don't think a lot of people I know would practice Yongshan if they didn't have to stay home and think about, well, what am I going to cook for myself? Or what am I going to do so I can get some movement in my life?
I'm going to take a walk or do some Qigong. We have choices. And the Chinese have a very interesting quote, a saying that I quote a lot, and that is, boredom is good luck. And when you are bored, you have a chance to make decisions that you normally wouldn't be able to make.
You can choose something different than you normally choose. So right now. believe it or not, most of us, except for those who are sick, unfortunately, have what's considered good luck because we're bored and because we have a chance to take really good care of ourselves and to practice yangsheng. So I'm going to start with some really simple things to talk about. The first thing I'm going to talk about is the yangsheng markers, and that's actually a handout that you all have.
There are three places to look for right here across the bridge of the nose. right here across the philtrum, and right here across the top of the chin. These three areas are areas that I use pretty much in every face reading that I ever do.
I want to see, is someone utilizing their bodies in the way the body wants to be utilized? This is actually a very important channel in the face where you've got the dew channel and the rend channel. I think they join right there.
And so you've got this, what I call the river of life. going here to Extraordinary Meridians meeting. And this particular meridian down the center says that if anything happens to you that marks across that center, it means that your life has to change. And usually, it doesn't always mean change is easy or good, but it turns out to be good ultimately that whatever change you do make that marks. And so the particular markings that I look at here, here, and here are also age-related.
We don't have time today to go into the idea of how the, you know, the, the feature of the face gets marked by trauma and age positions and show, you know, what happened at a certain age, but just know that these three marks are decade markings. They're 40, 15, 16. Now they can be marked not just because you have something big that happens to you at 40, 50, or 60. It can be marked because, you know, you've got other things going on, which we're going to talk about now. And what these particular markings mean that I think are really important for practitioners is that we have in Chinese medicine this understanding that you can make qi.
Thank god we can make qi because jing can get overused so easily by over overdoing and overusing. So jing of course is this incredible thing that we all need to have more actually hold on to and preserve and protect. It's our kind of innate constitution you know it's our innate health and because it does get overused by living.
we have this ability to make chi and chi is that animating factor that we live on and so if we have this ability to make chi there's two ways to make chi one is by food and one is by breath and i spent a lot of years with my grandmother trying to figure out how in the world did food and breath get transformed just like there must be something really magical that happens and like it becomes energy somehow and of course the body is very magical and you One of the things these three markings show you is this one's food, this one's breath, and this one's actually Yangshan preserving Jing and Qi. We'll talk about that more in a minute. These three markings say that at 40 years old, you have to change the way that you eat, okay, for almost everybody.
Change the way that you eat. You know, having raised two sons, I have to tell you, teenage boys can eat anything and everything. And now both of them are in their early 30s now are saying. you know, I just can't eat those hot chilies anymore. Or I, God, that greasy, you know, food that I just ate made me feel kind of sick.
And you're going to notice that your body is going to ask for more purity of food after 40. So you have to start taking care of your body in a way that says, you know, food has to be thought of differently. So what the marking is, is basically a line here, or a series of lines here. This is a little pancreas area, the spleen right above it. And I want to caution most of you to stop overthinking food, especially now when we're living off our pantries. What you want to do with this particular marking.
I think this is really critical is that you enjoy the food. One of the things that my grandmother and I had multiple conversations about was the fact that if you didn't have joy when you ate, then you didn't have enough fire to transform the food into chi. So you have to enjoy the food.
You have to love eating it. You have to like thoroughly get involved with like the taste of it and the texture of it and the smell of it. I mean, all those sensory things that are so important. You can't just shovel food in your mouth and go, Okay, I fed myself. Okay, that's actually not going to work.
What this is requesting when you have a line here is that you eat more consciously. That does not mean that you eat from your head. Okay, that's not going to help you.
When you think, oh, this is healthy for me and you don't like it, it's like you just force yourself to eat it. Not going to work. I mean, it's still gasoline. You know, it's still going to feed the car, but not in a good way. It's not going to be running optimally.
Optimally, if you have any kind of line here or indentation here. It's asking you to eat foods that you love. Now, people say to me, but that's tricky. You know, what if I have a food allergy or what if I want too much of it?
You have to separate the kind of food that your body is asking for you to use to make chi from the cravings that you have that come from emotional things. Emotional cravings are kind of a desperate need to eat something to get. your brain chemistry changed, you know, and, and that's different. And you're gonna feel kind of sick after you eat it. What happens when you eat the foods that your body really wants you to eat and the kind of craving that can bring up is there's a kind of satisfaction that occurs really fast that says, Oh, that was good.
That was really, really good. And it can be anything. The other day, I got really excited about eating carrots. I don't know why I just cut a bunch of carrots, but it's really good.
And it doesn't always work. Carrots aren't always going to be a food that make me happy. But the other day carrots were like, Oh, this is really good. And I, I watched myself a lot thinking about what is it that my body wants? And the difficulty right now is we can't just go out and order easily something that we want.
And we can't just run to the store as easily to get what we want to make it. But if you have a fully stocked pantry and there's things that you know, that you like, they'll work, you know, they'll work. And You kind of have to trust the body's wisdom on this one. This is not where you think about it. This is not where you know that this food equals these vitamins or these minerals or whatever, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish, because that's using the spleen too much when you're actually using the pancreas and the stomach to enjoy and digest the food.
So I spend a lot of time looking here and I have to say one of the other aspects of this particular area is some coloration that's involved. And color in the Chinese system is basically the five elements of color. You've got dark for stagnation. You have red for inflammation.
You have white for frozen. You have green for toxicity and yellow for putrefaction, which also means phlegm. And this little area right here actually tells you a lot.
Now, I am a little bit white right here, so I'll just use myself as an example. a little bit hypoglycemic. Didn't have quite enough breakfast, to be honest with you. And it's, yeah, I need to eat something a little longer lasting than I did. Toast isn't going to cut it today.
So lunch is going to be a lot bigger. But you can see it's a little white right here. That means there isn't quite enough blood sugar.
Okay. When it's dark, purplish or grayish or whatever, too much blood sugar. Okay. And the blood sugar is too high.
And if it's yellow, I kind of... If it's yellow, the pancreas isn't working very well. That usually shows up when someone's diabetic and their insulin level isn't proper. Usually you'll see hypoglycemia, high blood sugar as the purplish kind of bluish color there.
And this is for adults, not for babies. Babies will show a little bit of bluing here because they have an issue with the sugars in the mother's diet if they're breastfeeding or in the formula. It might be like a lactose intolerance or something like that, or just the mother is having too much sugar.
for the baby's system. So I do look at this area besides just the line, but I do get these lines really easily. It's one of the ways that my body knows how to make chi.
If I'm really tired and exhausted, the most important thing I can do is eat well. And it's something that showed up a lot when I was traveling, which was kind of difficult because airports aren't known for the best food and airplanes definitely aren't known for good food. At least the ones I fly on and I don't fly first class.
So I had trouble. making chi when I was traveling because I didn't know what to eat. In foreign countries, I don't know what restaurants are good. And so I had to really learn which airports had the best restaurants.
So anybody wants to know, I'm pretty good at airports and restaurants. But I will say, I watch this area a lot of myself and also my clients. And I talked to them about Listen to that body's wisdom that says, you know, you really need to eat something right now that it's going to give you that ability to make energy. And the body knows what is it.
Sometimes it's going to create something really fast. It's like, it may be that really sweet coffee is going to suit you today, you know, and that's really okay. I don't want you to judge what the body wants at a certain time to make things function. One of the things I've paid a lot of attention to recently is that when you have a lot of dark here and mine's finally starting to happen.
diminish a little bit, it means that your kidneys are so tired that it's actually asking your, your pancreas to, you know, digest food to give energy because the kidneys are too tired to give energy. They're tired even from pulling from the gym. So I, I look at this area quite strongly in most people.
And I, I think it's worth noting that when you do eat the foods that make you happy, you just kind of go, Oh, that was really good. good okay these lines start to diminish very rapidly i mean very people don't realize that lines are not permanent i teach this all the time and some lines are there as markers for now that they can go away within you know a short time and so don't ever think lines are permanent unless you've been doing that particular expression for a really really long time okay so um i'm sure i get rid of that little thing there um i want people to trust their body's wisdom. There's an instinct that we have for what's good that we override a lot.
And this is something where someone may feel like, oh God, I can't eat that. That's really bad for me. It's too much fat or whatever else.
Maybe your body needs fat today. And so I want you to be kinder to yourself about what you eat. So that's the number one way to make chi. And the other aspect of it it's a little harder to explain is that not only does your body want more purity of food and that's not to say that it's necessarily organic or necessarily you know raised by a happy farmer or whatever that's all great and I've you know cooked by someone who loves cooking that's all great and it's helpful but the body knows what it wants and it it can really handle a lot more than you think in terms of what you eat to make chi and when you feel that kind of like oh god that was so good or you that meal was so satisfying you can think about it sometimes even years later then you know that you have fulfilled something on an energetic level because what we're talking about here is that there's ling you know ling in the cosmos that's you know the the kind of the fairy dust of the cosmos that we are trying to um to bring into our bodies and food is one of the places that we get this ling which is why we can make chi from it as part of the magic as well besides the joy because all alchemy has to occur with fire okay that's just that's just a thing you Um, but you also have to like gather Ling.
And so when you, I have a personal preference for, um, Irish butter. It's just, it's just one of my favorite things. It makes she easily, this is why I do have toast.
It's a vehicle for good Irish butter. The cows are outside, so they're eating grass, you know, and, and I, I love butter. It's like, it just, it does, it does something for me almost all the time. If there's just Ling, you know, in that butter and I. I'm really happy with it.
And I'm not saying all butter does it, by the way. Some butter is like, eh, not so good. But Irish butter almost always does it, you know?
And so I'm getting Ling from that. And this is why a fresh tomato off the vine tastes so much better than one that we try to eat in the middle of the winter. It looks like, you know, it's got styrofoam inside because it's white, you know?
It's not right. That Ling is what we're trying to get. We're trying to transform that into Qi. And so don't forget the magic part, you know? There's a lot of...
magic that we need to pay attention to when it comes to transforming food. And then the other aspect which I started to bring up was we need to think about purity of ideas as well. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here, but I want you to think about not taking in everything that you hear, even from me. I do the best I can to give you information as purely as I can because I'm very metallic in some ways.
But I have to say, take what works for you and use it with any teacher, with any book, with any... study of anything, you can take it in and learn it and all that, but let go of the things that don't work for you and keep the things that do. And this is actually where you don't let yourself be influenced as much by someone or information that may not be as useful for you as you need it to be. This is purity right here of food and ideas.
So there's another aspect. This is to explain more about the thinking that I also want you to be aware of. The next area right here is breath. This one's a little bit harder to explain.
This one is 50 years old. And this one's, I told you, 40, 50 years old. You're supposed to stop caring about what other people think about you so much about how you look out in the world, which is not easy.
And it's very liberating. My mom had a great saying, when you can no longer hold in your stomach, you can no longer hold in your tongue. So be careful what you're thinking because. Usually after 50, you start saying things that normally when you were younger, you would have been able to close off. So I found that to be true personally.
And it's like, oh, didn't mean to say it that way, but I did. So I do watch what I think sometimes when I'm with people. But this area right here, I mean, it has to do with freeing yourself and freeing yourself from society and other people's opinions is one way of freeing yourself.
It's also freeing yourself. in terms of the body and its functions. There's a quality of freedom that comes from going through menopause, which most women don't think about.
You're freeing yourself of a whole lot of stuff that's not very fun. If people say, oh, I miss having menstruation, but why? It's not, I don't think it's fun.
And this says you're freeing yourself from the... body's biological drives to procreate. So you have a little bit of an ability to manage, for example, a lot of the sexual drives that drove you a lot into some relationships that maybe weren't appropriate when you were younger. So there's a freedom here, and it's called taming the dragon.
So it's actually considered a very good thing, especially in Taoist philosophy, to talk about how much more liberated you get, you know, once you've fulfilled your worldly obligations, and you've raised your children, or you've, you know, paid your dues by working for companies. And it's not about retirement. It's actually about freeing yourself.
And the idea of freeing yourself involves freeing yourself from biological drives that probably weren't always in your highest good. And so when you get to your 50s, you have a chance to get more in line with your meaning, you know, your mandate from heaven, what I call your golden path. And that's really cool. There's a saying, um, in my family, actually, that the later you start your golden path, your Ming, the faster you go. So it doesn't matter that you didn't do exactly what you were supposed to do when you were younger.
You've been doing something, obviously, that's helpful. But when you get to 50, it's like, okay, it's time to start thinking about yourself and doing what you're meant to do here. So when you have a line here, there's a couple things it means. First of all, you're probably not doing the transition from fertility to creativity that well.
So this is a a line that says you're that you're supposed to you know ease into this um this change right that change and you're not easing into it you're suffering from it in some way you're unhappy about it you might have you know issues with aging or fear or whatever else but there's something going on here where you're not transitioning smoothly from one era to another um the other thing about it there's this area is so potent it's like one of the most powerful areas of the face that There's so many meetings here, but I'm focusing on just one. And that's a line that says that you need to breathe. And if you think about breathing and how important it is, when you take really big in breaths, you breathe in fully and open up those lungs and you breathe out, you know, a long time and release those toxins, you're oxygenating the system really, really well.
And one of the things to do actually for your immunity, one of the most important things you can do. is major deep breathing to keep those lungs really, really healthy. It gets awfully tired of holding on to all those toxins that don't get removed from out breath, as well as all the grief that we may be holding from whatever has happened to us. So breathing out all that stuff is a really good spiritual practice.
And you'll find that most things like Qigong and Tai Chi and yoga and all those kinds of things and meditation involve breathing because you want to remove all that. the toxicity of that stale air basically and bring in more lean once again we're dealing with that cosmic lean that says i'm gonna breathe in the clouds i'm gonna breathe in you know the sky i'm gonna breathe in the heavens right and anytime you have a line here it says that you're not breathing in a way that you need to when you oxygenate your body really fully these cheeks pump out okay and that's really important and i remember asking my grandmother one time because i've I'm very prone to hollows here. I'm still a little hollow here and I'm trying to pump those out a little bit. But what I say about these is that this is actually mini grief and going too fast, breathing too shallow, delaying gratification. There's a lot of...
wonderful, the way she information right there. And I'm not the best example yet. I'm getting better. It's getting a little bit plumper. I can feel like, you know, there's something there.
You know, I'm coming from a background where a long time ago, I used to model and act. It wasn't a good thing to have plump hair. So I still kind of go, no, it's good.
It's good. I have to tell myself, this is good. This is good. It's not gels.
Gels are when they say that's earth deficiency, but this is actually saying, if you have this as well. oh, you're not breathing. And I asked my grandmother, what do you do when you don't know how to breathe well? Because breathing is really natural. Babies are born knowing how to breathe properly, but we forget because we hold our breath and we breathe shallow and go too fast and all that.
And she said, if you can't breathe well, you need to start singing. And this was a really big revelation. I like to sing.
I've always been singing. And I sing more now. I sing that.
In the car, when I do go out in the car, I sing in the shower. I sing to my grandchildren. It's fabulous.
And that's probably why my cheeks are getting a little fuller because I do sing more. And singing is a natural thing where you breathe in really fully to make those notes that come out. I don't care if you're on key or not. And that long out breath that you do with singing is really valuable. And so for those of you who don't breathe well and or you have a line here, you need to sing.
You need to do some. some deep breathing on a conscious level. Okay. And the other aspect of this, which is really important is that when you breathe deeply enough and long enough that you're, you're really oxygenated, you can actually go to this place where you don't have to breathe very much because you're so full of oxygen that you can get very, very still. I think it's the entire purpose of meditation is to get you to this place.
I think breathing. in deeply and out for a long time can get you there after not that many breaths when you just get really still and you can feel your skin tingle because you're actually oxygenated for a change and you go there and that's that quiet place where it's I call it a very numinous place where anything's possible and that's that place where the upwellings of creativity happen that's the place where conception happens it's the conception of anything whether it's babies or ideas for a new book or, you know, or the feeling you need to paint something, you know, it comes from this place. And if you don't give yourself that quiet and you don't give yourself that ability to be so still, you don't access that amazing creativity inside yourself. And I think now is a time where we really need to focus on on creativity um that's our birthright actually and i want people to to recognize when they have this line they're not allowing themselves to be creative very often you're doing all the right things you know you're you're working hard at work and you're working hard at home and you're raising your kids and you're you're doing all the things that you do guess what you're not doing you and and this line here says that you haven't freed yourself to to be your own creative self. And that's what's supposed to happen after 50, that you're given a chance to be your own creative self.
And this is really magical. The breath doesn't, in my opinion, transform as well if you don't go to that amazingly magical place. So that's a really important thing.
And this line too. come and go and come and go and you can decide whether it's you're having trouble with your transition from fertility to creativity you can decide whether it's an issue with with you know not breathing deeply or not breathing very much at all or um not letting yourself be still i mean whatever it is um this line will go away when you when you breathe in enough and breathe out enough to get that still place where you can transform the breath and that's really magical um The last one down here is really interesting. The meaning of this point is actually sometimes called a hole in the bucket. There's an aspect of the kidneys here, kidneys, basically bladder, bladder kidneys.
And there's also an earth aspect. I mean, earth, earth layers on top of everything. You know, it just kind of like lays plumpness, you know, fat basically all over the place.
And it's actually good to have some plumpness here because it makes you nice and stubborn. And what happens with this particular line, it's really common. Number one, it's actually a line that says that your body is tired of living the way that you've been living. It means that.
you're burning the candle at both ends. You may not be sleeping enough. You may not be resting enough. You may not be doing been doing nothing enough.
This one isn't about transformation. This is about preservation. This is about saying, okay, you've got some Jing left, you've got some Qi you've made, how can we manage the Jing and Qi?
And if you don't, there's a hole in the bucket, and the Jing will and the Qi will actually like get lost. And this is saying, you're losing some Jing and Qi. And if because it's a 60 years old, 60, 61, 62. If you don't, or 60, 61, 62, if you're a man, this area right here says that if you don't stop doing things the way that you're doing them, your body will make you stop. It doesn't necessarily mean you'll get sick or injured, but there's a chance, a pretty good chance that your body will say, uh-uh, I'm not doing that.
Most of the time, people are shocked to discover that the will that they had before 60 is not present after 60. It's quite shocking for me. It was literally from one day to the next. I didn't expect it. I thought my will was always going to carry me through. I literally, the day after my birthday went, I can't do that.
I was invited to a party. I wanted to go up here because it was friends. I don't really love parties, but I thought it's my friend. And my body went, no. No, you're not.
No, you can't. I couldn't get myself to go. I tried to make myself go and I went, Oh, no, I'm 60. And I can't do things like I used to make myself do. The will no longer engages, unless it's what Ted Kapschuk calls the will that can't be will is what you're tapping into.
And that's basically when you align, you know, your your Jing and your Shen and you start living your Ming and and doing your golden path, as I call it, when you line up, then you have all the energy in the world. You can do what's in your highest good. You can't do all the other stuff that's not in your highest good.
It's very frustrating. And it's something where no matter what, when you turn 60, you're going to have some diminishment of the will that allowed you to push through stuff that normally before 60, you could push through and you start feeling it even your late fifties. who I know that are like, the lane that's happening already.
It's like, yeah, it starts happening up to, you know, sometimes five years ahead, sometimes longer, but usually about four or five years. And I think this is an important marking to look at. I just showed you the other way that you do it.
And that's, if you push like this, one of my students, Saffron Elledge from England, a brilliant face reader. And she said, this is also a resignation where you push like this. You just kind of like push it up. And that's where...
You're used to doing something that's probably not good for you, but you keep on doing it anyway, and you're wearing yourself out. It's resignation to a way of being that you don't know how to get out of. And that's saying get out.
If you don't get out, your body will say, no, you can't do it anymore. And your body will find a way to give you that lesson. I prefer my lessons to be less physically intensive than illness or injury.
So I do pay attention to this line. I've had it come and go and come and go for years now. And I do watch it.
It's really saying that you aren't living in a way that your body is happy with. And it's saying, learn how to preserve and protect Jing and Qi. And this is why I think Chinese medicine is one of the great medicines of the world, along with Ayurveda, because they're from ancient cultures where they really studied how to preserve Jing and Qi. And most people in the Western world think that they just go and go as fast as they can and do as much as they can as young as they can and they burn out and unfortunately that's that's an issue i'm seeing a lot of huge accidents injuries and death even for people that are way too young in my opinion to die because if you stretch out all they've done over a longer lifetime they could have lived twice as long you know and and i've got so many things to do that i i want to live longer so i look at this a lot and think okay what can i do if it shows up to back away from pushing so hard.
What is it that I'm doing that's taking so much energy away? And you'd be surprised what some of the things are that take energy. I have a great deal of respect for people who caretake their aging parents or disabled children.
It's so hard. And when my mom, who actually died last year, when she had a really major stroke about five years ago, I had this line so bad because I was taking care of her a lot. I was down staying with her for a couple of months. Oh, it was really hard.
And I, and I, I would do it again. I would do it a little bit differently because I watched this line and I was, I got really burnt out after about six weeks of caretaking and I ended up helping, you know, we found someone to help me caretake because I could, I'm not physically very strong and I was having to pick her up. And I watched this line and I thought, my God, caretakers don't remember that they have to take care of themselves first.
They have nothing to give, you know, and. And I watched this line thinking, and I saw it, but I didn't know how to get out of it for quite a while because I'm stubborn. And I watched myself use up so much chi and then pull into the jing, which I didn't want to do. And so now whenever I see this line show up, which is not hard, you know, a couple of nights of not sleeping well, a couple of days of working too much on the computer, I'm tired.
I mean, to give you one more example, there's other places that can show you why you're tired. I've been on the computer so much lately that I took a day off yesterday and didn't do much on the computer. And you can see, for example, how indented my area is right here.
It's the liver area. My liver is tired. It's tired from all the eye work that I've been doing. It's like, you know, focusing and all of that.
And after I get off today, I'm not going to do a lot of computer work because my liver is tired. My liver needs to go outside and sit with the trees, you know, for a while. And my liver needs more green vegetables. I'll make a. you know, nice, a big green lunch or something or dinner.
But I'm watching that these other places in the face can also show you which organ is tired. And I'm going to take a break right now. Let Cynthia ask me some questions before I move on to the places that show you where you're tired, because I want to answer some questions from this point, you know, until from, from the beginning till now. Okay. Cynthia, you want to go ahead and find a couple of questions for me or Natalie, if you've got some too.
Okay. So the first question is about the marking across the bridge of the nose. People wanted to know if the line is deeper or if there's no line over 40. What does that mean?
And also, does the line there sometimes go away? And what does that mean if the line goes away? Yeah, this line should come and go. If it's permanently there, it's a sign that you really, really have to pay attention to food and to taking in information and really focus on the purity. And.
Usually when I'm, I'm sorry to say this, but usually when I see someone with a really deep line that doesn't go away, way too much junk food, way too much junk food. I mean, it's just food that's just not nutritious. And that's something to be aware of, but the line usually comes and goes. And the deeper it is, the more your body's kind of screaming, eat, eat the way that you want to eat. You know, I mean, I'll just give you an example.
For a while there, I was eating kale like crazy. And I'm sorry to say, I don't love kale. It's like, I try to eat it, but. I didn't love it.
All those kale salad. I mean, I wanted to like it. I discovered I like baby kale.
I think it's because I don't have really good teeth for grinding. You know, I don't know. I can do baby kale, but not even that often. I much prefer, for example, chard or spinach or something. I prefer, you know, Chinese greens.
And so the thing is, you sometimes have to watch like that override that happens when you think, oh, this is a healthy food. I need to eat it because it's so good for me. And you don't like it.
It's not going to make your line go away as fast as when you eat it and it's like, oh. This is so good. You know, I had some baby bok choy last night with shiitake mushrooms and I was in heaven.
You know, it's like my line's better today. I better make my line better while I'm teaching this stuff today. So I was really, I was really happy.
So it'll come and go. And if you might have multiples, you might have like three or four little lines. It's just a sign that your pancreas needs some support.
It wants more consistent blood sugar, number one. Number two, it wants you to eat foods that nourish the body in a way that transforms food into into chi okay so it's definitely something that I watch and pretty much everybody definitely myself go ahead next question is is a line different than a wrinkle not really you know wrinkles are caused by the constant use of expression and you can stop using that expression and the lines will minimize and if you let go of the emotions that you're holding on to the lines can go away and I've lost so many lines in my face I can't even tell you I found a picture of me at 47. It was terrifying because I was really wrinkled. So I did a lot of work on that.
The thing that I want to say about lines and our wrinkles is that besides the fact that they're not permanent, they're really just showing you what organ in your body, besides the heart, is implicated. All emotions are allowed to be expressed because of the heart. The heart is strong.
more emotions will be expressed. If the heart is not as strong, more emotions will be repressed, but that's a function of the heart. But then if you hold onto emotions, the lines will show that you're working hard to hold them all down, or you've expressed them so much that your face makes a shortcut. So I don't...
I don't think lines are bad. Some lines are great. I think it's an overuse injury often, but wrinkles and lines are basically the same thing. I just call them lines because wrinkles have a kind of negative connotation.
And some are worth having because they're like Girl Scout or Boy Scout badges and say, oh, I learned how to make a fire, you know. Yeah, go ahead. Can you tell us what you mean when you say ling? Well, ling is something I think should be taught more in Chinese medicine.
It's actually one of the foundational principles of Taoism and why, you know, you... meditate the way that you do in that tradition. Ling is cosmic chi.
That's all it is. It's cosmic chi. And it's manifested most often in things that are ephemeral.
So for example, sunlight on the water or the sparkling of the iridescence of dew on the bushes in the morning. It's the new shoot that comes up out of the ground. I call it the magic because I don't know what else to call it.
It's cosmic chi, and we're trying to actually bring more cosmic chi into our body. And the two ways that you bring cosmic chi into the body are through food. These other beings out there, which includes vegetables, by the way, and fruit and even animals, they're gathering ling as well.
And so sometimes we need the intermediary to gather the ling, you know, to make it into chi for ourselves. And then breath is a direct access. So someone who meditates a lot or... sings a lot, you know, does active deep breathing is going to have a stronger connection to bringing Ling through than someone who does the, you know, I'm in a panic and anxiety and all that stuff that happens when you're working in the kind of hurried way.
So Ling is really an extremely important thing that we forget, I think, in Chinese medicine to teach. It's, I have an entire module on Ling, which is like, because I think it's so important. And it's really at the core of what feng shui is about um so i i am a big believer in gathering ling it's kind of like taking a basket and going outside and gathering flowers right go outside because that's where the most ling is and gather ling from the natural environment because it's just you know rushing stream will get behind me it gives you so much ling you know and and the wind rustling to the leaves of a tree give you so much ling it's like i'd love after a snowfall there's so much the quiet gives you so much ling so we need to gather ling It's really important. Okay, Cynthia, go ahead.
Okay. Now talking about the line across the philtrum, a number of people asked about the horizontal line possibly coming when people have a hysterectomy. Yeah, you know it does. And if they have that much younger than age 50. Yeah, so what you'll see if someone has a line that's up high, it's usually something else.
50 is literally, it's right in the center. Okay. And that's, you know, it could also mean hysterectomy though.
But you can, you can, all kinds of things can mark here. You know, you can have mark miscarriages. You can mark abortions if, if it concerns you.
You can mark things that, that, you know, tubal ligation or a vasectomy can mark. Those things can mark, but they tend to be a little bit different. It takes some, it takes some effort to understand how to see the difference. Usually I just ask people, have you had any surgery on your... you know, reproductive organs?
Do you have any issues with reproductive organs? I'll ask about that because they all will mark you. That's why I'm saying this area is so significant that a number of things can be there. And just for the record, when you have a hysterectomy, it doesn't mean you lose access to what the uterus and the ovaries meant. In actuality, sometimes when you lose a body part, it gets energetically stronger.
It's like the phantom limb thing. When you cut off your hand, right? You can feel your hand when before you couldn't feel your hand really. You didn't pay attention to it, it was just there. And so when you're missing organs, sometimes it actually makes those organs energetically stronger.
I know it's a really strange thought. My uncle and I had a big discussion about this one time years ago about how phantom organs actually can have a lot of power. So for example, a lot of people I know that had gallbladder problems and had... gallstones and had gallbladder surgery actually get more decisive.
Their gallbladder is stronger after it's taken out. Now they can't adjust fat as well, but boy, that other aspects of the gallbladder are really strong. So it's not necessarily considered this horrible thing that happens.
The body compensates. How about a person who may not have a line across the philtrum, but they get sweat in that area and it looks sticky and greasy and shiny. Does that have a meaning if it's not a line, but they do have...
Sounds like someone's having hot flashes, unfortunately. Yeah. Anytime you see oil coming off the face a lot, for example, I have so much trouble with eye makeup because it runs, you know, it's like my mask, if I wear mascara, it runs or eyeliner, it runs or eyeshadow doesn't hold very well unless it's like, you know, powder.
And so mostly during this time of staying at home, I don't wear makeup. So it's the first time in days. And I have to say it runs because I have oily eyelids.
And that means that my liver. isn't tired it's not functioning optimally okay it's just not it's like it's not processing the gallbladder it's not processing the fats the way it's supposed to it's supposed to be coming out other ways you know it's like uh it's not so whenever i see anything that looks oily or greasy or whatever i go oh the liver needs some support maybe hormone hormonal stuff is out of balance and you can ask the address about that um but i think it's hormonal stuff usually okay go ahead okay um if you use your gene too much touch they're talking now about the line across the chin the chin could this happen much quickly much more quickly um than at age 60 what about that line that's present in younger folks and what about people who have it from childhood on yeah yeah i just say you can have it at any age it's one of those weird markings that can show up as a as a projection if you don't stop doing what you're doing right now at 60 you can't do anymore so even children can have this line when their children are in my opinion overscheduled um they should be playing more that's how they learn and And you've got all these parents, you know, putting them in, you know, all these tutoring things and, you know, lessons for musical instruments and, you know, homework and all the stuff that we do to kids. And also the parents are driving to the soccer and whatever. So you'll see this line in young children.
I don't like it in children, but you'll see it in babies after they're born. Getting born is so hard. It's like it's such hard work.
So they'll have it for a while. And then being in the world and trying to deal with all the noises and the sounds and the tugging on clothes. changing diapers and all that it's hard work and going to school is hard work and so you'll you can see it all through life but if you take the time when you see this marking to back away from those things that take too much energy in the way that you're doing it this line will start to subside and then you know oh that's what i'm doing too much of okay i i joke about this but i really mean i'm actually not a good caretaker if you are sick for longer than three days and you're around me I'm not so good after three days.
I want to be. I mean, I'll bring you food and whatever. Even my kids will tell you, I'm not the best. I'm good.
My earth is good for three days. Okay. Sometimes up to a week, but after that, it's like, Ooh, it's pulling from someplace.
So I watched myself, you know, since my mom had her stroke, when I would get this line and it was over nurturing, because that was something that I did a lot of. And that shows up also as lines here. So over nurturing something that I do really easily. And I've got to be careful because that makes that line. And mind you, I want to nurture, but not that much.
I'm being honest. What if you have no lines anywhere, but I've experienced lots of trauma? Why don't I have any lines?
Well, lucky you, but it's very deep. So yeah, your organ function is obviously very, very good. You can push it down there. I can still find where it is, just so you know, especially like this trauma in your childhood, I can still find it. And there's another aspect too, which we don't have time to get into, where if you're not...
present like your shen's not fully present you won't mark in the same way so that's another that's a class for another day um but i want to get back to what i was talking about with um the organ map and why i gave it to you one of the things that you can do with that organ map is if you find lines here on the face you can actually especially like this one where in your body are you overusing something okay if today i had really dark circles today is not the Worst day for that, thank goodness, because I'm starting to go back this way. The dark circles go this way and then back that way. Okay.
Then they also go that way. This up here is worse. Okay.
So if you have it here, it's the kidneys, right? That's the kidney area. And if you have, you know, shadowing down here or problems with the actual chin itself, your kidneys are very tired, probably from fear though. If it's liver anywhere here or here or here, you can see it. But I think the liver.
is seen really easily in the white of the eyes. And not only am I tired here today, you know, because I used my liver so much yesterday, doing all this computer work, you know, redoing my website pages and, you know, newsletter and all these things that I was doing, you can see that my eyes, my eye whites are red. So automatically you can say, oh, wow, her liver is tired.
So go rest your liver. I'm going to go hang out with trees today. Go rest your liver, go feed your liver, you know.
Eat more green vegetables, which is why I started last night eating the baby bok choy. So you can see that. And if you want to look at spleen, pancreas, I told you about this area. But I look here for stomach. And mind you, I'm a good example today.
My stomach's a little frozen. I need more enzymes and probably more hydrochloric acid. My goodness, I'm white.
But you can see how white it is here. That's a frozen stomach. It's too cold.
I need to maybe add more ginger. I'm making a soup with ginger in it or tea with ginger or some... some spices some warming spices like um you know cloves and whatever i mean i need more warmth you know hot more hot food like you know garlic or whatever so Chili is, I mean, I'm making a soup today.
And I, I will say, look here. And if it's sunken, Ooh, the stomach's tired. If it's got lines, Oh, the stomach's the nurturing equality of the stomach is overused. You know, if it's white, it's frozen.
If it's dark, it's stagnation. I don't care much about yellow here because food doesn't digest well. Sometimes you get yellow, take some enzymes, but white means no enzymes.
Yellow means you need food staying in the stomach too long. But I, but I look here, you know, And if I'm looking at the lungs, the whole area here, I mean, this whole upper area, the Wei Qi is all right here. Okay. So you're actually seeing mostly lungs, some liver down here, some, you know, spleen, stomach, pancreas right here.
So you've got, you know, four elements and most of its lungs is the Wei Qi right here. Okay. And most of its lungs, you want to look here too, to see if you're, you know, if you're breathing here, here, breathing enough. slowing down enough, you know, all of that. But you also want to see if there's hollows.
If someone's using wood to overact on metal, which is not supposed to be, our kind of wood work ethic sometimes really makes metal unhappy and metal needs to live a luxurious life, very simple, kind of more rhythmic life, I think is what I want to say. But luxury, there needs to be like beauty and I don't know, kind of a more stillness, I think. So look, look at that and see how the lungs are doing.
You know, take a look. The physical lungs are right here. The emotional lungs are more back here.
Old grief's back here. Take a look at the lungs and see if, if they're doing well or not, you know? So I think we can use this map anywhere you see the liver, you can look at it.
There's some places that are better than others. Any place you can look at the kidneys, you can look at and see if you know how the kidneys are doing but some places are better than others like this is better for the kidneys um heart is actually right here on the tip of the nose and blood which is also heart it's right here um and i have to say you know heart lungs heart lungs it's kind of the same thing above and below um this isn't so easy to monitor unless you have heart disease which is something i pay attention and also there's a spleen blood component here that's really important is blood is flowing but i don't um actually look at the heart as much there as i look at the shen because moment to moment excuse me the quality of shen will tell you how the heart is doing so i watch the eyes and i watch the color of the skin in the weiqi area to see how the heart is doing um so cynthia i think we should open it back up for some more questions um okay i'm gonna give you some more questions okay um What do the red dots on the handout signify? Oh, fire. If that map, that map should also have all the wrinkles on it in red, but I didn't do it because you can't see anything then.
So anytime you have a tip or a corner of something, you have fire. Okay. So fire just kind of goes, it just touches things. So fire is everywhere. So you'll see that the bigger, like the, the kidneys and the liver have the most features involved.
And then from there, there's less features, except for fire just kind of goes everywhere a little bit. And so you're going to see that it's easiest to actually diagnose the liver and the kidneys than it is to diagnose the lungs. Lungs are actually harder because they're so deep, you know, and it goes way in there. And so the lungs are harder to work with than the kidneys are. That's my opinion.
Yeah, go ahead. People asked about vertical lines as opposed to horizontal lines. So in the same area where you have the horizontal lines going across, what if you have vertical lines in those?
Oh yeah. Well, okay. Most of the horizontal lines are age positions. And by the way, you know, you're doing 40, 15, 60. Most of the vertical lines are emotional.
Okay. So emotional is vertical and diagonal. So anything that goes like this or like that, you know, anything that goes like that, I mean, is emotional and anything that goes like this or it's a spot is more.
an age position. So this particular marking is an important one. It's a person who is a caretaker.
It's a person who is giving their Jing away to someone else. Usually it's a parent, a child of aging parents. You know, you're taking care of them.
It's a coach that, you know, that's so involved with their athletes. It's someone who's giving their own Jing for someone else's path. And so it's not recommended.
And I, I do teach us a lot. It's not easy to stop doing that because I think a lot of people, the Judeo-Christian ethic, you know, it's, it's about sacrificing. I'm, I'm not for sacrificing unless you have something to give.
I think it's wonderful to give. Please don't ever question that, but you got to make sure you have something to give. You're not giving from your own source.
And that's what that line says is you're giving from your own source. Please stop doing that and find a way to fill yourself up again. and then give okay give what you have to give not don't give what you don't have to give it's hard it's hard yeah so those are the vertical lines in all three of those areas you're saying no that's this one Okay. These are really important markings, but this one here says that you're pressing some liver power. And this one says that you care too much about pleasing other people.
It's the performer's chin. You see it a lot in actors. It's someone who needs the approval of others and sometimes can cut your will.
Not a bad thing. Very charming people. but it cuts your will because you need attention and approval.
And so if you read, if you're an actor and you read the reviews and you get a bad review, it's like, it's really devastating. Where someone who doesn't have this goes, I don't care what they say, I did a good job. You know, a little more contained that way. There's lots, I mean, these markings on the middle, any of them are important.
So we only have a few more minutes, Lillian. Most of the rest of these questions are not specifically about the markings you talked about, but of course there's lots of general questions. about what does this mean and what does that mean? And if we have time, we can ask some of those, but I want to make sure that you get a chance for the next four minutes, if there's anything else that you want to talk about that you get to do that before we get into any general.
Well, I think the most important thing I can teach you today is about self-care. And please watch Deirdre's lecture because she's amazing at Yongsheng. And I listened to, I actually, she's one of the people that counsels me.
You need to really take care of yourself, especially in these times of crisis. We're going through a lot emotionally. all of you are sensitive people or you wouldn't be in this field in the first place and you're helpers and you're trying to help people. So there's huge amounts of fear out there and huge amounts of grief out there and frustration from liberty being contained. And it's like, we're in a time of crisis.
And the most important thing you can do is young shame, you know? And in Chinese medicine, they always believe that you should take care of yourself and those who are dependent. So please take care of your children and your aging parents and all that, but don't forget to take care of you.
And Yongsheng is very personal. And if you can teach every single person that you work with to take care of themselves, you're going to make the world a lot healthier. And that's what we want right now. And in terms of immunity, the other really important quality is that we need to make sure that we have the metal sense of independence. This is why I also stress this breathing where you get that place that's just your kind of magic place to be.
Because we are interconnected and there's no question that we are. But you also want to maintain a sense of self that has some permeable boundaries. I mean, that your shen comes through and comes out so that you're still connecting with other people.
But there's a very strong sense of self. The immune system really wants to have that sense of individuality. So, yes, we are individuals.
And, yes, we are connected. Don't be so connected that you feel like you're definitely going to get sick. Because you're not definitely going to get sick.
And you might. And if you do, I'm... I'm hoping you can handle that and recover well.
But if you believe that you will and you fear that you will, it's so much more likely to happen. So we've got to have a sense of like this individuality that says, if that's my karmic experience, then I'll do it. But if you have a lot of things to do, you'll stay and you'll be here.
And I want people to have that sense that they're supposed to be here and that they have value to give to the world. And that starts by taking care of yourself. And that's one of the...
my hardest lesson so i'm teaching what i have to learn okay this is not doesn't come naturally to me i watch these signs like oh i need to eat better oh i need to breathe like oh stop doing something what am i doing you know and i i monitor myself all the time yeah go ahead let's ask one last question a number of people wanted to know about finding uh colors on the face with different skin tones so if you have a lighter skin tone like you do you can see the colors what if somebody has brown it doesn't matter You know, honestly, I work with people of all nationalities from all over the world. If you have darker skin, you're going to have a rosier color when it's red and you're going to get paler and have that kind of grayish cast. You know, in the Mei Jing and the Yellow Empress Classic, they talk about cloth, you know, a red, you know, a red like white on top of red or white on top of blue. You're going to see that it comes from underneath. It's like it's like a shen color.
And so you're looking at, you know, a baseline skin color, basically. I would almost always look in the inside of the arm for like the real skin color. Or someplace else where the sun doesn't shine that easily.
And then you're going to take the face and look to see what's different from that kind of base skin color. And you can see at different times that some will get paler, something will get darker, something will get redder. You can see it on any skin color.
I mean, it does take a kind of looking. That's looking. differently so it's like it's kind of third eye looking where you're you're seeing the shen color that's the best way i can describe it okay well we do have lots more questions but i'm going to say we want to respect everybody's time i'm sorry we can't answer every single question everybody has about face reading but to do that you would have to be taking lillian's certification another time but we are so appreciative lillian you of just you know how much information you were able to share your generosity with your knowledge and your spirit it's a wonderfully informative talk thank you we just so appreciate you um everybody go to Lillian's website uh Lotus Institute uh read her books um especially her new book with all the fantastic recipes um and come back for our next topic with Deirdre Courtney Lillian thank you again thank you thank you thank you Miles and Emily you thanks so much bye everybody thank you bye thank you