TCM and Biophysics

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I'm not sure what we are meant to say about TCM and Biophysics so I'll just riff :) One of the juiciest parts of TCM is the way it perceives our bodies, and pathologies, elementally, according to the same stuff that our Earth is made out of. The study of Biophysics is the study of the systems of life, how they move, the dynamics between them... TCM is so much the same. We had it drilled into us, you cannot understand someone by hearing one symptom, you need a pattern. Things working together in harmony and less harmony - symphony blended with cacophony - a vital being with some messes, we all have them, and the vast container of all life is no different than we microcosms, or the microcosms that dwell within us.

I think in TCM there is a difference, there is a directionality. We are not just observing the way things unfold and exist within living beings - not just trying to understand - TCM also has an active goal to make it better - to heal. Biophysics I think? seeks to understand and capture the essence of Life, how it works, from a material, grounded standpoint - physics. Physical. I know physics also gets esoteric with its physicality... atomic theory and time-space theories... energy as both light and matter... so maybe the scope is not so different than TCM with its meridians, its physiology and western anatomy, and its different Qi dynamics. But what if BioPhysics, all scientific studies, were all healing disciplines? What would be the values? With TCM it will still vary from practitioner to practitioner, but something common like helping people become more vital, less encumbered and limited by physical (or emotional or energetic) discord. Would Biophysicists ever collaborate with indigenous Californians or permaculturists to learn how to carefully attune to the ecology and tend the life we are surrounded by? Does Biophysics keep something precious by *not* trying to intervene with human values, especially these days when so many people are really - and Truly - vying to gain something material for nothing, gobbling up as much as possible, burning burning burning? There maybe is something precious about a discipline that watches.

And then, in TCM - we are not Classical medicine, we are not Daoist. We are "TCM" as created by Mao, with so much removed so I hear, from the more ancient connection to spirit and the Earth's ways of being. I love diving into Biophysics and touching back into the rhythms of where we come from, what life is made of, more essentially. It feels relevant. If we are going to work with the Qi of ourselves and our patients, maybe Biophysics can help us tune in to a kind of ancestral Qi, of life itself.