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Parenting and Grandparenting Relationships Amongst the Major TCM Organ Pairs — and What My Body Keeps Trying to Tell Me

Our kids have 6 grandparents. When I try to think about who has the best relationship with them, what seems to matter most is:

  1. being young enough to play with them,

  2. knowing and respecting your own limits so you do not overdo it and take it out on the kids,

  3. working through your own issues so you do not blame the kids for what you did not or do not have, and

  4. trusting their parent to do a good job — because the grandparent is supposed to support the parent, not take over their job or even provide criticism


Master Yan (founder of RestoreChi) says: when the parent organ is tired, get a babysitter for the child organ so the mother can rest and recover.

My kids can be difficult, but they only turn on their grandparents when their grandparents are judgmental or trying to control them.


I share this because of the insulting pathway amongst the organs in TCM.


The normal and the insulting pathway


I have clients who are affected in the normal way, parent to child organ, also called the Generating Cycle:


And clients who are impacted through the grandchild to grandparent organ relationship, where the parent organ is bypassed, also called the Insulting Cycle:


They say that indications of how perimenopause will be for you include: how it was for your mom, how you felt when you first got your period, and how you were in pregnancy.


I had really hard pregnancies — all five major organ pairs were impacted: 24/7 nausea worse as the day and pregnancies progressed (which I now understand may have been related to gallbladder), sinus congestion, flu and bronchitis (lung), and acid reflux (stomach). One child was induced because my blood pressure increased beyond my resting low (heart), and then we both swelled up and became itchy after birth (liver), impacting our ability to bond.


They say strong pregnancy symptoms are a sign of a viable pregnancy and the consequence of strong hormones. I do think the body puts the child's needs first, and this is why the mother feels so sick — she is having to deal with more of her own toxic load to keep as much as possible away from her developing child.


The parent organ caught in the middle

A Kirlian photo of our thumbs shows the relationship amongst our major TCM organ pairs. When you see phenomena on the diagonal, you have a potential insulting pathway:


Here the stomach and spleen worry so much (two dots on the bottom left) that they insult the liver (gap with a fluff in the middle on the top right). The liver (grandparent, anger) has to be weak first for the stomach (worry, grandchild) to impact its ability to grow (because liver is wood), when the stomach (grandchild) becomes unstable. This is how we self-sabotage. The needs of the parent organ (heart, capacity to feel joy and follow our life path) is being ignored. So the needs of the grandchild (stomach) can not be met and the grandparent (liver) gets involved too, but not in a way that helps to put things (the parent, heart) back on track.


In the first couple years of perimenopause, I tended to have sinus issues around the time of my period. Whenever the issue started on my left, it would often be more prolonged and severe, and then briefly move to the right before clearing out. Taking the maxillary sinuses as an example:


The left is kidney (grandchild) and the right is spleen (grandparent), with the lungs caught in the middle. As part of my own healing, I came to realize that my lungs were the issue — as there was chill in my body. Supporting the child (kidney) is helpful, but clearing the chill and supporting the mother (spleen) is better. For some reason, supporting the lung directly can overwhelm its grandchild (liver) because it becomes too controlling. This is how generational trauma lives inside each of us.


In my last two pregnancies I developed a cough as part of flu and bronchitis, and I would sometimes develop a postnasal drip cough as part of my sinus issue during perimenopause. All of these coughing episodes resulted in me peeing myself due to a weak pelvic floor. My epidural was turned up too high with the birth of my first child, who sat engaged for hours, until I bled through the catheter. The bladder chill track and RestoreChi supplements can help temporarily with this, but the root is still the Insulting pathway.


In all these cases, the movement of illness into my lungs was because the grandparent (spleen, muscles, pelvic floor, right sinus) was weak and was being insulted by the unstable grandchild (kidneys, hormones in pregnancy and perimenopause).


What my body keeps showing me

Even now, 1.5yrs later, still in perimenopause, this pathway comes up for me again, but in a different flavour:


When I eat cheese or have alcohol for two days in a row, a couple of days later I get a split in my bottom lip — which in Esogetics represents the large intestine — some constipation, and shooting sharp pain (that I haven't had for months but that was a staple in my life last summer) returns to my right eye when I am under stress. This is the insulting pathway: the kidney (parent) is weak, so the liver (and maybe more importantly gallbladder), which cannot handle the cheese and alcohol without support such as a RestoreChi card placed underneath, insults the grandparent, the large intestine (which was also weak).


I am still trying to figure out where my boundaries are and how to put in place better self care so that these cascades of symptoms don't surface again and become chronic. This is why perimenopause is supposed to last 5-10yrs so the body drops the veil to show us what needs help, so we can help it, before the hormones are gone for good. Which is why I struggle with mainstream procedures that throw people into menopause or andropause and many women opt for it because monthly bleeding can be annoying, costly, and debilitating (for those who need to address more health problems ) and the perimenopause period is marketed as being an unpredictable nightmare. Most people don't know what a gift and how important perimenopause and andropause can be. More on this in Part 3 (see below).


After using the Specialty Speakers, I sometimes feel like throwing up before I am done what I've prepared for my meal. Sometimes I stop eating, and sometimes I force myself to eat part of it so as not to waste. My symptoms that follow have taught me that this may be my gallbladder saying it cannot process any more, this is my new limit, if the goal is to drop excess weight, I just couldn't hear it before. It is a blessing to be able to hear the body make a request. The question is whether I will listen.


The Specialty Speakers were causing pain in my shoulder and arm as an attempt to move the gallbladder issue — the pain is because there is a block in the pathway, the congestion that is released backs up and has no where to go.


When I stop the Specialty Speakers and work on movement and stretching, as well as ElectroFlow, and sadly have something else to focus on (the return of my split lip, constipation, and right eye pain, as when I was clearing arm pain I had frequent loose stool), the arm pain decreases.


Without engaging with the Specialty Speakers and clearing the congestion pain, the liver/gallbladder is not getting the help it needs, so it reacts when challenged, insulting the large intestine.


This has shown me that, rather than trying to heal the liver and gallbladder alone, I need to address the kidney too, which can cause head pain (because of the bones in she skull and all the meridians in the head), but I know how to clear that with Esogetic deep sleep brainwaves.


The night after I played several RestoreChi tracks overnight to reduce my pain — spleen dampness, frontline worker — I experienced what felt like the early signs of a bladder infection. My guess is that asking my body to heal my pain was a lot to ask. It did it, but at the cost of demanding balance somewhere else. Bladder is paired with kidney in TCM — when the kidney is already the weak parent in the insulting pathway, asking it to work harder overnight creates demand it cannot easily meet.


When the bladder discomfort came back a few nights later, I treated it differently. The first time I approached it with the concept of chill, which clear the discomfort. The second time I used the concept of yin emptiness — ovary and uterus phlegm, kidney, liver, gallbladder, pancreas enhance, spleen dampness, large intestine healing on a higher dimension, and the belt meridian for premature menopause) which may have trigger my 3rd delayed period (48-50 day cycle, as opposed to my others over the past 3 years, that can range from 20 to 36 days). I still felt cold when going to bed with these tracks, but I dressed warmly to accommodate, so I could focus on a clearing that might build strength too.


I like the monthly tracks because they allow for nuanced treatment, as opposed to the Specialty Tracks (which I get are faster, but sometimes too much for some of us to handle). I imagine Master Yan puts more into one to make them easier to use, and to make sure someone with emotional issues can't avoid them and just stay on the physical level of healing, but we all need to figure out what pace and method works best to get to where we want to go in a way that we can tolerate, which is why I like this way better than mainstream, the client has a lot more choice.


From an Esogetic Perspective


The right thumb represents self-sabotage through anger and food we are unable to follow our life path.


When we continue to eat past the signal to stop, and we keep reaching for alcohol (which indicates there was an issue from ages 0-3yrs, and how people received the news that a baby was on it's way, I was born before my dad graduated with his PhD) or accept dairy (a substitute for mother's milk, my mom couldn't wait to get back to work, the standard back then was to nurse for only a couple months, I nursed my kids for 4+ years) because we want to or because its easier, even when the body has shown it has a 1 day limit, the grandparent steps in. The lip splits and stool hardens, the grandparent yells on behalf of the grandchild (liver/gallbladder, sharp pain to the eye) who is also weak, and the parent (kidney/bladder) stays silent, did they drop the ball in supporting their child. You decide. Really all the organs help us, and we need to take care of them in return, if we want them to continue to do their job. Which means listening when they say they are all their limit and they need some support. Like Rosalina and her lumas:



I blamed my mom for holding her silence, but she does so only when she doesn't know what to do, she doesn't want to hurt me, but she doesn't agree with what I am doing either. She is weak. Nothing else to blame her for.


This is not a moral failure. It is a pattern. And patterns, once seen, can change.


My teacher — a doctor of acupuncture — used this website to supplement other material in teaching us about the proper placement and effect of meridian points on the major primary organ pathways. The website has a table of correspondences for each major organ pair — emotions, tastes, seasons, and more. Take a look and see what makes sense for you.


Unlike science, which takes apart in order to try to prove the whole, TCM, the I Ching (the basis for a lot of Unique Psychology), and more, use the whole to try to explain the parts. I hope this gets you curious and is helpful in getting you to engage in your healing process — now's the time.


If you want to explore this further

→ Part 3 to the two articles above is coming soon!

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