The Liver Meridian: Manage your anger, manage your life.
We’ve made it to the end of the Hero’s Journey! Our final stop is the Liver, a powerful organ and meridian that works with the whole body. Sometimes called a General (or in modern terms the Big Boss Manager), we talk about the common ways it can get unbalanced and cause problems. Liver is expressed through anger, so we talk about what it means to be angry, how to manage the energy that comes with it, and finding role models to help learn how to channel anger into making changes.
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Transcript below:
Transcription by kiatranscripts@gmail.com
[Music Starts]
Billy & Raymond repeating:
Healing with Raymond & Billy.
[Music Fades]
[0:14]
Raymond: Hi, everyone. Welcome to “Healing with Raymond & Billy”. This is episode 11 and our last episode of this series, actually. So it was originally supposed to be twelve, but we ended up streamlining a couple of meridians into one episode, so we tightened up the journey a little bit. This episode is actually recorded, this conversation is actually happening several months after the last one. So we kind of recorded a bunch of conversations last fall and then the idea was to kind of trickle them out, the second half of the series, this spring and in the course of me doing some editing, I came across our episode on the Liver and I accidentally had a microphone effect plugged into my mixing board.
[Raymond & Billy Laugh]
Raymond: So my half of the recording was like an ELO Concert with like flanger effects, with like woaaahhh and so I figured that that would be really hard to listen to for a whole hour, like I almost considered saving it but then I just thought, I’m gonna reach out to Billy Janes and talk about the Liver again, because we can talk about the Liver.
Billy: Oh yeah.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: Oh yeah. So let’s talk about the Liver. So last week, or last episode, excuse me, we introduced the wood element and we talked about the Gallbladder, which is the yang half of the Wood element. So now we’re coming to Liver, which is the yin element. The Liver hours are between 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM. This is basically when it’s a good time to be sleeping. It’s good time for us to be sleeping and for all of our blood, I learned that the way that, looking at the cycles of the body, that that’s when a lot of the blood in our body goes to the Liver to be filtered during that time and is stored and the Liver does a lot of storing of our blood. So we talk a lot, we’ve talked a lot in this series about how there’s this liver organ and then the Liver meridian and how sometimes there’s things that are very similar and some things that are don’t seem related at all, and I definitely feel like this is a meridian and an organ that there is a lot of overlap between some of the Western ideas and some of the Eastern ideas. I’ll do a little map of where the Liver is before I throw it to Billy Janes. So the Gallbladder meridian, as you may remember, goes down, so if you think about wearing a pair of pants or a pair of leggings that have seams that go down the side, the outside and the inside of your leg, the Gallbladder was kind of going down the outside seam and your Liver goes up that inside seam of your pants. So right in the middle of the leg. It starts at the, is it the top of the big toe or the first toe?
Billy: Yeah, it’s the big toe, like the-
Raymond: Yeah, that’s right. So the sort of outer corner, because Spleen is the inner …
Billy: Mhm.
Raymond: So the top of your big toe that’s next to your toe, not the, that’s what I mean by the inner part. Then it comes to between the bones of your big toe and your first toe. If you kind of pull the top of your foot and you feel the V of those tarsals and metatarsals, you often can feel a sort of a sensitive area there, that’s Liver three, and that’s a big point that gets used a lot in acupuncture, with moxa, I also use it with shiatsu as well. So then it starts at the top of the foot, but then it comes around the ankle, to the side, up that seam that I talk about, all the way up to the pelvis, to the side of kind of where your genitals are and right around when it gets to the belly button is where it shoots out to the side of your ribs. So basically where your actual Liver is, which is on the right side of your body, but if you put your fingers like on your ribs and then you kind of get down towards the bottom of your ribs, where it starts to connect with the diaphragm, those are where that Liver meridian and that Liver point is. So you only have one Liver on your right side, but your Liver meridian goes on both sides, so you do have Liver meridian points on both sides of your body. The Liver, I feel like whenever, I always joke that if you go to an acupuncturist that there’s only two diagnoses that an acupuncturist gives you and it’s Liver Stagnation or Spleen Qi Deficiency.
[Raymond Laughs]
Raymond: And that’s not totally true, but I do feel that those are very common diagnoses.
Billy: Uh huh, yeah.
[Billy Laughs]
Raymond: Talk to me about the Liver. What do you think of with the Liver? How do you describe the Liver to your patients?
Billy: You know, I generally kind of talk about how Liver has a very close connection with our nervous system and if you look at the Liver as we do in our training, we talk about it as being the wood element. It’s like a tree and with a tree, it has the roots that dig into the earth in order to get nourishment and when it has proper nourishment, the tree becomes very strong and it’s able to remain upright. It can feed the leaves and the branches that come out from it. Very similar to our nervous system, if it has proper nourishment from minerals and nutrients, from our diet and also from a nourishing environment, it’s able to, you know, kind of regulate itself and do what it needs to do, in order to keep the body’s processes kind of flowing smoothly. You know, digestion going nicely, regulating our emotions, things like that and how those regulation of our stress kind of impact our hormones and how that impacts the menstrual cycle and other sleep cycles and things like that. So the metaphor of the element being wood or a tree matches very closely, even diagrams of our nervous system. It very much looks like roots from a tree. So that’s kind of how I conceptualize and I talk about the Liver with my patients and that the idea behind the Liver is that it’s this general who works for the emperor and the job of the general, if you’re going to use these traditional ideas of structure of this kingdom, the emperor being the heart, is that the general goes around and makes sure that everything within the kingdom with the troops that are going out is handled very smoothly and that that smoothness means that things are working properly. When things start stagnating and seizing, you know, that’s that whole cramping of the system. So the Liver is really about trying to make sure that doesn’t happen, like that’s the Liver’s job. So it becomes, kind of in this medicine, a way of trying to get things to, you know, we’ve talked throughout this whole journey about transformation of these elements into each other, how they’re connected. So the Liver is really important for facilitating that, so that’s a lot of kind of why when you go to an acupuncturist, you’ll probably get Liver stagnation as your diagnosis.
[Raymond Laughs]
Billy: Because we live in a modern world that is not really set up for us to naturally kind of exist without some sort of taxing stagnation on our systems.
Raymond: Yeah, yeah. I feel like the Liver is responsible for the smooth flow of chi and the smooth flow of blood, is something that I always remember in lectures is a phrase that comes up a lot, so when you were talking about it, I was remembering that. I guess in the western equivalent, because I’ve also heard the metaphor of the Liver is like the general manager, so if we’re gonna move it into the western, business, corporate metaphor or whatever, but that same thing is that there’s the general manager who actually makes sure the office is running. So it’s everything from making sure all the different departments are funded and making sure there’s pens and making sure the pay checks go out and all the different things like that. Because it does have sort of a hand in everything, so to speak. I was looking at this flow chart in this article that was kind of comparing Liver in TCM and Liver in western medicine. In western, the Liver is connected to our nerves, it’s connected to our endocrine system. It’s also connected to our immune network, so it has a place in the nervous system, it plays a part in the digestive system, because of the releasing of bile it helps digest fat, it has a role in the circulatory system, because of the storing of blood and it has a role in the reproductive system because of the delivery of hormones and things like that, so Billy Janes just mentioned a lot of cycles, menstrual cycles, things like that. So that’s a great tool that I think it gets used a lot for people who are having to deal with regulating hormone cycles in their bodies.
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: Which is kind of all of us, we all have hormone cycles in our bodies, that we’re regulating and are in danger of becoming dysregulated. So when we talk about stagnation, I’ve probably talked about this in other episodes, but there’s a lot of different ways you can get stoppage and stagnation in the body, so sometimes it can come from something physically blocking a channel, which then the flow can’t go through it or go around it. But you can also be deficient in a channel, deficient of energy, deficient of blood, deficient of blood or whatever. So sort of like how if you have a creek, you can have a tree fall across the creek and block it and cause the river to spill out or something like that, but you can also just have the creek starts to dry up, so as the creek gets lower and lower, then suddenly water isn’t really flowing like a creek, it’s just kind of sitting in pools on the rocks. So that’s the different ways you can have stagnation loss, so you can have excess can lead to stagnation and deficiency can also lead to stagnation. I think I was reading, when I was joking before, when we hit record about how I always have to have the Lonny Jarrett “Nourishing Destiny” book next to me, along with a couple other texts, even if I don’t always get to reviewing before the conversation.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: But I was reading last night about the section on the Liver official and the metaphor that he uses is talking about the Liver’s job is also sort of a big picture job, right? So it’s sort of seeing all the systems and making sure they all work together and so if you’re running at full speed and a wall appears in front of you and you run into it, the Liver’s job is to actually take a step back and size up the wall and figure out how it got there, figure out how to go around it, how can we go through it, all that stuff, we do that sort of assessment, but if we have excess Liver energy, then we may end up just like running into the wall repeatedly, like why is this wall here? Why is this wall here? Why is this wall here? Just keep trying to run through it. If we have Liver deficiency, a deficiency in that Liver energy, we might hit the wall, get knocked to the ground and then just feel totally demoralized and be like “Ugh, I can’t. This always happens, there’s always a brick wall that’s being thrown up in front of me and I can’t handle another one.” and so that person is just kind of stuck and lying on the ground. But in both of those scenarios, ultimately the result is the same, which is that the person is stuck. So whether they’re stuck and repeatedly hitting the wall or whether they’re stuck and laying down in front of the wall, either way, they’re not going through the wall. So that’s also, we talk about, you can have sort of two different scenarios that lead to the same symptoms, you can have two different sort of pattern imbalances that lead to the same symptoms. Or why some people might have the same symptoms, but their treatment needs to be different, because they’re gonna treat the person who has excess, who’s maybe frustrated beating their head against the wall repeatedly, they might need different medicine to help them take a step back and sort of see the situation, versus the person who’s flat down and been knocked out, they’re gonna need different medicine as well. So I kind of like that way of thinking of the story and thinking about pattern differentiations.
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: The Liver is connected to the eyes in the body, and also tendons, that’s another thing that comes up a lot and nails, which is interesting because a lot of times if you do have Liver disease, that does actually show up in the fingernails of western medicine when we talk about that as well. So those are kind of ways that it manifests, other parts of the systems of the body that the Liver is controlling, is what I’m trying to say.
Billy: Yeah, some of that too is some of the ways that we talk about how the Liver helps with circulation and if you have a lot of stagnation in the core, our body will have a lot of heat in maybe our torso or you know something like that, but then we’ll have really cold hands and feet.
Raymond: Mhm.
Billy: And our fingernails might turn a little bit blue or white from lack of circulation if they get cold. I like to also talk about the Liver from an inexperiential standpoint, which is more of perhaps like a somatic view, which is that our experience of our body, sometimes these channels can kind of point to the ways that our emotions kind of interact with our body too and the ways that the energy kind of moves.
Raymond: Mhm.
Billy: And so that channel, too, if you’re sitting here listening and being like “WTF, why is the channel in the foot going up the leg and the crotch?”
[Raymond Laughs]
Billy: We’re talking about the functions of the Liver, you know, how it regulates hormones and deals with, you know, circulation, those kinds of things. Also, like the way that, you know, talking about the eyes, the way that the energetics of emotion and that being tied to the Liver, how the move in our body, sometimes, you know, the ways that we experience the movement of emotion will be like, for example, anger being tied to the Liver.
Raymond: Yeah.
Billy: Will come up and be expressed in the eyes, red eyes and that kind of upwards energetic movement, which I’m sure I’m jumping ahead, I’m sure that was coming up next.
Raymond: No, you were right on time. I was thinking like, “After Billy talks, we should talk about what emotion is associated with the Liver.” Transition!
[Both Laugh]
Billy: Good!
Raymond: I know and also I was just think about “seeing red” like how we have these ideas of like-
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: These metaphors connected to anger and that suddenly we feel blinded by rage when all the anger rises up really fast and it’s really hot and it feels very hot in our head and around our ears, or around our eyes, excuse me. I mean it may go around our ears too, but I was thinking about the cartoon, Bluto, with the steam coming out.
Billy: Totally.
[Raymond Laughs]
Raymond: But there’s also, you know, it’s interesting because anger is a very useful emotion. Anger is what communicates that our boundaries have been crossed and because the Liver is sort of a general and a general with as far as being in touch with all the systems in the body, that’s why it can be the first to sort of sound the alarm and say “Hey! Someone or something is crossing a boundary in this system.” and red alert. So that sort of thinking of anger as just being sort of a security, or alarm system or just a notification, it doesn’t even have to be an emergency, it can just be a notification, like “Hey, by the way, the fence is open and rabbits are coming in and eating your garden.”
[Raymond Laughs]
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: That’s a topical metaphor, because all of us who are first time gardeners are having to deal with different things coming from our plants.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: So anger, I think a lot of times gets a bad rep, right? We shouldn’t be angry, we’re all just trying to, you know, and I think what we actually what we have more of a crisis is with an imbalance of anger, like we’re too angry about some things and not angry enough and we definitely don’t have enough dispersing and releasing and a way to sort of channel it. But it’s always gonna be there, it’s part of our sort of being, being in a body where the boundaries between us and the outside world are a little permeable, you know?
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: And that we are sort of existing in these gray spaces and so sometimes we need to say, “Hey, too much.” or “Hey, I need more” or things like that and that sort of determination can come from the Liver. So there’s a part of the, in one of the ancient texts that gets quoted a lot, that says “Anger: the Liver is damaged.” So people often will translate that as like “Don’t be angry, because you’re hurting your Liver.” and that always frustrates me because its the other way around. It’s saying maybe the reason this person is being quick to anger is because they have some wrong in their Liver right now.
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: Rather than blaming the person for being angry or for expressing anger and then somehow turning it around to that. I mean, for me I heard that message a lot and anger is something that I never really learned how to express in a healthy balanced way.
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: So I was always sort of struggling to not be angry like I could see the danger it caused. I could see I was scared of it, but I was also sort of always attracted to people who were clearly very angry, but didn’t seem dangerous to me. So like people who were maybe very passionate, who spoke very passionately and were clearly angry about an injustice, like those people I was always very drawn to.
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: Because that is actually a healthy expression of anger, like they see a boundary has been crossed, something should be done about it, perhaps this is a boundary in society has been crossed and so it’s our responsibility to speak up and tell people this is problem, like warning, alert, a boundary has been crossed in our social fabric in the family or within the community and we need to address this. So I was drawn to that versus the more sort of simmering, rage, anger that I was exposed to a lot that was mostly more frustration, like people were frustrated that I did something wrong or frustrated I wasn’t doing things the way they wanted and that sort of hot expression, explosive anger always made me sort of nervous. And of course, I inherited that.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: I mean I have that same like, I mean we’re human we all have that to a certain extent.
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: But I also see within myself, but what I’m starting to realize is that like if you don’t have the healthy expression of anger and you don’t know how to communicate your boundaries in calm but firm ways, then that’s sort of what I think of as like the hot, sticky explosive anger comes up more often, like that’s sort of your default versus something that just comes up because you’re human. What’s your relationship to anger, Billy?
Billy: I think it’s, I really loved what you were saying because I really relate to it a lot. I think for me, as a person of color, I think many marginalized groups experience this when you exist in a world where there are injustices being done to people like you, you know, we see this a lot with what’s happening with the murders of trans women of color and the lack of response to it, we see this with just a lot of different things that are happening around the borders with our siblings being held in concentration camps and a lot of the injustices that happen that, as you are aware, you know, as Baldwin talks about that being a relatively conscious negro means that you’re angry all the time, you do begin to become aware that anger is apart of your life and how to live with it. I think a lot of my experience has been, especially being part of a healer’s group, that spiritual bypassing is a way that a lot of people, myself included, have used to be able to avoid anger, by labeling anger as a bad emotion.
Raymond: Yeah.
Billy: That there’s something wrong with you, that you experiencing anger means that you’re not a spiritual person, that if you were a spiritual person, you wouldn’t have anger you would be in bliss all the time. The idea of being in bliss all the time, I think, is very attractive and very seductive, but there’s a groundedness and a realness that anger brings that is I think, what I’m also attracted to in people, is the realness of that anger. It tells you that you are real, that you do have a boundary. That there is not only a spiritual world in which things are fluid but that there is a physical world that is an extension or a spectrum of that world and that we exist in both places simultaneously and that piece, I feel like, is the benefit of anger but it took me a long time to get there to really understand that anger was a useful emotion, that when it rose up in me, it was a messenger about boundaries for me to pay attention to, it was a friend. But what I had done for a long time was kind of push into the shadows, like “I shouldn’t be feeling that. Oh no, what is this.”, but I think a big part for me has been about befriending it and learning about how it feels inside of my body and so that even if I’m in a moment where I become essentially numb, because I am somehow triggered or don’t know what’s happening, I can tap into kind of what’s happening inside of my body and recognize, oh this is anger, or this is at least the pattern that looks like or feels like anger. Then that helps me kind of be like, oh, anger? Boundaries.
Raymond: Right.
Billy: And that really has been kind of, I think, a big evolution for me personally in terms of becoming more of a real person, which has kind of always been my goal, because I’ve looked up to people who have been passionate and who have had this anger that has been very constructive and kind of wonder what was the secret and I’m finding more and more that their anger moves them to do things that are constructive.
Raymond: Yeah.
Billy: And so that’s kind of been like how I have learned to relate with anger in a way that has been healthier for me.
Raymond: Yeah. That anger is a surge of energy like coming up through the Liver and what do we do with it? I think when we’re scared of it being dangerous or we’re scared of that energy being violent or invasive or any of that, then we all swing the pendulum too far and it becomes like let’s just shut it away, put it away. So I think if when you first start working with it, as someone who’s been relatively calm and not seen as an angry person your whole life, then those people, we can still suffer from anger management problems, too. We are not immune. I think we have this idea of people who have “anger management” as far as needing to work with their own sensation of anger in the body, we always think about this extreme example of someone who is, you know, sort of yelling or violent or having a lot of outbursts that they can’t control and that is certainly one way it manifests but I also think that there’s a way that depression kind of originates in the Liver. So thinking about that story of the person who hits the wall and instead of repeatedly running against it, they just collapse and they just fall down and their like “Nope, I’m done.”
[Raymond Laughs]
Raymond: Like the manager quit. I’m done with this place.
[Billy Laughs]
Raymond: I made my last paycheck. I’m taking these pants and this monitor, and I’m out of here.
[Raymond Laugh]
Raymond: And I’m sure that there’s, right now, during this time, it’s a very challenging time for all of our Livers, because our Liver creates and runs a system and a lot of our systems have been disrupted, right? A lot of our systems in the body, our routines. There’s a lot of boundary crossing right now, because we’ve lost a lot of our boundaries. The boundary between home and work and home and school and all the different roles that we play within each other. So I think that the Liver is probably getting quite a workout with all of us right now. And also that sense of being able to step back and see a way through the problem. I don’t think a lot of us really feel really confident in that right now, you know? Because there’s not an obvious way through this problem. It is a little bit of a time for us to collectively sit back stunned, like we all ran into the wall of COVID-19, you know what I mean?
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: Like it’s a global pandemic, so whatever thing we were all carrying on top of it and now suddenly everything is kind of exploded and scattered. So some people are still trying to push through and just act like nothing’s happened. Some people have sort of collapsed on the ground and have no idea what to do next. A lot of people are trying to size it up and come up with different solutions and it’s, you know, all of that is just gonna keep happening.
[Raymond Laughs]
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: Like none of them are totally right, none of them are totally wrong, it’s just happening. They’re all just happening. So if you are feeling more irritable and more prone to anger right now, that’s totally fine. It’s good to just give your Liver a break in some ways, which is to make sure that all of your systems, like you’re getting enough rest, you’re getting enough of that Liver time make sure that at 3:00 AM you’re actually getting some rest and not just laying awake scrolling your phone to see if anything changed on your phone and whatnot.
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: To check in with yourself around, you know, that, are you doing too much? Because everything that feels like what you might have been able to accomplish in the past, is, you know, we’re not gonna necessarily have the same reactions right now, you know. There’s a lot of things that we, I feel like I try and learn a lot about how my body reacts to things and of course, there’s still plenty I need to learn there’s still plenty I don’t know, but I feel like even sometimes the little bit that I did know just kind of has been thrown out the window, you know?
Billy: Yeah.
Raymond: Because it’s a good time to humble yourself and remember that human beings have survived things like this in the past, and I’m not saying that in this like weird flippant way, like “Let’s just go on with our lives!”
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: I mean like while we’re staying home and taking this seriously, perhaps I should read some stories about people in history who have survived these things. So more about thinking about that as a way to humble yourself and as a way to sort of, for me I need inspiration. I want some inspiration from people who have been through this before. There’s not a lot of people around me who have been through this before, but there might be some accounts or books written 100 years ago or 1000 years ago and those people might have some wisdom to share. So I’ve been trying to kind of do a mix of like, I want to read what all my scientists and doctor and healthcare friends are writing and posting and researching and all that stuff, but I also sometimes need to put the pendulum in the other way and think about, okay, what have people always done to take care of themself in times like this?
Billy: Yeah. I love that. I think that really ties in, in a large way, to this Hero’s Journey that we’ve kind of been going over in which the Liver is the last stop, the Liver gallbladder like the last stop on that kind of loop, which is essentially the return back home from our journey, like what have we kind of gathered along this path that we’ve been on and then how do we take this information and give it back to our community or how have other people who have been through this, how have the taken that information and given us something to be able to use. So I love that idea of really tapping into historical accounts or speaking with elders or other people in our communities kind of about how do you get through times like these or what tools are you using to be able to navigate this or calm your nervous system? I think that’s really a wise way of making sure that we’re also not isolating during this grieving process, because I think it’s really easy when we do grieve to get stuck in different places in that cycle.
Raymond: Yeah.
Billy: Or not cycle, but you know, the different places that you can be as you grieve because it’s not a linear process. But like, in this situation, getting kind of angered and collapsing because it can be really overwhelming. We’re just little people in a large kind of framework that we aren’t able to, even our anger can’t necessarily match up against the overwhelming power of it sometimes.
Raymond: Right, right. Yeah, like tapping into that energy for yourself, to fuel yourself and to fuel the sort of larger purpose that drives you in life, but to not take on too much and yeah, to remember, I think about your imagery with the tree and at the beginning, we’re reaching down into the roots and pulling up that is what I was thinking about when you were talking. Liver, we haven’t talked about the, we talked about the emotion, but the flavor in Liver herbs. Spring wood is all about spring things, so things for the Liver are a lot of spring greens and bitter herbs and sour is kind of the taste that often gets associated with it. So vinegars are very much a good thing for stimulating Liver function, getting that balance in the body. Think about, you were talking about, the Hero’s Journey and that makes me think about the Major Arcana in the tarot, thinking about that as a circle. So the fool is the zero card and you come around to the world, but the card that comes after the world is the fool, so we’re always kind of cycling around. So we come home from the Hero’s Journey having learned new things, but then often that means okay now we gotta be ready to take the next journey, but the next journey is informed by the one that we just went on and we talk all that knowledge and information with us, just like the five elements cycle with the tree growing up and things like that, the wood to fire to earth to metal to water to wood to fire to earth to metal to water to wood and the cycle just keeps on going.
Billy: And that’s the brilliance of like overlay with the tarot, with the Hero’s Journey, with the the five elements is that in the Daoist perspective of the Liver, the reason why we’ve done it in this way is that the last stop on the road of enlightenment is that you learn how to use your anger in a constructive way for the collective. So that overlay of this healing journey of, you know, through all of the processes and all of the emotions we’ve talked about here, with grief, with the lung, etc, as we’ve moved through all of these emotions, none of them are in themselves wrong or bad, but they are part of what propels us in the healing journey to reach a place where we can be our full authentic self, whole. Anger being part of that and this kind of wholeness of our nervous system being an important thing to nourish, I think is just like a beautiful way of kind of like ending these conversations about, you know, the healing journey.
Raymond: Yeah and that, you know, we sort of are concluding this series while the old world is falling away and the new world is coming up.
[Raymond Laughs]
Raymond: We don’t know what that new world is gonna be.
[Raymond Laughs]
Raymond: But it feels. I feel hopeful that one: that I have you Billy Janes.
Billy: Aww
Raymond: And that we have all of y’all who have been listening to this podcast and we have all the people and the friends and family in our life that have been really supportive of us in both this career and this project. It’s been, I think, really helpful for me. Especially, it’s been good to kind of come back and talk with you since you’ve been doing some telehealth, I know, with clients but I haven’t really seen any clients since mid-march. So I definitely have a lot of excess, pent up healing energy.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: As far as, you know, I haven’t been able to express this. I mean obviously I’m thinking about it everyday in terms of my own personal body, but it’s nice to take a step back from the brick wall and think about the larger systems and things like that. Oh, one more thing before we go. I don’t want to miss the last time to introduce
[7:45]
[Billy’s Upbeat, Funky Herb Theme Song Plays]
Raymond [singing]: Billy’s herbal corner.
Raymond: Wait, do you have any herbs?
[Music Stops]
Billy: Yeah, I mean I think the last time we talked about the last recording, we talked about this, I believe that I probably talked about oat straw as being a really helpful thing for the nervous system, because it’s packed with so many minerals that when you make an infusion of it, which is basically a really strong tea that steeps for four hours and cools, it is really calming for the nervous system but it also tonifies, or adds all of those minerals to your nervous system, so that it can not shake like a tree in the wind,but that it can be really firm and nourished. You know, now the world has changed a bit and having access to herbs online or in stores is different, you can’t just order from Mountain Rose Herbs because, which by the way we aren’t getting any money from them, I’m just mentioning because it’s the cheapest and it’s organic and so I’m just mentioning it, but if they want to sponsor us, hey.
[Both Laugh]
Billy: You can’t just order because they’re on a one to two week back order because of, you know, things. So my recommendation right now is that if you have the ability to be able to clip any mint or lemon balm, which is in the mint family, from any of your neighbors and be able to but them in water, tear up the leaves from the bottom of the clipping for about an inch or two and then soak it in water for a couple weeks, it’ll develop a root system and then you can replant that in some soil. Lemon balm is wonderful for anxiety and it’s good for headaches and digestion, anything in the mint family is gonna be really great for anxiety and digestion and I think that those can be really supportive right now and they’re very accessible and they grow pretty easily.
Raymond: Yeah.
Billy: So that would be kind of my herbal corner moment.
Raymond: Mint can almost grow too much.
[Billy Laughs]
Billy: Yes.
Raymond: We have it in our yard, it’s amazing, but sometimes I just have to beat it back with a weed wacker because there’s so much of it, but that’s a good problem to have. So if anyone is in Western North Carolina and needs some mint, email us and I’ll hook you up.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: Oh my gosh. Well, Billy Janes, thank you for taking some time out to fix my mistake and talk about the Liver again and for also doing this conversation and this labor of love, this podcast with me, it’s always been a joy and it’s great to have an excuse to have to talk to you on a regular basis and you have some podcast projects in the works potentially as well, right? Some future podcast goals?
Billy: I do.
[Both Laugh]
Billy: We’ll see. I’ve learned so much from you and I’m so grateful to, you know, have this opportunity to spend this time with you. It’s really been the highlight of what, the last year that we’ve been doing this?
Raymond: Yeah, I think pretty steadily the past year.
Billy: Yeah! I really am grateful for this and it’s made something really grow in me about what I can do to support our community and what that looks like for me. So, yeah, we’ll see what happens with the podcast thing I’m working on.
Raymond: Yeah, awesome. I mean, we’ll be doing some stuff. Your website is janesacupuncture.com, right?
Billy: Yep.
Raymond: And you’re on Instagram, @billyjaneslac, right?
Billy: Mhm, yep.
Raymond: Okay. I’m @mountainzenshiatsu on Instagram. I’m also on @purplefluoritemusic on Instagram. So I do all the music for the show and I don’t know, I feel like part of me is like “I’m not gonna do another podcast.” and I’m probably gonna make another podcast.
[Raymond Laughs]
Raymond: I mean, I have this microphone, so.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: Right? Might go back to music, I don’t know. I’m gonna go back to my radio roots and I might just do a show that’s kind of mostly music with a little bit of talking, things like that, rather than a lot of talking. Alright, so we appreciate all of y’all who have been listening to every episode. Thank you so much, keep in touch, we would love to hear from you, any thoughts that you have and share the podcast with anyone out there that you think would also benefit. We try to keep the episodes semi evergreen, mixing in some topical things, but just because we knew that we wanted to have this resource available to people in our community for a while. So we will look forward to seeing more of you all out in the world. Stay safe, stay healthy, take care of each other. Any other final words of wisdom you want to share, Billy Janes?
Billy: I think that we just love all of you and that’s what this work has been about and yeah, we would love to hear from you, how you’re doing and if you have any questions. But yeah, we love you and I love you, Raymond.
Raymond: And I love you, Billy Janes.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: And we love this work and we love the love of this work.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: Alright, thanks for listening.
[45:26]
[Lo-fi outro music plays]
Raymond: And scene.
[Both Laugh]
Raymond: Oh my gosh, I’m like blushing.
[Both Laugh]
Transcription by kiatranscripts@gmail.com
Healing with Raymond & Billy 