Sunrider Whole Foods Nutrition

Building the Life Force 

1. Building the Life Force
   
   The Chinese believe that a Life Force flows from organ to organ within us. A healthy organ receives the flow, transforms it, and gives it out again. An unhealthy organ receives the Life Force, but doesn't give it out again. An unhealthy organ, in other words, blocks the Life Force, which throws the body out of balance.
   
   We may not understand the Life Force, but knowing that the ancient Chinese believed in it can help us understand how they approached disease. They sought to discover which organ was weak, which organ was blocking the Life Force and then to strengthen it.
   
   They strengthened organs with herbs. They believed that herbs had properties that balanced the weaknesses of organs and allowed the Life Force to flow again unhindered. They studied these balancing properties of herbs and developing formulas, or combinations of herbs, for various purposes. With these formulas, they sought an inner peace that we call well-being, and which they would describe as our experience of the orderly and balanced flow of the Life Force within us.
2. Court Physicians and Temple Priests
   
   The best Chinese herbal knowledge came from two places; the palace of the Chinese emperors, and the temples of the Shao Lin Priests. Within the palace, the emperor's physicians sought to preserve his health, to allow him to live forever. Within the Shao Lin temples, the priests sought two things:
   first, physical strength for their martial arts; and second, peace or inner focus that came, they believed, from a balanced and harmonious body.
   
   For centuries, these princely and priestly minds experimented on themselves and others with one goal in mind; to discover which plants among Nature's tens of thousands strengthen which organs to find foods, in other words, for heart, kidney, lungs, brain, and so on. They experimented, observed, then experimented and observed again. Across thousands of years and billions of observations, they learned what works and what doesn't.
   
   As they learned, they kept records. "Of all modern cultures," writes Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, "the Chinese offer the most copious written record of their past." The most important herbal records were kept, naturally, in the emperor's library, which included even the records of the Shao Lin temple priests.