This is one of the 12 organ systems in Chinese medicine.

The information below is intended to enhance and expand your experience of the Kidney podcast (linked here when it is ready) but can of course be used on its own to understand your treatment at Watershed Wellness more deeply.

Kidney organ system overview #

The Kidney is known as 腎 shèn in Chinese.

In conventional medicine the kidneys filter blood and make urine. In Chinese medicine the Kidney is the deepest organ system we have. It holds what you were born with, governs the bones and the marrow and the brain, opens at the ears, and anchors everything else. Constitution, reserves, aging and what runs out are all Kidney questions.

In Chinese medicine, some of the major functions of the Kidney organ system are:

• Storing 精 jīng, essence, which is the concentrated inheritance a person is born with and spends across a lifetime
• Governing the bones and the marrow, and through the marrow the brain, the teeth and the hair of the head
• Opening at the ears, which is why hearing is read as a Kidney sign
• Anchoring the body’s yang, holding warmth and activity down where they belong instead of letting them rise and scatter
• Governing the deep water of the body, and with the Bladder deciding what is held and what is released
• Forming the truest axis of the body with the Heart, where fire above and water below have to stay in communication

The character says more than the function list does. 腎 is 肉 ròu, flesh, sitting under 臤. The 說文解字 Shuōwén Jiězì, compiled around 100 CE and the first Chinese dictionary to take characters apart into their pieces, calls the Kidney 水藏 shuǐ zàng, the water viscus. It also records what those pieces mean on their own. 臤 is 堅 jiān, firm. And inside 臤 sits 臣 chén, which the same dictionary says depicts 象屈服之形, the form of submission.

Reading a component’s meaning up into the whole character is an interpretive move, and one the tradition makes freely. Done here it gives water, firmness, and a bowed posture underneath them. This is the organ of bowing down.

In English, surrender mostly means giving up. That is not what is meant here. It means bowing and yielding.

Let’s dig in a bit more using the various structures and symbols associated with the Kidney.

The Kidney acupuncture channel #

The Kidney channel is the channel of foot Shaoyin, and it has 27 points. It is the only one of the twelve that begins on the underside of the foot.

It starts beneath the little toe, crosses the sole of the foot to Yǒngquán KID-1, and emerges on the inner edge of the foot at Rángǔ KID-2. It travels behind the inner ankle bone at Tàixī KID-3, drops down through the heel, then comes back up to Zhàohǎi KID-6 just below the ankle. From there it runs up the inside of the leg, crossing the Spleen channel at Sānyīnjiāo SP-6, to the inner side of the back of the knee at Yīngǔ KID-10, and continues up the inner back of the thigh to the tip of the tailbone.

Then it goes inside. It threads its way up through the spine, enters the Kidney itself, connects with the Bladder, meets the midline of the lower belly at three points, then ascends through the Liver and the diaphragm, enters the Lung, joins with the Heart, links with the Pericardium channel, and finally terminates at the root of the tongue.

This channel, in other words, networks most of the body. It is part of why the Kidney gets called the root of the other organ systems rather than one of the twelve, and why work at the ankle and the inside of the leg can reach so far up.

Phase Element – Water #

The five phases, also known as the five elements or five phase elements, is one of the most common symbolic systems used in Chinese medicine. The five phases are Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood. Each phase has its own basic character and series of associations, all of which can be used to understand human health, as well as other aspects of reality.

Water was covered at length on the Bladder page, and everything said there applies here. The Bladder is the yang organ of the pair and works at the surface. The Kidney is the yin organ, and its work is storage.

The Kidney’s water is the primordial water, the one that balances our primordial fire. It is the fullest representation of the yin force we have, and it calls us to turn our vision inward, to see ourselves, our past, our ancestors, our karma. The Kidney is the deepest root a person has. It stretches back into eternity, and it is our heritage before us and our legacy after we are gone.

Storage is the whole of it. Whatever water is on the earth, the deepest of it settles to the bottom and stays there, and that reservoir is what everything else draws on.

Fear is the emotion that belongs to Water. The Kidney’s relationship to fear is not avoidance. It is the willingness to peer into the darkness, to face fear and worry, and to learn something about the essence of reality by having done so. The virtue that belongs to Water is wisdom, and specifically the wisdom that arrives through humility rather than through accumulation. Both of those follow from the surrender reading of the name.

Six Conformations – Shàoyīn #

The six conformations is a system of diagnosis that divides the twelve organ systems into six synergistic pairs. There are a variety of ways to parse the information contained in this system, which is chiefly used when diagnosing and treating infectious conditions such as colds and flus, but has utility beyond that use.

Shàoyīn translates to lesser yin. The Kidney shares this conformation with 心 Xīn / Heart, which pairs the deepest water in the body with its brightest fire. Together they form the truest axis of the body, the pairing that keeps our humanness going.

Each of the six conformations has a job. Two of them open, two close, and two pivot. Shaoyin is a pivot, and what it pivots between is that fire and that water. When it works, the two stay in communication: the fire above is drawn downward and anchored into the water below, rather than rising away from it.

When the pivot fails, they separate. The yang has nothing holding it down and floats upward: restless at night, hot in the chest or the face or the hands, unable to settle, unable to sleep, and exhausted the whole time.

This is why being wired and being worn out so often show up together. In this system they are not two problems. They are one conformation not doing its job.

Huángdì Nèijīng – Chapter 8 – The Operator with Force #

One of the most important books in Chinese medicine is the Huángdì Nèijīng or Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic. In Chapter 8 of that text, all of the organ systems are described using language that relates to the operation of a country or state. This is a common way of symbolically discussing physiology and pathology in ancient Chinese texts.

In this chapter, it is said of the Kidney:

腎者，作強之官，伎巧出焉。

“The kidneys are the official functioning as operator with force. Technical skills and expertise originate from them.”

Paul Unschuld translation

Two things are being said at once here. 作強 zuò qiáng is force, doing, hard strength. 伎巧 jì qiǎo is fine skill, dexterity, craft. The Kidney holds both.

Heiner Fruehauf’s name for this office is the divine craftsman, and his reading of it is that the skill is downstream of the humility. Capability comes from taking your energy back and concentrating it, not from pushing harder. Which is the same movement the name of the organ describes.

This is useful to know clinically. Depletion usually shows up as clumsiness and lost precision long before it shows up as weakness. The fine work goes first.

Organ clock – 5pm – 7pm #

The Kidney’s hours are the end of the working day, and they belong to sunset.

The sun goes below the horizon. Shapes lose their definition, the day’s outward movement ends, and the body begins moving inward, which continues through the night.

Practically, this is a poor window for starting anything and a good one for coming home: leaving work behind, eating, letting the day settle rather than pushing it into the evening. How well you stop here affects how you sleep.

Organ clock – September #

Note : The lunisolar Chinese calendar doesn’t match up perfectly with the months of the Gregorian calendar. We’re using the closest month on the Gregorian calendar that makes sense.

September is the time of the steepest descent into yin: into darkness, into stillness, into the spirit. It is also the time for the intellect, for considering what should be kept and what should be let go, and for learning.

The Chinese agricultural calendar is unusually direct about what is happening. 白露 Báilù, White Dew, falls on the 8th, and its three five-day periods are all birds: 鴻雁來, the wild geese arrive; 玄鳥歸, the swallows return south; 群鳥養羞, the birds gather and store food. Two weeks later comes 秋分 Qiūfēn, the autumn equinox, and its three periods are 雷始收聲, thunder begins to subside; 蟄蟲坯戶, hibernating insects seal up their burrows; 水始涸, the water begins to dry up. All six are things arriving and settling in, or closing up.

Water that was in the air all summer, invisible, appears overnight on the surface of everything, because the nights have finally got cold enough. Nothing new arrived; something already present became concentrated enough to see and touch. That is close to what this tradition means by essence.

The plants do the same. In August the work was making seed. In September the plants that spent the whole year shooting upward are so heavy with fruit that they bow back down toward the ground, which is the same bowing the name of the organ describes.

So this is the organ that carries mystery, the descent into darkness, and an awareness of death and of completion. Coming to know the ancient cycles that govern all of us is not a morbid interest here. It is one of the ways this tradition understands a person getting wiser.

Organ clock – The branch 酉 Yǒu #

Every organ system is related to an “Earthly Branch” which is one of the pieces of the ancient Chinese calendar system.

The Kidney’s branch is 酉 yǒu, and the character is a picture of a jug of wine. 酉 is also the component sitting inside 醫 yī, medicine.

Fermentation is what joins them. Rather than let the grain fall to the ground and be wasted, fermenting it gives the grain new life. Three characters built on 酉 carry the idea further: 酒 jiǔ, alcohol; 醋 cù, vinegar; and 酎 zhòu, ritual wine, which was bottled in the first month and drunk in the eighth in a spiritual context. The first two are both used in Kidney remedies.

Alcohol in this reading is water, but a particular kind of water: water imbued with fire. The tradition draws a related distinction inside the body. The water of the Stomach is post-natal and behaves like fresh water; the water of the Kidney is pre-natal and behaves more like salt water.

Alcohol can serve connection, spiritual and social, and can as easily become an agent of disconnection: a loss of spiritual force, and in alcoholism a loss of friends and family. Offering wine to the ancestors is still living practice in more than one place, including the Christian sacrament and pouring one out.

Organ clock – The Owl #

To make those branch symbols easier to relate to, the Chinese associated each with one of the 12 zodiac animals from Chinese astrology. Popularly, 酉 is the Rooster, and that is the animal most people arrive with.

Anciently it is the owl, and the owl is the animal this tradition takes for the Kidney. Heiner Fruehauf’s argument for it is about the time of day and the time of year. The Kidney’s hours are sunset and its season is the equinox. Both are the moment when, in his words, “the shapes of the natural world start to blur and it’s not that important anymore to orient yourself during this time to use your normal sensory faculties, particularly your eyesight.” The animals that ran the daylight are going to sleep and many are heading toward hibernation. What comes into its own is whatever can work after the light goes.

Two details of the bird line up with the organ. Owls are always drawn with enormous pupils, and the Kidney’s association in the body is the interior of the eye, the pupil and the back of the eye rather than the surface. And the feathers on an owl’s face are a sound collector, funnelling sound into the ears, which is how an owl finds something moving that it cannot see. The Kidney’s orifice is the ears.

The hour, the season, and the eye and ear of the animal all say the same thing. It is a kind of perception that becomes useful when ordinary seeing does not work, and the tradition treats it as a skill to be developed rather than as a withdrawal.

The owl also pictures the Shaoyin pair. The Heart is passion, fire, maturity, leadership and strength of vision, which is the horse. The Kidney is mystery, meditation, focus, deep skill and strength of purpose, which is the owl. Most of us are much better at one than at the other. A life needs both.

Organ clock – Hexagram 20 #

The Yijing / I Ching is one of the most ancient Chinese texts. It contains 64 hexagrams and their interpretation and was used anciently, and is still used today, for divination purposes. Each hexagram is composed of 6 lines, either broken (yin lines) or solid (yang lines) or a combination of the two, meaning each has a unique type of yin/yang balance.

There are 12 special hexagrams called “tidal hexagrams” that are arrayed around the organ clock depicting the relative balance and relationship of yin and yang throughout the cycle of 12 months. The Kidney’s is Hexagram 20, Guān 觀, four yin lines below and two yang above. It is usually translated as Viewing, Contemplation, or Observation.

It follows directly from the Bladder’s Hexagram 12. In August three yin had risen and Heaven still stood intact above them, the two halves separated and not communicating. By September the yin has risen one line further and broken into the upper trigram, so Heaven is no longer whole. What stands above the earth now is 巽, wind, moving over the ground.

Stephen Karcher notes that the old form of the character 觀 shows a bird with large eyes and a crest, alongside a person whose head has filled with spirit. The name has also been read as seeing with the eyes of an owl: an interior kind of seeing, done with the eyes closed, and closer to listening than to looking.

Karcher’s practical reading of the hexagram: look without acting in order to find the right perspective, and particularly, look at what you usually don’t want to look at.

The Kidney in clinic #

Like most organ systems, and the channels they are connected to, the Kidney channel and organ can be used in a variety of ways in the clinic. In fact it is reductive, and inappropriate, to say that one organ system or channel “treats such and such condition,” as though that is the sum total of its impact. That said, there are general principles worth naming that will help you understand this organ system more deeply.

• The changes associated with aging: hearing and eyesight declining, fertility and sexual function declining, bones thinning, hair greying and thinning, teeth loosening. In this system these are not separate problems. They are one process, the gradual spending of essence, appearing in the tissues essence builds.
• Low back and knee pain, the two places the thinning of the bones is usually felt first. Back pain is not automatically a Kidney problem, though. It runs across several conformations, and most back pain is treated elsewhere. The Kidney presentation is the one that arrives with depletion rather than with injury or tension.
• Sleep, and specifically the kind where you are exhausted and still cannot settle. This is the Shaoyin pivot described above, with yang floating up because nothing below is holding it.
• Fluid problems where the body cannot hold water long enough to use it. The classical description of one of these is that you drink a bucket and urinate a bucket. Bladder urgency and leaking belong here too, on the Kidney’s side of the pair rather than the Bladder’s.
• Fertility, in both men and women. The classical approach usually anchors first and nourishes second, rather than beginning with tonification.
• Fear, and the longer-term work of building reserve. This is slow work, and it depends as much on how a person lives as on what they are given. It is why your practitioner may ask about your sleep and your evenings when you have come in about your knees.