Listlessness and heaviness of the body

There are three types of feeling listless chronically, mentioned below.

1. Feeling listless from waking up and during the morning.
2. Feeling listless in the afternoon and the evening.
3. Feeling listless the whole day.

When you feel weary only one day today, you can guess its cause thinking back what you did the day before.

The case when one feels dullness of the body from waking up and during the morning chronically is the type that one can accumulate the qi of the body by being active. One does not move the body during the night and the air becomes cooled down, so his/her power of qi gets weak in the next morning. This is the reason why one feels listless in the morning,.

Likewise, the case one feels listless or heaviness of  the body in the afternoon and evening is the type one exhausts the body qi because of the daily activity. For this type, one has not to exhaust the energy during the night.

The third case, feeling listless the whole day means it is the more severe case than these two cases. The vital energy is getting weak overall, one exhausts the qi of the body by daily activities and he/she cannot fill the energy up during the night.

If one finds out the cause of such weakness of the body qi, one has to eliminate it. For example, the practitioner has to find out if the person always goes to bed after the midnight, he/she has enough sleep, whether the amount of the foods he/she takes are too little or too much, if he/she takes any medication regularly, if he/she is overwork, if the work environment is too cold, if he/she has excessive sexual life, if she is too active during her period, and as a matter of congenital qi, if one's family member or relatives have similar conditions.

Ultimately speaking, the dullness of the body means slackness of body tissues, namely, the density of the body qi gets loosened. This brings the coldness into the body, and makes the body movement more dull.

All types of listlessness vary in terms of the extent of symptoms and they are not the same.

The expression that the body is heavy, is often used when one feels the weight on one's limbs and difficulty to move them, but sometimes one feels the whole body is heavy. Both of them are regarded as more serious conditions than feeling listless.

The heaviness of the body is sometimes felt even if one's weight is light. This means that the power of qi of inner organs cannot reach at extremities fully, so the movement of qi of extremities gets dull. Basically this occurs when the power of digestive organs becomes weak.

Here, the problem lies in the core where the body gets the acquired qi, but limbs are what makes such power of inner organs more active, so if one cannot use limbs freely, it is a fatal problem.
As recommended countermeasures, one changes the quality of the diet, ie. vegetarian foods that is more light to the body, and eats less.

*This article is translated from "Yamai hitokuchi Memo" p. 160-2, written by Shoji Kobayashi, 2005.

So, the green outside of the clinic was "the gourd"!!
It grows so fast!!