Summer break and Chinese yam

Updates and some TCM

Good morning!

I haven’t done any real reading or work on my Substack account for a few weeks. I try to push the guilt away, as it is not a useful feeling.

Yesterday I finished the 5^th semester of my TCM studies. 🍾🍾🍾Only three more to go!! Next semester will though be one of the hardest, as I will have 6 courses. I will probably need to study during the summer break and organize the working material to be ready to dive deep as soon as it starts. My plan is also to prepare several TCM posts and schedule them over the next 6-7 months. It looks like my break will still be about TCM 😁

🥔🥔🥔This semester was all about Chinese herbs. It was very challenging but incredibly interesting. As I want to specialize in food therapy, this semester was very relevant. I have been studying food therapy for a while, but this course gave me a deeper view of the herbs. I went to a Chinese supermarket yesterday and while browsing the herbs section, I was excited to see so many I know, and I can use 😊.

There is one herb, used also in food therapy, which is very interesting: the Chinese yam. Its Chinese name is shānyào山药. Shānmeans mountain and yào means medicine. It is a tuber and, after peeling, it can be eaten both raw and cooked. It is extremely slippery thus at first it can give you a weird feeling. But I find taste to be pleasant, the consistency is crunchy if you do not overcook it.

The yam tonifies the Qi without blocking it and without producing Dampness, and nourishes the Yin, our cooling system. It also tonifies the Kidney Yin and Kidney Qi. This means that it is a great food to use during the menopause years, where the Yin Qi naturally decreases, often causing night sweating.

It supports the Spleen and helps with digestion. Signs of Spleen Qi deficiency may be diarrhea, fatigue, loss of appetite. For elderly people the Chinese yam is a good option to include in their diet, as long as they do not have constipation or are experiencing heat due to external weather.

Finally, the Chinese yam also helps with the Lung Qi and it is useful in case of cough and asthma due to Lung Qi deficiency.

Guess what? I have a little of all the above! Thus, I am grateful to have found a food ally, which can help me to get my health issues under control.

I will prepare a dish later on with some yam and will tell you more about it!

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🥋🥋🥋I am glad about the break because I can dedicate more time to my other passion: qigong. Besides preparing for the new teaching season in Berlin, I hope to shoot some videos for Substack.

I also enrolled in the one-year program Self Mastery, by the Shaolin Temple Europe. I am looking forward to new physical and mental challenges.

💃💃💃 And of course, holidays are around the corner. I am looking forward to spending some time in Jimena de la Frontera, a white village in Andalusia. This is a large Spanish region, it occupies about 17% of the Spanish surface, amazing! It is also one of the hottest, Sevilla being one of the worse cities to visit in summer. Andalusia is unique in Europe as it has the Europe’s only true desert in terms of climate classification (so far…if global warming keeps going at this rate, we might soon have more deserts in Europe!). The Tabernas desert has attracted many cineasts looking for that arid flavour for their movies, in particular “spaghetti western”, films made by Italian filmmakers, mostly during the 1960s and 1970s were filmed there. For example “Once Upon a Time in the West”, by Sergio Leone, as well as a couple of films with Bud Spencer and Terence Hills.

Have a beautiful day, will be back soon!