John Kozinski
Diagnosing Your Health by John KozinskiJust as a plant reveals its health to you by the appearance of its leaves, stems and flowers; so does a person’s bodily appearance reveal deep insights into the state of a person’s health and well being. This method by which a person can see inside the body without x-rays originated thousands of years ago in the Far East. By reading the body’s signs, a practitioner of macrobiotic oriental diagnosis could tell if a person was developing specific sicknesses and ascertain what kind of imbalances in a person’s diet and lifestyle needed to be corrected in order to return the body to total health. The art of seeing health through observation of the facial features, coloring on the skin, the hand and feet, and behavior was known as the highest form of this oriental diagnosis.A contemporary form of oriental diagnosis is taught and practiced by macrobiotic health counselors and in courses that instruct individuals in the macrobiotic way to health. Macrobiotic oriental diagnosis combines a modern understanding of the body’s structures and functions with traditional ways of assessing health.Traditional oriental diagnosis sees the body as being energetic in nature. All things from structures to functions are seen as expressions of energy. Chinese medicine and East India’s Ayurvedic medicine both have poetic ways of describing health and sickness in the body.Modern macrobiotics simplified the energetic system. Two essential conditions of the body are assessed with multiple variations. In the modern macrobiotic way of diagnosis, a person may have a yin condition, an overly loose or weakened and collapsed organ, organs or system, or a yang condition, an overly tight, hard, or blocked up and weakened organ, or system.A good example of how to see one’s health through these methods can be seen in the observation of a person’s lips. In macrobiotic, oriental diagnosis, extremely swollen lips indicate that the individual’s digestive system has been overworked for many years and is now in a weakened condition. This would be a yin condition. Possible problems that are indicated by this sign are poor absorption of nutrients, and chronic constipation. On the other hand, if the lips are extremely thin, there is a yang condition, characterized by a lack of good blood circulation to the stomach and colon, caused by excessive intake of salty foods and snacks, hard, dried baked flour products, and animal products such as meat, chicken, eggs and hard cheese. Overly thin lips can be a yin condition of weakness or collapse of the digestive organs caused by extremes in diet and lifestyle for many years Poor absorption of nutrients and poor blood circulation to the digestive organs are problems that are indicated by thin lips.Oriental diagnosis gives new meaning to the phrase; one picture tells a thousand words. You’ll find a useful, practical and fascinating tool in the practice of oriental diagnosis and will in all likelihood never look at a person’s face in quite the same way.John Kozinski is a natural health counselor and teacher who has taught and practiced macrobiotic oriental diagnosis with thousands of people over the course of twenty years. He currently teaches and offers counseling and shiatsu energy balancing sessions in Connecticut, Chicago, IL, the New York City area, the Boston area, and at the Kushi Institute in western MA.Macrobiotics/Seminars, Workshops and Health Consultations with John Kozinski