The Kidneys in Chinese Medicine
Our relationship to fear, resilience, and deep reserves
TCM Deep Dives is a series of ongoing explorations of Traditional Chinese Medicine—bridging physiology, emotion, and spirit. Each arc invites you into a living system, where you begin to recognize patterns of harmony and disharmony and respond with steadiness and care.
If you’re new to this series, I recommend going in order: beginning with the introduction, followed by the Spleen, then the Lung. Today builds on that foundation.
One November day, after long hours teaching at the local Chinese Medicine college, I came home to an empty house.
My husband—whom I’d been separated from since October—had driven into town with a U-Haul, packed up his things, and left.
All that remained was a spare moving box and a roll of packing tape tossed to one side of the living-room floor. When I reached him by phone that night, he was already hours away, driving towards his new life.
Waves of fear, grief, and disbelief pulled me under. I could see no way out, and no hope of feeling anything good again.
After tossing and turning for a few hours, I rose at 3 a.m. and began a practice that would carry me through that day and the dark months to follow: taking one small step, then the next, neither looking too far behind nor too far ahead.
The first step upon waking was to turn on every light—upstairs and downstairs. Somehow, lights on made things better.
I then moved the fold-up mattress pad that was my bed to the main-floor bedroom, cleaning floors and surfaces as I worked through the house. By the end of the night, I reached the living room. There, I set up an altar and made space to meditate and practice yoga while looking out at mountains, lake, and sky.
In the distance, the just-before-four train passed through. Above, the sounds of geese echoed.
I watched and listened. Then I drove to the glacier-fed lake and plunged in. I dried off, got dressed, went to work.
Teaching Chinese Medicine at the college that day is a blur. Somehow I made it through hours at the front of classrooms, showing up for students. Somehow I made it home.
Later that evening and every evening thereafter, I walked—alone in the dark and cold, with my breath and my thoughts.
I walked and walked that winter. It saved me.
Each day I continued. I woke before dawn, practiced breath and movement, plunged into icy water, and walked half an hour to work.
Each evening after returning home, I walked again: through neighborhoods, through the barren courtyard of a local school, down snowy streets past houses full of life I did not feel.
With each step, I searched the day for small gifts—a smile, a kind word, a moment of connection with a student, anything at all. Some nights I had to walk a long while before gratitude arrived, but eventually it did: a pinprick of light in the darkness.
I began writing these gifts down in a journal. I haven’t missed a day since.
Eventually, Randy and I found our way back to each other. We remarried and remain together today—deeply in love, in a very different relationship.
But that winter of divorce remains for me a story of the Kidneys: a reminder of the deep place within us that keeps going even when the world has gone dark and we fear we cannot.
