Discovering… EnneaMediCina: an easy guide to getting to know yourself and your body
“Every person has their own psycho-physical structure, their own history, and needs a path that takes all this into account”. EnneaMediCina is all this: it is the path on which one can set out to activate the potential contained in one’s DNA and learn to be the architect of one’s own destiny.
EnneaMediCina is a work, within which you will find a new model, a new way of understanding man and his spheres.
In fact, the work unites Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Enneagram in a marriage that will hold you captivated. The author of the book is Liliana Atz, a psychologist and expert in Traditional Chinese Medicine, as well as an Enneagram teacher.
But it is also a historical excursus that begins in the late 1500s, when the world was revolutionised by the split between mind and body unleashed by Descartes’ theses, and reaches the present day, with the rediscovery of the importance of the holistic view in people’s lives.
The eye is turned both to the East, from which the ancient and fascinating Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) derives, and to the dated doctrine of the Enneagram, which has recently made a strong comeback. Because, as can be seen from reading this fluent and intuitive handbook, West and East are different worlds that complement each other.
And this is perhaps the battle that awaits us: definitively overcoming the scientific cultural model of the West, which for centuries has tended to subdivide and sectoralise, to embrace a more holistic vision, typical of the Eastern world.
A work in which the classical canons of positivist society are ranged, the reader is offered a wide range of ancient interpretations. An in-depth space is dedicated to the meaning of numbers.
Liliana Atz, the author, tells us a story that fascinates her: ‘Numerology is an ancient science, of which, in the West, Pythagoras was one of the most illustrious connoisseurs. St Augustine also believed that everything had a mathematical relationship and wrote ‘Numbers are the universal language offered by divinities to humans as a confirmation of truth’. Finally, Jung, the famous psychotherapist, considered the number a numinous, sacred entity’.
“Quantum physics,” the lecturer specifies, “reveals how the observer becomes part of the observed. The consequences drawn from this are revolutionary, disconcerting, and fundamentally concordant with what the great spiritual illuminati have always said since the dawn of time; time is bi-directional, matter is not reality. Reality is consciousness‘.
“Quantum physics and neuroscience now agree that our level of consciousness makes the nervous system move, creating one of an infinite number of possible realities, both on an individual and collective level. All this was already known in antiquity and was transmitted to us through the symbolic language of numbers. Numerology,’ the author concludes, ‘thus becomes an important gateway to the universe of the macro and micro cosmos of Man’.
Although some important themes are addressed – and indeed the result is a work that is undoubtedly didactic – the style is fluent and the language accessible to all. Free of convoluted turns of phrase, the insights and teachings the book dispenses are intended for a diverse and instinctively learning readership. However, we ask the author why a young – and perhaps unfamiliar – reader might learn valuable lessons from this book.
“In our western society,” he replies, “we can truly say that we have no major deficiencies in the material aspect. Food is not a priority and most of us can afford other things. On these induced needs other needs are unconsciously projected, other urgencies of inner filling, which thus remain ‘voiceless'”.
“What is the meaning of life?” questions Liliana Atz, attempting to offer us an answer to a question that has tormented humanity for centuries. “According to the World Health Organisation, health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of the state of disease or infirmity. But in our image society more and more people, more or less, manifest their discomfort with destructive and self-destructive attitudes’.
“Unfortunately,” he continues, “we have also learnt to veil our inner emptinesses, our existential malaises, forgetting about ourselves, we slavishly adapt because ‘that’s the way everyone does it’, losing touch with our inner selves. I think it is important for anyone, and more than ever for a young person, to prepare for the future by knowing and practising the ‘EnneaMediCina’ tool’.
And then whole chapters dedicated to our organism which, far from being a deaf and uninfluenced engine, is conditioned by factors that were not taken into account until a few decades ago. In the chapter on the endocrine system, Liliana Atz writes that ‘an optimistic view will lead to good functioning, a pessimistic view will produce imbalances’.
The author confirms those sentences: ‘Starting from childhood, various psychological studies have highlighted how the relationship with the mother and/or other reference figures is decisive in the activation of temperamental traits that are manifested in children from the first year of life. Already in the 1980s, John Bowlby, a British psychologist and psychoanalyst, advocated the ‘attachment theory’. Science has now amply proven how, in the mammalian brain, positive emotions facilitate the activation of a series of reactions that trigger the functions of the immune system, while depressive states cause an inhibition of immune resistance. What has been affirmed by Traditional Chinese Medicine for millennia now..”
What about the cultural backwardness and the fact that these topics are not examined at all in school? “Answering this,” the author replies, “would require a very broad socio-political-cultural analysis. Certainly, any paradigm shift takes time, and the old model, despite all its obvious flaws and props, struggles to give way, even to the language of science. Too many interests are at stake…. It is therefore up to each of us, as Gandhi said, to be what we would like the world to be’.
Oriental culture, in short, offers us extraordinary points to think about. The brain, for example, would be closely linked to the heart, which is the imperial organ. More and more cardiologists are advocating a heart-brain system. Is this correct?
‘That is correct,’ the author confirms. – According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Heart oversees emotions, consciousness, thought, spirit and the coordination of emotional and cognitive aspects. It is the executor of the information sent by the five senses: it interprets, converts, assimilates and causes an appropriate reaction to the trials of life, adapting them to one’s inner world’.
The Heart and Brain would thus be the seats of man’s intelligence, the organs of knowledge and spirit. ‘The Heart,’ continues Liliana Atz, ‘holds emotional intelligence, immediate and instinctive knowledge, while the Brain holds rational knowledge. Western medicine is also studying these relationships between the Brain and the Heart, and when the emotional brain goes out of phase, the Heart suffers and, in the long run, is exhausted. But the most amazing aspect is that this relationship is bilateral: at every moment of life, the balance of the Heart influences the Brain.
“Research in neurocardiology,” concludes Liliana Atz, “shows that the Heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticated centre for receiving and developing information. In practice, the Heart involves the entire organism in the variations of its wide electromagnetic field, perceives, feels and influences all physiology, starting with the Brain’.
Can reading this book lead us to a new vision? “It was because of my existential discomforts that I started this personal quest of mine. My life,’ clarifies Liliana Atz, ‘has changed in awareness. My needs are now ‘my needs’ and I don’t waste time with people who offer me ready-made solutions’.
‘Every person,‘ the author concludes, ‘has their own psycho-physical structure, their own history and needs a pathway that takes all this into account’.
EnneaMediCina is all of this: it is the path on which you can set out to activate the potential contained in your DNA and learn to be the architect of your own destiny.
You can find the complete works of Liliana Atz in all online stores and on this website.
