Sooner or later an exercise arrives with a name that unsettles someone. “Exercise for the liver.” “Strengthening the kidneys.” “The movement of wood.” For many people who came because of their back and their breath, that is the moment they wonder what exactly they have signed up to.
The question is fair, and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no would be.
What meridians are
In Chinese medicine, meridians are a network of channels along which qi is said to travel through the body. Twelve main ones are described, each linked to an organ, and acupuncture maps onto them.
What has to be said plainly: meridians are not an anatomical structure. They do not correspond to nerves, vessels or lymphatic pathways, and they cannot be found in the body as physical objects. This is not disputed even among serious advocates of Chinese medicine.
What meridians are is a map of observations. They emerged from centuries of recording where people feel tension, which pains appear together, and what happens when particular places are pressed. Some of those observations align with what we now know about referred pain and connective tissue; others do not.
The map, then, is not the body. But it is useful, because it was drawn by people who watched the body for a very long time.
What the five elements are
The five elements - wood, fire, earth, metal, water - are a classification system, not a claim about substances. Each element groups a set of phenomena: a season, an organ, an emotion, a taste, a colour, a direction.
When the tradition says “liver”, it does not necessarily mean the organ in the upper right abdomen. It means a group of phenomena the tradition bound together: spring, anger, tension, mobility, the eyes. An exercise “for the liver” is therefore an exercise for whatever falls under liver in that system - in practice a stretch of the hips and the sides of the torso, release, and a longer exhale.
Translation into Western languages goes wrong here. Read “liver” literally and you rightly suspect nonsense. Read it as the name of a category and you see a model - old, unproven, but internally consistent.
How much of this you have to believe
None of it. That is the honest and important answer.
The exercises work mechanically. A movement said to “open the liver meridian” produces, in the body, a stretch through the side of the torso, a rotation of the spine and a lengthened exhale. Those three effects are real, measurable, and happen regardless of whether you have ever heard of meridians.
The name of an exercise is therefore not a condition for it working. It is the label under which the exercise was transmitted for centuries, and in a group it is useful because it is shorter than a description.
So we give the names and do not require the explanations. Anyone interested in the tradition will be told as much as we know. Anyone who came because of their back gets exactly the same thing out of the practice.
The line we do not cross
The line is treatment.
Qi Gong is training. It is not diagnosis and it is not therapy. We will never tell anyone they have “weak kidneys” or “stagnant qi”, because we have neither the knowledge nor the standing for it, and because a statement like that can steer someone away from seeing a doctor.
When someone arrives with pain that persists, the answer is always the same: get it looked at, train alongside that, and tell us what you were advised so we can adapt the class.
Why we do not discard the tradition anyway
Because something true was recorded in it, even where the explanation is wrong.
That breath and emotional state influence each other was described in Chinese texts two thousand years before the first measurement of heart rate variability. That tension distributes through the body in patterns rather than at random is an observation older than anatomy. That it makes little sense to treat the body in separate parts is a position closer to physiotherapy today than it was fifty years ago.
The tradition is worth reading as a collection of long-run observations in an obsolete language. Not as physiology, and not as nonsense.
