What you are looking at is the clock I use at work (mine however is in English, not Dutch.) You may notice that it has 24 hours listed around the clock instead of just 12.  You may also notice that there are 12 organs depicted as the one hands slowly goes around every 24 hours.  Anyone who practices Chinese medicine will recognize this as a Horary clock or Chrono-acupuncture clock.

Long before chairman Mao Zedong stream-lined the practice of acupuncture into a system that met his own communist ideals, there existed many different methods to determine which points the Chinese doctors would choose to treat.  One of them is based on the heavenly division of years, months, days, and hours.  This ancient method is really, really complex.  Even when you talk to the oldest Chinese practitioners they will say that their teachers would mention it, but that it was way too difficult for anyone that they could remember to use.  I personally have tried about 5 times over the last 30 plus years to attempt to grasp it.  I have always given up.  One has to be a kind of savant with math to be able to calculate everything (including what longitude you are currently standing on!) to make the whole thing work properly.  I’m more like Dustin Hoffman’s character from Rain man…except not very good with numbers.

Well fortunately for me, there’s an app for that!

Christiaan Schipper at Chronoacupuncture.com has made it finally accessible to us non savant types.   This is also the place I ordered my clock from.  He had never shipped one to the U.S. before.  They went so far as to alter the website just for me.  I was having an issue with my office computer pinging to a satellite office that was throwing my longitude off by about 10 minutes.  They updated the website to allow one to manually put in my longitude.  How about that!

Without going into all of the complex traditional Chinese medicine jargon, what I am posting on this blog is basically the idea that there is a two hour window open every day for each of the twelve organs that acupuncturists find important.  So some acupuncturists will go so far as to treat that “open” organ during the time that tradition tells us that it’s energy is most accessible.

As far as tea goes, when someone asks me when would be the best time for them to drink matcha I tell them to drink it sometime during the open 2 hours of the organ that they are trying to effect.  So if they are dealing with some issues with the heart like insomnia or anxiety, the best time to drink their tea would be between the hours of 11: 00 am and 1:00 pm.  Their stomach would be best served to drink the tea between 7 and 9 in the morning.  But NOT according to their own clock at home or on their wrist… they should look at the time that this website says is open by doing all the complex math for them.

This theory also can apply with when to best take ones Chinese herbal medicines.

Oh, and if you don’t want to get up at 2 in the morning just to try and direct the benefits of your tea to your liver, you can also drink it at the opposite end of the clock (2 pm) and reap similar benefits!