CROSSOVER/X OR SAME SIDE "HARMONY"/COORDINATION?
There's a discussion about the coordination of the "Three External Harmonies" (wrist/ankle, elbow/knee, shoulder/hip) and whether that coordination is along one side or whether it is meant as, for instance, right-arm to left-leg. Maybe it's a good discussion topic, so I'll toss out my thoughts and I'll listen carefully to others' opinions because it's not something that I've ever thought of as other than an interesting thought-starter.
The muscle-tendon (or "Sinew") channels, of which the "acupuncture meridians" are just overlays, are the basic channels or routes along which our strength 'flows' as we move between Open and Close. So, generally speaking, the strengths/forces that we use to stand up, push, and Open the body go up the channels of the back, the strengths/forces that we use to curl/contract/Close the body generally come down the front of the body (except for the Stomach Channel), and the strengths/forces we use to lift and Open the arms are attached to the head and neck for the mechanical reason that the head and neck are the high spots from which forces can pull up the arms, if we aren't strictly reliant on the shoulder muscles.
So, let's look at the various routes of the channels and see if they crossover from one side to the other, or whether they go linearly up and down one side. There is no fixed answer to this question, but there are some salient points.
If you look at the channels on the front of the body, they tend to come from the hands and feet to the mid-torso region and then sort of disappear or go underground. You can think of the middle/dantian area as being the switching station (or "Area of Change") of a railroad network and the connections between the various railroad routes are made at the dantian. For our discussion, the implies that the coordination between, say, the right-arm and one of the legs is made at the switching station, the dantian. In other words, which side of the body coordinates or "harmonizes" with an arm is something that changes with circumstance, if you look at the front of the body and the "switching station" that is the dantian.
On the back of the body there is no "switching station" like the dantian on the front of the body. The Mingmen and kidney area of the body is functionally the backside of the dantian, but the Yang or "Opening" channels are pretty straightforward, in terms of how they have been palpated and defined, over time. So there is no "crossover" on the back, per se, but I personally feel that the surface of the back-muscles, etc., easily propagates a force from, say, left leg to right arm, across the Mingmen area. It could be that the channel system is simply an "OK" attempt to define body forces, but it is not a sophisticated-enough model to adequately define all force-direction possibilities.
I could examine a number of possible combinations of movement, some down one side of the body and some crossing over, but I'll just say that in my experience of examining this question, I've never come up with an answer other than "it depends on what you want to do".
Bear in mind, by the way, that we're talking about the coordination of the body and whether it is mostly same-side or whether it's crossover: forces going from one leg to the opposite arm are common, but that's a different topic entirely.
Thoughts, inputs?
Switching-station/Dantian:
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