Oriental Medicine and the Emotions

I had a teacher once tell me that 100% of all dis-ease has an emotional component. That means that either our emotions cause the illness or we have an emotional reaction to our imbalanced condition. This was an enlightening concept for me at the time. To think that for every condition there is an emotional piece to it was a completely new concept for me. That was just the beginning for me, what followed over the next years of my training was truly liberating.

In Chinese medicine there is an understanding of 7 basic emotions. Anger, Joy, Pensiveness, Over-thinking, Grief, Fear, and Fright. There are of course other emotions, but they are usually a combination of these basic seven. These emotions have a specific resonance in the body towards a specific organ. Anger affects the liver, Joy affects the heart, Pensiveness & Over-thinking affect the spleen and stomach, Grief affects the Lung, Fear affects the kidney, and Fright affects the kidney and gall bladder.

We use this clinically to differentiate what organ may be out of balance. For instance, when someone habitually elicits an uncontrollable temper, then we could assume that their liver may be out of balance. A Chinese medicine practitioner would then treat the liver and other supporting organs with acupuncture, herbs, massage, etc in order to bring the liver back into balance.

Anger is not the disease. It is a result of an imbalance. Just like all the other signs and symptoms we can manifest. Headaches, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, etc are not the disease; they are symptomatic of an underlying imbalance.

The most important piece of information that I took away from my studies was that the repression of the emotion is more damaging to the body. All of the emotions are normal to feel and have expressed. It is normal to be angry, joyful, pensive, sad, and fearful. These are expressions of life and so are natural expressions of our interaction. When we judge and begin to repress these feelings, we do our spirits a disservice.

Chinese medicine is not about helping people get rid of their emotions, but rather it is about helping people to fully express their feelings and move on. Watch a two year old for two hours. You will see the full compliment of emotions expressed and moved in that time. This might be an aspect of what the masters meant when they said, "be like children".

My hope is that we all can learn to express ourselves in a healthy and positive way. I welcome comments....

In health and healing,

R. Scott Moylan