According to traditional Chinese medicine, emotions are simply reactions to the environment and, no matter what they are, they're good and natural and serve us best when they are experienced, expressed, and let go. A complete range of emotions is necessary for responding to the world and for connecting with ourselves as well as with others, but, like blocked qi, unexpressed or squelched emotions cause obstructions in the body and create resistance that wreaks havoc on perspective, relationships, and health.
When you have a thought, it is usually accompanied by an emotion, which is a response to an event or your interpretation of an event. Emotions are literally energy in motion. They carry charges that affect the body: joy and elation are felt as high, positive charges and anger and fear are felt as low, negative charges.
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When these charges aren't able to move - say, for example, when something isn't working out the way you want it to - they can become stuck in the body, a tight knot of bound energy. This tightness becomes a source of stress and drains away energy. To release bound-up emotions, you need to open up the fist that is holding them tight, releasing the emotion's grip physically, mentally, and emotionally. The hypothalamus, our main endocrine control center in the brain, is an extremely sensitive relay station for transmitting emotionally charged messages from the brain to the pituitary gland and on to the body's endocrine glands, impacting almost all of our hormonal and physical responses.
The more bound up in layers of thought emotions become, the more deeply they are stuck inside. Emotions such as guilt, shame, jealousy, and regret may become wrapped in a knot of negativity that has to be untied layer by layer with consistent work and plenty of patience. Fortunately, no matter how strong these emotions are, they can be released and gently let go, restoring health and harmony. When Can I Fall Pregnant
How Emotions Affect Our Organs
Health comes from returning to stillness. When our emotions am triggered, they are like trees moving in the wind. If the trees resist the wind's force, they can break and fall. But if they move with the wind, they become part of the music of the universe, eventually returning to their original, still position, healthy and alive. Like trees, we must experience the force of our emotions and move with them. Not resist, but yield. Then we must express the emotions, let them go, and return to a state of balance.
This is the natural way. A tree does not say, "I don't want this wind today; perhaps if I stand still enough, it won't move me? But most of us would like to deny the wind. We don't want to experience changes that evoke powerful emotions such as sadness and anger; we want to control our surroundings in an effort to experience only pleasant emotions and make our own happy music.
All of us need emotions, all of our emotions, to respond appropriately to our world and to relate to ourselves and others. To prevent suffering caused by squelching or harboring excess emotion, we need to flow with the natural way and always return to a state of balance and calm.
When our environment calls for a response, it produces tension that evokes an emotion, each of which is governed by one of the elements. When a response is called for, the qi of the particular organ system reacts to the situation. In the Chinese medical text the Neijing, the Yellow Emperor asks his physician, Qi Bo, to explain which emotions are governed by which organs and what happens as a result of resisting the emotions or hanging onto them for too long. Qi Bo's answers, which I enlarge on here, will hetp you understand the link between emotions and well-being. When Can I Fall Pregnant
When there is fear, qi descends
The kidneys, through the adrenal glands, govern the instinct for self-preservation, the most basic energy for staying alive. Their job is to stand guard, pay attention, and look out for danger. Normally their energies promote caution, self-restraint, prudence, and withdrawal, but when fear dominates someone's life, their qi plummets to near collapse. This happens because the kidneys' water energies, which draw down and condense under proper, free-flowing circumstances, are shocked by fear into sudden contraction, preventing energies from moving upward at all. An acute example of this process is someone experiencing a severe fright and wetting themselves. If fear continues to rule and caution and restraint become a way of life, these energies become pathologic and retreat too far in and down, eventually severing the axis between the heart and the kidneys. The festering energies then create a void in the heart and spirit, which fills with timidity, uncertainty, agitation, and a lack of vitality. Physically, this void can lead to symptoms like anxiety or heart palpitations.
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A criminal lives this way, in a constant state of panic, afraid of being caught. You may sometimes live this way, too, and feel the damaging results. To overcome such harmful emotions, it's important to distance yourself from them. Reflective thought, like a mirror that reveals what's around the corner, lets you see more clearly and objectively, making the space in which you can develop the courage to face your fears. To learn more, you can check out When Can I Fall Pregnant.
