Oriental Medicine

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Emotions: health and disease

The emotions that you experience have nothing to do with who you really are. 

Most people are so attached to their emotions that if asked to simply drop their “frustration” or “anger” or “neediness” they find themselves unable to do it.  Emotions are at the root of most suffering and will eventually manifest physically in the body.   Emotions move on a continuum in the same way as the elements described in my post Five Elements: the Foundation of Chinese Medicine, and when emotions linger at the extremes of the continuum, the result is dis-ease, literally.

Acupuncture and Emotions
In my opinion, the most beneficial use of Traditional Acupuncture is in it’s ability to regulate emotions.  Treatments designed to even out emotional imbalances result in feelings of ease and well-being that can transform a person’s view of themselves and life.  This is a level of healing that cannot be bottled, will never be made into a pill and is priceless.

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Emotions as Five Element Correspondences

Take a moment to read through this chart, carefully, and be honest with yourself; what are the emotions that you get caught up in?  Do you think that being aware that these emotions will damage your body, changes the way you will associate with them?

Living the Middle Way
What is important is not to strive for perfection (I don’t know anyone personally who can live in the middle column all the time).  What is more important is to begin to recognize when you are experiencing an emotion that falls in the “deficient” or “excess” column.   Recognize it for what it is, suffering that you have the power to change.

The Answer is in One Breath
The best way to pull yourself out of these unhealthy emotional states is to take one deliberate, conscious breath, and at that momeDSC_0013nt, bring the attention to your body as you breath, and distance yourself from that feeling, observe it move out of you.  It is not you.  This takes no time, no time.  The more frequent you acknowledge the unhealthy state for what it is, the quicker you will be able to even know when you are in it.  Most of the time we are on automatic pilot and do not even know that we are in reaction.

Most people that I work with are completely unaware of the power that emotions have over our health.   It is not a stretch to see the extremes of deficiency and excess as they are playing out in our culture and the world we live in today.   Look around you, begin to observe people, see how quickly emotions take over situations and cause suffering.  Could life be different?

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Checks and Balances in Nature and Medicine

Nature has come equipped with a beautiful system of checks and balances.  To make this simple… when it comes to the relationships of the five elements: earth, metal, water, wood, fire (however they show up in nature), we are basically looking at two relationships (it is helpful to read the previous post).  One is a creation/generating/nurturing cycle of relationships and the other is a control cycle of relationships.

It is these relationships that are at the root of Oriental Medicine.  The creation and control cycles that I will discuss inform diagnosis and treatment plans in acupuncture and shiatsu.  My intention is to introduce these natural laws in ways that the general public can understand.  It is a fascinating system of medicine that uses natural laws as guides.

Follow the Arrows
The Creation Cycle of relationships:

  • images_3Water generates Wood (Water is the element from which birth and growth are able to occur)
  • Wood in turn gives life to Fire (the fuel that Fire needs to burn)
  • Fire generates Earth (think of the volcanic forces within the Earth that create earth/soil)
  • Earth gives birth/generates Metal (it is in the Earth that minerals are formed/created)
  • Metal gives life to Water (it is the minerals in Water that enable it to give life to Wood)

The Control Cycle of relationships:

  • Water controls Fire (it is Water that is needed to control Fire)
  • Fire controls Metal (the warming of the soil makes minerals available for plant life)
  • Metal controls Wood (it is Metal/minerals that control the growth of Wood)
  • Wood controls Earth (it is the Wood that “holds” the earth together)
  • Earth controls Water (without the banks of river it would flow uncontrolled)

Each of these relationships exist on a continuum; dis-ease lies at the extremes on one end or the other (deficient or excess).  Health lies in the middle, the balance point.  There can be too much “creation/mothering” or not enough “mothering” and there can be too much control or not enough control.  This is the foundation of balance that must exist in nature for nature to exhibit health and vitality; just as it must exist in our body in order for us to experience health and vitality.

Basically health exists when all the systems that make up an organism, whether that organism is a human being, a plant, a bird, a pond or the earth itself, are in balance.  Disease and disharmony manifests when one or more of these elements is out of balance.

What Out of Balance can Look Like in Nature:
Wood and Earth
We don’t need to have an understanding of Chinese medicine to know that it is wood’s job to control earth.   We can see in nature that without the roots of trees, shrubs, and grasses the earth would wash away.  So in this way the earth needs the wood to give it it’s boundaries.  Too much control, too many roots ie. never breaking up perennials and the earth is suffocated and can not receive nourishment and it ends up killing the wood (the very thing that is the cause of it’s own destruction).   Too little control and the earth will literally wash away because there is no wood to hold it.

Metal and Wood
In a healthy state Metal/minerals provide enough control (a balance of minerals) so that Wood/plant life can flourish.  An unhealthy state of control might be too much control, the minerals in the soil are too concentrated and affect growth or too little control, the minerals in the soil are depleted and normal growth cannot occur, either way there is a state of imbalance or we could say dis-ease.

No Beginning and No End
It is a circle, there is no “first” element, and there is no one element that is more important than another.  They are interdependent, each one gives life to the next and in turn maintains balance within the natural order of relationships.  These are natural laws and when they are disrupted/interfered with, when they are off balance, the result is dis-ease.  Keep in mind that dis-ease in nature is the same as dis-ease in people, something is off balance.  And it can look similar, for example, an imbalance between the function of Earth in holding Water in nature could manifest as boggy, stagnant ground where the water in unable to drain and plant life cannot grow.  In a person that could look edema, it’s the same bog.  This is just to offer an insight into the parallels that exist between nature and us.  These are not easy concepts to get across to a culture that was not raised with the five elements.   And modern China has no concept of this either.

A Little Bit of History
Traditional Chinese medicine only survives because of practitioners who carried it out of China around the turn of the century (early 1900s).  With the advent of communism in China at that time, all traditional medicine ie. doctors, libraries, schools were eradicated (in every violent sense of the word) to make way for modern westernized medicine.  The acupuncture practiced in China today, and in most of the world including the U.S. is simply western medicine with needles.  What that means is, the medicine’s objective is to treat symptoms not the root cause of disease.  Traditional acupuncture, also called classical acupuncture which is primarily five element style, is a system of medicine based solely on treating root cause, not symptoms.  This means that a practitioner from this style of medicine will search for the cause of the disease or the condition and not just treat the symptoms that arise.

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Five Elements: the Foundation of Traditional Medicine

The Five Elements: Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire
To understand Oriental Medicine and its diagnostic systems, requires an open mind and humility because it is full of paradoxes; it is at once cerebral and physical, then clear and perplexing.  I remember well, my first introduction to this system nearly 18 years ago, I was beginning my study of shiatsu at the Ohashi Institute, my teacher was explaining about the relationships between the organ systems of the body, for example: the stomach, the large intestine, the kidney and how each corresponded to one of the five elements, ie. the stomach with the earth, the large intestine with the metal and the kidney with the water.  I had no background from which to understand this.  At the time, it did not make any sense to me, in fact it seemed like the stuff that comes from a child’s story book, a fable. That nature is comprised of five primary elements (the earth, the metal, the water, the wood, and the fire) and that these also exist in us and function in the same way seemed contrived.  Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to hold the possibility that there might be truth in this and that I simply did not possess the frame of reference needed to understand it.

Be humble and patient with the process of learning something new.  We don’t know what we don’t know.

The Process of Understanding
As time passed, I began to understand the significance of these correspondences.  They were to become the absolute foundation in my ability to comprehend not only this system of medicine, but the system that is life and death itself.  Like learning a language, that uses a different alphabet, these correspondences are the new alphabet.  Every day, by being present to how life moves, over time the truth of how these correspondences relate to each of the elements is revealed.  This process of learning never reaches an end.  The understanding is at first in the mind (it is intellectual, we have to learn it, memorize it) and then it moves to the body, that is when real understanding happens.

The understanding becomes simply knowing without thought.

Preventative Medicine
This system of medicine works because it is truly preventative; within its construct it explains what disease looks like long before it becomes a disease as we know disease.  Traditional Chinese medicine offers a way of understanding the nature of disease and suffering and of course health and well-being, in a way that modern medicine is not able to do.  (I will go into more detail about these differences in a future post.)

It’s All About Relationships
Each element has corresponding relationships; and it is important to keep in mind that these correspondences are all in some way in a relationship with each other, and that it is the nature of these relationships that determine states of health and disease whether it is in our internal environment or external environment.   This is a partial list of correspondences that fall under each of the five elements.

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