ExclusiveTCM Strong in "Nourishing Life", Emotions matter. (TCM: Three Causes of Disease) 中醫養生

If you want to be healthy, you have to do certain things to be healthy, which can include learning to moderate your emotions, learning to slow down and rest, or dietary is a big thing. People may need to correct their diet in order to recover from certain types of conditions. So our medicine can really, really help with post-heaven, but that doesn't take the responsibility off of the individual for dealing with their emotions and dealing with their lifestyle and trying to get enough sleep and trying to eat properly. Those are things that the individual needs to do, and Chinese medicine is very strong on on yangsheng or nourishing life and teaching us how to live a life that's going to promote health. In Chinese medicine, some people divide it into three categories of things that cause disease. So the first category that is always discussed is called external causes, and that actually involves whether the qi from wind or cold or damp or heat or dryness can penetrate through the skin and cause disruptions in the external layers of the body, and the channel system runs through that region. So then if wind penetrates, it can get into the channels, and from the channels, it can get into the organs. So this is something, you know, the West used to have, and even your mother might have said, you know, wear a jacket or you're going to get sick or get out of those wet socks or you're going to get sick, but most MDs today are going to say that has nothing to do with whether you get sick or not. Although there is some recent research where they are connecting season and weather to disease, but that's only very recent research in Western medicine, but Chinese medicine has always acknowledged that if you're exposed to wind and if your body's not strong enough, it can penetrate, and wind has kind of a very chaotic movement to it. You can't count on wind being steady. Like water can flow steadily in a steady stream, wind is just all over the place, and so when wind invades the body, it causes all kinds of disruptions, and that will lead to certain things like common cold or flu or a few other kinds of things, certain types of joint pain or facial paralysis, Bell's palsy. So that's, and of course, I'm sure you know that if you get a cold and you don't take care of yourself, it could turn into bronchitis and that could turn into pneumonia and then some people are going to die. So while today we're not so worried, we have antibiotics if it goes into the lungs and we've got all kinds of stuff, but in ancient times, people really did die frequently of things that were attributed to external wind from weather. The second category is called internal causes of disease and that's emotions. There are like seven emotions in Chinese medicine, although each of them has a spectrum, so you know anger isn't just one thing. There can be intense rage or there can be push down anger and there can be all kinds of variations, but you know anger, so emotions move qi within the body in different ways. Anger is said to make qi rise, so when you get really angry, you can feel a throbbing, pounding headache, you feel your face turning red, your hands get up like this. There's this upward movement to anger and all of the emotions have a certain directional movement to them. So if the qi is moving too much upward in your body, that's going to cause problems. So there's actually a very strong connection between emotions and even physical disease because each emotion also corresponds to a particular organ. Anger bothers the liver and it makes liver qi rise up too much and then I'm going to have imbalances in the liver which can cause physical symptoms as well as just being unhappy because you're angry. So emotions are the second category of disease cause and today it's really relevant because we don't have to worry too much about weather. We've got, you know, clothes from REI that keep us protected from the weather. We've got air conditioning and heating. We don't have to worry about weather so much, but emotions are something that many of us don't attend to. Like we just let them go wild. The third category of disease cause is called neither external nor internal and that includes everything that's not weather and not emotions. So it's like dietary imbalances. It's like not getting enough sleep or being lazy and not getting enough exercise or working so hard that your body's breaking down and so anything that's not emotions, anything that's not weather goes in this third category.