In the Taoist tradition, there is an idea about the components of all living things – and the human body in particular. The five elements are water, fire, wood, earth and metal. The concept symbolically describes the complex of relationships in the body and helps to understand how our emotions are related to health, when they most often manifest themselves and how to correct them.
There are people who take their emotions for granted: I’m angry! So, I am an angry person, I hate people and I need to condemn myself or, on the contrary, succumb to anger, or maybe try to somehow hide this emotion.
In the Taoist tradition, intense negative feelings are seen as a symptom. Yeah, a person is angry, shows aggression … What does this mean? Aggression is associated with the element Wood, and therefore with the health of the liver. What happened?
Perhaps the person had a good drink the other day, was celebrating something: the liver is overloaded, he feels bad – hence the aggression. It is necessary to help the liver recover, and aggression will pass.
If you perceive emotions through the prism of the five elements, then they cease to be something invincible, overwhelming. They become a natural part of the system, which can be adjusted if necessary. An optimistic position, isn’t it?
Let’s look at which emotions are associated with which organs and how they can be regulated.
Tree
The Wood element is associated with spring, the organ is the liver. Negative emotion is aggression, and the opposite of it, positive, is interest in communication, development of society. Remember your adolescence (the spring of life!), how fascinating, interesting communication was, how it enriched, how much it pleased and gave discoveries.
Conflicts are also associated with the Wood element, but positive ones: “friction”, which gives a new experience, a new quality of self-knowledge. If you communicate with pleasure, learn to see beauty in people, feel happiness from learning new things in others, then the Wood element is in balance.
Water
The element Water is associated with the kidneys and bladder, the season is winter. At the level of emotions, it provides a sense of security, contact with one’s strength, self-acceptance. The negative emotion that will demonstrate that Water is out of balance is fear.
If a person experiences constant unmotivated fear, anxiety about the future, we can say that, most likely, the kidneys suffer and there is a possibility of developing certain diseases associated with the genitourinary system.
Lands
The Earth element is the digestive system (stomach and spleen), the area of the “solar plexus”. The season is the end of summer. The emotion of the Earth is fullness and acceptance, love for close communication, from which a family is born.
The negative manifestation of this element is a feeling of loneliness. If it brightly fills you right now, at the end of August, know that this is its time! “Forced” communication with friends, intimate confidential conversations and (oddly enough!) Taking care of the digestive tract will save you from this feeling.
Fire
The element is fire, the organ is the heart, the season is summer. In Western traditions, it is customary to believe that love lives in the heart, while in the East it is believed that joy lives here. The ability to enjoy little things, to cultivate this feeling with or without reason – this is all the work of the heart, and this is best done in the summer. Joy is related to development: the more pleasure we get when we do something, the better we get at it.
Oddly enough, this element has no negative emotional manifestation, except for the lack of joy. If it is not enough, there is a reason to do heart health or cardio exercises at least (have you noticed that they know how to please, right?).
Metal
The metal element is associated with lung health. The time of Metal is autumn, and the emotion… It’s not so easy to describe. It is love for all bodily experiences, in the best sense of the word.
In the Taoist tradition, it is believed that a person is a spiritual being, experiencing the experience of bodily living. And the body is very important. This experience is unique and priceless. And it is desirable to get maximum pleasure from it: from movement, touch, from the ability to perceive tastes and smells.
If we consider bodily pleasures as a spiritual experience, then they take on a completely different sound. And Metal is responsible for this perception.
The negative emotion of metal is sadness, a feeling of longing, emptiness. And it is treated, as one would expect, with bodily pleasures: from delicious food and massage to movement or walking barefoot on the sand.
Try at least a few days to look at your emotions through the prism of the Five Elements system, and your relationship with your own experiences will change.
There are many balancing exercises in qigong, such as the Five Elements self-massage or the Sing Shen Juang spine practice.
If you like the idea that you are in charge of your emotions, try these simple practices and you will have additional tools for correcting your condition in the most seemingly emotional situations.