In Chinese medicine, emotional stability is an indicator of both psychological and physical health. What «breaks» in our body if we constantly experience mood swings, and how to «fix» it?
The main goal of Chinese medicine is to help a person restore balance: to ensure that the body has found inner harmony and is in balance with the outside world. Any emotional imbalance: regular experiences, stressful conditions, emotional swings — in Chinese medicine is directly related to health. If emotions are «unbalanced», the body also suffers — it becomes susceptible to various diseases.
Emotions and organs
In Chinese medicine, each emotion is associated with a particular organ. For example, anger is a signal that the liver is out of balance. Moreover, just as the body can “generate” emotions (the liver hurts because we “love” to be angry), so emotions affect the body: the more often we get angry, the worse the condition of the liver. There are many such patterns: sadness is associated with the state of the lungs, a passion for self-digging and self-accusation is expressed in violations of the spleen, and so on. Where to start treatment and how to break this vicious circle, only a specialist can decide.
Western medicine also studies the so-called psychosomatic diseases (diseases of the body associated with the psychological state), however, the therapeutic effect on both the diseased organ and the «sick» emotion has not yet become a trend. Therefore, if you understand that some kind of emotion manifests itself in you with or without reason, you should be examined by a Chinese medicine doctor. A specialist can diagnose deviations that will lead to diseases only after a few years, and timely treatment will help prevent their development.
Balance at the body level
What does a person who is emotionally stable, calm, confident and happy look like? In Chinese medicine, it is believed that emotional stability is possible only on the basis of physical stability, balance. So, a healthy body with good posture is the basis for maintaining emotional balance.
Each emotion «settles» in the body in the form of certain clamps. These tensions help to realize it: for example, when we are sad, we stoop, the chest tenses, “closes”. This is how animators depict sadness: the unfortunate character has shoulders and neck forward, and his back is a wheel.
Another example: you probably know people who regularly drop something, stumble, fall. How is their emotional stability? Not too good either! Emotional stability is directly related to physical stability: the ability to stand confidently on your feet, to correctly distribute body weight on the foot.
Search for relaxation
To get rid of muscle clamps, it is useful to master any gymnastics aimed at active relaxation. It is important to learn to find habitual tensions that we have stopped noticing and relax them. This will help you manage your attention.
Mastering, for example, qigong for the spine Sing Shen Juang, we learn to control attention: it travels through the body and notes tensions that have long ceased to be read by the brain. When choosing gymnastics for relaxation, remember that you will be trained precisely in attentive, sensitive execution of exercises, in the search for a new, unusual type of movement.
Work on body stability
In order to “pump” the stability of the body, various balance exercises are suitable in combination with the very active relaxation that we have already talked about. Learning to stand on one leg, straining all possible muscles, is possible, although not easy. But how to find an “asymmetric balance”, when all the extra muscles are “turned off” and only the necessary minimum of muscles remains in good shape? The task is interesting, and it is its solution that provides us with true stability — both at the level of the body and at the level of emotions.
Try one of the Sing Shen Juang exercises, which trains the body to a new level of balance.
- Stand up straight, feet close, back straight, crown tends up.
- Raise your right leg so that the thigh is parallel to the floor, the knee is bent at 90 degrees, the toe is extended and points to the floor. The arms are bent at the elbows, the forearms are parallel to the floor.
- Start rotating your foot outward while maintaining balance. The muscles of the thigh and buttocks are maximally relaxed, the abdomen is soft, the temporomandibular joint is also relaxed. Do 12 rotations.
- Stretch your right leg as if you are pointing your toes at something on the floor in front of you, do 12 more rotations. When changing position, keep the muscles of the legs, back, and abdomen relaxed.
- Switch legs and do 12 rotations with your left foot out.
- Change your foot again and do 12 rotations with your right foot inward.
- Repeat this movement with your left leg.
- Stand up straight, feet close, hands cover the lower abdomen. Close your eyes and ask yourself how, on a scale of 1 to 10, you feel resilient right now.
Repeat this exercise once a day, at any time of the day, and track how your physical — and therefore emotional — resilience grows.