Understanding the process and cycles of the emotions can help us work with our patients when they experience trauma and upset; and even in the healing process of pain and injury. All issues with the body have an emotional component. They can be directly created from the emotional or spiritual imbalance, or they can be gateways to helping a person look more deeply within as they deal with a physical issue.
When working with patients as acupuncturists, we have a unique opportunity to connect the body, mind and spirit in this way, helping them experience transformation and release as they garner more self-awareness of their emotional processes.
Elements and Emotions: Beyond the Superficial
The spectrum of emotions is an important aspect of helping our patients with their emotional, mental and spiritual processing and growth. When we are initially taught about the elements and emotions, we simply receive one word each to describe them; wood is anger, end of story. Although it can be easy to also see that rage, frustration, irritation, jealousy, etc., are part of the family of anger that relates to the wood element, we are also missing the virtues of the wood element and the positive, flip side of anger.
Every element also contains within it a virtue. As we work through the core emotional imbalance of the element, we can come to a healthy expression of that element in our emotional landscape. In regard to the wood element, its virtue is passion and assertiveness; our ability to set and hold boundaries, to move forward in life with passion, to go after what we want and to stand up for what is important to us.
Repressed emotion of any kind is also an aspect of the wood element. Repressed emotions will have an impact on the wood element and subsequently the other elements as they relate to each other. If we have a patient who seems numb, as if they may be skimming over big emotions, then looking to the wood element is an excellent first step.
Wood – Anger and the Generating Cycle
Fear gives rise to anger. When we find ourselves stuck in the emotion of anger, perhaps it's the go-to emotion experienced. To develop more self-awareness of this pattern, we need to look to the mother of wood: water. We can't have anger without fear showing up first.
Anger is the response to fear – the physiological response to danger; and anger is the motivator designed to keep us safe. Anger says, “I'm afraid and I need to protect myself.” To deepen our self-awareness, when we notice anger coming up in our system, we can take a pause and simply ask: What is the fear I am having or recently had? This simple reflection alone can help initiate transformation of the emotional experience and our ability to respond, instead of react.
Repressed emotion feeds anxiety. Another aspect of wood emotions is repressed emotion, and here is where we can see the generation of anxiety or panic take place. When emotions are bottled up and repressed – particularly anger (as we might see with failing to set boundaries that are important to us), the wood element grows and grows until it starts to fuel the fire, pushing past joy and into anxiety.
I think of anxiety as a tea kettle with no release spout. The kettle starts to jump around with no release and continues to bounce and shake more fervently. One way we can process a panic attack, for instance, would be to release the excess energy; to release the anger being held within. We might do this with cathartic grunting or shouting, punching the air or a pillow – we need to physically move the emotion out of the body; open the release valve. Instead of trying to calm down, we may often benefit from allowing those emotions to pour out, thus removing the wood-fuel from the fire.
Wisdom informs passion. The virtue of water is wisdom; this is the place where we experience leaning into the Tao – the universal consciousness and letting go of our ego desires. Wisdom is what allows us to pursue healthy passions and informs how to set boundaries in a healthy way.
By having an inherent wisdom within the act of boundary setting, stepping forward on our life path becomes a simple and joyous endeavor. We feel supported by the wisdom of the universe in moving forward on our path.
Assertiveness releases joy. Joy is the virtue of the fire element, whereas anxiety or panic is the difficult emotion associated with it. When looking at this cycle, we see that a healthy expression of anger – like setting and holding a boundary – is what has the ability to release joy in our system. By setting a boundary, doing what's true for us, we feel in tune with our true nature and can reconnect with our inherent joy.
A valuable Tool to Help Facilitate Understanding and Emotional Wellness
As we can see, the five-element cycles can be a deep pool of information for understanding our emotional landscape. They give us clues as to how different emotions arise in the body, how they are transformed and even how they can be healed.
It's important to remember that all emotions are valid and important, and arise in order to be felt. Our job is not to remove emotional experience or to provide therapy; however, we can help patients by giving them insights toward their own self-reflection and awareness, and the five-element cycle is a great tool to help with deeper understanding of the emotional experience.
I always teach my students that helping patients with emotional wellness begins first with your own personal process; use this information first for your own personal growth and awareness before putting it into practice in the clinic. As we do our work, we are leading by example – a shining beacon of the process of healing and how it can be beneficial to our patients.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
| Digital Exclusive
One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
| Digital Exclusive