Addendum - Emotional Health

As an addendum to my previous posting, readers might be interested in a few ways to use the physical body to aid emotional health and well-being. For instance, you might have seen animals shake their body from top to bottom after any circumstance where their fight or flight mechanism has been aroused. The purpose is to shake off the energy produced by that reaction and return the animal to their normal state of calm. Unfortunately, humans have largely lost that instinct. But we can learn to regain it through regular practice of a simple medical chi gong practice, specifically the chi scattering exercise called, trembling horse.

Another phenomenon which is important to note is called, impregnation. That is where emotions that have not been discharged impregnate themselves into the tissues of the body. Many people, by the time they are adults, are carrying a lot of these emotions around with them as physical pain and various kinds of functional disturbance.

Emotions have a chemical signature and these chemicals can remain in the body the same way chemical toxins from environmental pollution and pharmaceutical products can stay in the body. Processing out these chemicals before they become extremely hazardous, or impair our well-being generally, is also a focus of attention for a variety of medical chi gong exercises. The purpose of such exercises is to circulate vital energy through the body, stir up the frozen emotional energy and other bio-toxins, discharge it and return the person to equilibrium. With concentrated effort, and an understanding of that process, these exercises can be very effective.

However, and this is essential to understand nowadays. Many people are carrying around emotions that are a function of a deep spiritual disturbance, such as what is sometimes called, separation trauma. Another source is the unresolved ancestral emotions that exist in the parents and are passed from generation to generation during childhood, starting with conception. These emotions are raw feelings that can impregnate as the tissue is developing, during intrauterine development and during early childhood development.

Those emotions can be found in a container, or deeper part of the organism, that is sometimes missed by simple chi gong practice. However, the more advanced practices do address that container, which is sometimes called the thrusting channels in Traditional Chinese Medicine. It is therefore useful to learn one of those practices early on so that a valve can be opened wide enough and those deeper emotions can also be drained as part of your regular practice. 

It is also useful to recognize that in respect to emotional health, energy practices can be understood from a biological perspective. If you learn about how the body becomes sick and also becomes well, from a broader perspective than that offered by the emergency medicine model with which we are all familiar, it all makes perfect sense.  The rewards make the effort worthwhile, and after a while become part of the effort itself.