My Talk on Emotions
Here is a recording of a talk I did for Meadowside’s Open Day:
Neatened version of the talK (Rough transcript):
Introduction
Acupuncture, an ancient Chinese practice that has stood the test of time, offers a unique perspective on health and healing. In a recent presentation by Josh from Just Life Balance, the importance of emotions in the context of acupuncture and their role in promoting a healthier life was explored. In this blog post, we delve into the fascinating world of acupuncture and its profound connection to our emotions, shedding light on how this ancient practice can enhance our well-being.
The Power of Acupuncture
Acupuncture is a holistic healing modality with a diverse range of applications. It can be effective in addressing acute injuries like lower back pain and chronic illnesses with complex underlying factors. Conditions ranging from mental health issues and fatigue to autoimmune disorders, digestive problems, headaches, migraines, Women's Health concerns, fertility, and insomnia can all find relief through acupuncture. What sets acupuncture apart is its unique perspective on health, viewing the body through a different lens than Western medicine.
Understanding the Body's Unique Perspective
One of the fundamental differences in the way acupuncture approaches health is the concept of Qi, often referred to as vital energy. Qi flows through the body, influencing physiological processes and transformations. Acupuncture aims to manipulate the flow of Qi, promoting what is known as "free flow," a state of balanced health.
To achieve this, acupuncture considers the "Three Treasures" of Jing (physical form), Qi (movement and change), and Shen (spirit). By influencing a person's Qi, acupuncture can affect both physical manifestations of illness and emotional well-being. The radiance in a person's eyes often reflects the state of their Shen, which acupuncture can help restore.
"When there is no free flow, there is pain," is a core principle of acupuncture. Stagnation of Qi or energy often leads to discomfort, while the free flow of Qi promotes overall health. This concept may seem abstract, but it is an integral part of how acupuncture views the body and its balance.
Channels and Points: The Pathways to Health
Acupuncture works through manipulating specific points on the body's channels, promoting the smooth flow of Qi. These channels, or meridians, are pathways that conduct Qi throughout the body. There are over 365 acupuncture points, each with its unique influence. Acupuncturists strategically choose points based on the patient's condition to optimize the flow of Qi.
The Emotions and Their Impact
Emotions play a significant role in acupuncture's perspective on health. According to Chinese medicine, "All diseases are rooted in the spirit." Illnesses are categorized into three main types: internal causes (emotions), external causes (climatic influences and environment), and miscellaneous causes (e.g., poisonings). Focusing on internal causes, the emotions have a profound impact on the body's balance.
Each emotion is associated with specific organs and elements in Chinese medicine:
Anger - Liver
Worry - Spleen and Stomach
Sadness - Lungs
Fear - Kidneys
Joy - Heart
These associations reveal how different emotions can affect our physical well-being. For instance, anger can lead to muscle tension, high blood pressure, and headaches, all linked to the liver's imbalance.
Maintaining Emotional Balance
Chinese medicine emphasizes the importance of maintaining a balanced emotional state. Experiencing a range of emotions is natural, but getting stuck in one emotional state can lead to stagnation and illness. Acupuncture aims to help individuals flow freely between emotions, allowing for a natural rhythm and cycle. The goal is not to suppress emotions but to prevent them from becoming obstacles to overall health.
The Diagnostic Process in Acupuncture
In acupuncture, the diagnostic process involves a combination of questioning, listening, touching, smelling, and looking. Acupuncturists ask patients about their health, listen to their experiences, and observe various diagnostic indicators to understand their condition fully.
The diagnostic process includes:
Pulse diagnosis: The pulse provides insights into the patient's condition, revealing imbalances and specific issues.
Palpation: Acupuncturists may palpate the body to identify areas of tenderness or discomfort.
Complexion, nails, tongue: These physical characteristics offer further clues about the patient's health.
Smell: In some cases, body odor can provide information about imbalances.
Emotions are also considered during this process. Understanding a patient's emotional state helps acupuncturists create a comprehensive treatment plan.
Acupuncture Treatment: Balancing Emotions and Qi
The primary objective of acupuncture treatment is to restore the free flow of Qi and blood throughout the body. Acupuncture points are strategically chosen to manipulate Qi and balance the body's energy.
For example, Kidney 3 is a point often used to address fear and provide grounding. Acupuncture treatments are not only about the needles; they offer a safe space for patients to feel heard, supported, and emotionally cared for.
Conclusion
Acupuncture is a holistic approach to health that considers the deep connection between emotions and physical well-being. By promoting the free flow of Qi and addressing emotional imbalances, acupuncture offers a unique path to wellness. Whether you're dealing with chronic illness or simply seeking emotional support, acupuncture can be a valuable tool in your journey to better health.
If you have questions or are interested in exploring acupuncture as a means of improving your well-being, don't hesitate to reach out to a qualified acupuncturist. Your path to health and balance may be just a treatment away.
Transcript
so good morning this is Josh from just life balance and this is just a I say a quick recording but it might be about 20 minutes just to give you um an understanding of the time of a presentation that I did on Saturday at Meadowside’s which was the importance of the emotions and to make life a little bit more difficult as well I tried to add in a little bit of a crash course of acupuncture into it as well so that you can kind of understand a little bit more about what I do and what I think about when looking at treatment so let's begin with um acupuncture is really incredible it can help so many different things that's whether it is an acute injury so something like acute lower back pain or chronic illnesses um where things get a little bit more complex as well and there might be several things going on and I think you know here's just a small list of things I have treated in clinic it's not exhaustive but thing from kind of mental health which is really in a sense what this talk is on but also things like fatigue burnout autoimmune digestive headaches migraines particularly this year since I've been quite a lot Women's Health fertility insomnia things like that and I think one of the ways that acupuncture is really helpful in all of these is it's because it takes a different approach to health and has a slightly different lens so I guess for example um how I found acupuncture was through what the doctors called IBS and I'm not 100 sure it was but they were always you know the problem is in the stomach so we're going to treat your stomach and actually go in to an acupuncture as he said all the problems all in your liver and that just gives you a sense of how we see the body as being a little bit different and that's where sometimes complex cases particularly in chronic illnesses we tend to get really good results because Western medicine doesn't seem to always be able to help and for us it's understanding not just the Western condition like I've shown here but it's about understanding you as a person so you know how are the different symptoms that you are experiencing and if there's a kind of a common cause underneath all of that so we just take a slightly different Viewpoint um and it seems like understanding you as a person to your Constitution understanding the the kind of connection we have to the environment so things like if you can capture a common cold through being out with a kind of a cold draft and being windy it's seen as kind of a winkled Invasion for us it's understanding those sort of things but understanding you know mentality as well and all of that and what let's talk about is really doing is understanding how emotions can have a role in illness so my first my first lesson um in this talk that was on this talk was understanding flow which for us in Chinese medicine is the concept of chi now Chi is seen as kind of like the energy or the motor force in the body so it's what happens behind all transformation and kind of physiological processes and really what acupuncture is looking to do is manipulate the flow of G in the body to encourage what we call free flow and part of this is um looking at what we call the three Treasures so Jing which is our kind of our physical form in a very simple sense Chi which is the movement and everything that moves and changes in our body and then shed which is seen as the spirit and what we're really looking at when we are inserting a needle or manipulating a needle as we're really looking at influencing someone's chief and now you can see that when you can see that when we are looking at Chia Khan impact both the physical form so the manifestations which is where we see really good illnesses but it can also affect the emotions and kind of what we call the shed and the Chance often seen as or seen through the radiance in someone's eyes so sometimes when we've got like a really complex chronic case um or chronic illness you kind of see a dullness in the eyes and then as you start to treat you start to see this kind of like the spark and the twinkle in the eye so that's one of the ways that we know that we're going in the right direction and these three are always working together in many respects so kind of working on one is working on the other two and there's kind of this Triad of things that we're always looking at in acupuncture but fundamentally what we're doing is we're affecting the G and one of my favorite phrases in Chinese medicine is this and it essentially translates as when there is no free flow there is pain so when she stagnates or stops moving that's when we tend to see pain and when there's a free flow of Qi or energy around the body we tend to be in good health um which sounds a little bit more um East medicine but one of the things that makes it a little bit easier is chi and blood are seen as interconnected they're kind of a yin yang pair so really when we're talking about Chi we can use it interchangeably in many respects with blood so we're just encouraging the free flow of Bud throughout the body and how we do that is through manipulating points on the channel so we have over 12 channels within the body and you can see here this is just an image with a series of the points that we can use so we manage the free flow of Qi to make things smoothly flow and we do that through needling points this is just an example this is just a small sample we tend to use a lot of points on the kind of the hands and the legs and the extremities rather than the chest but it's a nice diagram I thought and there's over 365 points there's a lot to choose from so going a step further well so to summarize we're looking at the free flow of Qi we're encouraging the free flow of Qi and there's various ways that we can understand this so one of them is what we call the five phases so it's understanding how the different elements in acupuncture are working together so you can see here the metal is to do with the lungs and it's also to do with other resonances like the Autumn or acceptance grief things like that and what we say is that the metal feeds the water so for example the lung feeds the kidneys but then there's also the fire here which is more to do with this kind of the summer the heart um and so on and that then controls the lungs there's this interconnection between all of the phases and organs that are constantly working together to understand how the body is functioning as a whole so you get this kind of Channel perspective and how it's How the flow of energy is moving throughout the body this is a picture of an ancient um description and the kind of image of the lungs which is seen as the kind of the canopy partly because it's the highest organ anatomically in the body because that's seen as like this canopy that brings things in and then descends things and kind of diffuses throughout the body so you can see it from an organs perspective and sometimes there's someone's lung isn't functioning correctly it's kind of an easy one because you know you get things like kind of shortness of breath or coughing panting things like that um so you know we get a channel perspective which is the 12 channels and the flow of energy you can also get an organ perspective and then how we manage these is through the actual channels on the body which you can see here the lung has got 11 points starting from sort of in the packs and goes down to the side of the thumb so we can use what you know each of these points have slightly different features or influences on the body but if someone for example has got a lung problem we can use one or one of these points in our treatments to work on the flow of chi in the body and the lamb Meridian so hopefully that's all making sense so far and we're kind of coming on to the importance of the emotions and one of the great quotes from a scholar of Chinese medicine is um all diseases are rooted in the spirit which is by Jeffrey Wen which I think is true and you know in acupuncture they classified illness into three categories so the first one is internal internal causes of disease which is the emotions then you get external which is the more climatic influences like I said about the cold and how we are in terms of the relation to the environment around us and other things like you know damp houses and things like that can cause dampness in the body so we're always working with the body and the environment and then there's also the third category of illness which is more miscellaneous so things like covert or poisonings or things like that where it's nothing necessarily to do with our body so those are the three categories of illness and Chinese medicine and really this is digging a little bit deeper into the first one the emotions and this is a really cool diagram and then kind of it's from a study that was done in Western medicine that kind of really goes to show that Chinese medicine was onto something when they started looking at these sort of things you know two thousand to five thousand years ago roughly um and you can see that the emotions that we feel has an influence on the temperature inside our bodies and the temperature in different areas of our bodies as well so for example in Anger you can see that everything Rises upwards and it goes to the head which four hours in Chinese medicine there's a one particular condition for us is called live the young Rising which is often seen you know you get a lot of anger and things like that so it kind of really does show quite well the impact that the emotions has on the body and we see that in TCM terms as well and you can see things like depression gives a lot of coldness throughout the whole body which for us you know coldness is often a course of illnesses either things get hot or cold it's kind of vegan and yang pairing and when everything is cold it then contracts and there's no movement so again that is a kind of a cause of illness so kind of the contraction of the cold and and depressive States in a sense whereas all the anger all Rises to the top so the bottom isn't rooted and so there's a lot of amazing imagery here that shows how what we feel impacts our body you can get a sense of how our mind impacts our body my favorite one and it was pointed out in the talk um on the weekend is the Spider-Man here the shame but it's really interesting it's I think often the ancient people in China really had a deep understanding of the body and a lot of Western research at the moment seems to be kind of echoing what they kind of found or thought about all those years ago when we didn't have the technology to do kind of temperature checks throughout the body and going back to kind of the Chinese medicine aspect of it so we've spoken about the five phases and you can see here this is kind of another example where the different emotions are associated with each of the five faces so too much joy is to do with the fire Warriors to do with the earth and the spleen and the stomach which it said that when someone worries it's going over the same sort of thoughts again and again and they kind of can't get out of that negative all that Loop really doesn't have to be negative they kind of go over the same thing again and again and it said to not achieve so kind of things can't move um and then sadness is to do with the lungs and grief and things like that fear is to do with the kidneys which in our perspectives um makes a lot of sense there's a whole phrase of you know you yourself when you've got a big presentation or things like that and the kidneys and Chinese medicine is said to be the kind of the master of the lower orifice is so there's a lot of sense there of like when we get fearful when we get scared we end up getting salute more so slightly more comical but again Chinese medicine is onto something there and then anger is another one of the kind of the emotions and that's a lot to do with the liver uh one of my favorite questions to ask is kind of sometimes when someone's liver pulse feels a little bit uh what we call wiry you can tell that you know there's a state of frustration or anger and there's things like kind of aggressive driving that's what they call it it doesn't necessarily have to be you're driving badly but maybe you're responding badly to other drivers who aren't driving well so it's one of those interesting questions um which I know a couple of my patients really enjoy but you can start to see how different elements and organs are relating to different emotions I think coming back to the three Treasures so before we were kind of looking at Chi as what we influence but I hope that after this little second part of the lesson you could hopefully you can see that The Shins of the spirit are what kind of emotions has an influence on the chi so we've seen that in the western medicine terms of you know sadness contracts and you get colder everywhere or anger everything Rises so the the emotions affect the movement and then that affects the body so you can see how important the emotions are in terms of managing our health but also how they can have an influence on the body so I guess part of Jing is you know it's a physical form so we feel pain it's a physical thing um so hopefully that gives you a bit of sense and we're kind of it works both ways where kind of like an acute injury will affect Chia because they can't move and then that affects the spirit but it works on the other side so these things are all so well interconnected and then going back to this so you can see how when we get stuck in a particular emotion that then can lead to pain it's not the case that we want to feel nothing because nothing is bad we want to be able to again flow freely between the emotions so that there's a kind of a natural Rhythm and a natural cycle where we can feel angry as a response to something but then quickly we go back to neutral and then we go to kind of happiness or you know you kind of kind of get that free flow of chi again that you get you can feel all the different emotions but you're not stuck in a particular way it's more about when you get stuck in a particular state that things tend to kind of then stagnate or stop and then you get pain but hopefully you can see how fundamental this phrase is of you know everything is about just encouraging the free flow and creating movement so we've kind of spoken about the philosophy of chi and how it's all about movement we've spoken about what happens when we get stuck in a particular State and how the different emotions are associated with different elements in Chinese medicine and from a from a treatment perspective and from a kind of a consultation well what does that actually mean and we get an acupuncture we get four different diagnostic principles really so we have asking so let's well more listening is more about listening to the patient I'm not understanding their experience of their health we get touching smelling and um looking as well which I'll talk about a little bit later but this lesson is primarily um focus on the questions that we ask and then listening to the patients who understand what they are experiencing and I really want to look at how the emotions affect us and what that can manifest on the body so for example stress and anger is a lot to do with kind of the liver I know a lot of it is about as we saw earlier that kind of energy rise into the surface and to the top of the body so you might see that as things like muscle tightness particularly the like upper shoulders upper back that sort of area you can get things like PMS blood clots high blood pressure headaches migraines that sort of things that's often associated with the liver and you you know it works two ways of if we suspect someone to be more Angry we can ask questions about you know and how is your blood pressure and if someone talks about headaches and migraines for example you can then start to think maybe about stress and anger so you hopefully you can see we're starting to kind of diagnose problems here and understand a little bit more about what's actually going on when someone is talking about their experiences so anxiety which is a lot to do with the Earth so the stomach and spleen you can get things like palpitations insomnia Mazzy headedness which is like almost like cotton wool in the brain where you kind of can't think clearly um you can get restlessness nausea bloating things like that sadness which is a lot to do with the kidneys um and the kind of like the grief aspect and the the water the lungs you get things like a passion of the chest shortness of breath panting coughing that sort of thing you can get lots of appetite and insomnia low energy and typically a patient can present as kind of like sign a lot which sometimes you'll see it actually in the clinic itself or sometimes you're asking do you feel like you say a lot sort of thing and again it's just getting a sense of what's going on um in the body and this is really about asking the questions and not everyone is going to feel all of these it's just to give you a sense of when the emotion starts to factors what sort of things might occur physically fear um it's a little bit more of a strange one but you can get things like heat in the face night sweats dry mouth and a few other things but we tend to not be treated that much fear really I think sometimes there's a little bit but I'm not necessarily seen it too much and want to see I think some people feel fearful of situations or making decisions but never the fear that they talk about really in Chinese medicine it's slightly different I always find and then we get joy as well joy always sounds like the most exciting one of like you know how can you have too much joy but it kind of scatters the chi and you need to have a balance of being grounded but also being happy so you need that kind of like grounding and too much again brings things a little bit to up to the surface and everything else and in my experience things like palpitations a lot of because it's to do with the kind of the heart and the pericardiums so that makes a lot of sense to us you can get overexcitability insomnia restlessness and talking a lot but also laughing a lot so sometimes you'll find I'll find it in clinic where you know you're talking about something serious or something potentially upsetting and the patient's kind of inappropriately laughing is what they call it so understanding that you can see maybe there's a problem there or like there's a kind of a lack of Joy they're not being grounded they're not in tune with their body sort of thing so hopefully these are all giving you a really good idea that how the emotions affect our body so how the Shen affects our gym really um and it gives us a sense of if a patient's presenting with a couple of these we can understand is the emotions that are causing it but we can also kind of start to see that you know if there's only one or two of these maybe and they start and develop more it's a sign that the diseases is progressing or the illness is progressing and just having an awareness of this I hope goes to show you that it's not the end of the world it's just the beginning and maybe you're feeling something too much and that's a really good time to sort of come to an acupuncturist or just to talk to someone because I think part of it is we think we have to have a serious illness to come for a treatment actually there's a lot of acupuncturist about providing seasonal treatments or supporting people when they feel like they need it so I've treated quite a few patients who come just for kind of like dealing with their stresses of everyday life or to get a bit of a break from you know their family family situations at home where they can't ever get a second to breathe and that sort of thing um and that was really just asking the questions and understanding the emotions a little bit more um as we are trained to be acupuncturist now after this brief talk there's also various other things that go into the kind of the diagnostic process so it's touching so all of my patients will know I love the past sometimes you're feeling the past to see are things changing but they also tell incredible stories um often I'm Blown Away by what what the pulse reveals um there's so many incredible stories um just too many to recount but they really they did give a sense of how the organs are working so how someone might be feeling for example so I had a patient reasonably recently who hadn't talked about having sort of diarrhea in the morning and a little bit of something discomfort but you could I picked that up in the pulse and gave a bit more of support to that often as well you can tell things like roughly where people are in their periods which again the blood is very closely linked to the shed and the emotions and our kind of our heart so when you're losing a lot of blood it's good to add a bit of supportive treatments into that just so that we can support you and understand it in the pulse we can kind of get a sense of that and support you appropriately so I use the pulse quite a lot we also do things like palpate in the channel so I'm often always asking you know does that does it hurt here or does that feel like a nice sort of pain so constantly using the body and how the body is presented into understand what might be going on we're also looking at things like the complexion um looking for little blood vessels that's really a good sign that things are getting stuck when we kind of get the spider veins and that's a good opportunity to sort of bleed the points which I quite like it doesn't hurt and it's a really effective way of getting the free flow of chi back we look at things like the tongue the nails so for example deliverer said to manifest the nails so someone has a lot of liver or wood issues um we tend to then look at the nails and see you know are they brittle are they tough are they kind of flaking and so on and then we also look at smell so we tend to see a bit less but there's things like oh someone is ill they might smell like rotten fish which again gives us a sense of what sort of organs might be imbalanced so it kind of gives you a sense of all the different things so you know throughout the interview we asked kind of 10 plus questions all kind of methodically and we dive into things more deeply if we need to but we're also always looking at what the body is showing in terms of what we can actually touch and feel what the body is showing us in terms of you know the their shed and the brightness in the eyes the complexion all of those sort of things and we're also sometimes trying to see is there any smells but that one's a little bit more of an interesting and then we actually get to the treatment which is the fun part of course but as we know now hopefully our health is defined by the free flow of chi and blood in the body and as acupuncturists we're manipulating that flow to be able to encourage just a general free flow so that there's no pain and we've gone through a little bit about how the emotions as one cause of illness can affect the body and we've also looked at a few of the other diagnostic indicators that help us come to a kind of a diagnosis so then we get to the actual treatment and we're using the acupuncture points to manipulate the flow of Qi throughout the channels which then regulates the body and promotes health and for example this point is kidney 3 which is really good actually for fear for grounding people there's a lot of kind of emotional things that go on through this point and this is a beautiful point and I really love it but it just gives you a sense of you know someone's feeling fearful and we're struggling to make a decision for example and just needed that little bit more support we might use that with for example some liver points which is to do with kind of like judgment and getting things done making a decision being firm all that sort of thing so we can treat a little bit on an emotional level as well as taking everything else into account but it's also you know acupuncture I think part of it is regulating the body's energy to flow through freely but it's also about giving you the space and time to feel like you've been listened to and kind of really just taking the time out for you and you know one of the questions I often get is do people talk throughout the treatments or do they stay silent and it's really it's really dependent and I think your body when the needles go in your body gives you the answer to that you know there's patience I've had who fall asleep for you know two hours and I'm kind of too scared to wake them up there's other patients who want to talk the whole way through and I think it really depends on your unique situation on that day of the treatment but I think you know a lot of it goes into supporting you as a person so supporting you kind of emotionally and just being there to be a friend that listens to you because I think sometimes you know I've got patients who don't want to talk about their health because they don't want to worry their family or things like that and we're that independent person who you can just be yourself and write about whatever you want or whatever else so a lot of the treatment is to do with the needles that we choose and the diagnosis that we make and how we restore the balance of energy but a lot of it as well as that kind of emotional and kind of physical support in many respects and my fourth lesson is you know at present let's say it's a 27 minute recording so it's not long to go through all of acupuncture and I've kind of given my heart self a hard challenge of talking about the emotions which is such a deep area and we really just cut scratched the surface but there's so much more behind acupuncture and different ways of treating and you know I could go on for days weeks months but I've tried to cover a little bit of some of the things I think about just so it gives you a sense of acupuncture really can help with anything you don't have to be Gravely ill it doesn't have to be a muscle problem or musculoskeletal issue it could just be hey you know I'm I'm feeling I'm struggling to make a decision and it's affecting my sleep can I come and see you and we can do kind of a supportive treatment um recovering over three years of kind of studying can't be done in 30 minutes I'm afraid so it's a very complicated topic people are complicated as well people present in different ways um I've done my best I hope and I hope you found that it's an interesting talk and learned a little bit about how acupuncture can help how acupuncture works and the sort of things that we go through in the treatment which you know there's a lot that goes on behind the surface it often looks you know how do you choose the points and this kind of gives you a little bit of a perspective of what we're going through so thank you thank you for listening and I hope it's helpful I thought it's such a great topic and it'd be ashamed just to only have it for the people that attended um the Meadowside open day so this is just a quick recording if you have any questions or would like to discuss it anything further or if you'd like to look in for a treatment or just have a chat no details though here um I'll be saying something like through an email so you also have my details there so feel free to get in contact and thank you for watching
