Health and Emotions

There are many ways to get relief from medical issues. Some of them require medication, surgical procedures, and other types of medical interventions, and many of these things can be expensive, invasive, and can sometimes come with serious side-effects. Fortunately, there are alternatives that can not only help us achieve the ideal health we’re striving for, but they can be cost-effective as well.

One such method is a form of Traditional Chinese Medicine called “qigong,” which is a movement meditation that can help us restore our bodies to good health and maintain it through regular practice. The great news is that once you’ve learned qigong, it enables you to take responsibility for your own well-being.

I recently interviewed my friend and medical qigong instructor, Fabrice Piché, to ask him about the emotions and their effects on the physical body from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This is what he had to say:

BR: What would it look like to have a body in perfect harmony and balance?

FP: When you’d go to bed at night, you would fall asleep almost instantly. You’d wake up in the morning full of energy, jump out of bed, and maintain that energy all day long. You wouldn’t have any digestive issues. Your breathing would be slow and deep. Your body would be more resilient and stable, and able to heal itself and protect itself from injuries.

BR: Can you give me an example of how you’ve helped someone achieve balance and harmony in their body?

FP: One example that I can think of is of one the students we had when I was in Montreal, within our first teacher training group. There was a woman in her late 40s or early 50s who came to us who’d had knee surgery, and her doctors were saying that her ability to walk would degenerate over time. At first, she was really careful about putting weight on her leg, and mindful about what she was doing, but gradually, through qigong practice, her knee improved. Three or four years later, she went on a hiking trip up a mountain, and she was outpacing some of the 25-year-olds who were part of the group. During her follow-ups, her surgeons were impressed to see that she was actually improving rather than declining.

BR: What kinds of treatments were you giving her? Acupuncture?

FP: No treatments. Just qigong.

BR: What is it about Qigong, Tai Chi, and Chinese Medicine that attracted you to them in the first place?

FP: What's most interesting to me is to use qigong as a tool to better understand how the body functions. These days, it's interesting to see how, as I work with qigong and Chinese Medicine, a lot of instinctive kinds of responses come up when clients have questions. This is not because the response is something that I've studied from an intellectual perspective—it's more visceral. I think this is because the work that we do in qigong is to develop our ability to render a lot of unconscious systems in our body conscious.

BR: What do you mean?

FP: Breathing is the easiest example. Usually, your breath is unconscious, but it's the easiest system to control consciously. We can choose to take a deep breath. Through the practice of qigong, we develop the habits of becoming more aware of things that are going on in our body that usually happen at the subconscious level. However, there are things going on that we don't normally observe. One example is blood flow. It's a bit more difficult for people to feel it, but if you develop enough stillness, or if you’re engaged in some sort of sport, your heart beats really fast, and you can feel your pulse and the blood moving through your body more easily. It's more difficult for people to just sit there and be able to access this kind of information.

However, with enough training, you can quiet your mind to start to feel the pulsation of your heart and then track it down through your body and feel where the blood is flowing easily. When you notice areas where you don't feel it, you’ll know that they’re blocked. You can bring your awareness to that area and work on that level so you can feel it start to open up sufficiently. When you do, it will start to feel the same as the other parts of your body where you can already feel the blood flowing. So this is one way of developing the ability to perceive, and when you can do this, you’ll be able to receive the message your body is sending, and be able to say, “Hey, this area doesn't feel quite right,” and know where to put your attention and energy to get it to work better.

BR: So if you get really good at this kind of thing, you can feel energy blocks in your body?

FP: Not just from an energy perspective, but also more in tangible things like blood or lymph. Muscle tension is a bit easier, but a lot of times when you tell people to relax their shoulders, they'll tell you that their shoulders are relaxed. They're not even aware of the amount of tension that they're holding. With the practice of qigong, as you develop the habit of observing your body, you start to realize everything that’s present. That's what I mean when I talk about bringing consciousness to things that are mostly unconscious.

Some of these blockages have emotions associated with them, so as you release physical tension, sometimes the emotional obstruction that was behind it may show up and get expressed. Sometimes it doesn't-- it just releases, and that's perfect. If it doesn’t, you don't need to open up your old garbage to see what's at the bottom. Just take it out and leave it on the curb.

BR: So even when someone’s working with qi energy, they can come up against emotional blocks within the body and release them? Is that a common concept in Chinese medicine—that emotions can get caught in the body?

FP: Yes, it's at the core understanding of Chinese medicine. Any chronic condition can have stuck emotions, although they can also be associated with some acute conditions as well. Most chronic, internal issues within any organ will have the associated family of emotions present and prevent the body from healing.

BR: Can you give me some examples of that kind of thing?

FP: Well, the classic one that everybody can see is anger, which is associated with the liver. Anger usually creates a lot of tension in the body, either in a way where anger is explosive and outward, allowing release of the blockage, or some people have a lot of anger that they repress and keep inside.

BR: They internalize it.

FP: Yes, but the role of the liver is to keep smooth circulation of blood and qi, so if the liver gets impaired, or if we have an emotion that tightens everything up, then the liver can’t do its work, and therefore, its function, and the whole organ’s system will be affected by it.

BR: Wow! So what kinds of diseases or conditions does something like that create?

FP: That depends on the overall situation, the lifestyle of the person, and the state of the other organs. Let's say there’s someone who has some dampness in their system. Their body’s fluids aren’t circulating properly, and they go into a big rage that makes their blood boil. A situation like this, with such a strong emotion, creates a lot of heat in the body.

Let’s say, though, that for some reason, the person doesn't let it out—doesn’t express their anger, they're holding it in. In this case, there's already a lot of dampness associated as well, and things become more and more stagnant. This will develop an issue of damp heat within the body, which can then either create a hepatitis type of issue, or jaundice, with the liver really becoming quite inflamed and hot. The digestive system will be affected and can cause vomiting.

This could actually be a solution to the problem because if the person didn't express their emotions, there's so much boiling heat inside that it needs to come out somehow.

Another possible condition that it can cause is headaches, which is very common when people get angry. They get bloodshot eyes, huge, pounding headaches, and a slight fever. In a sense, their anger literally gets their blood boiling, and as you can see, a lot of our colloquial expressions come from conditions like this in the body.

BR: And the kidneys are associated with fear, right?

FP: Yes.

BR: Can you tell me a little bit about that?

FP: Any kind of emotion associated with fear and self-value will affect the kidneys. The kidney is the area where we store jing, which is basically the energy that's closely related to our genetic material—our DNA—and our ability to reproduce. It’s our primal lifeforce energy, and fear has a tendency to make us drop it.

When people are fearful, they kind of curl up. They try to hide and disappear, and this lowers jing energy. If someone’s kidney energy is a little bit low, the bladder is not strong, so if they get scared, they'll pee themselves. The energy that's supposed to be there to hold the urine is missing, so the bladder can't hold it anymore, and everything comes out. Sometimes, people will get cold extremities and they'll start to shrivel up, maybe even lose consciousness.

BR: And the heart—is it associated with grief?

FP: The heart is related to joy, which is the emotion that affects it the most. Happiness is internal, and joy comes from outside. There’s this notion that something external makes you feel a rising of energy, so it's easy to see how people who have been struggling financially for a while will have a heart attack all of a sudden when they win the lottery. There’s a manic quality to this excessive kind of joy and people kind of lose it when things are a little too good. It brings a lot of energy up to the head and, in a sense, makes them lose contact with the earth.

BR: Do those kind of people tend to become manic depressive as well?

FP: Yes, manic emotions affect the heart.

BR: Is there an organ that's associated with grief?

FP: That would be the lungs. Sadness, grief—all that sobbing can affect the lungs, and our breath gets very affected when we're holding this kind of emotion.

Issues of trust and worries are associated with the spleen. The spleen and stomach are the internal organs that are most directly connected with the outside world, and because they transform the food we take from the outside into our bodies and transform it through digestion. This is why the spleen and stomach are closely related to our level of trust towards things that are outside of us. If we're always worried, we're not going to digest well. If we're always thinking and our mind is always spinning the same ideas around in our head, it will have a fatiguing effect on the spleen.

BR: Does the brain have any kind of role in the idea of emotions being caught in the body?

FP: Not directly, no. The brain is the overall center that deals with everything in the body.

BR: And that’s because the body has neurons inside of it to communicate with the brain?

FP: Yeah, the whole nervous system connects everything, and the different kinds of emotions will affect different areas. So for example, the link between the kidneys and fear is understood in western medicine, as fear will stimulate the production of cortisol and adrenaline which comes from the adrenal glands in the sympathetic nervous system.

Constant fear will stimulate a continuous production of these hormones and will eventually exhaust the glands. We’re now learning that the toxic chemicals produced by fear can be transformed by magnesium within the kidneys, which helps eliminate it from the body.

Stress is related to fear, and stress is the root cause of most health issues nowadays. In order to heal, we need to switch back into the parasympathetic phase of resting and digesting. When we do, we relax. Our heart rate decreases, our breathing slows down, and our brain goes into an alpha or theta phase, which is calm and productive, and the body is able to recover and heal itself. However, we can’t do that as long as we're caught up in fight or flight.

When we’re stuck in fight or flight, most of our energy and blood supply goes towards the surface of the body into the muscles, where the body would normally use it to escape or take action in a physical situation.

These days, however, people are living in a state of constant stress—not necessarily big stress, but constant small stress. Everything stresses them out, and therefore their sympathetic nervous system is constantly engaged. They never switch back into the parasympathetic state, even in their sleep. Because of that, their sleep is light and restless. They even wake up stressed, and when people are working from their sympathetic nervous system, they can’t digest their food properly, and their breathing is shallower.

But stress is useful as well. If we were never stressed, we would never do anything. It should be just a small part of our day, or a big stress for a short period of time, and then once we're out of a stressful situation, we should be able to relax. Life is not meant to be stressful all the time.

BR: That makes me think of yin and yang.

FP: You need to feel hungry to go look for food, right? If you don't feel a little stress from hunger, you don't feel motivated to grow your food or go hunt for it.

BR: That would be yang then, right?

FP: Yes, that would be the yang phase. There's an active state and a passive state, right? We need to have moments of activity—that little bit of stress. Even if you’re just doing physical exercise, it creates a certain level of stress in the body, and when you’re finished you relax and enjoy the endorphins, which is the passive, or yin state.

BR: What kinds of hormones are released when you’re experiencing good stress and when you're under bad stress?

FP: They're the same. They're not different. It's a question of quantity over time. That’s what determines whether or not they’re good or bad.

BR: Oh, I see. They get out of balance.

FP: Yes. If you're constantly producing adrenaline, you're going to drain your adrenal glands and they will become exhausted.

BR: Wow, that's really interesting. But what about the positive kinds of hormones and chemicals that are produced when you're feeling good?

FP: Endorphins and dopamine. They have the same kind of effects. They provide positive stimulation so that you feel relaxed and happy, but they’re also at the base of addiction. If you're constantly stressed and you constantly look for an external source to stimulate or create a dopamine hit, then you can become addicted to it—food, alcohol, drugs, any kind of addiction.

BR: Okay, so that's the flip side.

FP: It's always a question of maintaining balance—having the right amount of hormones activated for the right amount of time gives us the response we need, and then experiencing the opposite, so that we don't go too far in one direction or the other.

BR: So using qigong and other forms of Chinese medicine is all about achieving balance and harmony within the body. That’s what keeps us healthy.

FP: Yes.

Fabrice Piché began studying Qigong and Chinese Medicine in 1997 at the National Institute of Chinese Medicine in Montreal. He’s certified in Qigong, Chinese Massage Therapy, and Naturopathy. He furthered his Medical Qigong training in 2009 with Dr. Bernard Shannon from the International Institute of Medical Qigong, Oversea College of Medical Qigong, Henan University of Chinese Medicine in Palm Desert, California. He earned his Master of Medical Qigong degree in September 2011, and later had the privilege of studying under one of the greatest Qigong Masters alive today—Professor Lin Housheng.

Fabrice offers group classes and one-on-one training online and in person in Taiji Qigong Shibashi (18 movements) to not only help his students improve their health, but become skilled and knowledgeable teachers as well.

You can find Fabrice at Qigong18.com to learn more.