EM.9: Deep Dive – Part 6: At the Movies Emotions in Traditional Chinese Medicine at the Movies

Approximate reading time: 3 minutes

Imagine you’re at the movies, ready to dive into the emotional depth of a drama film. As the story unfolds, you’re drawn into the narrative.

• Stimulus: On the screen, the hero experiences a profound loss, just like one you experienced recently. Witnessing the hero’s loss and agonising grief deeply affects you as you empathise with them. You are with your friends and don’t want to be seen or heard weeping. Your choice is to cry and sniff and blow your nose or hide your feelings of grief and stop yourself from crying.
• Emotional Response: In the context of TCM, your response to this scene is immediate and visceral. You feel a wave of grief that seems to resonate within your chest, an area that TCM associates with the lungs.
• Body Response: According to TCM, the lungs are the organ where grief is processed. As you stifle your tears and maintain a strong exterior, you might experience a sensation of constriction in your chest. This is the qi, or vital energy, being affected by your suppressed emotions. TCM teaches that the release of tears could help move this stagnant energy, but by holding them back, you risk creating an imbalance that could manifest as physical symptoms.

In this TCM-informed example, your emotional experience (i.e., grief) and organs (i.e., lungs) are intertwined. TCM teaches us that we can find the same interdependence between joy-heart, anger-liver, worry-spleen, and fear-kidney. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) provides a holistic perspective on emotions, deeply rooted in successful health care practices and theories that have served billions of people around the world for millennia. It diverges from modern scientific theories by situating emotions within specific organ systems and associating them with elemental forces of nature; emotional states are directly linked to physical well-being.