Digesting Emotions

I had been treating a patient for pain of their lower leg and constipation. After just a month treatment, the pain was completely gone and the digestion was mostly normalized. I looked back to the original goals the patient had made when they started treatment to check if there is anything else to address. I was shocked to discover that the original goals were entirely psycho-emotional. The patient listed as their top goals: lightness in moody and help with boundary setting.

The number # 1 reason people say they are seeking naturopathic doctors is for their digestion; however, in my experience, the number one reason people are actually seeking support with naturopathic medicine is for their ‘emotional digestion.’

Digestion is a process of transformation starting with something that is foreign integrating what is useful and discarding what is not useful as waste. The same process that occurs on the physical level with nutrition plays out on the emotional level with feelings. The same pitfalls we can suffer in physical digestion can afflict our emotional processing. Reluctance to address our feelings can be thought of as an emotional constipation, lashing out at others at the slightest provocation can be thought of as emotional diarrhea.

Processing feelings if it is a new skill is a bit like learning to swim. You don’t just dive right in. First you make contact, dipping a toe, then you may go in with assistance like floaties or a parent until one day you realize you are swimming on your own!

Pacing yourself is important so as not to get overwhelmed. It can be helpful to schedule ‘feeling time’ maybe during a therapist visit or during a daily walk that you take so that when the uncomfortable feelings arise during an inconvenient time like during work you can give yourself permission to deal with that during your feeling time.

Feelings feed our spirit. We cannot survive without them. They guide us away from dangerous situations and towards people we love. The first step of emotional digestion is appreciating that our feelings are valuable and, in some way, or another trying to tell us something.

The next step is sitting in the feeling and trying to understand what it is expressing. This discovery process is a bit like interpreting poetry. Sometimes the poem is very simple like roses are red, violets are blue, but often it is not. A feeling may have more to do with something that happened to you years ago than what is currently occurring, or it could have more to do with what is going on in the community than you as an individual. Interpreting feelings is an open-ended playful process. Feel free to ‘trying on’ different possibilities.

The digestive juices from our pancreas and stomach consist of different chemical for different foods. We use amylase for carbohydrates, protease for proteins, and lipase for fats. Similarly, we use different ‘enzymes’ for different emotions. The ancient Chinese created a five element system matching each organ with an emotion that afflicts the organ as well as a virtue for unwinding the emotion. Again, emotions are not bad. Anger can propel the wronged to stick up for themselves; however, as in all matters health, we seek balance, supplementing deficiencies and curbing excess.

The five central organs or Chinese medicine and their linked emotion are as follows – heart – joy, spleen – worry , lungs – grief , kidney – fear , and liver – anger. The virtue associated with ‘digesting’ each emotion is as follows – joy – peace, worry – trust, grief – integrity, fear – wisdom, anger – compassion. The work of truly internalizing these concepts is done individually in each of our souls wrestling with their meaning. I will walk through how I understand one of them, transforming worry through trust.

Worry is an emotion of rumination. We run over and over and over again the situation attempting to plan for every possible scenario. This is how a cow digests its food, slowly and repetitively in four stomach chambers over a long period of time. In some cases can be helpful or even necessary in say launching a space shuttle; however, in excess worry is paralyzing inhibiting our action due to concern for every possible pitfall. Trust short-circuits the worry cycle by accepting our own limitations. We cannot control everything and must ‘trust’ in the goodness and wisdom of the external world to co-direct the future. Trusting outside influence may appear foolish to some, however in my experience it best resembles the experience of being a single striving life-force doing it best to navigate the overwhelming complexity of life on this tiny blue dot.

I leave you something Rudolf Steiner shared for those entering the worrying time of WW1, a meditation of trust if you will:

We must eradicate from the soul
all fear and terror of what
comes towards man
out of the future.
We must acquire serenity
in all feelings and sensations
about the future.

We must look forward
with absolute equanimity
to everything that may come.
And we must think only that
whatever comes is given to us
by a world-directive
full of wisdom.

It is part of what we
must learn in this age,
namely, to live out of pure
trust, without any security
in existence.
Trust in the ever present
help of the spiritual world.

Truly, nothing else will do
if our courage is not to fail us.

And let us seek the awakening
from within ourselves,
every morning
and every evening.

1. Appreciate the value of the feeling in forming you
2. Schedule intentional time to digest the emotions
3. Play with different possibilities of interpretation
4. Link corresponding TCM virtues for assitance if you are struggling with a specific emotion