Respect for the Heart
According to the Chinese classics of internal medicine, Summer relates to:
- Phase: Fire (huo)
- Direction: South
- Colour: red
- Yin organ: Heart
- Spiritual faculty: spirit (shen)
- Tissue: vessels
- Positive emotion: respect
- Negative emotion: hysteria
- Sound: laughing
- Injurious activity: excessive talking
Of the 5 emotions in Chinese medicine (anger, joy, worry, sadness, fear), when I ask my patients which are most pertinent to them, joy seems to be the most sought after or acceptable.
We all love that summer high, of warm sunny long days, where the sun’s energy fills the body and soul. However, balance is required to avoid a conditions of excess. According to Louis Komjathy of the Daoist Foundation, the negative emotion of heart-disharmony often termed ‘excessive joy’ is better understood as hysteria and/or mania specifically an elevated, extreme mood change. This often leads to a subsequent psychological crash, a condition that exhausts the hearts and dissipates spirit. A feeling of momentary elevated joy, often occurring at the height of summer-heat, is fleeting, and in fact dissipating.
In the Huangdi Neijing (the Yellow Emperor’s Inner classic – one of the foundational works of Classical Chinese Medicine):
- Extreme anger injures yin; extreme joy injures yang
- Joy injures the heart: fear overcomes joy
The latter turns the tables on the contemporary obsession for joy, the desire for an eternal yet unachievable state of happiness, considered achievable via thousands of instagram likes. Chinese philosophy and medicine advocates moderation and balance. So with the highs come the lows, the yin must follow the yang. In the five phases the water of the Kidney (emotion: fear) will control the fire of the Heart (emotion: joy).
The Taijiquan (tai chi) movements reflect the constant changes from yin to yang and back again. Taiji means supreme ultimate, the ball or whole that is divided into the yin and yang. The image of the white semicircle (fish) with a black dot (yin within yang) and the black semicircle with a white dot (yang within yin. Yang is outward, energy, movement and yin is inward, blood, stillness.
One of the fundamental principles of Taiji is stillness in movement, movement in stillness. This is a reminder that nothing is absolute and that in every situation or state of mood there is always a seed of transformation into the opposite.
In acupuncture, health is associated with bringing the body into harmony by balancing the channels and organs, and the related emotions.
In a 10-year study (Hershfield et al 2012) ‘not only found that frequent experiences of mixed emotions (co-occurrences of positive and negative emotions) were strongly associated with relatively good physical health, but were associated with attenuated typical age-related health declines’.
Rather than seeing happiness or joy as an end goal, the legacy of ancient Chinese philosophy is to see movement as transformation, interaction, confluence and exchange. Seeing the world as a constantly transforming entity and ourselves as part of this healing, transformative and interactive process can help us to navigate the challenges of today, by experiencing the highs and the lows in moderation.