I have been wanting to share some emotion-related tips from the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) perspective as I’ve personally gained valuable insights from it. I hope that the information I share here will be useful for you and the people around you at some point in time.
First of all, in TCM (five elements), each organ is linked to an emotion:
Liver ⇒ Anger
Heart ⇒ Joy
Spleen ⇒ 思虑 (Thinking deeply, contemplating, deliberate)
Lungs ⇒ Sadness
Kidneys ⇒ Fear
No matter what emotion, it is never healthy to stay in a particular emotion for a prolonged period of time, or experience a great amount of a certain emotion in a short period of time.
For instance, there is a Chinese saying – “乐极生悲”, which means when one is overtaken by extreme joy, it can lead to tragedy. You might relate to this when you hear stories of people fainting or even losing their lives after suddenly winning the jackpot.
Today, let’s focus on the emotion of anger and what emotion can counter it.
When a person is angry, it will harm and damage the liver from the TCM perspective. This affects the eyes and blood flow, as our liver is closely connected to both. This explains why blood pressure rises and people’s eyes turn red when they are in an angry state.
So which emotion can counter anger? Let’s take a look in this simple summary:
- In TCM five elements, liver belongs to the wood element.
- The element that counters wood is metal.
- The organ that represents the metal element is lungs.
- Lungs is linked to the sad emotion.
- This means sadness counters anger.
The following is a story that I read from the late Stephen Covey’s book that proves how sadness can overcome anger.
(*I can’t recall all the full details of the story, so please forgive me if my words are not 100% the same as what was originally written in the book, but the core of the story still stays.)
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This story happened in a train.
The train door opened, and a very disturbed kid and a man (the father of the kid) entered.
In the train, the kid kept shouting and making disturbing noises that affected almost everyone in the cabin.
However, the man seemed to be thinking about something and he did not stop his child from his actions.
Two stops later, the kid still did not stop his behavior and at this time, an angry man approached the father of the kid.
The angry man shouted at the kid’s father and told him to stop his kid’s nonsense.
The father looked up at the angry man, made an apology and said “I’m sorry, but he has just lost his mom in the hospital.”
The angry man immediately softened and turned empathetic towards the father and son. All of a sudden, the atmosphere in the train did not seem as disturbing and noisy for the rest of the journey.
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Thought not everyone can use sadness to resolve a person’s anger in all situations, this gives us greater awareness of how emotions can affect us from the TCM perspective.
I hope you find this information useful!
P.S. I will be sharing more stories and examples of other emotions in upcoming posts, do stay tuned.