In life, we’ve all experienced moments where we become overpowered by the shadow feelings of anger, disappointment, heartache, despair, or sadness.
Yet, most people load these feelings deep inside their bodies and ignore them, unaware that the energy or frequency of these emotions can affect their spiritual, physical, and mental health.
For people who are always on the go, they may find it a bit difficult to concentrate on any one thing for very long be it a dietary strategy, an exercise program, or even activities within your daily life or work. They can be someone who uses a frantic pace of life to dodge dealing with shadow emotions.
One sign that you may be utilizing activity to restrain feelings that have negative thoughts and shadow feelings are when you find yourself excessively tired or when you allow some down time when slowing down.
Suppressing deep seated feelings requires adrenaline, yet when one slows down, the amount of adrenaline in the bloodstream drops. The effect of an adrenaline rush when moving through life is that while it may prevent you from experiencing challenging emotions by spurring you into action, it can also fatigue your thyroid and adrenal glands and significantly contribute to chronic diseases such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure.
Qi gong or Chinese yoga is an ideal tool that anyone can incorporate into their daily lives to rid of shadow emotions, which also can lead to issues of toxicity such as depression, chronic pain or illness, depression, and cancer.
Building Consciousness of Emotional States with Chinese Yoga
Chinese yoga can produce a deeper realization of our emotional layers. The first step in healing and releasing shadow emotions is realization or awareness. A lot of times, these shadow layers within our bodies and minds may be physically held in the body leading to excess weight in our bodies, especially around our waist and stomach.
Dao yin or Chinese yoga breath supports the slowing down of our thoughts and breath in order for us to come into a realization of the emotions we are holding, and start processing and liberating them.
There are people who asked to deepen their breath begin to feel irritable, anxious, or impatient. These feelings are windows into our emotional responsiveness and they provide us with information about how we may be unconsciously reacting to experience.
Likewise, people tend to hurry through the movements when they’re asked to do qi gong exercises, as opposed to allowing and lingering themselves to observe the sensations of emotions that occur when the body is in motion. Qi gong can therefore be a very helpful way of generating a consciousness of feelings and relating emotions to the physical states.
The movements in Chinese Yoga liberate emotions that are connected to certain body organs. These organs are associated with specific emotions within Chinese medicine.
Kidneys: Fears, discipline/will and courage
Liver: Frustration/anger or compassion.
Spleen: Anxiety, calmness, centeredness.
Heart: Over excitation or joy.
Lungs: Sadness/grief/perseverance.
Spokane Chinese medicine practitioners can teach a series of qi gong movements that lightly target each of the organs with gentle body twists and slow leg and arm movements mixed with breathing.
One can perform these movements for a mere two or three minutes scattered throughout the day to help process and liberate layers of feelings. When it’s regularly practiced, this form of prescriptive qi gong can be an ideal tool or a great complement to conventional drug therapies or psychotherapy.
For instance, the University of California, School of Medicine did a recent study that found people 69 years of age or older suffering from depression experiencing greater effects from anti-depressant drugs, when they were learned a basic and easy set of tai chi.
As the mother art of tai chi, qi gong or Chinese yoga is a much easier art to learn, yet is as powerful in terms of positively affecting emotional states.