Balancing Your Emotions – As per the Five Element Theory

Emotions play a huge role in how we communicate, are perceived by others, how we perceive things, the meaning we give events, how we react, our health, our happiness, the things we achieve, and most of all the general quality of our lives. Billions of dollars and countless hours are wasted dealing with emotions.

People use drugs, work with therapist, and reduce their productivity staying off center due to the failure to achieve emotional balance. The best tool I have used over the past 30 years is found inside the Taoist study of Chinese Medicine.

Thousands of years ago, the Chinese Taoist began to observe nature and associated what they perceived to be the “Five Elements” – Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal. Over time each element was correlated to an organ system, an emotion, color, taste, climate, body tissues, the time of day and even the seasons. This tool plays a significant role in Martial Arts, Acupuncture and Herbal medicine. This article will focus on understanding the 5 Elements as they refer to the emotions.

Look around at people you know. Observe our news stories and you’re your own feeling. The prevalent emotions in our society appear to be out of control – fear, anger, sadness, depression, excessive joy and ruminating. The Five Element Theory gives us a simple perspective to help understand and effectively cope with these imbalances.

There are practitioners that assist people using herbs, needles and other modalities. Yet the mere understanding and awareness of how this works can have a huge effect on your health and happiness. For example let’s look at how fear affects us from this perspective.

Fear creates an imbalance in the water element. When water is damaged, the wood element fails to be properly nourished and the fire element fails to be controlled. Just look at nature and this is very easy to understand – water makes wood grow and puts out fire.

When the wood element fails to be nourished the wood becomes brittle and inflexible. The fire element burns out of control. The emotion that corresponds to the wood being out of balance is anger and depression. When fire is out of control we see the need for immediate gratification. The fire element then fails to control the metal leading to excess sadness and also fails to nourish the earth properly leading to poor digestion and eating poor quality foods to fill the void.

One can see how all this correlates to the ills of our society. A fear based media, government, health care and religious systems dominate the information we receive. Anger, depression, sadness and overeating can be obviously observed. Greed and excess also are a result of our imbalanced need for immediate gratification. The good news is that this same tool can be used to generate solutions. It is simpler than one might think.

The earth element can control or dam the water element and nourish the Metal. A healthy Earth shows up when we take time to understand, nourish and be truthful. It is very giving and able to forgive and accept. Bottom line it is compassionate. When this is done fear does not exist. How different things can be with just one ancient tool.

This article introduces the use of Five Elements to make your life better. There are many books available on this subject. The author, Jacob Barrocas, lives in Western NC and will be having workshops in this and other useful subjects to help bring balance to your personal life as well as your business. Jacob has a unique background with a degree in Industrial Engineering and Chinese Medicine. His 35 years of experience includes being an Engineer, a Corporate Executive, an acupuncturist, a consultant and a home builder. For more info go to www.consultitgreen.com.