I just kicked off a special in person session of Qigong for Stress and Anxiety and while I shouldn’t be surprised, the response was the largest I’ve ever had for this course. Seems like all of our hearts could use some soothing these days.
Chinese medicine is replete with deep relationships between the organs in our bodies and the emotions that they govern. Going a step beyond this, each organ in the human body has a specific title similar to a government official. Just like a well-run government requires all its workers functioning properly in their designated roles for the system to run smoothly, so too must our organs do their jobs right for us to thrive (yikes I swear I’m not trying to draw any parallels to our current political situation).
At the top of this hierarchy is the heart. The heart is known in Chinese medicine as the emperor organ. This is of course, likely no surprise to you, but it bears some special relevance to Qigong and how our practice can ensure that this sovereign functions at its best.
While all organs have their associated emotion, every stimulus that we come into contact with must first be processed by the heart. So, before we can be angry, sad, scared, or over-think things, the heart has to first examine that event and decide how the body is going to feel about it. Just as the emperor directs all of the functions of government, so too does the heart direct each piece of input we encounter. If all of this sounds a little far-fetched, then simply consider it in terms of how our brains perceive a stimulus. The event is presented to us, our frontal cortex analyzes it, and the amygdala activates to a greater or lesser degree, or not at all. From this stems all of our emotional responses.
The emotion associated with the heart is Joy. When we have emotional blockages, forcibly our heart emperor doesn’t function as well as it should. We get angry too easily, scared at the slightest noise, sad when we don’t need to, fixate on decisions that should be simple, and find that joy to be elusive. In some ways, neurology is like water. Water follows the path of least resistance, and our thought patterns are just that- patterns that are comfortable and easy to fall into over and over, even if the net result is that it makes us feel bad.
When we practice Qigong, we build up our energy and circulate it so that little by little, our blockages are smoothed away. The emperor leads the kingdom better, and we find the same traffic jam is less irritating or we look at the news and simply raise our eyebrows and walk away from it in search of something better to do. In short, we build better neural connections that let us thrive. This has been born out time and again in Western science. MRI imaging shows us how the frontal cortex, our seat of higher reasoning, grows with a regular mindful practice, and the amygdala, home of our fight or flight response, shrinks. Functional MRIs, which actually observe brain activity as it happens, show decreased responses to stressful stimuli after just eight weeks of a regular mindful practice.
Suffice it to say the if our heart emperor represents the filter through which each event in our daily life passes, Qigong is the action we can take to keep that filter clean and functioning properly when it seems like we are being constantly bombarded with challenges to our emotional wellbeing. So go enjoy your practice, it will always treat you right.
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