This is the first in a series of posts related to acupuncture and grief.
You’ve probably heard that acupuncture is helpful for healing physical pain like back pain, sciatica, or headaches, but did you know that acupuncture can address emotional pain, too?
Acupuncture and Holistic Healing
Many people don’t realize that acupuncture is a complete, holistic system of medicine, of which the mind-body-spirit connection is an integral part. The goal of treatment is to bring balance to the entire system for overall health and wellness.
From this point of view, emotions have a significant impact on the physical body, and TEAM (Traditional East Asian Medicine) actually acknowledges them as one of the main causes of disease. (It goes the other way, too: physical imbalances can affect our emotions.) Emotions are powerful, and they serve an important purpose. It is when they get stuck for a long period of time that they cause problems.
The Lungs and Grief
This post will focus on the Lung organ system and the associated emotion of grief. (Check out this post to learn more about the organ systems in TEAM.)
Physical manifestations of grief can include:
The Lungs and other Organ Systems
Different from Western Medicine, where systems of the body are seen as separate from each other (think: seeing a gastroenterologist for digestive difficulty, a cardiac specialist for circulatory issues, or a therapist for anxiety and depression), the organ systems in TEAM are interrelated (all three of the above issues can be addressed in the same acupuncture treatment, often coming from a single root cause). When there is a shift in one part of the body, change occurs somewhere else, too.
With grief, the Lungs are often most affected and common symptoms will be similar to those described above. But because the Lungs affect and are affected by other systems of the body, there are various issues that might arise with grief, especially over a period of time.
Some of the organ systems and symptoms that are closely related to the Lungs are:
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but the take-home point is that there can be widespread effects from one seemingly straightforward emotion such as grief. The good news is that acknowledging this and addressing our being as a whole, rather than the independent parts, will bring balance and healing in a shorter amount of time.
It also offers us an opportunity to become aware of these connections and weave this wisdom into our own personal healing practices...More on that next time!