Within the male-dominated field of scientific research, one woman stands out as the mother of the current paradigm. She opened the doors to the study of neurotransmitters, giving us the basic chemical messengers that have become so vital to understanding modern physiology. Her journey is a story of struggle in a culture deprived of feminine intuition, and her triumphs have led to a paradigm shift into positive correlations between biomedical studies and the success of body-mind therapies such as meditation.
She writes:
"We tend to deal with the physical aspects of keeping ourselves healthy and ignore the emotional dimension -- our thoughts and feelings, even our spirits, our souls. Yet, in the light of the new knowledge about emotions and the psychosomatic network, it's obvious that they, too, are a part of our responsibility to manage our own health.
The tendency to ignore our emotions is oldthink, a remnant of the still-reigning paradigm that keeps us focused on the material level of health, the physicality of it. But the emotions are a key element in self-care because they allow us to enter into the bodymind's conversation. By getting in touch with our emotions, both by listening to them and by directing them through the psychosomatic network, we gain access to the healing wisdom that is everyone's natural biological right." p287
She has discovered, through a lifetime of scientific research and networking amongst various healthcare modalities, that emotions illicit chemical responses with the potential to build up and eventually cause disease. If you do not direct your emotions towards a balanced state, they will cause harm.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) holds an equivalent translation of this concept; established over thousands of years of observations and pattern diagnosis, TCM practitioners know that qi (in this case in the form of emotions) will stagnate and cease flowing properly when effected by strong emotion. When qi ceases to flow smoothly the result is disease. This basic concept has survived and been observed for thousands of years; as with many concepts in TCM, it is a matter of translation.
She writes:
"We tend to deal with the physical aspects of keeping ourselves healthy and ignore the emotional dimension -- our thoughts and feelings, even our spirits, our souls. Yet, in the light of the new knowledge about emotions and the psychosomatic network, it's obvious that they, too, are a part of our responsibility to manage our own health.
The tendency to ignore our emotions is oldthink, a remnant of the still-reigning paradigm that keeps us focused on the material level of health, the physicality of it. But the emotions are a key element in self-care because they allow us to enter into the bodymind's conversation. By getting in touch with our emotions, both by listening to them and by directing them through the psychosomatic network, we gain access to the healing wisdom that is everyone's natural biological right." p287
She has discovered, through a lifetime of scientific research and networking amongst various healthcare modalities, that emotions illicit chemical responses with the potential to build up and eventually cause disease. If you do not direct your emotions towards a balanced state, they will cause harm.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) holds an equivalent translation of this concept; established over thousands of years of observations and pattern diagnosis, TCM practitioners know that qi (in this case in the form of emotions) will stagnate and cease flowing properly when effected by strong emotion. When qi ceases to flow smoothly the result is disease. This basic concept has survived and been observed for thousands of years; as with many concepts in TCM, it is a matter of translation.
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