Chi Nei Tsang: the Taoist massage that unblocks your organs

We feel butterflies in our stomachs when we fall in love, our worries tie up in knots, we swallow our bile to contain our anger… This happens here and also in China.

Thousands of years ago, the Taoists already realized that emotions affect the organs and they saw that one of the main causes of disease occurred when these were trapped in the body.

If we feel emotions like anger, sadness, fear, jealousy… and we don’t know how to let go, each encyst in a specific organ, which interrupts its normal functioning. A punctual anger is sometimes necessary, but sustained anger can create pathologies such as chronic constipation, menstrual dysfunctions or migraines.

A massage to unlock entrenched emotions

He chi nei tsang It is a Taoist technique to unlock emotions in all organs. To make it part of the abdomen, because Taoism considers the digestive system to be a general emotional regulator. And it is that for a reason we talk about the difficulty of “digesting” emotions: an intestine with emotional blockages does not process food well.

In fact, today we know that many of the neurotransmitters responsible for happiness and well-being are produced in the intestine, so a healthy intestine It will perform this function better and contribute to optimal emotional health.

How emotions affect each organ

According to the Tao and traditional Chinese medicine, each organ is especially sensitive to some emotions or others, and is affected, therefore, by some emotions and nourished by others. At the same time, a weakened or excessive organ can generate specific unpleasant emotions and, conversely, a healthy organ endows us with specific positive emotions.

Heart: In the traditional Chinese system, the functions of the heart are paired with the small intestine, and it is affected by emotions such as impatience, excessive joy or euphoria, cruelty and hate. To nourish both organs you have to fill them with love, compassion and measured joy.Lung: paired with the large intestine, it is very sensitive to sadnesssorrow, mourning and depression, and if it is strong we feel courageous, determined and joyful to live.Kidney and bladder: when they are weak, they make the person fearful and excessively timid. The panic and the sustained fear they weaken them and, instead, courage, silence and gentleness nourish them.Liver and gallbladder: unbalanced, can make us tend to anger, rage, envy and resentment, emotions. If these emotions are not released, they encyst in these organs and congest them. In balance, they favor generosity, justice, creativity and equanimity.Spleen and stomach: in balance, they give us confidence in life and a feeling that everything is fine. If they are healthy, they give us a good memory and the ability to study and understand. In imbalance, they generate worry and obsessive thoughts. These organs also regulate digestion, and a lifetime of worries affects their functioning and the body’s ability to “digest” emotions, which become more easily entrenched and create more blockages…

How locks are undone

With the massage of the organs, the therapist works with the qi, chi or life energy, looking for and undoing the obstacles that are found, according to the Taoist concept that, where there is pain, there is blockage. For this reason, it is important that the therapist is a practitioner of chi kung, a set of practices and meditations designed to generate and control the chi.

It is a physical and energetic work with which each organ is massaged through the skin.

Sometimes the massage can be painful, but it is a pain that we perceive as positive because as the treatment progresses, supported by breaths and relaxations, we can notice how that knot is loosening. Then we feel how the energy of each organ flows strongly and nourishes the physiological processes that were previously stagnant.

The massage is also accompanied by visualizations of the colors that nourish each organ:

red for the heartyellow orange for the spleenwhite for the lungbluish black for the kidneygreen for the liver

At the same time that the visualizations are made, we also work with the so-called “six healing sounds”. These help to release harmful emotions, which can come from past or present experiences, or be generated due to the weakness or pathology of some organ.

Complementary aid for comprehensive treatment

Apart from therapy, patients are taught exercises to enhance positive emotions that nourish them and provide well-being. This is done through concrete visualizations and meditations.

Deep work with emotions can also be done through flower essences and gestalt therapy.

As a complement, nutritional guidelines are given for each case and techniques such as acupuncture are used to support the restoration of energy flow.

Advice for the care of the digestive organs

A basic Taoist advice on digestive health is always eat in a relaxed atmospherewith few conversations or at least that are superficial and pleasant.

When we find ourselves in emotionally difficult situations (separations, disagreements…) we have to make it easy for the digestive system, eating few ingredients at a timethat are crushed or well cooked…

The foods that nourish the digestive system they are the roots and tubers, the pumpkin, the millet, the rice.

There are, moreover, simple self massage techniques that applied daily provide great benefits and that each one can be easily put into practice at home.

You can try, for example, this Taoist abdominal self-massage that we tell you about here. It can help you unblock the belly area and is very useful in cases of constipation.