What Traditional Chinese Medicine Teaches About Sadness

In the first episode in our new series about sadness, Julie talks about sadness and depression from a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) perspective. TCM regards the body in terms of patterns and metaphors, making discussions about the body simpler. TCM teaches that the major organs--heart/small intestine, lungs/large intestine, spleen/stomach, liver/gall bladder, and kidney/bladder--embody different emotions, life stages, disease patterns and tendencies, and much more. When it comes to sadness/grief or depression, which is a more extreme form of sadness, the associated organ is the lung. The heart, or joy, is what keeps sadness in check. Listen to the episode to hear about the interplay between the heart-joy and the lung-sadness and what the TCM perspective says about overcoming depression.