How To Digest Your Thought-Forms
For the ancient Chinese physician, a negative or habitual emotional state would often indicate an organ that was imbalanced or diseased.
For instance, it was observed that people who tended to worry and obsess often had digestive issues like diarrhea, constipation, gas, bloating and indigestion. Conversely, poor digestion tends to affect the mind causing worry and rumination. In fact, worrying and poor digestion are one connected phenomenon.
When we worry or ruminate, our thoughts tend to turn over again and again. We are not able digest our thoughts which obsess the mind. The form of the thought, often an image, scenario or sound, blocks the mind and inhibits the natural energy of transformation. This is why thoughts are often called thought-forms. Trans means to go beyond. If transformation is to take place, we have to go beyond the form, and “transform.” Proper digestion is mental and physical transformation and central to good health.
Transformation is digestion and vice versa. The Chinese classified the organs involved in digestion; the pancreas, spleen and stomach into a phase they called earth. They used the word phase because all human processes and events are moving and transforming in time. Though some people translate the word phase as “element’, the word element conveys something static. A phase is a state of being and becoming and it implies movement.
There are five phases in Chinese medical philosophy: earth, metal, water, wood and fire. The earth phase is all about transformation. We take the form of the earth into our body as food and make it into something else: the energy and life force of survival itself. When we are transforming, we are going beyond our current form: emotionally, mentally and spiritually. We go beyond mere bodily survival to realize the freedom of the innate awareness that we truly are.
Digestion is based on the principle of transformation: we take in form, or earth, and we transform it, or take the form and make utilizable energy out of the earth. The physical earth, food, in this alchemical reconfiguration, then becomes subtle energy for thought. And the more positive the thought, the more we are able to digest those thoughts back into freedom of thought altogether.
If we are not transforming our food well and absorbing it well, we will not transform thought well and we will ruminate or worry. Interestingly, cows are called ruminants. Rumination is the term we use to describe a cow chewing on its cud. A cow’s stomach has 4 compartments, so they ruminate for long periods of time, while humans need to be able to transform more quickly.
I have personally heard more than one friend lament after gaining weight: “I feel like a fat cow.” Why do they feel like a cow? Because they are not able to transform their food, so they ruminate and worry.
Each of the organs has a specific emotional and mental state associated with it as part and parcel of its continuum of energy, that is why in Chinese medical thought it is much more useful to use the term body-mind instead of body or mind. Body is just dense mind, or the unconscious mind and mind is just subtle body, or the self awareness of a discrete existence.