1. Learn how unprocessed grief and sadness affect your body and how to heal.
2. Discover how your lungs, digestion, and diet play a role in processing grief and sadness.
3. Find tools like herbal remedies and affirmations to help you release grief and find emotional balance.
This article will show you how the emotions of grief and extended sadness can affect your body, specifically your lungs and digestion. You’ll learn how to support yourself through food, herbs, and practices that help honor and release these feelings. By the end, you’ll have practical tools to start healing emotionally and physically.
Energetic Health Institute
Emotional Description: Grief and extended sadness can lead to feelings of heaviness, difficulty expressing emotions, and a sense of disconnection.
Identifying the Emotional Root Cause: Holding onto sadness, loss, or disappointment without processing, validating, or expressing it.
Chakras are energy centers in your body, each linked to different aspects of your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Think of them as spinning wheels of energy that need to stay balanced and open for you to function at your best. When a chakra is blocked or out of balance, it can impact your mood, health, and overall energy.
Chakra colors represent the energy of each chakra and help you understand the qualities connected to them. For example, the Throat Chakra is blue, symbolizing communication and self-expression, while the Heart Chakra is green, representing love and emotional balance. Each chakra’s color reflects its unique energy, and by understanding these colors, you can connect to the chakra’s energy and work on restoring balance when needed.
Energy colors are different from chakra colors and represent the healing energy needed to balance or clear a blocked chakra. These colors can support the natural chakra energy and help recharge or soothe the body and mind.
Energy tastes, such as sweet, bitter, or pungent, influence the body’s energy flow. These tastes stimulate or balance the body in different ways, helping to clear blockages, restore harmony, or enhance overall energy. Together, understanding chakras, chakra colors, energy colors, and energy tastes can help you maintain physical and emotional harmony.
This approach isn’t just “woo woo”—there’s scientific evidence that supports how energy, emotions, and physical health are interconnected. Research shows that practices like breathwork, meditation, and even visualization can positively impact emotional health and physiological functions.
Primary Chakra: Throat Chakra or Vishuddha Chakra
Chakra Color: Blue
The Throat Chakra is blue, symbolizing communication, truth, and self-expression. Blue’s calming energy promotes openness and clarity in how you speak and express yourself. Surrounding yourself with blue through visualization, clothing, or your environment can help unblock the Throat Chakra, allowing you to express your emotions and speak your truth confidently.
Energy Color: White
The energy color white is connected to purification and clarity. It helps to cleanse emotional and energetic blockages, allowing you to see situations with more understanding and insight. When you focus on white, it’s like wiping away the emotional fog that clouds your thoughts, helping you release stuck emotions and move forward with a clearer perspective.
Energy Taste: Hot & Spicy
The hot and spicy taste helps clear energy blockages, especially in the lungs and large intestine, which process grief and emotions. Spicy foods like cayenne, chili peppers, and ginger stimulate energy flow, helping release trapped emotions. Adding these flavors to your diet supports emotional healing and clarity by clearing blockages in these organs.
Impact on Chakra: When your Throat Chakra is balanced, you’re able to express your thoughts and emotions openly and honestly. You can communicate your needs clearly, share your truth, and feel understood by others. However, when this chakra is blocked, it can lead to difficulty expressing yourself or suppressing emotions. You might feel like you can’t speak up or that your words are misunderstood. This blockage often stems from fear, past trauma, or repressed emotions, making it important to address these feelings to restore your voice and emotional freedom.
Why This is Important: Understanding the connection between your Throat Chakra and your ability to express yourself helps you take control of your communication and emotional health. By recognizing that struggles with self-expression could be linked to a blocked Throat Chakra, you can focus on practices like chanting, breathwork or visualizing blue light to support this area. This approach aligns your emotional and physical health, helping you release stuck energy and find your voice.
How This Applies to Your Life: If you’ve been feeling unable to express your emotions or struggling with communication, focusing on your Throat Chakra can help. By incorporating practices that support this chakra, like using the color blue or speaking your truth, you can start to heal these challenges at a deeper level. This isn’t just about improving communication—it’s about empowering yourself to express who you truly are, creating more meaningful connections and emotional relief.
Your emotions and organs are closely connected, meaning the way you feel can actually impact your physical health, and vice versa. In traditional Chinese medicine, this connection is especially emphasized through the concept of yin and yang organs. Each organ is believed to store or express different emotions, and by understanding this, you can better manage both your emotional and physical well-being.
Yin Organ: Lungs
The Lungs are the Yin organ associated with processing grief and emotional release. When your lungs are balanced, you feel a sense of lightness and ease in both your breath and emotions. However, when you hold onto sadness or grief, your lungs can feel heavy, leading to shallow breathing, fatigue, and even respiratory issues. Just as the lungs take in fresh air and release what the body doesn’t need, they also play a role in releasing emotional burdens.
Yang Organ: Large Intestine
The Large Intestine is the Yang organ paired with the lungs. Its role is to let go of what the body no longer needs—both physically and emotionally. It helps you release waste and also supports emotional release. When you’re holding onto grief or struggling to let go of sadness, it can block the large intestine’s function, causing issues like constipation and digestive discomfort, reflecting the emotional difficulty of letting things go.
Gland: Adrenals
The Adrenals, which regulate stress hormones, are closely tied to how your body handles grief. Long-term sadness can exhaust the adrenals, leading to fatigue and a weakened immune response.
Associated Hormones: Cortisol (stress hormone)
Hormones released by glands in your body play a major role in how you manage emotions. The adrenal glands, for example, release cortisol, a hormone that regulates your stress response. When balanced, cortisol helps you stay calm under pressure and manage emotional challenges. However, prolonged grief or sadness can cause your adrenals to overproduce cortisol, leading to fatigue, weakened immunity, and emotional burnout. Supporting your adrenal health can help you better cope with stress, restore emotional balance, and improve your overall well-being.
Associated Tissues: Skin, Sinuses, Lymphatics (reflecting the body’s ability to release and cleanse both physically and emotionally)
Emotions don’t just affect your mind—they show up in your body too. Grief, sadness, and emotional stress can impact your skin, sinuses, and lymphatic system, all of which help your body cleanse and release. When emotions are stuck, you may experience skin breakouts, sinus issues, or congestion in your lymphatic system. Just as these tissues work to clear toxins from the body, releasing emotional burdens can support their function, helping you feel lighter and more balanced physically and emotionally.
Skin:
The skin acts as a barrier and reflects both physical and emotional health. When grief or sadness is held inside, it can manifest as breakouts, rashes, or inflammation. Releasing emotions helps restore skin balance, promoting clearer, healthier skin.
Sinuses:
The sinuses help filter and cleanse the air you breathe. Emotional congestion, like unexpressed sadness or grief, can show up as sinus pressure, blockages, or infections. Clearing emotional blockages can improve sinus health and relieve discomfort.
Lymphatics:
The lymphatic system removes waste and toxins from the body. When emotions like grief are not processed, the lymphatic flow can become sluggish, leading to swelling or fatigue. Supporting emotional release helps the lymphatic system function properly, promoting detoxification and well-being.
What you eat directly affects your mood and overall health. Certain foods and nutrients can lift your spirits and help you feel balanced. This section highlights what to eat to support your emotional well-being.
Benefit: Supports healthy vision, immune function, and skin health.
Food: Sweet Potatoes
Benefit: Helps regulate mood, strengthens bones, and boosts immune health.
Food: Salmon
Benefit: Protects cells from damage and supports immune function.
Food: Sunflower Seeds
Benefit: Aids immune function, wound healing, and supports healthy growth.
Food: Pumpkin Seeds
Benefit: Promote gut health and improve digestion by balancing good bacteria in the intestines.
Food: Yogurt
Benefit: Boosts antioxidant levels, supports detoxification, and helps with respiratory health.
Food: Chicken
Benefit: Helps repair and maintain the digestive tract, supports muscle recovery, and reduces inflammation.
Food: Bone Broth
Benefit: A powerful antioxidant that supports detoxification and boosts immune health.
Food: Spinach
"*" indicates required fields
Affirmation: “I work to honor and release grief and sadness. I open my lungs to breathe freely and welcome peace into my life.”
When we use affirmations, we’re basically giving our brain positive messages. This can change how our brain works because it helps create new neural pathways. These new pathways encourage positive thinking, which can lower stress hormones like cortisol. When our stress levels go down, it can lead to better physical health, like improved immune function and lower blood pressure. So, by boosting our mental outlook, we can actually have a positive impact on our physical well-being too!
3300 NW 185th Ave. Suite 189, Portland, OR 97229
