Skip to main content

Melancholy

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, symbolism is often used to explain certain patterns of illness. For example, it is said that sadness and melancholy harm the lungs, as these emotions consume, dissolve, and disperse qi, leading to a heavy-hearted mood.

Melancholy, here defined as pensive sorrow, is a form of sadness that involves deep and serious contemplation, overshadowing worry due to its highly concentrated, ruminative nature. As a result, melancholy affects both the spleen-pancreas and the lungs. The impact of these emotions on the spleen-pancreas can lead to digestive disorders, including loss of appetite, loose stools, weight loss, epigastric pain, abdominal distension, and constipation.

In everyday language, melancholy is sometimes described as “feeling down,” characterised by sadness combined with apathy. When excessive, this can contribute to certain forms of depression marked by sorrow. This may occur because deeply melancholic individuals tend to lack an optimistic outlook and often dwell in gloom, leading to qi stagnation in the liver, which frequently results in a sensation of chest tightness and an irritable mood.

The heart may also be affected, potentially leading to mental disturbances, emotional imbalances, and circulatory issues. Every emotional excess has a balancing counterpart – the remedy for sadness and melancholy lies in joy and gratitude for life. In this sense, grief is a way of dwelling in sadness over past events. It is no coincidence that a principle of Taoist philosophy in healing grief is to cultivate equanimity – that is, peace of mind – something highly sought after in today’s world.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

When Shawn Mendes Became a Lifeline

When my father fell ill in his final days, the lyrics of Shawn Mendes’ In My Blood became an unexpected refuge, helping me process the reality unfolding before me. The song’s plea — its raw, urgent cry against the weight of helplessness — resonated in a way that felt almost too personal. “Help me, it’s like the walls are caving in” — those words captured the suffocating dread that gripped me in the small hours, waiting for news, hoping for a miracle I already knew would not come. The song does not offer easy comfort; nor does it deny the pain of endurance. Instead, it acknowledges the struggle — the desperate search for strength when every instinct urges collapse. “I just wanna give up, but I can’t.” That was it, exactly. The exhaustion, the emotional erosion, the moments when hope felt like a cruel joke. And yet, beneath it all, an unspoken defiance: the fight continues, not because it is easy, but because surrender is unthinkable. The grief that followed those long hours ...

The Quiet Battle of Becoming

Sometimes I write selfish pages. Not out of greed, nor vanity — no. I write them as if whispering to myself in the dark, so I don’t forget. Because forgetting is easy. The noise of the world is thick, sticky, clinging to the skin and numbing the senses. And in this blur of days, of duties, of silences swallowed whole, I must remind myself of what truly matters. Life isn’t a straight line, nor a grand revelation. It is a slow unravelling, a peeling away of what isn’t yours until you find what is. Never stop fighting, they say, until you arrive at your destined place. But what is destiny if not the place where you are most yourself? And how do you know when you’ve arrived? You don’t. You just keep moving, sculpting yourself with each step, shedding skins that no longer fit. There must be an aim, a north, a whisper calling you forward. Otherwise, what is effort but exhaustion? With purpose, even suffering holds meaning. The wind scatters those who walk without direction, but t...

The Shape of Thought

Gustav Klimt once said, “Art is a line around your thoughts.” A line — thin as a whisper, trembling yet deliberate — emerges from nothingness. It does not impose itself. It does not command. It is barely there, yet it holds. It is the first breath of form, the fragile boundary between the unsaid and the spoken. Without it, thought is a flicker in the dark, a thing half-lived, dissolving before it can be known. A vision stirs. Not summoned, not controlled. It arrives unbidden — whole yet veiled, elusive yet certain. It lingers at the edge of perception, pressing gently, insistently, against the mind’s quiet. It cannot be seized outright. To reach for it is to risk shattering it; to hesitate is to watch it dissolve. And so, the line must be drawn. But not too soon. Not too rigidly. It must breathe, as thought itself breathes, as meaning unfolds. The hand moves, uncertain yet assured, guided by something beyond logic. An intelligence older than language, something that knows ...