Are you Manifesting Your Beauty from the Inside Out?

Have you ever met someone who just glows from the inside out and yet it has little or nothing to do with his or her physical appearance? In Oriental Medicine, dating back to Taoism, this inner radiance is described as “Bright Shen or Significant Shen”, meaning Bright Spirit. These individuals are lit from within and have no problem expressing through their eyes.

How do we have access to our beauty? We balance our mind and our emotions which in turn affects our health and our overall radiance.

Chinese medicine has used face and body reading as a way to access what is going on inside the body and the mind. According to Lillian Bridges in Face Reading in Chinese Medicine, “The ancient Chinese considered the control of the five emotions based on the five elements to be key to inner and outer beauty and health and vitality ( p169).” These five emotions were called the rebels of the body and need to be kept under control; fear from the kidneys, anger from the liver, joy from the heart, worry from the spleen/stomach, and sorrow or grief from the lungs. All of these emotions are necessary and have value when used in balance; however both overuse and underused of these basic emotions can cause harm to the organ to which they belong.

Each of these major emotions also affects the face in specific ways, for example, dark circles under the eyes can indicate depletion in the kidneys as a result of overuse of fear. When anger is overused it can create deep lines between the eyebrows. Worry can cause the chi to stagnate causing unclear thinking and can also cause incomplete digestion. The eyes appear to have a lost look, glazed or unfocused. Too much excitement in the emotions can lead to chronic redness in neck, throat and face. Grief can show as a deadness of the shen, where the eyes do not sparkle.

Feeling, expressing, or repressing these emotions all have effects on the body and eventually on the face affecting our overall beauty. The Chinese modalities use shiatsu (finger pressure or acupressure on key points of the face and the body) to unblock or balance the energy of the organ system as well as acupuncture. Other modalities used today to balance the emotions are aromatherapy based on the five elements, as well as diet based on the five tastes to balance the five emotions. In upcoming articles, we will be examining the modalities and tools we use to nurture and encourage the manifestation of beauty by exploring the five elements in more depth as it pertains to our physical energy of our organs, how it out pictures physically on the face, and how we can be the one to determine our well-being on all levels, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

This article was written by Deborah Thum, as a patient education resource for The Center For True Harmony Wellness and Medicine. Edited and revised by Sherry VanGoethem, Dr.Christine Brass-Jones OBGYN, and Dr. Denise Quance Grobe N.D. If you have any questions or comments contact the office at (480) 539-6646 or through email at info@trueharmonywellness.com