In the spring we considered blood quality and emotions. You don’t have to think a lot about these things to practice them. Everyone knows, consciously or unconsciously, how to change their blood in order to affect their emotions. For example, we all have certain foods and drinks we rely on to create some type of emotional response. If you want to go out and have a romantic meal, you know what type of food, what type of restaurant, you are going to choose because automatically you know that when you start to eat or drink certain things, you start to feel a certain way! There are certain foods on which we rely for that. That’s amore!

If we want to quickly pick up our energy and be more outgoing, there are certain other foods we will choose. If we plan a party, there are certain traditionally accepted snacks we know will make people more social and active. They will talk more and be chatty and feel happier from eating these foods. Doritos were not an accident.

If we don’t want to face something that is coming up, we have other foods we will choose. They are more dulling and block us from that experience. These are things everyone knows. At the same time, If you feel happy, your blood starts to become more alkaline. If you laugh this is also true. Everyone knows that laughter is the best medicine! When we take certain foods, we create our blood. These foods generate certain emotions, which in effect are helping to return our blood to balance.

For example, if you take sweets, for a while you feel more happy, and your blood is more excessive. Then through that happiness, that laughter and activity, you are helping your blood return to normal. On the other hand, if you feel or experience some negative emotion, you change your blood. If you have a shock about something, instantly your blood starts to turn acid. If you get angry, it makes your blood more acidic. It makes your blood boil!

Happy and unhappy emotions have the effect of either improving or weakening the quality of our blood so please go watch a funny movie! For your health.

\In macrobiotics we look at illness as a developmental progression. The first major stage, which is not really an illness itself in many cases, is our blood starting to become imbalanced. Our blood, which has hemoglobin, iron containing protein at the center, is important for maintaining our direction in life. When our blood quality is strong, it is easier to maintain a good direction. When our blood quality starts to become weaker, it is easier to lose our direction. Also, our sensitivity is affected. Once we have a disorder with our blood, which includes allergies and skin diseases, we become much more emotional than we were before and emotional sensitivity starts to change. We start to become more sensitive, overly sensitive, or start to lack sensitivity in certain areas. It can go from one extreme or the other.

From there, illness passes to the next level, emotional disorders. Here, emotional imbalances, which started on a previous level of blood, start to become more fixed or deeper. This then becomes our state of being, where we have free-floating fears or anxieties and become more depressive or angered. Our view of life or our approach to life starts at this point to be affected, in the area of so-called emotional disorders. Finally, from emotional disorders, we develop organ or gland problems. This is the area where most modern problems fall, heart disease as well as diabetes and chronic hypoglycemia. Intermittent hypoglycemia we can classify on the level of blood.

It is not by accident that emotions are between our blood quality and our organs or gland quality. Emotions play a kind of balancing or harmonizing role in our lives. We will look at this more next week.