Difficult digestions

Published on Digestive system.

Difficult digestions have to do with the stomach

Stomach

Published on Digestive system.

The stomach makes up the fourth segment of the digestive tube. It stores recently eaten food and takes it down to the duodenum.

Indigestion and difficult digestions have to do with the stomach.

It belongs to the earth element of the five elements of eastern philosophy.

The stomach’s first function is to serve as a recipient, so we may say that it represents the capacity for hospitality towards another person. To receive implies abnegation, passivity, and surrender. In this perspective, the stomach is a yin pole, feminine.

The stomach’s second function, this one more masculine, more yang, is to produce acids that attack, corrode, and decompose the food, since the stomach is the organ in charge of digesting matter in the first instance. So, the stomach digests the person’s feelings and emotions.

So stomach problems represent, first of all, a difficulty in allowing oneself to experience feelings and emotions, and, secondly, a great difficulty to digest them.

In the stomach resides the conflict of not being able to digest the chunk (digest what happened to me), whether real or virtual.

When the emotional conflict is very active, the stomach needs more gastric fluid to digest better. The person remains mulling over what others did to him. Here the emotional tension is of the type: “You bastard, I can’t even digest it!” The stomach patient does not like confrontations. His stomach calls for baby food.

The stomach patient cannot deal with his anger, his emotional wear, either to turn it into a verbal aggression or simply to verbalize the emotion he feels. Emotion comes from ex-movere, which means to move out. The stomach patient finds himself forced to swallow his temper, his rage. Literally, he swallows bile and then feels the stomach acids in the form of heartburn (dyspepsia) because, to digest all this, the stomach must produce much more gastric acid. Gastric secretion is directly associated to the mind.

This suppressed emotions that the stomach patient deals poorly with are associated to material problems, professional problems, money issues, legal and educational matters. Stomach problems are very much down to earth. They have much to do with a person’s roots and essence (work, home, Mother, place where he lives, and money). A burp (see Aerogastria) is a release of air, of stomach tension, and it gives relief. An ulcer is also associated to roots, but exclusively with the relationship aspect. It is associated to the couple and the home.

The person who does not get along with one of the people he lives with, constantly feels that he cannot digest the tensions he feels towards that person. Yet, for whatever reason, he continues to live with that person (either because his beliefs do not allow him to leave or because he does not have the material possibility, or maturity, to leave that environment) and is continuously forced to face that person. He may well develop an ulcer as a result. In the beginning, when the tension is active, the person feels a stinging pain in the stomach and later he bleeds.

The ulcer results from the continuous aggression that the person creates against himself by fearing to effectively confront others or to allow himself to get out or to leave. The ulcer is directly associated to relationships. It is as if the body was saying that it needs more space to digest and then proceeds to make a hole (the ulcer).

© Copyright by Luís Martins Simões, developed by RUPEAL