I am sure that you have heard of the brain-gut connection. Basically, they say that the nervous system in the gut communicates with the brain: the mental health affects your digestion and vice versa.
Eastern Medicine delves into the topic a little more and assigns each organ to an emotion. For example, the topic of today, the lungs are associated with sadness. Empirically, it is known that someone who has experienced a great deal of sadness presents with a weak voice, shallow breaths, and rounded shoulders and upper back, which are also the signs of Lung deficiency. The opposite is also possible in that one tends toward sadness because of the weakness of the lungs.
When the lungs are healthy, they support the functions of 魄 (Haku in Japanese and Po in Chinese). It is difficult to translate Haku because there is no contemporary equivalence. If you can divide the concept of “spirit” into the ethereal and the corporeal, this is the corporeal aspect of the spirit.
What this means in real life is that abundant Haku makes you stand tall with the open chest, and your voice is strong with confidence. I think Haku is the physical manifestations of “being spirited”, and the lungs are responsible for it. On the side note (speaking of the brain-gut connection), the Lung channel is connected to the large intestines via the internal pathway.
*Individual results may vary.
