Spring is coming and it’s time for spring cleaning. As part of your cleaning, why not clear up any stored anger? Anger lends itself to spring cleaning because in Chinese medicine, both spring and anger correspond to the element “wood”. The live and gallbladder also are associated with the wood element. The liver produces bile and a person with bilious humor tends to be irritable and bad-tempered. Someone with a lot of gall, another name for bile, has an excess in the gall bladder.
The Natural Success understanding of anger is both physical and psychological, as it is with all other health problems. Anger is like an earthquake in your being. When you are angry, your body/mind builds a fault line of tension and imbalance that needs a release. Physically you get into anger by excessive intake of animal foods or too many sweet, sugary foods, both of which produce extreme effects on the body. Psychologically, anger comes from pinning our problems in life onto something outside ourselves. We don’t want to accept responsibility for something that is not our fault. Anger also serves to cover up the hurt we often feel from being mistreated. Instead of feeling hurt, we feel resentful and hold a grudge against our assailants.
We have better things to do than to spend time resenting others! Free yourself from anger forever in the following fashion:
1. Take responsibility for everything that happens in your life. Stop placing blame altogether, and just say, “it’s up to me”.
2. Forgive. Say to yourself, “I let go of my bad feelings about this person because I refuse to allow the anger to do me any more harm.” Continue saying this until you honestly have no more resentment when you think of the “culprit”.
3. Get to the hurt underneath your anger. When you allow yourself to genuinely feel this hurt, your anger will become secondary.
4. Be more vegetarian and you will become more mellow. Too much fat from animal foods and all dairy products congest the liver.
5. Reduce intake of all sweets including artificial sweeteners. Even too much fruit or fruit juice can lead to irritability from hypoglycemia.
6. More greens will do spring cleaning in your body. Try wheatgrass, barley greens (Green Magma), sprouts and more salads. Avoid oil in salad dressings.