Hot girls have stomach issues (but you don't have to)
How the mind-body connection teaches us that healing your gut and your emotional patterns are one and the same journey
Five Elements are a Taoist framework mapping the seasons, the body, and our emotional life onto five phases — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. This piece is about the Earth Element wellness through the lens of both ancient Eastern and modern Western wisdom. Check also the accompanying Earth Element piece about late summer seasonal living tips HERE.
The Chinese holistic approach to health
In modern China, hospitals often have two sides: one for Western medicine, one for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). If you arrive to such hospital complaining about excessive worry on one hand and weight gain on other, you might get directed to the traditional side and see one doctor only.
It might feel kind of refreshing to have also the emotional side of your struggles acknowleged. This doctor might also point out other parts of the pattern you didn’t see: digestive issues, brain fog, heavy limbs, sugar cravings, disordered eating, hormonal issues and a circling mind running worst-case scenarios on a loop. Maybe even attachment issues and people pleasing.
Would you have guessed these could all be part of the same pattern? Ancient Taoist texts tell us it might, and this pattern would be called Earth imbalance.
The ancient mind-body connection and the modern gut-brain axis
In the Taoism Five Element framework, Earth governs two organs: the Stomach and the Spleen. The Stomach’s job is to receive and ripen whatever comes in. The Spleen's job is to transform and transport what the Stomach receives, turning it into energy that the rest of the body can use, and transport it where it’s needed.
Here’s what we often miss: we do not only intake food, but on an emotional and energetic level, life experience and information, too. This recognition of not just the physical level results in the emotional part of the symptom list. Not just undigested food that caused a bloated belly, but also undigested experience that caused a spiraling mind. Thoughts don’t resolve into decisions. The problem you've already turned over forty times does not metabolise nor move even an inch closer to a resolution.
It’s not like Western medicine hasn’t arrived to a conclusion that bears some resemblance to the ancient Chinese one. The vagus nerve physically connects your gut and your brain, and this connection runs in both directions. This is called the gut-brain axis.
Disrupted digestion can produce brain fog and low mood. Strong emotion and chronic stress can disrupt digestion, slowing it down or speeding it up in ways that show up as the same bloating, nausea, or irregularity described on the Eastern side.
Physical affects emotional. Emotional affects physical. It’s a loop.
Your gut even runs its own semi-independent nervous system — often called the enteric nervous system — dense enough that it's sometimes referred to as the second brain. A large share of your body's serotonin, the neurotransmitter most associated with mood, is produced in the gut rather than the brain. Gut microbiome research is increasingly finding links between the diversity of the bacterial population and markers of anxiety, focus, and cognitive clarity. Some say that harmful gut bacteria could, in fact, be blamed for your sugar cravings.
The gut and the brain, or the body and the mind, were never separate systems. Therefore, could we assume, that healing one also requires and benefits from healing the other?
The loop may have its roots in childhood attachment trauma
This is the part of the framework that moved me the most, and the part I want to be most careful with, because I know it won't land the same way for everyone reading this. But for a lot of people, as I have seen with my own eyes, I suspect it will land uncomfortably close.
Earth represents home and stability. And a child, this tradition proposes, learns one of two things early on. Either that their needs — food, comfort, attention — will be met, which tends to produce a person who grows up wonderfully secure. Or a they learn that receiving isn't safe or reliable — that neither love nor lunch, because a child needs both, arrives freely, and that whatever they need, they'll have to earn, chase, or provide for themselves.
That second lesson doesn't disappear in adulthood. It becomes a pattern, a coping mechanism that was once necessary but usually proves harmful later on.
We’ve heard of attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganised. Attachment trauma stems from exactly the type of situation described above. In Taoist wisdom, something similar is defined through the balance of giving and receiving.
Someone who never had their needs met may become overly concerned that they get what they want, and as a result, quite self-centered. Earth is a central, gathering element, and when it's out of balance, everything tends to mirror back to the self: this person is a self-identified victim seeking acknowledgment and security in ways that can exhaust the people around them.
Sometimes these experiences produce self-sacrificing over-givers without any boundaries or self-care practices. Just like you and me have overwatered plants so much we suffocated it, this person is up in everyone’s business, needing to be needed, always trying to be useful to perhaps avoid their own responsibility of themselves. This person becomes a resentful victim of their own over-giving and negligence of self.
What disrupts these patterns is learning to listen to your own inner voice instead of constantly recalibrating around everyone else's expectations. It’s showing up for oneself in ways that build the kind of confidence that holds steady even when things get hard. It’s letting go of the victim mindset and cultivating a growth mindset based on the belief of abundance and a balance of giving and receiving.
Food as an emotional coping mechanism and a method of healing
We all know what is one of the most common coping mechanisms for emotional and relational challenges. It’s food.
Earth imbalance with its multitude of symptoms often includes issues with food: food sensitivities, over-and undereating, difficult relationship with food and disordered eating, which could be anything from stuffing oneself way too full of carbs and sugar to restricting the quality and quantity of what one eats.
Food can also be truly healing. A high quality diet offers us, in Western terms, high quality ingredients to build cells and power our bodily processes, and in Eastern terms, a high source of postnatal energy.
The avoid-list is nothing groundbreaking: excess sugar, refined grains and starches, saturated fat, deep-fried food, excess dairy, alcohol and caffeine, and ultraprocessed foods. Also, avoiding raw and cold foods, especially in the mornings, to keep our digestive fire strong. The Chinese will offer hot water as a remedy for almost any health challenge, far from the cold smoothie, raw salad and sugary matcha image of healthy lifestyle.
Rather, to strenghthen the Earth organs of Spleen and Stomach, we’re adviced to enjoy simply cooked, mild, warm, cooked, nourishing meals like broths, soups and stews. Whole grains, round and yellow foods from the ground, and subtle sweetness to reduce sugar cravings are preferred. Western medicine draws attention to gut health and advices to increase fibre and fermented foods, as well as increase gut microbiome diversity by enjoying a variety of vegetables.
What we eat is only part of the story. For a healthy relationship with food, Earth asks to keep ourselves grounded, unhurried and present with the thing we are currently doing, and as it is so closely tied with digestion, this especially applies to mealtimes. This also implies eating in moderation, chewing well, perhaps hopping on a short post-meal walk and avoiding heavy dinners to allow the spotlight to move from digestion into other healing and cleansing processes that go on in our bodies during the night.
And, perhaps, by unraveling both the emotional-relational patterns and our relationship with food, we can achieve what we call a balanced Earth Element. This includes a strong body with good muscle tone, beautifully flowing digestion, stable energy and the kind of endurance that takes you through doing hard things, a grounded presence, clarity of mind and a good processing capacity, as well as a nourished sense of self from which nourishment can also overflow towards the people around.
Please note that I am not a TCM doctor or a medical professional, and what I offer is to help you with pattern recognition rather than diagnosis.
If you’d like these stories and seasonal living tips in a video form, link to my YouTube piece below, with more robust symptoms lists, along with a late summer Earth Element yin yoga practice.
I teach Yin Yoga and FasciaMethod for fascia health, mobility and nervous system recovery. I also offer seasonally informed, Chinese inspired tea ceremony. If this piece resonated, do have a look at my service offering, event calendar and the contact form below.