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by Laing Z. Matthews (Author)
Healing the Spleen - Spiritual Remedies for Worry and Digestive Illness
(The Healing Handbooks - Volume 5)
When the mind won't stop spinning and the body forgets how to rest, the Earth within us begins to starve.
Worry consumes what nourishment should restore. The stomach tightens, the breath shortens, and life's sweetness turns to fatigue.
This book offers a way home.
Drawing from the timeless wisdom of Daoist medicine, Healing the Spleen reveals how trust, rhythm, and gratitude restore the body's center of gravity - the Spleen and Stomach, the alchemical kitchen of life. In this gentle and practical guide, spiritual insight meets simple daily practice to heal both digestion and the anxious heart that drives it.
Each chapter offers grounded teachings, breathing exercises, and ritual reflections designed to re-train the nervous system through the Daoist element of Earth - the medicine of nourishment, empathy, and stability.
Through poetic instruction and modern understanding, readers learn how to:
Transform overthinking into calm presence.
Restore appetite and energy by aligning with natural rhythm.
Rebuild trust in the body's intelligence.
Create sacred routines around meals and rest.
Awaken gratitude as a spiritual nutrient.
You'll explore the Five Element insight that each organ mirrors a virtue: Fire heals through joy, Metal through release, Water through stillness, Wood through growth - and Earth through trust.
In these pages, you'll find breathing patterns that calm the digestive fire, a rice offering ritual that transforms anxiety into grounded faith, and a 21-day rhythm for rebuilding peace through nourishment and mindful eating. The tone is warm, simple, and deeply human - written not as doctrine, but as companionship for those who have been tired for too long.
This is not a medical manual. It is a devotional handbook for returning to the body as home.
Each exercise, affirmation, and meditation is a quiet invitation to remember what Daoists call "the center" the still point between thought and breath, where healing unfolds naturally.
By the final pages, worry has softened into trust. The reader no longer chases healing; they embody it. Meals become prayer, digestion becomes meditation, and ordinary life turns sacred again.
Mantra: "Tu Jing, Yi Ning - May the Earth within me rest and renew."
Virtue: TrustShadow: WorryElement: Earth
Perfect for readers of The Body Keeps the Score, You Are the Placebo, or The Tao of Healing, this volume bridges science and spirit, helping modern seekers reconnect with the oldest wisdom of all - that the body already knows how to heal when the mind learns how to trust.
About the Series:
The Healing Handbooks present fifteen small, beautiful volumes uniting classical energy medicine and spiritual psychology. Each focuses on one organ and one virtue - Heart and joy, Lung and faith, Liver and forgiveness, Kidney and courage, Spleen and trust - guiding readers toward balance through body, breath, and soul.
Whether read as daily meditation or practical therapy, each book is a medicine for modern life: simple, poetic, and timeless.
