This past week, I received an email from a reader of this blog:
“Been reading your blog all afternoon for inspiration! Just sat here thinking it maybe a good idea to write a blog for idiots like me that think healing is all physical and supplements? I now know it’s emotional but I just wonder how many people who read your blog would benefit from this topic!!”
Thank you for asking, dear reader. Here is your answer!
As I discuss in my book, What Is Healing? Awaken Your Intuitive Power for Health and Happiness, an Amazon Number 1 best-seller that currently has 22 five-star reviews, there are actually five layers of YOU according to holistic alternative medicine:
- The physical body. You know what this is – your bones, organs, blood, muscles, skin, etc.
- Your energy body. This includes the acupuncture meridians, your breath and your chakras.
- Your emotional body. We’ll get to this in a moment!
- Your mental body. This includes all your thoughts and beliefs. Whether these beliefs and thoughts are true or untrue doesn’t actually matter because they rule you anyway.
- Your spiritual body. This is the part of you beyond all space and time.
Why is it so important to clear your emotions?
- Emotions can shut down literally any physiological process. I mean ANYTHING! If you don’t believe me, just watch what happens when you think of something stressful. I had to go to the bank on Friday afternoon to sort out not just one but two issues. I kept having to remind myself to breathe! I resolved to keep a positive attitude and ended up with the nicest branch manager who sat with me as I got to the solution.
- Emotions are actually energy. When these emotions are stuck in our body in an unresolved state, we may feel pain, discomfort, fatigue or malaise. If you think the problem is just a pain in your elbow, you can fix your elbow and lo and behold, all of a sudden you have a pain in your lower back. You fix your elbow and lower back and all of a sudden you break out in a skin rash all over your body. You fix your elbow, your lower back and you are taking five or six different remedies for your skin and you wonder when this will ever end.
- If I am doing a healing – whether it’s your elbow, your lower back or for your head-to-toe skin rash – I always find the emotions because I recognize that until and unless you clear the emotions that started the problem in the first place you will continue to chase good health. The energy of those unresolved emotions will just morph into a new problem.
- Failure to understand that emotions are an integral part of your total and complete healing will lead to a failure to become completely healthy. Surely you know dozens of health nuts who juice, eat gluten-free, take loads of supplements and exercise regularly who continue to be bogged down by one ailment after another and live in a constant state of fatigue, wandering from doctor to doctor because they haven’t actually addressed the core issues. Personally I am a health nut who juices, eats gluten-free, takes plenty of supplements and exercises regularly AND I continue to do my emotional work. A guest who came to visit recently had this to say about me: “I get tired just watching you.” I have tons of energy because I have resolved core emotional issues AND I keep dealing with my emotions as they arise.
- There are three inevitable aspects of your life: death, taxes and emotions. One day even us health nuts are going to end up lying on a cold metal slab. It doesn’t matter what my opinion is of the Internal Revenue Service, the Georgia Department of Revenue or the city of Atlanta Tax Assessor, they all want a part of me. As long as you are living, you will continue to have emotional reactions to everything that happens to you – good and bad, conscious and unconscious. I know actual people who have gone on 10-day meditation retreats to try to solve their problems, only to be told by the Buddhist monks that their problem is their attitude! We can meditate and calm our emotions, but they will still be there until we actually resolve them.
Identifying and clearing the emotions behind a dis-ease is part of what I do in literally every healing.
Yes, I work with food and every kind of natural supplement you can think of. I am holding in mind a client I am currently working with who had severe ulcerative colitis. Her constant bloody diarrhea and vomiting were not stopped by steroid drugs but have come to a complete halt due to nutrition and supplements. Now we are working on resolving the emotions that continue to erupt and that were the original cause.
She has gotten the message that dealing with her emotions is EQUALLY important to eating well.
Other clients I have worked with who have chronic issues such as fibromyalgia take longer to get well precisely because they have so many buried, unresolved and unexamined emotional issues. The sooner they embrace this fact, the faster they get well.
In fact, clearing emotions is SO important, identifying which emotions need to be cleared is step number two after step number one – identifying and clarifying the goal in the first place.
If you have emotions, fear not, so does everybody else. You’re just human after all!
What is healing? Healing happens when we acknowledge and face all parts of ourself – not just the physical body but also our energy, our emotions, our thoughts and beliefs and our soul.
