If you have ever started to follow any form of detox programme you may have come up against some old, perhaps painful or intractable emotions. You may have been surprised by their existence, or by the energy with which they reminded you of their existence. You may have got thinking about the changes you want and need to make in your life, when we are eager to make positive changes it is easy to focus upon all the negative things wrong in our life, but it is important to remember that the desire for change is the first step and if you recognise the need for change and want to take decisive action towards manifesting positive change you are ready to being your journey of Emotional Detox.
Before going any further it is important to understand why it is imperative to our health and wellbeing to release negative emotions. Like the intestines, the body is a remarkable storage device for unprocessed emotions and thoughts. As explained earlier negative emotions are held within the body not the mind and most people spend a lifetime depositing unresolved emotional issues throughout the body; in fact, it is not only painful experiences that are stored; all sorts of memories get lodged in the body at cellular level.
Whilst the body is almost endlessly accommodating in this coping strategy, eventually, it runs out of space, or the strain of this load becomes too big a burden. Then the price comes due for your long-term emotional storage: your unresolved, stored emotions become toxic to the body and will start to make you physically ill. In our Emotional Detox Courses, we fully explore the contribution of unresolved emotional issues to body-wide toxicity, and provides a strategy for clarifying and dissolving this subtler level of toxicity helping you cleanse yourself of deep-rooted negative emotions at cellular level, giving you peace from these past events releasing any negative emotions in relation to what happened. However, for the purposes of this taster course let’s take a brief look at how unresolved emotions can contribute to illness.
Emotional issues carry a powerful charge capable of affecting your biology in a profound and often undesirable way, for example, unresolved emotional issues are often associated with ill health, stress, and dysfunction.
Dr. John Diamond, M.D., a homeopathic physician explains that he frequently sees strong emotions, if left unaddressed, manifesting as body symptoms, such as excessive menstrual bleeding and gynaecological dysfunctions. The fact of the matter is that emotions are an energy that has to go somewhere, have to be expressed and released otherwise they fester within us and manifest problems in our physical bodies.
According to Dr. Diamond, a uterine fibroid is about emotional suppression relating to either sexuality or relationships with men; the heavy bleeding it causes is often associated with prolonged internalised sadness and withheld emotions, and an ovarian cyst can be correlated with a history of sexual abuse.
It is not just women that are ailed by negative emotions manifesting into physical symptoms; unexpressed, trapped, negative emotions can contribute to the emergence of conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, according to board-certified rheumatologist Norman Levin, M.D., who practices in the U.S.A. who says that no one gets a chronic illness out of the blue, instead there are always emotional and psychological factors involved in the development of an illness. “Patients need to be encouraged to find the meaning in their health crisis,” Dr. Levin notes. Echoing Dr. Diamond’s observation, he adds: “The body speaks its own language, and often illnesses affecting different parts of the body are associated with certain emotional states.” For example, Dr. Levin often finds that unexpressed anger or resentment underlie the emergence of arthritis; the arthritis is a physical manifestation or expression of those emotions, he says.
The longer negative emotions remain trapped within the body unaddressed the more toxic they become affecting the body’s structure, physiology, and biochemistry. Carrying the burden of negative emotions around with you can feel like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders and you will begin to reflect this in your physical posture and psychological outlook- shoulders will respond and hurt accordingly.
Think of all the trapped or unresolved anger, fear, resentment, guilt or whatever the emotionally charged issue might be, acting as free radicals in the body, as toxic agents capable of undermining physiological structures and processes just as powerfully and effectively as mercury, arsenic, polonium or any other toxic substance known to man. The original emotion is not the problem it is that stuck, emotions become a physiological problem for the body. Emotions are energy in motion and so when trapped their powerful energy charge starts to work negatively on the body.
All emotions are healthy because they are what tie the mind and body together, explains Candace Pert, Ph.D., in Molecules of Emotion. But they need to be expressed and let go of so they don’t fester, build, or escalate uncontrollably. When they are not expressed, and instead are repressed, this sets up a “dis-integrity” within the body, causing it to act at cross-purposes with being a unified whole organism. This repression generates stress that leads to blockages and an insufficient flow of “peptide signals to maintain function at the cellular level.” This blocked flow creates the conditions of weakened function and immunity that can precipitate disease, says Dr. Pert.
The peptide signals are modes of communication between the biochemicals of emotion, Dr. Pert explains. Emotional biochemistry consists of neuropeptides (key brain chemicals that translate thoughts and feelings into biochemical and physiological responses) and their receptors. Dr. Pert’s research has established that emotions are equal players in the health or illness of the body, as considerable in their influence as chemicals, toxic substances, or other material biological substances. The neuropeptides are the “substrates of emotion,” in continuous communication with the immune system and its cells. Emotions have a “cellular signal” that is involved in translating emotional and mental information into physical reality, “literally transforming mind into matter.”
In fact, Dr. Pert says our brains are not really just in our skulls; they are mobile brains, with communication networks throughout the body. Intelligent information travels throughout the network, which includes the hormonal, gastrointestinal, immune, and central nervous systems. According to this model, as we think and feel, so do our molecules act. Emotions are part of our cellular consciousness because every cell has receptors that are conduits for emotional energy. First, the emotions happen, then the neuropeptides are released. The fact that information flows throughout the mobile brain network demonstrates that “the body is the actual outward manifestation, in physical space, of the mind.”
