Emotional health

In the movie, Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks plays a man who dies suddenly in a car accident. He ends up in a way station before his fate is decided. In order to move on spiritually, he has to review his life in court, defending the decisions he made during his time on earth. Each vignette from his life illustrated a choice that wasn’t true to his real wishes.

How many times a week do we do things we don’t really want to do? Often we do things because we think we don’t have another choice. Each time we do something we don’t want to do or don’t like, our body has an emotional response. Many times we are so used to doing things that way, we don’t even notice.

Everything we do has energy. When we do something we don’t want no matter how small, our bodies register it as an imbalance. Ignoring emotions and continuously doing things we don’t want to do leads to chronic imbalance in energy. Eventually the body won’t be able to compensate leading it to create illness.

The annual winter flu is one way of clearing a lot of little stuff from our daily lives out of the body. You can look at piles of mucous coming out of many orifices as a release of lots of stress.  After the flu you often feel exhausted, but you also feel cleansed-as though you’re starting with a clean slate.

If you find that you have a medical problem for which you have tried all kinds of treatment without significant success, explore the emotional aspect. Carrie has multiple sclerosis, cancer, and sleep problems. She takes forty different supplements, several medications, had chemo, radiation, and surgery. She has seen 7 different doctors, has regular acupuncture, and still doesn’t feel well. You might assume all that mix of pills could lead to her not feeling well, but the bigger picture is that in spite of all the physical treatments and lifestyle changes, she hasn’t explored her emotional situation. When she begins to take that apart, she finds that she is angry with everything. Her marriage is not what she wanted, her career is unsatisfying, and she is busy taking care of her very demanding ailing parents.

Carrie has a hard time exercising because she’s exhausted and her brain is so busy. I suggested she begin by walking a little bit each day, while focusing on all the things that make her angry. She can use her breath and the physical movement of exercise to consciously release her emotions so they don’t have to be stuck in her body anymore.

In my last column I spoke of splitting the various components of physical medical care, lifestyle, and emotions in a 20/30/50 percent pattern. The emotions are like Pandora’s Box of troubles; we’ve stuffed them away and avoided them for so long they feel impossible to deal with. Therapy can help you uncover the traumas but it doesn’t necessarily help you heal. Healing comes through allowing yourself to experience them without needing to harm someone else while doing it.