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Emotional Anatomy: Your Issues are in your Tissues


Have you ever wondered how much impact your mind, thoughts, and words have on your health?


When you get a pain in the neck, is it really your cervical spine, your neck muscles, or stuck emotions? Sayings such as being broken-hearted…break a leg…makes my blood boil…tear your hair out… lump in my throat…get off my back… and my favorite from Groucho Marx, “whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.”


These are not just common sayings; they have metaphysical meanings that can impact the body. Your body not only digests meals but also words, thoughts, and information. What are you feeding yourself? How do you digest life?


Back in my 20’s when my mom was dying, I read Louise Hay’s book “You can Heal Your Life” and Dr. Bernie Siegel’s book “Love, Medicine and Miracles.” Both books explored the powerful role the mind can play in our health. I hoped they contained the insight that would help my mom in the dying process, but they actually changed my view about the body and illness as well as taking personal responsibility for my mental and emotional worlds.


“Every emotion is keyed into some bodily location, and taken all together, they form the emotional body.”

~ Deepak Chopra


E = MC2

Modern Physics tells us that energy is matter multiplied by the speed of light squared. Matter is super condensed energy; it’s a really big number how much energy is stored in matter. Everything we see that appears to be solid is nothing more than energy fields. Healing is not so much a function of matter as it is of energy.


The Latin derivative for the word emotion, “emotere”, literally means energy in motion. All emotions are natural and healthy, the unhealthy part of emotions is when we try to settle them and then we attach our mind to them. Emotions are like water and air; they flow and NEED NOT be contained.


In 1985, Stanley Keleman wrote Emotional Anatomy: The Structure of Experience. Stanley says that people do not always think of the body as the source of our psychology, emotions, and even values.


Mark Lamm believes “that the Bio-Computer we call our body stores dysfunctional information as psychological, emotional and physical trauma within connective tissue. Inside our computer body is a grid system, which could be compared to a circuit board. At different locations in this circuit board of connective tissue is the storage of trauma memory thus the term emotional anatomy.”


He says, “since the body is a total functioning unit these psycho-emotional states affect and interact with each other to become complex or synthesized. The trauma can be transgenerational (the transference of ancestral patterns) or present lifetime, which becomes the reference (frequency and information) to shape our belief and responses. Think of the dysfunction from both the mother’s and father’s genealogical lines as your microchip.”


Ayurveda, the sister Science to Yoga, believes that problems in the Luminous Energy Field (LEF) manifest in the physical body later. This tradition recognizes the whole system – body, mind & spirit. And all three equally influence our health.


Our physical bodies respond to what’s happening to our energy system, our emotions (consciousness), our thoughts, and our spiritual experience. And each trauma, recorded in the body, has an emotional counterpart experienced and stored at the moment.


According to Ayurveda, the body is a crystallization of the mind. And mental toxins and unresolved emotions can lead to disease. For example, unresolved anger can accumulate in the liver and impair its functioning, unprocessed grief can disturb the lungs, and chronic anxiety can upset the health of the colon.


Every emotion has a purpose. For instance, anger tends to make you assertive and motivates you to get up and do something to change an unhealthy situation. Fear heightens all your senses to a threat preparing you for fight, flight or freeze. Grief is a necessary release of energy from deep mental anguish. Pain alerts you to something that is harmful to you.


We suppress emotions because we judge them as wrong. In doing so, we limit ourselves by dropping into those lower emotions. Painful feelings tell us that we are descending into belief systems that are destructive. They let us know we are experiencing emotional discomfort and inner conflict. They indicate something is not flowing.


“When you shut down emotion, you’re also affecting your immune system, your nervous system. So, the repression of emotion, which is a survival strategy, then becomes a source of physiological illness later on.”

~ Gabor Mate


Gigi Young describes the anatomy of the emotion body: “Fear and misunderstandings about lower emotions keep us subject to our emotional body when we could be participating with it, using its feedback to heal and manifest what we desire. Often, we find ourselves powerless, paralyzed, exhausted and waterlogged; our thoughts and actions completely tainted by difficult emotions. When this occurs, it is telling us something very important about how we are relating to our emotional feedback system. It tells us there is something that we are missing. “


Gigi says, “suppression wreaks havoc in our life. When we believe (consciously or unconsciously) that we are victims of our emotions we are also affirming that we are not the creators of our reality. We don’t want to shine the light into our dark spots and potentially be forced to change.”


The body talks & communicates, providing information and revealing what is going on inside of us emotionally. For example, if you look at older people, it’s easy to read their lifetime emotional habits. A person who habitually frowns, develops lines in their face that mirror that give them a perpetual “sour” look. In contrast, a positive, happy person will have “Crow’s Feet” lines by their eyes and mouth that reveal their more joyful nature.


The Issues are in your Tissues

The human body is beautiful, and it has the capacity potential to erase this genetic storehouse of recorded insult and injury. Understanding our archetypal patterns can break the victim cycle of disempowerment.


Tracking energy provides insights to patterns of energy and how the emotions are stored in the organs of the body – specifically the endocrine glands.


Peter Aziz talks about the 7 Levels of Emotional Healing in his “Ultimate Healing Handbook.” He says, “Every suppressed experience, thought or emotion is stored as a crystal in every DNA molecule in the body. Different emotions will be stored in different organs in the body, and the function of these organs is impaired by the crystallization.”


He further explains: “Enthusiasm resonates with the pineal gland. When we lack enthusiasm, the pineal gland begins to calcify. Pain is basically a separation, which occurs when things disagree with our judgement of how they should be. Pain is stored in the pituitary gland. When we resist further, we get angry, and anger is stored in the thyroid gland. When we resist anger, we become fearful that things will continue to go against us, and fear is stored in the thymus. Resisting fear, we become victims, feeling that the world is against us, and we experience grief, which is stored in the adrenals, pancreas and solar plexus. When we resist grief, we give up, and become hopeless and apathetic, and this is stored in the spleen. Hopelessness often produces a death wish. Every terminal illness will have a death wish stored in the spleen. Finally, we numb out completely and suppress all the emotions into unconsciousness. Numbness is stored in the gonads (sexual organs). All unconscious experiences, including drugs, anaesthetics, and hypnosis are stored here. Every physical weakness, and every illness, is related to a particular pattern of suppressed emotions, which tends to damage the body.”


The emotions and associated organs in which they are stored can be summarized as:

  1. Gonads – unconsciousness, anesthesia, drugs, entities

  2. Spleen – apathy, failure patterns, giving up, limited thinking, hopelessness, shame

  3. Adrenal, Solar Plexus, and Pancreas – grief, victim pattern

  4. Thymus – fear, shame

  5. Thyroid – anger, guilt, control issues

  6. Pituitary – pain, separation issues

  7. Pineal – enthusiasm, experience of oneness

Catherine Carrigan says, “You may not realize how emotional your body really is until you start to connect the relative ease or discomfort you have been experiencing with the emotions you have been feeling.”


Carrigan continues, “As you make the connection between the chronic muscle pain and the emotional suffering you have been experiencing, you can begin to contemplate how to unwind some of these patterns.” This is why yoga, Somatics, and body rolling are so effective in breaking up unhealthy holding patterns in our body. Try out my tennis ball class here.


Our emotional body is our inner feedback system to make us aware of where we stand in relation to our heart and soul. Healthy emotionality is to feel (whatever you are feeling) and let flow, let go. Allow yourself to experience every possible emotion for what it is - a brief and temporary state of being. By letting go and observing the emotion as something we are feeling rather than something that we are, we are able to welcome it and then let it go. This process of healing by progressively releasing the suppressed emotions.


We simply need to acknowledge what we are feeling, we don’t need to completely decode it or understand precisely why we feel it. My spirit guides frequently remind me “You don’t need to know.” We are not designed to understand everything within our conscious mind (ego). Sometimes we just need to have trust and faith in the process.


If we are willing to take an honest look at ourselves, we can learn how we hold emotions in our bodies. By acknowledging our feelings, we are bringing attention to a wound that needs to be healed. This is how emotions become tools to heal and connect. Our healing power is rooted in holding light in areas that are dark or painful. This transforms wounds into wisdom, and the healing begins.


We live in a world of duality. Everything operates in the principle of opposites: yin-yang, left-right, up-down, forward-backward, within-without, masculine-feminine, as above, so below. Between these opposites is balance or equilibrium, the center of balance.


Ralph Waldo Emerson talks about the Holographic Body – the 3 forces (contractions, expansion, equilibrium) and how they affect the different aspects of the body (physical, emotional, energetic). We need to move our minds away from certain unhealthy patterns we are consciously or unconsciously engaging in.


We know that on the Scale of Consciousness, peace, gratitude, and other loving emotions most resonant with our soul and therefore enable the healing, guidance, and transmutation of our pain. High vibration emotions are the highway to healing. We need to start seeing loving emotions as nourishment because they allow us to feel our Soul. Holding loving emotions such as gratitude, acceptance, peace, and appreciation is quite literally holding light. When we do this regularly, we finally become conscious participants in our expansion and evolution.


I am worth healing. I am worth the time it takes to learn how to nourish myself. I love you, body.
~ Louise Hay

Our earth journey is to learn of love and how to handle our own states of consciousness (emotions). In August’s musings, I described that each chakra is a step between matter and Consciousness and the evolution of our spiritual dimension. If there is dis-ease in the body, look for the closest chakra (which is intimately connected to an organ/gland) and start there. What energetic emotion is physically manifesting?


Our first chakra is our survival center and our physical identity; it’s our root to the earth. The second chakra is our creativity center and emotional identity; it’s our gut feelings. The third chakra is our power center and the seat of our ego identity. Being fearful of our voice can show up in the throat chakra, our communication center, and the inability to express ourselves. Here is an image of the emotional energy centers of the body and this one shows the emotional anatomy of the chakras.


The fourth chakra is our heart center and social identity. The heart is a powerhouse organ that is intimately connected to every cell and tissue throughout the body. Even our physical form began from those very first cells that divided into our heart. No other organ shares that level of integration with the entire body. Studies show that our heart center can radiate 5,000 to 6,000 times more energy than the brain itself. How amazing and power this center is. That’s why I start and end my yoga practice focused here because everything returns to this sacred center – the soul chamber & infinity spark.


The Channel of the mind is rooted in the heart.


The heart center is said to be the very seat of our emotional experience, home to our purest form of self. And the heart chakra (anahata) is associated with our capacity for unconditional love. Here is where we anchor our energy in the divine love light. An empowered 4th chakra escorts us to spiritual maturity. Reminding us that we come from unconditional love. We are infinite and timeless. Eternal and immortal.


95% of people rely on the outside world. They depend on the external environment for energy survival. Emotionally deprived, they feed on low vibes and become “slaves” of the system.


Emotions control the mind-body complex. All emotions are valuable especially when we experience them from a place of understanding that we are Divine beings. One who uses meditation & imagination to balance the chakras and the LEF is emotionally satisfied and is self-energized.


Just about everybody in the modern world has to deal with some sort of stress. Health professionals have placed stress as an underlying factor in a wide range of diseases. Not only can you balance the chakra centers via meditation, you can also use sound.


The Taoist way of dealing with stress is to perform the Six Healing Sounds. In ancient times when they sat quietly and listened inwardly, they became aware of different inner sounds and discovered that each organ had its own sound. Later they called them the 6 Healing Sounds.


Negative emotions are stored in the body’s organs. Over time, the accumulation of the negativity erodes the organs health and effects the person’s disposition. When Taoists confront negative emotional energy, rather than seeking to destroy it or to dump it out, they use techniques to easily transform this sick energy into positive, loving, healing light energy thus energizing vital life-force. Practiced daily, they recycle more and more negative energy. Grandmaster Mantak Chia shows you how to work with the Six Healing Sounds in this video.


My challenge for you is when a negative thought enters your mind, think 3 positive ones. Work with the Scale of Consciousness. Meditate on balancing your chakras. Train yourself with the Six Healing Sound practice. Engulf the mind with imagination and with high vibe emotions. Close your eyes and make it happen! Aho. So bet it.

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