We have receptors and the ability to produce Morphine, Caffeine, Nicotine and many other chemicals in our minds and bodies. We can use plant alkaloids as well ie coffee. Drug companies are trying to copy many of the chemicals found in nature so the body can use them. Emotions and injuries, can block or expedite many chemicals. Our immune system is influenced by life, beliefs, and society. The understanding of this theory seems to help me. MW
Manage Your Emotions with Energy Psychology
Lisa timidly approached me after her third yoga class, visibly distressed.
"When my body gets so relaxed in class, all these painful emotions rush over me and I just want to cry. What's happening to me?"
Unknown to Lisa, she was taking the first steps to healing emotional trauma that had lodged itself within her muscles.
This agreement between her mind and body likely started in her youth, during a stressful situation that overwhelmed her.
Unconsciously, the besieged mind screams at the body: "I can't handle this! You take care of it!" So the body stuffs the energy of the emotion into its soft tissues. And there it lays, like a buried microchip, frozen and inert within chronically constricted muscles. This arrangement works well as long as the muscles remain tight. But the deep relaxation engendered by yoga postures, or a massage, can release that latent energy into circulation to once again be experienced by the conscious mind and expressed through the body.
This phenomenon is well known to massage therapists who manually ply both physical and emotional tension from their clients. What is less well known is that the body is very precise in where it stores different emotions. The energy of a specific emotion embeds itself in a precise energetic pathway called a meridian. For instance, anger and its cousins bitterness and resentment cause an energetic disruption in the heart meridian. The good news is that this buried emotional pain can be systematically, efficiently, and perhaps best of all, comfortably released from the body/mind by tapping points along that energy meridian.
This momentous discovery, an exquisite union of Eastern sensibility (that the mind, body, and emotions interact together to form the human energy field) and Western practicality is revolutionizing the field of clinical psychotherapy. Therapists are amazed to find that relief from emotional distress and trauma can come in as little as fifteen minutes. An exciting torrent of therapies based on this breakthrough treatment is rapidly evolving as therapists further refine and hone their techniques based on experience. Collectively, these treatment methods are termed Energy Psychology (EP).
As with any discovery that sharply departs from the status quo, mainstream acceptance can be slow. Some therapists and their clients are reluctant to believe that restoring emotional well-being can be so swift and non-intellectual. After all, shouldn't talk therapy be a slow process where a client discusses problems for months or even years? Surely achieving emotional freedom and higher levels of functioning can't be that easy. Consider the clinical therapist who shelved for years, without reading, the pioneering Five-Minute Phobia Cure (written by Dr. Roger Callahan) simply because she couldn't believe the title: that phobias could be cured in five minutes. Yet, when she hit a plateau with a number of clients and could budge no further, she finally gave the book some serious consideration. Now she is very active in spreading the word about this revolutionary technique that is spinning off in a myriad of directions.
Indeed, EP is attracting keen interest from a wide range of health-care professionals. The annual conferences are brimming with hybrid vigor due to a free exchange of ideas between naturopathic physicians, physical therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, medical professionals, Touch for Health practitioners, counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists, massage therapists, pain management specialists and more. Each year new spin-offs are developed, refined and shared with others.
It's not necessary to understand the underlying dynamics for the process to be successful. But some people won't believe it will work until they comprehend how. So in a very brief nutshell: In essence, emotions are energy-in-motion, with each type of emotion vibrating at a different speed and altering the chemical makeup of the body/mind in different ways. Some emotions, like contentment or joy, produce hormones that we register in our minds and bodies as pleasant when they stimulate our nerve receptors. Others, like anxiety and worry, produce substances that we categorize as unpleasant. When we remove the firestorm of a disruptive emotional memory, we eliminate the manufacturer of the chemical hormones we experience as painful. This frees the body/mind system to recalibrate itself by producing "feel good" hormones called endorphins.
This scientifically verifiable link between emotions, mind and physical body lies at the heart of EP. According to Dr. Candace Pert, author of the seminal book, Molecules of Emotion, our physiology is literally run by our emotions. That is, emotions produce concrete, material chemical reactions coursing everywhere within the body. For instance, a happy mood can be described as both an abstract feeling and the physical molecule of the hormone serotonin.
And the knife cuts both ways: these chemicals change our moods just as our frame of mind will produce these chemicals. As Dr. Deepak Chopra describes in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, the mere suggestion of potential job loss can initiate a profound chain reaction of physical change in the body: sadness floods the body as serotonin levels drop; the brain's output of neurotransmitters becomes depleted; the sleep cycle is interrupted; neuropeptide receptors on the outer surface of the skin cells become distorted; and platelet cells in the blood become stickier and more prone to clump. Even tears of anxiety contain different chemical traces than tears of joy.
Most significantly, this fresh knowledge opens a vast storehouse of tools that each individual can use on themselves to enhance personal health on all levels: mental, emotional, physical and energetic. We now have available to us a range of simple techniques that effectively strengthen the autoimmune system, alleviate depression, increase energy levels and restore holistic balance. For free. For more information, visit
http://www.energypsych.org.
By Deborah Shields