Emotional Cleansing
Self-Healing: Targeting the Multiple Bodies
This article appears courtesy of Healing Headquarters www.healinghq.com.
For many of us, due to our cultural upbringing, the role of emotions in our lives has been severely downplayed. Many of us have received the message that our emotions are inappropriate, even shameful. Faced with situation after situation of grief, heartbreak, violation or loss, we have not been given permission to feel and express our emotions and so we’ve pushed them deep down into the recesses of our psyche. This behavior pattern, left unchecked, will continue long into adulthood; practitioners in the healing arts are desperately trying to awaken people to the severe health costs of unprocessed emotional history.
Western medicine is slowly recognizing the connection between unprocessed emotion and illness, but in general, is still reluctant to accept the wisdom found in older medical systems, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, which has been treating the underlying psycho-emotional causes of disease for 5,000 years. While nascent Western medicine (c. 100 years old) aims to master understanding of the physical body, older medical systems rooted in an indigenous, shamanic worldview place the physical body within a larger context of multi-dimensional existence. Western physicists are racing to prove theories about the nature of multi-dimensional reality originating with Einstein. This all brings us inevitably back to our wise indigenous cultures, who understood that the human entity is multi-existential, having many bodies, and that illness and its subsequent treatment, must be approached from many angles.
What we understand from indigenous shamanic, Chinese, and Ayurvedic medical systems, which are rooted in thousands of years of experimentation and study, is that as an entity, we are comprised of multiple bodies. String theory proposes that the universe as we understand it may consist of as many as 10 different dimensions. Others suspect the entire Universe is holographic. The only thing we can truly be certain of is that we do not fully understand the nature of our reality, nor our part in it. It would be foolish to dismiss the wisdom gained by ancient cultures, particularly when our history documents a Western culture that has too often acted arrogantly, based upon assumptions of superiority and dominance over others. This is still the legacy of our religion and our politic; let’s avoid persisting this way in our science. Rather, let’s seek an inclusive, holistic approach to healing by first adopting a view on reality that is open to realms beyond the physical.
While there are many theories on the number and nature of our existential bodies, there are a number of them that are widely agreed on across cultures: these are the mental, emotional, physical, energetic and spiritual.
Psychotherapy
The mental body benefits from Western psychotherapy. Thinking, talking, sorting through and ordering events, attributing meaning to them or diminishing their significance—these tasks can all be carried out by the mental body through various methods of analysis and talk-therapy. Self-help books are one of the largest and most profitable markets these days, and there is a prolifera of helpful tools from journaling (The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron) to neuro-linguistic programming (Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins), which empower the individual to employ their mental capacities to heal on this level. This is necessary work that must be done as part of one’s complete healing journey. Like any one component, psychotherapy has its limit, and is unable to address all aspects of wounding or illness, which is why many people who attempt to heal only through talk-therapy eventually just get ‘stuck’ and cease making any real progress. If you get to the point where this is occurring for you, it is time to look around at some other methods and move on.
Bodywork
Bodywork is extremely helpful in targeting unprocessed emotional history. It is clear that bodywork benefits the physical body through activities such as stretch, massage and physiotherapy, which offer enhanced flexibility, relaxation and ease of movement. While all that is true, bodywork has a secondary healing function with far-reaching implications. We are beginning to understand across disciplines that trauma, be it physical (car accident), emotional (sudden death of a loved one), or mental (long-term drug use altering brain chemistry) stores an imprint upon the body. The muscles and fascia, and some claim -the very cells of the body- retain an imprint of the trauma. Imagine the implications for a complex trauma such as long-term sexual, physical and verbal abuse during childhood. Imprints of trauma are retained in the mental body (thought patterns, beliefs and memory), physical body (tension from receiving force), emotional body (unexpressed responses of shame, anger, sorrow), energy body (blocked energy flow due to muscle tension and emotional resistance), and spiritual body (split from the physical body due to aversion to the experience). As you can see, treating trauma can be complicated, because the experience itself can be very complicated. Just as you experience a trauma in a multi-faceted way, healing must come in multi-faceted ways. Bodywork can be of benefit because muscle tension in the body is linked directly to traumatic events, and so by releasing the tense muscle through massage, yoga, Alexander technique or Linklater voicework, for example, unexpressed emotions can also be released, and the electric charge held in the body can be dispelled from the memory association. When commencing bodywork therapy, take the time to select a practitioner that is experienced in treating trauma to the extent that you have experienced it. It is a mistake to place yourself in the hands of an inexperienced practitioner if you are the survivor of complex trauma. It is worth your time and expense to seek out the support that is best suited to your specific needs.
Get in Touch with Your Feelings & Needs
Emotions are best targeted through the body, due to their close association with the muscles and organs. The Chinese believe that the organs of the body store unprocessed emotions and that left long enough, this condition will give rise to physical illness such as cancer, immune disorders and so forth. Western medicine scoffs at ancient knowledge and dismisses it as ‘folk’ or ‘primitive’ and yet itself has been largely unsuccessful in curing any disease! We would be wise to delegate Western medicine to what it is truly good at—emergency response to life-threatening physical tissue, bone and organ trauma. However, when it comes to disease and terminal illness, the response of Western medicine is to drug the superficial symptoms or cut out the site of the illness. This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the root causes of dis-ease within the body, and shows a disrespectful attitude toward the body. On a political scale, Western medicine has now become corporatized; these businesses manufacture both pharmaceuticals and chemical pesticides, for enormous profit, as part of the oil industry. Western medicine is now deeply woven into the web of our current political and economic climate, including the American war in the Middle East (see documentaries “The Oil Factor” and “The Future of Food”, both available through Netflix). For this reason, Western medicine is no longer a source of neutral, unbiased care or information. As a system, it also refuses to consider the realm of individual experience in its diagnosis and treatment. It is appropriate to use Western medicine to address acute symptoms, and look to other medical systems to unearth and treat the root causes of your illness.
A helpful form of emotional therapy has been developed by Marshall Rosenburg (author of “Non-Violent Communication”). Rosenburg is a Jewish American who grew up in Detroit amidst racial poverty and tension between European and African Americans. Now in his later life, Rosenburg has developed a system of therapy and mediation that reduces all external and internal conflict to the drama of unmet emotional needs. Reading his book, attending a course taught in your area, or listening to his teaching cds are of great benefit to learning how to get connected to your own emotional needs.
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