How Emotions Affect Physical Health

Have you ever had a massage and found yourself feeling tearful or emotional afterwards? This may well be because emotions that are held in the soft tissues have been released and is just one example of how the body stores our experiences and memories.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a Professor of Psychiatry, spends much of his time working with trauma sufferers and has found that, in some cases, experiences lodge themselves deep into the body, where even words struggle to access. He has found that physically based therapies, such as yoga, works well to reconnect them with their bodies and establish a sense of safety for these patients.

You may have heard your yoga teacher talk of, ‘emotions being stored in the hips’ and it is not uncommon for yoga students to feel an emotional release after practicing deep hip opening poses, such as ‘pigeon pose’. John Upledger, of Massage Today, writes that when we experience negative or sad emotions we feel bad. To relieve our discomfort of feeling bad we sometimes suppress the emotions, choosing not to feel them fully, which can result in them getting lodged in the tissues and causing physical pain or ailments. This lodging, or ‘getting stuck’, occurs because emotions are designed to move through us, hence the word e-motion.

Have you considered that physical symptoms you have felt, or currently feel, may be your body’s way of highlighting something that needs healing? In the last few weeks I’ve experienced pain and tension in my upper back and shoulders, yes, it is certainly due to stress factors, but what else is my body telling me? In a particularly emotional time perhaps I have been too quick to suppress my feelings to feel ‘fine’ and stay busy. I believe those emotions have become lodged and are asking to be felt and released.

How do I plan on achieving this? Very simply to ‘be’ more, to observe my breath, to be in my body and to give myself space and time to allow whatever wants to come up, to come up, without judgement. Having a salt bath with candles and gentle music is a lovely way to do this.

What might your body be telling you? How is it trying to help you heal and move back to wellbeing?

Written by Gemma Ford

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