The Relationship Between Our Emotional and Physical Health
By Susana Stoica, PhD
When I officially started my second career, as an energy healer, nearly forty years ago, I thought emotions were maybe 5-10% responsible for our health. Since then, I found out that emotions play a much more important role, sometimes being exclusively responsible for our state of health, like in the case of fibromyalgia.
As any other healer, I can perceive changes in the human energy field. This field is inside, and it also extends past the boundaries of our physical body. The field is perceived by a healer as a slight vibration, similar to what one can feel when touching the tongue to an AA battery. When a person is happy, has a habit of exercising outside in the fresh air, and has a positive attitude towards life, the energy field expands, feels strong, and its vibrational frequency is high. Those are the “markers” that would define the person as being healthy. As soon as a person is angry, depressed, envious, or vengeful, the field vibrational frequency goes down, and the field becomes weaker, similar to what one would perceive in an old or sick person. It is interesting to mention that illnesses typically show up in a person’s energy field, before the person has any signs of illness. When a person is exposed to negative emotions for a prolonged period of time, the changes in the energy field are eventually manifest as changes in the physical.
This relationship between our emotional and physical health was also discussed in Bruce Lipton’s book Biology of Belief. He showed that the proteins in our cells curve when exposed to negative emotions. Considering that our DNA, a spiral ladder inside our cells that holds the information of who we are i.e., our physical characteristics like hair color, height, organ sensitivities, etc. is made of proteins, it is easy to infer the importance of emotions for our state of health. Before an old cell dies off, its DNA splits vertically in two identical halves: one half dies off with the old cell, while the other – the RNA – carries the information to the newly born cell, providing the necessary information to replicate the same characteristics in the new cell. We can easily imagine that, if the DNA ladder curves i.e., the DNA spiral tightens, it could result in a faulty split of the DNA ladder, hence faulty RNA information transmitted to the new cell. When our immune system is strong, it can recognize and remove the faulty cells, but if too many faulty cells are produced at the same time, the immune system could get overwhelmed and thus we get sick.
We can also look at the relationship between emotions and health from a different lens i.e., through Masaru Emoto’s experiments with water crystals described in The Hidden Messages in Water. He showed that exposing water to different emotions produced different crystal shapes, with the positive emotions creating beautiful structures – independent of the language they were expressed in, if they were verbal or written, or expressed through music. He also showed that exposing water to negative emotions created broken water crystals, or no crystals at all. Considering that we are on average about 70% water, we can imagine how important it is for us to keep a positive frame of mind.
We all heard stories about people who are doing yoga or meditate seriously for years and claim they do not even get a cold. The reason is that yoga/meditation relaxes the person’s system, and thus their cell replication is healthy.
In my own healing practice, I started to notice years ago that some people would get well after the healing sessions, but sometime later they would get sick again, sometimes with another more serious illness, as if an invisible force wanted to keep them unwell. In every such case the reason was some kind of unresolved emotional trauma.
The next obvious question is: if emotional health is so important does it mean one can eat an unhealthy diet, be in a toxic environment, and never exercise, but still be healthy? It depends on the person’s genetic makeup. If a person is born with a strong physical makeup, had a healthy diet as a child – to create a healthy resilient adult body, and had a happy childhood meaning his system does not hold stresses, the person can easily live a long life. One famous example is the late comedian George Burns who, in spite of his diet and cigar smoking, lived to the ripe old age of ninety-four.
So, if emotions are so important for our wellbeing and we know that by doing yoga, meditation, or other relaxation methods we can be healthier, why do people not follow that path? The most frequent complaint I hear is: “Even if yoga/meditation is so useful, it is really not my cup of tea. I cannot relax/ bend like a pretzel/ I feel stupid doing it!”
Luckily, there is another way in which one can release the stress of trauma: doing emotional work with the help of a trained professional i.e., a psychotherapist, psychologist, or hypnotherapist.
My own final trigger to study hypnotherapy was a client referred to me with Grave’s disease, a serious thyroid hyperfunction. A normal thyroid (which is located at the front base of our neck) is relatively small, only 25 grams/1 ounce. The client’s thyroid was so large that it was visible from the back and she could not bend her head forward. As typical for Grave’s disease, the client’s eyes were bulging. She seemed eager to get healthy again and by the third session her eyes looked normal, her thyroid height and width was only 2/3 of what it was before we started the sessions, and her tests showed a thyroid output ten times lower. That is when the truth came out: she did not want to get any better. She stated that she wanted to continue being on disability as she was earning some money under the table, as a massage therapist, enough to both get the minimum she needed and have the time “to enjoy life”. We had twelve more sessions, each time discussing the importance of defining a plan for her life for when she was completely healed, but she refused and her thyroid and the tests stayed at the same level. This convinced me that I needed an additional tool to help people stuck in such health-harmful ideas.
As a certified hypnotherapist, I found that most people are afraid of the pain involved in re-examining their painful past, that is why I decided to write my book Five Mirrors, Five Blessings. The book presents an example of what emotional work looks like and offers an opportunity for people to start their trip to emotional freedom by doing the exercises at the end of each chapter.
The book can be read as the story of an older woman who decides to figure out her life experiences by re-examining the traumas induced by her relationships, or as a workbook. The woman in the story is a compilation of the many people I worked with over the years. The reason she is a female is that women have some traumas that men could not have, like abortions. I also decided to show the intergenerational effects of war trauma by making the woman a child of Holocaust survivors.
At the end of each chapter the reader can find a questionnaire to help examine the same type of relationship in his/her own life: from being a child, sibling, being in a committed relationship, to being a parent, and work related traumas.
I hope the book will help readers feel more comfortable with starting their journey of emotional healing. As a hypnotherapist with over thirty years of experience in the field, I can state that with every person I worked with I found that the pain of examining past traumas was much less than the pain of carrying around the trauma over the years.
Susana Stoica, PhD is the author of nine books on emotional and physical healing. She is a speaker, having been invited to talk at a conference on brain injury recovery at Harvard Medical School. She also lectured to medical students at University of Michigan Medical School and PhD level students of Social Work at Wayne State University. Her findings on Delayed Brain Trauma were published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Susana is also a medical intuitive and distance healer. Her books are available through Amazon.com and you can get in touch with her through her website: stoica.com.