If you prefer to listen, here's the podcast version of this post, also on iTunes.
Just like stress can cause you to get a tight knot in the muscles of your back, so too can other parts of your body hold tight to things like fear or anger or even malform due to a particular belief system. Things like a pervasive feeling of lack in life can manifest in physical form in the way we digest food. You’ve probably heard things like this a million times and thought to yourself, “Ha - yeah right!” Because it’s a heady concept and not something you could test with a beaker tube. The power of the mind over the body comes off as super new-agey and therefore we all to often put it in the bullshit pile. But the affects of how we hold onto emotional pain are quite severe, they manifest in disease and damage your gene code for future generations– so in my opinion, why not lean in favor of, “do something about it, regardless” because there’s nothing to lose, everything to gain. OR, even just decide to stay open to what I am saying purely for the sake of practicing openness.
In broad strokes, I will go through some of the connections between emotions we hold onto and where they tend to get stuck in our body- plus a few tools to do something about it. I will post my references at the end of this post but in truth – if you suffer from chronic pain, go to a doctor! And if you suffer severe emotional pain, see a therapist! This is not a substitute for either of those. And just so you know what you’re getting into – this is an episode all about the body, with a whole lot of yoga to soothe particular negative emotions that get stuck in our body. If that doesn’t appeal to you – you probably won’t like this episode– but I will bet you get something valuable out of it regardless...
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