IMPROVED HEALTH THROUGH HONORING OUR FEELINGS

Improved Health Through Honoring Our Feelings

Alexandra Delis-Abrams, Ph.D.

Extensive scientific research in the field Psychoneuroimmunology has successfully proven that fun and laughter are dramatically potent healing techniques. Your quest for improved health lies in recognizing your body–mind connection, meaning that you already have the capability to enjoy optimal health. The miraculous benefits are two-fold: Become conscious of more happiness in your life while you experience relief from physical ailments and discomfort.

I was researching for my dissertation topic, “Laughter, Enthusiasm and Joy as Healing Modalities,” when I first became aware of a new word that didn’t exactly roll off my tongue. It wasn’t in the dictionary, and it’s still not recognized by the thesaurus program in my computer. During a personal interview with the late Norman Cousins in his office at UCLA, I soon learned its meaning. “Psycho-neuro-immunology” is the study of the direct correlation between stress and the functioning of the physical body, including the immune system. Since it is easy to understand how powerful emotions can be referred to as stressors, the next obvious step is to correlate feelings and health. Norman Cousins was one of the first that introduced living proof that laughter and a joyful heart, as well as anger and fear, influence our health. I am grateful for the contribution he made to my project and for the exceptional opportunity of interacting with him about the subject and his process. He was instrumental in a task force to probe the field of psycho-neuro-immunology, and helped to provide the scientific evidence that indeed the positive emotions – love, hope, faith, purpose, determination, and will to live – all have physiological significance. And when employed as healing techniques, they will result in improved health, as he revealed to me in an interview.

The body-mind connection principle acquired more respect and validity thanks to research by Dr. Candace Pert, Adjunct Professor of Physiology of Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical School. Although the traditional concept associating the location of the mind with the brain is still prevalent, scientific research has rapidly created a new paradigm revealing evidence that the mind is actually traveling throughout the body in the form of the immune system. When we feel happy and experience fun and laughter, our immune cells feel happy and we enjoy optimal health. When we feel sad, depressed, or angry, the immune cells take on that emotion as well. Cells have intelligence. To quote Dr. Deepak Chopra, “Every cell in the body has a mind. Every cell creates messenger chemicals. These chemicals are secreted in response to feelings, emotions, beliefs, and intentions. Whenever we have a feeling, it’s happening throughout the body -- at the same instant in time.” I encourage you to read any one of his incredibly thought-provoking books.

For more scientific proof Dr. Theresa Dale, naturopath and creator of the Neuro-physical Reprogramming (NPR) protocol, states: “When we resist an emotion and/or feeling, the resistance itself creates an electromagnetic charge of energy which stores on a cellular level in the organ or gland that correlates to the particular emotions. Over time, as the pattern of resistance continues, this charged energetic pattern creates even more and more of a burden on the particular organ or gland where it is stores.”

After becoming licensed by Dr. Dale at her California state-approved school, and completing the basic and advanced training of the Holistic Health Practitioner Courses, I use NPR as a healing technique in my private practice of transpersonal psychology. Efficiently and easily, emotions, beliefs and identities stored in the organs or glands from childhood, are released permanently on a cellular level. This is done through employing the principle of the five-element theory of acupuncture, kinesiology, or muscle testing (brain communication to the muscles via neurons called propioceptors), Neuro-emotional remedies (high potency, organ-specific, and homeopathic), and sound.

The body is a remarkable lie detector. It simply provides the information that takes us to the next step of exploring the core issue and its base cause. This is no band-aid. It works--and fast. In less that one hour, an individual can retrieve knowledge that could free him/her from a lifetime of imprisonment. One case history after another verifies the research that the cell retains the energy of the resisted feeling. These feelings don’t go away, even if we do everything in our power to ignore, deny, and stuff them. The bottom line is that a resisted emotion persists and, due to the body–mind connection, resisted emotion affects our health.

“Every time we express ourselves, we lose a little more emotional clutter”, says Dr. Jacob Lieberman, author of Take Off Your Glasses and See, Dr. Lieberman correlates resisted feelings and traumatic events with vision problems. “Every person I have worked with has been able to uncover some kind of major emotional stress in the one-to-two-year period before their vision first deteriorated.....It’s much harder to see clearly when we aren’t expressing our feelings clearly.” His book is a validation about the importance of liberating resisted emotion and feeling fully, what we feel, when we feel it.

If we embrace the project of cleaning out the garbage, excess baggage, or whatever you want to call it, we will eventually be present enough to stay current and communicate what is so in that moment, rather than through our filters and “stuff”. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Like cleaning out the garage, when we throw away the old junk, hopefully we become more aware of each piece we place on a shelf to prevent further accumulation. The same holds true with the incompletions that keeps us stuck and sabotage our dreams. Once we honor our feelings--our hurts, angers, fears, inadequacies, guilts etc.-- we can keep current. This requires our honesty and total responsibility in each moment. No matter how much we plaster on that ole’ smile and boast about our P.M.A. (positive mental attitude) those unfulfilled situations seem to somehow creep into our lives. We have to do the work, then create the life we prefer in each moment of now.

Thanks to Neuro-physical Reprogramming, it doesn’t have to be a long, arduous ordeal of weekly visits to the “shrink” that eventually shrink our wallet. (By the way, I refer to myself as a “stretch”, rather than a “shrink.”) With the arrival of the Twenty-First Century, we feel the rapid pace in our lives and society. Why shouldn’t the counseling process also be accelerated? When each one of us commits to the unfolding of our potential, releasing forever the victim/self-pity identity, our life experience becomes a most amazing and miraculous adventure. Our family begins to reflect our inner harmony and peace, our community becomes united through support and kindness, our nation reflects a people honoring our Oneness, our Mother Earth is respected and loved as the giver of life, and the universe is recognized as the source of intelligence-- the macrocosm of the microcosm called a living cell.

It’s an awesome time to be living on the planet. It’s a time of unlimited possibility, and using the power of our free will, we can experience the power linked with this state. A study was once done with people in their nineties and over. What would they have done differently? They would have made more decisions and taken more risks. Are you living your life in safety, as the turtle does, in his shell, or are you daring to stick your neck out and take risks? What are you waiting for? Start today peeling away the false identities and layers of whom you think you are and discover who you truly are. If the research from Norman Cousins’ task force is right, tap into your source of joy, express your compassion, allow the opportunity to be of service to others, and be the person your dog thinks you are.