Where would you be without your emotions? If the sum total of all your experiences makes up the tapestry of your life, it is the emotions you have experienced that give that tapestry its color. Try to imagine for a moment a world where no emotions could occur. No joy would be possible. No feelings of happiness, bliss, charity, or kindness. No love would be felt, no positive emotions of any kind.
On this imaginary emotionless planet, there would be no negative emotions either. No sorrow, no anger, no feelings of depression, and no grief. To live on such a planet would be to merely exist. With no ability to feel emotions, life would be reduced to a gray, mechanical ritual from cradle to grave. Be grateful that you can feel emotions!
But are there emotions you have experienced that you would rather not have felt? If you are like most people, your life has had its darker times. You have probably experienced moments of anxiety, as well as times of grief, anger, frustration, and fear. You may have experienced periods of sorrow, as well as depression, low self-esteem, hopelessness, or any of a wide variety of negative emotions.
What you may not realize is that some of the negative emotions you’ve experienced, even though you may have felt them long ago, may be creating problems for you now. Yes, some of your old experiences are still affecting you in subtle yet very damaging ways.
What Are Emotions?
As you live through the days and years of your life, you are continually experiencing emotions of one sort or another. These feelings you have all serve a purpose — they provide motivation, direction, and communication from your body, your higher self, and the divine. Negative emotions also can be useful, even if they are at times uncomfortable or painful. All of us experience negative emotional extremes at times; it seems to be part of what it means to be human.
Our emotions don’t come out of nowhere — they are generated by our bodies based on two criteria: what we are experiencing in the moment, and information stored in our bodies and minds from past experiences. So, whether we are feeling happiness or shame, that emotion comes from deep within, and for a reason.
What are emotions made of? Simply put, emotions are vibrations of pure energy. Every emotion has its own unique vibrational frequency. Everything in the universe is made of energy, and emotions are no exception. Quantum physics has proven that energies affect other energies. So it follows that we are affected by the energy of our emotions simply because our bodies are also made of energy. This simple fact is the reason our emotions can affect us so profoundly on a mental, emotional, and physical level.
The Emotional Experience In A Nutshell
Three things happen when we experience an emotion. First, our body generates the emotional vibration. Second, we begin to feel the emotion and any thoughts or physical sensations that come along with it. Third, we choose to let the emotion go and we move on, after a few seconds to several minutes. This last step is called processing, and once it is completed, we have successfully moved on from the emotional experience and it shouldn’t cause us any problems.
Everyone has trapped emotions, because everyone has had difficult experiences in life. Even a temporary struggle or a particularly bad day can produce a trapped emotion.
However, if either the second or third step is interrupted, the emotional experience is incomplete, and the energy of the emotion is likely to become trapped in the body.
We do not yet completely understand all the reasons emotions are not processed completely. It appears that the more overwhelming or extreme an emotion is, the more likely it will become trapped. There could be other reasons, such as weakness in the body or many old trapped emotions of a similar vibration. As much as we would like to forget some of the emotionally difficult times we’ve been through, the influence of these events may stay with us in the form of trapped emotions.
Everyone has trapped emotions, because everyone has had difficult experiences in life. Even a temporary struggle or a particularly bad day can produce a trapped emotion. Below is a list of circumstances that will likely result in trapped emotions:
Divorce or relationship problems
Feelings of inferiority
Financial hardship
Home or work stress
Internalization of feelings
Long-term stress
Loss of a loved one
Miscarriage or abortion
Negative feelings about yourself or others
Negative self-talk
Neglect or abandonment
Physical illness of yourself or a loved one
Physical or emotional combat
Physical trauma
Physical, mental, verbal, or sexual abuse • Rejection
This list is by no means all-inclusive. The only way to know whether you have trapped emotions is to ask the subconscious mind. This can be done quite easily, but first a little explanation is in order.
Conscious Vs. Subconscious
First, let’s discuss the difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind. It has been said many times that we humans use only a fraction of our brains. It has been said many times that we humans use only a fraction of our brains. Recent studies have found, in fact, that the conscious mind needs almost none of the brain’s total resources. In other words, thinking, moving about, making choices, planning, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling are all conscious activities that take up a minimal portion of the processing power of the brain.
If this is true, what is the vast remainder of the brain doing? If the conscious mind takes up such a tiny fraction of your brainpower, we can refer to the rest of it as the subconscious mind. This silent and unconscious intelligence within you is constantly busy storing information and keeping your body’s systems running efficiently. It is also important to understand that the subconscious mind exerts an unseen yet profound influence over the things we do, and over how we behave and feel.
Most people give little consideration to the existence of their subconscious minds. But imagine for a moment having to take over the functions that your subconscious mind performs. Imagine the difficulty of instructing your digestive system on how to digest your lunch, or telling your cells how to create enzymes and proteins. Imagine if you had to worry about keeping your heart beating or keeping air moving in and out of your lungs every moment of every day. And you think you have a full schedule now!
Like a computer, your subconscious mind is capable of storing vast amounts of information. And interestingly, brain surgery is often done while the patient is conscious, since the brain has no pain-sensing nerves. Surgeons take advantage of this fact to get feedback from their patients while their brains are being delicately probed during surgery.
Your subconscious is aware of any trapped emotions your body may be harboring, and it also knows exactly what effects these emotions are having on your physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
Dr. Wilder Penfield discovered that under certain circumstances, people who are undergoing brain surgery will have memories return to them when particular areas of the brain are stimulated. For example, the surgeon might touch an area of the brain with his electrode and the alert patient suddenly will remember a scene, a smell, or a sound from a particular moment in their life.1
Often these flashes of memory are about events or scenes that would not be remembered under normal circumstances. If the same area of the brain is touched again with an electrode in the same precise spot, the same memory will be reexperienced.
Every face you’ve ever seen in a crowd, every smell, every voice, every song, every taste, every touch, and every sensation you have ever experienced has been recorded by your subconscious. Every virus, bacteria, or fungus that has ever invaded your body, all your injuries, all your thoughts and feelings, and the entire history of every cell in your body have all been archived.
Your subconscious is also aware of any trapped emotions your body may be harboring, and it also knows exactly what effects these trapped emotions are having on your physical, emotional, and mental well-being. All of this information and more is tucked away in the subconscious mind.
The Computer-Mind
Your subconscious is also aware of exactly what your body needs in order to get well. But how can you access this information?
I began asking myself that question when I was in chiropractic school. I learned that the brain is essentially a computer, the most powerful computer in the known universe. This made me wonder if healers would ever be able to tap into the immense power of the brain to find critical information about what was wrong with their patients.
During my years of practice, I learned that it is actually possible to retrieve information from the subconscious mind using a form of kinesiology, or muscle testing. First developed by Dr. George Goodheart in the 1960s as a way to correct structural imbalance in the skeleton, muscle testing is now widely acknowledged. While many physicians worldwide use muscle testing procedures to correct spinal misalignments and other imbalances, the fact that muscle testing can be used to get information directly from the subconscious mind is gaining acceptance.2
The ability to open a line of communication with a patient’s subconscious mind through muscle testing became a powerful tool for me. It enabled me to discover what a patient needed in order to get well as quickly as possible. I came to implicitly trust the wisdom of the subconscious and to have great faith in the body’s innate ability to communicate that wisdom to me through muscle testing.
Many years of teaching seminars to both laypeople and doctors has taught me that anyone can do it. Anyone can learn to get answers from the body, and anyone can take the necessary steps to help the body heal. You don’t have to be a doctor or have any other training; you just have to be willing to learn.
NOTES
Jefferson Lewis, Something Hidden: A Biography of Wilder Penfield (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Formac, 1951), 198. 27
Robert Frost, Applied Kinesiology: A Training Manual and Reference Book of Basic Principles and Practices (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2002), 4.
Excerpted from the bestselling book, “The Emotion Code” by veteran holistic physician Dr. Bradley Nelson with permission from the author.
Veteran holistic physician Dr. Bradley Nelson (D.C., ret.) is one of the world’s foremost experts on natural methods of achieving wellness. He is the creator of The Emotion Code, The Body Code, and The Belief Code, and the CEO of Discover Healing, a holistic education platform that provides training and certifies practitioners worldwide. His bestselling book “The Emotion Code” provides step-by-step instructions for working with the body’s energy healing power. His latest book is “The Body Code: Unlocking Your Body’s Ability to Heal Itself” (February 2023, St. Martin’s Press).
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