What if there is more to explore when it comes to your physical symptoms than the physical body alone?
When something happens in your body, it’s natural to focus on the body.
There is pain, discomfort, a change in function, a diagnosis or something that simply doesn’t feel right, so you want to know what it is and how to fix it.
That makes sense.
My own work began in exactly this world. My background is in osteopathy, Western acupuncture, herbal medicine and psychosomatic therapy, and for years I worked clinically with people experiencing pain, chronic symptoms and complex health challenges.
Over time, I became increasingly interested in something else.
The emotional experience of the person attached to the body I was treating.
I began noticing patterns and connections that weren’t always explained by looking at the physical presentation alone.
That curiosity eventually became the foundation of The Art of Listening to Your Body.
Today, I am 99.9 per cent sure of the importance of the emotional root in what I see.
That is my perspective, developed through my clinical experience and subsequent work with emotional processing. It goes further than what medical research currently establishes, and it doesn’t mean I believe conventional medicine, diagnosis or other modalities have no place.
I simply believe the emotional piece is always worth exploring.
We already know that emotions can create physical experiences.
Think about fear.
Your heart may race, your breathing can change, your muscles may tighten and your stomach might suddenly feel completely different.
Embarrassment can bring heat to your face. Nervousness can create butterflies in your stomach. Stress can affect sleep, digestion, appetite, muscle tension and the way pain is experienced.
None of this is particularly controversial.
The body and our emotional experience are not two completely independent systems.
Where the conversation becomes more complex is when we move from saying emotions can affect the body to asking whether emotional experiences may contribute to persistent symptoms or particular health conditions.
This is where I believe curiosity is incredibly important.
I don’t believe exploring emotions means rejecting the physical body.
And I don’t believe receiving medical care means you can’t simultaneously become curious about what is happening emotionally.
These conversations are sometimes positioned as though you have to choose.
Either something is physical or it’s emotional.
Either you see a doctor or you explore your emotions.
Either you use conventional medicine or you work with the mind body connection.
I don’t see it that way.
Your emotional experience happens through a physical body. Your physical experience occurs while you are simultaneously living a life filled with relationships, stressors, memories, beliefs, responsibilities, challenges, losses and desires.
Why wouldn’t we remain curious about the whole picture?
My perspective on this has strengthened considerably over the years.
I used to say I was about 95 per cent sure of the emotional root.
Today, I say 99.9 per cent.
That doesn’t mean I claim that 99.9 per cent of every disease has scientifically been proven to be caused by emotions. It hasn’t.
It means that through my own clinical experience and the work I’ve subsequently done with emotional processing, the emotional component has become something I consider too significant to ignore.
My preference is to explore and clear the emotional component first.
Then, if something else is required, conventional medicine and other modalities are still there.
This isn’t about refusing treatment or trying to prove that everything is emotional.
It’s about asking whether there is another piece of information available that hasn’t yet been explored.
One of the things I don’t do is look at a diagnosis and immediately assign it an emotion.
You may have seen books, charts or online resources that associate a particular condition, organ or body part with a specific emotion.
I understand why these are appealing. They give you an answer.
But people aren’t that simple.
Two people can receive exactly the same diagnosis and have completely different histories, relationships, personalities, experiences and ways of responding to life.
Even the physical presentation of the same diagnosis can be different.
So if two people come to me with the same condition, I don’t automatically assume they have the same emotional experience sitting underneath it.
I’m interested in their story.
What was happening in their life?
When did things change?
What else was occurring around that time?
What relationships were significant?
What hadn’t been said?
What was being carried?
What did they need?
What patterns were already present?
The diagnosis gives us information.
It doesn’t give us the whole person.
This distinction is incredibly important.
The Art of Listening to Your Body isn’t about replacing one diagnosis with another.
Instead of being told, “You have this medical condition”, I don’t want you immediately deciding, “This means I have unresolved anger.”
That simply gives you another label.
Listening requires curiosity.
Perhaps you notice that a physical sensation changes around a particular person. Maybe symptoms began during an incredibly challenging period of your life. Perhaps something changes when you talk about a particular experience.
Maybe there appears to be no obvious emotional connection at all.
That’s okay too.
You don’t need to manufacture one.
The purpose is to become curious about your own experience rather than searching for somebody else’s answer.
Emotional experiences can feel profoundly physical.
You may notice changes in your breathing, muscle tension, heart rate, digestion, temperature, energy or sleep. Your chest might feel tight, your jaw may clench or you may feel heaviness, pressure, heat, tingling or sensations that are difficult to describe.
This is part of why I believe body awareness can give us valuable information.
But noticing the sensation isn’t necessarily the same as understanding what is happening, and understanding isn’t necessarily the same as processing the emotional experience.
These are three different layers.
Notice. Understand. Process.
A lot of people become incredibly good at the first two.
My work is particularly interested in the third.
Sometimes an emotional experience wasn’t processed when it occurred.
You may not have known how. Perhaps nobody ever role modelled emotional processing for you. Maybe you didn’t have the space or time, or the experience was simply too much to deal with alongside everything else happening in your life.
So you suppressed what you felt and kept going.
When I use language such as stored emotions, I’m describing an emotional experience that wasn’t fully experienced and processed.
I’m not saying we can cut open a particular piece of tissue and find your resentment sitting inside it.
I am interested in whether an emotional experience from the past continues to have relevance in the present.
Does your body respond?
Does the experience still trigger you?
Is there something you haven’t expressed?
Is there something you still can’t receive?
Is there a message within the experience that you haven’t yet deciphered?
Those questions give us somewhere to explore.
The passage of time doesn’t necessarily tell us whether an emotional experience has been processed.
You might have stopped thinking about something years ago.
You may completely understand what happened and believe you’ve made peace with it.
Perhaps you’ve talked about it in therapy, journalled about it, meditated, cried and done years of personal development.
I don’t automatically assume that means something is still unprocessed.
I also don’t automatically assume that it isn’t.
My response is much simpler.
Let’s go and find out.
Using the Release Process®, exploring an experience can sometimes take only a few minutes.
Rather than spending months intellectually debating whether there is an emotional component, we can become curious about what actually happens when you process the experience.
I don’t believe your body is your enemy.
This is one of the biggest shifts I want people to experience through this work.
When your body isn’t doing what you want, it can be incredibly easy to become frustrated with it. You want the pain gone, the symptom gone, the diagnosis gone.
You may begin to feel betrayed by your own body.
But what happens when you stop approaching the body only as something that needs to be fixed?
What if you become curious about what else there is to understand?
That doesn’t mean you need to be grateful for pain or pretend a difficult health experience is somehow wonderful.
It simply changes the relationship.
Instead of only asking:
“How do I make this stop?”
you can also ask:
“What else is there for me to hear?”
This is one of the reasons the Release Process® is central to my work.
I’m not trying to give you the message.
I’m creating a structure through which your message can emerge.
An experience may ultimately reveal something about a relationship, a need, a boundary, the way you communicate, the way you lead yourself or a choice you already know you need to make.
Sometimes what emerges appears completely unrelated to the place you began.
This is what I call Deciphering the Message.
The message happens as a result of processing. It isn’t something I want you to manufacture intellectually before you’ve experienced the emotion.
Because if I hand you the answer first, you may simply make your experience fit my interpretation.
I’d rather you discover what is true for you.
Although this work began with my fascination with physical symptoms, it eventually became clear that the same emotional patterns can be visible throughout someone’s life.
How someone moves through an emotional process can reveal the way they communicate, whether they ask for what they need, how easily they receive, where they minimise themselves and whether they trust themselves to act on what they know.
This is why The Art of Listening to Your Body has evolved beyond health.
The work now extends into relationships, leadership, identity, desire, communication and the way you actually show up in your life.
Sometimes a physical symptom is what first gets your attention.
What you discover through listening can reach much further.
I want to make this very clear because exploring the emotional component of a physical experience doesn’t require you to ignore the physical one.
New, persistent, severe or concerning symptoms deserve appropriate medical assessment.
A diagnosis can provide valuable information. Medication can be necessary. Surgery can be necessary. Physical rehabilitation, nutrition, medical monitoring and other forms of treatment can all have a place.
Exploring emotional experiences doesn’t require you to reject any of those things.
My invitation is simply not to assume that the conversation has to stop there.
You can receive medical support while simultaneously becoming curious about your emotional experience.
For me, these approaches don’t need to compete.
This is important too.
Emotional processing shouldn’t become another way to blame yourself for what your body is doing.
If you process an experience and a physical symptom remains, that doesn’t mean you failed, didn’t process properly or simply haven’t found the “right” emotion yet.
You have still gained information.
You may have released something you’ve carried for years. You may understand yourself differently, communicate differently or recognise something in your life that needs to change.
And you can continue exploring whatever other support your body requires.
This is why I don’t believe the goal should be to force an emotional explanation onto every physical experience.
The goal is to listen.
You don’t need to search your entire history looking for the moment that “caused” your symptom.
And you don’t need a chart telling you what emotion you’re supposed to find.
Start by understanding the distinction between identifying an emotion, understanding an emotion and actually processing an emotional experience.
Become curious about what your body does when you revisit certain experiences.
Notice what arises without immediately deciding what it means.
And if there is something there, process it.
This is the distinction I teach inside my free Missing Link Masterclass.
For many people, it completely changes the way they approach emotional work.
A free introduction to the relationship between your emotional and physical experiences, why understanding your emotions may only be the beginning and what it actually means to process what you feel.
If you’ve spent years trying different approaches, or you’re simply curious about what your body may be communicating, start here.
Explore why emotional experiences can feel physical and how your body can give you information about what you’re experiencing.
Explore what I mean by suppressed, unresolved and stored emotions and why an experience can remain relevant long after the original moment has passed.
Understand the difference between identifying, analysing and actually processing what you feel.
Discover the four part methodology I created for experiencing and processing emotions and how it can help you decipher the message within an experience.