Your emotions aren't experienced through your mind alone. Your body is part of the experience too.
Think about the last time you felt nervous before something important.
Perhaps your heart started beating faster. Your stomach felt different. Your hands became sweaty or your breathing changed.
Now think about anger. You may have felt heat moving through your body, tension in your jaw or the urge to move.
Grief can feel completely different again. There may be heaviness through your chest, a lump in your throat or a physical sensation that seems almost impossible to put into words.
We often talk about emotions as though they’re something that happens entirely in our minds, but emotions can also have very real physical expressions.
This is one of the foundations of The Art of Listening to Your Body.
Your body can give you information about what you’re experiencing emotionally.
The question is whether you’ve learned how to listen.
An emotion isn’t simply a thought.
Your emotional experience can involve changes throughout the body, including your breathing, heart rate, muscle tension, digestion, temperature and physical sensations.
This is why fear can make your heart race, embarrassment can make your face feel hot and nervousness can give you butterflies in your stomach.
Research has also found that people consistently associate different emotions with sensations in different areas of the body. That doesn’t mean every person experiences an emotion in exactly the same place, but it does reinforce something most of us already know intuitively: emotions can feel physical.
This relationship between our psychological and physical experiences is part of what is commonly described as the mind body connection.
For me, however, understanding that a connection exists is only the beginning.
I’m interested in what happens when you become curious about your own physical and emotional experience.
If I asked you where you feel anger, sadness, fear or disappointment, you might immediately know.
Or you might have absolutely no idea.
Both are useful information.
Some people notice emotions very clearly through physical sensations. They may experience tightness in their chest, pressure through their throat, heaviness in their stomach, tension through their shoulders or another sensation that appears when something emotional is happening.
Other people have become so accustomed to suppressing, overriding or analysing what they feel that recognising an emotion through the body can initially feel unfamiliar.
There isn’t one location where every person should feel a particular emotion.
Your experience is your experience.
This is why I don’t begin by telling someone where an emotion is supposed to be.
I ask them what they’re noticing.
One of the things people often come across when they begin exploring the mind body connection is the idea that a particular emotion corresponds with a particular body part.
Anger might be associated with one organ, grief with another, fear somewhere else.
I don’t work that way.
It isn’t because these frameworks can never provide useful reflection. It’s because I don’t want someone else’s interpretation to override what your own experience is showing you.
The same applies when somebody asks me:
“What emotion is behind my condition?”
I don’t believe there is a universal answer.
Two people can have exactly the same diagnosis and completely different histories, relationships, experiences, emotional patterns and physical presentations.
If I simply tell both people that their condition means the same emotion, I’m no longer listening to the individual in front of me.
The body is far more interesting than a chart.
This is where people can accidentally turn emotional work into another intellectual exercise.
They notice something in their body and immediately want to know what it means.
Why is it there?
What emotion is it?
What event caused it?
What does this body part represent?
Is this anger? Grief? Fear? Resentment?
I understand the desire to know.
But sometimes the search for the correct answer takes you straight back into your head.
Listening to your body begins with something much simpler.
What are you actually experiencing?
You may notice pressure, heat, heaviness, tingling, tightness, movement or another sensation that is difficult to describe.
You don’t necessarily need to label it immediately.
You can become curious about it first.
That shift from interpreting to experiencing is an important part of my approach to emotional processing.
You can spend hours thinking about something that happened without necessarily experiencing the emotion connected to it.
You might replay the conversation, analyse what somebody meant, explain why they behaved the way they did and construct an incredibly sophisticated understanding of the entire situation.
Meanwhile, your body may still react every time the subject comes up.
This is one of the distinctions I teach again and again.
Understanding your emotional experience and processing your emotional experience aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Your mind might have moved on years ago.
That doesn’t automatically tell us whether there is anything left to process.
My response when someone tells me they’ve already dealt with something is usually very simple:
Let’s go and find out.
Rather than debating whether something has been processed, we can become curious about what happens when you actually return to the experience.
When I use the term unprocessed emotion, I’m describing an emotion that wasn’t fully experienced or processed when the original experience occurred.
There are many reasons this happens.
You may not have known how to process what you were feeling. Perhaps nobody ever showed you how. You may not have had the time or space because life required you to keep moving. Sometimes the experience itself felt too much at the time, so suppression became the way you got through it.
In my work, I often use the language of emotions being “stored” because the emotional experience hasn’t simply been resolved by the passage of time.
That doesn’t mean I believe we can point to a particular piece of tissue and say, “there is your resentment”.
It’s a way of describing an emotional experience that hasn’t yet been fully processed and may continue to influence how you respond.
This is a subject we’ll explore much more deeply in the article on Unprocessed Emotions.
This is where the conversation becomes more nuanced.
We already know that emotional experiences can create physiological changes in the body. Stress and emotion can affect things such as muscle tension, heart rate, breathing and digestive function.
My own perspective goes considerably further than that.
After years of working clinically with the body and then developing this work around emotional processing, I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of exploring the emotional component of physical symptoms and health challenges.
I am 99.9 per cent sure that emotions sit at the root of what I see.
That is my perspective and the framework through which I work. It isn’t a statement that conventional medicine has no place, nor does it mean I believe somebody should ignore medical assessment or treatment.
Quite the opposite.
I believe you can use the information and support available to you while also asking another question:
What is happening emotionally?
For me, the emotional component is always worth exploring first. Then you can decide what other conventional or complementary modalities you want or need alongside it.
The relationship between emotions and specific diseases is a much larger conversation, which is why I have created a separate resource dedicated to Physical Symptoms and Emotions.
One of the reasons I don’t believe in giving people generic emotional meanings for symptoms is that I want to know about the individual experience.
If you tell me you have pain, I’m interested in more than the word “pain”.
Where is it?
When did it begin?
What was happening in your life at the time?
When does it change?
What makes it more noticeable?
What experiences, people or conversations create a response?
What happens when you talk about it?
What else was happening around the time your body changed?
These aren’t questions designed to prove that every symptom has one neat emotional explanation.
They’re questions that allow us to become curious about connections that might otherwise be missed.
This is the art in The Art of Listening to Your Body.
It isn’t about memorising meanings.
It’s about learning how to listen to what is actually in front of you.
Listening to your body also isn’t only about health.
You might notice what happens in your body when you need to have a difficult conversation, ask for more money, set a boundary, become more visible or tell somebody what you actually want.
Your body may respond when you’re about to do something unfamiliar, even when the thing you’re moving towards is something you deeply desire.
This is why my work has evolved beyond physical symptoms.
The way you experience emotion can influence the way you communicate, relate, lead, ask, receive and respond to life.
Sometimes the body draws your attention to something long before you’ve consciously admitted it to yourself.
And when you learn how to listen, that information can become incredibly useful.
Awareness matters.
Noticing that your chest tightens when a particular person speaks, recognising the sensation in your stomach before you say yes to something you don’t want, or becoming aware of the way your body reacts when you remember a past experience can give you valuable information.
But awareness alone isn’t necessarily processing.
This is another place people can become stuck.
They become incredibly good at noticing themselves. They can identify their emotions, understand their patterns and recognise what their body is doing, but they don’t necessarily know what to do next.
This is where the Release Process® comes in.
The Release Process® is the four part emotional processing methodology I developed to give you a structure for moving beyond identifying and understanding what you feel into actually experiencing and processing it.
And through that process, something else can emerge.
The message.
This is a question at the heart of my work, but I don’t believe the answer comes from me handing you a list of body parts and emotional meanings.
The answer needs to come from your experience.
When you process what is there, you may begin to see something you couldn’t see before. Perhaps you recognise a need you’ve never expressed, a boundary you haven’t set, a decision you’ve been avoiding or a pattern that continues to play out in different areas of your life.
This is what I call Deciphering the Message.
The message isn’t simply an interesting insight.
It gives you information about how to move forward.
Because listening to your body isn’t particularly useful if you hear the message and then continue living in exactly the same way.
The insight needs to come back into your life.
You don’t need to know every emotion you’ve ever suppressed.
You don’t need to work out the meaning of every sensation.
And you don’t need to become obsessed with monitoring your body for clues.
Start by becoming curious about the difference between identifying an emotion, understanding an emotion and actually processing an emotional experience.
That distinction is what I teach inside The Missing Link Masterclass.
It’s free and evergreen, so you can experience it whenever you’re ready.
A free introduction to emotional processing, the relationship between your emotions and physical experience, and the piece that may have been missing from the work you’ve already done.