Heal Those Issues in your Tissues
Do you struggle with neck/pain or headaches? Perhaps you experience fear, anxiety, or you just can’t let go of an emotional wound that keeps you stuck and from moving forward with your life. Often headaches can be triggered by stress, fear, and taking on other people’s stuff.
Are you looking for relief from your headaches?
Many books describe the mind body connection, but I have to agree with Denise La Barre in her book “Issues in Your Tissues”. She talks about how many of these books leave out an important part of healing and that is emotion.
Perhaps you were bullied in school, felt unsafe, or someone gave you the message that you’re not worthy or good enough.
We carry our emotional wounds in our muscles and cells of the body and overtime they can accumulate. It is like a sealed container and the lid is ready to erupt like a volcano.
We can’t have optimal physical healing if we don’t address the emotional component that is triggering the physical pain.
When this happens it can lead to physical pain, fatigue, anxiety and ultimately disease. It affects us physically, emotionally, energetically, and spiritually.
The accumulation of negative emotional energy is often referred to as emotional baggage. This is holding onto unresolved or repressed thoughts such as anger, resentment, unresolved grief, stress, feelings of not being good enough, guilt, and shame.
As a seasoned physical therapist of 26 years , I’ve witnessed many of my patients dealing with real physical pain which has been exacerbated by fear, anxiety, loss, guilt, and difficulty life stressors.
These “issues in our tissues” have an emotional charge. Quite often we may shut down and repress our emotions. We may find it safer not to feel those emotions and we may even do this unconsciously.
“When we reach emotional overload, or have the thought, I shouldn’t feel that, or I can’t let myself feel that angry -or afraid-or worthless, our body responds by storing that emotional energy where we don’t have to feel it-in our tissues.
When we allow the release of these emotions, the energy that was trapped there also releases and we feel more vibrant and alive. To restore healthy balance we need to be able to process those emotions.
Some helpful strategies:
1. Give yourself permission to feel the feelings
2. Go for a run, take a walk outside, connect with a friend for support, meditate/pray
3. When you experience pain or discomfort in a particular body part, ask yourself is the pain related to a particular emotion I’m feeling? For example, is my jaw pain related to perhaps anger I’m holding onto?
4. Find a quiet place and allow yourself to inhale and exhale, notice your breath and where you are holding tension. Let go of the control.