The Forgotten Dialect:
Our Body Language

Part 2: The Mindbody Connection:
The Puppet on a String

* This leads to an accumulation of undigested emotions.

This author is a fan of natural holistic medicine. The mind and body, when nourished properly, know how to restore balance and health on their own. Nourishing ourselves holistically involves balancing our diet and exercise as well as balancing our thoughts and emotions. Our culture recognizes the importance of physical activity and a healthy diet. However, the importance of achieving emotional health is overlooked and misunderstood. If we do not resolve our emotions and attempt to eat better and exercise, it is hard to maintain these healthy changes. Despite a healthier lifestyle, we will be vulnerable to stressors. It will be a matter of time before that stress drives us back to our bad habits. If we start by improving our emotional balance, then we are naturally drawn to nourishing life choices. Eating right and exercising feel good when we are emotionally balanced; they are no longer a chore. For that reason, this paper strives to emphasize the importance of emotional development.

It's so easy to make poor life choices in our culture. In the past, our culture recognized that hard work and hard times make us resilient and ultimately produce a sense of genuine satisfaction. Over the past decades that lesson has been lost. We judge our difficult experiences too quick. We do not realize that some of the best times in our life occurred shortly after some of the most difficult achievements. Instead our culture encourages us to enjoy now and earn later. We are lead to believe that if we are clever enough, we can have the good life and the easy life. This never works. We judge these easy, good times too quick as well. We do not notice how we become dependent on these experiences and how we are often left unfulfilled and wanting more as soon as they are over. To have it easy is ironically a lot of work. We have to accumulate possessions, or free time, or artificial stimulation or lots of money. If we accomplish this without truly earning it, then we do not truly appreciate it. If we accomplish this through busyness, we still have a hard time enjoying it because our lives have become so chaotic. If we cannot accomplish this, then we live in a continual state of disappointment. In all these scenarios, we expect the impossible. This is disempowering and disheartening. When we learn to let our experiences mature before judging them, we can see more clearly. We can see that the good life is a result of hard, honest, useful work and the discomfort which is natural in this human experience is much easier to tolerate.

At times, life hurts. The fact that all humans are occasionally subjected to intense discomfort is normal and natural. The only way our culture can convince us to keep making poor life choices is by distracting us from how we really feel. This causes more problems. Not only are we forfeiting a fulfilling life, but we are bottling up all of our emotions as well. From the moment we are born we are either taught directly with words or indirectly through the behavior of others that there is something wrong with having emotions. When we were emotional as children, the adults in our life would spring to action and try to make us “feel better”. But instead of helping us safely feel our way through that discomfort, we were taught to stuff it and distract our attention from it. Emotions only have one way out of our awareness... they must pass through it unobstructed. To cultivate a true sense of relief from an uncomfortable emotion, we must embrace it fully and let it pass on its terms.

Springing to action when we don't feel good only creates temporary relief. The emotion gets stuffed away, but never fully digested. Although we don't feel it, we unknowingly carry this turmoil inside. Doing this is no simple task. Our bottled up stress tends to surface whenever we try to relax. And as this emotional baggage grows, we get a shorter and shorter fuse. We are upset by more trivial things. To cope with this, we learn to point our attention away from our emotions. I call this the “stuff and distract” technique. We distract ourselves by blaming the situation that triggered our upset. This serves two purposes. It keeps our attention directed outwards and it keeps us preoccupied “fixing problems”. Most adult behaviors are unconsciously driven by an attempt to avoid our emotional baggage. We are avoiding things that upset us or we are chasing after things that will make us artificially feel better. Sometimes we are so preoccupied with fixing problems in our world, that we don't realize the real problem is inside of us.

By the age of seven, we have usually mastered this stuff and distract technique so that like any other learned habit it occurs unknowingly and automatically in adulthood. However, this habit is continually short-circuiting our ability to fully digest stress and see the full value of our experiences. This habit is preventing us from being naturally happy and making better life choices. Amazingly as adults we can continue to bottle up more undigested stress without knowing that we are doing it or knowing that it is there. Eventually this strategy fails. We can only contain so much inner turmoil. Once we have reached “emotional overload” this turmoil must be vented. When this happens, we often misinterpret the uncomfortable physical, mental and emotional symptoms that result as “illnesses”. These symptoms are the body's natural therapeutic way of re-establishing balance in our lives and are feedback that we've been making poor choices. These illnesses are not “all in our head”, as it truly effects the biological functioning of our body. Even though undigested stress is the root of the problem, this is not a “psychological illness”. It is a consequence of coping skills that we all adopt to some degree. It is a universal human predicament. How could we consider something universal a “disease”? Fortunately, we don't need to revisit our past to resolve this undigested turmoil. By simply adopting healthy coping skills and making better life choices, we can learn how to separate these undigested emotions from their painful past. In essence, we can learn to separate our emotions from our thoughts. In doing so, we finally allow the emotions to flow unobstructed and can finally make some nourishing decisions.

I believe that those 90% of people without identifiable causes for their illnesses are experiencing the natural therapeutic balancing act of the mindbody connection. And what about the 10% of people with serious identifiable causes for their symptoms? Research is finding that emotions are an important risk factor in their development too. We all recognize that stress can trigger transient but profound physical changes to our bodies. If we've been in a life threatening event, it wouldn't be unusual for our hearts to be pounding, sweat to be pouring off our heads and our breathing to be rapid and shallow. We may even feel like we are dying if the surge of panic is powerful enough. During an intense bout of sadness our body might feel extremely heavy, there may be a lump in our throat that prevents us swallowing normally or our gut might be tied in a knot. A sudden inability to speak, think or spell correctly would be considered a normal “brain freeze” during a public speaking event. And a bout of clumsiness and confusion such as dropping things and dialing the wrong phone number is to be expected if we are flustered by something. We wouldn't worry if someone fainted during their wedding either. Is it possible that we could develop all these same symptoms and many other ones as a reaction to chronic stress? And because we have learned to stuff and distract so well, is it possible that we might not be able to see this whole picture in ourselves? In other words stress might be eating away at us and we might not even feel stressed out.

It may be useful for us to imagine our mind and body as puppets dancing purposefully and diligently for a puppeteer. The puppeteer will be discussed in depth later, it is our unconscious mind. Each mind has a unique perspective, which is shaped by those stories we learned in childhood about what is to blame for the problems in our life. These perspectives have a powerful influence on our mind and body. This will be illustrated through the use of research and case reports in the next section. The strings that connect the puppet with the puppeteer are the human emotions. If we are focused on the puppet with the goal a good and easy life, we will continually find ourselves being tugged in all directions without warning. And what might have been a harmonious dance of life's ups and downs, will be experienced as a chaotic and continual struggle. When we learn to focus on our emotional state, embracing the ups and downs, then we start to notice the strings and the puppeteer. Suddenly the puppet dances with purpose and ease. As we learn to look at our lives in a holistic manner, we no longer have to exert enormous amounts of energy to make ourselves feel good. Happiness naturally flows in and out of our life effortlessly. Our mind and body reflect this new state of genuine peace as they harmoniously dance for the puppeteer. As our relationship with our mind and body improves, all other relationships in our life improve as well. These are the automatic results of focusing our effort on balancing our lives holistically.