Anshu Bahanda: Welcome to another episode of Wellness Curated. I’m your host, Anshu Bahanda, and my aim with this podcast is to highlight ideas, trends and techniques to help you get healthier and lead your dream life.
So, anyone who’s experienced heartbreak will tell you that it’s a very real feeling in the pit of your stomach. Similarly, if you’ve gone through anxiety and depression, it’s not just something that’s in your head. Like sometimes we say to people, ‘Stop fussing, you have something happening in your head’. [But] it’s actually a very physical pain.
When you talk to ayurvedic experts in India – for centuries, they’ve talked about the physical manifestation of emotions. Similarly, Chinese medicine doctors will tell you immense anger…it’ll affect your liver, it’ll affect your liver functions. And, also if you have something wrong with your liver, it makes you angry.
So we’re going to discuss today: the physical manifestation of emotions. Do emotions actually manifest physically? And when we have physical ailments, do they come out in the form of emotions?
We have two wonderful guests with us today. To throw some light on this, we have a psychotherapist and psychological astrologer, Arya Timblo. And we have an internationally licensed, Heal Your Life workshop coach, psychologist, and Rational Emotive Behaviour therapist, Sushma IR. Welcome to the show, and thank you for joining us today.
Sushma IR: Thank you, thank you.
Arya Timblo: And thank you for having us here.
AB: Sushma, tell us a little bit about this ‘Heal Your Life’ methodology.
SI: Okay, so Heal Your Life is based on Louise Hay’s best-selling book— You Can Heal Your Life, which has sold millions of copies. And the fundamental message that she says is— we choose (our) thoughts, and they create our present and reality. And thoughts are nothing but words. So, when we choose different thoughts, we can change our present and our future, and that’s how we change our reality. Right? And the crux of the entire concept of ‘Heal Your Life’ is when we start to love ourselves, and when we start to accept ourselves, we can change our thoughts automatically. [Because] then we choose nourishing thoughts for ourselves, and therefore, the emotions that we experience also serve us, and eventually, the future that we create is beautiful, too.
AB: Is ‘Loving Yourself’ the crux of it all?
SI: Yes.
AB: That’s lovely. That’s wonderful. In fact, I’ve been doing this Joe Dispenza meditation on loving yourself, which is so powerful.
Tell me, why do emotions have so much power over us? And also, some people can cope better than others, so why is that?
SI: So the thing is that, usually, it’s the thought that causes an emotion. However, since we are thinking all the time, the tendency is to not recognise the thought. However, since emotions, as you said, come with physical sensations…that’s when we can recognise that sensation because of which we say, okay, I’m feeling a particular way. Right? And we sometimes can label the emotions, and sometimes we are not able to label the emotions, but the feeling is real.
And to talk about it, I’m going to now refer a little bit from the REBT (Rational Emotional Behavioural Therapy) standpoint. We all experience positive emotions and negative emotions, but in negative emotions, there are healthy emotions or helpful emotions, and unhealthy or unhelpful emotions.
So, when I feel like a real strong rage, that is going to be unhelpful… It’s going to further cause physical pain, and I’m going to feel it very intensely. So, to answer your question, someone who is in a situation, when they choose thoughts to help with the negative situation, they experience perhaps a negative emotion – which could be irritation or annoyance [for example] – which helps them cope with the situation…Someone who says, ‘how could something like this happen to me?’ And, ‘how dare they and how dare the world?’ and so on…they [may]experience intense rage, and then, you can feel it all through your body. So that’s how some people can cope better in a negative situation, whereas certain others are absolutely not able to, and they kind of succumb to the negative situation.
AB: Okay, and Arya, welcome back to the show. We had such a fun show last time on psychological astrology, which a lot of people found very useful.
AT: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
AB: So picking up from where Sushma left off, can you tell us why some people cope better?
AT: It’s a very significant question. The truth is, in my experience, both as a psychotherapist as well as a psychological astrologer, and working for 18 years in this field, I found that there is a combination of factors. One is the genetic structure of an individual, the other is the conditioning. Another way to put it is the person’s nature and the person’s nurture. And certain people have a predisposition to be psychosomatic. Psychosomatic meaning ‘Psyche’ being the soul and ‘Soma’, meaning the ‘body’ in Greek. For example, athletes or people who use their bodies like a gymnast or someone else who’s very physically active, they have the potential of working with the body. Now, the potential is also what we overuse. So they might push their bodies, for example. What happens then is that it (the body) takes the brunt of it and it accumulates stress. For example, if I overwork and I overdo it…So, certain people have a pre-genetic disposition to over-exert themselves and take out stress in a certain way through their bodies. And if their conditioning, their family environment, their early family environment didn’t teach them how to healthily let it out, blow off steam, so to speak, or express it more creatively through art or other forms of exercise, meditation, yoga, as we have in India, then it becomes a little more complicated for them, and they tend to have what we consider to have dis-ease. Dis-ease is the disequilibrium within the body which actually, in its natural form, knows how to have homeostasis.
AB: Okay, homeostasis. Explain that to us before we carry on.
AT: So, homeostasis is a form of equilibrium. Now, what happens is that certain people are not in tune with themselves. When people, from early childhood, have experienced too much fear or too much anger or danger; [the childhood environment] is really important to our development as human beings, so they accumulate their anger or the fear or the lack of safety, they take up tai chi or meditation or yoga, whatever it is. But, if people don’t, that is where it starts to get accumulated and suppressed in the body.
AB: Okay. And I wanted to ask you, so the physical manifestation of an emotion— is it likely to be things like back ache and migraine, or could it be other things as well?
AT: Each person has a genetic predisposition to be sensitive in a certain area. So, for example, certain people’s energies get caught up in their throat because their throat is, if you even think about it symbolically, our throat is [associated with] our form of expression. So, if they’re holding back their feelings, I think it (addressing Sushma IR) might resonate, from Louise Hay’s perspective as well. If we don’t speak our truth, if we’re not able, to be honest, and stand up for our values and what we need, it gets stuck in the throat. And if we are not able to find another outlet, it can accumulate for a person with that genetic disposition, to be sensitive over there.
AB: Actually, I’d love your views on this as well, Sushma. With the Louise Hay thing. Why do certain emotions manifest as certain pains?
SI: Just taking what Arya said one step further, Louise says something amazing. She says that the reason why we are genetically predisposed to certain ailments is, because, as we grow up, we pick that up from our parents. So I see how my mother would respond to a threatening situation, and would unknowingly pick that up, and therefore that becomes an ailment because that’s how I’m dealing with the emotion. And that’s amazing. Which is why the hereditary ailments, as per Louise’s research, she says, it could come from observing as well.
AB: Wow. So it’s not just nature, it’s a combination. Even nature is a combination of nature and nurture, is what you’re saying. Fabulous.
SI: Yes.
AT: And I agree with that as well, because we have a predisposition, and then we are being exposed to somebody, and their reaction may not be the most healthy. For example, people who have heart issues— it’s genetically passed on from issue to issue. The heart is considered to be the seat of the soul, right? And it’s a fountain of joy, so to speak, astrologically as well as when you look at it psychologically, and when people are disconnected from that, they have a tendency to be fearful and over-adaptive, and that starts to accumulate. That is when the heart reacts very strongly. Now, if my parent, whether it’s a mother or father, does that, I learn that as a coping mechanism.
SI: Just one more thing to add to that is— and it adds to my belief, where I say, oh, you know what? My family has this heredity of maybe heart attacks. And I keep saying that to myself.
AB: And then it goes into your subconscious mind, and from there it goes on to your physical body.
SI: Yes, and just any discomfort, and I’m like, oh, you know what? This could happen, and I know this is going to happen, and we affirm it.
AB: So Arya, what do you see in charts when there are aches and pains in someone’s body?
AT: I look at it [wearing] both hats. I look at it from a psychotherapist [perspective], which is my first training, and I also look at it from a psychological astrologer [point of view]. Now, very loosely, when we look at the person’s chart, we see the person’s potential. Again, we also see the genetic structure. We see the conditioning of the family and where they’re coming from. And there are particular areas of the chart where we see the body and how is the person using their body. What is their potential? How do they process things? Certain planets over there can give you an idea. For example, I was looking at a chart of a woman, who was on many levels, over-adaptive and fearful. So she tries to people please, where you’re kind of like, okay, I’m stretching myself, but I’m not realising it. I’m going to do that so someone likes me more. Now, what happened is, in the area of her chart for her body, she had the planet Mars there, which is about assertion. And what I was seeing in her chart is that there is a transit that’s going to be coming up that will activate the suppressed anger that she has been disconnected from. So what I discussed with her is that I see this, and she’s familiar with astrology. So I said, I see that this is something that you’ve been holding on to for so long. This is a really good time from this period onwards to start to look at asserting yourself. So she started to look at sports, tai chi, taekwondo, and other ways of healthily getting the anger out that she had been holding in all these years. So this is one example of how we can try to creatively work with the flow of the energies that are coming up through the chart.
AB: And that’s what I love about what you do. It’s not just about making predictions. It’s about, exactly what you said, creatively working with the energies. That was interesting.
Now, Sushma, in the introduction, we spoke about Chinese medicine, and we talked about the liver and how, when you’re angry it affects your liver, but when your liver is affected, then you feel rage. So can you tell us a little bit about that from the ‘Louise Hay’ point of view?
SI: Right. So Louise Hay has made, like, a directory of sorts where she talks about the various ailments and the various parts of the body and what they could represent. And when you think about it closely, it makes a lot of sense logically as well. So anything to do with the knees, for example. The knees are about helping us move forward. So there could be an inhibition of something new that I’m not able to come to terms with because of which perhaps I could be having knee pain.
And the same goes with, like Arya mentioned, the throat. When you hold yourself back, you want to express yourself, but you are not able to, and therefore you experience throat pain. It’s amazing. And the stomach, for example, is about nourishment. So, any time that you feel intimidated about what’s in store…‘I don’t know what’s going to happen’… there is this protective mechanism because of which you feel it in your stomach. And the churning is a lot to do with [that feeling of] ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen’. We colloquially call it ‘the butterflies in the stomach’, even in a social setup. But then when that becomes too much and it gets into the negative space, it can cause a lot of anxiety, and the anxiety is causing the stomach-churning. And the more I recognise the stomach-churning, it just kind of exacerbates the emotion as well, so it becomes like a cycle that we get trapped in.
AB: So you talked about Louise Hay’s directory. It’s really interesting because I’ve been reading it for years. When I have some pain, I sometimes go and refer to it and see what is causing it. So tell me some of them, like financial stress, where does that show up? Or backache? Some of the common pains that people (face), like shoulder pains, tell us what is the reason for those things.
SI: You spoke about financial stress, right? So as per the ‘Heal Your Life’ philosophy, the back is the symbol of the support of our life. Because that’s the backbone. And financial stress is where you feel pain in the lower back. And it’s got nothing to do with your financial capacity or your ability to pay bills. It’s just the attitude where you think you might not be able to.
Let’s imagine that there’s a couple and one of them loses their job. There’s this sudden burden that the other partner feels where they say, ‘Oh my God, where am I going to get the money from?’ Their financial stability may not be affected, but the anxiety that comes from the change is going to cause lower back pain.
Similarly, [with the] shoulders or arms. When I feel burdened, when I feel like there’s so much on me and I don’t know how to go about it, it could cause pain in my arms. So it’s very interesting that every part of the body has something or the other to do with emotions.
AB: How can you tell if what you’re feeling is caused by emotions or by an underlying physical ailment – something like a muscle tear could have happened, or an injury…Using that philosophy, how can you tell?
SI: So Louise says that every ailment definitely has an emotional undercurrent.
AB: Oh wow, every single ailment?
SI: Yes, and in fact, she was diagnosed with cancer. This was after many years of her actually doing the work. And she was taken aback because she thought she had already processed all her emotions and everything. She said, ‘oh my God, where is this coming from?’ And she realised that she had a lot of resentment, which she had to work through. And that was so deeply buried that it actually came to the fore. Now, having said that, it doesn’t mean that if I have, say, a ligament tear, I don’t go and cure it with a doctor. But it always helps to see where it is coming from emotionally and what various emotions I perhaps need to process. And if we look back and analyse, it does go down to self-love, self-approval, sometimes the feeling of safety and security, where I feel threatened, therefore, I need to tell myself that I’m safe, the universe is here to protect me, and there are these four or five things that you can actually narrow down to, and that’s beautiful.
AB: But what is really amazing is, everything you’re talking about…Louis Hay’s philosophy… is coming down to us. It’s about us and the internal. It’s not about the external. That’s very powerful.
So Arya, how can we use psychological astrology to prevent emotional issues?
AT: Well, there are two aspects. One is looking at the chart, which I kind of use as a blueprint. So I try to see, what is this person’s predisposition. What is their potential? What are some healthy outlets they can have? Talking about it is the first step, as you said. It’s one thing to acknowledge it, to realise where it stems from, to go back and therefore release it. The second aspect I look at, whether it’s through psychological astrology or whether it’s a therapy session, is to find a healthier outlet.
Supposing I tend to get anxiety attacks, and I feel it in my stomach, like how we talked about butterflies, but sometimes it can get more intense, and it’s a very physical, visceral pain. One tries to connect to that pain and help a person in the therapeutic session. For example, I look a lot at Gestalt psychotherapy. Gestalt, in a nutshell, looks at the whole and the parts. So I’ll try to invite the client to understand their stomach, if her stomach could speak, can you touch it, can you give it physical contact? Whatever is in disequilibrium, try to nurture it, try to give it the contact, the healing, connection, and acknowledgement that it needs.
So in Gestalt’s psychotherapy, one of the techniques we look at is speaking to the stomach or wherever the ailment is, touching it, giving it the strokes, a bit like a mother would with a child, right, when the child gets hurt. And we start doing that in therapy. And ideally, we invite a client to slowly start to do that themselves. Okay, you’re feeling the fear? How does it feel? What does it feel like in your body? If it had a voice, what would it say to you? And I would invite the client to have a dialogue between the pain and the rest of her.
Very often you’ll find that a person is dismissive of their pain. It’s not convenient (for them). (They’ll say) I have a deadline, and I don’t have the time for this, I’ll just pop a pill and it’ll go away. There are times when it’s important to have medicine – I have no issues with medicine. But it’s also helpful — like you were saying, Sushma, to try to work with it, you know. So in that sense, I find Gestalt psychotherapy techniques very helpful to try to create a relationship with the pain and try to give it another outlet.
AB: Thank you for that.
So I’ve been through something really interesting in my life. When my first daughter, my older daughter went to university, I had a left frozen shoulder. And when my younger daughter went to university, I got a right frozen shoulder. I live in the UK and they went to the US, so they went far, far away. How would you explain that in the Louise Hay methodology? What was going on with me?
SI: So the shoulder represents our ability to enjoy life. And any ailment with the shoulder is to do with the attitude that we have towards whatever is taking place in life. So if I could ask you a question, how did you feel about your daughter going away? If you felt unsure or if there was any rigidity in your mind?
AB: There are so many mixed emotions when a child goes away to university.
SI:Absolutely.
AB: Thousands of miles away, there are so many mixed emotions, right?
SI: Correct. And that explains it, right? And assuming that two daughters, your two sides, that makes you a whole, right? That kind of explains how the first time your first daughter went away, you had one of your shoulders freezing, and then the second time the stiffness was in the other one. That is where it comes from.
AB: So, is there a way of avoiding this kind of pain? You know the aim of this podcast is to help people and as we said, prevention is better than cure. So, are there any exercises like mindfulness? How can people become more resilient? How can we help people so that they don’t go through things like this? I’m not just talking about frozen shoulders, but all kinds of ailments. How can they cope with their emotions better?
SI: So, unfortunately, we are brought up and not taught how to express emotions, right? We are either told to deny them or suppress them or distract ourselves. And as a result, what happens is… Emotions, by definition are energy in motion. So the job of an emotion is to flow, but the moment we suppress [it] or deny [it] or distract [ourselves] , we block it in our body. So, the most simple, yet not easy, way to go about it is to allow ourselves to express it. Let’s imagine I decide to go out for a run because I’m feeling a particular emotion. It’s important that I tell myself that I am allowing myself to let the emotion go as I involve myself in physical activity. If I don’t have that connection and that correlation, I’m going to think of it as a distraction. And while, definitely, it’s going to make me feel better because it’s gone out of my system— I have not made that correlation and therefore I am not celebrating dealing with the emotion.
AB: That’s a very good point, that we could do the same exercise— mental, physical, or emotional – but if you haven’t made the correlation, then we haven’t explained to ourselves that we’re dealing with it.
SI: And correlating it with self-love, if I could have a conversation with myself saying, I know that I need this, and here’s me gifting myself this walk in the park because I know that that’s going to help me dissipate the emotions that I’m feeling and I know that that’s going to help me feel better. And then identifying the thoughts and changing the thoughts so that I’m not dependent on these walks to make me feel better.
AB: So, explain to me what you mean by identifying those thoughts and then dealing with them.
SI: So, if we have to talk about a different emotion, let’s imagine anxiety, right? It’s a very common emotion. Now, anxiety is usually caused by a lot of what-if questions. Our thoughts comprise of what-if questions. What if things go wrong? What if I don’t reach a particular place on time? And it doesn’t stop? It’s not an inquiry, it’s panic, correct? Because one what-if leads to the second, the second leads to the third, and then before we know it, we are stuck in a whirlpool of what-if questions. So if I’m able to identify the what-if question – and the what-if is insinuating that it’s going to be the worst-case scenario – if I could say that it’s not the end of the world…it’s difficult, but I have gone through it in the past and I can handle it now once again. Again, I’m choosing these thoughts. I have first allowed myself to feel the anxiety.
A lot of times, people are so compelled to think that negative emotion is not good, that they push themselves to feel a positive emotion, and that’s not possible. In a negative situation, you cannot feel a positive emotion. The idea is to work through the negative emotion and then move gradually to a space of peace and calm where you feel a positive emotion again. So, step number one, allow yourself / give yourself permission to feel the emotion.
AB: So, number one, feel the emotion.
SI: Yes. Whatever it may be, without judging yourself for feeling the emotion. Step number one, feel the emotion. Step number two, allow yourself to recognise the thought that caused the emotion. Because it’s never just one thought, it’s a repetition of those same thoughts. Like, for example, how could I do such a horrible thing?
AB: So the importance is also recognising the thought, and that’s why you might need the help of a therapist. You might not be able to do it yourself.
SI: Yes. If you are not able to [recognise the thought yourself], otherwise, go back to the what-if questions that keep ringing in your head, those are the thoughts [you need to change]. So, step number three, change those thoughts to more functional thoughts. For example, ‘it’s not the end of the world’. Like when I think / say, ‘what if this happens?’ So the tendency is to first tell ourselves, ‘No, no, this won’t happen’. But then the question stays— ‘but what if it does?’
AB: Yes, so figure it out. Then it’s not the end of the so what. That’s number three.
SI: Yes.
AB: And those are the three steps you would say, which will help you.
SI: Yes. And also physically, if I can feel it in my body— allowing myself to engage in some kind of an activity which allows a healthy outlet for the emotion.
AB: Feel the emotion, identify the thought, and change the thought. Those things. And try and do this through physical activity, if you can.
SI: Yes.
AB: Okay. Very helpful. Thank you, Sushma. Thank you.
So, Arya, do you have any tips for our listeners on how to deal with emotional issues that they cannot prevent? We have loss, we have grief…things happen. We can’t prevent it, even if we’re sitting on a mountain, we won’t be able to prevent every emotion. So, can you give us some tips?
AT: It’s a very relevant question because we live in a very stressful world now, don’t we, Anshu? Like we have deadlines. We are expected [to do] so much…there’s social media and also, some people have very high-stress level jobs. For example, I’ve seen doctors working in an emergency and I’ve seen psychotherapists. I was working in a suicide prevention centre before I had children, so there was a lot of high stress. I think the important thing is, and this is very hard to realise, I need to prioritise myself, my well-being is as good as and as important as what I need to do or whatever I’m going through.
Supposing you’ve gone through bereavement or loss, it is important, like you said (addressing Sushma), to complete the emotion. Emotion is not the problem. [The problem] is suppressing it or disconnecting from it and letting it lodge and fester in your body. And I’ve actually spoken to some of the most hardworking psychotherapists or doctors that I know. And they say, ‘Whatever we put in our systems, we need to take out; whatever stress we put in our systems we need to take out.’
If we do not do that, we are heading towards problems, whether it’s our mind, body, or our soul.
AB: That’s very true. So, I have a lot of friends and family who are going through things like back pain. That seems to be fairly common now. So, Sushma, tell me how can we deal with it? I mean obviously, this is about responsibility, as you said in the Louise Hay methodology, it’s about being weighed down by responsibility. But how can we help people deal with it before it happens? Is there a way of doing that? And secondly, if it does happen, then what should people do?
SI: To answer the first part, which is prevention, just like Arya said, right? Prioritising our well-being and not allowing ourselves to spread ourselves thin just because work needs us, people need us, family needs us, and every other social obligation. I mean, it’s a perception that it’s an obligation, right? I mean, that’s what we are telling ourselves. But if we could allow ourselves to recuperate, not just physically, but also emotionally and spiritually, that’s going to help us be resilient to stress. So that’s how we’re going to be able to prevent a situation.
And also, I think, as Arya said earlier, talking to the body, and thanking the body for actually being such a loyal friend is so important. We take the body for granted.
AB: So give us some techniques on how to express emotions.
SI: We spoke about expressing emotions.
AB: That’s the three-step process that we talked about. Okay. So even before something happens, you would say, when the thoughts come in, start recognising them.
SI: No, it might be difficult to do that. The starting point of identification becomes the body sensation and therefore the emotion, and then tracing back to the thought. Because it’s going to be difficult for me to keep observing my thought throughout the day because we’re doing other things. But the moment we feel it, like, for example, the pit in the stomach or say, a sensation in the head. If I’m anxious, I could feel palpitations or sweaty palms and all these physiological symptoms. I think anxiety comes with the maximum number of physiological sensations. So, [it’s important to have] the awareness that this is my body talking to me, saying, you know what, there’s something that’s coming up for you and you need to deal with it. And then completing the cycle by thanking the body, saying you know, ‘thank you that you’ve been here for me, and I promise to look after you as much as I can’.
AB: So, what I’m getting from both of you is that we’re not kind enough to ourselves. That we don’t love ourselves enough. We’re not kind enough to ourselves. One last question. A lot of people go through knee pain and joint pain. What do the charts say when you see something like this?
AT: I think there are a couple of things. Sushma is talking about how the knees relate to certain things. When I’m looking at it from a psychotherapeutic as well as a psychological astrology point of view, we look at the knees as a joint which is a lot about bending. When you look at all religions, for example, whatever religion, there’s something about submitting to a higher authority, right? When we go down on our knees, and sometimes we go down on our knees and cry, it’s actually relinquishing control. So, actually, the whole skeletal system, according to psychological astrology relates to the whole aspect of focusing too much on structure. So, a person has that potential of being able to be in charge, take responsibility, take things on their shoulders, on their back, their spine on their back. But, when we overdo that, that is when the joints, the back or the knee start to hurt us.
So it’s a sign from our bodies telling us that we have to be kinder to ourselves, we have to be softer with ourselves. Some people have this very early on. I had a friend in his teens, and he had back problems. He used to worry too much, there was too much fear in his system which was getting lodged in his back and his spine and his skeletal system. He needed treatment. So the medical system is sometimes important when it has reached too much of a point. But, he also started to work on it and realised that this is the shift I need to make in my life, and he needed to find that mind-body-soul kind of balance. And I’m happy to say in his forties, now he’s in a much better space. He’s gotten off medication. He’s learned how to soothe himself much better. So it is something.
We need practice for things, we also need to practice self-nurturing. For me, I can’t start my day and I don’t end my day without doing whatever I need to do. I vent, I write a lot, and no matter how busy I am, I will always find time for me and taking care of myself so I can do my best and live up to my potential.
AB: That’s a very good point you made.
AT:[nods] I don’t make any excuses.
AB: It does come up in a lot of our podcasts— journalling. A lot of people have said it’s been invaluable to them. Like when you’re feeling lots of emotions, just write them down and write them down. Some people recommend keeping the pieces of paper, burning them and imagining them going into the light. Some people just say throw them away, tear them and throw them away. But writing is meant to be invaluable to deal with emotional issues.
So thank you so much for your valuable advice, Arya Timblo and Sushma IR. That was such an interesting conversation. And just to do a quick recap. How do emotions manifest? Sushma?
SI: [Negative] Emotions manifest when we choose thoughts that don’t serve us, and those thoughts cause emotions. And when we don’t allow emotions to get out of our system, they fester.
AB: Arya?
AT: So your question is what causes emotions?
AB: How do emotions manifest?
AT: It can have a healthy manifestation like love, joy, connection, a sense of belonging, a sense of unity, and solidarity. That’s a healthy expression. When I suppress that or cut off from it. Like we’re talking about conditioning, where we say, ‘don’t feel things, you’re such a sissy, suck it up. Don’t feel like that or don’t get angry’. It’s very socially unacceptable for some families to cry, right, because you’re being weak. When we suppress it, it gets lodged in the body.
AB: Okay, and what would you recommend to our listeners who might be experiencing pain? Sushma?
SI: Firstly, talk to that part of that body that is hurting, because the body responds very quickly, but we don’t end up doing that. So that’s the first thing to do. And then identify the emotion and all of those things that we went over.
AB: Okay. Arya?
AT: I have an interesting take because I feel that our pain is the biggest gift. It’s giving us a message. And our pain is always connected to our potential. For example, if my potential is to speak, it will be my throat, which might get irritated because it’s not getting its natural expression, right? If I’m a very physical, tactile and energetic person, and if I don’t get that, I will get aches and pains because my body is feeling restless. Listen to your pain. It is your greatest gift. So if you can connect to it and listen to it, you can also help it serve you in your potential.
AB: Lovely. Thank you once again for taking the time to be in our show today.
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