It's All In the Body: How We Store Painful Emotions in Our Bodies and How Energy Healing Can Help Release Them

Before Christmas as I stepped out into the December night after being at my singing group, I could feel the cold “seeping” into my bones. As well as the immediate thoughts (“I don’t like that!” “I preferred being in Spain last week to this!” and “maybe I will emigrate!!!”) I realised that this was a very familiar feeling.

At first this puzzled me, as I immediately realised that this isn’t an experience I have had recently – living in the relatively built up areas of Manchester as I have done over the last few years has meant that even when it’s been really cold I haven’t felt that getting into your bones cold!

Then I realised – it’s a memory from when I lived in Russia for 15 months! (I always say I lived in Moscow for 15 months, but that that included 1 and half winters!) I used to go walking on a Sunday with a wonderful group of people – about half of us were Russian, and half foreigners from many different parts of the world. We used to catch the train out to different villages around Moscow, and go for beautiful walks in snowy forests with iced over lakes (which we used to stop to swim in in the summer!) – often in bright, clear sunshine.

On the way home, the heating would often not be working in the train. And, no matter how careful you were, it also seemed as though by that time of day, your feet were wet. And that’s when the cold would get into your bones. My focus would shift to the highlight of my week! – arriving home to a warm apartment (central heating literally centrally controlled – so pretty much always really hot inside any building in Moscow!), and having a hot bath – with a bar of chocolate!

Maybe now I am living out here in Hebden Bridge it is time to reinstate that “tradition” from the past – with some homemade raw chocolate!!!

After all of that consciously “working out” what my body was remembering, I started to think about the nature of memory and how it is stored in the body. Everything I have just described is for me much more powerful than the mere words “I used to sometimes feel cold to the bone when I lived in Russia.”

And I was thinking of course that this is why energy healing and EFT can be so powerful. Both therapies can literally take you back to that in the body feeling, and release the energy behind a trauma that it is no longer serving you to hold on to.

On my energy healing course, I remember my very first experience of this. I was releasing some hurt from my childhood regarding being criticised. As I released it my right arm started to spasm and shake. And I realised that this is where those harsh words had “lodged” in my body. As a result of that process, I no longer had so much tension in my right arm and shoulder and I no longer took casual comments from people as outright criticism.

And this is where I think the real power of energy healing and EFT lies: in getting to the root cause of an issue in the body, and releasing the energy associated with it.