How to Approach Self-Healing—Are Positive Emotions Enough?

Knowing how to approach your self-healing process can be a real quandary, particularly if you don’t have a favorite and specific energy healing modality. You can spend a lot of energy just figuring out how to think of self-healing in a general context.

Recently, one of my readers asked a really great question regarding a general approach to self-healing. It was significant enough that I sent it to several of my colleagues for their consideration and comments.

Here is what was posed to me. The writer wondered what I thought about an approach to healing where you never think about your body, but instead have thoughts that made you feel emotionally good, and as a result your body would automatically realign itself. Since I have historically chosen to lovingly focus on the area of my body needing attention, I wanted some additional insights to this query. Here are a couple of responses I received.

Dr. Valerie Olmstead, NMD wrote me with this observation about holding positive feelings and trusting the body would align to those feelings, “Yah, of course! If, that is, one is intending alignment.” This is an important distinction. If you are feeling good emotionally, but not holding an intention for the body to align to that feeling, you might make very little progress physically.

If we take this a bit further, the concept proposed to me seems to assume that good emotions and physical discomfort cannot exist together. This seeming assumption opens up another question. Is it possible to be emotionally happy and still be in physical distress?

I know from personal experience, that it is possible to be emotionally happy and physically ill or uncomfortable. I have witnessed this in others as well. For example, imagine that you are quite ill and someone you love comes to visit you. You might feel your heart leap and reach your hand out for them. Perhaps you automatically sit up to hug them, and increase your pain level for having made the effort, yet feel love and happiness just holding them in your arms.

Consider a time when you were in discomfort and someone said something that caused you to laugh. There you are feeling pure joy and delight, while simultaneously saying, “Ouch,” because the laughing itself caused you to feel more physical discomfort. So positive emotions and physical pain are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

If you have ever been ill or in chronic pain for an extended period of time, you know how difficult it is to keep your emotions in a positive place. The illness and pain seem to scream at you to pay attention to your body. If you could actually maintain focus on positive emotions, ignoring the demands of your body, and your intention was clear that the body was to align with the positive emotions you are feeling, I could see how this approach might be effective. Having been in intense discomfort, I’m not sure I personally could do it.

My friend and shaman, healer, Maria Mar, made a significant observation about positive emotions and their helpful or limiting roles in healing. “There is a lot of ‘feel good’ that is ego-bound. It is lodged in what I call the Second-hand heart. The one that carries the emotional scripts, expectations and dramas. That kind of feel-good is not healing or re-aligning and it is usually part of the attachment to the dis-ease.”

Maria makes it clear that just having positive emotions may not lend to ultimate healing, if the good feelings are caught up in the very ego attachments that helped to create the illness to begin with, or contribute to the illness’ ongoing existence.

This is a powerful distinction. There are certain positive emotional states that do contribute to healing and others that, depending upon your personal attachments, may not be helping you heal. Let’s say that you are deeply in love with someone that is leaving the intimate relationship you have had with them. Your heart is aching emotionally and physically. If you are attached to receiving intimate love from only that person and you have an attachment to how that love must be reciprocated to you, you have a drama of expectation wrapped around the positive emotion of love.

You can literally develop chest pains, high blood pressure, loss of weight and more in an attempt to keep beliefs about your version of what that love must look like and feel like alive in your life. This is not the kind of belief or positive emotion that will help you heal.

In my own experience, not attending directly to the part of my body that is speaking loudly to me usually results in it yelling louder through more pain. Yes, I can remove myself from the pain for a period of time through a form of meditation that takes me into states of bliss, but when I am more grounded in my body, the part of the body in pain wants attention.

Rather than not attending to the pain, it has been my personal preference to go into it. That’s right—into the pain, illness or discomfort. By being present to the sub-textual message my body is carrying, my body relaxes into a state of healing freedom. By being present in loving compassion, without judgment regarding its existence or reason for being, the motivations and needs behind the pain are acknowledged, and then heal naturally in the presence of centered, loving compassion.

Is it possible to heal in the manner suggested by my reader where you do not attend to the body and rather hold positive emotions so that the body can automatically align? I imagine it is possible, provided your intention is very clear and your emotions are based in loving compassion, rather than bound to emotions that are actually part of the healing trauma. And your thoughts and beliefs (conscious and subconscious) are in the right positive framework. If any subconscious need is being met by the illness, the condition will prevail, regardless of what your feelings might be.

In my experience healing personally and as a healer supporting others, I have discovered that beliefs, feelings and intentions must all be in alignment. If any one area is caught in the drama that contributes to the illness, some subconscious or conscious need is being met by the illness, and your healing is not likely to progress.

May I suggest that while the concept presented holds some truth, it is probably not complete in and of itself. Other factors need to be considered in creating a holistic response to illness and the creation of health. That said, if I were going to focus on one positive feeling with which to invite my body into alignment, I would choose compassion. Feelings—emotional and physical; positive and negative—held in compassion, lead us to truth. Freeing the self into the truth beyond the attachments and dramas provides the greatest opportunity for healing at every level.