How are the mind, emotions and body related?

Negative mental perceptions and traumatic experiences can create difficult emotional states, such as anxiety, depression, worry, sadness, fear, anger, paranoia and confusion.

These emotional states in turn ripple through the body. When the body is overwhelmed by any particular emotional state, it reacts by manifesting physical symptoms. Physical reactions to emotional states can include:

• Headaches
• High blood pressure
• Neck, shoulder and back pain and tension
• Digestive problems
• Insomnia
• Low libido and sexual problems
• Other physical health issues

Likewise, if the physical condition of the body becomes imbalanced, this may cause ripple effects on the emotional and mental levels. This is why people often feel greater emotional and mental wellbeing after physical movement, breathing exercises and eating well.

This interconnected matrix of mental-emotional-physical reactions is responsible for the great majority of chronic illness and mental health problems that face the average person today. Commonly referred to as “stress,” the condition is called “anxiety” or “depression” or is given other labels as the intensity increases.

It is a common insight in the holistic medical field that emotions hide in the body. When we are overwhelmed by an emotional state that we cannot process sufficiently, we push it beneath our conscious awareness. It then hides in the body in the form of core-level physical tension, and vague free-floating feelings of uneasiness, feeling out of imbalance, and feeling that things don’t seem quite right.

To gain sustainable, long-term healing, it is essential to address these hidden emotions.

More and more, people are becoming aware of this phenomenon and how it impacts the quality of their lives. This greater awareness leads many people to want to heal and fully release these embodied negative emotional states. The combination of acupuncture and counseling is perfect for helping people interested in doing this inner work and healing.

Acupuncture

Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine use a wide range of techniques to release blocked energy in the system of energy channels that run throughout the body. Using acupuncture, acupressure, Chinese herbs, exercise and dietary suggestions, and guided breathing and meditation, acupuncture treatment addresses both the mind and body.

Using Acupuncture to help release of tension

The essential effects of acupuncture are to release tension at the core of the body. This effect occurs in almost every acupuncture session. Core-level tension of the muscles, fascia and organs is almost always directly caused by mental and emotional factors. It’s responsible for many of the stress-related symptoms mentioned above, such as headaches, fatigue, insomnia, neck and back pain. It’s also directly responsible for the symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression.

As the body releases these subtle layers of tension, physical and mental symptoms lessen and can often do so dramatically—sometimes immediately. In many cases, significant progress occurs within 3–6 weeks.  Complex and long-term issues may take much longer to see major and sustained improvement, up to 6–12 months of  regular treatment.

Many times acupuncture is not sufficient by itself to create sustained and long-term healing. If a person does not put in the work to address the mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns that created the health issue in the first place, the body will re-accumulate the core level tension that it released during the acupuncture treatment, and the problems will return.

Counseling uses a variety of approaches to directly address these mental, emotional and behavioral patterns, making counseling and acupuncture excellent partners in the healing process.

Counseling

Your practitioner understands trauma as any experience that leaves the client feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope as he or she normally would, leading to unhealthy, self-defeating patterns. In this sense of the word, trauma occurs every day in repeated or prolonged interpersonal or workplace conflict. More extreme examples of trauma are life-threatening or violent experiences outside the realm of normal daily life.

Stressful and negative emotional, thought and behavior patterns often have their root in earlier traumas that remain stuck in memory networks in the brain. Your practitioner, employs a variety of methods to help you directly heal these underlying patterns. These methods include:

Helping the client cultivate greater mindfulness and awareness of:

• Body sensations
• Emotional states
• Thought patterns
• Behavior patterns

Helping the client gain insight into:

• How past traumatic experiences are affecting the client in the present moment in the realm of body, emotions, thoughts and behaviors
• How the client can neutralize the negative impact of these past traumas, allowing for the healing, change and rebalancing of the body, emotions, thoughts and behaviors

Creating a safe, empathic space for the client to experience:

• Surfacing of difficult emotional and mental states
• Release of these difficult emotions and thoughts

Greater mindfulness allows clients awareness of their in-the-moment physiological and emotional experience. Through this increased awareness of their inner experience, clients gain a greater capacity to understand how present-day stress, anxiety, depression and other issues are being influenced by past experiences.

By helping the client bring the present experience into conscious awareness, the practitioner provides a space for the client to create new memories. The practitioner creates a safe, empathic environment where the client can deeply feel and express any repressed emotional states that need to rise to the surface. As these hidden emotional states release and heal, the client develops a renewed sense of self-compassion.

Since emotional states are often stored and hidden in the body, this approach to counseling also focuses on helping clients develop greater awareness of their bodily sensations in the present moment. To accomplish this, clients learn the skill of consciously tracking body sensations and understanding how they are connected to emotional states, thought patterns and behaviors.

Eventually, clients obtain insight into how past experiences create unconscious responses in the present moment.

As a result of this process, clients gain access to the healthy observing self and the ability to mindfully attend to their internal experience.

This process heals symptoms of emotional imbalance, promotes affective transformation, creates higher levels of overall wellness, changes unhealthy behavior patterns, and enables more adaptive functioning.

In summary

Acupuncture

• releases core-level tensionat the level of the body and energy system
• creates a physical experience of emotional peaceand inner balance
• provides physical and chemical ways to maintain inner balance
• prepares the nervous system for emotional healing

Counseling

• increases self-awarenessat the level of the body, emotions and thoughts
• helps the client experientially understand the connectionsbetween past trauma, thought patterns, challenging emotional states and negative behavior patterns
• provides a safe, empathic space where the client can consciously heal past traumas, thus creating peace and balance in the present moment