There are many different conflicting paradigms in the world of healthcare, depending on different professions, beliefs systems, location/culture, and etc. Western medicine, for example, is predominantly ran by a mechanistic biomedical healthcare system that unfortunately can lead to viewing the patient through isolating parts, instead of looking at the parts as an interaction of the whole. With this type of view, comes great understanding on how to treat disease when it presents in the physical body but may be avoiding the underlying reason disease is manifesting. As knowledge continues to build on one another and the understanding of human beings shifts, new views or healing paradigms emerge. Holistic nursing, developed in response to mechanistic views of the body and mind, seeks to view the body, mind, and spirit as connected or a unified whole, where emotions are an intrinsic part of the whole (Dossey & Keegan, 2016).
Many Eastern medicine systems link an imbalance in emotions to disease. For example, Tibetan medicine believes that afflictive mental states and mental poisons, as described by Donden (1997) as feelings of “desire, hatred, and obscuration,” are the ultimate causes of disease. It is apparent that to be healthy, requires harmony between the mind, body, and spirit, and not only physical ailments.
The movie “E-motion” sums up this perspective on emotional health very well, suggesting that trapped, unconscious, or avoided emotion within our bodies leads to imbalance, disharmony, and ultimately disease. The movie title represents that emotion is simply -> "energy in motion."
Dr. Bradley Nelson, explains that each emotion has a vibrational frequency, and when we feel that emotion or vibration strongly enough, it can become too powerful causing the energy to become trapped within the body. When you understand the body as a being of energy, you can see how lodged energy can start to distort the natural energetic system and distort tissues of the body leading to disease.
You can start to view negative emotions as energetically chaotic, causing chaos on your own cells. Dr. Joe Dispenza states, “Your body is your unconscious mind, it doesn’t know the difference between an experience in real life that creates an emotional response and emotion that we fabricate by thought alone; to the body it's believing it's in the same environmental conditions.” Therefore, all the negative emotions that we continue to recycle in our minds can lead to your body releasing the same stress response chemicals that have been proven to genetically modify our DNA overtime and cause disease.
Many times, our destructive behaviors that we keep repeating stem from an emotional reaction from an event in our lives that we may have long forgotten about or have pushed away, but the brain still carries the information or reaction. This is a great example of why there is a strong emphasis on trauma work in the healing arena, because we may be unconsciously reacting to ordinary events in our lives from a past-programed trauma response. Bringing light to the unconscious helps us to understand our reactions and use conscious intention to create new pathways in the brain, so that we do not pass our traumas selfs on to our children or other people in our lives.
Overall, there is much to be taken from this movie, even if it simply posits a more uplifting way of thinking.
Kelsey
Movie E-motion trailer -> https://www.e-motionthemovie.com/
In text citations:
Donden, Y. (1997). Health through balance: An introduction to Tibetan medicine (J. Hopkins, Ed.). Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass.
Dossey, B., & Keegan, L. (2016). Holistic nursing: A handbook for practice (7th ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.