What if we told you that the body speaks? Or that emotionally balanced people get sick less? According to Cristina Cairo, psychologist and specialist in body language and in areas such as Chinese medicine and NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), our emotional state (which has been with us since we were born) and our limiting beliefs are truly responsible for the development of all our health problems, physical and mental.
Cláudia Marquês, a Medicine student at the School of Traditional Chinese Medicine, in Lisbon, explains to us that “the two basic principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine are yin and yang , as well as the five movements/elements” and that “a more yin is always someone who is more introverted, who likes to be at home, who is chilly and who has a greater tendency towards a less lively mood, while a yang individual is precisely the opposite. He is a more lively, dynamic and extroverted person.”
According to the future doctor, “in Chinese medicine, it is believed that, in most cases, the causes of the main physical illnesses come from emotional disturbances”. The issue of the five elements, in turn, translates into the fact that each organ and each viscera has a connection to a certain emotion. “The liver and gallbladder are linked to rabies; the heart and small intestine are about joy; the spleen-pancreas and stomach represent the concern; the lungs and large intestine are related to sadness; and, finally, the kidneys and bladder represent fear”, explains Cláudia.
No matter how much we try to free ourselves from certain feelings and emotions, the unconscious, which represents 95% of our mind, knows precisely everything we think about and knows – perfectly – our anxieties, our revolts, our desires, our our internal struggles and everything that is part of us. That's why it sends us signals every day, signals that can be interpreted as answers.
To prevent a manifestation of a negative emotion from occurring in the physical body, we must resolve emotional issues.
The theory that nothing happens by chance is closely linked to this topic and, according to Cristina Cairo, our body is a kind of screen on which we project our emotions, with negative emotions being represented in the future in the form of physical illness. The psychologist argues that this is all somatization, which reveals resentment, unhappiness, hurt and anger, and which culminates in illnesses, especially when there is an accumulation of years of these same negative feelings. To prevent a manifestation of a negative emotion from occurring in the physical body, we must resolve precisely the psychological and emotional issues that are part of us.
António Damásio, one of the world's greatest scientists in the study of the human brain, also argues that it is not possible to understand how our mind works without taking its emotions into account.
Cristina Cairo also comes close to this idea, believing that any health problem has an emotional, psychological and even spiritual cause. Thus, the emotions we harbor (often without realizing it) can trigger an illness or even an accident, this being a form of alert triggered by the unconscious. Change and healing go through internal transformation, so that “the body becomes healthy again”, not forgetting that this is “a reflection of our mind”.
Recent studies in the area of psychoanalysis are in line with this line of thought and are linked to the thesis that illnesses can be cured through the cure of emotions. The main negative emotions that affect us are guilt, resentment and fear. It is crucial to learn to let them go so that they do not materialize into something more serious in the physical body. We must heal ourselves from the inside out and do therapies/activities – reiki , yoga , acupuncture, etc. – that allow us, finally, to free ourselves from negative patterns.
