The mind/body connection is hardly a new concept. In fact, it is the foundation of Chinese medicine and Ayruveda. Hippocrates, the ancient Greek known as the “Father of Medicine,” was also aware of the spiritual aspects of healing, and took great concern with treating patients with calmness and gentleness. The integration of mind/body/spirit is essential to holistic healing practices. It was only after the Renaissance that healers commonly viewed the mind and body as separate concepts or entities. And now, as we know, modern Western medicine is largely, if not entirely, premised upon their separation. In light of Taureans being so acutely aware of their senses, and Earth signs in general being so conscious of their bodies and their sensory experiences, I want to explore the concept of the mind/body connection and the idea that unconscious emotions and beliefs could be at the core of physical disease and ailments.

As a holistic, depth-oriented psychotherapist, my practice is based on exploring unconscious beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and how they may be manifesting in our daily life—as patterns in relationships, or as the common “issues” that people come to psychotherapy for in the first place. It is believed that the conscious mind accounts for only 5% of our brain activity. The other 95%? We attribute that to the workings of the unconscious mind. Did that just blow your (conscious) mind?! It’s an overwhelming piece of information to digest, for sure. But also, so humbling! It can take a lot of work, courage, and patience to explore our subliminal programming and become conscious of it. (Decoding the confusing and weird messages in our dreams is no easy task!) But, the transformations that occur when we awaken to these unconscious schema are remarkable. It is not preposterous to claim that our childhood wounding or the trauma we’ve experienced affects the way we behave in relationships, as well as every other aspect of our lives. However it still seems “out there” to many to assert that this wounding and trauma might also take a toll on our bodies, eventually manifesting as illness and disease.

So let’s take a brief look at how the mind and body were separated in the first place...

In the 16th and 17th century, as many advancements were taking place in science and western medicine, French philosopher (and scientist) Rene Descartes came up with a theory called “Dualism.” Descartes stated that the mind and body were separate, but closely joined. This all came during the Age of Enlightenment, or Reason, when intellectualism—the mind and rational thought—were favored. And this needed to happen. After the Dark Ages and the ensuing deterioration of society and corruption of the Christian Church, there was a backlash against the blind faith and fear that religion called for. (Although many progressive thinkers of the time, including Descartes, qualified or hedged their theories, so as not to be ostracized or dubbed “heretic” by the Church powers that be, like many of their predecessors, e.g., Galileo). In the Age of Reason, the scientific developments that took place changed everything and have served as the foundation of many of our healing practices in the Western World, both in medicine and psychology. But it seems that in many ways the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. We still value intellect, reason, and science more than we do emotions, intuition, and spirituality. We have valued material results based on data and evidence-based practices at the expense of our well-being and our lives due to our one-dimensional view of disease and health. Health of course isn’t just a reference to the state of your body, but also the state of your mind and spirit.

The “stress/disease” connection is hardly a new idea either. In researching for this topic, I found a New York Times article written in 1988 warning of the dangers of “repressing emotional turmoil.” Daniel Goleman wrote, “The ability to tune out feelings like anger and anxiety is reflected in brain function. A recent study of ‘stiff-upper- lip types’ found they had a lag in the time it took certain information to get from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. The lag was only for disturbing messages, not for neutral ones, according to the study by Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin. Although experts believe that the represser personality is rooted in psychological experiences of childhood, the findings on brain function provide a tangible marker of the syndrome. In effect, the brain hampers the conscious registering of negative emotions.”1

Let’s just pause for a minute and take in the fact this was written in 1988! How has it taken us so long for this to sink in? And when will it be acknowledged by modern medical care? If repressing emotions is connected to illness and disease, I would hope there would be more funding for mental health services so that ALL people could address unprocessed stress, trauma, and childhood wounding with a compassionate, trained practitioner. What if this would speed up recovery time? What if, in addition to other holistic practices like meditation, we could heal ourselves from terminal disease? (Note: I feel it is important to clarify I am in no way indicating that holistic practices should be used in lieu of Western medical treatments. I am arguing they should be an important supplement—a belt-and-suspenders approach, if you will.) This is what Dr. Joe Dispenza, author of “Becoming Supernatural, is basing his whole practice on: the idea that through meditation, we can heal all sorts of physical conditions. Through the practice of meditation and the awareness that it brings, and through the experience of connecting to something greater, Dr. Dispenza’s students/patients are miraculously healing from myriad chronic illnesses.

Another renowned doctor, Gabor Maté, details experiences he has had with his patients in his many years of working in palliative care. More a therapist than a traditional medical doctor, Dr. Maté spends time with his patients, talking to them about their lives and their experiences. He offers them a compassionate ear at the end of their lives. After time spent with this approach, he noticed undeniable patterns in the characteristics of his patients. He noticed they all shared the issue of emotional repression: that is, they were unable to express their feelings in an authentic way. Emotional repression is something we learn to do as children. It is our oldest and deepest programming, and something that feels like our true nature. However, our authentic selves have instinctual needs and feelings that get blocked and split into our unconscious when we repress emotions.

Put differently, emotional repression is not a personality trait but a coping style. It’s the way we learned to deal with our feelings or needs when we’re very young. When you’re sad, angry, or upset as a little kid and no one is available to talk to you, or to acknowledge and validate your feelings, you quickly learn to turn those feelings off. But they don’t go away, instead they split off into the unconscious mind. There are more obvious reasons this happens, too, such as verbal or physical abuse, but it can happen without severe trauma as well. As children we intuit how our parents and society need us to be and to behave. If our parents cannot handle our sadness or anger, or (perhaps more likely) they are just too busy for it, we can unconsciously adopt the role of the person that’s always “fine” or “happy,” splitting off our authentic feelings and needs. This also affects our ability to communicate emotionally—how can we communicate what we are feeling if we can’t even identify the feeling?!? This of course hinders our ability to be intimate, vulnerable, and to have deep connections in our lives, resulting in loneliness, fear, and emotional isolation. Emotional repression is a domino, affecting every aspect of our lives, so how could it not also impact our bodies?

I also think it’s important to acknowledge that this theory hopefully doesn’t make a person feel like it’s their “fault” they got sick—for how can we control developing unconscious coping techniques out of mere survival when we are children? That is no one’s fault. We have made such advances in psychology in the past few decades, and with the discovery of attachment theory and developments in treating trauma, that we are only just connecting how these distressing events and our emotional wounds impact the body. In fact, it’s been only recently that we’ve started to understand the importance of feelings and the impact of emotional repression, which can manifest in so many different ways, not just in disease.

There is a new field of medicine called Psychoneuroimmunology and it’s based on the interactions of the mind and body. Try saying that word three times fast! (Or try saying it once, at any speed!) Psychoneuroimmunologists are “studying the ways that the psyche--the mind and the contents of emotions—profoundly interacts with the body’s nervous system and how both of them, in turn, form an essential link with our immune defenses.”* We are now finding a way to prove (or talk about with scientific language) something we have always known, but have lost. Something that many Eastern modalities have always based their practices on, knowing that the mind, body, and spirit are not just intrinsically connected, but One. I would go on to conclude that the mind/body connection is in fact wrong in the sense that there is no separateness. If there is no separateness, no connection is required; it just IS. “Yet in life there is no such separation; there is no body that is not mind, no mind that is not body.” -Gabor Maté

I think we have an opportunity here to empower ourselves with this knowledge in order to really heal from not only physical ailments, but all sorts of complex emotional pains. What if getting sick is more than just a combination of randomness and genetics, but there is some sort of deep pattern that makes sense? That possibility could give us more agency to stop disease before it starts and would alleviate a lot of the fear that we have about getting cancer, or any illness for that matter. If we could educate parents and families on the importance of presence, tolerance, and empathy, we would have a much healthier society. Of course this would have to start from the bottom up, and be offered in public education systems in every single community in our country, so that no one is left out, as no one should be. We all deserve to understand the principals of this philosophy, and we all deserve to be taught different ways of being that are healthier and more harmonious so that great healing could occur. I will end with this statement by Dr. Maté, “The potential for wholeness, for health, resides in all of us, as does the potential for illness and disharmony. Disease is disharmony. More accurately, it is an expression of an internal disharmony.”

*For further information on this topic, I recommend When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté, MD.