Healing The Emotional Body - Part 1: What is the Emotional Body?

Ariel Emmanuel, MHC

Emotions are messengers that let us know if there's something internally we would like to address. Many people weren't taught how to process or integrate emotions. Instead, we've learned survival and distraction techniques that help us avoid, suppress, or push down our feelings. Survival strategies are often automatic responses by the body's nervous system to bring us from a place perceived distressed to safety.

Once our nervous system is out of that distress mode, our body will want to integrate and honor our emotions differently. Healing the emotional body allows people to transmute and release their emotions. Choosing to move emotions through the body using energy work can prevent the feelings from coming back up when you least expect. 

To understand the emotional body, we must first look at their different systems within our bodies. 

The Four Body Systems:

1) Physical Body

The physical body is our physical experience in the world. It's our body's physiology, our movement, our ability to heal, the organs, the brain, and the skeletal system. 

2) Mental Body

The mental body represents all things intellectual, including analytical thought, how we process information, how we learn, and how we use our words. It's our thoughts, attitudes, judgments, prejudices, and how we perceive our worth or value in the world.

3) Emotional Body

The emotional body is the bridge between the physical and the mental. It represents our feelings and relationship to all things. It includes the nervous system, hormones, touch, water release, and water absorption.

4) Spiritual Body

The spiritual body is our connection to all things, including the earth, your soul, or higher self. It contains your aura or energetic field and represents the union between your soul, life experiences, and your destiny or purpose.

Our emotional body represents the system in charge of how we process and understand our emotions. People often focus on their physical and mental bodies and neglect their feelings. Taking time to understand the emotional body can ground us, bring balance into our lives, and create alignment. Healing the emotional body requires us to be more aware of our emotional messengers and find compassion and understanding for our experiences.