Epigenetics, Emotions and Healing

Have you ever heard someone say "I'm sick and tired..."? They probably are, or will be.

Chronic heightened emotional states create a perfect breeding ground for illness. It was through my practice with thousands of peo-ple that I noted the increasingly obvious relationship between one's mental focus on negative thinking, emotions, resistance to experi-encing feelings and disease.

Thousands of years before epigenetics and psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), the Chinese Five Element Theory and Body Clock lead the way to understanding the relationship between emotions and disease. The theory of the Five Elements or Wu Xing, is an an-cient system, dating back to the 4th century BC. Wu means five, and the Chinese word xing is often translated as "element".

The Five Elements are symbolic for the different phases, or primal forces within the universe, nature, and our bodies. Each element is also attributed to a certain personality archetype. Knowing which element(s) predominates our personalities can help further insight into our lives and relationships. The Five Element theory describes how the different organ systems are interrelated, and is used in traditional Chinese medicine to diagnose patterns of disharmony and disease.

This diagnostic tool connects meridians of the body to emotions, organs, and glands. In turn, each emotion has a corresponding electromagnetic energy pattern. Since acupuncture meridians are energy channels corresponding to organs, and each organ stores spe-cific emotions, we can easily see the relationship between disease and our thoughts, identities and belief systems.

Psychoneuroimmunology

PNI's major focus has been the study of stress and how the body's stress response relates to the emotions of anxiety, fear, guilt, anger and sadness, weaken the immune system, interfere with healing and even cause disease. For physical health and well-being, we need to be able to effectively release stressful emotions from the body and cultivate a more balanced state.

The immune system and the brain talk to each other through signaling pathways and they are the two major adaptive systems of the body. Two major pathways are involved in this cross-talk: the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) and the sympa-thetic nervous system (SNS). The activation of SNS during an immune response might be aimed to localize the inflammatory re-sponse. The body's primary stress management system is the HPA axis. The HPA axis responds to physical and mental challenges to maintain homeostasis in part, by controlling the body's cortisol level.

The rapidly expanding fields of PNI and epigenetics have sound answers to healing the root cause of disease. In times of stress, a negative message absorbs into our unconscious mind; we reinforce these by focusing on them for some period of time. When you negatively judge yourself you are reinforcing, even instructing your unconscious mind to persist with the behavior. Research tells us that this information is then transmitted to all our cells! Our cellular intelligence is designed to self-heal but most patients aren't aware of this fact. Moreover, every time we think about something we don't want, we actually draw it to us.

A healthy internal environment includes empowering identities, which stimulate positive belief systems and emotions. As Carl Jung's research revealed: a persona is an identity (unconscious, pre-existent disposition) we hold, which we present to the outside world. This persona propagates beliefs which in turn stimulate emotions. Most identities are unconscious and specific ones may be connected to genetic predispositions.

Understanding Why Patients Experience Stress

Clearly, stress is the uncomfortable gap between:
a) how we would like our life to be, and
b) how it actually is.

If this gap is persistent and growing despite our efforts to reduce it; the distress becomes acute.

Understanding Epigenetics

In biology, epigenetics is the study of changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence, hence the name epi- (Greek for over, above)genetics.

Traditional science has believed that our genes are fixed and that nothing can change genetic determinism.

Conversely, the new biology of epigenetics is proving that cells are responsive to their environment and that these responses reach deep into the internal structure of the cell, including the DNA.

It is proven that cells have a dynamic cellular intelligence; research indicates that genes are being turned on and off based on envi-ronmental factors. What is most exciting and empowering is that if the environment that supports the disease is eliminated, and a new healthier environment replaces it, the predisposition for the genetic disease will not be supported and it will not manifest.