The Impact of Emotion On Muscles and Bones

Part 1 of 3

Emotion is probably the biggest single factor affecting health. Disorders that seem entirely physical in nature are often no more than a subconscious reaction to some sort of fear that’s been induced earlier, then trapped deep inside. It is this fear the subconscious is continually trying to appease with physical symptoms.

Even the most common aches and pains of the muscles and joints are generally just pleas from the subconscious; it is begging to be heard.

How often is a shoulder that has become stiff misinterpreted as a physically disabled joint? I can assure you that in the majority of cases that I’ve treated, it is nothing more than a statement made in the language of the subconscious. Many frozen shoulders take only a few minutes to release, once the true cause of the stiffness has been identified.

A frozen shoulder is a condition where the arm will only lift a short way before the shoulder becomes painful; in some cases it is impossible to lift the arm at all. Patients with this condition often tell me that it started some time after an earlier fall and within days or weeks it became too painful to lift the arm. The common course of treatment for this problem involves visits to physical therapists, sometimes shots of cortisone, and such a regimen can take months to complete.

In fact, the real cause of the problem is usually the subconscious, which noted with great accuracy the details of the fall. To ensure that the body will be ready to save itself the next time there’s danger of a fall, the subconscious keeps the arm down, prepared for the impact. It is practicing its own brand of preventive medicine.

In this situation there is nothing wrong with the shoulder until the rotator cuff begins to show signs of wear due to the tightness of the joint. Sometimes, the shoulder eases twelve months after the precipitating accident because the patient passes, without incident, the date on which the mishap occurred. Believing the risk of further injury has passed, the subconscious eases its control over the arm. Often, all that is needed to release a frozen shoulder, assuming there is no physical damage at the time of the accident, is for a trained healer to place a hand immediately below the hand of the affected shoulder and wait for the arm to rise. This is not as strange as it sounds; I’ve done it many times.

How does it work?

Once, during a public demonstration, a gentleman came up to me and asked if I could help with the stiffness he was feeling in his right shoulder. He explained that it was very important to him to keep his right shoulder free. Fifty years earlier, he’d broken his left shoulder in an accident. Surgery to repair the damage was unsuccessful; and since that time, he’d been unable to move his left shoulder. The only movement he had in his left arm was from the elbow down.

Looking at him, I couldn’t see why he should have any difficulties with either shoulder. I held my left hand under his left hand and waited. Almost immediately his left arm began to twitch, then shake. Then, very slowly, it began to lift from the shoulder. The sounds of creaking and cracking could be heard all over the room. The shoulder was coming free, and there was no pain. Forty minutes later, the arm that had not moved for fifty years was almost totally free.

I believe his problem was a mixture of two things. First, after the operation, someone had probably told him that his arm would “never move again.” In his sick and traumatized state, this comment would have been a very powerful hypnotic suggestion. Second, the subconscious had been holding the arm down in readiness to support him in case he fell that way again.

The treatment was a simple one. In healing, the hands release electrical energy that can be measured and felt. When this electrical force flows between two hands, the effect is similar to that of the negatives of two magnets opposing each other—the stronger will force the weaker away.

The client’s subconscious, feeling the electrical resistance and remembering the earlier accident, was not prepared to resist the pressure the electrical force was creating. The end result was that the subconscious allowed the arm to rise, releasing the arm from its grip of fifty years. Of course not all injuries recover as dramatically as this, but osteoarthritis caused by injury is usually simply corrected with energy healing.


Malcolm S. Southwood