​THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF THE BODY

Each pair of emotions supplying the energy for a specific activity energizes a different tissue and fluid in the body. It also energizes a different part of the cell. I should state here at the outset that I have no idea of the mechanism by which this works but I'm open to ideas from physicists, chemists, neuroanatomists and biologists.

• FEAR and EXCITEMENT energize  nerves and cerebrospinal fluid
  
  

• ANGER and DESIRE  energize muscles and blood
  
  

• PAIN  and SATISFACTION energize bones and lymph
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• NEED and LOVE energize bone marrow and synovial fluid
  

When you feel each of the emotions named above you will feel them in the tissues and fluids named with them.

EMOTIONAL DEFENSES

Sometimes it doesn't feel safe to experience and thereby reveal an emotion. In these cases our emotional defenses take over. Each one is comparable to a specific physical defense.

When we are in danger we have four choices and four choices only: we can STAND, FIGHT, RUN or HIDE. It is our anger that gives us the energy to do these things. Each of us has an instinctive preference for one of these but unlike virtually all other animals we are equally equipped to do them all.

Ideally we would always choose the defense that is best for a specific situation and on a physical level we often do. But we are so constructed from conception that our nervous system automatically shunts us on one of these four paths over and over again. Unless we are so nurtured in those critical few weeks after birth that our emotional brain makes strong connections with our cognitive brain it remains tied almost exclusively to our reptilian or survival brain and this keeps us stuck in early survival tactics - the ones that genetically come most easily to us.

I believe that these patterns start in the womb where experiencing emotions consumes too much oxygen. They are a way of allowing cell division and differentiation to continue unimpeded in the face of danger. They are later reinforced in infancy and childhood where acknowledging the emotions of danger (fear, anger, pain and need) can put the child in greater peril. As adults, however, they keep,oxygen from getting to essential tissues and organs and if sustained often lead to extreme psychological distress or physical disease.

• We defend against feeling FEAR with JUDGMENT, CRITICISM, PITY or DENIAL.
  
  

• We defend against feeling ANGER with ANXIETY, AGITATION, DESPERATION or DESPAIR.
  
  

• We defend against feeling PAIN with HATE, RESENTMENT, CONTEMPT  or INDIFFERENCE.
  
  

• We defend against feeling NEED with HUMILIATION, EMBARRASSMENT, GUILT or SHAME.​
  

FORCES AND FEELINGS

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THE ENERGY OF EMOTIONS

Why do I think emotions are energy? First because we experience them moving through us with the motion of a wave - the way energy moves. (Think about the last time you felt terrified or tremendously excited, became enraged, felt deeply hurt or fell madly in love.) And second because we can sense what someone else is feeling virtually instantaneously - which is how we experience light, gravitation and the subtler pulls of the strong and weak nuclear forces.

This brings us to the question of what is energy. Physicists have an excellent answer to this question: energy is that which does work. What work, then, do the energies flowing in our bodies which we call "emotions" do? All the fundamental work of being human and perhaps of life itself.

Human beings - and perhaps all living matter - must do four things over and over again in order to survive. We must:

• Perceive - take in information

• Perform - act in response to information
  

• Comprehend - put information into context, based on our actions
  

• Connect - communicate and share information with our environment
  

For each of these activities we have two closely related emotions: one for safety and one for danger. That is to say one gives us the energy to do the activity when we are safe and one gives us the energy to do it when we are in danger. The chemicals that cause these paired emotions are very close to each other molecularly, are manufactured in sites that are very close to each other physically and lock onto the same receptors on the surface of a cell.

The members of each pair also feel quite similar to each other and activate and are experienced in the same body tissues and fluids.

The emotions that allow us to PERCEIVE - to take in information -  are EXCITEMENT and FEAR. In safety we perceive with excitement - in danger we take in information with fear.Both give us an electromagnetic sensation flowing up and down our spinal column. Where there is a difference is in the direction in which our bodies want to move. With excitement there is a pulling forward in the spine; with fear a pulling back.

The emotions that allow us to PERFORM - to act in response to the information we have taken in - are DESIRE and ANGER. In safety our desire pulls us forward towards what we want (and also brings it towards us in a gravitational effect we often call "synchronicity.") In danger our anger gives us the ability to act to defend ourselves and automatically directs us to the best defense: stand, fight, run or hide. With desire there is a pulling forward in the upper part of the body; with anger a pulling back.

The emotions that allow us to COMPREHEND - to understand the information by putting it into the context of what we already know - are SATISFACTION and PAIN. When the action we have taken with our desire or our anger brings us what we want we get to a new level of understanding with the feeling of satisfaction which organizes the information upon which we have acted. When the action fails to bring us what we want or to protect us we understand the consequences - the loss - with the feeling of pain. With satisfaction there is a feeling of the body lifting up; with pain of sinking down.

The emotions that allow us to CONNECT - to share what we understand with others - are LOVE and NEED. When we are safe we reach out to connect, to share who we are and what we know with the energy of love. When we have experienced loss or continue to be in danger we reach our with our need for the help and information of others. With love there is a feeling of the body widening at the sides; with need of pulling in.

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"NEGATIVE" EMOTIONS

It's easy to see that the feeling we consider "negative" emotions (the ones we think we want to get rid of) - namely fear, anger, pain and need - are the feelings we need to survive danger. It's as if we've confused the necessity of getting out of danger with the necessity of abolishing the feelings associated with it.

These are also the feelings by which parents control their children - by not allowing the open expression of them within the family. In certain families fear cannot be shown without reprisals. In others it's anger, pain or need. But the moment the parent decides to be the arbiter of what is safe and what is dangerous (controlling fear); of what actions are appropriate to take in self-defense (controlling anger); of what damage has been done to the child (controlling pain); or what the child is entitled to have in terms of emotional or physical support (controlling need) the parent robs the child of power and dooms him to confusion, impotence, anxiety or depression whenever that emotion surges up inside him.

UNIVERSAL EMOTIONAL ENERGY

Many years ago when I was interviewing an astrophysicist for a documentary film I was making I was struck by his statement that everything we could observe about the universe was the result of the working of four fundamental forces: ELECTROMAGNETISM, GRAVITY, NUCLEAR FORCE and the WEAK FORCE. I and my filmmaking colleagues who were also familiar with the concept of four fundamental emotional states (we hadn't worked out the idea of four linked pairs at that point) were struck by the parallel.

Later I realized that what we were looking at was not a similarity but an identity. That is to say I realized that the four basic forces in physics and the four fundamental emotional energies were one and the same. 

• When we felt FEAR or EXCITEMENT we were actually experiencing the electromagnetic force moving through our bodies in some intensified way.
  
  

• When we felt ANGER or DESIRE we were feeling an increase in our gravitational field or acceleration. (Einstein demonstrated in General Relativity that these were one and the same.)
  
  

• When we felt PAIN or SATISFACTION we were feeling the power of nuclear force increasing in our cells.
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• When we felt NEED or LOVE it was the energy of the weak force that was dominant.
  

This made sense to me from a few perspectives. The first was the way I observed myself experiencing these emotions - just an instinctive feeling for the four forces and how they operate. The second was the simple idea that Nature - ever efficient or, put another way, always lazy -  having gone to all the trouble to create these four universal forces that ran everything else wouldn't then bother to create a whole new set  just to run human beings - or, if you will, living matter. Finally it seemed to explain our fascination with the universe and how it worked - that it was our yearning to understand ourselves on a deeper and deeper level.​

EMOTIONAL SHOCK

Emotional shock occurs when our defenses are overrun - when it doesn't feel safe or effective to use them. Actually it's a more extreme embryonic and fetal defense mechanism that serves to keep us safe in utero when there are intense physical, emotional or energetic threats to our well-being.

After birth it's part of the process the body uses to insure that we forget the most harmful things that happen to us at the hands of our parents or siblings almost as soon as they occur. 

In the womb consciousness of trauma feels too expensive in terms of consumption of oxygen and calories. We go into shock so the process of cell division and differentiation can continue relatively unimpeded by outside forces.

In childhood this same mechanism keeps us both from going into total hopelessness  and from attacking our parents. Nature wants to keep us alive until we can produce the next generation and putting us into shock around trauma - instead of allowing us to experience it clearly and respond by either giving up entirely or trying to hurt those who have caused it - is part of her plan for doing this.

There are four kinds of emotional shock - each involving part of the autonomic nervous system and a focus of direction. We  can go into parasympathetic shock in which the parasympathetic system goes into overdrive and shuts us down (depression and exhaustion) or we can go into sympathetic shock in which the sympathetic system takes over completely (anxiety and hysteria).The behavior pattern people call "manic depression" or "bi-polar" is simply the process of being tossed back and forth between sympathetic shock (mania) and parasympathetic shock (depression).

The four primary states of emotional shock are:

• parasympathetic, outer-body boundary: fatty tissue

• sympathetic, outer-body boundary: skin
  

• sympathetic, inner-body boundary: ligaments
  

• parasympathetic, inner-body boundary: tendons
  

What happens on a physiological level with shock is that our awareness of self gets shunted into a tissue layer where the energy is chaotic. This is usually the tissue layer in which our abuser is most comfortable and at ease. It's as if our body becomes entrained to his or hers and we give up our power by merging energetically with the abuse itself.

THE FOUR FOLD UNIVERSE

Many years ago I discovered that the quadra-partite nature of emotional energy, emotional defenses and personality types reflected something profound about the nature of the universe - i.e., that "fourness" and particularly the kind of fourness that comes from two variations of two fundamental elements or the combining of two qualities that each vary in two ways to create four types was essential to the way the universe - or at least our understanding of it - is constructed.

In line with this I'd like you to consider certain things that come in fours:

• the dimensions of the universe itself (three of space and one of time)

• the elements that make up the universe - space, time, energy and matter

• the basic forces that are responsible for everything that happens in the universe: electromagnetism, gravity, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force

• the bases of dna that code for all the proteins in living matter

• the elements essential for life (oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon). 

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Julie Motz's theory of an emotional universe

THE EMOTIONS CHART, continued

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WORKING WITH EMOTIONAL ENERGY

Once you familiarize yourself with the fundamental emotions and how they operate in the body the navigation of your own anatomy becomes a healing journey.

You start by locating a place in your body where there is pain or discomfort. Then go through that place tissue by tissue - i.e. nerves, muscles, bone, bone marrow. Wherever you feel you can't connect energetically will tell you what emotion is blocked there - fear if you can't connect to your nerves, anger if you can't connect to your muscles, pain if you can't connect to your bones and need if you can't connect to your bone marrow.

The next step is to bring up the emotion and the suppressed memory to which it belongs. You can do this by bringing the associated fluid to the tissue - cerebrospinal fluid to the nerves, blood to the muscles, lymph to the bones or synovial fluid to the bone marrow. Another method is to do a repeated eye movement in a specified direction. If fear is missing move them up and down under closed eyelids. For anger move them side to side. For pain upper left to lower right. For need upper right to lower left.

Then as you feel the energy of the emotion moving through the tissue see what images or sensations come to you and how old you feel. This should open the door to the memory you need to uncover which will in turn guide the body to do what it should have done at the time but couldn't. 

THE EMOTIONS CHART

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