My previous articles have dealt with how the brain and body work together through the nervous system.  Sensation and perception both play important rolls in how we experience both pain and relief from it.  There is one aspect that we haven’t fully considered yet though, and that is the mind.  The mind differs from the brain in that the mind can and will attach emotional weight to physical sensation, and vice-versa.  The mind, for our purposes here, is the seat of the emotional body as well as the intellectual body.  It is not separate from the physical body, it is integrated into the complete system, overlapping with the brain-body connections.  While the brain perceives and takes action, the mind attaches judgement to both the perception and the action.  Our mind is what takes us as humans beyond mere instinct into the realm of conscious thought, deliberation and emotional experience.  (That’s not to say that animals don’t feel, but that’s a whole other article).

Because the mind is not separate from the brain-body, certain associations are made emotionally when we feel something physically; the circumstances that lead us to the physical sensation have judgements linked to them.  Say that, as a child, you slip and fall in the hallway, and as kids do, all the passersby point and laugh at you.  This has now become not only painful to your backside, but painful to your pride.  Your brain sets up a pattern that when you slip and fall, you feel embarrassed.  That pattern lasts through most of your life, deep into adulthood…when you slip and fall, even when there is no one there to see you or laugh, you feel embarrassed.

This works in reverse as well.  As an example, we have all felt deep sadness in our life.  Whether we have lost a loved one, buried a beloved pet, or had a relationship fall apart, we have all felt devastating emotion.  There is a reason that the word “devastating” is used with respect to sadness; because there are physical sensations that accompany the emotional state.  Many times there is an aching pain in the chest, stomach or gut.  Our breathing changes, sometimes nausea occurs, even vomiting.  We are in turns exhausted and restless.  These are physical reactions to the emotional state of our mind.  They are very real because there is no delineation between the mind and the brain-body.  The nervous system reacts to these emotions as if they were physical stimuli by activating the stress response and all its chemical reactions.

Here’s the clincher…the brain-body’s physical responses to these emotions can be remembered too.  In fact, just as embarrassment is your reaction to the slip-and-fall, tension and adhesion and spasm and trigger points are activated in times of emotional stress. Patterns are set up by the brain to elicit the same physical responses to each emotion…some of us clench our jaw, or our glutes, or our abdomen.  Some of us have trigger points near our armpits or at the base of the skull that lead to pain and tension patterns elsewhere.  To our brain-body, these physical patterns are linked with our emotional state…they are inseparable.  This is the less tangible side of “muscle memory”.  We sometimes refer to this as “holding onto an experience”. Massage can help us let it go.

When you are receiving massage treatments, there may be times when your therapist hits upon an adhesion or trigger point that, through treatment and release, also brings up an emotional response.  That trigger point had been activated not by a physical activity, but by some emotional event, and now that the point has been “found out”, the emotions come up as well.  Sometimes we are able to identify the emotion specifically while other times it is just an intense feeling of anger, grief, sadness or anxiety.  This can happen at any point in the massage and can sneak up on you out of nowhere.  If you are new to massage and emotional release, you may be tempted to stifle the response or “run away” from it, but in the end it is best to try to ride the wave.  The beauty of emotional release is that once those emotions and tensions are gone, they are gone.  We may have been carrying around pent up emotions for years, using up precious energy keeping them hidden deep in our tissues, and now….ah!  Relief.  The pain of the tension is gone and so is the exhausting holding-on of emotion.  No psychoanalysis necessary, just a wonderful sense of levity and lightness you didn’t know you were missing out on!

I know it all sounds very woo-woo, but it is a phenomenon grounded in the science of the human system.  All of our sensations and actions are possible because of electrical and energetic impulses.  Those impulses have many signatures, expressions and effects on our brain, body and mind.  Massage can make sense of some of them and help release the ones that don’t need to make sense.  If you find yourself in the midst of an emotional release, don’t fight it.  Embrace it and even explore yourself through it. You may learn something new about the body you’ve been walking around in all these years.