Deepak Chopra, amongst others, have given “Feeling Forwards: How to become the person who has the life you want,” a thumbs up! We really think you will enjoy and benefit from this wonderful read by accomplished author Elizabeth Gould. Here, you can enjoy an excerpt exclusive to Holistic Healing News readers! Happy Reading! – Meredyth
pictured: Elizabeth Gould
Emotion or thought – which has the most power?
Did you think ‘thought’ straight away?
If you did, I wouldn’t be surprised. Over the last few decades, personal development has focused on how your thoughts can be organised and controlled to create fabulous habits leading to inevitable success. Whereas emotions are viewed as wild and unpredictable, liable to suddenly overwhelm you and sweep you away from achieving your goals!
But if thinking alone could guarantee your happiness and success, it would be easy to keep every New Year’s Resolution and every good intention, right? So, is it emotion or thought that can create the future you want? Or both?
The power of emotions is like the wind. You can’t see or touch emotions, but emotions are revealed in facial expressions, in body language or spoken words. But do emotions arise from thoughts in the brain, or feelings of the heart?
The heart really does have a special place, celebrated in language, music and science. The heart even generates electricity about one hundred times stronger than the brain. Both the brain and heart also have their own magnetic field1 but again, the heart is up to 5000 times more magnetic. The heart’s magnetic field is so powerful that it can be measured for several feet in all directions beyond the physical body. What you are feeling can even dramatically change your body – sometimes in a couple of minutes.
There is a medical condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) where extreme physical changes caused only by emotions have been scientifically documented. A person with this condition can have any number of different personalities housed within their mind and body. Each personality has their own name, age, specific memories and abilities, sometimes they’re even a different gender from the person whose body they inhabit. These different personalities can demonstrate different handwriting, artistic and food tastes, even the ability to speak a foreign language. But more, each personality can change their body.
In studies going back decades, scientists have observed that within one person who has DID, different personalities have triggered a change in eye color, the appearance and and disappearance of welts, lazy eye, wildly different blood pressure readings, near- or far-sightedness, switching between left and right handedness, color blindness, even diabetes in one personality but not another!
Scientists could only conclude these dramatic physical changes occurred through the power of emotions rather than thoughts. It’s like having an allergy. No one chooses to be allergic to pollen, peanuts, cat fur or anything else! And if you sat in a corner for the rest of your life thinking about creating a diabetic condition in your body, it still wouldn’t happen. Yet, a person with DID can create that condition in minutes.
Fascinated with these facts, I explored the connection between emotions and the cancer journey when I interviewed Kelly A. Turner Ph.D. for my latest book ‘Feeling Forwards’.
Dr Turner has focused her Radical Remission Project on studying and supporting cancer patients who are given less than a 25% chance of survival, but still survive and go into remission.
I asked Dr. Turner about the power of emotions, and she told me,
“Feeling confident is stronger than a thought. It’s rock solid and reaches into your core. You can’t create that just through thinking – you have to surrender to your emotions as well.” Dr Turner shared that some Radical Remission patients to embrace relaxation and surrender. “They chose to feel gratitude, peace, excitement and hope,” she told me. “Those emotions carried them through the day, and they experienced the day differently as a result.”
But it’s not just science that inspires me to reveal how you can harness positive emotions to create the future you want. Through my own journey from trauma to triumph, to losing everything and getting it back and more, it has been my ability to believe in a better future that has kept me going.
As Abraham Lincoln said,
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
And you can too.
In this article
