Emotions Stored in Body: The Root of Physical Illness

Your emotions stored in body tissues may be the key to understanding physical symptoms you haven’t been able to resolve.

For years, I’ve used Jacques Martel’s “Complete Dictionary of Ailments and Diseases” as a guide. The subtitle says it all: the conflicted thoughts, feelings, and emotions at the root of illness.

This isn’t about replacing medical care. It’s about adding another lens. One that asks what your body might be trying to tell you.

Three Levels of Healing

There are three levels of reality from which we can receive healing. Depending on our belief systems, sensitivity, and awareness, we can accept healing at whichever level makes sense for us.

The three levels are: spiritual and emotional, mental and energetic, and physical and cellular.

It’s appropriate to receive healing at any of these levels. We must work within our own belief systems.

Some people need medication. Some need energy work. Some need to cry for an hour and let something old finally move through. Often we need some combination of all three. The levels aren’t competing. They’re complementing.

The Emotional Level Theory

Here’s the theory I’m experimenting with: even if we heal an ailment at the physical or energetic level, it may return and manifest in another form until we heal it at the emotional level.

Perhaps this is true. Perhaps it’s just another lens for analyzing personal health. We each must be our own judge in matters of personal health.

What I’ve noticed in my own body is that certain symptoms keep returning until I’m willing to feel something I’ve been avoiding. The physical symptom becomes a messenger. And if I ignore the message, the messenger gets louder.

Reading Between the Lines

What I like about this approach: we can use health issues that manifest in our lives and reference potential emotional root causes as a thought experiment or healing practice.

None of this has to be medical fact. But there’s an opportunity to read the circumstances of our life as we would well-constructed poetry. We read between the lines and feel what stirs within us.

A tight throat. A clenched jaw. A knot in the stomach that won’t release. These aren’t random. They’re communication. The body speaks in sensation, and emotions stored in body tissues create a language we can learn to read.

The Real Practice

Using this framework, physical symptoms point to emotional blockages. When felt through, these blockages provide new healing, flow, and aliveness.

Does something trigger within you when you consider what emotional energy might be behind a physical symptom?

If so, can you sit with that feeling? Not project it outward, but really sit with it with curiosity until it begins to dissipate and transmute itself?

This is the emotional healing available to us all. This feeling-work is the deepest prayer I know: sitting with whatever I’m feeling and watching base-level emotions transmute back into pure potential.

The body wants to heal. It’s constantly trying to return to balance. Sometimes the barrier to that healing isn’t physical at all. It’s emotional material we haven’t been willing to feel.