This is the introduction from my recent Emotions & Ailments Workshop, and I felt like it should be shared to a wider audience, because it speaks to the foundations of so many things that I do. The audio has more information that the teaching notes below, but some people prefer the written word to listening to audio.

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You are a spiritual being having a human experience. First and foremost you are your essence and the energy of that. Theoretical physics suggests everything else is hologram. Shamans agree.

Everything you experience around you, outside of yourself, is a reflection of an internal process. When you are at peace, the world is easy to deal with. When you are in turmoil or resistance, the world reflects that back at you as well. This doesn’t mean things are your fault; you just haven’t had the right information. With the right information, you can affect your health in a positive way.

This plane of existence is a classroom. Not a punishment, not a penance. A classroom. We (or a higher level of self, really) sets ourselves up to have experiences that give us the opportunity to learn (or remember) new skills, new ways of being. The purpose is spiritual evolution and, ultimately, remembering our way back to the Divine.

We all have patterns. Every time a pattern comes up, it is an opportunity to heal an originating wound. Those opportunities start plainly, quietly, but as we blow past them, they get louder, more insistent. If we disregard them long enough, they can show up in our bodies.

Your body is your vehicle here on this plane, and it has some amazing indicator lights. Every physical ailment or injury we experience is part of that signaling system. What the issue is, and where it sits in your body, are all part of this complex system to let you know what to work on. Once you learn the language of the signals, things can get fairly simple.

Emotional trauma affects the body as much as physical trauma does. Left unresolved, unprocessed, it becomes an originating wound that can create patterns in your life and in your body. From a shamanic point of view, every time there is unprocessed trauma, we leave a piece of ourselves at that point in the timeline. From then on, each time something feels in some way like the situation around that originating wound, we rubberband back to that space of the originating wound and react to NOW as if we were THEN. So if you had a trauma in a pre-verbal state, you lose the power of language in the here and now when you get triggered.

Any strong emotion had by the person who carried you in their womb while you were in utero is likewise imprinted on your vehicle in this lifetime. So if your mother was in a car accident, or an earthquake, or a war, you get that imprint.

It is even possible that you are also imprinted with the strong emotions of both biological parents at the moment of conception.

If we bring epigenetics into this, we also carry major traumas from our ancestors. If you have a grandparent who lived through a starvation-level event, it affected their DNA, which was passed down to your parents, which was then passed down to you. What does this mean? You’re very likely genetically encoded to hold on to weight.

None of this means anything you’re experiencing is anyone’s fault. We all take on traumas and wounds, because they prompt us to grow. If you identify a pattern, whether your living situation is always like this, or your boss is always like that, or you keep dating the same person with different faces, you can change the pattern by approaching the current situation differently. You may have to go through a few more of these situations to really get it down, and it certainly helps to identify and work on healing the originating wound, but you are not stuck in those patterns. It is important to remember that you can take your power back.