The Whole Person: Body, Emotions, Mind, Spirit and Energy

We feel at home in our bodies because we can touch them, yet we understand surprisingly little about how they work. The body is the physical home of the organs, the brain, the mind, the emotions and the soul. Its systems include the skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, circulatory, lymphatic, respiratory, digestive, urinary and reproductive systems. Together they make a vast chemical factory in which memory, movement and communication all depend on chemical reactions.

The body constantly responds to thoughts and emotions. Hope and comfort move it towards relaxation and healing; prolonged anger places stress on organs such as the liver and pancreas. The heart beats on its own, yet fear can quicken it and meditation can slow it. The mind can adjust many “automatic” functions.

Cravings, too, often have emotional roots: we reach for comfort foods when lonely or afraid, because emotions set off chemical signals in the body.

Feelings are neither good nor bad; they simply are.

Emotions arrive automatically. They are immediate feedback about how a person or situation affects us, and they are often coloured by old experiences that were never resolved. Feelings that are denied or suppressed do not disappear: they are stored in the tissues, glands and organs, and they leave only when they are truly felt and released.

All emotions grow from two roots:

• Love-based: joy, contentment, acceptance, hope, peace, self-esteem, generosity
• Fear-based: anxiety, anger, sorrow, bitterness, jealousy, loneliness, depression, powerlessness

Each family of feelings produces different chemistry in the body.

We have many ways of pushing feelings down: smoking, alcohol, overeating, compulsive busyness, or endlessly analysing our feelings instead of feeling them. Cultures that treat vulnerability as weakness make this worse. Repressed feelings distort behaviour, and over time they can contribute to illness. The good news is that what we have pushed away can be welcomed back.

What is the mind? Where are memories kept? Philosophers and scientists have asked for centuries. A useful view is that the brain is an instrument, a storehouse of impressions from the senses, while the mind is larger than the brain.

Much of what we call thinking is really reacting: imitating the crowd and following habit. Modern culture is “head-centred”. It trusts analysis and ignores intuition, that moment of simply knowing. Yet the heart often gives a different answer from the head. Imagine someone offered a promising job who feels strangely flat about it. Only by listening inward do they realise that their heart lies elsewhere. Good decisions need both.

Because thought precedes action, changing our thinking changes our behaviour. Beneath our thoughts lie beliefs and values formed over years, and these must be examined if lasting change is to happen. Visualisation is one powerful tool for the mind to influence the body, but limiting beliefs must shift for it to work.

The original article also reflected on children growing up amid a flood of media images, and asked whether education should help young minds learn to question what they see and hear.

The soul is the essence of each person, its complete blueprint. Spirituality is our relationship with a power greater than any human power. Its main ingredients are truth, dignity, integrity, faith, hope and love.

Spirituality is not the same as organised religion. Religion is a community with shared beliefs and practices of worship. Spirituality is the daily practice of love-based attitudes, and it can be lived alone or with others. Many people have moved away from fear-based ideas of God towards a direct, personal connection with the divine, which they see in nature, in kind people, in a newborn child or in the stars at night.

Worship can be simple: meditation, a walk in the forest, prayer, chanting, lighting a lamp, fasting or service. What matters is that our values are lived at home, at work and in society, especially when no one is watching. A life without spiritual roots tends to need ever more material things to fill its emptiness, and people without a spiritual life are more prone to fear, anxiety, anger and depression.

Everything alive is made of energy. Each person is surrounded and permeated by a subtle energy field, often called the aura, whose colours and size change with emotions, thoughts, food and environment. Different traditions name this vital force differently: prana in India, chi in China, astral light in the Kabbalah.

Many healers teach that illness begins as a blockage in the energy field before it appears in the body. The energy centres, the chakras, can become clogged and need to be cleared so that energy flows freely. Vibrational approaches such as homoeopathy and flower essences are used in many countries alongside conventional medicine.

Explore the chakras and their glands on our Pranvakshar Dhyan page.