What Your Aches and Pains Are Telling You

Book excerpt: Reveals the precise correspondences between specific emotional and mental tensions and the illnesses and traumas of the body • Explains how physical complaints--energetic disturbances that lead to ailments or chronic conditions--are your soul speaking to you • Shows how the body part affected as well as which side it is on pinpoints what your soul is trying to tell you and what you need to work through emotionally • Explains the Yin-Yang energetic correspondences of the body: the Yang axis of the shoulders, the Yin axis of the hips, and the Yin-Yang maternal/paternal connections Our body speaks. Physical complaints--allergies, fever, sore throat, inflammation, cysts, backache, migraines, sinus problems, sciatica, dizzy spells, and even cancer--are all signs of deep tensions inside of us are seeking expression. This is why, given the same genetic foundation, one individual develops a specific illness while another remains in good health. Drawing on 20 years of experience and several thousand individual consultations with patients, Michel Odoul shows the “proof” of this lies in the clear correspondences between emotional and mental tensions and specific ailments. The author reveals how every illness or trauma is a signal of incredible precision: The part of the body affected pinpoints what your inner being is trying to tell you and what you need to work through emotionally. Providing a reference grid of body-mind connections, he explains, for example, how skin conditions reflect difficulties with aggression from the outside world and knee problems indicate inflexibility or tension in relationships. He shows not only how each side of the body has specific meanings and connections to emotions, relationships, and family but also how the upper and lower halves of the body have specific connections--together forming four quadrants with unique Yin-Yang balances, where Yin represents emotional issues and Yang represents action/inaction. He also explores the role of the meridians of Chinese medicine in distributing emotional and mental energy throughout the body. Offering keys to decipher what the body is trying to tell us, the author shows that we can learn to see physical ailments not as something caused by chance or fate but as a message from our heart and soul. By releasing the energies and patterns they point to, we can return to a state of health and forward movement on our path through life.