How Emotions Affect Your Health and Leadership (feat. Dr. Bradley Nelson)

Hi, I'm Susan Drum. And welcome to the enlightened executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. Today we are going to focus on emotions and how they impact your health and your leadership. And with me today, I am delighted to introduce Dr. Bradley Nelson, who's a holistic physician and one of the world's foremost experts on natural methods of achieving wellness. He's trained thousands of certified practitioners worldwide to help people overcome physical and emotional discomfort by releasing their emotional baggage. His best selling book, the Emotion Code, provides a step by step instruction to do just that. Dr. Brad was raised in rural Montana and suffered two life threatening illnesses, both of which were healed not by traditional western medicine, but by separate alternative methods that tap the power of energy. These experiences shaped Dr. Brad's life going forward. Welcome, Dr. Brad.

Thank you, Susan. It's great to be here.

I am so excited to talk to you about this subject and hear about your story and the Emotion Code. Your bestselling book has really taught people to understand, identify and release emotions associated with various form of illnesses. So let's dive in. I love to hear you explain what is the Emotion Code?

Okay. Well, the Emotion Code book looks like this. Okay. And we first published it in 2007. This is the new hardcover version that came out a couple of years ago. But I spent 20 years as a holistic chiropractor working with people of all ages and who had all different kinds of problems. What I found was, as time went on, no matter what my patients were suffering from, whether it was something mental or emotional, whether it was depression or anxiety or phobias or panic attacks or PTSD or eating disorders, or whether they had some kind of physical pain, which is very common, like migraine headaches or neck pain or back pain or knee pain or elbow pain or wrist pain, whatever it might be, or whether they had been diagnosed with some kind of a disease or they were dealing with something like infertility or digestive disorders or asthma, whatever. What I found was that all of those people had something in common. What they had in common was what I came to call emotional baggage.

Yep. I dealt with some leaders with a whole lot of emotional baggage.

And that's a phrase that we often use when we're referring to other people that usually not to ourselves. You know, so and so it's got a lot of emotional baggage. It's. It's something that we almost intuitively can sense when there's Emotional baggage. When people have been through a lot, there's an obvious difference to us, that their life isn't really maybe working like it should be. And we kind of intuitively know that it's because of what they've been through and that emotional baggage. The thing about it is, we all have emotional baggage. What I found was that our emotional baggage is really energy. It's the leftover energy, the trapped energy from the emotional experiences that we have been through. To understand how that's possible, you have to really think about the body in terms of what we now know from quantum physics, that the human body itself is really just an energy field. I mean, for example, if you were to take a look at your hand and magnify that hand a million times and more, eventually you'd be looking at a single individual atom. And if you look inside the atom, you see there's really nothing in there. It's just empty space and lots of empty space in between those atoms. In fact, they say that if you could remove all the empty space from everyone's body on Earth, you could put all 7.8 billion of us into a little box the size of a sugar cube. And then. Interesting. So these bodies of ours are almost. They have an almost illusory nature that our bodies are. Yes, they're solid, and yes, they have a certain amount of weight and so on, but really they're more of a force field than anything else. And that's what quantum physicists have been telling us. Well, when you're feeling an emotion, what we believe is happening is on a quantum level, you're feeling a certain frequency because everything is energy. Thoughts are energy, emotions are energy. The chair you're sitting in, the desk you're sitting at, the Earth, the sun, the moon, the stars. Ultimately, everything is just energy. In fact, Einstein said, really, there is no matter as such matter, or the things that we see with our. With our physical eyes, all that is, is energy that's just slowed down a little bit so that we can comprehend it. So everything is energy.

And I know, just as a side, from what I understand, we can even measure that today. We can measure. There are instruments that measure. And I know we're going to get into the heart, but you can measure the energy coming off the heart three feet off your body. And the energy coming off your head is only an inch and a half off your body. But the heart actually produces the largest electromagnetic wave. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about energy and frequency.

Yep, that's exactly what we're talking about and the heart really is the. Is the core of this work that we're doing with the emotion code. Because what we have found is that when you're experiencing an intense emotion of anger, resentment, grief, sadness, whatever it might be, sometimes if that emotion is powerful enough on a quantum level, your whole being can be vibrating now at this particular frequency of whatever that emotion is. They're all different. And sometimes when the bully moves away or the divorce is finalized, or you quit that terrible job and get a job with a better boss, yet you still are holding some of this vibration, some of that emotional energy. What happens is this emotional baggage that we have and we all have causes a couple of different problems for us. To give you an idea, there was a man that came in to see me many years ago who had really severe back pain. On a 0:10 scale, his pain was a level nine. So one more point away from going to the ER and been going on for several weeks. Using the emotion code, I did some testing on him and found that it was a trapped emotion of anger. Questioning his subconscious mind a little bit further. I found that this had occurred 20 years before. And he immediately piped up and said that he remembered what had happened. It was a work situation. He'd been falsely accused of something. He was really angry about it. That emotion was too powerful. That became stuck in his body. That was. It released that trapped emotion, which just takes a few seconds. And the feeling of pain instantly left, went from a nine to a zero in the snap of a finger. He couldn't believe that. He kept bending over and exclaiming and twisting this way and that way. And I was grateful that it worked so well. Why did that work? Well, you see, when you have a trapped emotion, what we believe is that that's literally a ball of energy. What it's doing is it's distorting the normal energy field of the body. And when you distort the energy field of the body, it's. You're actually distorting the body itself and interfering with chemical reactions and blood flow and lymph flow and the flow of energy and so on. So that was interesting, right? And we see this kind of thing all the time. All the time, all the time. All over the world. We have thousands of practitioners now in 80 countries. We're all finding the same thing. The biggest source of physical pain for people is actually emotional baggage, believe it or not. Well, what happened a couple of days later helps to illustrate the other side of this. A couple of days later, he Came back into me again, and he said, hey, my back is still fine. I still can't believe it. But he said, listen, he said, when I came in here, I had another problem I didn't tell you about. He said, for as long as I can remember, I've basically been what you'd call a rage, a holic. And he said, I've been to anger management several times. Hasn't really helped me. He said, I've really got to watch the road rage. I'm always yelling at my wife and my kids. Said I'm always on edge, Just kind of like on a hair trigger. And he said, since you released that trapped emotion of anger, for me, I feel really different. I feel kind of peaceful. And things that used to set me off don't set me off anymore. How did you do that? And I said, well, I don't really know. I don't know. But here's what we believe, okay? When you have a trapped emotion, think of this guy, this trapped emotion, this ball of anger from 20 years before. And so when a situation would come along in his life where he might tend to feel the emotion of anger, he would feel that emotion much more easily, much more readily than he otherwise would have. Why? Because literally part of his body was feeling that emotion, that vibration of anger, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until we released it. Now, think about your own life. Think about all the experiences that you've been through. Think about, you know, did your parents argue in front of you when you were a kid? Did you cry yourself to sleep at night? Were you ever bullied? You know, did you ever have anything difficult in junior high or high school? Do you ever go through any breakups? Maybe a divorce, maybe two or three? And so what ends up happening to us is that we. We end up having all this emotional baggage that then kind of runs our lives in many ways. And it interferes with our ability to really create the life that we want. Which brings us to the heart. Because the heart, we believe, is everything the ancient peoples believed it to be. They believed that it was the seed of the soul and the source of love and creativity and romance and the core of our being. What we've discovered is that when you feel like your heart is going to break, when you're really feeling deeply hurt or deeply grieved, the subconscious mind will put up a wall around that heart. That wall, it's a totally invisible thing, but it's a wall made from layers of your emotional baggage. And what we find is that 93% of people have this phenomenon going on. And what it does is it interferes with your ability to not only give and receive love, but it also interferes with your ability to manifest the best creative ideas that you have, because those best creative ideas are never going to come from your brain up here. They're going to come from this brain, the heart. Brain. And the heart is another brain. And so that's what we call the heart wall, and that's the most important part of the emotion code. When that wall is taken down, people not only often fall in love, even at advanced ages, people who never thought they would, but people also have creative ideas that start to flow for them that never flowed before. And what we find is that it's an incredibly powerful thing in. In business as well as in life, because when you take a creative team and you start removing the emotional baggage from those people, and all of a sudden, creativity starts to flow from its actual, real source, things can really change quickly.

Yeah. And that's where we're leading into. This is not just for your health, but they're intertwined between your health, how you're showing up, and how you show up at home and how you show up in your leadership and at your workplace. Just to your point around, the heart is a brain as well. We have neurons in our heart just like you have neurons in the brain. A lot of people don't realize that the heart is sending more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. The heart is actually the seat of where we have a lot of power that people don't tap into because they're so stuck in the head. And we're used to thinking the head is the control center of everything. But there is an incredible powerhouse that I think a lot of leaders don't tap into, which is the heart. And they think that that is just about, oh, persuading people or, you know, I tap into the heart because I got to show I care. It's more than that, and I think that that's what we're discovering in the types of work that you're doing today.

Yes, absolutely. The. The heart. It's the most amazing thing when that wall is taken down. People. People say things that are really amazing. In fact, here's. Here's someone who wrote in after having their heart wall taken down, the woman named Luanna. She said, the relief is unexplainable to the point of shedding tears of joy for the release of carrying such heavy burdens for so many years. What a wonderful feeling of release. That I never dreamed would come true. Well, we all are carrying burdens. We're all carrying emotional baggage. We're all dragging emotional baggage, in a sense, through our lives with us. Then we wonder why it's so difficult for us sometimes to manifest abundance, to manifest love, to create the business we want, to create the life that we want. It really is all about the emotional baggage. It's a fascinating thing.

I think sometimes people think, oh, I shouldn't be feeling any negative emotion at all. And I. And. And what we often do in the work around EQ is no, emotions have information for you, and they have a gift. So you take your example of anger. Anger has information that a boundary has been violated, and it has a gift to help you set a boundary. But I think what you're talking about is not so much. We're not saying don't feel anger or feeling anger is bad because that's important information that you need to have so that you can take appropriate action when you feel fear, it's to put ourselves into safety. So there's a gift in that. But what we're really talking about is when this gets trapped, when it becomes almost overused, when it's like, normally you should get the information, get the gift and move on. And the sense is when it's been real trauma that gets trapped in the body and keeps getting reactivated in ways that are not helpful for you. Is that accurate? Is that how you would describe it?

Yeah, I think so. The fascinating thing about it is. Well, you're right, of course, that the emotions that we experience are messages. Oftentimes they are messages that are coming from old emotional baggage, from old experiences, that the end result oftentimes of that old emotional baggage is that it's often deflecting our life from the course that we'd like to be taking, from the direct course to success, for example, the emotions will tend to. To move us away from that. Now we can overcome those. I often think of the image of the Queen Mary. If the Queen Mary is underway and it's going straight ahead, the tugboats alongside aren't going to be able to deflect it much. And that's how it is for so many of us. So many people are able to achieve things that they set out to achieve by the sheer force of their will. But oftentimes what happens is when you have emotional baggage, we see people that achieve success and then they lose that success and they have to continue to rebuild that over and over through tremendous effort. What we find is that when that emotional Baggage is taken away. Then the achievement of success becomes a more automatic thing. A more natural thing. Where success tends more to flow to us. Instead of us having to pursue it quite as hard. Here's one that was an interesting one. This woman, a woman named Kim, wrote. And she said after the session, this is an emotion code session. She had some work done. She said, I not only felt amazing. And had one of the most wonderful evenings of my life. But our accountant called and let us know he had found investors. For a real estate deal we were putting together. And then several people expressed emphatic interest. For having their group participate in our work. These results were far beyond the results we were getting before in growing our business. It's an amazing thing that the energetic connection that happens with people. One of our practitioners told me a story about a woman that she worked with. Who had had a house that had been on the market that she was trying to sell. Been on the market for a year with no sales and very little interest. She had some work done. She had some emotion code work done. Had some emotional baggage removed. And 24 hours later. Had gotten several, several offers on this house already. Kind of out of the blue. Neither one of them told anybody what they were doing. And she was able to sell the house right away. Yeah, after a year. This is one of the aspects of this that seems kind of spooky. But the reality of it is. If you look at quantum physics. And you start to understand it a little bit. You realize all of this makes perf sense. Because we literally are all connected. There was another story that I really love. Where one of our practitioners got a phone call from her sister. Who'd been divorced for about 12 years. And she said, I've been alone now for a dozen years. I'm tired of this. I really want to, you know, I really want to get back in the game. And I want to find love. And so her sister came over, worked on her. And she had a heart wall that had been put up from the divorce. Of course, it's an automatic thing. But she worked on her, took down that wall around her heart. Neither one of them told anybody what they'd been doing. And the following week, the phone started to ring. And it was guys that had known her before that were seeking her out. Now there's an energy exchange that happens between all of us all the time. And we do not live by any means. In any kind of a vacuum. And so the things that we think affect other people. And our energetic state. And whether our heart is open or not there's an effect on the teams that we work with, on the people that we work with and the people that we love.

Well, I'm sure people are just really curious at this point to know how do you remove the emotional baggage? What is it that you're doing?

Well, it's actually a really simple process. And of course, it's all explained in the. In the emotion code. And so people can learn how to do this themselves, kids can learn how to do it. It's that simple. In fact, we have kids all over the world having great success with the emotion code. But basically, the way that it works is this. In the book, we have a chart of emotions, looks like this, and there are 60 emotions on this chart, and it's divided up into two columns and six rows. And so then we have little flowcharts in the book that show you how to do this. And first of all, the first, most important thing to understand is that in order to do the emotion code, you have to have some way to tap into the subconscious mind, because the subconscious mind is that other part of our mind. It's the really vast intelligence that is within each one of us that is keeping our hearts beating and keeping air moving in and out of our lungs and creating new cells and so on. And it's an incredibly high level of intelligence, and it exists within each one of us. That part of you is also kind of a holographic archiving computer. And it's remembering. It remembers everything you've ever done. Every face you've ever seen in a crowd, everything you've ever eaten or tasted or touched or smelled is all in there in that subconscious mind. In the emotion code, we teach people a number of different ways of tapping into the subconscious mind, which might sound really esoteric, but it's actually really simple. One of the simplest ways, actually, that I can share with your listeners right now is what we call the sway test. The sway test is really based on the ability of all organisms to respond to positive or negative input. So, for example, if you put a plant in a pot, you put it near a window. After a while you're going to see it's growing towards the light coming in from the window. Plants will grow away actually from negative inputs. And so the human body has that ability. This is one of the ways that you can ask questions and get answers from the subconscious mind within. You can stand and. Do we have time to go through this exercise really quick?

I don't know. How long does it take?

I don't know. A couple Minutes, maybe.

Yeah, that's fine.

All right, so here's how this works. Really quickly, just stand up, drop your hands down to your sides, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and relax. As you're standing there, you'll notice that it's not really possible to stand perfectly still. There's always a little bit of movement going on. That's just your postural muscles working to keep you from falling over. But let's start with something negative and see what your automatic response is. Now what? Normally, the body will sway forward if you're holding thoughts of positivity or congruency or truth. If you're holding thoughts of negativity or incongruency or falsehood, your body will tend to sway backward. So this is one simple way to get your to be able to tune in and ask questions and get answers from your subconscious. So here's what we'll do. Let's start with something really negative. Okay? So as you're standing there, totally relaxed, arms down by your sides, I'd like you to think for a moment about the word war. That's a word we've heard all of our lives. Very negative thing. I'd like you to think for just a moment about what really goes on in war, what's really happening. What are people doing to other people in wars, what's happening to cities and villages and what's happening to families. Think of all the tears that have been shed over all the wars that have been fought over all these centuries of man's existence. Now, as you're thinking about that thought of war, the moment your subconscious mind connects with what you are consciously thinking about, in that moment, you'll start to sway backward. And that's your subconscious mind trying to move you away from the sheer negativity of that thought. Now, usually it takes anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds for this to happen. The more you do this, the more you practice this kind of a technique, the easier and the faster it gets. But now let's try something different. Okay? So once again, take a deep breath. Relax, arms down by your sides, eyes closed. And like you to think for a moment about. Think about the word unconditional love. And imagine that you are surrounded with unconditional love. Imagine that every being in the universe has nothing but unconditional love for you. Not only that, imagine that you are a being of unconditional love. And the love that fills your heart for all creation, for all people, for everything, for the whole universe is so big that your heart can't even contain that Love. And that love expands out from you and expands out into the universe. And think about what it would feel like to be that kind of an individual, to be able to be capable of love on that level. Now your body's probably straining forward right now. You're probably right on your tiptoes. And that's your subconscious mind trying to tell you, yeah, hey, you know what? We can get this eventually. This is where we can go. And I believe that is a potential possible future for all of us to become beings like that. So what we can do is we can use this method to ask questions. So, for example, ask as you're standing again, just relax. Okay. Hands down by your sides, ask yourself this question. Do I have a trapped emotion that needs to be released? Do I have a trapped emotion that needs to be released? And see if you sway forward or backward. You can also ask, do I have a heart wall? Do I have a heart wall? And see how you sway on that one. And again, you should sway forward for yes and backward for no. And so this is one of the ways, very simple way that you can ask questions and get answers. We teach a number of other different testing methods. The ring and ring method and the hand solo method and different methods of testing using your hands and also testing other people by having them hold out their arm and they're strong or weak. Right. But basically it's a simple process from there. If the subconscious mind gives you a yes answer to the question, do I have a trapped emotion that needs to be released? Then what you would do is you go to the chart and ask, is this emotion in column A, it's either going to be a yes or a no. And then you just ask, well, what row is it in? And then eventually you drill down and.

You find the trap in the book. Exactly what to do. I love it.

It's all in there. Yeah.

How would you. So let's just make the link here between why this matters for leaders and executives and entrepreneurs. In your mind, what have you seen that doing this type of work helps them with their business and their leadership?

Well, I believe that true leadership is heart based. When I say that, what I'm really talking about is that we each have this conscious mind and we've got this brain in our heads and we've also got this brain in our hearts. You can't lie to people. People know where you're coming from with them. If you've got a team, for example, that you're working with and you're trying to motivate that team because there's this communication going on between all of us all the time. It doesn't really matter what you say verbally. Everybody knows in their hearts where you're really coming from and what your true agenda is. What we find is that when we start to strip away that emotional baggage, and especially when we take down that wall that the vast majority of us have, then we're able to communicate on a higher level. And we're also able to start manifesting the true gifts that we have. Think about it. Most of us spend untold amounts of money if we're in business, we're always reading books, we're always, we're always attending events and things. And a lot of the time, you know, a year later you'll find some great thing that you went to, some great training, is still shrink wrapped on your shelf. May have had that experience. We're all trying to manifest everything we're capable of manifesting, right? We're all trying to become better leaders and we're all trying to create what we're capable of creating. The problem is your emotional baggage is in your way. And you can struggle through life with all that emotional baggage and drag it around through your life and try to manifest abundance and creativity and everything else in spite of it. Or you can actually start to get rid of that emotional baggage and you can start getting rid of it by using the emotion code and you can do it on yourself or you can find a practitioner. We've got thousands of them@discoverhealing.com all over the world. And this work is done at a distance as well as live and in person. So you don't even have to leave the comfort of your own home to get rid of this baggage. But I'm telling you right now that as that baggage, you see, here's what happens as you, as you start to get rid of enough of this baggage. Susan, it's almost like at a certain point, it's like stepping out of this old suit that you've been walking around and you step into this new state of being that just feels so much more congruent. And it's easier to be who you really are and it's easier to really, it's easier to lead people because you don't need all of these facades and all of these different mechanisms that we learn about in so many places and come right from the heart.

And that's, and that's, you know, we do work with executive presence, with a number of leaders, and ultimately it's that work when you release what you need to release, you're showing up as your true, authentic self. The time that I see the most incongruence is often people have their company values or their team values, and yet the leader doesn't always show up that way. The leader might. You know, maybe integrity isn't a value, but the rest of the team is like, yeah, I don't see you always operating with integrity, and I don't see you walk the talk or mean what you say and say what you mean. And so there's this disconnect between what you think you want to stand for, which is integrity, and how you're actually showing up. And my sense is that doing some of this work around the emotional baggage will free you up to be, again, more authentic, and people will gravitate to your leadership in those cases versus kind of being at a dissonance. It's almost like a leadership dissonance that occurs. And that's what I've seen with leaders.

Well, I think so, too. I think you're absolutely right. The way I think of it is if this hand represents true 100% integrity of what we know we should be doing, and this hand represents where we really are, the further apart those two become, the less successful we are, the. The more work it takes, the closer those two are together, the easier it becomes, really. It's also about the conscious and the subconscious mind. If this hand represents the conscious mind and where we want to go, and this hand represents the subconscious mind and where it wants to go, the subconscious is so powerful that if our emotional baggage is deflecting us off in some other direction other than success, other than what we want, the more we get rid of that baggage, the more aligned our conscious mind becomes with our subconscious mind, and the easier it becomes, the more automatic it becomes, the more things can start to flow to us in really wonderful ways.

Awesome. Well, where can people learn more?

Well, of course, the book's available on Amazon and on audible.com as an audio book available in bookstores everywhere. If you'd like to, you can go to. You can go to our website@discoverhealing.com and we have a little trial package there. If you'd like to. You can just put your info in there, and then we'll send you the first couple of chapters that you can start to take a look at and see if it's something that you're interested in. But, you know, in parting, I would just say that this is really something that you. You've absolutely got to take a look at. It. It's the missing link, really. In Western medicine, our emotional baggage is an enormously huge component of our physical, mental, and emotional health, and it's also the byproduct of getting rid of it can work wonders for not only your love life, but also for your business life. So take a look.

Awesome. That's exactly what we're here to do. Well, thank you so much for spending the time with us today, and look forward to seeing what questions come up and how people use this amazing technique to improve their business life and their personal life.

Well, thanks for the opportunity, Susan. I really appreciate it.

Hope you enjoyed today's episode. And I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive.