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. And These experiences shaped Dr. Brad's life going forward. So 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. And your best selling 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. So 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. And 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. So 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. And 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. 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. He 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? Did 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.

Heart.

It's the most amazing thing. When that wall is taken down, people say things that are really amazing. In fact, 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 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 when 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 kind of 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.