Healing Feeling - Molecules of Emotion

"As a researcher on the drug frontier for over twenty years, I have to depart from the opinion of most of my colleagues in the mainstream and say that less is best. The implications of my research are that all exogenous drugs are potentially harmful to the system, not only as disrupters of the natural balance of the feedback loops involving many systems and organs, but because of the changes that happen at the level of the receptor.

Each of us has his or her own natural pharmacopoeia - the very finest drugstore available at the cheapest cost - to produce all the drugs we ever need to run our bodymind in precisely the way it was designed to run over centuries of evolution.

...a frequent theme in my thoughts is the question of healing feeling, something so desperately needed in our society, as reflected by both the rising numbers of people on anti-depressant medications and the escalating use of illegal drugs. In my mind, both kinds of user- the one who gets the drugs from a doctor and the one who buys them from a dealer - are doing the same thing: altering their chemistry with an exogenous substance that has widespread effects, many of which are not fully understood, in order to change feelings they don't want to have.

My research has shown me that when emotions are expressed - which is to say that the biochemicals that are the substrate of emotion are flowing freely - all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior. This, I believe, is the state of unhealed feelling we want so desperately to escape from. Drugs, legal and illegal, are further interrupting the many feedback loops that allow the psychosomatic network to function in a natural, balanced way and therefore setting up conditions for somatic as well as mental disorders.

But the idea of the network is still too new to have affected the way mainstream medicine and psychology deal with our health and our illnesses. Most psychologists treat the mind as disembodied, a phenomenon with little or no connection to the physical body. Conversely, physicians treat the body with no regard to the mind or the emotions. But the body and mind are not separate, and we cannot treat one without the other. My research has shown me that the body can and must be healed through the mind, and the mind can and must be healed through the body."

Molecules of Emotion - The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
by Candace B. Pert, Ph.D.