It’s no secret that we live in a Western society that often puts a Band-Aid on our symptoms instead of excavating and healing the root cause of the health concern at hand.
And according to Dr. Janine Kreft, a wellness and energetics mentor with a doctorate in clinical psychology and a DailyOM course creator, the core issue is always energetic, or emotional, in nature.
“I believe that all physical pain has some sort of emotional root,” she says. “Say you tripped over the sidewalk, broke your ankle, and now are in pain. Some would argue that your broken ankle is the cause of your pain, but what originally distracted you from not paying attention to the sidewalk? Anytime we’re bumping into things, we’re not fully in our bodies — and some sort of emotional piece is at play.”
In order to discover truly life-altering healing that allows us to live the joyful, receptive lives we’re meant to have, we need to heal our emotional body at the deepest cellular level.
Interested in learning more? Check out Clear Emotional Pain at a Cellular Level.
A holistic psychologist and mental performance coach for more than 16 years, Dr. Kreft focuses on helping people understand the language of energy to heal any issues at their core. “I help bring conscious awareness to subconscious patterns, habits, and processes,” she explains. “The energy needs to be brought to the surface to be acknowledged, moved, transmuted, and alchemized, because ultimately that’s how it shifts.”
In addition to embodying a particular frequency, Kreft uses a variety of tools, including neuro-linguistic programming and quantum linguistics, to support others in moving toward profound healing and transformation.
Emotional pain can be equated to feelings of grief, sadness, anger, guilt, shame, and so on, but Kreft offers an even more expanded way of understanding it. “Emotional pain is us perceiving a situation that is in contrast with how our Higher Self would see it,” she explains.
To break this down further, she says we have access to this innate, higher-level wisdom that has a bird’s-eye view of everything we’re going through. And then we have our ego, or human mind, which only sees what’s right in front of us. We experience emotional hardship through the lens of the human mind — and this emotional pain registers at a denser energetic frequency that doesn’t feel good in our body.
Not only does emotional pain feel less than wonderful, but it actually camps out in the body, too. “When there is emotional pain, things are moving slowly and the energy becomes kind of stagnant — and that is what we mean when we say ‘stored in the body,’” Kreft tells us.
According to Kreft, we have a tendency to store emotional pain at a cellular level. “Everything is energy before it becomes matter, and if energy is a language, so to speak, it’s communicating to us what’s happening,” she says. “The body’s cells are going to adapt and express themselves accordingly. When you’re stressed, your cells are gearing up for action, like little soldiers.”
She adds that we’re not meant to live in a continuous state of fight-or-flight. “Chronic stress is going to ’burn out’ our cells. They’re not built to be on guard all the time.”
If left unaddressed, emotional pain — and resultant physical pain — can remain locked in the body, per Kreft. “Many people pass away from physical illnesses, or they just live with chronic illness their entire life. Or the body might adapt somewhat; however, the person just feels like they’re not having the best quality of life,” she shares from her practice.
In order to move into healing, Kreft says you need to focus on the core of what ails you — not just the symptoms. This process is called cellular energetic healing. “You want to look at the energy piece first,” she notes. This usually involves working to answer questions like:
“Things can shift very quickly when you change at the foundational, cellular level,” Kreft continues. “Some things can take a little longer if there are other beliefs that are incongruent with the healing, or things that are keeping you stuck. And the body takes some time to rework itself. So allowing yourself to be patient and let go of expectations is really huge.”
When you heal on a cellular level, your entire energetic frequency soars, which positively affects every aspect of your well-being. Here, Kreft shares some of the most powerful ways in which you might expect to experience transformation in your life if you embrace this kind of healing work.
When you’re functioning optimally at the cellular level, you don’t experience physical pain, Kreft notes. “Yes, we’re a very intricate machine that requires a lot of maintenance, but if we’re not contracting every five seconds because we’re stressed, then our muscles are relaxed and we don’t have muscle pain, for example,” she says.
For years, scientific research has explored the link between physical and emotional pain. One recent clinical trial found that chronic pain was significantly reduced, alongside anxiety, depression, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, in older veterans through a form of psychotherapy called EAET (emotional awareness and expression therapy), which focuses on addressing past trauma and stress.
“Our bodies sleep best when they’re being utilized properly, meaning we’re getting enough movement throughout the day, but we’re not overly exhausted,” Kreft tells us. “We’ve appropriately expended our energy, and we’re able to relax. But oftentimes, when people have emotional pain, they can’t relax; they constantly feel on edge or depressed, and then their sleep tends to be affected.” So when you heal the emotional root cause, you’re able to relax into quality slumber with greater ease.
Ironically, when sleep quality is diminished, this exacerbates our emotional pain (talk about a catch-22). Research confirms that sleep is a necessary mechanism for processing our emotions, both in terms of storing positive emotions and alleviating negative ones.
As you heal on a cellular level, you naturally lessen the stress in your life and you experience less illness, according to Kreft. “When you reduce your stress load, your cells are functioning optimally, and then they’re not needing to adapt and have symptoms of illness,” she says. “Personally, I now only get sick about once every two years, which I’m pretty proud of.”
A study found that chronic stress in dementia caregivers can be felt at a cellular level, adversely impacting physical and mental health and leading to their own development of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
“When you release emotional pain — that dense, stagnant, slow energy — then you are allowing your body to embody its natural high-frequency state,” Kreft says.
Our physical bodies are meant to function at a higher frequency, but we tend to suppress it with all of our beliefs, traumas, and dysregulated nervous systems, she adds. “When we’ve done this healing, ultimately, our frequency can rise — and we’re not experiencing these intense mental-health issues like anxiety and depression.”
When you’re in pain on an emotional level, you don’t have space for positive emotions like joy and love. So when you heal, you feel more hopeful and excited about life, per Kreft.
“And then, ultimately, you’re going to create more things because you’re feeling better, and then you’re going to interact with people differently, too,” she explains. “You experience this crazy domino effect by releasing the pain.”
Not to sound like a broken record, but, again, as you release deep-rooted emotional pain, you begin to raise your overall frequency.
“Then, your frequency is lined up with more abundance,” Kreft says. “You become very magnetic to the things that you desire because your energy is light and easy. You’re no longer contracted and holding on really deeply.”
“When you’re feeling good, plugged in, and connected, synchronicities happen for you,” Kreft explains. “It’s like you’re in the right place at the right time. You feel like you’re flowing with the Universe.”
Conversely, when there’s emotional pain stored in our body, we’re distracted by it, she adds. “We can’t find a state of flow because we’re disconnected.”
True healing and transformation requires us to go deep, to peel back the energetic layers that cause us to feel stuck in states of chronic pain, discomfort, and overall unease.
If you’ve tried what feels like everything under the sun to heal, it may be time to embrace a different approach, one that involves the more subtle aspects of energy. It all starts with having the desire and awareness that it’s time to change — and then installing the belief that you can.
You don’t have to live with emotional or physical pain. In fact, dis-ease couldn’t be further from the truth of who you are and who you’re meant to be, here and now.
