Emotional Wellness

​By Melaine Myklebust

​My grandma was a child when her mom died. My mom was 18 when her mom died. I was 24 when my mom died. I come from a family of strong women who have had to pave the way into adulthood without a mother's guidance. We started our marriages and had children without a mom there to offer advice.
 
If I live to be 50, I’ll be the first woman in four generations to do so.
 
In my quest to break cycles, I stumbled across emotional links to our physical body systems. Have you ever been so overwhelmed with grief that your throat hurts? Or have you ever been so worried that you feel it in the pit of your stomach? Maybe you’ve experienced diarrhea before a big presentation or job interview.
 
Our bodies run on measurable frequencies. Emotions can raise and lower our frequencies. If we are experiencing a particular emotion, our body will store it in an area that is running on the same frequency. (For example: Worry is stored in the stomach).
 
I became curious about all of this, so I took a peek inside of the book Feelings Buried Alive Never Die by Karol K. Truman. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that the inability to cope with traumatic loss, feelings of helplessness, and holding on to deep hurt are all linked to buried emotions stored in the female organs.
 
By putting on my brave face for so many years and pretending like everything was ok, I was suppressing some major feelings, and I was on the road to storing them in a place in my body that is exactly the same place that generations before me had experienced cancer. In an effort to learn more about emotional responses, I learned that trauma and emotional responses can be passed in our DNA from generation to generation.

Neuroscientists at Emory University found that genetic markers can transmit a traumatic experience from generation to generation. They did an experiment where they taught male mice to associate fear with the scent of cherry blossoms. They would expose the mice to the scent as they shocked their feet. Then they removed the shock and the mice continued to express fear when they smelled cherry blossoms. They bred the mice with female mice. When the pups were born they had never smelled cherry blossoms. As soon as they smelled the blossoms the first time, they showed fear. This emotional response had been passed from the father to the pups and was triggered in the limbic system by their sense of smell.

The way we respond to the world around us can be from emotional responses in our DNA and our learned coping mechanisms. Is it so farfetched to wonder if constant hip pain might actually be due to suppressed emotions? Or that anger issues might actually be stemming from a liver crying for help?

Dr. Andrew Weil[HT1]  says, “No matter how far a resilient person is stretched or pulled by negative emotions, he or she has the ability to bounce back to his or her original state.”   This gave me hope. 
My passion for health and wellness started when I realized that I wasn't loving my body well. I was on a path of self-destruction. I thought taking care of the physical side of things would be enough, so I ate wholesome foods and exercised regularly.

But it wasn't until I started seeking spiritual healing through prayer and emotional healing through forgiveness that everything came together. Healing begins where the wound was made. We cannot heal if we don’t deal. We cannot deal if we don’t feel. I needed to be the one to heal so I don't inadvertently pass my woundedness on to my daughter.

As a child, I was taught to stuff emotions because, in my family, crying was a sign of weakness. I had years of suppression waiting to spill out. But once I started allowing myself to feel the ugly things I had been burying, the floodgates opened, and an overwhelming sense of peace has filled my body. In the process of learning about my emotional well-being, my physical body started to transform as well. I have more energy. I’ve lost a few pounds. But the best part about digging deep is the freedom that comes with healing. We were made to be free.
 
Melaine Myklebust currently resides in Rockville, MN, with her husband and four children. Melaine graduated from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2008 with a bachelor's of science degree in education and received her master's degree in curriculum and instruction from St. Catherine University in 2013. Melaine has a passion for wellness and education. She loves to cook nourishing meals for her family, homeschool her children, and educate others about how to live with purpose and intention. You can find her blog at www.lemongrassandsage.com