Our emotions are messages from our soul and there are no such things as "bad" emotions. Fear and anger and frustration and rage and grief and depression and even suicidal thoughts all are just messages from our soul and when we get that message, these emotions just drop away.

It's recognized by many different alternative therapies and even by many doctors that our emotions are the cause of much very real, very physical illness. But it's not the emotions themselves that make us sick, but how we deal with them.

This is an oversimplification, but it will do for our purposes here.

The front part of the brain is where all the really positive action takes place -- where we can change our old ways of "doing" emotions. That's where asking The Questions from the previous chapter takes place.

The limbic system, roughly in the middle, is where we feel the emotions, that's where we feel the pain, the hurt, the anger, the anxiety, the terror, the grief, all the big stuff.

When we ignore these emotions or try not to feel them or when we've become so overloaded with intense emotions that we've gone numb, then they get shunted to the back of the brain - where we can "do" the emotion physically. That's where we do our tantrums, slam the door, kick the cat (I'm kidding), throw the dinner at the husband (I'm not kidding), punch someone's lights out (hopefully not, because that sort of behavior comes back at us!)

This back part of the brain is also where we can use physical effort to release the emotion. We can run until we are so tired that we drop, we can use a punching bag, we can use music and dance to release emotions instead of burying them.

If we don't deal with it physically, then the brain pushes the emotion down to be stored in the body, it buries it. This is an ingenious mechanism - it clears the decks, if you will, for the next lot of emotions, otherwise we'd go mad with all these emotions swirling around in our head at the same time.

It is the result of the brain burying our emotions in our body that makes us sick. This burying of emotions in the body is the source of serious and often life threatening and very real, physical illness. Everything from cancers and arthritis, to simple aches and pains are involved.

Almost all illnesses, if not actually caused by buried emotions, are made worse by buried emotions.

And the worst part about these buried emotions is that when we feel the same emotion some time in the future, the old feelings that we didn't do anything about in the past, come welling back up, often HUGELY INTENSIFYING what we're feeling about the current situation - making it bigger, stronger and more uncontrollable.

Emotions buried are cumulative, i.e. each "little" one is added on top of the last one until you have a giant that can be made up of small things.

It makes more sense when we realize that our emotions are messages from our soul. If we don't get the first gentle message, then our soul sends the message louder and louder, bigger and bigger until the emotion is so intense that we simply have to do something about it or burst!