Your Brain As A Projector: Explaining The Mind Body Connection

In eastern medicine the mind (and thoughts to be more specific) are intimately connected with the body. You cannot have whole health without treating the the emotional state.

How are the two connected? Your mind is a high powered machine. Think of the brain as the projector, your thoughts as the film, and the physical reality as the screen.

Thoughts and emotions are, synaptically speaking, created in the brain. Your brain projects different emotions onto corresponding parts of the body, stimulating a physical response.

Which emotions affect which organ system were intricately mapped during the development of eastern medicine and came to form the foundation of what is now called the mind body connection.

A thousand years of medical observation deduced, for example, that sadness projects onto the lungs. That’s why you find that people with depression tend to have weak immune systems and are prone to cough and cold.

Stress projects onto the muscles and tendons, explaining why, when you’ve had a hard day at work, your neck and shoulders ache.

Similarly, if you’ve just gone through a breakup you feel heartache in the area of your biological heart, even though western medicine describes the physical function of the heart as having nothing to do with processing emotions.

The theory that thoughts and emotions are intertwined with, and manifest onto, the physical body is at the core of eastern medicine and critical in treating the patient as a whole. If you’re being treated for infertility by western medicine and have not addressed the emotional rollercoaster that comes along with it, you are ignoring half of the puzzle. Invest in your whole self, whether that be through acupuncture, therapy, community support groups, meditation or some other mindfulness practice.