It’s a common view of bodyworkers, particularly in the field of sexuality or alternative healing, to make the assertion that a particular emotion is being stored in a particular body part, and it needs to be released for healing to occur. Many people take this assertion (or diagnosis) at face value, but the concept is rarely explained, and often goes entirely unquestioned. I think that it is very useful to understand what is happening at a physiological and emotional level not just for the sake of comprehension, but because it is quite confidence-inspiring to know the mechanism. Sometimes, understanding assists healing.

Memory is a slippery thing, and I know no better illustration of that than the Booker prize winning novel The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Many know it from its filmic adaptation. It tells the moving story of an Indian boy lost at sea. He and his unlikely companions, a zebra, a hyena, an orangatuan, and a Benghal tiger are the lone survivors from the wreckage of a Japanese ship which was transporting Pi’s family and all of the animals from their zoo. Only the boy Pi and the tiger survive their adventure of incredible challenge, tragedy, and endurance. At the end of the novel, the Japanese representatives from the shipping company interview Pi to attempt to understand what happened. They do not believe his story of life at sea with the tiger, and ask for a story which is more believable. [Spoiler alert!]. And so, after the reader (or viewer) have survived the emotional roller coaster ride of the hero’s boy-tiger-boat journey, Pi presents a second, considerably shorter, version of the story. In the second version, which is both more mundane and much more tragic, the original animals are recast as human survivors, and it includes the horrific murder of Pi’s mother at sea before his eyes.

Which memory was true? This central question about memory, trauma, and meaning is what makes the novel so powerful. The revelation of many, myself included, is that in the end, the objective truth (if there is such a thing, and science says, probably not) doesn’t matter. What matters is the healing power of Pi’s tale for his own psyche. The quintessential psychological truth about ‘remembering’ is that memories are stories we tell ourselves. Freud was perhaps the first to state this, but it has since been reconfirmed many times over by neuroscientists. Most relevant to me and other healers is that how we remember and how we re-experience our memories (emotionally, physiologically), bodes much for the healing journey.

Science tells us that memories are not even stored in a particular part of the brain. You cannot, therefore, identify them as physiological events akin to lightening, occurring in a particular location. We know this from the grisly experiments of experimental psychologist Karl Lashley who taught rats to find their way through a maze, then systematically removed various bits of their brains and re-tested them. They could find their way through the maze even after their cerebral cortices were nearly destroyed, until the rats had too little left of their brains to function.

Not only is memory not stored in a specific part of the brain, it is entirely relative. Memories which we recall are always recalled for their meaning or relevance to us at the moment in time when we remember. The mind selects images, experiences, colours, and so on, in various combinations, to form a memory. It is a type of perception, which creates a gestalt—a functional unit, a set of beliefs. Not only that, research has also shown that some element of emotion is necessary for the experience of remembering! Without a linked emotion, there is no memory. The work of Elizabeth Loftus on false memory tells a fascinating story.

So, memories are not stored in a particular part of the brain, but, it seems, in the body or psyche as a whole (as in the case of the rats); and memories are not fixed, objective realities, but selective, creative and linked to emotion. What does this mean for sexual healing, even for something as seemingly unrelated as performance anxiety? For that matter, what does it mean for any kind of healing?

Certainly many esoteric systems correlate the heart to the place where grief is stored literally as a thing, as energy; or the gut to where shock is stored, for example. To add complexity, we know from organ transplants that recipients often awaken from surgery with preferences and memories of the donor. In this case, a girl receiving a heart from a murder victim suddenly had memories of the murder, and her recall was detailed enough that she was able to assist detectives in the case… all from the heart of the murdered girl being in her body! A liver recipient entirely changed her immune system, including blood type. The study of organ transplant-induced memories is not entirely understood from a science point of view, but those of us who do bodywork understand it well from an experiential point of view.

In any case, what is clear from observation is that the body as a whole remembers. It doesn’t seem to be the case that people with heart transplants only have memories of the donor’s grief, for example. Recipients seem to have a fairly random selection of memories, emotions, and tastes, which implies more aptly that each body part contain knowledge of the whole…. that memories are diffused throughout the entire body, and if you take out any part, it will contain memories of the whole. Back to Karl Lashley and his rats.

So, from the point of view of someone who does deep tissue work to help create emotional shifts, I find it useful to explain it thus: rather than say, an emotion we can identify as x is stored in the body part we identify as y, it’s rather more apt to say that a memory has a particular consequence for a body part. So a person stores grief, for example, throughout the body. But grief has a particular effect on the heart and lungs, whereas trauma or fear have a particular effect on the abdominal/psoas area. This is where healing comes in, and this is why bodyworkers often say, “we need to release some of the trauma in your gut,” or “grief in your heart” (which is what I can help do).

In another article, I will explain the mechanism whereby emotion has a particular effect on specific organs/areas of the body, as well how bodywork can assist in healing.

E.M.

[And if you haven’t read the book or watched the movie Life of Pi, it’s really worth doing!]