Dr. Bradley Nelson: “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness”
Always stay heart centered. As a healer, it’s critically important to always be coming from your heart, in total sincerity. If your focus is money, and you see people as dollar signs, you may be able to fool the conscious mind but you cannot fool the subconscious mind. People know intuitively what your true agenda is, and if you are truly coming from a place of love for them, truly having their best interest at heart, they will automatically know that.
As a part of my series about the “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness” I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Bradley Nelson.
Veteran holistic physician Dr. Bradley Nelson (D.C., ret.) is one of the world’s foremost experts on natural methods of achieving wellness. He has trained thousands of certified practitioners worldwide to help people overcome physical and emotional discomfort by releasing their emotional baggage. His best-selling book “The Emotion Code” provides step-by-step instructions for working with the body’s energy healing power. A newly revised and expanded edition of “The Emotion Code” is now available (May 2019, St. Martin’s Press). For more information and a free Emotion Code Starter Kit, visit www.emotioncodegift.com.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
My mother was a very gifted healer, and I was raised in a very entrepreneurial family. My father was a successful real estate broker and developer, and people were always seeking my mother out for help and advice.
When I was 13 years old, I developed a kidney disease for which there was no medical cure. My parents, being open to alternatives, took me to see some old timer holistic physician, who practiced out on the edge of town in a trailer house. Their clinic might not have been much to look at, but I remember seeing chartered buses full of people from other states that would pool their funds and come to see them for their healing abilities. Within a few short weeks of starting treatment with them the severe pains that I was experiencing had faded away. My parents took me back to the medical clinic where all the tests were rerun, and I was pronounced healed. It was at that time that I decided I wanted to be a doctor, but not a medical doctor, rather, I wanted to be a holistic doctor that helps people to get well in totally natural ways, using the incredible intelligence that exists within the body.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
I had a patient that was brought into me once who was suffering from daily seizures, terrific physical pain, unendurable fatigue, and complete loss of short-term as well as long-term memory. This young woman had been on a Christian mission to the Philippines, where she lived in very primitive conditions. She got sick in the Philippines, and was sent back to the United States where she was passed from one specialist to another. All of them were baffled by her condition. Although they did not know what was wrong with her, it was obvious that she was dying. She was told that she had about four months to live. Somehow she survived. Four years after she had first gotten sick, she was brought in to see me by her parents. I tested her using what we now call The Body Code, which accesses the subconscious mind for answers. Within just a few minutes, her subconscious mind revealed that she had picked up a parasitic infection in the Philippines. However, it wasn’t just one parasite, it was nine different parasites! I saw her on a regular basis for one year, battling these nine different parasitic infections with herbal remedies until they were finally all gone. At the end of that year, all her memories had come back to her, her seizures were gone, her pain was gone and she was full of energy. She enrolled in college and earned an advanced degree in sign language. She told me that she would periodically run into someone that she used to know and their reaction was always the same. “I thought you were dead!”
Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?
When I was a new doctor part of my responsibility was putting electrodes onto patients in the therapy room we had in the clinic where I worked. The routine was that I would attach these electrodes via sticky pads to a patient’s back, I would set the timer for 10 to 15 minutes, and I would return to the room around the time their treatment of electrical stimulation was finished. One day we were just closing up the office and were actually going out the front door when suddenly the therapy room door opened and a middle-aged woman appeared in the hallway with all sorts of wires trailing out of the back of her shirt. I suddenly remembered putting her on the electrical stimulation machine an hour or so before. I learned to always check all the rooms in the office before closing up.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
This was a bit of a hard question for me to answer. There have been a number of people that I am very grateful for, who helped me to achieve what I’ve been able to achieve in my life but I have to say that on the top of the list is my father, Bruce Allen Nelson, Jr. In the winter of 1983–84, my wife and I went home to Montana from attending college. We had gone back to see my parents, and as we sat in the living room talking with them my father suddenly asked me if I was still interested in going into the healing arts. I replied that I was not. I decided to go into computers and business, and I was about six months away from going into the MBA program at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. My father looked at me and said, “Well, why don’t you think about it one more time.” You see, I had lost sight of my childhood dream of being a healer. My father’s question brought me back to that dream, and not long after hearing this question from him, I received a very powerful answer in prayer that this was indeed the route I was supposed to take with my life. These were the most important words that anyone has ever spoken to me. These words changed the course of my life and now have changed the course of countless other lives around the world.
What advice would you suggest to your colleagues in your industry to thrive and avoid burnout?
Always stay heart centered. As a healer, it’s critically important to always be coming from your heart, in total sincerity. If your focus is money, and you see people as dollar signs, you may be able to fool the conscious mind but you cannot fool the subconscious mind. People know intuitively what your true agenda is, and if you are truly coming from a place of love for them, truly having their best interest at heart, they will automatically know that.
What advice would you give to other leaders about how to create a fantastic work culture?
I think the secret is communication. I believe that company leaders need to be available to everyone in the company. That doesn’t mean that they need to allow themselves to be interrupted at any moment, but I think making yourself available as a leader through some sort of company wide communication system is a great way for everyone to stay in touch, from the bottom of the company to the top.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. Mental health is often looked at in binary terms; those who are healthy and those who have mental illness. The truth, however, is that mental wellness is a huge spectrum. Even those who are “mentally healthy” can still improve their mental wellness. From your experience or research, what are five steps that each of us can take to improve or optimize our mental wellness. Can you please share a story or example for each.
It’s been an amazing thing for me to understand how much of a person’s current mental state is a result of their “emotional baggage.” What I’m referring to here is the trapped emotional energy that people have from those experiences in their life that they would rather not have gone through. Those energies, which we referred to as trapped emotions, live in the body as little clouds of pure emotional energy. At least, that is how we look at it when we are using The Emotion Code. Getting rid of that emotional energy is the most important step you can take to living on a higher level, without that emotional baggage dragging you down to the lower emotional ranges.
For example, a man came in to see me who was suffering from severe lower back pain. Using The Emotion Code, I found that he had a trapped emotion of anger from about 20 years before. He immediately remembered what had happened. It was a work situation, and he recalled being very upset, indeed. Using the simple technique that we outlined in The Emotion Code, I was able to release his trapped emotion of anger. Instantly, his low back pain was gone. It was miraculous to him, but to me it was not unusual. Our emotional baggage causes much of our physical pain. The interesting thing about this man, though, was that he returned to my office couple of days later with more information. He said to me, “Dr. Nelson, my low back pain is still gone, and hasn’t come back. That was really amazing. However, when I first came in here I had another problem that I did not share with you. For as long as I can remember, I’ve basically been what you might call a rage-a-holic. I’m always yelling at my wife and my kids. I have to really be careful about road rage. I’ve been in anger management several times, and it has really helped me. But since you released that trapped emotion of anger from me, I feel totally different. I feel peaceful and relaxed. Things aren’t setting me off like they used to.”
This is just one example of how our emotional baggage can affect us decades down the road, in both physical and mental ways.
A specific kind of emotional baggage results when our subconscious mind attempts to protect our heart. The human heart is a somewhat mysterious organ. In ancient times, the heart was believed to be the seat of the soul, the source of creativity, the source of love and romance, and the core of our being. In modern times, these old ideas about the hart have been ignored. Ignored until lately, that is. New research about the heart is revealing that the heart is much more than just a muscular pump. There are books written about people who have received heart transplants, and along with their transplant also received some of the memories, the affinities and loves of the donor. We now know that the heart puts out a more powerful magnetic field than any other organ in the body. In fact, the magnetic field from the heart extends around the body up to 12 feet in diameter. It’s been found that if one person is feeling love or affection for another person, their heartbeat will become measurable in that other person’s brain waves ablation point.
When you feel like your heart is going to break, when you are feeling deeply hurt or grief, the subconscious mind will build a wall around the heart, a wall that is literally made of the emotional energy that a person has trapped.
Miranda is a perfect example of how a Heart-Wall can interfere with your love life. She was an attractive thirty-eight-year-old nurse who came to me suffering from neck pain. During the course of her examination, she mentioned that she had not dated anyone in years and had no interest in having any kind of a relationship with men anymore. When I tested her, I was not surprised to find that she had a Heart-Wall.
Eight years before, Miranda’s heart had been broken by a man she had deeply loved. In an effort to protect her heart from experiencing that kind of pain and injury again, her subconscious mind had created a Heart-Wall.
In Miranda’s case, three lingering emotions had been trapped in her body for all those years, blocking her from creating another relationship. She had no idea that these Heart-Wall emotions were the major underlying cause of her neck pain as well. The pain in her neck had been going on for some time and was considered chronic and even a bit mysterious by the other doctors she had consulted, because nothing seemed to relieve it.
One by one, I released these trapped emotions that were making up the layers of her Heart-Wall. When I released the last emotion, her neck pain suddenly disappeared completely, and muscle testing revealed that her Heart-Wall was indeed gone.
I didn’t see Miranda again for about three months. When I did, she looked incredibly happy. I asked her what had changed, and she excitedly said, “Everything!” She reported that her neck pain was long gone. But there was even better news than that.
“Right after I saw you last,” she said, “I ran into my childhood sweetheart. I hadn’t seen him since elementary school. But it turned out he’d been living right around the corner from me — less than a block away — for almost eight years. We started dating, and something really sparked between us. We’re in love! I think he’s going to ask me to marry him.”
The woman who had come into my office complaining of neck pain and swearing off men was gone for good. Miranda was a completely new person.
“Thank you so much for helping me,” she said. “If you hadn’t released my Heart-Wall, I honestly don’t think this would have happened. I was too closed off before.”
When trapped emotions and Heart-Walls are released, people sometimes say it’s like they can finally feel again. They can give and receive love freely for the first time in a long time. In that state, very interesting and wonderful things can happen.
We’re meant to live vibrant, healthy lives, filled with love, joy, and connection. Out of all of the emotions, love is the most pure and has the highest vibration. Love is the most powerful and most popular of all the emotions, is both generated by the heart and received by the heart.
When you have a Heart-Wall, you are not able to give love as well as you might otherwise, because the love energy that is in your heart cannot get out as well.
At the same time, love that is being radiated toward you by other people is blocked to some degree.
As a result, you can go through your life somewhat insulated from others because of the emotional traumas you’ve been through create the wall around your heart. Building your Heart-Wall made perfect sense at the time. But until you take it down, you’ll be trapped behind it to some degree, less able to reach out and connect with people, even the people you love the most.
People’s lives and the lives of their children and their families have been completely transformed when their Heart-Walls have been removed.
I believe that getting rid of your Heart-Wall may just be the most important single thing that you can do for your mental and emotional health, as well as your love life!
By the way, in my experiences, about 93% of people have put up an energetic “wall” around their heart. This means that you probably do have a Heart-Wall. Ask yourself, if I have a Heart-Wall, what is it doing to me? What is it doing my relationships and what kind of an effect is it having on my love life?
It’s very important to be in connection with other people, especially during this crazy time we are living through now. This is a great time to be reaching out to friends you may have lost track of, and to be strengthening relationships you already have. Isolation can lead to anxiety, heightened fear, and a greater likelihood of depression.
Another great way to stay mentally healthy is through performing acts of service for other people. It’s a proven fact that when we do something selfless and kind for another person, that our blood chemistry changes. Our stress and aging hormones decrease, while healthy hormones increase. Simply smiling at another person can change your whole day, as well as theirs.
“Count your blessings” is an old phrase about an incredibly powerful method of changing your emotional state. In this day and age, it’s easy to become focused on negative things that are going on in the world. Taking the time to actually enumerate good things that are going on in your life can instantly change how you feel about your life and present circumstance that can help keep you from falling into the doldrums.
What of the most powerful ways to almost instantly change your emotional state is to simply say “I Love You” to the people around you. You don’t have to say it out loud, either. You can say it in your mind, and if you feel it with your heart, that other person will detect the love that you are sending them in their subconscious mind. There is no limit to as far as you can send this love. Distance is not an issue. I believe that, since we are all connected energetically, if you silently say “I Love You” to someone that is on the other side of the planet, they will instantly receive it. This is my favorite way to shift my mental state into a higher level fast, and it works anywhere. Try it!
Much of my expertise focuses on helping people to plan for after retirement. Retirement is a dramatic ‘life course transition’ that can impact one’s health. In addition to the ideas you mentioned earlier, are there things that one should do to optimize mental wellness after retirement? Please share a story or an example for each.
I think that it is our very nature to be creating. After retirement, when we no longer have a regular job, we are not creating. I believe that one of the biggest reasons why people fail to thrive after retirement is precisely that, they are no longer creating. It’s very important to find some sort of creative outlet after retirement. No matter what it is. It doesn’t have to be anything big or earthshaking. From woodworking to crochet, stamp collecting to hiking, there is no limit to where your creative skills may take you, it just takes some thought and effort.
How about teens and pre teens. Are there any specific new ideas you would suggest for teens and pre teens to optimize their mental wellness?
One of my favorite stories comes from the mother of a young boy. She told me that she bought The Emotion Code book as well is the book on audio. She started reading and listening and her son was interested, so he started reading the book as well. He started practicing the method with his friends, which his mother thought was cute.
About two weeks later a woman called her on the phone. She identified herself as the mother of one of her son’s friends and she said, “I need to talk to you. My son has a severe phobia of water. It’s been very disruptive to his life, and to our life as a family, but no one has ever been able to help him with this. We’ve taken him to many different people and places, but nothing has ever helped him. Right now, I am at the community pool. My son is out playing in the water with the other boys, for the first time in his life. I don’t think I can make you understand how incredible this is. Your son did this. Your son helped my son, somehow. What in the world is he doing!? How is this possible?”
This is an example of how simple The Emotion Code is, yet how life-changing the results can be.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?
The book that has had the biggest impact on my life is undoubtedly The Book of Mormon (not the Broadway play, the actual book). One of my favorite stories from the book is one in which a young man is commanded by God to build a boat big enough to cross an ocean. He was shown in detail how the boat is to be built, but he has no tools. Rather than asking God to provide them with tools, he asks where he should go to find iron ore so that he can make the tools on his own. I’ve always liked this story for couple of reasons. One is that it reminds me that we can draw upon that Higher Power for help, and I’ve learned for myself that help is always available to us for the asking. Everything that I like about this story is that it’s important for us to use our own brains and our own initiative to get things done. With God’s help and our own efforts, anything is possible.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
It’s love that is going to change this world. Hate has had its day, and we’ve been dealing with its sad effects for long enough. If I could start a movement, it would be a movement that would teach people the tremendous and earth changing power of love.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
I have learned for myself that the old saying, “Ask and you shall receive” is absolutely true. During the years that I was in practice I proved this to myself. There were times when people would come in to see me with problems that I didn’t know how to approach, and in answer to prayer I would occasionally receive incredible downloads of understanding that enabled me to help those people. I think that most of us go through our lives without ever asking that Higher Power for help, and to me that is a very sad thing!
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Website: www.discoverhealing.com
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Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
