Anxiety isn’t just in your head. It’s a full body response.
Grief recovery work helps release trapped emotional patterns at a cellular level that may be at the core of anxiety.
🔹 1. Emotions Are Physical, Not Just Mental
In her groundbreaking work and book Molecules of Emotion, Dr. Candace Pert showed that emotions live in the body, not just the brain.
Neuropeptides (chemical messengers) carry emotional information throughout the body and bind to receptors in organs, muscles, and tissues.
Her central premise that emotions are biochemical events stored and transmitted through neuropeptides provides a scientific foundation for why we must feel to heal.
▶️ Reflection: Somatic approaches (like breathwork, movement, HeartMath) help move you out of your head and into body.
🔹 2. Unfelt Emotions Become Stored in the Body
When emotions are suppressed or ignored (think: “Be strong,” “Keep busy”), those neuropeptides can linger in receptor sites leading to stuck emotional energy that can manifest as anxiety, illness, or fatigue.
Engaging in clear action steps or other ways to process emotions frees the body’s emotional chemistry, allowing healing to begin.
▶️ Exploration: Clear action steps include processing undelivered communications in at least 6 different categories: hopes, dreams, and expectations as well as things you would have wanted to be better, more, or different.
🔹 3. The Body is a Feedback System
The body continually communicates through sensation. Anxiety may be the body’s way of signaling emotional overload, unresolved loss, or resistance to change.
Your body is full of wisdom. Listen to anxiety as intelligent feedback rather than fighting it.
▶️ Awareness: Notice sensations (tight chest, shallow breath) and use that awareness as a portal to emotional clarity and choice.
🔹 4. Rewiring Emotional Pathways is Possible
Dr. Pert believed we are biologically wired for change. New thoughts and experiences can shift neuropeptide patterns, creating new emotional baselines.
New thought can occur when you have fully processed unresolved grief.
▶️ Rewire: Create new biochemical “loops” of safety, calm, and confidence. Neurons that wire together, fire together. When you untangle and unwind a grief pattern of emotional storage you change the neuropeptide expression in your body.
🔹 5. Spirituality and Biology Are Not Separate
Dr. Pert bridged science and spirituality by acknowledging that the biochemical network is also our “soul network”. Emotions connect us to our deepest truth and wisdom.
Moving through emotions isn’t weakness, it’s sacred biology in motion.
▶️ Invitation: Anxiety may be the soul knocking, asking you to evolve. Listen to your soul…
For many years I worked as a spiritual healer and counselor. I moved all of my work to facilitating processes that help people heal through conscious action.
Most of my clients experience soul retrieval (feeling like a part of them has returned) when they move through the process of grief recovery.
Do you feel like a part of you is missing? I invite you to a conversation to learn more about the Grief Recovery Method, (the only evidence-based program for grief recovery). Please find a time to chat here.
