Healing the Body to Heal the Emotions: A Unified View of Physical and Emotional Patterns

Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Henckell, Karsten

Keywords

Physical Health, Mental Health, Emotional Behavior, Photography

Area of Concentration

General Studies

Abstract

Modern society has been moving towards a true crisis of personal health, environmental destruction, and disconnection from the self actualized expression of the individual. I believe that the degradation of our physical bodies via an increasingly sedentary lifestyle is a core element of many of the struggles of industrial society. This Thesis explores my personal theories of how patterns of emotional behavior are synonymous with patterns of chronic tension in the body. It briefly explores my experiences working on myself for two and half years, explores related literature, and finally discusses some experimental research that I performed to support my theories with quantifiable evidence. I photographed New College Students to assess their body alignment visually and then correlated the scores with two measures of psychological wellbeing. The experiment showed high levels of correlation between the alignment of the body and the individual's emotional wellbeing. When the results from the research are examined side by side with my personal case study, it is apparent that we can improve the emotional wellbeing of individuals by actively working with their physical bodies as well. The implications of this and directions of future research are then discussed. This work is a blend of philosophy and quantifiable data.

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