Our emotions influence our physical health. Science has proven that emotions, like chronic stress, unresolved trauma, anxiety, and depression, alter our inflammation levels, immune function, and ability to heal. However, spiritual and metaphysical teachers take this fact further, claiming that emotions are energetic events that can become trapped in the body. When that happens, “stuck emotions” become health issues.

Many natural or alternative health practitioners, such as massage and myofascial release therapists, have discovered that body work often leads to the release of trapped emotional energy. They have seen this happen when patients unexpectedly cry or have memories of past traumatic events during sessions. Afterward, the patients feel better emotionally and physically.

Science Proves that Emotions Impact Health

Science has proven that chronic emotions affect physical health, healing, and disease risk. However, it doesn’t support the claim that a specific emotion directly causes specific illnesses. For example, most doctors and scientists don’t believe that resentment creates arthritis or grief creates lung disease. These remain metaphysical beliefs rather than an established scientific finding.

That said, there is some science behind the idea that emotions impact health. Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) studies how psychological processes affect the nervous and immune systems. Researchers have found that persistent stress and emotions such as anger, loneliness, anxiety, and depression can increase chronic inflammation, which is a common factor in many diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Studies prove that the body heals more slowly when under emotional stress. For instance, depression and anxiety cause slower recovery after surgery, longer hospital stays, poorer outcomes in chronic illness, and delayed tissue repair or wound healing.

A Spiritual Perspective on Healing

When seen through the eyes of metaphysicians and spiritual teachers, emotions are energy. When fully experienced, acknowledged, and released, they flow through the human body, leaving no residual effect. But if they are suppressed, denied, resisted, or repeatedly relived, emotions become stagnant energy that lodges within the body, or in specific places in the body that correlate with the emotion itself. From this perspective:

• anger may settle into the liver or muscles
• grief can get stuck in the lungs or chest
• fear might make a home in the kidneys or nervous system
• shame can live in the digestive track or immune system

In other words, your body remembers what your mind tries to forget. And then the past comes back to haunt you physically.

If you consciously or subconsciously relive betrayal, fear, guilt, anger, or unworthiness, you repeatedly activate the same energetic blueprint. Thus, healing is about changing the emotional energy that continually recreates the same physical state in your body. You can’t expect healing until you change the old emotional energy from your past.

The solution—or path to healing—necessitates acknowledging, addressing, and releasing emotions.

Emotional Reasons for Hip Issues

I’ve had recurrent right hip pain and tightness since 2024, when I broke the opposite ankle. I used a scooter for six weeks to remain mobile without putting weight on the healing ankle, and that resulted in an overuse injury to the right hip. Lots of physical therapists and body workers have tried to heal this issue. To date, no one has done so, although it is loads better.

I’ve paid for medical massage, chiropractic treatment, cupping and needling, as well as acupuncture. Most recently, I decided to try fascial release or fascia blasting. During my second session, the practitioner and I began talking about holding emotional energy in the body and what Louise Hay would say about hip issues.

Louise Hay, author of Heal Your Body, may be the most well-known for her work related to the relationship between emotions and physical ailments. She associated each ailment with an emotional cause and suggested healing it by reversing the thought that initially caused the emotion. Using affirmations provides a way to release the emotional energy and its impact on the body.

I acknowledged that, more than likely, my hip was storing old emotional energy. I always research the emotional and spiritual reasons for physical ailments, but I realized I needed to revisit this topic.

• According to Hay, the hips are associated with issues related to fear of moving forward in life, making major decisions, change, feeling stuck, or holding onto the past. Similarly,
• Caroline Myss, a medical intuitive and author of Anatomy of the Spirit, associates the hips with support, stability, and moving through life’s transitions. From her perspective, hip pain may reflect feeling unsupported or, like Hay, fearful about major life changes.
• Inna Segal, a healer and pioneer in the field of energy medicine and human consciousness, as well as the author of The Secret Language of Your Body, says hip pain can be related to fear of the future, suppressed anger, or feeling trapped by circumstances.

If I am honest, my hip could be impacted by most of the associated emotions mentioned.

Triggered Trauma and a Broken Ankle

Frustrated with my recurrent hip pain, I decided to take a closer look at what emotional energy I might be holding there.

I broke my ankle on December 28, 2023, almost two years after my husband’s stroke, which he suffered in April 2022. The accident happened a day after he had a catheter ablation to stop his arrhythmia. It’s now August 2026, and the hip still bothers me to some extent. I feel it with internal hip rotation and during and after I go horseback riding.

(Before you tell me I need a hip replacement, let me share: I do not feel this pain all the time. It doesn’t impact walking or most daily activities. Therefore, I have concluded it is not a bone issue. It is a muscle, tendon, and fascia problem.)

That’s the timeline and the circumstances behind my pain. But what emotional energy is causing the problem? I suspect my husband’s stroke brought up emotional issues related to my father’s death; he died from a massive heart attack when I was seven.

I’m not sure why I didn’t see the correlation between my husband and father before…or maybe I did but stuffed down that knowing along with the emotions. However, I’m certain my husband’s stroke reactivated the trauma I experienced when my father died. And the ongoing issues with his heart kept the emotions present.

The stroke definitely brought up intense fear at the time about my husband’s outcome and what life would look like going forward. Luckily, the stroke resulted in no deficits; my husband was the same after as before the event. But I became hypervigilant, always worried he would have another stroke or, even worse, a heart attack.

It’s possibly, even likely, that my husband’s ablation reactivated those old emotions again. I have never associated my broken ankle with my husband’s health, but ankles, like most joints, are about fear of moving forward. I can attest to a fear of my husband dying from another heart event.

Emotions Trapped in My Hip

I looked specifically at the emotions related to hips, and four were repeated often by healers. And I explored how they related to me and my experiences—current and past.

1. Fear: The soaz muscle contracts to protect the core during perceived danger—specifically when we have a flight-or-flight response. While I don’t have overt anxiety now, I believe I did experience fear often after my husband’s stroke. Additionally, I felt vulnerable—as if something like that could happen again, unexpectedly. I had no way to protect myself from that experience or losing my husband except by putting up emotional walls between myself and him. Since those walls still exist, I must still have fear.
2. Grief: Sadness can cause the body to tighten the hip flexors. I hadn’t acknowledged the deep grief generated by my husband’s stroke and what I thought would be the loss of him and our life together—and my life as I knew it. Now I also carry sadness that we are not quite as close as we were before his stroke. Maybe I also feel grief related to my father, although I have done a lot of personal work around his death.
3. Anger: Unexpressed anger can result in physical tension across the pelvis and inner legs. After his hospital stay, I felt angry that my husband refused to take better care of himself and to do things that could prevent another stroke. Of course, this increased my fear and vulnerability. There are still things he could do to be healthier and keep his heart strong; I suppose I have a bit of anger about that. And the doctor asked him what he would do with his second lease on life; he has done nothing different. I suppose that makes me a bit angry, too.
4. Control: Hips manage stability and movement, controlling the body to a great extent. Before and after the stroke, I wanted to control my husband’s health and our life. But I couldn’t control him or anything else. Afterward, I also wanted to prevent the pain I would feel if he had another heart event. Ultimately, I can’t control anything except my mindset and actions, but that doesn’t mean I am not harboring a desire to control in my hips.

I’m sure my hip issue is emotional as well as physical. I’m doing many of the physical things that can help release the trapped emotional energy stored in my hip. So, what else can I do to release it?

My Plan to Free Trapped Emotional Energy

Here’s my emotional energy healing plan. You can adopt it as your own for whatever physical issue you believe might be caused by trapped emotional energy.

1. Acknowledge and Feel Emotions

I plan to continue acknowledging my emotions and feeling them, if possible. I will become more conscious of them by journaling about them and noticing when I stuff the emotions in one way or another, including with food.

2. Get Bodywork

I also intended to continue getting bodywork to help move the energy. I think the fascial work is helping enormously, and chiropractic and massage always support the healing.

3. Move

I will continue lifting weights, doing cardio, and generally moving my body. When you move, you foster the release of emotions. In fact, all body movement moves energy in the body.

I will continue horseback riding. Interestingly, this activity, which I began when I was seven and have continued into adulthood, has brought the hip issue into sharper focus. I stopped riding for five years, and returning to it has been painful. Each time I ride, though, I become aware of where my hip still hurts and can have a body worker address that. Plus, the pain lessens with each ride.

It’s possible that doing something I love is releasing energy—and the horses are healing, too. Plus, using the hip seems to be strengthening and stretching the hip in beneficial ways.

4. Communicate

Communicating verbally is another way to release stuck energy. I plan to have a conversation with my husband. None of my physical symptoms or ailments are his “fault,” but talking with him about what I had learned will facilitate some emotional release. (I often cry when revealing personal information.) Then, he can support me from a place of greater understanding.

Additional Energy Healing Tools

Many other tools and approaches can help release emotion. For example, you can try forgiveness practices—forgive yourself or others. I could probably forgive my husband and father on a deeper level.

Additionally, meditation and breathwork move the healing process—and stuck energy—along. I have opportunities to attend sound healing and breathwork sessions where I live, and I might take advantage of these.(As a rebirther, I know the power of the breathe to release energy in the body.)

I will also seek out an energy healer to see if they can move the emotions out of my body. Usually, energy healing involves working with the chakra system, an ancient concept describing seven main energy centers in the body. Each chakra corresponds to physical, mental, and psychic emotions. I’ll focus on the sacral chakra, which is housed in the lower abdomen or pelvis and governs emotions, creativity, pleasure, and intimacy.

Visualizing the pain leaving your body can prove helpful as well. Or consistently imagine yourself healed and without pain. I plan to do this and to incorporate such visualizations into daily self-hypnosis sessions. (You could also hire a hypnotist.)

In line with Hay’s approach, you can write affirmations to counteract any negative thoughts that recreate the emotions held in your body. As your emotional state shifts, so will your energetic state. I already sometimes repeat affirmations related to moving through life with ease.

And you can journal about your pain and the emotions or event associated with it. A great way to do this is to ask powerful questions and then answer them. Create questions related to your health challenge after researching the emotions held in that area of the body.

You Can Release Trapped Energy

Ultimately, you can release the emotional energy stored in your body. First, become conscious of the emotional correlation to your physical ailment. Then, do what you can to move the stuck emotional energy out of your body.

Focus on how your body feels afterward. It might take a few days or weeks, but you will start to see improvement in your condition.

Now that you know how emotions settle in the body and cause physical issues, be more aware of how you feel…and allow yourself to feel fully. That’s how you prevent such problems in the future.

Do you believe you have trapped emotional energy in your body that causes physical challenges? Tell me in a comment below. Please share this post with those who may benefit from reading it.

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