Dr. Bradley Nelson On How to Break Down Our Heart Walls

Dr. Bradley Nelson On How to Break Down Our Heart Walls

After the year of a global pandemic, more people are experiencing levels of depression and anxiety than ever before. 

A recent episode of “Open Minds” with Regina Meredith, explores our subconscious response to the past year’s tribulations in a conversation with Dr. Bradley Nelson, author of “The Emotion Code,” and the forthcoming book “The Body Code.” The two discuss Nelson’s work breaking down our “heart walls,” helping us to live with more joy, connection, and vibrational health, while also allowing us to thrive in difficult times. 

Overwriting Negative Tendencies in Our Subconscious

The past year’s collective experience opened new insights into our innate need for connection and belonging. “We’re designed to be together,” Dr. Nelson explains. “We’re not designed to be apart.”

Nelson explains that the unfamiliar landscape we’ve been living in has resulted in our bodies shutting down, especially if there is already a tendency to bury intense and overwhelming emotions. He believes more people are now forming what he refers to as “heart walls,” a protective energy field around the heart, the organ Nelson defines as being “the seat of the soul, the source of love and creativity…the seed of the subconscious.”

Composed of mostly nervous tissue, scientists and holistic practitioners alike have viewed the heart as being another brain. Nelson shares that the majority of the messages between the heart and the brain are sent from the heart. With the amount of continuous stress, worry, or grief over lost loved ones, the heart’s response is one of feeling broken or being in extreme danger. In response, the heart erects a “wall” around it to protect our essential self — the heart wall.  

Nelson explains that while this stress response is appropriate during times of crisis when the heart moves into a bunker, the heart wall pattern can live on after things have returned to “normal.” These protective layers, after a crisis has passed, can make it difficult for us to live in health or to give and receive love and affection—a basic function that is key to living our full potential. 

Nelson’s work to help people break down the heart wall has had significant and positive impacts on suicidally depressed people. He believes that breaking the heart wall down is the most important work that any of us can do and is accessible by simply tuning into our subconscious self and ability to love. 

The Healing Path of Love and Forgiveness

According to Dr. Nelson, the ability to love unconditionally, regardless of money, politics, gender, religion, or different belief systems, is what is going to help save our world. By breaking down the heart wall, we can feel deeper and higher vibrations of love in all its iterations, from romantic love to friendship, to life’s passion, and spiritual connection with higher energy; feelings many have never been able to experience before. 

What does breaking down the heart wall look like? Nelson refers to a cup when he discusses the process. He states that most of us live with a very full cup on a daily basis, one that is filled with experiences and traumas from our recent and distant past. In other words, our emotional cups are very full. 

And in a stressful time, such as a worldwide pandemic and political strife, and our cups begin to overflow. This can lead to what many of us have experienced — an inability to deal with life and an impending, overwhelming feeling. Nelson’s work helps people to learn how to empty their cups to allow new emotional experiences to be processed, or to not be as susceptible to collecting emotional baggage through resilience and love. 

For Nelson, the ability to offer and receive love is the key to breaking down the heart wall. “When you tell someone you love them, really from your heart, even if you’re not saying it out loud, your heart sends that energy to them and their heart picks that up and it understands it on a subconscious level.” 

This includes learning how to forgive, while the learned tendency when we are hurt, especially by someone we love, is to withhold forgiveness. Nelson says he believes this behavior only harms us. He advises us to let go of the hurt and practice forgiveness in order to have true peace in our lives, including forgiving ourselves.

Idea “Allergies,” Financial Energy Flow, and the Heart

Beyond our emotional walls, many of us have built up walls around our belief systems when it comes to financial wellness and prosperity. Nelson shares the story of a woman who used his work to help heal her “idea allergy” around financial success, which muscle testing revealed was related to her fear that if she were to be successful, her marriage would be ruined. By consciously clearing her abundance blockage, she more than doubled her income within a month, a goal she’d been chasing for many years. 

By using what Nelson refers to as the “universal intelligence,” our imbalances can be revealed by simply asking our subconscious mind if there is an underlying reason why that blockage or trapped emotion exists. Identifying the blockage can quickly resolve the imbalance. The subconscious mind is our purest barometer of what is truly happening within us, from nutritional deficiencies, to emotional baggage, to so much more, if we believe what Nelson describes as, “our perfect comprehension.”

The Future of Healing

After a decade of working with many people who Nelson said had “no hope,” he believes that the work of the subconscious represents the future of healing. A former computer programmer, Nelson applied his past background to his new path as a healing practitioner, comparing our subconscious to a massive database that can be accessed through The Body Code and The Emotion Code. 

Whichever approach you choose, the important thing, as Nelson points out, is to “trust your little inner voice, that voice that comes from the light and we’ll gradually ascend to higher and higher planes.” 

For Nelson, that little voice is our birthright because “everyone has the ability to heal—to heal themselves, to heal their family members, and their loved ones.” 

Nelson offers this way of looking at the challenging times we’ve all been living through: “As things seem to get darker, somewhere things are getting lighter…the light and the dark always stay in a state of balance.” He advises us to not worry if we’re “looking too much at the darkness” and invites us to also “look for the light because it’s increasing too.” 



Research Shows Gratitude Practices Lower Inflammation

Researchers have uncovered the potential of a daily gratitude practice to heal the body and mind.

While research in the field of positive psychology has shown the clear benefits of positive attributes such as compassion and empathy, new studies suggest that gratitude may have the biggest effect of all.

Dr. Paul Mills has been studying the effects of gratitude as a professor at the University of California San Diego and as Director of Research at the Chopra Foundation.

“The way I define gratitude is, it’s a way of seeing the world with a sense of heartfulness; a sense of embracing-ness; a sense of appreciation for all that is being experienced. Typically people differentiate gratitude from thankfulness — it’s a response in exchange for something. Gratitude really, at its foundation, it’s more of a dispositional set where we walk around with gratitude for everything that’s going, just really the gift of life.”

Over the last several years, scientific studies into the psychological and physiological benefits of gratitude have grown exponentially.

“I think one of the main reasons that research on gratitude has taken off more than other areas that we typically could call positive psychology, is because the findings, the significance, in all the studies is so high and impactful. So many of the studies that have been looking at gratitude find more and more significant effects related to health and wellbeing.” 

Some of the more recent studies on gratitude have focused on the physiological benefits to the heart.

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