My Story
I grew up in Great Falls, Montana, in a wonderful family, with parents who loved me. But the moment that truly shaped the way I see the world came when I was just seven years old.
I had come down with the measles, and I was very, very sick. My parents made up a bed for me on the couch upstairs, near their bedroom, so they could keep watch over me through the night. Half-asleep, I overheard them talking about the plan: the next morning I was to be taken to the hospital and placed in an oxygen tent.
Then something happened that I have never forgotten.
After the house had gone quiet, my parents came back into the room. My mother turned to my father and said, "Honey, will you kneel down by the couch with me and pray for our boy, that he'll be able to get well?" And they did. They knelt beside me, and my father began to pray — the first time, as far as I can remember, that I had ever heard him pray aloud. I could hear how worried he was, and how much he loved me.
As he prayed, something moved through my body. It began at the top of my head and went whoosh — all the way down — and in that instant I was completely healed.
To go from desperately ill one moment to perfectly well the next is such an impossible, remarkable thing that you never forget it, no matter how long you live. I waited until my father had finished — it didn't take long — and then I said, "I'm better. I'm better. I feel completely fine." They smiled and told me to go back to sleep; tomorrow I'd still be going to the hospital. But the next morning proved it. I was well.
What I learned that night has stayed with me ever since: there is a higher power we can draw upon. I internalized that deeply, and I have thought about it my whole life.
A second healing, and a calling
Fast-forward about seven years. As a teenager I developed kidney disease. It began as a pain in my back that grew worse and worse, until it reached a crescendo — pains that would drop me to the ground or take my breath away, like being run through with a sword. My frightened parents took me to the hospital, where the doctors ran their tests and delivered hard news: my kidneys were failing, there was nothing they could do, and in those days there were no transplants. I would either recover or I wouldn't.
So my parents took me to see a pair of alternative doctors who worked out on the edge of town — out of an old trailer house in the middle of a muddy field. You could not have found a greater contrast with the expensive clinic that had given up on me. But these doctors seemed to know exactly what my body needed. Almost immediately I began to feel better. Within a few weeks the pain was dramatically reduced, and within a month I felt completely well.
My parents took me back to the clinic, where the tests were run again — twice, as I recall. The doctors called it a "spontaneous remission." But I knew the truth in my heart: those humble doctors in the trailer house had truly helped me.
That was the moment I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to become a natural healer — to help people the way I had been helped.
A sacred calling
I went on to chiropractic school, became a holistic physician, and went into practice. From the very beginning it felt like a sacred calling. I've come to believe that anytime you help someone's body work better, help them feel better, help them manifest more life, you are doing a sacred thing — because the body truly is a temple.
Because of what I'd learned as a boy, I developed a quiet habit. Before I treated anyone, I would pause for just a moment and silently ask for help from above. I did this with every patient for seventeen years in my practice, and for a couple more years in a distance practice after that. No one ever knew — it was completely private, completely personal.
And I will tell you something I know for a fact: that higher power is aware of what we are doing all the time. There were occasions when someone came to me and I had no idea how to help them — and after that silent prayer, the understanding of what was wrong and what to do would sometimes pour into me like an avalanche. That was rare; usually guidance comes more quietly, as a thought, an impression, a gentle idea. But in the last ten years of my practice, most of the people I saw had been told there was no help for them anywhere — and I was able to help nearly all of them, because I was tapping into the wisdom of the subconscious mind and asking for help.
I've come to believe that the highest duty of a healer is to act as a go-between for that higher power. When we try to heal without asking for that help, we shortchange ourselves and the people we serve.
The common denominator
In all my years in practice I was obsessed with one thing: getting to the underlying cause of people's suffering. I had no interest in band-aids. As a holistic doctor I couldn't prescribe medication to mask symptoms, and I couldn't perform surgery — which left me with the wonderful problem of having to discover what was truly wrong.
The key, I found, is the subconscious mind. It is vastly more intelligent than we can comprehend — the part of you that creates millions of new red blood cells every minute, that turns a sandwich into living tissue. I found I could simply ask the subconscious questions, and it was very willing to answer.
And the single biggest common denominator, in every patient — young or old, whatever their condition, physical or emotional — was what I call emotional baggage.
To understand it, you have to understand what we really are. Your hand looks solid, but magnify it far enough and you reach a single atom — and inside that atom is almost entirely empty space, with infinitesimal energies racing around at the speed of light. We live under the illusion that these bodies are solid. They are really more like a force field. We are, at our core, beings of pure energy.
Every emotion has its own vibrational frequency. When you feel an intense emotion — grief, anger, resentment, fear — your whole body takes on that vibration. And sometimes, when the emotion is especially powerful, a bit of that energy becomes trapped in the body. That is a trapped emotion. That is what our emotional baggage actually is.
One of the first people I ever treated this way taught me how powerful that baggage can be. A woman came to me believing she was having a heart attack — crushing chest pain, trouble breathing, the left side of her face and her whole left arm numb, worsening for about twenty-four hours. It looked like a heart attack to me; I told my staff to be ready to call an ambulance. But when I tested her, I found a trapped emotion — a ball of energy lodged right in her heart. It was grief, and it had become trapped three years earlier.
When I told her, she burst into tears. "I can't believe it's still affecting me," she said. "I thought I'd dealt with all that." Three years before, she had discovered her husband was having an affair; the marriage had blown apart, she had grieved deeply, gone through therapy, and even remarried. As far as she was concerned, that was behind her. But as far as her body was concerned, it might as well have happened yesterday — and the energy was still there.
I released that trapped emotion, which takes only seconds. Within about three seconds the feeling returned to her arm and her face; the chest pain and the difficulty breathing were gone. Ten minutes later she walked out completely fine, and she has never had a recurrence. I sat in my office afterward with my head spinning. How is it possible that an emotion could create symptoms like that?
What I have found over the years is that ninety percent or more of the physical pain people carry is rooted in emotional baggage. Some of those experiences we remember; many we don't. The conscious mind forgets, but the subconscious never does — it remembers everything. We carry baggage from childhood, even from the womb. And remarkably, some of it isn't even from our own lifetime — it can be inherited at conception, passed down through many generations.
How something invisible affects the body
How can an invisible emotion from the past affect the physical body? To me it's actually simple. We have this physical body, and within it a spirit — which I believe looks exactly like you, in every detail. A trapped emotion is a ball of energy, and it exerts a distorting force on that field. Distort the energy field of the body long enough, and you begin to distort the body itself, interfering with the chemistry of the tissues and the flow of energy through them. When we identify and release that trapped emotion, the distorting force — sometimes present for many years — is suddenly gone.
Let me tell you about a man who came to me with terrible back pain, a nine out of ten. I found a trapped emotion of anger from twenty years before and released it. His pain dropped instantly from a nine to a zero. He kept bending and walking around in disbelief.
But the real surprise came two days later. He returned and said, "Dr. Nelson, my back is still fine — but I have to tell you something." For as long as he could remember, he explained, he'd been what you'd call a "rageaholic" — always yelling at his wife and kids, always on edge, fighting road rage, in and out of anger management that never quite helped. "Since you released that trapped emotion," he said, "I feel like a different person. I'm not on edge anymore. I just feel… peaceful."
Think about what had happened. Twenty years earlier he had developed a trapped ball of anger that lodged in his low back and began distorting the energy there. Two decades later, that produced real physical pain — but it had also been quietly doing something else: a part of his body had literally been vibrating at the frequency of anger, day and night, for twenty years. No wonder anger came so easily to him. When we removed it, both his body and his heart changed. That is not unusual at all.
Coming home to who you really are
I believe we are meant to be pure, clean vessels of energy. But all through our lives — in the womb, in childhood, through junior high and high school, through divorces and heartbreaks — we pick up these trapped emotions, and each one is like a small area of darkness within us. As we release them, we return, bit by bit, to being that pure vessel. It can feel like stepping out of an old, ill-fitting suit into a state much closer to who you were always meant to be — who God, who the universe, intended you to be.
As I worked with patients day after day, I simplified what I was doing until it became a method anyone could learn. In 2007 I published it as a book: The Emotion Code.
I've come to know for myself that this is a friendly universe, and that the higher power behind it has nothing but love for us and wants us to succeed. When we ask for help, that help becomes available — perhaps not always in the obvious moment, but looking back you can connect the dots and see how it was there all along. So when we teach the Emotion Code, we simply suggest that — if you believe in a higher power — you take a moment first and ask for help. That's all. It's that simple. And we rely entirely on the subconscious mind of the person, that vast intelligence that knows exactly why we may be suffering.
The heart
The heart is a fascinating organ. Back in the 1960s, when doctors began performing heart transplants, recipients started reporting strange things — sudden changes in their taste in music, food, or sports; memories of places they had never been; even changes in their handwriting. Again and again, when they were connected with the donor's family, they learned those were the donor's tastes, the donor's memories, the donor's handwriting.
Ancient cultures believed the heart was the core of our being — the seat of the soul, the source of love and creativity. For a long time the West dismissed that as poetry. But the instruments we've developed over the last twenty years are showing us that the ancients were right. The heart is the most powerful organ in the body. It generates a magnetic field that extends several feet in every direction, and when one person feels love for another, their heartbeat can actually be measured in the other person's brainwaves, and their heart rhythms synchronize. There is a quiet communication going on between all of us, all the time.
But there's a problem. When your heart feels like it's breaking — and most of us have felt that very real, physical sensation — the subconscious mind does something to protect you: it puts up a wall around the heart. A Heart-Wall. In the moment, it's appropriate. But the trouble is that long after the bully is gone, the divorce is final, or the hard chapter has closed, the heart is still inside that bunker. It becomes harder to connect heart-to-heart with others, harder to fall in love and stay in love, harder even to feel the love that the higher power has for you.
When that wall comes down, beautiful things happen. People fall in love who never thought they would, even late in life. Creative ideas begin to flow — because the best ideas you'll ever have come not from the brain in your head, but from the brain in your heart. The Heart-Wall has been called the most important discovery in the history of energy medicine. I take no credit for it; it was shown to me. But I believe it matters enormously, because for this world to truly transform, we have to stop living from the brain in our heads and begin living from our hearts. That is where love lives.
Where happiness really comes from
Happiness doesn't come from material things. It comes from our capacity to feel love and to serve. When you perform a selfless act of service, you feel wonderful — you rise. When you cultivate gratitude, your whole being lifts. And the same is true of forgiveness. If there are people in your life you haven't forgiven — even if that person is yourself — you won't find real peace until you do. One of the unexpected gifts of releasing emotional baggage is that it often makes forgiveness possible at last, because it takes the electrical charge out of the old wound and lets a person finally make peace.
I believe we are all children of that higher power — truly brothers and sisters — and that we are all connected, so that what happens to one of us touches the rest. As we remove trapped emotions and open hearts across the world, I believe that when enough hearts are opened, a real transformation will begin.
St. Augustine said that faith is to believe what we do not see, and that the reward of faith is to see what we believe. Communicating with that higher power is a simple thing — as simple as asking for help. When I'm trying to make a decision, I've learned to study it out, come to a conclusion, and then ask: if I feel peace, it's the right choice; if I feel confusion or anxiety, it's not. The answers usually come not as thunder but as a whisper — a subtle thought, an impression, an idea — and I believe it is with the heart that we receive them. Which is exactly why a Heart-Wall makes that connection so much harder, and why taking it down so often lets people feel that connection, and that love, for the first time.
The lessons we came here to learn
I believe we chose to come into this world — that before we arrived we chose our experiences, our families, even where we would live, all based on what we most needed to learn. This life is sacred. We are not here by accident; we are here for powerful, divine reasons — to learn for ourselves the difference between light and darkness, and to choose. And I believe that to truly rise, we have to set down the baggage we've been dragging behind us, because it is diminishing our lives and dimming the light of who we really are.
An inheritance released
Let me share something deeply personal. One day I asked my daughter Natalie to work on me from about a thousand miles away. The first thing she found was an inherited trapped emotion of hopelessness — one I had received from my father at conception. As she traced it, she found he had received it from his mother, who had received it from hers, back twenty-two generations in the maternal line. When Natalie reached its point of origin, she could feel the presence of that long-ago grandmother standing beside her, and how desperately the woman wanted this energy released.
Natalie released it, and she felt it ripple back through all those generations. A thousand miles away at my desk, I had a profound experience. All my life I had quietly struggled with hopelessness without ever being able to name it. If you had asked me, while I was writing The Emotion Code, to describe in one word how the project felt, I would have said — without hesitation — "hopeless. But I'm continuing." Every single day, before I could write, I'd had to watch motivational talks just to push through that feeling. When Natalie released it from our whole line, it was as though a factory in my mind that had been playing the music of hopelessness, every waking moment of my life, suddenly fell silent. The silence was deafening. It changed my life — and hers, because I had passed it on to her.
We all have ancestors, and our ancestors all went through hard things. Science is now showing that even animals pass traumatic memories down through many generations, though no one yet understands how. Your subconscious knows exactly what baggage you carry that was never your fault — that was simply handed to you. And letting go of it can be a turning point. I have seen people who were suicidally depressed — who had to decide each day whether to keep going — get well within days of having their emotional baggage, and especially their Heart-Walls, removed.
Just the messenger
People often tell me the Emotion Code "seems too simple to be possible." I usually answer, "Well, I can make it more difficult for you, if you'd like." The truth is that it is simple. It's the ego that wants to make things complex — to prove how clever we are. But my ego isn't in this. I'm just the messenger. Everything I've been through in my life prepared me to carry this message into the world. It isn't about me; it's about everyone else. So whatever anyone thinks or says about me or about the method, good or bad, doesn't trouble me. My job is simply to bring this to the world — and then the world can do with it what it will.
Strangers passing through
I believe the world is struggling, and that people everywhere are searching — most of them without even knowing it. What they're really looking for, I think, is a connection to their true home.
When we come into this world, a veil of forgetfulness is placed over us, so that we don't remember where we were before. But when I was eighteen, sitting quietly in meditation one day, that veil somehow parted for part of me — my heart, I believe — and I was filled with the most overwhelming homesickness I could ever describe. Take the most homesick you have ever felt and magnify it a million times, and it might come close. It was homesickness for a home where I had once lived with my heavenly parents. It lasted only about three seconds before the window closed again, and it left me reeling with awe.
What I learned is that we really are strangers here, just passing through. I believe that if that veil of forgetfulness were not placed over us, we could not bear this world for five minutes — because we came from a place of such beauty, peace, and impossibly high vibration that we can scarcely imagine it here. We're a little like fish in an aquarium, for whom the tank is all there is — until, now and then, one leaps out of the water and glimpses that there is a whole other world.
So much of what we chase in this life is really an attempt to reconnect with that Source — to remember where we came from. That is the deepest reason I do this work. As we lay down our burdens and open our hearts, we become more capable of love, more able to see one another as we truly are — and we find our way, a little at a time, back home.