Parvati Magazine interviewed Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz, MD, PhD, about her most recent book “Heal Your Mind, Heal Your Life”, co-authored with Louise Hay.
PMAG: Please tell us about your book.
MLS: The book is about the five basic emotions: fear, anger, sadness, love and joy; and about cognitive areas: attention, memory and learning as well as intuition. It is about all that has to do with the mind, and how the body’s chemistry influences the mind. In essence, a mood isn’t just affected by say, trauma (such as PTSD), what is going on in our life now, but also biochemically in our bodies. Through a number of technologies such as tensor imaging and functional MRI, we are also trying to look at the networks underlying changes in the brain in certain disorders of mood.
PMAG: One often sees charts of the major chakras, the corresponding organ systems, with the common diseases associated with dysfunction of each chakra. In your experience as a medical doctor and medical intuitive, do these bear out?
MLS: I prefer to use the word emotional centre rather than chakra, as the word “emotion” means “to create movement”. Emotions are a signal of what needs to change. If you don’t feel or recognize your emotions, they go down into your body because emotions have dominant connections to the right hemisphere [of the brain], which has dominant connections to the body. That’s just neuroanatomy.
There is basis in the scientific literature too. Through my research, I kept coming across papers on thyroid and certain emotional patterns, and others about anemia, rheumatoid arthritis, and the different organs of the body. Generally speaking, there are trends. It makes sense —the emotional centre is memorialized in the area that was injured.
Emotional centres are therefore based on science. There is an association between certain emotional, psychological patterns and certain diseases. I don’t say an emotional pattern causes an illness; it’s an association. Many illnesses are due to a combination of genetics, environment, toxins, etc. There are also emotional toxins: “stress”, which is too global as a term. We want to name that stress—what is it, what specific sphere is it in, what emotions come up? Emotions are keyed into areas of the body through connections to the autonomic nervous system.
PMAG: There may be a tendency at times to interpret these chakra charts quite simplistically, as a one-to-one correspondence.
MLS: To say that chronic pelvic pain is associated with your history of sexual abuse and incest is only one aspect. That is in fact a disempowering association; because if that is the only reason for your pelvic pain, then you’re screwed! When you understand that it is multifactorial, then you can do something to change. You can do something about your current environment—your diet, exercise, work, spirituality—all those things neutralize the impact of one’s past. But if you have a one-to-one correspondence, then you blame the people in your past. You also blame yourself. There’s no health to be acquired in blaming. This blame can make healing from medicines, supplements, etc. harder to acquire. Those people gave you an event in your life, which you can then triumph over.
I have met many people who have one illness or another, and this is their way of dying. Dying is not a failure. To call a natural event a failure is to blame—victimization. It’s not accurate. If you believe in a higher power, then you understand that you don’t create your reality solitarily. You co-create it with a higher power. You get a vote and they get a vote.
Louise Hay created “You Can Heal Your Life”, which has some profoundly accurate observations. She simply sits with people and notices certain emotional patterns with their illnesses; these are associations, not causality. Her work has created a genre for us to fill in the details with the skills we have. I try to help by telling people about their anatomy within the body and within the brain, and help them to utilize this system to become the best they can be.
Mona Lisa Schulz (Dr. Mona Lisa) is a medical intuitive. Dr. Schulz received an MD and a PhD (Behavioral Neuroscience) from Boston University’s School of Medicine in 1993. In addition to her extensive background in health and brain research, Dr. Schulz has been a practicing medical intuitive since 1987. Dr. Schulz teaches us how to become aware of how our symptoms of illness are part of our intuition network, letting us know when something in our lives is out of balance.