You Are What You Feel

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When Wordsworth compared the Romantic imagination to a "Orphean lyre" played by the wind, he employed an image that sparked a century of political, intellectual, and social revolt.

Why did the image of the lyre resonate so strongly with the people three hundred years ago? Can we find clear evidence in our present study on emotions and the body that what was once a poetic metaphor is now a physiological reality?

By comparing the mind to a lyre played by the wind, Wordsworth made a dramatic break from Descartes, whose statement "I think, therefore I am" utterly disregarded the body's significance in the psychological and intellectual scheme of things. This Mind vs Body duality tormented the Western Imagination until the Romantics passionately asserted the significance of breath, inspiration, and emotion in language and poetry. "Poetry is the spontaneous outpouring of strong emotions," stated Wordsworth. And in claiming a place for emotions, Wordsworth made an equally audacious claim for the alienated, disenchanted, and disgruntled of his social universe; the exiles who populate his poetry world serve as reminders of what we have lost: connection with kin, the land, and God. And by reclaiming them, he not only restored the significance of emotions, sound, and movement to the "body" of poetry, but he also advocated for a more egalitarian and humane "body politic" in which everyone had a place in the social network of connections.

Due to the research conducted by Dr. Candace Pert (Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Body Mind, 1997), we can now witness how Wordsworth's metaphor manifests in our actual and genuine bodies. Emotions and thoughts are not confined to the brain; in fact, the body functions as a large neural network of reactions to emotions and thoughts. Consider the body to be a vast limbic Web in which signals are exchanged and received in a never-ending chain of interactions.

The primary sources of this transmission are emotions, which produce specific neuropeptides that bind to specific receptive cells (receptors) throughout the body. According to Mona Lisa Schulz M.D., Ph.D. in The New Feminine Brain (2005), the emotional circuitry of the brain is connected to every organ in the body. This means that our emotions cause definite and distinct alterations in the body's cells. Chronic irritability can induce chemical imbalances that result in depression, which in turn raises the body's susceptibility to illness and suffering. And disease or suffering can also alter the dynamics of the cells, resulting in a more profound and acute depression. Physical ailments may originate from the emotional dynamics of the body.

Current study in cell biology indicates that each cell is capable of altering its structure and program in response to its external environment. Our perceptions and sensations of the world are influenced by the waves of sentiments and emotions that travel through our bodies, as if the wind were playing a lyre.

Such a fluid and permeable relationship between mind and body suggests that the material nature of our body (and the world in general) can be called into question. What percentage of our body are solid? How much may our own receptivity influence our worldly experiences? To what extent can we alter the direction of our life by altering our perceptions and emotions? In what measure would survival in this Brave New World be a matter of the most malleable and permeable?

Perhaps an examination of some of the established physiological responses to unpleasant emotions can convince us of the route we must follow with our thoughts and emotions.

Negative emotions such as fear, wrath, and sadness can result in fatigue, apathy, shortness of breath, insomnia, depression, immune system dysfunction, heightened susceptibility to infections, autoimmune disorders, and cancer.

Positive emotions such as love and joy can cause an increase in body temperature, a sense of physical strength, or a sense of empowerment. Enhanced immune system, Change in appetite, Enhanced focus, learning, and memory, and Enhanced sense of well-being.

Anger, sadness, fear, and hatred all release neuropeptides that inhibit the body's production of natural opiates such as endorphins and serotonin. These natural opiates enhance sensations of happiness. Clearly, the choice is ours: not only to think favorably, but also to pick acts that evoke favorable cellular reactions. Our bodies are as fluid as Wordsworth's lyre, and it is up to us to change the biochemical composition of our cells in the most effective direction by deliberately choosing our emotional responses to events.

If we are what we eat and what we do, then we are much more our thoughts and emotions.