Understanding the Messages of Your Body: How to Interpret Physical and Emotional Signals to Achieve Optimal Health

Fears, anxieties, traumas, and physical and emotional shocks imprint on the body and remain dormant in its vast memory store until they are roused by an event or encounter. They may manifest in a different form or place—a fearful incident may transform itself into a stomachache or a headache, or even a chronic disease. Pain creates its own path. In particular, psychological and emotional stresses affect the functioning of the internal organs. In Understanding the Messages of Your Body, Dr. Jean-Pierre Barral explains the relationships that exist between internal organs and emotions, to allow us to free ourselves from the effects of present and past tensions and traumas.

The book opens with an explanation of the body-mind relationship and goes on to show how physical-emotional therapy works based on examples from Dr. Barral’s clinical practice. The second part of the book offers detailed analyses of various “types” of human personality and the physical-emotional complexes and related organ dysfunctions that accompany them. The author offers advice and encouragement to improve physical, psychological, and emotional health, and recommends physical exercises, psychotherapeutic approaches, and dietary plans that can be used by both professional therapists and the average reader.

TIME magazine named Jean-Pierre Barral, D.O. (UK) one of the top 100 practitioners in alternative medicine to watch out for in the new millennium in the 1999 feature, Innovators: TIME 100 The Next Wave, Alternative Medicine. Dr. Barral was trained at the European School of Osteopathy in Maidstone, England. A well-known clinician and teacher in his native France and throughout Europe, he has authored many osteopathic textbooks. His works in English include Visceral Manipulation (with Pierrre Mercier, D.O.), Visceral Manipulation II, The Thorax, Urogenital Manipulation, Manual Thermal Evaluation, and most recently, Trauma: An Osteopathic Approach.

Dr. Barral is presently Academic Director of the International College of Osteopathy in Saint Etienne, France, and the Chairman of the Department of Visceral Manipulation on the Faculty of Medicine at Paris du Nord. He practices osteopathy in Grenoble, France.