Have you ever blushed? Have you ever experienced “butterflies” in your stomach? Have you ever felt your heart racing out of excitement or fear?

These common occurrences are undeniably physical phenomena. Yet their underlying causes are not physical but emotional. Might there be other physical phenomena, even illnesses, whose true, underlying causes also reside in the world of our emotions?

Many of us would, understandably, reject such a possibility. Our mindset is a Western one. What is observable by the senses and empirically verifiable is legitimate. What isn’t isn’t. Moreover, the mind and the body are two separate entities. Emotions may be responsible for emotional illnesses. My back pain, however, is caused by a structural abnormality, my irritable bowel by inflammation, my chronic fatigue by….well, nobody really knows but certainly not by my inner world of feelings.