ו׳ אייר ה׳תשפ״ו | April 22, 2026
Is ‘Emotion Code’ a Jewish Way to Heal?
People are recommending Emotion Code as a way to deal with anxiety, pain, and emotional struggle. But before we start borrowing a new language of healing, we need to ask a more basic question: What exactly is this system, and what kind of view of the person does it carry inside it?
By Moshe Kesler
Something new is spreading in Crown Heights. People are recommending Emotion Code as a way to deal with anxiety, pain, and emotional struggle. But before a community starts borrowing a new language of healing, it has to ask a more basic question: What exactly is this system, and what kind of view of the person does it carry inside it?
Emotion Code is a healing system created by Dr. Bradley Nelson, a chiropractor. The main idea is this: strong emotions we never fully process can get “trapped” in the body as balls of energy. These trapped emotions, it says, cause many of our physical and emotional problems — sometimes as much as ninety percent of them.
Here’s how it works. The practitioner uses muscle testing. You hold your arm out, and the practitioner asks yes-or-no questions to your subconscious. If your arm stays strong, the answer is yes. If it goes weak, the answer is no. There is a chart with sixty emotions — anger, fear, grief, resentment, and others. The testing finds exactly which trapped emotion is causing the issue. It could be from your own life, from before you were born, or even passed down from parents or grandparents.
Once they find it, they release it with a magnet. They swipe the magnet a few times down the back and over the head while focusing on letting the emotion go. That’s supposed to clear it. No long talks about the past. Just a few quick swipes.
At first, some parts feel familiar. We all know emotions can affect the body. Stress can tighten your shoulders. Old hurts can sit in your stomach. Chassidus teaches that our middos — our emotional traits — are part of the soul itself. They shape the garments of the soul and matter deeply.
But Emotion Code goes much further. It treats emotions as literal packets of energy stuck in the body. It says the subconscious knows exactly which ones are there and where. It says muscle testing can find them reliably. And it says a magnet can release them.
The claims keep growing. The same method is used on animals. A dog that became aggressive after a trauma, or a horse with sudden lameness — they say these can come from trapped emotions too. Since the animal can’t talk, a person acts as a “proxy.” The practitioner tests the person’s arm to find the animal’s trapped emotions, then swipes the magnet on the person. The book says the animal often improves quickly.
It even claims distance healing works. You don’t need to be in the same room, or even the same city. A name, a photo, or a birthdate is enough. The system says energy has no limits of time or space.
Each step depends on the one before it. Put all of them together, and it becomes a very big stretch — one that asks us to accept quite a lot at once. We cannot say for sure that any single part is false, but the whole system sounds highly implausible to many people.
This is not against therapy. It is not against the idea that emotions affect the body. And it is not against listening to what our bodies are telling us.
Whether all this is actually true or not, the real issue is much deeper.
Emotion Code looks at emotional pain and says the problem is trapped energy stuck in the body. The solution is to find it and release it quickly with a technique — often done by someone else or with a simple tool. The person is mostly passive. Healing happens to you.
Chassidus sees things very differently. It teaches that we have two souls inside us. The G-dly soul is our true self — a literal part of Hashem. The animal soul pulls us toward comfort, fear, and smallness. When we feel stuck emotionally, the root is usually not trapped energy in the body. It is that we have forgotten who we really are and are living too much from the animal soul instead of from the G-dly soul.
The Chassidic way brings real change because it puts the power in the person’s own hands. You are the one who can transform yourself. The mechanism is active and personal. You study ideas about Hashem and reality. You contemplate them through hisbonenus until they descend from your mind into your heart and even into your body, and you feel them. But crucially — you are not generating emotions from below. You are tuning into supernal emotions that already exist above. When you daven or contemplate a certain concept, you are aligning with ahavah or yirah that exists in the higher worlds. You become a conduit. The emotion flows through you, not from you.
You take that understanding and actively apply it to your animal soul. This means you feel the light of Chassidus directly in your body. That real, physical feeling of the divine light retrains the animal soul from within. You are not just releasing old feelings. You are elevating and redirecting them. When that supernal light enters and is felt in the body, the stuck emotions — the fear, the shame, the despair — don’t need to be released. They simply dissolve, the way darkness dissolves in light. The body recognizes this as real because it is real. The neshama knows it’s home.
Emotion Code is subtraction. Chassidus is illumination.
This is the kind of inner work Chassidus calls us to right now in Crown Heights. Yet at the very same time, good, sincere people are trying Emotion Code and recommending it to others. The concern is not that they are bad or foolish. The concern is that a system built on so many assumptions is quietly training minds — and hearts — to see emotional struggles through a lens that, even if it helps in some way, is simply not the one Chassidus has given us.
We already have a deep and complete way of seeing the world and healing ourselves — the one given to us by the Baal Shem Tov, the Alter Rebbe, and all the Rebbes, especially the Rebbe of our generation. That way does not need another map added to it. It needs to be lived with.
The question is not only whether Emotion Code helps some people feel better. The deeper question is whether Chabad should be borrowing a model of healing built on hidden energies, subconscious signals, and external techniques, when Chassidus already gives us a radically different map of the soul. Emotion Code offers release. Chassidus demands transformation. And those are not the same thing.
COMMENTS
Another opinion article bashing a healing method the author never even tried. Its a weekly trend now.
Why does it bother you that people find really nesesary healing with methods that you didn’t grow up with?
Go help your childs toilet training with chassidus.
“Emotion Code offers release. Chassidus demands transformation.”
Go transform yourself with chassidus while your mind and body are stuck on things that are shutting it down.
Please stop the public bashing. Discouraging others from getting actual help is a big load to carry and frankly none of your business.
The difference between working with emotions and toilet training should be obvious.
Toilet training is a physical activity (like eating and exercise). Chassidus is not relevant (except for intent).
Emotions are life itself. Chassidus uplifts a person and touches your soul.
It seems you are not familiar with emotion code.
It’s a free country – you can live unhealthy and follow any therapy you want…
The writer is trying to advise those looking for real answers. Therapy – no matter which – will never satisfy the neshama of Jew. It gives you a temporary good feeling, but if there is no higher purpose – it will ultimately feel empty. But they brainwash you that you just haven’t done enough…
Of course, therapy done according to Torah, can help. But without a neshama, it leaves you self absorbed.
I’m a bit surprised that you wrote a comment before taking a few minutes to look up what Emotion Code actually is. These days, it only takes a quick search to get a bit of context, and it seems like you know nothing about how it works it also looks like the author of the article in the same place as you in terms of knowledge on this topic.
This comment is written so offensively while it attacks an article for being offensive. It’s very hard to respond to such comments.
On a very basic level, the ideas of this comment are completely wrong.
The idea that such articles shouldn’t be written if they contain truth and the idea that you need to try something before criticizing are so absurd that it undermines any other points in it.
Emotion code has helped me and my family in many areas. If you can get my baby to sleep the night through chassidus I would gladly come to you.
Chassidus isnt a healing method
Real physical and emotional pain doesnt go away with learning more chassidus.
Many people i know have been very successful with emotion code to heal past traumas.
Theres also thetahealing, which for some is even more effective and many have seen miracles.
There are many rabbanim that give a haskama to these healing methods.
Emotion code helps physical pains not just emotional ones. Do you not go to a Dr. Because we have chassidus? Have you researched emotion code in depth?
emotion code helps your baby sleep at night??
The article is flawed from the start. “Something new is spreading in Crown Heights.” – ?? I don’t know which Crown Heights youre in but this is certainly not somthing spreading in our circles bh. As per the famous adage “in velche Odessa bist du”.
I give you a bracha to never have to deal with emotional healing and problems, but there are plenty of chassidishe yidden that daven ba’avoda and still use different methods including emotion code.
If living in denial helps you, I hope that it lasts forever for you because plenty of times trauma comes out in the kids.
I was thinking the opposite, that this is not a new phenomenon at all in our circles! The amount of people I know around me that practice this voodoo is staggering, and mind you these are very Chassidshe people, indeed, this what’s most troubling about this, how deeply it has seeped into our communities.
Bh are kids can be raised in a healthy way, and people are dealing with what’s bothering them.
Instead of parents screaming at their kids when they’re frustrated they can deal with their frustration.
The general principle is the same as the crazy gangster religion of Scientology. The placebo effect is real. If a person is losing faith in his own principles and convinces himself that this is better, he may achieve relief through the placebo effect.
One עיקר חסר מן הספר is ” the ways of Chasdidus” . These include seder, moderation on eating and drinking etc, not paying attention to trivialities, and neginah, both happy and meditative. Niggunim can easily fill in the blank times that are open for “nerves”. Krias Shma al haMitah with joy and not bitterness, believing one is forgiven, can help more than fooling around with past traumas. I write from personal experience.
Just want to share that I know someone who’d gone to the ER multiple times with a medical history no doctor could figure out. Emotion Code got him fully better and he’s now totally functional. He actually learned it from a friend with the same experience. Honestly, I don’t know a thing about the science behind it and I don’t really care. it definitely works.
a successful and experienced Tanya/Chassidus based psychologist, therapist or life coach?
As a person who’s been blessed with great emotional processing skills and intellectual capabilities, I’ve found Chassidus uplift me in a way nothing else could including emotionally. And I’ve tried therapy on doctors orders but it was Chassidus that was there for me. Happy to help other women. Reach out at +1 3477702024
For men, many find Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin helpful. A man who went through 8 years of prison and emerged joyful without requiring therapy.
Appreciate this!
All these articles are the same, all bashing emotion code or therapy and saying we should just use chassidus to help us instead. I think we can be chabad, appreciate and use chassidus in our lives but still use other techniques that are offered nowadays (that are halachicaly approved) to help us. Just because were chabad doesnt mean every single thing we do to help ourslves physichally and mentally needs to be through chassidus and NOTHING else. No i dont think we should put full trust in such things, yes we need to recognize its all a keli for Hashems brachos but to never do or use anything to help us besides chassidus is a bit extreme.
If someone is trying to refine their emotions with emotion code, then this article applies. But if there’s a serious issue, especially with a child or where someone is really stuck, it’s worth trying to work with the BODY. Forget about energies for a second, sometimes the person can use a little help just like eating before davening helps a person daven better.
I think this author is trying to encourage integrating chassidus more but always in the wrong context. That’s amazing you believe in chassidus actually changing a person. Write articles and post shiurim on anash.org about that! I haven’t seen your content on this platform. There only thing I see is bashing something neutral which has helped many people in their avodas Hashem, me personally and my children. Emotion code wasn’t always effective for me but it’s important to know how to use it. And obviously should only be used when absolutely necessary, like for trauma.
When the methods that are allowed are used as a tool Hashem has given and not to the exclusion of taking care of our neshama or replacing Hashem ch”v, it can really help. Just like a chiropractor helps with hands or a psychiatrist with medicine. There are other bodywork methods that help with physical issues. All these methods help the body function better which automatically help the emotions. Waiting until the emotions get changed from the inside is like not taking medicine when you have a headache.
The main thing is to take a wholesome approach taking care of both our bodies and our neshama equally which include integrating chassidus, living with bitachon, real farbrengens, having a mashpia and a real friend. Let’s focus on that. Enough of the judgement and shame for the healing that hurt people are trying to do to get better
Today we understand that new healing systems are part of Moshiach zeit. I came to
Lubavitch in the 70’s when I was macrobiotic and vegetarian. One Rebbetzin told me I was crossing myself like a xtian. Another told me my child would be permanently harmed. If I passed up cholent I was into avoda Zara.
One day I opened N’Shei chabad newsletter maybe 20 years ago
To find a frum nutritionist professional dr recommending higher grain ( brown rice) and vegetable diet.
Puh- lease stop having something new coming into a 1940’s Eastern European Russian origins movement be discarded out of hand!!!
Yes I love my own
Grandparents who were from belorus and Poland. Unfortunately in America they assimilated and I had to come back to my roots.
To a diet that worked in Russia and Poland in freezing weather. And I as greeted with American sugar addiction.
This is not Chassidus or Tanya Let’s move forward and be more open – not to avoda Zara but to
Examining new pharmaceuticals, new healing systems and new cures.
Tye Rebbe mhm spoke a sicha about yene machla that new illnesses require new cures. I would like a more astute person about Tanya to explain if the middos described in Tanya and
‘Emotions’ are by definition the same emotional struggles we are discussing today? Or is it necessary today to
Understand mind/body medicine as a unification of the different levels of Nefesh ha chayunis With the guf. About distance healing : the Basl Shem Tov said thought helps machshava moeles. Not just by tzaddikim
New May not be new. I am not ungrateful to the Crown Heights homes that hosted me and judged me for being a vegetarian. And not eating mayonnaise. I was mature enough to
Appreciate the goodness and kindness and Chinuch that formed my hashkafa until today.
Crown Htights and Machon and Bais Chana are my
Mother and father in Yiddishkeit that I cherish. My cradle that has enabled me to
Continue shlichus in SF Bay Area from 1975 until this morning
I don’t know enough about emotional coding and can’t it does or doesn’t work, but when it comes to therapy, the Rebbe didn’t like prolonged approaches. If emotional coding heals a problem quickly, that’s actually a good thing! Your neshama didn’t come down to this world to heal trauma. You came down to serve Hashem, to work on your midos, help other yidden, to better the world. Things like that. If you are unwell mentally, which prevents you from connecting to Hashem (as the Rambam and magid have said) heal your and get on with your life. This usually takes some time, but if there’s a quicker method, aderabah!!
I’ve looked into it, I’ve tried it. It’s all theoretical. It works only bc of the following.
Label an emotion. The practitioner has a very lengthy list of names for emotions.
Validation. By labeling your emotion the therapist is validating your feeling, and you also know you’re validated because you agree with the label that was given to your emotion.
Put it into action. Do something or something is physically done for you as a ritual to make it go away.
This last part is a concept exists in Chassidus, it’s called Ufaratzfa, yesh koneh olamo beshoah achas, lechatchila ariber etc.
It was the same when people were getting hypnotized. Every hypnotist will tell you the person has to be open to suggestion, they had to want to be hypnotized.
All it takes is to jump out and break the cycle. You can do it on your own, but it’s hard. Having someone help you it’s always easier whether it’s, a farbrengin, a sicha or maimer, hypnosis, therapy, or someone waving magnets over your head (midline excuse me 😉).
I hope everybody finds happiness and healing,
Lechayim
As far as I know, the Rebbe disparaged hypnosis to an extreme degree. It involves abandonment of one’s G-d Given free will.
https://asktherav.com/16687-is-the-emotion-code-allowed-according-to-torah/
This is much more informative and helpful than anything in the article or comments
Emotion code has helped me with a physical ailment that the highest of medical specialists were not able to cure.
Chassidus can’t do that.
U wouldn’t tell me just learn chassidus if I need antibiotics.
Emotion code is a gift to us from hashem just as antibiotics, epidural or any other life changing phenomenon we are experiencing in this moshiach era.
I use Emotion code and then I contemplate how great Hashem is and how he created such a complex, wonderful body along with all its energies.
Emotion code- like anything else- can be used to serve Hashem or chas vshalom the opposite
Emotion code has helped me with a PHYSICAL ailment that the highest of medical specialists were NOT able to cure as well as 4 others that i know,,
Noticeably, several commenters have dismissed the author as “ignorant” and not knowing “enough.” I personally know the author, and he is well versed in therapy, healing, and chassidus.
One commenter writes “Chassidus isn’t a healing method” and another asks “do you not go to a doctor because we have chassidus?” The article never says otherwise. It argues that Emotion Code’s map of the soul conflicts with chassidus, not that chassidus replaces medicine.
Another commenter declares Emotion Code “a gift to us from Hashem just as antibiotics.” Antibiotics have a proven, mechanistic, peer-reviewed basis. The AskTheRav ruling notes that Bradley Nelson “attributes receiving his ideas through prayer to his deity” and explicitly grounds the method in Chinese and Indian energy traditions.
Several commenters cite “many rabbanim that give a haskama.” Henceforth, the relevant ruling: AskTheRav concludes there is “definitely room for concern” and that it “should be avoided.”
I’m still looking forward to seeing a comment that doesn’t mix the idea of whether it’s kosher or not, or which Hasidic tradition it follows, with the question of whether it actually works. The author of the article made the same chalent
It seems as tho the sources that asktherav.com used have not been researched properly.
Because they say that Bradley Nelson used prayer to his deity and also that it has sources in Chinese and Indian energy traditions.
Bradley Nelson is a X-tian. Which on some level believe in one G-d. The same G-d that is referred to on the dollar bill.
Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin was also a Xtian also said that his finding of antibiotics was the hand of G-d and it was because of his G-d that it was found.
Will u not use antibiotics because the one who discovered it gave the credit to his deity?
Emotion code also has a proven basis.
It is based off of the science that every molecule when broken down to its core has vibration in it.
In the past majority of medical nurses were trained to muscle test.
There’s a lot of real science in emotion code.
It’s just not that many years old and can not be monetized on a large scale level for a proper university to fund a scientific study.
But because an official study hasn’t been done yet it does not mean that it has no roots in logic or science.