Judith Orloff
Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself From Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life
An Interview with Judith Orloff, MD on her new book, Emotional Freedom
by Barbara Stahura
Judith Orloff, MD, is a psychiatrist and intuition expert who synthesizes the pearls of traditional medicine with cutting-edge knowledge of intuition, energy, and spirituality to create a new blend of healing wisdom. She passionately believes that the future of medicine depends upon integrating all these elements to achieve emotional freedom and total wellness. Her new book is Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself From Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life (Harmony Books, 2009).
Her earlier bestsellers are Positive Energy, Intuitive Healing, and Second Sight. As a teacher and author, she combines her personal story as someone who comes from a long line of intuitive healers, including her grandmother, mother, and aunts, with professional knowledge gleaned from her medical practice and popular workshops.
Dr. Orloff is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and has been featured on The Today Show, CNN, and in Oprah Magazine and USA Today. For more inspiration and information about her workshops and books visit www.drjudithorloff.com. For Judith’s free video class on emotional freedom and intuition check out www.youtube.com/judithorloffmd.
Barbara: Why did you write Emotional Freedom?
Judith Orloff M.D. I’m passionate about teaching people to transform negative emotions into positive ones. If you get mired in the muck of negativity, you can’t lead a liberated, happy life. As a physician, I see that most people don’t have the everyday tools to transform frustration, depression, anxiety, worry, and fear into positive emotions. This book is a how-to guide that offers you these tools.
I work in a mainstream medical system that doesn’t generally deal with emotions in an expanded way. As a UCLA psychiatric resident I learned to prescribe medications and use traditional psychotherapy. In this book, I also bring spirituality, subtle energy, and intuition into this equation and offer strategies that go beyond mainstream medicine.
Another powerful reason I wrote this book is that I watched my mother, a physician, literally loose her life to stress and fear. I loved her more than anything, but I didn’t want to do the same thing to myself, as I have similar tendencies.
Barbara: What is emotional freedom, and why is it so important for individuals and our world today?
Judith Orloff MD: Emotional freedom is your ability to love by cultivating positive emotions and being able to compassionately witness and transform negative ones, whether they’re yours or another’s. This skill liberates you from fear and lets you navigate adversity without attacking someone, losing your cool, or being derailed by negativity. With emotional freedom you can choose to react constructively rather than relinquishing command of the situation when your buttons get pushed (This book is unrelated to the tapping technique of the same name).
