Dr. Bradley Nelson is the best-selling author of The Emotion Code, The Body Code. His new book, The Heart Code, will be published in December 2025. He is the creator and CEO of Discover Healing, which shares natural healing through self-study courses, and has professionally certified over 15,000 practitioners in 108 countries around the world. As a retired chiropractor, Dr. Nelson has a deep understanding of the human body. He has combined his medical knowledge with intuition, biomagnetic energy, and muscle testing to help people take their mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health into their own hands. Read on for our interview with Dr. Bradley Nelson!

Tell us about your background and how you got started in natural healing.

When I look back on my life, it seems to me that all the experiences I have had combined together to enable me to bring the message of The Emotion Code to the world.

When I was 13 years old, I was diagnosed with kidney disease. At the hospital, the doctors told my parents and me that there was no treatment for what I had. They told me to be careful, not to run or play too hard, because it could be dangerous.

I remember thinking that they didn’t really need to tell me that, because just walking would sometimes create pain in my back that would make me feel like I had been stabbed with a knife. Since this disease was potentially fatal, and since there was no medical treatment for it, my parents decided to try an alternative. They took me to see a couple of alternative doctors who practiced and lived in a trailer house situated in the middle of a field on the outskirts of town.

Within a couple of weeks after starting their treatments, I felt much better. The pain that I had been experiencing was much less frequent and much less severe.

After about a month, I had just about forgotten that I was ever sick. My parents took me back to the clinic, where they ran the tests on me again. The tests were all negative, and as I recall, that was the first time I ever heard the phrase “spontaneous remission.” I knew in my heart that what my “alternative doctors” had done had worked, and I decided to become a doctor when I grew up. Not a mainstream medical doctor, but an ‘alternative’ doctor like the doctors that had healed me, if I had to practice in a trailer house in the middle of a muddy field on the edge of town, that was okay with me.

But as the years went on, my dream of being a healer started to fade a bit. I was introduced to computer programming in college, and I loved it. I loved business, and decided that I wouldn’t go into the healing arts after all. Instead, I was going to become a businessman.

When I was about 6 months away from starting the MBA program at Brigham Young University, my wife Jean and I went home to Montana for Christmas. As we were sitting with my mother and father in their living room, my father suddenly asked me, “Are you sure you don’t want to go to chiropractic school? You’ve always wanted to do that, and it seems like a really great career.” I replied, “No, I’ve decided to get my MBA.” He said, “Well, why don’t you think about it one more time?” I told him that I would.

Later that evening, Jean and I drew up a pro and con list. On one side was chiropractic, and on the other side was the MBA and the business world. The list was a little longer on the chiropractic side, but I still wasn’t convinced. Honestly, I was not absolutely sure what I wanted to do. I had thought that my mind was made up, but now I felt like I was being torn between two exciting futures.

When Jean and I got married, we made an agreement that we would never make any momentous decisions without praying about them to see if it was right. This was definitely one of those momentous decisions. So, that night found me on my knees. I essentially said, “Father in Heaven, if it makes any difference to you, please help me to know what direction to go. I will go either way.”

I was awakened in the middle of the night with my mind full of thoughts about healing, and how wonderful it is to be able to serve other people in a natural way. I remember thinking, “Well, yes, that’s true, but this other direction is good, too….”

It was a long night that night. I woke up three times, and each time my mind was full of warm feelings about going into the healing arts. Somehow, I still wasn’t sure.

The next night found me on my knees once again, asking God for guidance. And this was a night that I will never forget, even if I live to be 1 million years old. This night, like the night before, I was awakened three times. And each time I was awakened, my mind was filled with the same thoughts as the night before. But somehow these feelings became progressively more powerful each time I was awakened.

The third time that I woke up, my mind was overflowing with thoughts of service to mankind and humanity. It’s impossible for me to describe what this experience was really like, but these feelings were absolutely overwhelming. As I was feeling and thinking those thoughts about service through healing and helping the world and all of humanity, a voice suddenly spoke to me of the divine nature of healing and of the importance of what I was embarking upon.

I had my answer, and I have never regretted my decision to heed that call.

I’ve reflected on this experience many times since then. I believe that because the human body is actually a sacred “temple” for our spirit to inhabit, that any time we are working to help that body function better, we are doing a sacred thing. If we are sewing up an injury, if we are helping someone who is disabled, if we are healing someone who is in need of healing, we are doing sacred work.

What led you to start practicing energy healing in your chiropractic clinic?

Well, the reason I began to explore energy medicine was simply that I was bound and determined to find out what was really causing my patient’s symptoms, and I was open to anything that might help. I practiced as a holistic chiropractic physician for 17 years. Having learned in my younger years that it’s possible to get help from above, I made a habit during those years to ask a silent prayer for help from God for each person that I worked on. During those years, I learned bit by bit, patient by patient, case by case, about the true underlying causes of our illnesses. During the last 10 years that I was in practice, I was working primarily with people who had been told there was no cure for them. These were people who had been given up on by the Western medical establishment, but were suffering greatly. There were times during those years when, in response to my silent prayer for help, information would flood into my mind about exactly what a person needed and what approach I should take. Sometimes this was a completely different way of looking at things than what I had ever imagined before. It was during these years that I gained an understanding of how our imbalances, and in particular emotional baggage, are real things that affect all of us in many dramatic ways.

I never actually discovered it, but I never learned it from anyone either. It was a strange thing, but somehow the knowledge of how to work on a patient at a distance was just there within me the first time I needed it. Occasionally, a patient of mine would call me when they were on vacation or travelling, and they would need my help. I just knew how to connect with them, and it always worked out that I was able to help them through muscle testing, no matter how far away they were. It was a wonderful thing for me to be able to help them, wherever they were. I felt that this understanding needed to be included in The Emotion Code when it was published in 2007, and we now have many thousands of people around the world who are helping their loved ones, friends, and clients who are far away, and getting wonderful results.

When did you decide you wanted to share this information with the world?

During the years I was in practice, I developed a very powerful feeling that people could do a lot to help themselves. I had a deep, driving urge to empower people. I began teaching seminars to do just that in 1998 and taught as many seminars to as many people as I could around the US and Canada for many years. But I was wearing myself out. I was working in my practice 60 hours a week and then flying off on weekends to teach seminars. My family was suffering because of it.

In 2002, I felt that I needed to turn my practice over to someone else and pursue other means of sharing this work. It had become clear to me that these healing methods that I had developed were not just for me and my patients, and the handful of seminar attendees who came to hear me speak. They were for the whole world.

I left my practice in 2004, and in June of 2007, I published The Emotion Code: How to Release Your Trapped Emotions for Abundant Health, Love and Happiness. The success of The Emotion Code has been astonishing to me. It taught me how very powerful the written word is. There are people on every continent and in nearly every country on earth who are using the Emotion Code to get rid of their own emotional baggage, and the best part is that they are helping their loved ones to do the same.

I’ve been all over the world teaching Emotion Code Seminars, from Australia to Germany, Toronto to Auckland, Seattle to New York City, and Dublin to Amsterdam. It’s really been a wonderful adventure. While I would love to take the credit for this amazing information, I will never do that. I believe that I could not have done this without help from above. My calling is to bring the Emotion Code to the world and to give back the healing birthright that belongs to every man, woman, and child on this planet.

Do you have a miraculous healing story you’d like to share?

I get emails from people, all the time, whose lives are changing, who are falling in love as they get rid of the walls around their hearts, who are getting rid of their anxiousness, their debilitating mental health struggles, their miserable discomfort. People are falling in love who never thought they would, learning that there is a purpose to their lives, that life is special and sacred, and that they can be, have, and do more with their lives. People are regaining their health naturally, reconnecting with their Higher Power, and living better, happier, and more fulfilled lives.

We have, at the time of this writing, over 15,000 Emotion Code Practitioners in 108 countries around the world. We have expanded to offer more comprehensive energy work through the Body Code and the Belief Code methods as well. This work continues to grow and change the lives of people around the world. There are many personal stories I could share with you, but instead, I will let you hear the stories that one of these practitioners shared with us.

“Some time ago, I released a Heart-Wall and a few more trapped emotions by proxy from a five-year-old boy who had been giving a hard time to his parents and siblings with his stubborn and aggressive behavior. Part of those emotions had occurred when his twin died in his mother’s womb while he survived. After a few Emotion Code sessions, his behavioral problems vanished. Within days, his family was happy again, and he was a very happy boy. A few months later, I talked to his father again. He recounted that in a peaceful and quiet father-son moment, his five-year-old son had said to him, “I love Jesus. He gave me a new heart. It´s great to have a new heart.” This little boy had not known anything consciously about the Emotion Code sessions or his Heart-Wall or anything we had done for him by proxy!”

I chose this story at random, and then saw that it was shared with us by Susanne Hufnagel, MD, a German medical doctor who felt called to translate The Emotion Code into German after a seminar I taught in Dublin, Ireland, in 2008, and who now teaches Emotion Code Seminars in Germany!

What do you see happening in the future of medicine?

To eliminate any kind of problem that has to do with your health or well-being, the underlying causes of the problem must be addressed. Many powerful drugs can temporarily relieve symptoms. But when the drug wears off, the symptoms often return, because the underlying causes have not been dealt with.

It’s vital to understand that symptoms are no more than the body attempting to communicate that it has imbalances within that need to be addressed. It is my experience that the fastest, most efficient, and indeed, often the only way of discovering these imbalances is by communicating with the subconscious mind, where all the answers reside. This is precisely what The Emotion Code, Body Code, and Belief Code do so well.

We are now on the threshold of a breathtaking new era, where the best of Western medicine and the best of alternative medicine may be combined to the benefit of all mankind!

This interview was originally posted on Huffington Post, and has been updated here to reflect current 2025 information.