A Teacher
John Diamond
Emotions and stimuli register as measurable shifts in ‘life energy’
The transmission
John Diamond (1934–2021) was an Australian-born psychiatrist and author who developed Behavioral Kinesiology (BK), a discipline he built by linking Goodheart’s muscle testing to emotional and psychological states.
A Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and a Diplomate of the International College of Applied Kinesiology, Diamond proposed that the strength of a tested muscle rises or falls in response to thoughts, words, images, music, and emotions — that the body registers what is life-enhancing or life-depleting through changes in what he called “life energy.” His widely read Your Body Doesn’t Lie (1979, originally titled BK: Behavioral Kinesiology) popularized this idea for a general audience, and Life Energy (1985) mapped specific emotions onto the body’s acupuncture meridians.
Diamond is the crucial hinge figure who carried muscle testing out of the chiropractic clinic and into the psychology of emotion. By asserting that a held thought or felt emotion produces an immediate, testable change in the body, he supplied the conceptual link that made “energy psychology” thinkable: feeling as a measurable force with a physical signature.
His emotion-to-meridian mapping directly seeded Roger Callahan’s Thought Field Therapy and, through it, Gary Craig’s EFT — the tapping methods that became the field’s mass-market form.
What they gave
Behavioral Kinesiology: Extended muscle testing from physical diagnosis to emotional and psychological response, the founding move of energy psychology.
- Emotion–meridian linkage: In Life Energy (1985) paired specific emotions with acupuncture meridians, the template later used by tapping therapies.
- “Your body doesn’t lie”: Popularized the thesis that the body gives an honest, immediate readout of life-enhancing versus life-depleting input.
- The thymus and life energy: Centered the thymus and a vital “life energy” as the Atlas’s organizing principle, bridging Western physiology and meridian theory.
In their words
It is love that banishes all the negative emotions. It is love that invokes the spirit and activates the life energy. It is love that balances our brains and makes us creative. And it is love for our true self, for the self that we can be, that drives us on to want to be better and want to be healthier and to want to be more evolved. Love is health and life.
The most basic and primitive emotion is love in its various manifestations. This has been neglected in medicine, neglected in psychiatry, and neglected in our society. We don’t read in the newspapers about love. We don’t read in the medical textbooks about love. We don’t read in the psychiatric textbooks above love, except to study it in a pathological way. We must realize that love can activate our life energy and promote healing.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: George Goodheart’s Applied Kinesiology; psychosomatic and preventive medicine.
- Influenced: Roger Callahan (Thought Field Therapy); Gary Craig (EFT); the wider energy-psychology movement.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Your Body Doesn't Lie (Behavioral Kinesiology)1979
- Life Energy1985