Changing Our Inner Programing

We often find ourselves is a rut of the ‘same old, same old’, the same litany of thoughts, the same negative feelings and the same limiting outlook.  Here are some simple solutions to help us immediately move into a better state of being.

Breathe!

When we get stressed out, our breathing becomes rapid and shallow.  Often people will hold their breath when they tense up.  Taking a few deep and slow breaths can really help us ‘pull out’.  Tibetan nasal breathing can really de-stress us.  Use your right thumb to block your right nostril and just take a few minutes of deep slow breathing. 

Posture

Over time, we take all our issues to the body and lock it in the body.  Pay attention to your posture.  Often just changing position; straightening your spine, or moving and releasing your hips will make a huge change in your thoughts and feelings.  There is actually a trauma defusion technique that uses posture as a key-in.  For example, if you were injured with your body in a certain posture, re-visiting that same posture will key up the trauma.

Bach Flower Essences

A fundamental part of my supply needs when I first started out in private practice in 1989, was a complete set of Bach Essences.  Just as nutrition is for the physical body, Flower Essences are energy remedies to balance and support the emotional body.

Dr. Edward Bach was an M.D. in the 1930’s and 40’s, specializing in bacteriology and endocrinology.  He wanted to, as he put it, “treat the whole person”.  As he listened to his patient’s stories he began to notice re-occurring themes emerging.  He developed his ‘Bach Essences’ in response to these themes.

 

Flower Essences have been an essential part of my services from the very beginning.  What is interesting to me is that after almost 20 years in practice I have had to replace and refill five of the 38 remedies.  This has given me a chance to reflect on what life issues have been the most commonly evident in the last 20 years.

Centuary:  In the negative (or stressed) state, one’s connection with one’s own will is poor.  This is the ‘doormat’ personality, who will tend be overly influenced by stronger personalities or to loose themselves in service to others to the degree of doing themselves harm.

Pine:  In the negative state, pine will tend to cling to feelings of quilt.  This can be conscious or unconscious as well.  This is the person who feels the need to apologize constantly. An example would be growing up knowing you were an ‘unwanted pregnancy’.

Red Chestnut:  In the negative state, these people suffer for those they love.  They easily and excessively tune into other people and situations and are great transmitters as well.  This essence relates to a powerful energy link, or locked energy between two people. 

  

Vervain:  These people experience anticipatory stress; trying to be on call or on time to the point where they are squandering their energies.  Imagine a tennis player running all over the court until the point of exhaustion.  He is knocking himself out, but he’s not centered enough to connect with the ball.

Vine:  These people are natural leaders.  In the extreme negative state, a person is greedy for power, having no respect for the individuality of others.  Bossy vine types wonder why people are so upset with them, saying “it was for their own good”.

 

Walnut relates to new beginnings and unaffected ness.  This is the final step remedy.  All your belongings are in the moving van, and yet there is still a reluctance to let go.  This is that last attachment.  It can be to a place, person, attitude or job.

Star of Bethlehem relates to the qualities of awakening and reorientation.  This is one of the most important remedies in Rescue Remedy.  This is for shocks or trauma whether it be physical emotional or mental.  This remedy restores our self-healing mechanisms.

Willow relates to the qualities of personal responsibility and constructive thought.  This is used when people tend to blame others, hold on to grudges or get lost in self pity.  Disappointments and resentment can be powerfully projected into the outside world.

White Chestnut relates to the qualities of tranquility and discernment. Long after the argument is over, your mind refuses to shut down and relax.  Unwanted thoughts of ‘should have saids’ go around and around like clothes in a dryer. This remedy relieves the constant mental chatter can lead to headaches and unrelenting tension.  Often used when

experiencing insomnia.

Flower essences may also describe the nature of people around us (past or present) that ‘stress us out’.  Often a grown person will say “that sounds just like my mother” or “this isn’t me, it sounds like my husband”.

It is wonderful to find remedies that so gently and sweetly bring a person back to balance.

Which Bach Essences might be helpful for you?  Why?

The most useful approach in regard to self-care is awareness.  Pay attention to the body’s subtle cues. Our bodies are always talking to us.  There is amazing healing potential when we begin to listen.

Have a great summer_
Nelda

In the Valley of the Details

The other day I was too weary to cry.

I don’t know about you, but I seem to travel from mountain to mountain. While I am standing on the peak, I can see with total clarity; where I am going, where I’ve been. I’m standing in the thrall of the vista. All of a sudden, everything makes sense. My decisions are clear and I chose my direction with purpose and commitment.

Once that decision is made, I start to travel down into the valley. At some point in the decent, I lose all sense ‘rightness’. The clarity is gone. I endure, I trudge, I put one foot in front of the other. Every fear kicks in. My mind is caught in a litany of negative messages.

Self pity, frustration, and discouragement reign. I am lost in the Valley of the Details.

I had been renovating in filth for 6 weeks. I had been painting 50 kilometres of baseboard, door and trim for four whole days and I realized on the fifth morning that the old brown paint was shadowing through. I absolutely had to do a fourth coat.

Many dark thoughts traveled through my mind that day. This was my low point. I was tired of being dirty. I hurt everywhere. I was definitely past my point of patience with crud and dry wall dust. I was totally sick and tired of painting trim. My life was reduced to nothing but paint, tea and sleep.

My neighbours, God bless them, noticing that I was feeling ‘lower than a snakes belly in a wagon rut’, offered to share their pot of chilli with me. This was their ultimate comfort food. Probably if I had been offered something I liked, I might have been distracted enough to move into a better state quickly. However, distraction was not forthcoming.

Truly, I loathe chilli. Chilli is what you eat when you are surrounded by cattle, and ‘nothing’. Chilli is what you eat when you are desperate and going to die otherwise. Chilli is what you eat when there is no more hope left to be had. Add a whack of soft bread and I am definitely on the slippery slope of depression.

Coming to the end of ourselves; this is where, for me, faith kicks in. No distractions, no rescue. This is where we have to just ‘gut it out’.

This whole day was an uninterrupted therapy session. I did persevere. Later that evening over tea and banana loaf, I was able to giggle with my chums and make fun of myself.

The trim looks great and has transformed the space. Friends are dropping by to oooh and ahhh. My landlords have kicked into gear and are speeding the process. The 720 square feet of bamboo flooring is being laid next week.

I am out of the valley and can see the completion of the project. Thanks to the team of ‘Angels’ who have helped and encouraged in so many ways.

A Visit to the Rabbit Hole

I was just doing the final tasks after doing a whole whack of the dreaded bookkeeping, and horror of horrors, my computer slowed, stalled and then went black! I had not gotten to the point of doing the final back up.

Now I tend to be a pretty level-headed individual. I’m known for good sense, and the ability to transcend most of our earthly cares. However, this easy going nature does not apply to numbers, the revenue department, and technology malfunction. In fact, this is pretty much my Achilles heel.

The hardware was professionally wiped and software reloaded. Equipment –check! I went back to the bookkeeping and yikes! The beginning balances were not jiving with the statements. By the time I had tracked back to 2007 and it was still unresolved, I was beside myself. Using the adage that ‘it’s not what we know, but who we know’; I called in my chum who has her degree in Combinatorics and Optimization, (a mathy/computer programming thing that for example, plots the flow of traffic through city lights using algorithms). So apparently the software was skipping a gear.

Now here’s the thing. While my chum tended to the computer, and was happily ironing out my files back to 2005, I was sucking back on the chocolate martini she had made for me so that I could survive the stress of the surgery. Oh the cares; the woes! Yes readers, I went right from being a mild-mannered holistic health educator, to a whimpering thing in the corner; hence, the’ rabbit hole’.

Deb Bermont is a more ‘holistic’ business consultant based in the US. She coined the term ‘rabbit hole’ to describe the experience of ‘when the rim of our rut becomes our horizon’. We all have times in our life where we find ourselves looking out upon our lives from the rim. Issues already emotionally loaded from the past lay like holes in the road waiting for us to fall.

Ms. Bermont suggests that we first have to recognize that we are in the rabbit hole. Any thoughts that run through our minds while in it are all the lies we tell ourselves. “I’ll never make it”, “I’ll never be any good at this”, “no matter how hard I try I’ll never….” She suggests that we “heard those lies from people we trusted when we were children, who were at that moment speaking from their own personal pit of lies”. Unfortunately, in our innocence, we believed them and then incorporated these messages into our internal programming. In daily life, at work and at home, we so often connect with the fear based stuff in-between, and then act is if this is truth.

During the darkest part of my three month saga of troubles I was wondering about what life might be like in Argentina. It was far far away, and I love the dance. Needless to say, it is not a good idea to make serious decisions from the rabbit hole.

Talk yourself out of the rabbit hole first or get someone to ‘pull you out by the pigtail’ If you wait until you are on the solid ground of sober thinking, creative solutions appear.

Note: I am now back on track, chunking happily through my numbers. Thanks Kat for pulling me out by the ‘pig tail’.

Mental Convoy Stalls

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A friend said something to me this morning that brought the convoy in my brain to a complete and utter halt. She said,

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“Serenity is a natural state of mind.”

Often we think that if we work our way through all our problems, we will finally find ourselves serene. This doesn’t work because there is always a litany of problems lining up. We will never be problem free on this earth.

Granted, the world is a curious and strange place. But what if worry was a learned perception? What if anxieties were subtlety rewarded over time by our families and teachers. Wouldn’t we think worry was normal? Mightn’t we feel kind of empty without it?

Our society seems to be a worry machine. Our worth is measured by the sweat on our brow; we are esteemed by our struggles. We have conversations that go like this; “oh yeah, well my worry is bigger than your worry”.

Worry, fear and anxiety are big business. On the news I am given at least 10 new things to fret about every day. We are out to prove that mental gymnastics will keep the chaos at bay and our world in some kind of order. Advertising probes the place of our insecurities. It’s clear how we don’t measure up and what we don’t have. For example, ‘If I just had the car, I’d have it made’ (read stress-free).

If our default mental outlook is set on anxiety, what then? It would be natural to assume that our mental axe would go on looking for something/anything to grind itself on. When I reflect back over my past five decades, what I notice is that most problems resolved themselves over time. Maybe its divine timing or maybe because people just figured something out, or somebody turned up out of the blue. I will guarantee that the world is not running smoother today because of my heavy emotional investment.

The point is, the world never sits up and flies right just because my mental monkeys hashed it over for a week. My mind may create strategies when it behaves itself, but it life never works just because of the worry I’ve invested into it. To be honest, most times when I finally gave up and said “uncle” the situation remarkably improved.

If we set working toward peace-of-mind as our highest goal, and we were to diligently align our thoughts to that focus, then perhaps life’s challenges would assume a manageable proportion.

Maybe we would find that serenity is a natural state of mind.

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A Life-long Relationship

We tend to ride our bodies hard. A lack of good self-care can result in our bodies being chronically under nourished, over stimulated, over worked and under rested. On top of this our bodies are expected to tolerate stresses self-created by our own personalities. Our own internal dialogues bombard the cells of our bodies constantly with negative, abusive and demoralizing messages on an almost constant basis.

Emotions have a molecular weight. In other words, they are real. It is almost impossible to heal the physical body in the presence of chronic negative emotional chemistry. It creates a constant toxic down load. Such emotions are natural to the human condition.

However, as Martin Luther said “we cannot keep birds from flying overhead, but we can keep them from nesting in our hair”.

There are many ways to work with the program of habitual toxic thinking. There are many therapies that work with changing the feeling/thought/mind connection that have proven their effectiveness over time. Flower essences can help tremendously, as they work within the emotional body directly.

But of course, the first major step is to be aware that you are doing it to yourself and sincerely desire a change. If we are not willing to dig deep and be brutally honest with ourselves, we can find ourselves giving away the small addictions and withholding the emotional addictions; the ‘pay offs’ we are not willing to give up. We dig the juice!

As we harbour and feed such feelings as resentment, bitterness, disappointment, unforgiveness, and self-righteous indignation, we essentially invest so heavily in our past; we rob ourselves of our own future. And we think our bodies don’t know

Imagine this if you will; we are at a horse race. After the race is run, we interview the jockey. “Great ride, a little slow at the start…really picked up on the home stretch…really pushed hard and we came through.” and so on. Then we interview the horse. That’s when we get the real scoop on how aware, attuned, appreciative and compassionate the rider is.

Ride respectfully. Your body is yours for life.