Monthly Archives: June 2019

Your Body, Trauma and Confidence

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“Research is also now starting to make clear the long term impact of early childhood trauma on people’s relationship to their own bodies (Price, 2007; Van der Kolk, 2014). Body awareness, body attitude and body satisfaction may all be negatively affected.”
(Benjamin R, Haliburn J, King S, (Ed), Humanising Mental Health Care in Australia, 2019, p253)

How is your relationship with your body? Body Mindfulness work requires you to feel into your body and accept what is there. Some areas are easier to accept than others. Others remain blind spots, numb areas that you have great difficulty accepting and allowing. As you access and delve into your body further, you will begin to learn the landscape that you have created within you. This is very significant because your body is dictating a lot of your health issues, psychological problems and limitations in life.

Those numb dissociated parts of your body are almost certainly due to a past trauma that you couldn’t assimilate at the time. You had to block off the pain and emotion to survive. That immediately cuts off part of your real self. And if the trauma was really severe and/or prolonged, you begin to live a shadow of your real self, have poorer health and limited abilities.

Past trauma, even if you don’t recall it whatsoever, will be affecting you through your body. If the trauma is deep, you will highly likely be feeling deep shame, disgust or even hatred towards your body, (very true with sexual trauma) which greatly lowers your self esteem. In the past you would have needed lots of motivation to override this lack of confidence and self esteem.

Your poor intellect revving you up to override the deep body based trauma. This as you can probably imagine, is short lived. It can help in moments where you require a boost but is difficult to work with long term if it is not eventually addressed at the body level and released and cleared permanently.

Thus a regular body mindfulness practice is essential as part of your long term mental health, physical health and personal development.

Your Second Brain

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“Your gut has capabilities that surpass all your other organs and even rival your brain. It has its own nervous system, known in scientific literature as the enteric nervous system, or ENS, and often referred to in the media as the ‘second brain’. This second brain is made up of 50-100 million nerve cells, as many as are contained in your spinal cord.”
(Emeran Mayer, MD, The Mind-Gut Connection, 2016)

Doctors have long kept the brain (the nervous system) and the gut (digestive system) completely separate from the maintenance of our overall health. Let alone even consider any connection the two systems might also have.

Medical doctors still mostly see the human body as mechanistic, largely unaffected by our thinking, our emotions, other systems and organs of the body and by us directly (our awareness). This separation of us, our brain and the body is helping to cause far more health problems than is necessary.

Your gut is like a second brain and it is strongly connected to the brain. The brain also remembers every gut feeling you have and uses this information when making decisions, not just about food but about people, work, play and life.

So it makes sense to spend some body mindfulness time regularly connecting to that gut and listening to what it has to say. It will respond in sensations, but rest assured there are also emotions there. (Your gut stores 95% of the serotonin in your body which is used to regulate your mood, anxiety, sleep, appetite, temperature, eating behaviour, sexual behaviour, movements and gastrointestinal motility). Your whole belly area is a powerful and very important brain.

Take time to connect with it in your mindfulness practice. After your brain, (which we spend a lot of awareness on,) the belly brain should always be your next port of call.

Healthy Work – Finding your Sustainable Level

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“According to the World Health Organization, stress is considered a worldwide health epidemic. The American Institute of Stress links stress to the six leading causes of death (heart disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide).”
(Joe Burton, Creating Mindful Leaders, 2018)

Working in a high performance, high stress major company, the stress will eventually takes its toll. After 20 years and in their mid 40s managers and staff start to burn out and if unchecked, in the worse case scenario, leads to one of those leading causes of death.

If you survive and don’t die then there are other issues that arise, frequent sickness, anxiety, depression, loss of direction, moodiness, lack of fulfillment, relationship breakdowns, unemployment, financial issues, addictions, family issues, ageing faster, and general poor health. Luckily many companies are now turning to mindfulness meditation to improve mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.

It sounds crazy that this is the state that our work culture is in. What leaders would design a company like that? Rather than push a person for the maximum output, hence into a zone of high prolonged stress levels, why not find the sustainable level of work?

How do you know when you are working at the optimum sustainable level? My gauge for this is to ask the following question…

At the end of the day when I arrive home – am I calm and relaxed?
If the answer is NO, you are overworking, and over time it will take its toll.

If you are self employed or have a decent boss, you are able to adjust your work week to work at a sustainable level. And by sustainable I mean that you can keep doing those hours and activities indefinitely, for years to come and not tire. That’s the beauty of sustainability, it’s repeatable over and over and over again without much wear and tear.

This is a big work secret to long term health, success and happiness. Find the level for you that is repeatable, over and over again. The added length of time, gives you the benefit of accomplishment – higher income, more experience, and fulfillment in being able to do the things that need time, without burring yourself out in the process.

I adjusted my number of work client hours years ago when I was seeing too many people in a week and almost burned out and collapsed a number of times. Once I asked the sustainability question my whole practice changed. I now see the exact number that I know I can keep seeing indefinitely for years and decades to come. It has worked beautifully now for about a decade.

Initially you seem to earn less, but the quality of your work goes up because you are not stressed out. So over your work lifetime you actually earn much more and also feel happier in mind and body.

You also get the benefit of having a great buffer that you can draw on when unexpected stressors and traumas hit you. Your body has room to absorb the impact and see it through with less reaction. I had some major ones (totally unjust) hit me like a ton of bricks over the last six years, major assaults, that would have adversely affected many people. But my body had room to absorb the impact and release it over time.

I’ll be talking more about this process in future articles.

The Myths of Science

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We all need help to increase our self healing abilities. This is still a vast untapped resource within us. The potential within you is vast. Most of us are hardly tapping much of it.

Why?

One of the biggest road blocks to expanding your effectiveness in self healing body mindfulness I believe, is how we (myself included) from the day we were born, have been indoctrinated by science. This has become subconscious for most of us and is a huge hidden cultural belief system in western countries.

“Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.”
(Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion, 2012)

I talk a lot about the hold of the intellect and it’s hindrance in self healing in this blog. This intellect has been indoctrinated by the old beliefs of science which most scientists have never seriously questioned.

If you want more help, to break this block further I highly recommend Rupert Sheldrake book above. This is a brilliant scientist. He break the ten myths that science still believes are true. When in lived experience we know today, that they are not.

Rupert gave a TED talk on this topic some years ago and guess what? The talk was banned from the TED website! This is how threatened current old-school scientist were. TED talks are always on the edge and push the boundaries of what we have known. “Ideas worth spreading” their catch cry. So when I heard about this ban, I immediately thought we must have a real pioneer here. So I checked him out and I was right.

Check out his ex TED talk on YouTube here, (1.5m views) it’s freely available. This is brilliant pioneering scientific myth breaking and it will help your intellect and mind free up even more.