Category Archives: Your Emotions

HEAL Documentary

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“Your body loves you, it loves you unconditionally, and it’s not letting you down. Have patience and have compassion. Take one day at a time, you’re going to get there. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been sick, you can heal, and always remember that, and never forget it.”

Anthony Williams from the movie documentary, HEAL (2017)

I just finished watching a very good documentary on alternative health titled HEAL. It was released in 2017 and can be currently viewed on Netflix or Youtube (for a fee).

This documentary is very aligned with my experience in my 30 years of private practice with how we heal and why that is. It is an exciting time to be in the health industry as more and more people begin to discover how to really heal themselves.

Doing a mindfulness practice is one of the central components to deep permanent healing of issues and diseases that we once thought needed constant medication (with side effects) just to keep in check.

The power of your (1) inner belief system and (2) your past traumas, are affecting your health way much more than you probably ever realised. By deeply facing past physical trauma and past emotional trauma you can heal a whole battery of illnesses that before were confined to the medical doctors office, medications and hospitals.

Learning to go deeper within your body and mind is one of the biggest roads to better health. Take time to continually learn the language of your body and mind. You have the ability to access it more than ever before. The medical model teaches you to keep it separate from you. But it is not separate from you, unless you deliberately ignore it, which most people have done in the past.

Connecting back with your body gives you aces to deep power to transform and heal any illness. The HEAL documentary is a great step forward in opening up to a deeper real long lasting healthier life.

View the HEAL trailer here:

Healing and Preventing Diseases

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In Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer Against all Odds (2014), Dr Kelly A.Turner found that there are thousands of cases published in medical journals of people who had healed their cancer after doctors had decided that they were not expected to live.

She decided to interview over one hundred of such cases and analyse over one thousand written cases, to find the factors that led to the ‘miracle’ cure. Those factors were many, about 75, but there were 9 that kept showing up consistently.

So here are the 9 things that you can be doing to radically help reverse cancer or, if you don’t have cancer, to do anyway to prevent it and other diseases in future.

  1. Radically change your diet
  2. Take active control of your health
  3. Follow your intuition
  4. Take herbs and supplements
  5. Release suppressed emotions
  6. Increase positive emotions
  7. Reach out for more social support
  8. Deepen your spiritual connection
  9. Have strong reasons to live

Looking at that list, a body mindfulness practice can help and enhance about 7 of those factors.

That’s one powerful practice.

A quick snapshot of each factor:

  1. To change your diet – cut out sugars, dairy and reduce meat.
  2. Be actively involved in your health (don’t just sit around wishing), be willing to make changes, face your fears and don’t automatically do everything a doctor says you must do.
  3. Your body wisdom knows what’s best for you, listen to it.
  4. Strengthen your immune system with supplements.
  5. Blocked emotions and trauma seriously affect the immune systems ability to heal disease. This factor is massive and often overlooked.
  6. Increase the fun, joy and love in your life. Deepen your inner connection.
  7. Receiving love from others helps the body to heal. Family and friends can provide the love that boosts the body’s healing ability. Doing anything that stops you from feeling alone is what helps.
  8. Connect to the unconditional universal love that we are all part of. Merging with the peace of everything, where you are not separate from the whole. This spiritual energy can significantly help the body to heal. Pray and/or meditate to help quiet the mind noise.
  9. Expand your creativity, believe you will live, that you have a greater purpose and deserve to be fully alive.

Having the Courage to face your Demons

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“Manning up in the past was to suffer in silence, manning up now is to put your hand up.”

(Danny Frawley, AFL Football Great/Coach, 2019)

Danny Frawley died in a car crash hitting a tree last Monday afternoon. He was only 56. The whole Australian AFL football world was in shock that this great man had died.

He was the second longest serving captain ever of the St.Kilda football club – the club that I follow – so I remember his playing days well. He also did some good things in his coaching days and then was a great host and commentator in the media, radio and TV. He was a great leader and inspired many. He was much loved by all.

Danny had major depression issues over the last ten years. He was one of the first men in football to go public with his mental health issues. Having them splashed across the newspapers would not have been easy. This was such a brave thing to do for a celebrity and for a man so much in the public eye of the australian football world.

I am hoping his legacy will have a wide reaching effect on all men, to stop playing tough and pretending ‘she’ll be right mate’ and be brave and courageous enough to speak up and ask for help without feeling it is a sign of weakness. In fact it is a sign of great courage.

It takes great courage to face your demons. It takes men even greater courage to do that, because of cultural conditioning growing up. I believe it is the beginning of a death sentence when a man decided to completely suppress his real feelings in order to be or look strong. This is just not healthy whatsoever. Blocking off feelings reduces your life span.

It takes great courage to face what you have going on within you. I see this regularly with new clients, coming in shaking and scared at what will be revealed. I was the same. Having been through it myself, most are able to calm down fairly quickly and begin the deep inner process.

Looking back at all the sessions I had over the years, I would often be sitting in the waiting area terrified at what I was likely to show to the therapist which had never been safe to show ever before in my life, even to myself. This type of courage leads to freedom and greater health in your life. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.

Doing a regular Body Mindfulness meditation practice means you will have to go within and eventually face some of your old traumas and demons that you could not face in the past. Don’t give up when uncomfortable feelings arise. Just take a smaller piece, whatever is manageable and face that. Do that regularly and you will progress further than ever before. You will thrive.

Your body – the door way to greater health

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“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”

(Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005)

Last week I quoted from Eckhart’s book that preceded The Power of Now. This week the quote is from the book that followed The Power of Now.

Everyone will have events in their lives where there are strong negative emotions that are hard to deal with. People find ways to cope with such events.

But coping is not healing and at some point those negative emotions need to be dealt with and released. If not, as Tolle says, they accumulate and join together to form tensions, pressures, pains, muscular restrictions, energy drains, limitations, stiffness, and then later, affect our thinking creating anxiety, depression and if still not dealt with, much worse, disease and even serious injury.

The good news is that you can do something about it for yourself by mindfully connecting to your body on a regular basis. Taking time to connect within allows you to contact the cells that are carrying that built up negative emotion.

By switching off distracting thoughts you open an inner door way within your body that allows you access to the community of cells that make up the different parts of your body. This crucial connection allows for a lot of self healing that scientists and doctors are still coming to grips with.

Learning to connect within, gives you unprecedented access to your physical vehicle as well as your past unprocessed emotions and traumas. Facing this past material is not always easy but it is worth the resulting freedom, reduced drama and enhanced health that is waiting on the other side of that old hidden pain.

This can be difficult to believe if you have been brought up thinking you have to always take something when you are unwell.

But if you learn how to face something now,
you most likely won’t have to take something later.

Releasing the Past, by Coming into the Present

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“If we know how to touch the present deeply, we can touch the past, and even transform it.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh, How To Fight, 2017)

The present moment is all that is ever real. What you are reading now is all that is real in this moment. What just happened or is about to happen in your life, isn’t real. The plans of the future and the memories of the past are just thought form imprints in your brain. They are not real. Your body responds as if they are real if you recall them. And if you recall them too often you can create anxiety that isn’t real either.

A daily body mindfulness practice helps you to stay more in the present moment. To not live as if past memories, and future made up memories, are real.

Learn to spend more time in the present rather than your memories. All of life is happening in this present moment. It can’t happen anywhere else.

And as you stay with the present moment awareness of your body, the past unfinished material will reveal itself. What you haven’t let go of will surface and it will feel as if it is happening now, and it is. Everything is either happening now or not at all. It may have started in the past, but you feel it now in the present moment.

So just staying with something difficult from the past, and staying in the present moment as you feel it, helps it to release and diminish in intensity. The trapped emotional charge (trauma) has a chance to let go and flow out.

This way, past old stresses and traumas can heal, complete and release in the light of the present moment. And your thinking mind doesn’t need to do anything. It doesn’t have to work it all out. All it needs to do is stay present deeply, in your body, right now.

Does it make sense that being more present releases the past? If you are habitually living from your past/future memories, it doesn’t make sense at all. Your thinking mind thinks the past actually still exists, that it is real. It isn’t. It is long gone, its just history now. A memory.
Only this moment exists. Ever.
And it is always this moment. Forever.
Well, how can it always be this moment you may ask?
And I’d like to ask you the best question of all.

IS IT NOW?

And the answer is…..Yes.
Ask this question at different times in the day, in the middle of the night, ask it whenever you want, the answer will always be the same, YES.
Ask it a trillion times over the next fifty years and the answer will still be the same, forever constant. YES.
So it follows that it is now forever.
It is this moment, forever.
And it is this moment that you ever need to be in….. Forever.

Feel Positive, Live Longer

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Last post covered the health of your Heart. In this one, we focus on longevity.

“Just as attitude affects the heart,…Yale scientists even concluded that attitude was more influential than blood pressure, cholesterol levels, lack of smoking, a healthy body weight and exercise levels in how long a person lived.”

(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)

How important is research like this that keeps coming out? Strongly and continually pointing to how positive emotions improve your health and help you live many years longer than negative based people. The overall research indicates clearly that attitude impacts your health in a very significant way.

So anything you can do to be more positive and feel more positive emotions throughout your day will improve your physical health directly and have you live longer.

In my experience, this is why people who keep a gratitude journal where you write in it what you were grateful for during the day tend to feel a big positive difference. So making this activity a habit can really help. Even if you just do it in your head, but do it everyday.

If feeling more regular positive feelings equals a healthy and longer life, it makes sense that you should jump on board and do it everyday. A lot of people can’t do this for very long because it is not always easy. For to genuinely feel positive emotions (and this is key) you must allow the negative ones to release. Otherwise you are just faking it and not really feeling anything of substance.

Going within, in a body mindfulness practice, helps you to face and release the negative emotions that cover up your natural positive ones. Once the negative ones (usually pain, anger and fear) are acknowledged in your body and allowed to move naturally, the positive health benefits can begin to surface and spread throughout your body.

This is the natural authentic way to positive emotions, with no push, pretending or force of willpower.

Anger and its link to the risk of Heart Disease (Attack)

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I focused on Cancer in the last post. This week we look at Heart Disease (Heart Attack).

“The connection between attitude and the heart is so reliable that a 30 year study published in 2003 in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that ‘…hostility is one of the most reliable indicators of coronary heart disease risk’.”

(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)

According to the World Health Organisation (in May 2018) the leading cause of death in the world in 2016 was Heart Disease (Heart Attack), followed by Stroke, accounting for 27% (15.2 million) of all deaths world wide.

Then we have studies like the above quote that strongly link heart attacks to hostility, or as I would word it, the emotion of excess and prolonged anger in your mind and body.

If you would like to self heal yourself through body mindfulness meditation, it is imperative that you also focus on the emotion that sits with the sensations you feel in your body during a practice. Taking the time to feel the emotion, will go a long way to improving your health and immune defense against disease.

By spending quite, deep and prolonged time in a body mindfulness practice you can uncover your hidden frustrations, blame, hates, people you cannot ever forgive, angry judgments and hostilities towards others. Deeper down there will probably be suppressed rage and fury at injustices.

Your intellect can rationalise these old traumas and subdue them, but going deeper (into your body) you can uncover what is still actively firing in you emotionally. If it is anger related, then we have a red flag for a future heart attack.

Express that anger, acknowledge it, get it out, throughout your body, release it and make peace with what you have hated for however long, This will literally bring peace and lightness to your physical heart and lower the risk of ever getting a heart attack.

But it must be felt IN YOUR BODY not just intellectually in your head, hence why doing a regular body mindfulness practice is so vital to your health.

Expressing Emotions to Heal Disease

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“In our body, cancer cells never arise in the heart or small intestine, because the heart and small intestine are warm, with high blood circulation and high oxygen content…Cancer is the end result of alexithymia – or not expressing feelings or emotions.”

(Kelly A. Turner, Ph.D, Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, 2014)

Body Mindfulness work is excellent for getting you still and inward enough to heal a lot of issues and diseases. Cancer’s link to emotional suppression is very strong now with many studies and research all pointing to the truth of the above quote.

In your practice when you go within and stay there long enough, the diseased or suppressed parts of your cellular structure begin to reveal themselves to your awareness and consciousness. You begin to bring these cut off parts into the light of the present moment where they can heal. Most times when they reveal themselves, the releases can be somatic, physical, emotional and feeling and even involve small or big movements, depending on what was unfinished in the traumatic event, that shut that part of you off, in the first place.

So as you advance with this work, you have the opportunity to go very deep and heal things that the majority of doctors in western medicine cannot make sense of. It’s a whole other paradigm, a whole other world where you have much more control of your health and wellbeing then you were ever taught was possible.

You are that amazing on the inside and can do (by today’s standards) remarkable things. (I’ve certainly witnessed this with clients often, in my private practice.)

I look forward to the day when this is the new norm.

We are well on our way 🙂

Connecting Deeper and Lowering Suicide Rates

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I was alarmed by the figures of youth suicide reported in the paper in Melbourne today. 3,128 (aged 15-44) died by suicide in a single year. This is almost three times the amount of deaths from car accidents each year. Every day, there are about 8 suicides and 180 attempts. So that means that there are 68,620 suicide attempts each year. That is a lot of pain and angst that people have within them which they do not know how to resolve and heal in a healthy way.

Such pain points to a massive disconnect within themselves and with those around them. This leads to a lot of trapped emotion in the body. If this build up isn’t released in a healthy way, the pain can reach levels where the only way out logically seems to be to kill oneself.

What’s also concerning is that many times, families and work colleagues do not see it coming. So what can you do?
Internally – a mindfulness practice is critical to connect you within yourself to create an outlet for this trapped emotional pain.
Externally – making more meaningful connections with your loved ones is critical. Don’t always assume they are okay just because they are not saying anything. One way to facilitate this is to ask people you care about meaningful questions and ask them often.

I’ll give some examples here but what is important to note is the state you are in when you ask them. You slow down, become mindful, connect within yourself first, and then ask the questions slowly, with a lot of care and then wait, giving the person a lot of time and space to answer. The person must feel safe to go a little deeper than normal. Going deeper requires more time otherwise you’ll just get a shallow response.

Questions:
What’s been on your mind that you think would be difficult to talk about?
What makes you sad about yourself? Sad about the world?
What do you wish you were able to do better, if it were possible?
What makes you angry about yourself? About the world?
When was the last time you got scared or a big fright?
What scares you about yourself? About the world?

If the body is not at peace the mind is not at peace

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If the body is not at peace the mind is not at peace.

Your body has a very big influence on your mind. More than what most people realise. A lot of it is subconscious, below the level of your awareness. With body mindfulness work you can access more of this deeper awareness, bring it into light and help it release.

When you go deeper what often arises is repressed buried emotions, feelings that are unresolved, unfinished. These unfinished feelings are there because you couldn’t deal with them at the time. So your mind labels them out of bounds, they become a no-go zone in your body. This no-go zone creates a stress in your body in its attempt to keep them locked away. Over time if they are not released they turn into physical pain, and longer term, become chronic pain.

So much of our chronic pain in our bodies are actually repressed emotions.

Release the emotion and the physical pain disappears. The majority of the medical community will still not acknowledge this proven fact and it doesn’t matter, as long as you believe it and do the work to access and release.

I’ve seen this happen time and time again in my private practice. And of course I’ve experienced it in myself too, over and over again.

I highly recommend reading Dr John E Sarno’s books. A good one is Healing Back Pain – The Mind Body Connection.