Posted by Kimberly Rex
Showing Compassion to Your Body for Self-Worth
Showing compassion to your body is connected to the quality of your self-worth. The importance of being loved and valued for who you are, what you feel, and how you are seen and heard is connected to your self-worth.
Shame can damage the bridge to compassion for yourself and self-worth. This bridge can be damaged early in life when a parent or authority figure yells, neglects, abuses, or ignores the needs of a child.
Because the need for connection is so strong, shame serves as a survival response when the connection between others and the self is broken. The need to bond with safety and trust needs to be rebuilt by the parent or caretaker. When this doesn’t happen, the child takes the burden of attempting to regain connection, acceptance, and bonding by trying to earn love. This comes from the child not feeling worthy and left feeling that somehow they need to rebuild the bridge to connection.
The outcomes of this need to reconnect can manifest in your body through anxiety, depression, withdrawal, isolation, substance abuse, attempt to be perfect, lying, self-loathing, trying to please others, fit in, self-harm, or expressing itself in PTSD or eating disorders. These attempts to bond or disappear can sometimes hide repressed anger, grief, rage, and sadness for early unmet needs for connection.
Start Where You Are to Rebuild Compassion in Your Body for Self-Worth
Get in touch with the impact of shame and body oppression created by family, culture, authority figures, age, racism, body shape, size, and color of your skin, religion, and language. Identifying the sources of the shame you feel and your survival strategy reactions allows you to begin to process what has been hidden or oppressed. The truth is that not only is your self-worth and image influenced by the outside world, and this becomes your identity, Shame is also internalized in a way that you embody the negative consequences of degradation and oppression with your beliefs, thoughts, self-talk, and actions toward yourself and, in turn, how you see or experience others.
Identify How Your Body is Expressing Your Need for Compassion for Your Self-Worth
Trauma experiences related to body oppression can lead to the survival strategies of submission, separation, silence, or secrecy. It is expressed in how you hold your body, your gestures, posture, tone of voice, breathing, how you take space and support, and facial expressions. It is also expressed in what you wear, the music you listen to, the art, and the rituals in your life.
“Conditions of worth are circumstances when “self-experience is avoided (or sought) solely because it is less (or more) worthy of self-regard.”~Carl Rogers
Notice How You Respond to the Outside World
Your life experiences have molded over time into what you experience today. If you are a people-pleaser avoiding self-care, or giving up your inner values to express a different image in your relationships with choices that neglect your truth, it points to your need to bring compassion to your self-talk, beliefs, and ideas about your true nature. Acknowledging how your body has carried you through life, its strengths, and its wisdom to meet your life and spirit needs is essential for building the bridge to self-compassion in the present based on your true personal worthiness.
Sankofa, a symbol from Ghana, is the idea that it is important Sankofa to reflect on the past to build a successful future. Going back to retrieve the gifts that your body offers you an egg that can rebuild your own body authority in how you perceive your value and needs in life today.
Your body will allow you to become familiar with these parts that have held shame and a sense of unworthiness. When you experience shame, you are more focused on what others expect and want from you rather than considering your own essential needs. Tuning into how you devalue or give value to your self-worth through the eyes of others is an act of reparation. Working with boundaries with the outside world is a good place to begin to foster greater self-care and compassion for your body and self-worth.
Fostering loving messages from within, ideal mentors, a loving friend, or finding the ancestral connection to your need for love and connection through Family Systems Resonance Repatterning sessions can benefit your ability to connect to the compassionate messages you need. Releasing the burden of carrying the life work of others in your system benefits your ability to face life with your own truth and energy to remember and reclaim your true self-worth in the present to create new possibilities.
Responding to Life Today with Compassion for Your Self-Worth
As you give space to the messages you receive from your body, you can become ever more aware of how it can serve you today building a new bridge into greater self-awareness about how it can serve you. It allows you to breathe, digest, rest, process information, move, transport energy, circulate blood, fluids, hormones, neurotransmitters, and also to take action.
The shift to compassion will benefit you in hearing the messages from your own body when you feel overwhelmed, attacked, or feel the sensations of guilt that tug at you. From these signals, you can begin to allow your body to guide you to set boundaries with the outside world when you experience unease or dissonance with the words, actions, or behaviors of others. This allows you to consider what you need in any given moment or situation. In this way, you connect to your body’s strengths of compassion, love, nurture, protection, and true self-worth.
This is your invitation to benefit from a compassionate process that builds your self-worth. Resonance Repatterning sessions work with your body-mind-spirit system to create greater self-worth and compassion by working with the information stored within your body..
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy. Set up your personal session here.
Find out more about how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
Read MorePosted by Kimberly Rex
Letting Go of Old Tapes
Letting go is a theme in nature, especially in fall. It’s an invitation to do the same with what no longer serves your growth and transformation. Old tapes are those negative limiting beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts that keep you in habitual stress responses with life-depleting patterns that keep you in similar scenarios, relationships, and outcomes. These old tape tracks are well-worn and imprinted in your life.
Old tapes like old songs generate a sense of the past. The problem is that playing old tapes without choice or introduction to any other option keeps you carrying the frequency of these tapes into your life. This impacts how you see the world around you.
Acknowledging the Source of Old Tapes that Keep You Stuck
Acknowledgment starts with the realization that most of these beliefs originate from times in your life when your needs for survival and response to life were experienced through the lens of emotions early in life. Whether they originated from family rules, acculturation, school, or unresolved trauma or loss, they created neural pathways reinforced over and over again as you moved through life attempting to get your basic needs met while monitoring and protecting the parts of yourself that learned these basic survival skills.
Because these old tapes are habituated into an automatic response or reaction menus, your unconscious brain response today defaults to the beliefs, thoughts, and responses to earlier experiences when presented with similar material. Your body-mind system is designed to avoid danger and to look for negative threats. Your Autonomic Nervous System creates your sensory-motor and influences your behavioral responses.
With the number of stimuli that bombard your system in every moment, culling through all of the signals present in the world around you gives the edge to this unconscious material to take care of your well-being.
Identifying Old Tapes that Keep You From Living Your Life More Fully
In fact, old tapes that keep playing today might actually be an introjected emotion, thought, or family rule that was present in your early life while you were immersed in the environment of stress experienced by a parent or caretaker. Even the stress of prenatal experience can influence your way of looking at the world today.
Identifying where activated alert, fight, flight, and immobilization responses from unresolved physical, emotional, and mental needs for survival is key to opening doorways to positive change. In trauma research, the residue of old tapes shows up in intrusive thoughts, hyper-arousal, and avoidance. Unresolved nervous system material shows up physiologically in sleep issues, nightmares, illness, changes in digestion, heart rate, hormone levels, and hyper-arousal. They show up mentally and emotionally in hyper-vigilance, anxiety, panic attacks, irritation, violent thoughts or actions, reliving or experiencing the initial pain and depression,
They show up behaviorally or socially in fawning/flocking with an excessive need to please others, submission by giving in to others, or defense to bring the attention of others through excessive crying. These tapes also contribute to compensating for pain through addiction, numbing or hiding out as a result of not being able to discern danger from life-enhancing choices. These behaviors point to the need to create a successful outcome or resolution from traumatic earlier experiences.
So it’s important to identify the actual old tapes that keep showing up and to get a sense of their source. Your beliefs about life, relationships, men, women, self, work, different groups, etc. impact how you face the world, and the quality of life energy you have to dedicate to your positive intentions for your life today.
These old tapes are played over and over within beliefs with an inventory of repetitive experiences in your life that play out in remarkably similar ways. You might even catch yourself looking at the world in negative ways with things you say out loud, how you move toward or away from others or situations, or within repetitive emotional, mental, or physical states that point to your reactions to life.
Transforming Old Tapes into New Possibilities
Resonance Repatterning® works with your inner technology to access information stored in your body-mind system at the unconscious level to bring life-depleting old tapes to the surface to identify and transform. This happens with a resonance muscle-checking system that connects to your Nervous System. Your Nervous System is connected to every organ, tissue, and gland in your body. This means that it is possible to work with prenatal, family, and activated unresolved traumatic experiences where patterns have been held. These patterns and old tapes keep playing as they get lived out in your relationships, your health, and your sense of well-being.
The process creates coherent release and updated options for your system to transform this information for more optimal functioning to create greater harmony and balance in your body-mind system. This happens with natural modalities of color, light, sound, movement, breath, energetic contact, fragrance, and consciousness science paired with your specific needs.
Sessions create greater relaxation, peace of mind, ability to connect to playfulness, love, joy, and stillness. By doing so, you are better able to experience more of what you choose to create in your life on the physical, emotional, mental, and spirit levels. You reclaim your authority (authorship) with greater life energy to dedicate your positive intentions. Your life-enhancing choices then create more conscious pathways that allow you to experience new possibilities for greater growth and transformation that are aligned with your vision of life.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
Read MorePosted by Kimberly Rex
Respecting and Honoring Your Own Life
At this time of year, harvest and Thanksgiving time, it can be an invitation to look at respecting and honoring your own life with all the factors that came together to bring you to where you are now. This includes your life experiences, your parents, and the lifetimes of ancestors who came before you who through love, trials and tribulations made it possible for you being here. Showing this kind of respect for life is a beautiful way to harvest the lessons from the past with gratitude to create new possibilities for your life and those of others.
Respecting and Honoring Your Earlier Experiences
Over tens of thousands of years, the brains of humans have changed to become better able to see both the big picture as well as the details. However, the hard-wired Nervous System is designed to keep you safe in the midst of any seeming “danger,” and this alarm system gets activated when you don’t resolve the original unresolved issue or memory imprint. For this reason, it is vital to have respect for your evolution as a human both personally and collectively when considering the experiences of change you have gone through in your life.
Your earlier experiences as a little one, a teenager, young adult and so on build the foundation for what you believe to be true in your life. What you believed as a little one is stored in your body-mind system in your survival brain. Year by year this gets translated into your emotional brain. Until your thinking brain becomes fully developed, around age 25, your responses to the world are primarily through the lens of emotion and reaction to the big world of uncertainty.
This means that unresolved negative earlier experiences in your life can still have a residence in your unconscious originating from a time in your life where you were not yet able to communicate your needs pr figure out how to take care of them. As an example, an infant can scream when hurt, however, he or she cannot yet say, “No,” “Stop,” or “I need a hug.” And, if an adult did not step in to help you calm or protect you, that unmet need with the stress continues to reside in your unconscious. Stored in your Nervous System, your body and mind continue to resonate with these emotions, thoughts, and attitudes that create automatic stress reactions in your life as an adult. This is the reason it is so important to acknowledge that these unresolved beliefs, thoughts, attitudes, and reactions you experience today might be related to your early development.
Respect for these experiences gives you a window into the underlying material that keeps trying to get to the surface through difficult relationships, anxiety, depression, conflict or frustration. Knowing that negative earlier experiences in your life will attempt to raise the alarm to protect and manage your emotions allows you to use that information to create positive change. This, in turn, creates greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
It is then possible to transform unmet needs to create more coherent beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, and patterns. Respect for yourself creates the ability to listen and take care of your need for positive change for your health, relationships and sense of well-being.
Respecting and Honoring Your Parents and Ancestors
Know that patterns in your life are the patterns your parents and family delivered to you and through you through birth, training, place, and culture you were born. 80% of the patterns in families are unconscious. This unconscious palette is what you have to work with as you go through life. For thousands of years, we, as humans have functioned in tribes to survive. Tribes experienced wars, drought, famine, migrations, illness, poverty and loss. However, it is through their efforts to survive that you were loved into being. Your palette for creating your life is colored with these emotional and survival efforts. It is only with respect for the love and difficulties experienced by your parents and ancestors that you can work with this material. By doing so, you create new patterns for your family and your descendants.
If you take the information from your Family System, it allows you to take the lessons from your parents and ancestors. This happens when you discern how these patterns keep you feeling stuck, frustrated, upset or anxious. This creates the opportunity to become aware of its relevance in feeling overwhelmed, powerless, hopeless or disconnected.
Identifying the automatic pilot of negative emotions, attitudes, and reactions to life through Resonance Repatterning® sessions gives your body-mind system access to the unconscious material through your Nervous System connected to every tissue, organ, and gland in your body. This includes the material stored in your DNA and RNA, your vision and your Family System patterns.
Sessions create the benefit of aligning with the coherent information needed to heal unmet needs and calm your body-mind system for life-enhancing choices. This happens when you resonate with taking your mother and father exactly the way they were, coherent and non-coherent, so you can work with the information you took in, and out of respect allow your parents to take responsibility for their own destiny. This is done with honor and respect that translates into working with your own needs for coherent nurture and vision for life within your own mothering and fathering aspects. This allows you to choose greater resonance with self-care that benefits greater integrity in your own wellness and well-being.
For more on how parental and ancestral patterns impact your life: http://www.windowstotheheart.net/honoring-the-messages-from-all-your-relation/
Respecting and Honoring Your Teachers and Mentors
In the same way that it is important to take your mother and father, if you do not have the ability to take the information or acknowledge teachers and mentors, you do not gain what they have to give you. If you resonate with arrogance towards them you will be unable to learn from them or feel their support in nurturing new information that can lead to your ability to consider new possibilities. Taking meaning from the lessons of your life allows you to consider new horizons.
Below is a video of Fred Rogers, who studied child development, in an interview about his book that speaks to what he learned over 30 years of working with children. His message is to acknowledge and take care of your feelings through acceptance for exactly where and who you are right now. By doing so you give value to your experience and to who you are deep inside.
In this video, he gives an interview about his book, The World According to Mr. Rogers, one that all of us could benefit from hearing no matter where we are in the process of challenge or sense of accomplishment in your life.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”~The Little Prince
Respecting and Honoring Others
When you are able to heal and restore a greater sense of well-being and author-ship in your own life this means that you have a wider vision for life. This opens the possibility for greater discernment and choice. The new movie, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” based on Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire article titled “Can You Say…Hero?” * is about applying these principles to family relationships, in healing childhood trauma through acceptance, patience, kindness, forgiveness, and humility.
When you resonate with greater choice and vision for life through listening and seeing individual expressions as just one way of seeing the world, you are better able to have empathy for others. You can only see as much of another to the degree you are able to see within yourself.
When you resonate with permission to be loving and also balance that with self-care, you are able to express your joy and respond to grief, acknowledge your need for safety, trust, and grounding, and sometimes feel confused. This permission to observe, feel and acknowledge your needs allows you to work with the innate wisdom of your body-mind system.
Like a GPS you are then better able to choose and connect with others in a way that creates mutual respect, power, and life-enhancing connections. Through these connections, the ripple effect of beneficial mutual empathy expands the wellness and well-being benefits for everyone.
*LINK to Tom Junod’s article, “Can You Say…Hero?” https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/
I’d like to invite you to explore how ResonanceRepatterning®can make a difference in your life. Experience a session by phone, Skype, or in-person with Windows to the Heart Repatterning. Set up a session with Kimberly Rex here: Contact Page
Sign up for our monthly newsletter here: Newsletter and Exclusive Re-pattern Your Life Events with FREE eBook, Eight Natural Modalities for Navigating Stressful Times.
Read More