Posted by Kimberly Rex
Working with the Origins of Pain
Working with the origins of pain takes on many paths. Physical issues are usually associated with pain. it is often defined as a discomfort. However, different forms of pain can change how you view and experience life. It can be embodied in your thoughts, feelings and beliefs about how this pain impacts your ability to meet life. It is also the discontent that creates suffering for the inability to return to the life you had before the trauma, accident or illness occurred.
In some cases, these negative perceptions and limitations expand into proliferation of pain into long- term suffering. The inability to acknowledge what is happening leads to difficulties in processing the need for change to adapt to the life you are presented in current challenges.
The Origins of Personal Pain
Suffering can also be traced to generational patterns. Recently, I read the book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and saw the movie based on the story of the author’s journey in writing the book.. In an interview about the film, the actor who portrayed the author of the book Caste, was asked how she could dive into the grief and pain she worked with in her part, reponded that she carried the generational grief of her ancestors who suffered at the hands of slavery.
There are many stories of people who through acknowledging the truth of a challenging situtation they were experiencing,were then able to use that experience to catapult them into a greater sense of meaning in life. This process included honoring the truth, sharing that knowledge with compassion to others as an instrument of personal and community transformation.
As an example, In the film, Origin, the author experiences three major losses in her life within a 6-month time frame including her husband, her mother and closest friend who was her cousin. The places where you experience emotional pain from loss feels like a separation from love, support and connection, and this can proliferate long-term suffering that limits your access to life.
Too much or too little resistance affects how you approach life. Avoiding pain amplifies suffering by way of intensifying excess immobilized energy within your system. Although your system might perceive this protective mechanism as a way to survive, energetically this interrupts or diconnects you from the pathways toward acceptance, decision-making, and new possibilties. It creates a ripple effect that changes and de-energizes your body-mind-spirit system. Depression, anxiety, guilt and confusion decrease your ability to emerge from suffering without the energy and motivation to move towards what is life-enhancing.
The acceptance on the author’s part in the film came when she realized that she no longer had the words and encougagement from her loved ones who motivated her to write the book, Caste, so she would have to accept the truth to commit to encouraging and motivating herself.
With acceptance comes the ability to choose your response to a painful situation at hand. :Acceptance allows you to see what is happening with greater clarity, to see not only where you are in the picture, but the bigger picture as well. Acceptance offers you the option of considering all of the possible pathways through inner guidance.This, then allows you to consider what aligns you with what is most beneficial, energizing and life-enhancing in the given circumstances, and to choose a path with discernment, self-care, with compassion for yourself and others with your true values.
“Looking beneath the history of one’s country is like learning that alcoholism or depression runs in one’s family or that suicide has occurred more often than might be usual or, with the advances of medical genetics, discovering that one has inherited the markers of BRCA mutation for breast cancer. You don’t ball up in the corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t if you’re wise, forbid any mention of them. In fact you do the opposite. You educate yourself.”
~Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
The Origins of Collective Pain
The book and film address the origin of caste systems that regulate hierarchy and racisim across the planet, and addresses the material as both a place that separates us from ourselves and each other across the world.The research for her book led her to rely on the examples from history still existing in the world today. She sought out stories of people who rebelled against opression and shined a light on the truth of heirarchy and oppression from the past histories of slavery in the United States, the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust and the Caste System of India.. She studied researchers and leaders deemed the “lowest caste”who nevertheless stood up to advocate for freedom, social justice and human rights.
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”~Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Many people today still carry the burden of patterns from the past. According to Family Systems, 80% of our family material is unconscious.We see this when groups of people still live out historical separations whether this be religious, racial, social status, money or resource-based, gender, language, territory, age, etc.
The collective pain that continues to show up today shows up in war, the response to climate change, the pandemic and mass refugee and immigration issues. The victim-perpetrator cycle is the reflection of personal and global pain that have not yet been healed.
Each one of us has a story that includes pain. Where there has been loss, grief, fear, physical injury, abuse, trauma or unresolved hurt there is a message that needs to experience the truth. This happens with the acknowledgement of unmet life needs and meaning for you today from the injury that created separation from all of the parts of yourself, or blocked your connection to others whether it originated in your own life or those of your ancestors.
Using Origins of Pain to Create New Pathways
‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedom~to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’ ~Viktor E.Frankl
It is a personal journey. Willingness is a factor that contributes to your thinking, feeling, and beliefs about what you are facing. Taking care of yourself is primary when you want to move in a new direction. This is based on a point of choice for the journey with checkpoints that remind you of your positive intentions based on new possibilities. Motivation follows as you experience greater awareness. This creates hope paired with any positive actions. as you choose your own way.
It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.~Isabel Wilkerson
Resonance Repatterning® works with personal and generational pain related to trauma stored within from your life as well as lifetimes of victim-perpetrator cycles. Sessions identify origins of pain in your unconscious material. Working with personal and generational patterns creates restoration of optimal life energy flow within your physical, emotional, mental and spirit parts.
This allows you to create a new vision for your own life with greater coherence, author-ship and life enhancing patterns to end the victim-perpetrator cycles. With freed energy available, this empowers your ability to live and communicate your truth in action. As a result, seeing and reclaiming more of your Self, you are better able to see others more fully with greater compassion and understanding. This empowers the possibility for postive personal and collective change in healing the origins of pain.
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, by phone, in-person, and by 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.
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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.
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Fall is a Good Time to Show Your True Colors
Fall is a good time to show your true colors. Like the leaves in fall that lose their green due to the reduction of chlorophyll in their fibers from a reduction of sunlight, they begin to show their true underlying colors of red, orange, and yellows in every shade. It is an invitation for you to look inward to your true value. It is also a good time to look at what you can no longer tolerate. This comes from the pairing of inspiration and letting go to allow your true colors to shine through.
Metal Element becomes prominent in the season of fall. As with any transition, the changes you experience in this season vary from changes in the amount of sunlight you experience daily, to cooler temperatures, and changes in your activity levels.
In this season, plants put their energy into their roots while letting go of the past season to set new leaf buds for a new season with renewed light. So it takes grounding to activate potential with the correct resources and time. Letting go of what no longer serves your life as the trees do as fall progresses points to the message that balance and harmony within means releasing what no longer benefits your life while also creating new ways of preparing for new possibilities.
Taking Inventory of Your True Colors
It is time to look at what keeps you grounded and rooted, and consider what keeps you stuck in a mode of not expressing your truth in your values and communication. So it is a good time to ask yourself, “How do I put myself down or diminish myself?”
Criticism can keep you from taking action whether it be toward another person or within yourself. Looking at where you stand in the victim stance that reflects a lack of self-worth, or expecting yourself or another to be perfect can keep you in a place that creates behaviors that interfere with your ability to know that you are learning and a work in progress. Fall can be a time to take inventory and take an insight into creating positive self-talk and building a growth mindset.
Anxiety, anger, shame, or guilt can keep you from staying with a growth mindset. Sometimes locked in traumatic experiences where you did not have the support or resources from others to transform abuse can still have an influence on how you experience the world today.
This shows up in your adult relationships where triggers and patterns in relationships mimic the earlier traumatic experiences out of vulnerability and lack of experience with access to positive resources in the present for resolving or transforming the trauma experience from the past. However, resonating with inner resources within parts of yourself that stay present to your inner needs with care and compassion allows you to consider new possibilities.
Letting Go to Show Your True Colors
Letting go related to grief is the prominent non-coherent emotion to work with related to the Metal Element and Fall. On the physical level, grief can be registered from past losses. Your energy can be depleted in your lungs and show up as respiratory congestion and difficulties with letting go in the large intestines with constipation. So it is a good time to ask yourself, “What is my purpose in life?” and, “How can I connect to my purpose spiritually or in the world?”
Grief can keep you facing away from life and the inner value of the meaning from your loss to transform into love and compassion for your ability to face life again by taking the roots, love, and lessons from your experience to create the energy of love within to set buds for life with the wisdom and heart to take forward when you are ready. In this way, you can find light in the journey through the darkness.
Sessions that Focus on Your True Colors
This is your personal invitation to root yourself, find the value in your life, and set your buds for new possibilities. Give yourself the gift of inspiration for new possibilities for either a Living On Purpose or Letting Go for Good Repatterning with these links.
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.
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How Negative Thoughts Affect Your Wellness and Well-being
Research shows that we experience about 50- 70,000 thoughts per day. Of these 70,000 about 80% of them are negative thoughts. In fact, if you were to take a moment right now, and think about your day, it would be well worth noting this for yourself. What do you most remember? Do you mainly experience criticism, judgment, and/or doubt about others or toward yourself from actions or inaction, words, or interactions? How does the overall experience make you feel? Are your thoughts mostly about gaining something positive and life-energizing or losing and life-depleting?
This can give you insight into the workings of your body-mind system designed to avoid danger and preserve survival. Your negative or positive thoughts create meaning for your life that affects your beliefs, attitudes, and actions. It is important to acknowledge that the negative loops might actually be orchestrated by early unmet needs and emotions remaining in a perpetual loop from unresolved negative experiences or that of your family system. The need for enough safety and trust to resolve unmet needs is connected to your inner software wired into your body-mind system over thousands of years whether there is a current reminder of a threat within your system that perceives danger based on a negative earlier experience or programming.
Negative Thoughts and Your Body
Excessive negative thoughts and complaining over time has a negative impact on your brain, your heart, and your digestion. Cycling complaints inside or reiterating them to others, without any recourse or opportunity for positive action reinforces the imprinted neural highways, stress hormones, and neuropeptides firing that keep the loop going. This creates an imbalance and disruption of energy flow in your body-mind system that interrupts communication between systems down to the cellular level.
The anxiety created in your system negatively impacts your heart function while interrupting your rest, digestion, and connect Parasympathetic Nervous System Cycle needed for creating integrity in your wellness and well-being. This is essential to your life experience for belonging and experience of pleasure.
This is accomplished by experiencing connection to yourself and others with greater ease through discernment and resonance with safety and trust. This allows for the creation of long-term loving bonding relationships that not only create a place to be heard but also valued and appreciated. This benefits your life with integrity in your communication and the actions you take.
Negative Thoughts and the Point of Choice
Your view of the world makes all the difference in experiencing the Point of Choice. With commitment and small steps that build new neural networks and communication within your body-mind system, you can limit the effects of negative thinking and complaints by moving into the world of gaining new perspectives and possibilities.
This can be done by setting a time limit on a discussion of what is happening that is negative daily, and also reframing your day by asking yourself what happened in the day that was positive. You can make this a daily practice with a short time to take a gratitude inventory. A good time of day is just before sleep. This creates even more benefits for your quality of sleep at night.
Another way to work with transforming a loss mindset into a gain mindset is to create a journal that not only records what is happening each day but also addresses your long and short-term goals, and any insights, inspiration, synchronicities or support you are receiving from the Universe and others you meet along the way to encourage you on your journey. Changing how you see things contribute to creating new positive neurotransmitters and pathways, relaxation, and a greater sense of ease.
Interrupting the cycle of negative thoughts and complaining with this reframing changes your inner world as well as your interaction with the world. A new perspective including the prospect of gain can improve your ability in seeing the bigger picture. This can happen by considering another perspective or a longer view of what is happening, or by being open to considering what another person’s experience might be in a particular situation. By doing so, you actively contribute to creating better opportunities for building greater appreciation, openness, bonding, and pleasure.
Resonance Repatterning® sessions work with the roots of material in your body-mind system related to limiting negative thoughts, beliefs, and patterns that keep you from moving beyond the perpetual loops of unmet needs, communication, and positive action. The process creates the pathway for new neural connections, coherent beliefs, and attitudes while resolving the residual material affecting you today. By doing so your body-mind system creates more space for new ways of seeing and experiencing life from the gain perspective.
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 by Skype, phone, and proxy.
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Tending to Your Heart
In the midst of heartbreaking situations, it is important to look at how you are tending to your heart. This means that in the loss of a person, pet, income, relationship, or any destabilizing event it is important to nourish yourself. Even the gut-wrenching grief and exhaustion from processing the violence in the news make it important to give compassionate support to your own wellness and well-being .
We know that your heart is affected by emotions. Heart rate, pressure, and even shape and size change with the intensity of grief, heartbreak, sudden change, or loss. Our hearts break.
So what can we do to give tenderness to our hearts in the midst of all of the cacophony? This article will offer some simple and natural modalities related to foods, herbs, essential oils, teas, stones, sound, acupressure, and energetic contacts for tending to your heart. Please use any that call your name. Your heart carries the wisdom, intuition, memory, and compassion needed for this time. For additional support related to anxiety, trauma or overwhelm you can also get more ideas here.
Modalities for Tending to Your Heart
| Modality | Specific Modalities | How to Use |
| Energetic Contacts, Sound, and Color to Treat Your Entire Body-Mind-Spirit System | Harmonizing Contact Medical Qigong Under Healing Blue Skies | https://kimberlyrex.audioacrobat.com/download/kimberlyrex-harmonizingcontact.mp3 Listen to calming music https://www.windowstotheheart.net/medical-qi-gong-under-healing-blue-skies/ |
| Aromatherapy and Essential Oils | Clary Sage for grounding and coming back into center Rose for grief and broken heart | Diffuse in the room, inhale, surround yourself with fragrant roses, or apply to acupressure points with a carrier oil |
| Teas Water | Green tea for serotonin; Lavender or Chamomile tea for calming; Bergamot or Linden tea for anxiety; Chai or Tulsi tea for grief Hawthorn Tea for your heart Rose petal tea | Teas for Stress and Depression: https://senchateabar.com/blogs/blog/best-tea-for-stress-and-depression Solar infuse rose petals in water and drink tea Stay well hydrated. |
| Herbs | Sage, Hawthorn, Rose, Linden, Motherwort, Mimosa, Holy Basil (Tulsi) | https://www.onlymyhealth.com/herbs-for-grief-and-sorrow-1577506013 |
| Foods | Eat dark leafy greens; Omega 3 foods; foods with Tryptophan (a precursor for serotonin). Eat root vegetables for grounding.’ Cook with sage associated with relieving sorrow. | Foods with Omega 3 https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/12-omega-3-rich-foods Foods with Tryptophan https://www.livestrong.com/article/247974-list-of-foods-high-in-tryptophan/ |
| Acupressure Points | Kidney 2: (brings warmth, joy, and love); Conception Vessel 17 (Ren Vessel): relieves anxiety; Lung 1 (Letting go); Stomach 36 (grounding); Gallbladder 20 (insomnia and clears brain); Governor’s Vessel 24.5 (center of the forehead above eyebrows and below hairline) | Acupressure Point Locations https://www.acupuncture.com/education/points/ |
| Exercise | Take a walk, stretch to relieve anxiety, tone, and sing | Walk next to or near water or in the forest. Spend time in a garden. |
| Stones | Rose quartz for unconditional love; obsidian for absorbing negativity; Amethyst for restoring balance* | Carry the stone with you or wear the stone; use it in your bath water or make solarized water with stone; hold it in your hands (sub chakra of your heart) or near your heart. |
| Meditations | Grief Meditation 3 Meditations for Keeping Calm and Carrying On | https://kimberlyrex.audioacrobat.com/download/kimberlyrex-griefmeditation.mp3 https://www.windowstotheheart.net/three-meditations-to-stay-calm-and-carry-on/ |
Now is the time, more than ever that you take good care of yourself by tending to your heart. Be well, sleep well, and eat well. Think well, and love yourself well. We are at a turning and tipping point as we move forward with the potential for significant change. Let’s use our hearts to create new opportunities for sustaining life, love, and compassion starting with ourselves, and hold this space for tangible and sustainable possibilities!
If you have any questions about how to use these modalities in this article, feel free to contact me at kimberly@windowstotheheart.net. If you are experiencing heartache at this time and would like a personal Resonance Repatterning session, this is also the place to make contact.
From my heart to yours,
Kimberly
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