Posted by Kimberly Rex
Transforming Stress: The Heart-Mind Connection
Your heart-mind connection contributes to transforming stress. Stress is a natural occurrence in your daily life. However, when chronic stress takes over by rumination, anxiety, worry, obsessive negative emotional states this creates confusion in your life.
On the physical level, science shows that in these instances, your heart beat and function change. Your digestion of food becomes more of a challenge. Your breath rate and blood pressure shift. Your Nervous System moves from the Parasympathetic or rest, digest and heal state into the Sympathetic state of preparation for danger and escape.
This escape mechanism when not interrupted or addressed can lead to a perpetual loop of worry, fear, anxiety, and need for numbing the overwhelm. You might be able to identify an experience in your life where you have experienced this chain reaction. And, even if you have tried different ways to calm the stress cycle with food, drink, running or moving away from a stressful situation, taking on a person or situation that you have no power to change, or shutting down and isolating, the loop is still there. It can attempt to serve you with anger, criticism of yourself or others, hate, jealousy, and even isolation. However, this can lead to a deep sense of hopelessness and energy depletion.
The loop still presides because there is a direct connection between your body and mind, your heart and your thinking. When negative emotions, thoughts, and beliefs have been cast into neural pathways in your mind, your beliefs, thoughts, and feelings are directly related to how your body responds to what life presents to you in any given moment even when you attempt to suppress them. They return.
If you have followed articles from this website, you know that the Fire Element in Chinese Medicine and your heart give you the opportunity to love, experience joy, warmth and connection with the ability to discern between what is energetically beneficial and what is not life-energizing. The Institute of HeartMath in San Diego has done research on the impact on the electrical field around the heart and brain in varied states. When the heart is stressed, the electromagnetic field is smaller than when the heart is focused on love, gratitude, joy, or appreciation. This created calm and coherence. This pattern turns out to correlate with the electromagnetic field of the brain. There is a synergy between the function and coherence of your heart and mind.
Transforming Stress with Your Heart
For example, if your mind is racing, it is an opportunity to ask the question is, “What is in your heart?” Stop for a moment to focus on your breath and tune into your heart. Get a reading of what you are experiencing in your heart area right now, what messages do you receive? Do you hear the stress or do you hear the connection to life-enhancing calm? Acceptance of where you are right now will support your entire body-mind system to register what is happening and influence your next steps.
,There is a healing relationship between what your survival and early emotional brain and your heart’s wisdom has to offer in addressing unconscious material stress responses. Bringing awareness and acceptance and tending to the origin of these habitual or automatic stress responses, your heart is capable of updating your long term memory. This allows you to experience more and more what you would like to experience in your life related to the values you would truly like to live today.
There is no day where you experience 100% happiness or sadness. There will be days that you experience stressful situations, and some more than others. Yet, within these days are the possibilities for noticing what is helpful, beautiful, joyful, and meaningful. The way to get more choice in your day is to allow your values to lead by accessing your heart’s reach into your mind to observe with kindness and connection what is happening. By seeing the stressful feelings, thoughts, and beliefs as the observer, you then offer an off ramp from the intensity and stress aligned with your values.
“When you stand with yourself in a self-compassionate, kind, loving way, life opens up and then you can turn toward meaning and purpose, and how you bring love, participation, beauty, and contributions into the lives of others.” ~Steven C. Hayes, founder of ACT Therapy
Transforming Stress with Your Mind
Here you can notice what is happening without being held captive. You can literally thank your mind for sharing. You can expand your flexibility of choice with each stress response by tuning into or just noticing your breath. You can detach or defuse from being tied to a negative a thought, belief or feeling to just notice or observe. A statement you might use is “I notice that I am having a thought that…,emotion of, or belief that…” This allows there to be a state of acceptance of what is happening right now. By letting it be, it is possible to give space to any underlying messages or needs, and this can calm your mind and your heart. This allows you to more coherently think, to feel, and then to act.
The pathway to unity between these healing agents creates greater wholeness. It creates room for your heart, mind, and emotions to function more optimally while restoring energy for your priorities.
This can happen with visualization, connecting to your true values for your day or longer term projects, meditation, and/or noticing what your mind believes is true through journaling. In this way, your commitment to wholeness is accessed through changing your breathing pattern, and noticing, with connection to your heart’s compassion. It allows an opportunity for calming your body-mind system and moving into greater flexibility, resilience, focused coherence, or the rest, digest and healing state.
This is an invitation to give yourself the opportunity to explore underlying material that needs your heart’s compassion, and to experience 10 natural modalities to use for creating calm for your mind and heart working together with your values for living life based on purpose.
You can take part in the Calming Your Mind and Heart Group Repatterning* on December 17, 2023 as a gift of self-care to transform the stress in your life through the alignment between your heart and mind.
Get details here: https://www.windowstotheheart.net/calming-your-mind-and-heart-repatterning *You can take part in this repatterning process from any place on the planet.
To continue receiving life-enhancing modalities and experiences through Windows to the Heart Repatterning. Sign up for our FREE monthly newsletter here.
Kimberly Rex, MS is a Master Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Master Wellness and Well-being Life Coach, and Person-Centered Expressive Therapist. She works with people all over the world by phone, Skype, and proxy.
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Finding Gratitude and Appreciation in Your Life
Finding gratitude and appreciation in your life can change how you feel and respond to what is happening in front of you. It can change your perceptions, and your physical responses and impact your thoughts. This can change your sense of boredom, apathy, or displeasure with life.
You can change how you see yourself and the world around you by choosing to find reasons to appreciate your life, who you are, and what you have right now. Even if you have felt isolated these past few years, find yourself trying to find calm in all of the changes taking place, or wish you were someplace else, there is the potential for choosing to find what is life-energizing. This has a positive effect on your health, relationships, and outlook on life. It can happen with simple gratitude and appreciation.
By creating a Gratitude and Appreciation Practice for yourself you can build a presence that feeds your body-mind-spirit system daily. This can contribute to your satisfaction with life. Physically, you might express appreciation and gratitude by acknowledging the wonder of your body and how it carries you from moment to moment, day by day. By doing so you reduce stress and calm internal conflicts. Your relationships can also improve through gratitude and appreciation to become more constructive with actions and interactions.
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation Right in Front of You
It is easy to get so lost in daily routine and automatic responses to life that you take for granted or become blind to all the nurture and support that is right in front of you. To make the shift, you first notice and allow your senses to take in your surroundings. Start by getting in touch with your breath. Then allow your eyes to scan and rest on the contents of the space you are in, your home, the sky, plants, flowers, and trees outside. Rest your awareness on the significance of each particular place you rest your eyes or what you notice. This can be a vase of flowers, a bud on a tree, or the sound or color of a bird.
You don’t have to look or travel far to give to find beauty or something that brings you pleasure. You live in your body 24/7 and on the Earth 24/7. Take it in what is right in front of you with appreciation. By doing so you create positive benefits for your wellness and well-being.
“Upon awakening, let the words “Thank You” flow from your lips, for this will remind you to begin your day with gratitude and compassion.”~Wayne Dyer
Start where you are, literally. Appreciate your body and what you wear on your body each day. This includes the vibrancy of colors, the patterns, and the texture of the cloth, warmth, fun, comfort, and joy you have experienced from your choices. What meaning and energy do these colors and feelings are you experiencing when you wear these clothes?
As the weather is changing and there is more opportunity to get out into nature or to safely attend gatherings to connect, I have opened my closet to what seems like a brand new wardrobe! Putting on earrings, and wearing a scarf or sweater I haven’t worn in a few years, is an absolute joy! And, I experience appreciation for these new opportunities.
Since the pandemic, I have limited the amount of clothing I cycle through weekly. I have also donated clothing with the thought in mind that someone else can also appreciate the items that no longer fit or have a place in my clothing choices. And, this makes me smile with the thought that paying it forward can multiply appreciation.
How about applying appreciation to the foods that come from the Earth to nourish your body? These foods come to your table from a wide diversity of places. Appreciate the soil, seeding, farmers and workers, and the growth process each of the foods you eat has taken, and how this, in turn, energizes your body. Appreciate the color, texture, and flavor of your food.
Acknowledge how food has created a story and connection with your family and friends. Perhaps there are favorite dishes, a particular holiday, or a ritual that has made your food story a special memory or has an emotional positive meaning for you. Bring this appreciation practice into your selection of foods and preparation as well.
Cook with love and with the intention of nourishment and well-being. Become aware and discerning of what foods are energizing to you and bring them into your kitchen to combine in creative ways for health and well-being. As you do so, you can also consciously become aware of foods that are not energizing to your body-mind system. And, express internal conscious choice to create even greater potential for your life energy, your moods, and well-being to appreciate.
Finding Joy and Appreciation for the Small Things in Life
It is often the small things that change your perceptions. A smile from someone, the laughter of children, a word of encouragement, a favorite song, someone holding the door open, a beautiful sunset, or appreciation for truly being seen and heard can mean the most.
Allow appreciation to take in the people in your life who have been there at a special time, made you laugh, consoled, or listened when you needed it most and who you learned from as you shared time with them. Appreciate the ups and downs of your own life as they have created who you are today. Notice and appreciate what is happening and speaking in your body-mind-spirit system today.
It might sound like a small thing, however, throughout the pandemic, my mother and I, both isolated, have had a daily appreciation and gratitude exchange close to sunset. She has a view of the bay in the West while I live in a circle of cedar trees. She sees the sky light up as it moves into twilight each day. Each evening by phone, she describes the colors of the sky and the shapes of the clouds to me. By doing so, we each experience the expansive qualities of the beauty unfolding through our senses and imagination.
“Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you. Then it will really be a good day.” ~David Steindl-Rast
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation for Others
By making appreciation a practice, include words, prayer, affirmation, journaling, drawings, movement, making music, toning, or spending time in places locally that you love or might not yet know. Your gratitude and appreciation meditation might become a walk or even a wake-up or calm-down around your sleep routine. No matter what you choose, this practice can easily become your daily experience as you recognize the value of life and its gifts each day.
In the same way, be sure to use appreciation with others. Everyone needs to feel they are appreciated and have a purpose. This can be done when you express gratitude for something or to someone in your life by including the reasons you appreciate an action or presence. This contributes to the health of your relationships and also supports creating greater motivation and life energy whether in personal or business relationships.
Research shows that gratitude and appreciation stimulate oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin neurotransmitters and hormones to build pathways within your body-mind system to create a sense of calm, satisfaction, safety, love, joy, trust, and bonding. This happens for both the giver and the person who receives it.
I am reminded of a recent experience running around doing errands while in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s in my town. As I pulled into the parking lot, I could hear the sound of singing and Native Drum. There was a Native American man with a sign next to him asking for support for his situation as his house flooded in the recent storms in this area. Instantly, I was taken into the space I have experienced in sweat lodge rituals, and when parked, I sat for a few moments with my eyes closed just to listen. I was brought back into my center and relaxed. I remembered the connection to the Earth and to each person in the lodge and with all my relations. And, although I only had a few dollars cash on me, I walked over to him and said, “I’m sorry, this is all I have.” He took my hand between his two hands and smiled deeply. The gratitude exchange between us was enormous and made something seemingly small more than enough.
With practice and over time you can see how small steps in the direction towards creating an internal and external environment for gratitude and appreciation to thrive that you will begin to experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
Making a daily appointment and commitment to create new neurotransmitters that communicate life-energizing vitality to your body-mind-spirit system can also expose or illuminate negative patterns and beliefs. By consciously choosing new ways of seeing and experiencing life, you actually gain more confidence and motivation for the process as your internal barometer begins to change. So the takeaway message is to start the process and keep coming back to find gratitude and appreciation with conscious choice.
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.
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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Updating Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects
Resonance Repatterning® works with updating your mothering and fathering aspects in your life today by repatterning your life to experience greater integrity in your wellness and wellbeing. The process gives you a way to access energetic material from your pre-natal, pre-verbal, and early experiences as well as ancestral patterns through your DNA.
What are Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects?
As you move through life the quality of the relationship you had with your mother and father impacts the mothering and fathering aspects of yourself, in how you respond to life and take care of your needs as an adult based on your early experiences. This includes both the positive and limiting qualities you took in through growing up in your family related to the qualities of absence or presence, criticism or nurture, suppression or expression of emotions, neglect or positive attention, neglect or encouragement, danger or safety, lack of safety, or the building of trust and protection.
Your mothering aspect is translated into your life today through how you experience nourishment and support. This is reflected in your ability to feel at home in your own body and in the world around you. The ability to feel stable, grounded, and imaginative while being about to digest and integrate experiences in your life create greater experiences of harmony and balance.
Your fathering aspect is related to your ability to move out into the world in an assertive way. In Chinese Medicine particularly related to Father is Metal Element. This element relates to your values, the Divine Masculine, your ability to draw upon your own truth, money values, your self-worth, inspiration, and letting go and connecting to your inner brilliance.
This also rolls out into what you observed as a child related to the conflict styles of both parents. According to the Gottmans, it is not so much that children experience conflict, as much as how children observe conflict resolution or the lack thereof in their family that determines personal conflict responses and attraction to partners with similar compensation, resistance, or conflict styles as their own parents.
Updating Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects
In Twelve Step programs, the importance related to mothering yourself is vital. The work of accessing your inner child with your adult self is essential in that you are invited to nurture and support the earlier parts of yourself by updating your mothering and fathering aspects.
To survive early on, you might have had to compensate for your basic needs being met by your parents These early patterns became wired into your developing survival and emotional brain as implicit memory imprints in your unconscious. It is then no coincidence that your association with survival and bonding continues into relationships in your life as an adult.
If your body-mind-spirit system experienced significant fight or flight experiences early on, you are wired for that frequency and continue to activate those neural, biochemical, and thought pathways related to those limiting beliefs about who or what is safe or dangerous.
This creates repetitive interactions and situations that replicate your early learning as it is familiar. You are actually matching up conflict styles, and stressful frequencies while en-training with another through your own Nervous System.
Becoming aware of these internal patterns is actually the first step to moving more into your ability to self-nurture through moving into the safe zone with self-regulation. In fact, the more you can see of yourself equals your ability to see more of another by expanding your ability to calm, nourish and support your decisions, values, and mental health.
By doing so, your mothering aspect becomes more aligned with your unmet needs from your earlier experiences. This means where there was neglect, you give yourself time and space for self-care. Where there was abuse, trauma, or chaos, you offer yourself the warmth, compassion, safety, and care your need. Where you felt unsafe being in your body and trust your intuition, you begin to check in with what your body is telling you and follow through with self-care.
Polyvagal Theory offers an avenue to bring your body back into the safe zone for healthy social engagement that allows you to move back into a greater sense of calm, relaxation, grounding, and stabilization. Acquainting your body with this information, interoception and neuroception give you the opportunity to learn how to identify the triggers that have served as gateways to the states of fight-flight or freeze.
“Trauma is chronic disruption of connectedness.”~Stephen Porges
This also gives you an opportunity to work with returning to natural states of safety that create calm, expanded awareness, and ease. By doing so you add your body’s memory bank to be able to resonate with greater choice, discernment, values, and direction. This leads to your ability to attune your body-mind-spirit system to safety, nurture, and support within and with others. This changes the internal biofeedback of your experience related to the dynamics at work in your relationships.
Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects: Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation
Through the lens of your social engagement system from your earlier experiences, you interpret other people’s facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and words. These interpretations are orchestrated through your Nervous System. Some feedback might be comforting while other states feel destabilized or uncomfortable based on past experiences leading to misinterpretation.
When you identify and work with the root of limiting earlier experiences that shaped your social engagement responses, you can then feel more at home in your own body and can begin to recognize and discern your own internal biofeedback, attention, and focus in the present. This then creates a new connection within and updated reading of another person through your energy exchange.
The possibility of registering your experience while with others leads to your ability to choose relationships that contribute more to your safety and calm. This translates into creating more co-regulation in relationships that are built on safety, trust, curiosity, and mutual choice.
Through updating your mothering and fathering aspects, you create greater integrity in your body-mind-spirit system that results in better health, less stress, and more appreciation for your own choices with your ability to experience a more fulfilled 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.
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Listen to the Guidance Within
“Listen to the inner light, it will guide you. Listen to the inner peace, it will feed you. Listen to the inner Love, it will transform you.”~Sri Chinmoy
In the process of working with Resonance Repatterning sessions, you start to listen to the guidance within. Your inner light, peace, and love grow as you begin to take the time and space to access what is healthy, energizing, and life-enhancing for your life.
These three aspects of inner guidance allow you to work with what is coming up in your life from your core essence instead of being driven by unconscious patterns from your personal and Family Systems material when you resonate and are oriented to your inner light, peace, and love.
Through accessing and listening to your inner guidance, energy shifts from a Resonance Repatterning® session with follow-up Positive Actions continue to update your body-mind-spirit system.
Listen to the Inner Light
Light is a nutrient to your body-mind system. It supports cellular communication. In fact, according to Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp, a German Biophysicist, our entire metabolism depends on light. This speaks to the importance of the frequencies of light you take in through your eyes, skin, and food you eat. The translation of photons into bio-chemical communication within your body-mind-spirit system is dependent on this nurture. By using light and color purposefully in your life, you also positively affect our mood, well-being, and health. Your diet, the colors you wear, the color you take in from your environment, and what you wear makes a difference.
When you are disconnected from your inner light, you might feel depressed, have less energy, movement, and motivation. What you feed yourself in the way of food, your beliefs, thoughts, and responses to life either enhance the circulation of light within or depletes this vital force. This is one of the reasons that transforming limitations from unconscious negative habits, thoughts and beliefs make such a significant positive difference.
Accessing and listening to the guidance from your inner light comes through your body sensations, your state of mind, posture, movement, and levels of energy. Connecting to this feedback truly benefits your ability to monitor where you are and spotlight where you need clarity, relaxation, encouragement, support, and greater confidence. Your inner light can be accessed through mindful movement practices to ground and integrate your positive goals and life purpose as a resource for vitality, motivation, and perseverance.
Listen to the Inner Peace
Inner peace evolves from differences, and sometimes conflict. Finding the path to neutral from the Violence Cycles of life is a process. Putting down the criticism of self and blame of others so that the victim-perpetrator-rescuer cycles begin to cease is the road to non-violence.
This does not mean that getting or being hurt is not a valid place to process. It means that what you do with your inner communication, your actions and reactions are what leads either to more conflict or greater peace. Listening to inner peace speak is much more likely to come from your heart than your head. Limiting thoughts and beliefs can rule like a hammer that fragments your attention and dulls your ability to be present.
Spending time in your heart is a beautiful way to bring peace to your entire being. Getting in touch with your breath to bring your attention back to your center allows you to return to peace. Staying with the sensations in your heart and listening to your heart’s wisdom brings guidance that restores balance and harmony throughout your entire system.
“The only way we have of influencing the future is to own the present, however we find it.”
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn
Acknowledging the need for peace within softens the intensity of conflict by creating space for being able to see all of yourself more clearly. This means your feelings, your thoughts, and what is triggering you possibly from an earlier experience. This calms your entire body-mind-spirit system. It benefits your ability to widen the lens of your vision so you can then see more of your own needs and consider those of another person as well. At the same time, this can connect you directly to your unmet needs for greater compassion for all of your own life.
In the process, listening to the guidance of inner peace allows you to also forgive parts of yourself, and then consider divergent perspectives based on the fact that each person has their own history of pain and family systems mechanics that contribute to the situation. Seeing and listening to each person as a peer in their own power to take care of themselves with their own set of rules for the journey of life frees you to live your own life.
“Your presence is the most precious gift you can give to another human being.”
~Marshall Rosenberg
Listen to the Inner Love
Inner love can be defined as self-care. This love allows you to include all of your experiences with struggles, grief, fear, challenges, seeming errors and successes from your past experiences, all of your body, and every part of yourself unconscious or conscious in the process of your spiritual journey.
Listening to all of these aspects supplies you with all the inner software and information you need to move toward what is life-enhancing. The unconditional love of the universe works with you to co-create, transform and support you in your journey. In taking the time to connect with love within and listening to its guidance you are better able to integrate those places within yourself that feel pain, trauma, or lack of connection. Through making time for self-care, comfort, connection, and support from within, you are better able to both discern and connect to others in more authentic bonding and nurturing ways.
Listening to inner love can also be about setting boundaries, realizing what needs to change, what feels uncomfortable, or what no longer fits into your life in a healthy way.
This means choosing situations, work, and communications that are based on trust, safety, and empowerment. It also means allowing yourself to experience life’s beauty, truth, wisdom, pleasure, joy, and curiosity. By doing so there is a greater balance and harmony in giving and receiving, nurture and support, all with permission to be LOVE, and who you truly are.
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.
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 Attitude, Beliefs, Challenge, and Development Lead Your Response to Life
Your attitude, beliefs, challenges, and development lead your response to life. The question is, “What is driving?” Is it fear or reactivity from the unconscious material, unresolved issues, or the conscious desire to create kindness and resonance with direction and positive change? This article will explore the influence and possibility of attitude, beliefs, challenges, and development to expand your experience of life.
Attitude Leads to What You Believe
Your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings create your view of life. When your attitude diminishes yourself or others, this leads to life-depleting and limiting outcomes. If your mindset is fixed you are more likely to feel like you cannot try or experience life differently. When you experience a mindset based on the potential for growth, a growth mindset, you are more likely to engage energy, motivation, and respect for your journey whatever it is and where ever it leads.
Having an attitude for example that “I can’t learn that material because it’s too hard ” vs. “I haven’t learned that material yet, but I want to learn,” creates different views of the world. Which view opens the door to new possibilities?
Taking inventory or questioning your attitudes about different areas of your life can give you insight into what holds you back and what can also shine a light on opportunities for growth and transformation. Asking yourself what holds you back from getting an inspiring job, a nourishing home, a relationship, experience of peace or relaxation is a way of beginning to sketch out what your life experience is attempting to teach you at the moment. Asking and then working with the response is essential to positive change. How would your life be different from a new perspective?
Beliefs Lead to How You Meet Challenges
Beliefs create an automatic filter through which you see and experience the world. Your brain is wired for bias to create survival behavior. However, the threats in earlier evolutionary stages of the world as well as of your body-mind system can overshadow your ability to experience greater calm, joy, love, and vitality as well as your experience of safety in the world.
Tara Brach speaks to Papancha, a Pali word for “mental proliferation,” the chain reaction of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings that causes suffering.
Pause and notice you are in a spin of suffering, name it and allow it to be present. Allow it to be. Give it space. Get in touch with what you are believing and the stories you are telling yourself. Each time you interrupt the pattern and chain reaction allows you to return to mindfulness and create the blueprint for new pathways to reconnect to your innate inner wisdom.
Take time to get in touch with inner kindness and wisdom by asking yourself these questions.
- Can I get in touch with my breath to take a pause until I can begin to shift inner awareness and consciousness about what is happening?
- What am I feeling or sensing in my body and my heart? Get in touch with your body sensations and what this tells you about your feelings.
- Who am I blaming? Can I forgive or just be this awareness? Can I give it space, give kindness, and allow the feelings? This allows you to build neurotransmitters for other perspectives, intelligence, and awareness of possibilities.
- Begin to examine your reactions, responses, or behavior in different situations. Identify your triggers, and ask yourself if you want to continue responding in the same way. If not, how could you interrupt or respond differently to break the cycle of the fight, flight, or freeze reaction? This allows you to connect to the good within yourself and others.
By doing so you start to change the inner landscape of your vision by expanding the rules and circuitry of your belief systems that have been embedded by earlier experiences, family system rules, and inculturation.
Challenges Lead to Your Development
“Life is a challenge. Meet it.”~Mother Teresa
When meeting challenges of any form, it’s important to know that what you believe upfront will determine what comes next. All of us have been thrown into situations where we felt overwhelmed, afraid, confused, hurt, betrayed, etc. It is for this fact that resonating with having been able to move through and out the other side of challenges in the past can allow you to work with a challenge in front of you now.
Challenges come in different durations and intensities. Putting challenges into perspective allows you to meet what is in front of you with both inner strength and wisdom when you resonate with having met challenges that created a sense of empowerment. This awareness reduces resistance and creates encouragement for what life is dishing out right now.
Of course, some challenges are larger than others, and not all challenges might feel like they are met with success. For example, if you spill coffee on your shirt, it is different than receiving a phone call about an ill family member that needsyour help that you can’t provide at the moment. Getting centered in both circumstances is beneficial. Being able to calm yourself first allows you to be more available to problem-solving, decision-making, and delegating.
Instead of reacting with the fight, flight, or freeze, it’s important to move out of fear into a greater sense of calm so that problems can be solved by calming the stressed mind to allow life-enhancing and creative choices to be considered. This also allows you to be kind to your own life to learn from past experiences where it might have felt you “failed” so you can apply what those experiences taught you to your current situation.
This is why getting in touch with your breath, taking a few moments, or using a phrase to remind you that you are in the here and now is beneficial. My personal favorites come from 12 Step Programs: “ First things first,” “Keep it simple,” or “One day or one moment at a time.”
Having the strength to get through some life challenges takes time and effort over the long run. Resonating with continuing to come back into your center allows you to pace yourself over time.
Development Leads to Direction in Life
Earlier versions of yourself carry information that can inform your life today. In the same way, your current version of self is able to inform earlier experiences and parts of yourself. You are not an abridged edition, rather you are an expanding and developing being of light and sound.
Your unconscious and conscious material that inform your attitude, beliefs, and responses to challenges make up your overall experience of life.
It’s important to acknowledge that the newborn version of you did not know what you knew as a 2-year-old. Your 7-year-old part of yourself did not know what you knew as a teenager, etc. The way that your body-mind system developed allowed primary functions for survival and feeling states in stages then became more complex with reasoning and logic paired with increasing networks of communication and creativity.
You would not expect your 2-year old part to drive a car, balance a checkbook or make scrambled eggs, yet earlier parts continue to inform and influence choices about bonding, separation, fear, calm, and safety as an adult. This is due to the developmental stage memory imprints from the past that continue to signal to you today.
Your adult self has navigated many developmental stages, challenges, relationships, and structures over time. Taking care of and listening to earlier parts of yourself is essential to developing greater harmony and balance within your life today.
The direction you take in your life is led by your personal and family system’s unconscious material. It conducts your journey until it is brought into the light to create greater conscious awareness and understanding of new possibilities from the perspective of your adult and Greater Self.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, a Master Wellness and Well-being Life Coach, and a Person-Centered Expressive Therapist. She works with clients all over the world with Resonance Repatterning sessions that work with personal and generational unconscious material to facilitate this process of updating your body-mind system to experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
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