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.
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Coherence Creates Self-Awareness
Resonance Repatterning® creates coherence in your self-awareness. Greater coherence benefits your experience for a higher energy state potential in your body-mind-spirit system. This allows you to experience greater understanding and respond with positive actions that benefit your life, relationships, wellness, and well-being.
This happens through identifying and transforming your unconscious limiting beliefs, attitudes, and patterns with the resonance muscle-checking system combined with consciousness science to pinpoint where and when your system was blocked or interrupted. Working with coherent choices and updates allows you to step into and actualize your inner truth, values, and potential.
Personal Self-Awareness
Personal self-awareness allows you to meet what you are experiencing more fully. Becoming more aware of your inner strengths and weaknesses over time gives you the ability to be more in touch with what holds you back, as well as what you would like to create. This allows you to look at your inner story as well as the changes you have experienced in your life over time. Self-awareness makes it possible to evaluate life-depleting, stress-reducing, or avoidant behaviors still impacting your life today. This awareness is useful in asking what you would like to create with your life energy to harmonize and balance from where you have traveled to where you are now. (article)
Coherence in Relationship Self-Awareness
You can only experience as much of another or a situation to the degree you have worked with the emotion thought, or process yourself. Relationship coherence requires empathy, the ability to make space for the other in your awareness with compassion. As unconscious material from limiting earlier experiences stored in your early survival and emotional brain are transformed, it is possible to expand and embody new awareness and expand your ability to understand others. This allows you to observe others’ actions, words, body language, and interactions more clearly.
This benefits your personal awareness in a way that allows you to listen to what you are experiencing as you interact with others. This serves as a way to identify similarities or differences in communication styles, It also allows you to become more observant or trusting of your gut feelings or intuition. This happens by looking at how you are feeling and experiencing your interactions with others. Relationship awareness can give you feedback about what you move toward and where you move away from closeness. It can be an invitation to notice how you approach others individually or in groups, monitoring how you build closeness with your values intact from compassionate and coherent self-awareness.
“Your presence is the most precious gift you can give to another human being.”~Marshall Rosenberg
Through coherent self-awareness, you are better able to observe group dynamics and interactions between members. This mindfulness within and with others can support you in observing the dynamics of group members related to the rules that “govern” the group. You can be mindful of how this affects your participation and how you feel about being a part of the group, where your values are tested or swayed, with what meaning this has for your overall well-being.
Coherent Self-Awareness creates the opportunity to take action with this feedback in a way that is both compassionate for yourself, your relationship, or your situation. Through acceptance with self-love, your awareness can create wisdom as you rely on the coherent teaching that each experience presents. Through coherent self-awareness, you have the opportunity to respond with a positive intention for growth and transformation in every experience you encounter.
Resonance Repatterning creates coherent self-awareness that affects how you meet life on a daily basis. Sessions give you the opportunity to transform limiting patterns in your life that affect your personal health, relationships, business, and vision for your life potential in a tailored holistic process that creates greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
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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The Impact of Intergenerational Trauma
The impact of intergenerational trauma is a topic that has come to the fore as we process what is happening with families, refugees, and soldiers in Ukraine with the devastating images alive in the news we receive from another part of the world. First, there is the question of how this traumatic experience will affect each person experiencing this directly. Second, how will the aftershocks affect each person in the future in the generations after this war?
We can see through the history of Europe that the residue still lingers from previous wars and traumatic experiences. This is true in the United States as well as in the trauma endured by Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Historically, immigrants fleeing from other parts of the world over time bring their own trauma history into the mix in the repetition of the victim-perpetrator cycles. It is this intergenerational trauma that continues to impact life on the emotional, physical, mental, and spirit levels.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Emotional Level
Adverse Childhood Experiences are sources and evidence of intergenerational experiences. The overlapping correlation with traumatic events with health, wellness, learning, and well-being becomes more apparent when looking directly at the roots.
Intergenerational Trauma can be expressed through fear, depression, hyper-vigilance, worry, PTSD, codependency, anger, inability to attend or focus, and memory issues. It can also result in pervasive social anxiety with an inability to engage with others in a way that nourishes your needs for safety and trust. Addressing the roots of these de-energizing reactions needs compassion, safety, and trust to heal these wounds at their source.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Physical Level
Intergenerational trauma physical manifestations can be expressed through loyalty to your Family System as well as mobilized energy blocked in your body can show up as eating disorders, addiction, a lack of vitality, pain, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. The energy of a traumatic experience through unresolved epigenetic memory creates continuing stress behaviors that impact descendants from your ancestors to your parents, and then to you. These behaviors influence gene expression as a response to the stress in your environment.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Mental Level
Bruce Lipton, the author of The Biology of Belief, proved through his research on stem cells that genetic expression is managed by epigenetic (above the genes) factors related to your environment. The expression of the genes is impacted by stress, blockages, and interruption of energy flow within your body-mind-spirit system. The good news is that you have the power to change your environment and your perception of your environment now. This change happens when you change your resonance with beliefs and attitudes about life created by negative earlier experiences and generational patterns stored within your system. This has a rippling effect on righting your ability to turn towards nurture and support with your thoughts, your communication, and your relationships.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Spirit Level
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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4 Ways to Connect to Love in These Times
Connecting to love in these times of staying at home with social distancing and isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have found more time to ruminate about what has been going on in the background of my mind. Hearing about the death of loved ones, healthcare, EMT workers, and nursing home patients widens the gap of separation while longing to somehow know how to offer love and compassion.
This article gives you 4 ways to connect to love in these times. This time touches places of anxiety, loss, and grief you have experienced in your life in the past. These triggers bring up fear about how to cope with the anxiety, loss, and grief brought on by separation from others in the present.
1. Connect to Love in Yourself and Others
With all that is happening, the journey of love has to start from within. Where have you felt separated from yourself, not felt safe or protected, not able to live your truth, or feel more connected with others? Underneath is the need for mercy, self-love, and compassion.
Connect to Love in Your Heart
2. Connect to Love through Forgiveness
Connecting with the whole of yourself creates greater self-love. This love allows you to connect with greater compassion with the whole of others. Listening to your biofeedback, thoughts, emotions and physical response to what is happening inside of you creates the opportunity for empathy in considering others in the same way.
The 3 Directions of Forgiveness in the Buddhist tradition takes into account the need to be able to free up space in your heart and mind through the process of forgiveness. These three directions include what others have done to you, what you have done to others, and what you have done to yourself.
Forgiving allows you to open to greater awareness and understanding. Others have an influence on your awareness. Your responses are based on your perception of other’s behaviors, words, and actions. This impacts your ability to see the underlying intent and need for connection or boundaries in the situation.
Acknowledging lessons from the past by giving space for grief, anger, and hurt that constricted your life energy creates new possibilities for your thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes to choose new pathways when you put the burden down.
Jack Kornfield and Forgiveness Meditation
3. Connect to Love through Giving Back Responsibility
It can seem incredibly difficult in connecting to resolve traumatic early experiences alone. These parts that have felt unheard or acknowledged need the attention of your adult part and higher self. This means that you are able to respond to these parts within you now that are attempting to protect and manage your emotions of anxiety, fear and confusion from the past in a way that creates support, nurture and mercy in the present.
According to Steven Levine, this is having mercy on ourselves and others through conscious living. In this time where we become are made acutely aware of life and death, it is this work that allows you to expand the space within yourself to allow connection to your Self, your family, friends and loved ones more compassionately.
Part of the forgiveness process includes giving back the responsibility to others who have abused or harmed you. In these cases, you are working with creating compassion for yourself and your unmet needs for protection and safety to transform the negative experience.
In Family Systems, not giving back the responsibility to others for their actions puts you in the arrogant position to the perpetrator making you the big one taking on the responsibility and burden. You were only the little one or perhaps a peer. Giving back responsibility is actually a way to create order in your system. This allows each person to work with their own fate. This gives each person the inner power, dignity, respect, and responsibility to choose how to respond to life in a new way.
So, in these cases, it is vital to acknowledge the responsibility to end the Victim-Perpetrator Cycle. This happens inside of you. You might never receive a literal apology, but, working with the shift in perception of a negative experience to empower you now, changes your life in the present. By no longer carrying the burden, you free up life energy the imprint of abuse, stress response, anxiety, and unease that you carried.
This is where your ability to respond to life in a more authentic and life-enhancing way through choice begins to happen.
4. Connect to Love through Gratitude and Grace
Being separated from loved ones miles away, in nursing homes, or in hospitals, and not knowing when this could or might happen to people we know draws us into the space of grief. It can create a feeling of being powerless. Connection, love, and gratitude is the healing balm. Tell others you care and love them right now to bridge the distance.
Many years ago, in reading Richard Louv’s book,Web of Life: Weaving the Values That Sustain Us, he wrote about sending Gratitude Letters to family members and friends in place of holiday gifts due to lack of money. It is a beautiful idea for any occasion, especially at this time when it is difficult when you might be struggling with finances and not knowing when you will see your loved ones again.
This can also be a time to write a gratitude letter to a loved one who has passed. Your words have meaning in the Unified Field of Consciousness. They also have a loving influence on healing your Family System in the past, present, and future.
Grace Notes: A Living Eulogy TED Talk
Why are eulogies only for the dying? In this funny, touching talk, Andrea Driessen argues that writing your loved ones a “grace note” – a kind of living eulogy – is a potent tool for connection now that also lessens the pain of grief and regret later. Everyone wants to matter, and Andrea’s wish is that we share what matters most with our loved ones while they’re still alive to hear it.
Family Systems is one of the many healing disciplines within the body of Resonance Repatterning® work. If you would like to work with this process to create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being, sessions are available by phone, Skype and proxy. Start your process here.
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Letting Go to Create Something Good with Your Life
At this time of year, traditionally, there is a collective sense of both endings and beginnings. You might find yourself making a ritual of letting go of or throwing out items, considering stopping a habit, or looking at what has kept you in patterns that do not seem to change.
There is a big difference however in the process of letting go and throwing things out. Letting go is a process of creating space within that builds greater harmony in what life has presented over time. It implies a relationship with what you are presented with instead of toughing it out, manipulating, being the victim, the rescuer or the perpetrator. Letting go allows you to create something good with your life.
Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.~Herman Hesse
Throwing out things that are no longer serving your spiritual growth is different than throwing out a broken vase or ripped pants. Throwing out can literally be a place of denial, inability to work with, or learn from a situation or relationship. While taking care of your life energy is healthy, throwing out the lesson from a situation or relationship can keep you in the gerbil wheel of repetition. In these cases, throwing out the lesson is not really letting go.
At the Still Point
It is really unconscious negative patterns that keep you in circular dead-end pathways. The false hope of getting your genuine needs met in a situation or relationship that brings you back to your original negative pattern without internal positive change leads to repeating the cycle over and over.
Getting to a place where you can start to work with the repetitive pattern means you need to call upon your body, mind, and spirit. Mindfulness and time to consider what is happening within can lead you to a greater sense of grounding and homeostasis. It is only in this place that your inner wisdom and energy can collect for reviewing what is going on, and then allow you to consider the next steps.
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”~ T S Eliot
Family Systems work is one of the many disciplines in Resonance Repatterning. Modalities work with creating order within your system so you can experience the freedom to face life and do something good with it. Doing something good relates to giving dignity to all of the members of your system by allowing them to take responsibility and place so you can do the same with your own life.
Widening the circle of your beliefs so that you can explore new possibilities in your life is one way to explore new emotions, responses, and interactions with the world around you. Knowing that the circle of life through generations has brought you here allows you to expand your awareness.
From Circle to Maze to Spiral
The questions we ask ourselves from time to time like “Why do I keep going through this in my mind?” “Why does this keep happening or coming up?” point to the way we are interacting with the material. Considering events, relationships, and emotional anchors to the past can leave you feeling like you have not solved the puzzle, and have made no progress in your growth process. It can leave you feeling like you are lost in a maze.
Letting go of the idea that the material from the past is backtracking, an impossible puzzle, or circular, consider it as a spiral.
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. ~Vladimir Nabokov
This can show up in your beliefs about a relationship or your self. You can become more deeply aware of your innocence and fragility in the past with compassion. This allows you to free yourself from judgment or blame so that you can use this information for healing your greater connection to self. Letting go, in this case, creates new ways of seeing choice, and for opportunities in how you can move more securely into your life today.
Labyrinths
I once met a woman at a Resonance Repatterning® Conference who told her story of visiting the Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth in France. She walked the labyrinth with a question in her heart. When she finally reached the center, she met a man with whom she spent the rest of the day in conversation. She described the meeting as a spiritual appointment with him. They each walked the labyrinth with a question in their own hearts and met at the center at exactly the same time. They both learned something from each other related to the question they held in their hearts as they walked the labyrinth that day.
Appointments with life can also include being thrown off the path in challenging situations. These situations can be opportunities for a point of choice for spiraling down into greater non-coherence or spiraling up into greater awareness of your inner strengths and values. No matter what the situation, person or problem that shows up in your life, it is an appointment that can lead to a greater sense of feeling whole while integrating parts that have been excluded or neglected with greater love, attention, and expression.
New Pathways to Wholeness
In a workshop with Jean Houston at a Humanistic Psychology Conference, she compared a kind of schizophrenia or fragmented parts not yet integrated or available to work within the body-mind system to what she phrased as polyphrenia. Polyphrenia creates a wider and more inclusive space for taking the information and lessons from your spiral journey through life to heal, acknowledge and integrate the lessons from your life experiences so you can use that wisdom for your life today.
The point of a maze is to find its center. The point of a labyrinth is to find your center. New pathways to wholeness are created when you let go of the resistance, guilt, resentment, self-pity, anger, negative judgments and regrets. This happens with an acceptance that your life path includes spiritual discovery with challenges along the way.
The journey you take in life is like a labyrinth. The labyrinth includes the spiral and circle together. A labyrinth is a metaphor for your own spiritual journey that includes all kinds of appointments, twists, turns, and wanderings through life. It is a pathway that starts with the still point to focus and let go of resistance to an expected outcome. By walking mindful of your experience, it leads you to your center. By taking the inspiration and insight, this creates a widened circle of awareness. This awareness can then be applied to your life with what you have learned in your center. Letting go and learning along the way creates new pathways of experience with grace, compassion, and deeper understanding.
Willingness to become more greatly accepting and aware creates the pathway back out into the world with the gems of insight from your journey within. Making space for your feelings and experiences with what they are telling you informs you of what you want to create based on your inner needs and how to live these values in action. This leads you on the return path with what you have learned towards a greater sense of life purpose, meaning, and feeling of doing something good with your life.
Walking a labyrinth is just one of many ways to move into your center. Meditation, taking time for your self, getting in touch with your breath, mindful movement, drawing, journaling or getting into nature can all be ways of reflecting on what is going on in your life right now.
Resonance Repatterning® sessions get to the root of what you need to experience a positive and sustainable change in your life. Your body is a map of your life’s experiences. It is through working with this information that transformation through the connection to your family system’s patterns can be healed. By doing so, you gain awareness, a greater sense of ease, peace and author-ship for your life.
Contact Kimberly Rex, MS to set up your personal Resonance Repatterning session by phone, Skype or in-person here.
Re-pattern your life to experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
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