Get your feet onto the Earth for grounding.
Posted by Kimberly Rex
7 Natural Ways to Treat Trauma, Shock and Overwhelm
The following article includes 7 natural ways to treat trauma, shock, and overwhelm. These healing modalities collected from the fields of herbalism and aromatherapy, Hanna Somatics, Polarity Therapy, Chinese Five Element and Meridian System, as well as color, light, sound, movement, breath, and energetic contacts.
1. Essential Oils, Herbs, and Teas
Beneficial essential oils for treating trauma, shock and overwhelm include clary sage, lavender, orange, rose, chamomile, Ylang Ylang, Vetiver, and Frankincense.* These essential oils are both energizing ad calming in nature. I have used these essential oils first-hand in school settings with students and administrators in the presence of anxiety-producing situations with issues related to accidents, attempted personal harm, grief, and need for calming. This was done with simple treatments of carrying tissues with oils in small plastic bags or placing the tissue in a fan or diffusers. Finding what works best for you is essential to your specific needs.
*These herbs or essential oils above in a warm bath or foot soak can also be supportive. If a bath is not possible, use coconut oil mixed with a calming or energizing essential oil to provide nourishing support massaged on the bottom of your feet.
Make teas from herbs like chamomile, lemon balm or passionflower at home will also offer comfort. Make teas with rose petals and/or hawthorn for support with grieving and heartbreak. A tea with citrus especially orange peel is energizing and uplifting. Peeling an orange, inhaling the scent from the peels, and then eating the orange can relieve anxiety.
2. Breathwork and Compassionate Touch
https://kimberlyrex.audioacrobat.com/download/kimberlyrex-3ModalitiesforTrauma.mp3
3. Movement and Grounding
Take a walk in nature or sit in a garden to create calm. If you cannot go outside, look through a window at nature outside. There are acupressure points that calm and tonify your body-mind system, as well as touchpoints on your body that can calm and bring you back to center in the midst of trauma.
a) Six Acupressure Points to Relieve Anxiety: https://www.healthline.com/health/pressure-points-for-anxiety
b) Somatic Trauma Reflex Release: This modality comes from Hanna Somatics and the work of Thomas Hanna, and is especially beneficial for releasing long-standing trauma held in the body: https://kimberlyrex.audioacrobat.com/download/kimberlyrex-traumareflexrelease.mp3
c) Activities to Create Feeling Grounded: How to Ground Yourself to the Present Moment
4. Nourishing Foods
To counteract adrenaline and blood sugar spikes, decrease or eliminate sugars from your diet. Alcohol and caffeine also contribute to increase in fear, anxiety and worry.
- Stay well hydrated.
- Eat slowly and chew your food completely.
- Gut health directly affects how you feel, and add pre-biotics like onions, garlic, leeks, soybeans, chicory root, honey, banana, Jerusalem artichoke, and chia seeds to your food choices to feed beneficial gut flora.
- Add probiotics to your diet including yogurt, kefir, cottage cheese, cheddar cheese, sauerkraut, kombucha, pickled vegetables, kimchi, miso, and tempeh.
- Create greater balance in your body-mind system with beta-carotene from carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, spinach, and kale; and vitamin C from citrus fruits, red peppers, brussels sprouts, broccoli, and strawberries. Add vitamin E from almonds, avocado, spinach, sunflower seeds, spinach, and again sweet potatoes. These vitamins nourish beneficial neurotransmitter brain function.
- The trace mineral selenium in Brazil nuts, halibut, grass-fed beef, turkey, chicken, and eggs is also a wonderful antioxidant that supports stabilizing fear, anxiety, and panic attack. Including foods with zinc leads to fewer anxious feelings. Cashews are a great source of zinc.
- Research studies show that omega-3 fatty acids from foods such as salmon and walnuts, zinc like oysters and liver, and magnesium from leafy greens and whole grains help to reduce anxiety.
- Make sure that you don’t skip meals to avoid a drop in blood sugar, which can cause you to feel jittery and make your fear or anxiety feel more intense.
- Have a snack from the list above on hand throughout the day to keep your system in balance. According to studies on mood regulation, it is beneficial to eat every 3-4 hours.
- Make sure you get enough fiber in your diet to digest food and detoxify what is not needed in your system.
5. Someone You Trust
Having someone be with you if even just in the same room or close by to provide a sense of safety and support is helpful. If you cannot be in the same space, connect by computer or phone. Being able to express your fear and anxiety safely and to be heard is important through the loving presence of listening. Talk about your fears, and what you need to feel safe to trust again. Talk to and be with people who make you feel safe.
6. Nature and Sound
Get into the sun, meditate, practice Yoga, Tai Chi, prayer, or listen to music. This connects you to the support of your life force to harmonize and balance your emotions. Listen to music with flowing water in the background, or go for a walk next to the water.
7. Creating Peace and Quiet
Give yourself the time you need to rest, to cry when you need to, and make space for healing. Sleep allows you to cleanse toxins and stress from your system. Keep the same routines that you have kept for your sleep schedule. Create comfort in your living space. Wear and sleep in soft fabrics and find ways to bring gentleness into your living and workspace. Even if it means carrying something in your pocket that connects you to a feeling of safety, create a loving space that goes with you. It can be a picture of someone you love, a gentle message to yourself or from another person recorded on your cell phone, or a reminder of something that allows you to feel peace.
Take a break daily to give yourself a loving space for peace and quiet. If you want, you can draw, write, sing, move, play an instrument or walk to express your inner process. Life is energy in motion. Moving through the process of fear, anxiety and trauma is a whole-body experience, and it takes time and loving support.
This is your invitation to move through the process with the natural and nourishing process of Resonance Repatterning® that relies on the innate wisdom of your own body-mind system to transform trauma, shock, and overwhelm naturally.
If you have any questions about how to use essential oils, make a tea, blend, or want to schedule a session, please contact:kimberly@windowstotheheart.net
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*See Directory of specific essential oil usage mentioned in this article: Directory of Essential Oils
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Posted by Kimberly Rex
Grounding Yourself to Get Centered and Oriented to the Present
Grounding yourself helps you center and keep you oriented to what is going on in the present. It allows you to see more, and consider the next step or decision you are making. It can help you set boundaries on the continual inflow of material you have to sift through to process. When you become overwhelmed and confused, grounding helps you center and feel more fully present and aware. It is a simple yet powerful tool for mindfulness and well-being.
Spending time outdoors has diminished over the past decades due to jobs, transportation and focus on
leisure technology. With the speed of change, increasing intensity and transitions you have to handle in just one day, the simple act of grounding can help you feel more calm, centered and energized.
By grounding yourself, you become more aware of where you are so you can set boundaries on the continual inflow of material you have to sift through to process. When you become overwhelmed and confused, grounding helps you center and feel more fully present and aware. It is a simple yet powerful tool for mindfulness and well-being.
The research is in about the importance of grounding for physical and emotional health.
Physically, grounding reduces inflammation, pain and stress. Emotionally, grounding has a beneficial impact on decreasing the impact of addictive behavior, anxiety, grief and depression. In both cases, grounding helps to build a sense of greater safety and trust because you are more aware of your choices and possibilities.
The following 12 grounding activities and modalities will give you a simple, yet powerful menu to use in your life for how to ground yourself to center yourself and orient yourself to be more present.
1. Go outside: In a book entitled, Earthing by Dr. Sinatra, the need for spending time on the Earth with bare feet to energize the body-mind system is explored. The book speaks of the electromagnetic connection and relationship between your body and the planet itself. The earth’s surface is negatively charged and has an unlimited supply of “free” electrons.
If your body has lots of positively charged free radicals (creating inflammation), the Earth’s free electrons can help to neutralize them.
How To: a) Get out into a grassy section of the earth and take your shoes off. b) Walk barefoot on the beach. c) Lie down on the Earth and look up at the sky. d) Sit on rocks, e) or better yet, sit in a chair for 30 minutes with your bare feet resting on the ground. Read more about earthing here: Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?
2. Diet: After a long day or week of many appointments, you might feel disoriented. Sit down
while you eat. Choose more whole and natural foods to energize and ground your energy. Eat root vegetables like potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, garlic, radishes, turnips, horseradish, Daikon radish, rutabaga, parsnips and kolrabi. Decrease sugar and caffeine.
3. Feed Your Earth Element: Earth Element on the Chinese Five Element and Meridian Wheel is about nurture, digestion and support. Eat the following foods to enrich this connection.a) Grains: Millet b) Vegetables: Sweet corn, all squash: (acorn, butternut, Hokkaido, Hubbard, spaghetti, pumpkin), shitake mushrooms, beets, carrots, onions, parsnips, rutabaga, collards, chard, artichoke, sweetpeas, and string beans c) Fruits: sweet apples, figs, cantaloupe, sweet orange, honeydew, tangelo, raisins, sweet grapes, papaya, dates, and tangerine d) Fish: salmon, tuna, swordfish, sturgeon e) Nuts: Almonds, pecans, walnuts, sesame seeds, and sunflower seeds.
4. Feed Your Earth Chakra: Eat red foods like root vegetables such as beets, rutabagas, garlic, ginger, turnips, potatoes, and parsnips. Eat red food like apples or pomegranates with the color of this chakra to feel connected to the energy of Earth Chakra. which in Ayurvedic Medicine is related to survival, stability and safety.
5. Aromatherapy: Earth Element focuses on smell and scents. Use the scents of Cedar, clove and Balsam Fir or your favorite scents to help you feel grounded and connected to the Earth.
6. Polarity Points: Work into the joints of the little toes and fingers with your opposite hand and pull from the base.
7. Get your hands, face or body into mud or clay. This will help you feel directly connected to
the Earth itself.
8. Dance, Drum or Sing: Dancing barefoot or drumming with your hands helps you to feed the energy circuits of your body-mind system. When you sing, you are treating yourself to a bath of personal sound frequency. Drumming energizes your Earth Element through joy, motion, rhythm, connection to your heart and the Earth.
9. Take a vacation from distractions: Make a space or time daily for centering and
nurturing yourself. This can be done through meditation, journaling,
walking in nature or gardening.
10. Express Gratitude: Keep a Gratitude Journal or make it a point to take inventory of that for
which you are grateful. Gratitude orients you to the present and to life-energizing support.
11. Breathe: The Buddhist Soft Belly Meditation helps to make space for you and your feelings.
Most of us breathe with only the upper third of our body. Breathing all the way down into the belly helps you to feel more embodied, and allows space for awareness, openness, compassion, and mercy for yourself in the
moment.
12. Take inventory of what needs nurture and support in your life: Get in touch through the Soft Belly Meditation with places in your life where you have felt continual fear, anxiety or felt like a victim.
Make time to listen to yourself and find someone safe with whom you can share where you will be listened to with respect and support.
Here is an opportunity to continue on the path to create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being with monthly healing modalities and repatterning events from Windows to the Heart Repatterning.
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Posted by Kimberly Rex
Medical Qi Gong under Healing Blue Skies
A few summers ago I traveled to Hollyhock Educational Center in Canada to a Medical Qi Gong class taught by Dr. Steven Aung, as part of continued training as a holistic practitioner working with the Chinese Medicine and Five Element System. The class worked indoors, on the beach, in the woods, and under the beautiful blue skies of British Columbia with focused breathing, movement, and healing exercises.
Qigong (Chi Kung) means cultivating energy, it is a system practiced for health maintenance, healing, and increasing vitality. Medical Qigong accesses wisdom from the body-mind system through the Meridian System and includes working with color, sound, breathing exercises, movement, nutrition, massage, acupuncture/acupressure, and exercises that benefit your body and mind.
There are 12 interdependent meridians within the system that when in balance create greater harmony in your life. It is important to know that each of these elements is associated with color, sound, organ system, emotion, harmonizing nutrition, scent, and movements.
Not only did we practice each of these aspects in specific sequences to cleanse, balance, and harmonize our body-mind system in detailed protocols, we also had the instruction to take nurture directly from nature as a practice for wellness and well-being. In the same way that the systems of your body are interdependent, you and nature are interdependent for health and well-being. 
Water Element Color
Blue is related to your kidneys and bladder and treats issues related to fear, feeling like a victim, or places in your life when you feel frozen, victimized, or overwhelmed.
Metal Element Color
White is related to your lungs and large intestines and supports you in feeling more inspired in your life, as well as supports you in letting go of that which no longer serves you.
Wood Element Color
Green is related to your liver and gallbladder and treats indecision and focus. When working with this color, it also supports nourishing the places in your life where you feel you have unfinished business that keeps you from feeling more optimistic.
Fire Element Color
Red is related to the heart, small intestines, Triple Heater, and Purple with Pericardium. Fire Element is associated with the aspects of love, joy, safety, trust, discernment, and belonging.
Earth Element Color
Earth Element is related to your stomach and spleen and is related to nourishment, gratitude, and support in your life. When you worry or feel a lack of nurture in your life, this is a place to work with this color.
With this in mind, I would like to share two simple activities that create grounding and nurture within to create functional balancing for health in the process.
Look Up at the Blue Sky
Notice that if you lie down on the green grass and look up, you have the opportunity to see blue and white. If you are surrounded by trees, you see green. If the sun is out, you get the spectral colors of yellow and red through your physical eyes. Look around your environment to find the all of the colors for the organ systems for greatest benefit. Spend a little time with each color. With intention, direct energy to the organ system you are viewing each time. Do this for 15 minutes watching the clouds and sending nourishment to all of your body-mind system.
Laugh to Heal Your Body-Mind System
This summer we walked in a continuous line that involved healing the person in front of us by directing chi towards their bladder points in their lower back while laughing. The specific walking pattern creates balance in the upper and lower body, as well as the left and right side while clearing residue within your body-mind system. It was literally a chain link to a link of people healing themselves and others through the healing vibraion of laughter. Imagine what this looked and sounded like!
The sounds for each meridian are as follows:
a) Your Heart: Haaaaaa
b) Triple Heater: hEEEE (primary temperatures of your body: brain, digestion, reproductive system)
c) Small Intestine: hAWWWW ( discerns what food will be used by the body for energy)
d) Stomach: wHOOO (digestion)
The sequence sounded like this: “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha; He, he, he, he, he; Haw, haw, haw, haw, haw; Who, who, who, who, who.”
Now it’s not necessary to get this complex. Finding ways to laugh can be as easy as telling a joke, hearing a joke, watching a funny movie, laughing with others, and in Resonance Repatterning® doing a modality with one other person to get a belly laugh. This modality builds bonding, heart connection as well as serving as great stress relief. My Aunt Marie used to say, “Laughing massages your liver.” She was right! A family practitioner at New Jersey’s School of Osteopathic Medicine, Dr. Marvin E. Herring, said, “The diaphragm, thorax, abdomen, heart, lungs and even the liver are given a massage during a hearty laugh.”
Other Benefits from Laughter
- The decrease in stress hormone levels
- Strengthening of the immune system
- Muscle relaxation
- Pain reduction
- Lowers blood pressure
- Creates Cardiovascular conditioning and better flow
- Natural anti-depressant
- Increases the release of endorphins
- Creates relaxation
Here’s How
Face another person. Start by slapping your knees and bending over slightly facing the other person. Say out loud: “Ha, Ha, Ha.” You may start slowly, and this will build the momentum of laughter. Use the other sounds above to get the full benefit of treating your body-mind system. You may need tissues at the end from laughing so hard!
Here is an opportunity to continue on the path with monthly healing modalities and repatterning events from Windows to the Heart Repatterning.
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