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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Posted by Kimberly Rex

How to Access Clarity from Your Life

Finding clarity about your feelings, thoughts, attitudes, and choices takes time. When you feel overwhelmed by the input or expectations of others, it can be difficult to listen to yourself to make a decision, know where to turn, have a sense of timing, or trust the validity of your choices. This is where accessing clarity from your past can apply to your present life, and give greater clarity for creating your future.

The Clarity in Accessing the Past

Your beliefs, thoughts, and attitude about life are related to each other. When your family system is passed on through the generations as well as your early life experiences contribute to the habits, addictions, choices, and physical responses. The body-mind-spirit system is just that, a system that responds to behaviors, input, environment, lifestyle choices, diet, sleep and detoxification, stress levels, unprocessed trauma within your system, and emotion.

This means that evaluating your past in regard to these areas can create clarity about how and why you respond to life today.

Gabor Mate, in his talk on the 7 Impacts of Trauma speaks to the following attributes that contribute to a) being separated from your gut feelings, b) feeling disconnected from others: c) addiction, isolation, and distrust, d) impacts on how you see the world, e) lifelong pain until you deal with it, f) brain development and self-regulation, g) shame, h) and difficulty with being in the present moment. His book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture is a wonderful resource for the compassionate understanding of the individual, familial, and collective impacts of trauma.

Your interactions with others and how you see the world contribute to how your system responds or reacts. This can show up by taking on the characteristics of the victim, helplessness, being the rescuer, savior, or perpetrator. Uncovering the roots of these roles that likely evolved over time as survival mechanisms can point to how you are interacting today in either life-enhancing or depleting ways based on how you are interpreting your experience now.

The Clarity in Knowing Where You are in the Present

Being in the present means that you are aware of your inner world connected to your body signals, persistent emotions, and physical responses. This allows you to perceive where you are in your center with greater clarity as you are experiencing the environment around you. This, allows you to have greater clarity about how you are affected by your environment and this gives you feedback about that input.

You can only be aware of what is going on around you or with others to the degree that you have the ability to access that awareness within yourself. Like a computer programmed with software to recognize and choose a response, what you make conscious within your body-mind-spirit systems benefits your ability to consider more options overdriven or automatic adaptive hard-wired conditioning from the past. Returning to neutral gives you the ability to connect to a more educated view of what is happening to you now to bring greater clarity to your life right

Inner conflict, negative behavior and attitudes, addictions, and feeling like there is no space for your truth arise from past experiences. When the unconscious material from your negative early experiences is given attention and time to practice positive self-regulation this allows your system to relax, breathe, and take time to process what is happening. From this place, you have the benefit of setting boundaries while expanding your potential for life-energizing experiences. This then creates the opportunity to truly acknowledge your individual needs and experience greater clarity in decision-making.

The Clarity Considering the Future

Clarity can create positive changes in your diet, lifestyle-related to sleep, exercise, stress reduction habits, and environment. Self-care creates the capacity to experience greater clarity based on trusting yourself, and the signals around you, as you are more connected to your feelings, body sensations, and needs. Accessing your inner nature allows you to discern how to be authentic in the world around you. When you look at how the separation between your inner essence and outer image has impacted your wellness and well-being.

Each time you consider the depth of who you truly are, you can bring back more and more of your essential being connected to all of the parts of yourself. Having clarity about how to build the bridge to bringing what is alive in you can be in subtle or big ways. Becoming more loving of yourself allows you to create what is beneficial for creating respect for yourself and others. In this way, you are able to bring clarity to your life, and direction, through your positive intentions and choices.

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 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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Posted by Kimberly Rex

How Emotions Inform Your Life for Wellness and Well-being

Emotions inform your life for wellness and well-being. When your body-mind system perceives stress, it can respond with or without tension. This is based on the learning you received in early childhood related to attachment, safe expression of feelings such as anger, grief, joy or frustration.

You respond to life based on how you experienced what was happening to your parents or between your parents. An infant or small child pick up when their parent is stressed or unable to be emotionally present. When this happens, the small child learns how to repress basic needs to compensate for the need to attach through inhibiting or stopping the expression of emotions to not lose that bonding.

Abuse or neglect in families can show up as physical, emotional mental or even at the spirit level. If your parents were unable to give you the nourishment you needed to feel loved, or were unable to witness you and acknowledge your emotions to support your emotional development, this impacts how you create relationships and respond as you go through life.

Your survival and emotional brains continue to influence your behavior responses today. The template of your earlier experiences and family system rules about acceptable emotional response creates unconscious patterns for attempting to get your basic needs met in your relationships with others.

According to Dr. Gabor Mate, stressful childhood conditioning creates confusion about boundaries that can result in the inability to engage in healthy fight or flight responses. This repression of the ability to be assertive leads to a state of helplessness.

The imbalance and confusion within your body-mind system can lead to a belief that it is more important to meet the needs of others than take care of yourself based on your stressful early childhood relationships.

When your body-mind is imprinted with unconscious limiting beliefs, attitudes and thought patterns, this leads to relationships and body responses that represent unmet life or spirit level needs.

When your emotions are repressed, you are unable to work with them to inform you about what is happening within your body, or you lose your ability to discern situations and relationships that are depleting or toxic to your emotional well-being. It is then, also, that your immune system has more difficulty discerning what is self and what is not-self to create healthy boundaries.

Emotions are a vital part of your PNI (Psychoendoneuroimmunological) System which includes the connections between your emotional, nervous, immune and hormonal mechanisms. This means that the impact of stress on your emotions relates directly to your nervous system, hormonal and immune response affecting your health and sense of well-being. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology

What you experience emotionally influences your neurotransmitter, hormonal and immune system responses. Repressed emotions can have a negative impact on overreaction or depletion of healthy internal systemic responses. Over time this can lead to the destruction of internal resources to effectively deal with immunity, vital energy levels, and health.

Mental tensions, frustrations, insecurity, aimlessness are among the most damaging stressors, and psychosomatic studies have shown how often they cause migraine headaches, peptic ulcers, heart attacks, hypertension, mental disease, suicide, or hopeless unhappiness. ~Hans Selye

Disorder in your body-mind system results over time with an inability to discern true feelings, danger, or personal needs leading to exhaustion, depression, addiction, disease, and self-destructiveness.

Emotions inform your life and response to it. It is what you do with the information that emotions offer you that creates an opportunity for essential insight, expression and life-enhancing body-mind system response. Accessing your emotions through your body wisdom is a vital skill for creating greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.

According to psychologist Ross Buck, there are three levels of emotional response. This is how your body-mind system signals and reacts to what is happening to you and around you to resolve stress. By tuning in to what is happening inside, what you observe your body is doing, and what feelings you are experiencing, you can begin to build the foundation for conscious self-care.

1. Notice physiological changes in your body including your heart rate, breathing patterns and blood pressure. When your body experiences emotional stress, the muscles in your eyes contract, your stomach can become irritated and your muscles tighten for “fight or flight.” Notice where you feel the tension in your body, and where you feel numb. These signals can guide you to acknowledge your stress. It is an invitation to work with stressful situations or to explore healthy self-care.
2. Observe body language to feel and express emotions through gestures, facial expressions, mannerisms, and posture. Your body-mind system responds in this powerful way when interacting and bonding with others. The expression on a person’s face or the way your body is held can give you an enormous amount of sensed information. If you are not sensing what is happening in your own body, it becomes difficult to feel and read other people and life situations. Make time to tune in to how your body is letting you know how you are holding your self together, protecting, expressing or showing you where you stand.
3. Identify your subjective awareness. Tuning in to how you feel is key to creating a connection between your emotions and your body’s response. Do you feel angry, happy, sad, frustrated, hurt, tired, hungry, lonely, or scared? This allows you to draw upon what your body-mind system is telling you about your experience now. It creates the possibility to work with and respond to the need for authentic self-care. If you notice that you experience the same kind of emotional stress over and over, it is pointing to an unmet need or systemic root that deserves your time and awareness.

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 authorship 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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