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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What is the Unspoken Voice of Your Body?
What is the unspoken voice of your body? This is the question Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. explores and answers in his seminal book with the title, In an Unspoken Voice. Your body stores and knows the terrain of your past experiences. It is from this history, whether pre-or post-verbal that you are facing the world today. As a practice of truly listening to the voice and language of your body, you can experience new awareness to bridge the connection between body and mind. Becoming familiar with the vocabulary of the body can give you clues as to how to monitor and potentially change outcomes where you have felt disconnected from the intelligence within and to learn to trust what you are experiencing to create positive change.
Accessing the Unspoken Voice of Your Body with SIBAM
Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. in his book, In an Unspoken Voice goes into more detail about working with self and others that paint the picture of this process of identifying what your body-mind-spirit system is reporting based on your somatic experience. SIBAM is a way to bring awareness to the channels of communication your body-mind system is offering you at any moment.
Sensation Channel
These are physical sensations that arise from within your body. This includes the tension or relaxation of your muscles. These sensations are stored in your joints, in the position of your body in space as well as in the velocity or speed of your movement. Additionally, this includes your visceral sensations including your gastrointestinal function as well as your blood vessel condition related to circulation. Your gut (enteric brain) actually sends 9x more information to the brain than the “upstairs brain” sends to the organs of your body. Your gastrointestinal system is also responsible for 95% of the serotonin production to create more calm, flexibility, and a sense of peace.
All of this feedback gives you a report on how stressed, anxious, relaxed, frightened, energized, or de-energized you might be right now. Even the absence of sensation can give you feedback about what you are not experiencing, or what you are attempting to avoid.
Image Channel
This channel accesses all of your senses creating responses to the external environment you experience, and this gets translated into your sensory memory. The overall stimuli of color, movement, sound, taste, smell, and touch transfer information that gets interpreted through the lens of your perception and body-mind system. For example, the quality of light entering your eyes is impacted by frustration, fear, grief, jealousy, unfriendliness, or competitiveness. This can create tension and have an impact on your vision when your ciliary muscles, your iris, or the six extrinsic eye muscles are overstressed or distorted. Sensory input not only affects how you connect to yourself but also to others,
Behavior Channel
Your body gestures, facial expressions, and body posture report on your intrinsic movement from within. This can translate into holding yourself in a fight-flight-freeze or collapse posture. Your behavior can also be observed through the quality of your breath cycles, heart rate, and the muscle lining of the blood vessels. Flushed skin can report embarrassment, shame, and even rage.
The pupil of your eyes reflects your state of being in the moment. When the pupil is wide open this gives a report on your arousal state and activity in your Sympathetic Nervous System wired for action. When your pupil is small this can give feedback on vulnerability, or even dissociation.
The position you take with your body when you are alone or with others can give feedback from archetypal postures. For example, pushing away, pulling toward, expanding, or collapsing your chest and shoulders, the position of your neck, standing or sitting in open or closed positions, and movement of arms, hands, and legs give feedback from the somatic perspective.
“Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim within the energies of the (body) senses.” ~Tathang Tulka
Affect Channel
Your emotions give you feedback on your experience somewhere on the spectrum of this feels “good”, this feels “bad” comfortable, or uncomfortable. Feelings of joy, anger, disgust, sadness, or fear are all windows to what is alive in you right now. Becoming aware of your feelings allows you to register trigger moments, as well as the experience of pleasure, beauty, and return to calm.
Meaning Channel
The meaning you give to what is alive in you right now determines how you face the world. The attitude you have about yourself and others become labels that determine your experience. Your attitudes and beliefs are influenced by your life experiences over time. Premature cognition, as Peter Levine describes, is an embedded imprint arising from past trauma and early negative conditioning at a time when your body-mind system did not have the opportunity to complete a necessary recovery process. When a sensory or memory imprint is not resolved or released, the trauma body becomes the conductor in identifying the meaning your give to your experience in life.
Putting the Unspoken Voice of Your Body Together
Putting this all together: If you had a traumatic experience in your life related to an accident or verbal abuse, for example, your body-mind system might still be registering this information in the present even though the threatening event has passed. This happens based on your earlier experience, If you believe that the world is dangerous, or that you are powerless. You might hold yourself in a different way than you would if you believed that the world is safe and you have the power to initiate the optimal movement toward or away from the direction you choose in your life. Your eyes might be wide in expression or you might look down when you speak with another person. Your shoulders might be held tightly or curved toward your chest. You might feel more rigidity in your muscles and your breathing pattern might be shallow or held in response to how you interact in triggering social or environmental situations. In response, your gut might feel knotted, and you might feel nauseous. All at the same time, you feel anxious or fearful, and your hands feel clammy or cold.
These detectors are indicators of your state of mind through your body’s voice, and it is good to become more familiar with your body’s vocabulary. Issues can arise over time when chronic stress, immobilization, fear, depression, and fight-or-flight patterns become the norm. The over-activation of your Vagus Nerve and Sympathetic Nervous System over a long period of time can lead to illness, depression, and loss of energy for your positive intentions for life.
When you acknowledge what is happening within you it is then that you have greater access to the point of choice. Changing any of these patterns: breathing, posture, movement, attitude, beliefs, facial expressions, pace, etc. can create windows to new possibilities for inner change.
Resonance Repatterning®sessions work with all of these somatic channels within the process. Resonance Muscle-Checking gives direct and particular feedback response on the physical, emotional, mental, and spirit (core essence) levels. This method accesses every muscle, tissue, organ, and gland in the body. This is done with the language your body truly understands: color, light, sound, movement, breath, aromatherapy, consciousness science, and energetic contact. And, as illustrated in the SIBAM Model, the mind goes hand and hand with what is happening in the body reflected in limiting beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions. This awareness builds the pathway for letting go of limiting patterns in your 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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