Posted by Kimberly Rex
Working with the Origins of Pain
Working with the origins of pain takes on many paths. Physical issues are usually associated with pain. it is often defined as a discomfort. However, different forms of pain can change how you view and experience life. It can be embodied in your thoughts, feelings and beliefs about how this pain impacts your ability to meet life. It is also the discontent that creates suffering for the inability to return to the life you had before the trauma, accident or illness occurred.
In some cases, these negative perceptions and limitations expand into proliferation of pain into long- term suffering. The inability to acknowledge what is happening leads to difficulties in processing the need for change to adapt to the life you are presented in current challenges.
The Origins of Personal Pain
Suffering can also be traced to generational patterns. Recently, I read the book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and saw the movie based on the story of the author’s journey in writing the book.. In an interview about the film, the actor who portrayed the author of the book Caste, was asked how she could dive into the grief and pain she worked with in her part, reponded that she carried the generational grief of her ancestors who suffered at the hands of slavery.
There are many stories of people who through acknowledging the truth of a challenging situtation they were experiencing,were then able to use that experience to catapult them into a greater sense of meaning in life. This process included honoring the truth, sharing that knowledge with compassion to others as an instrument of personal and community transformation.
As an example, In the film, Origin, the author experiences three major losses in her life within a 6-month time frame including her husband, her mother and closest friend who was her cousin. The places where you experience emotional pain from loss feels like a separation from love, support and connection, and this can proliferate long-term suffering that limits your access to life.
Too much or too little resistance affects how you approach life. Avoiding pain amplifies suffering by way of intensifying excess immobilized energy within your system. Although your system might perceive this protective mechanism as a way to survive, energetically this interrupts or diconnects you from the pathways toward acceptance, decision-making, and new possibilties. It creates a ripple effect that changes and de-energizes your body-mind-spirit system. Depression, anxiety, guilt and confusion decrease your ability to emerge from suffering without the energy and motivation to move towards what is life-enhancing.
The acceptance on the author’s part in the film came when she realized that she no longer had the words and encougagement from her loved ones who motivated her to write the book, Caste, so she would have to accept the truth to commit to encouraging and motivating herself.
With acceptance comes the ability to choose your response to a painful situation at hand. :Acceptance allows you to see what is happening with greater clarity, to see not only where you are in the picture, but the bigger picture as well. Acceptance offers you the option of considering all of the possible pathways through inner guidance.This, then allows you to consider what aligns you with what is most beneficial, energizing and life-enhancing in the given circumstances, and to choose a path with discernment, self-care, with compassion for yourself and others with your true values.
“Looking beneath the history of one’s country is like learning that alcoholism or depression runs in one’s family or that suicide has occurred more often than might be usual or, with the advances of medical genetics, discovering that one has inherited the markers of BRCA mutation for breast cancer. You don’t ball up in the corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t if you’re wise, forbid any mention of them. In fact you do the opposite. You educate yourself.”
~Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
The Origins of Collective Pain
The book and film address the origin of caste systems that regulate hierarchy and racisim across the planet, and addresses the material as both a place that separates us from ourselves and each other across the world.The research for her book led her to rely on the examples from history still existing in the world today. She sought out stories of people who rebelled against opression and shined a light on the truth of heirarchy and oppression from the past histories of slavery in the United States, the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust and the Caste System of India.. She studied researchers and leaders deemed the “lowest caste”who nevertheless stood up to advocate for freedom, social justice and human rights.
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”~Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Many people today still carry the burden of patterns from the past. According to Family Systems, 80% of our family material is unconscious.We see this when groups of people still live out historical separations whether this be religious, racial, social status, money or resource-based, gender, language, territory, age, etc.
The collective pain that continues to show up today shows up in war, the response to climate change, the pandemic and mass refugee and immigration issues. The victim-perpetrator cycle is the reflection of personal and global pain that have not yet been healed.
Each one of us has a story that includes pain. Where there has been loss, grief, fear, physical injury, abuse, trauma or unresolved hurt there is a message that needs to experience the truth. This happens with the acknowledgement of unmet life needs and meaning for you today from the injury that created separation from all of the parts of yourself, or blocked your connection to others whether it originated in your own life or those of your ancestors.
Using Origins of Pain to Create New Pathways
‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedom~to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’ ~Viktor E.Frankl
It is a personal journey. Willingness is a factor that contributes to your thinking, feeling, and beliefs about what you are facing. Taking care of yourself is primary when you want to move in a new direction. This is based on a point of choice for the journey with checkpoints that remind you of your positive intentions based on new possibilities. Motivation follows as you experience greater awareness. This creates hope paired with any positive actions. as you choose your own way.
It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.~Isabel Wilkerson
Resonance Repatterning® works with personal and generational pain related to trauma stored within from your life as well as lifetimes of victim-perpetrator cycles. Sessions identify origins of pain in your unconscious material. Working with personal and generational patterns creates restoration of optimal life energy flow within your physical, emotional, mental and spirit parts.
This allows you to create a new vision for your own life with greater coherence, author-ship and life enhancing patterns to end the victim-perpetrator cycles. With freed energy available, this empowers your ability to live and communicate your truth in action. As a result, seeing and reclaiming more of your Self, you are better able to see others more fully with greater compassion and understanding. This empowers the possibility for postive personal and collective change in healing the origins of pain.
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, by phone, in-person, and by 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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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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Being in Transition
Being in transition can change your past, present, and future. We live as though everything has a logical sequential process. However, when the number of transitions you experience escalates, this can change how you deal with the steps you take, the amount of time to complete a process, and your ability to integrate change.
The rate of change in our lives has accelerated especially in recent years with the rise of technology and the impact of the global issues created by the pandemic, climate change, and financial instability. In the midst of all of this change, it is important to acknowledge that you are affected by both personal and collective levels. The increasing number of transitions you experience at once translates into the need for a more non-linear way of looking at what is happening to you.
Being in Transition as a Way of Life
The number of transitions that you go through has both linear and non-linear characteristics. According to Bruce Feiler, this acceleration of change in our lives is intensified by the chaos and complexity of daily living. Research shows an average of 3-5 life changes every 5 years cumulatively taking up half of your adult life.
These life disruptors include the changes and transitions you experience in your relationships, work, sense of identity, body image, as well as your money. Extreme life changes might include the loss or change in home, of friends and family, or your job. Illness, self-esteem, traumatic events, energy levels, moving from one place to another, or change in your energy levels due to the stress that life changes have caused. This all can contribute to an overall feeling of loss of stability, safety, trust, or security.
While some transitions are more extreme than others, the tools of the linear world might not feel as productive as expected. The mechanics of the logical linear world applied to starting, pacing yourself, pausing, giving up, or even starting over again might need more time for being with the process as it unfolds than for a recipe or formula. As the world continues to feel like a tossed salad, it’s important to acknowledge that you have a home within yourself that can be nourished by giving yourself the room to be in transition so you can take in the depth of the multi-linear and non-linear transitions you are experiencing personally and we are all experiencing together.
Being in Transition in a Changing World
The way you look at your own life is also translated into how you see the world. So what power do you have with all of this change happening all at once? The important news is that within you is a well of strength that has gone through challenges in the past. These parts are available to you now. Allowing the parts of your life experience that are stuck or confused to get to know the other parts of yourself that have met challenges successfully can create an empowering give-and-take to support you in the present.
Acknowledging your current emotions to meet the current challenges and transition expectations then become non-linear. It is the strength and compassion you have acquired over time that the earlier parts of yourself that still carry limiting beliefs, attitudes, and concepts of time that need to become more acquainted. This creates the space so that the essence of your life experience in your body-mind-spirit system can integrate with the greater parts of yourself as a resource for positive change. This means that fear, sadness, shame, anger, loneliness, hurt, guilt, anger, confusion, and hurt can point to your real need for self-care for what you are meeting in the world today.
In the process of change, Bruce Feiler speaks to three parts of working with transition in a way that moves, redirects, and changes order: a) The Long Goodbye b) The Messy Middle and c) the New Beginning. He suggests starting with your strength whether it be an attempt to try something new, staying in the moment with the messages and emotions you are experiencing; or working with the steps of grieving in no particular order or time in an attempt to work with what emerges or works best for you. This acknowledges the non-linear nature of true change over time. You are accompanied by the thought and feelings of each of these parts while at the same time responding to daily tasks. When you honor your inner value and truth, the pace of life you experience is more authentically tied to your needs in your personal process.
Being Transition with What You Value
No matter where you begin, it can be a time to start to value more what you know you love about yourself and take the support you need in the transition process. It can also be a time to seek out mentors and friends who can share the process.
It is essential to nourish your vital being and essence in the process of change. This could be creating through dance, art, writing, baking, ritual, or pacing yourself, while also learning new behaviors and habits. It is time to ask yourself these questions. “What do I need to let go of, learn, or move toward to create the space for speaking and living my values in my communication and actions in this transition? What can this life trauma, or lesson teach me about what I would like to create with new possibilities?“
When the best timing for integration emerges, begin to see that you are not slamming the door on the past or throwing it away. You are, like nature, using the compost of life to begin a new chapter. Take the messages and the soul weight that has been created by your journey, and use it for new possibilities.
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 in times of trauma, change, and transition. 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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Fall is a Good Time to Show Your True Colors
Fall is a good time to show your true colors. Like the leaves in fall that lose their green due to the reduction of chlorophyll in their fibers from a reduction of sunlight, they begin to show their true underlying colors of red, orange, and yellows in every shade. It is an invitation for you to look inward to your true value. It is also a good time to look at what you can no longer tolerate. This comes from the pairing of inspiration and letting go to allow your true colors to shine through.
Metal Element becomes prominent in the season of fall. As with any transition, the changes you experience in this season vary from changes in the amount of sunlight you experience daily, to cooler temperatures, and changes in your activity levels.
In this season, plants put their energy into their roots while letting go of the past season to set new leaf buds for a new season with renewed light. So it takes grounding to activate potential with the correct resources and time. Letting go of what no longer serves your life as the trees do as fall progresses points to the message that balance and harmony within means releasing what no longer benefits your life while also creating new ways of preparing for new possibilities.
Taking Inventory of Your True Colors
It is time to look at what keeps you grounded and rooted, and consider what keeps you stuck in a mode of not expressing your truth in your values and communication. So it is a good time to ask yourself, “How do I put myself down or diminish myself?”
Criticism can keep you from taking action whether it be toward another person or within yourself. Looking at where you stand in the victim stance that reflects a lack of self-worth, or expecting yourself or another to be perfect can keep you in a place that creates behaviors that interfere with your ability to know that you are learning and a work in progress. Fall can be a time to take inventory and take an insight into creating positive self-talk and building a growth mindset.
Anxiety, anger, shame, or guilt can keep you from staying with a growth mindset. Sometimes locked in traumatic experiences where you did not have the support or resources from others to transform abuse can still have an influence on how you experience the world today.
This shows up in your adult relationships where triggers and patterns in relationships mimic the earlier traumatic experiences out of vulnerability and lack of experience with access to positive resources in the present for resolving or transforming the trauma experience from the past. However, resonating with inner resources within parts of yourself that stay present to your inner needs with care and compassion allows you to consider new possibilities.
Letting Go to Show Your True Colors
Letting go related to grief is the prominent non-coherent emotion to work with related to the Metal Element and Fall. On the physical level, grief can be registered from past losses. Your energy can be depleted in your lungs and show up as respiratory congestion and difficulties with letting go in the large intestines with constipation. So it is a good time to ask yourself, “What is my purpose in life?” and, “How can I connect to my purpose spiritually or in the world?”
Grief can keep you facing away from life and the inner value of the meaning from your loss to transform into love and compassion for your ability to face life again by taking the roots, love, and lessons from your experience to create the energy of love within to set buds for life with the wisdom and heart to take forward when you are ready. In this way, you can find light in the journey through the darkness.
Sessions that Focus on Your True Colors
This is your personal invitation to root yourself, find the value in your life, and set your buds for new possibilities. Give yourself the gift of inspiration for new possibilities for either a Living On Purpose or Letting Go for Good Repatterning with these links.
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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3 Primary Energies of Life
There are 3 primary energies of life that consistently show up in nature, your relationships, your body, your business, as well as your wellness and wellbeing. These energies are related to creation, sustenance, and completion. Let’s look at an example from nature to begin. If you observe a wave in the ocean, you will see this process in action. The wave starts in the large body of water and builds energy from the ocean itself with a force that moves by raising energy to create a waveform with forwarding motion. The energy is sustained until it crests. It completes when it finally curves back into the water from which it arose. In each stage, energy is activated to begin, sustain the forward movement, and then resolve or complete the process.
These energies also show up in transitions and are prominent in seasonal change. Being aligned with these primary energies allows you to be in sync with the natural flow within the changes that are happening within and around you.
1. The Energies of Creation
These 3 primary energies of life show up in any project, creative endeavor, relationship, life cycle, or inner systemic function. This means that fundamental processes like breathing include all of these aspects. You inhale oxygen to create the stage of breathing. When you breathe fully, this sustains your life by energizing your body-mind system, and when you exhale, the cycle completes by letting go and releasing CO2 in one breathing cycle.
In your life, creation arises with energy for a sense of purpose that requires both intention and foresight to take form. Whether it be the birth of an idea, child, relationship, or business, the process of starting takes energy. Every beginning emerges from the field of new possibilities with your thoughts, the meaning and importance you give to your creations, and your awareness in setting your destination for new possibilities.
In each moment, what we choose to say and do plants the seed of our future.”~Tara Brach
2. The Energies of Sustaining
Sustenance involves both motivation and being on board with moving inertia into action. In the process, momentum is created by the energies of support and nurture for the journey. This gives life and creates growth that allows movement based on prioritizing, timing, and pacing of your energy for the journey. Motivation and momentum come from the life energy you give to both your short and long-term goals, milestones with rites of passage, and celebrations.
“Life comes at us in waves. We can’t predict or control those waves, but we can learn to surf.”~Dan Millman
Being present with your WHY and being present with what sustains you makes a difference in sustaining your life energy. This prioritizing and asking for help is part of the process. Letting go of what does not serve your process, and taking nurture is essential to your planning. Creating ways to bring happiness and joy into your life throughout your time and action investments builds your capacity to continue forward. This means that finding happiness within the process itself enhances your ability to keep going.
“Faith is the courage to live your life as if everything that happens does so for your highest good and learning. Like it or not.”~Dan Millman
3. The Energies of Completions
The road to success is not always a straight line. In your movement from intention to your goals, sometimes obstacles, challenges, and interruptions show up on the road. How you meet this resistance to moving forward, can either cause you to give up, or to learn from your experience. This invites discernment and decision-making. It also requires energy to take the meaning of what is happening within to find a resolution.
Whether it be an interruption of your plans, a loss, death, grief, or a change in what you planned, it takes energy to process and integrate inner growth and transformation. This can create a need to stop and reconsider your choices, slow you down, or manifest as procrastination in completing your work.
Knowing that the 3 energies of life are embodied in the beginning, sustaining, and completion allows you to resonate with the potential for light at the end of the tunnel. Creating sacred space for your body, mind, and spirit, you can take the benefits from listening to the messages from your experience. Your awareness and commitment to your growth and transformation allow stepping stones to emerge from insight from meeting challenges that change your perception of life. This can then be applied to your experience in a way that allows you to have the energy to complete or resolve your efforts with the lessons you gained along the way.
“Faith is the courage to live your life as if everything that happens does so for your highest good and learning. Like it or not.” ~Dan Millman
Completions can be like turning a page, completing a chapter, or starting a completely new book. The horizon you look at in the entire process is like a wave rising, cascading, and then resolving back into the water from which it is made.
The energy needed in each part of the process of life becomes the force that benefits your awareness, action, inspiration, and resolution. Every completion or end returns to the field of infinite possibilities. In essence, it is how you ride the wave of your feelings, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs about yourself and the world around you that influence and affect the process of choice and change internally.
Feeling stuck in one of the 3 primary energies of life? Resonance Repatterning® sessions work with these energies collectively and individually to restore, support, and nurture the energy circuits of your body-mind-spirit system. This benefits your ability to optimize new awareness, inspire ideas, make connections and take coherent actions. Creating greater harmony and balance allows you to go with the flow while resolving what is taking place in your process so you can align with your intentions for your life related to what is positive for your growth and transformation.
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 with sessions that create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
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