Posted by Kimberly Rex

Using Stress to Transform Your Life

We all experience stress daily. Using stress to transform your life can shift the flow of thoughts that run through your mind. With intention and attention, you can use stress to benefit your experience of peace and well-being.

Major evnts related to concerning health diagnosis, losing a job, not getting a promotion, losing a loved one, a relationship breakup, or unexpected news or change that impacts your life can take a great deal of your energy and time to process.

Ongoing stressful thoughts can lead to greater anxiety, anger, worry, rumination, and fear. Cycling into these territories can be overwhelming when you do not feel that there is an end in sight. And this can disconnect you from your ability to see the big picture, problem-solve or to take action for your wellness and well-being.

Is Stress Moving Toward or Away from Life?

Distress tolerance is your ability to manage actual or perceived emotional distress. The aim and intention in these situations are to choose your response or reaction to this distress.

This begins with creating a conscious practice of asking yourself if your negative thought patterns move you away from life-enhancing patterns that allow you to face life or away from life through avoidance? And, do you want to change this pattern?

Examples of contrast might be the following:

• Spending time with people who give you positive energy or those who bring you down
• Forgiveness or feeding resentments within
• Self-love through creating boundaries with your words and actions or avoiding living your values in action
• Spending time in nature and appreciating beauty with gratitude or blaming yourself and others for what is happening
• Admiring your positive qualities and those of others or comparing yourself to others

“When we are no longer able to change a situation~we are challenged to change ourselves.”~Viktor Frankl

Using Stress to Make Coherent Choices

Changing your inner self-talk and dialogue about what is happening starts with intention and attention. When negative thoughts about the past or future become invasive, it is a choice to either stay with the habitual negative thought, body and feeling pattern, or to become aware of their impact on how you are feeling and how this affects you.

“It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it.”~ Hans Selye

Once you make it a habit to change the ongoing pattern of cycling negative thoughts, your body, and emotions will have the opportunity to shift. This conscious choice allows for new possibilities in your wellness and well-being, even if this is for a short time.

Using Stress to Build New Pathways

Creating new pathways takes practice. This means that both your intention and attention are needed. What if you could take control of your thoughts by using using these questions to your advantage? Here are two actiities that you can put easily in place.

• Establish a daily routine of checking in with yourself. This can be done at the beginning of the day, and also be used throughout the day. Setting up specific times of the day to check in with yourself either by schedule or using sticky notes in prominent places you can tune into what your body and mind are processing at eny given time. This creates a conscious noticing of what is going on within. You can use this as a barometer during the day, and then get a reading on how your thoughts are influencing how your mood, energy and focus are responding to life.

• When you find yourself cycling into worry, anxiety, fear or depression, take a few moments to get in touch with what is happening. A simple way to start the process is to ask yourself three questions. “What am I thinking right now?”“What am I feeling right now?” and “Do I want to continue with these thoughts?” Becoming the observer of your current state of being you are better able to navigate what comes next in your life with greater options.

• Chinese Medicine speaks to the importance of keeping your energy flow in harmony and balance for your health and well-being. The suggestion is to pay attention to your emotions when they come up.but to also limit the effects of the negative state. By first working with the (3) questions, and then taking action with a mindfulness activity, you are able to use stress to change your life.

The opportunity to create a shift in perception with mindfulness activities such as a short meditation or breathing practic, journaling, yoga, Qigong, gratitude, looking out the window at a tree or flower, walking in nature, experiencing beauty and good nurture, listening to an inspirational talk, reading, or soothing music. These are “supplements for your body and mind”, and they can energize, reset and tonify your body-mind system.

“No mud, no lotus.”~Thich Nhat Hanh

Mindfulness practices allow you to tap into the energetics of awe, beauty, and pleasure that expand your awareness and diminish your stress. When you resonate with choosing what you will focus on you become the author of you own life and in the short term allows you to lower your stress while building new responses in your body-mind sytem over time.

Once you have answered these questions, chosen a mindful activity to change your internal landscape, your enhance your ability to access your conscious mind with a greater access to critical thinking, and decision-making. This allows you to consider a responsive action based on expanded and focused vision so you can then choose to focus your time and energy on the task at hand, brainstorming, problem-solving, setting boundaries, getting support and planning that will benefit your wellness and well-being.

Resonance Repatterning® Sessions are based on working with your ability to repattern your body-mind-spirit system. This means that the distress you experience on any level can be an opportunity for creating new possibilities 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, by phone, 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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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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