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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Finding Serenity in the Midst of Challenges and Change
Finding serenity in the midst of challenges and change, well, is challenging. Serenity is defined as the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled. In these times when challenging events continue to escalate, serenity would certainly be a welcome guest. The Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr, is well-known in 12 Step Groups for this reason. It addresses acceptance, empowerment, and faith to face each moment and day with a greater sense of balance and fortitude. This article will give you ideas about how it can benefit you, and your relationships to change your experience in the world in the midst of these challenges.
Serenity to Accept The Things You Cannot Change
Living in a world where there are overwhelming simultaneous events that signal the need for change, this prayer is especially helpful. It is as if all of the material below the surface is coming up into our view at the same time. This material begs the question: “How deeply are we able to address the muck or sewage coming up everywhere?“
In your personal life and relationships, the invitation is to look at where we are pointing our fingers. We are part of a larger collective. Our blame and anger buried into the numbness within the chaos create alienation from our needs for safety, nurture, kindness, respect, sharing, and focus. These are essentials to creating a life that is not only sustainable for ourselves but for all of us.
When you believe that you have control over everything in your life, this ironically can lead to feeling completely out of control. This can lead to sometimes carrying burdens that are not yours to carry. You cannot change other people by carrying their responsibilities or burdens in life.
In a Resonance Repatterning® session, the process works with your inner limiting beliefs, thoughts attitudes, and orientation to life. These are all influenced by your history and the underlying material. When we ask someone else to change to meet our needs, we are reliving patterns that ask for inner change. Blame is often a resonance with something within us that signals agitation or charge with the energetics of the material we dislike. In some repatterning sessions, we look at how the blame of another is a component of ourselves asking to be healed. If I believe that someone is dishonest, we look at how the charge and energy devoted to this are within us. We check for “I am dishonest.” In whatever way this energy is playing out within yourself it is projected into your field and into the world of relationships.
In fact, this dance of dishonesty between you and others might be one that has been going on for generational family patterns. Whether you have a charge around someone else being dishonest or are truly angry about the issue of dishonesty, it originates within you. How is dishonesty affecting your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations?
Here are some questions you might work with related to this topic, “ How am I being dishonest with myself? What truth am I not living? Where am I not completely ready or yet able to confront my fears or need for more truth about something?”
Accepting people where they are in their lives is a way of giving them respect and dignity. It allows you to give responsibility to others and authorship back to yourself.
Empowering Statements for Greater Serenity
- “If someone’s behavior is unacceptable to me, I cannot change it, but I change my interactions with that person.”
- “it’s no one else’s job to meet my needs. I am responsible for taking care of myself. This is a good thing because it gives my power back.”
- “It’s not my job to control other people, however, I am in control of my reaction to them.
Serenity to Change the Things You Can Control
.Feeling like you cannot change anything can stem from blaming yourself even when there is nothing you can do about a situation, or you resonate with having absolutely no control over anything in your life. This happens when you believe that you do not have the ability or power to make a difference. In other words, the situation or person has power over you. The inability to start or create can result from an unresolved traumatic experience where you are stuck in freeze mode. You might find yourself procrastinating or feel a lack of authority or power due to abuse, chronic stress, grief or overwhelm. Resentment, depression, anger, and fear over time can create a feeling of disconnection from yourself. This means that you are unable to use your body sensations, and your ability to respond to what is happening around you in a life-energizing way with self-care. This impacts your ability to pace yourself or conserve your own life energy for your own benefit.
Empowering Statements for Creating Greater Serenity
- “My past does not define me, I am always able to make decisions for how I will think and behave today, and into the future.”
- “Being perfect or having no flaws would not solve all of my problems, make everyone approve of me, or make it certain that I always get what I want.”
- “It is inevitable that not everyone is going to like, agree with or approve of me all of the time. It is more important for me to be authentic and approve of myself than it is to try to please others to earn their approval.“
Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it. ~Rabindranath Tagore
Serenity to Know the Difference
Either an excessive state of having to control everything or resonating with having no control is extreme. Being able to acknowledge these states creates a realistic way of accessing what you truly do have power over. Having unconditional love for yourself, others, and the circumstances that surround you lessens the struggle to accept life as it is in the moment even if it isn’t what you desire or even demand. This means that you can then begin to gauge what is in your sphere of influence and what is not.
Some great examples might be the following: While you cannot control the economy or politicians, you can control how you spend or save your money, and how you vote at the ballot box.
You might not be able to control another person, however, you can choose how you respond to them. You can choose to respond coherently in a way that promotes your greater peace. You have choices about how to think about the situation. You do have influence over how you feel and respond.
This also applies to your beliefs and thoughts about yourself. Shifting limiting beliefs about yourself goes a long way to transform underlying material so they can be woven into new possibilities for seeing and experiencing the world anew.
In the transformation process of creating greater serenity, some belief statements might include:
- “No matter what is happening around me or in the world, I always have a choice about what I focus on, how I judge the situation, and how I react or respond to it.”
- “No matter what happens in life, I know I am capable of finding a solution and that everything works out in the end.”
- “Sometimes life’s disappointments and challenges can lead to wonderful new possibilities that I never would have known I wanted.”
Serenity arises when you embrace the messages, lessons, and opportunities that the challenge presents to you. Getting to have choices with the material that the upheaval brings into focus is a wonderful reason to work with what feels unfamiliar, unsettling, and upsetting. It signals the potential for your readiness for substantial change in your life. By doing so, you give serenity and peace a chance!
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.
Read MorePosted by Kimberly Rex
Anger as an Invitation to Resolve the Past and Unmet Needs in the Present
When you experience frustration or anger, it is a signal that something underneath is needing to be heard. An underlying unmet need that might need acknowledging or voicing is attempting to get through to you as an invitation to resolve the past.
Anger and fear often work hand in hand. The Chinese Five Element Meridian System asks you to balance and harmonize the organs related to clearing stored toxins, particularly in your liver. Your anger also affects your vision and how you see the world. Your perceived vision of what is happening around you and within you affects how you respond or react to life.
Anger as a Signal from the Past
Anger can be the messenger for something speaking from the past you wish had resolved differently. By holding onto the emotional frequency of this wish, you literally keep yourself from ever getting the need met in the present with the life you have created as an adult.
Many times an earlier experience in childhood needs tending. The anger and frustration about what you wanted instead from a parent or guardian, can keep you from parenting yourself.
The layers of disappointment, misunderstanding, or the inability to express your need may be the very thing that continues to cloud how you are seeing the world.
For example, let’s say that one of your life needs from the past was, and still is, “I am cared for.” Many times abuse, misunderstanding, lack of conflict resolution or trauma colors the lens by which you continue to see your personal world due to the resonance with a parent or caregiver who did not protect you, hug you, play with you, listen to you, or instead ignored you.
With that said, it also allows you to then move towards acceptance in a new way. This new way creates humility in the present rather than internal conflict through still fighting with the past arrogantly (as if you could change it and get a different outcome). When you let go of this fantasy, you free up some inner “emotional real estate” to create new space for finding ways to meet your underlying needs in your life today.
Using Anger to Create New Possibility in the Present
It’s important to see that your need in the past was important. Regretting that your need was not met allows you to name the need, while you go beneath the anger to a place of grieving so that you can then start to author the underlying need for care in your life now.
When you move into a space of understanding that your need is also valid, it can become a possibility for it to be met with positive action. You can create new possibilities for getting your need heard and met in the present in your relationships, interactions, through observation and self-care.
Looking for ways to activate this awareness in your life with unconditional love for yourself and others opens the doorway to realizing what you can and cannot change. This empowers you to experience a greater sense of balance and strength knowing that you have the capacity to take care of yourself today.
Clearing the Lens of Anger
Awareness in the present is an invitation to notice, see and observe. Use your vision to look at life through the lens of the inner need. Identify where this need is not being met. Look at ways you can move into meeting this need for yourself, or where your relationships are reflecting back your instruction for next steps.
“The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is to
release the images and emotions, the grudges and fears, the
clingings and disappointments of the past that bind our
spirit.” ~Jack Kornfield
It’s an Inside Job
How would you be able to change this in your world today so that this need might be met in a way that is meaningful to you?
Ask yourself the following:
1) “Can I get this need met by creating more self-care in my daily life?” This could include eating whole foods, getting into nature, getting a good night’s rest, or building a practice of meditation, or to notice more where you have been cared for in unexpected or until now unseen ways.
2) “Where can I get this need met with others?” “Where am I not receiving this from others?” Notice how the pattern from the past plays out in your selection of relationships. Are you continuing to try to get the need met in a similar scenario where it is near to impossible to get that need met?
3) Do I resonate with receiving what is beneficial for me, and resonating with ” I am enough”and being worthy of care?
4) Do I push care away, or choose relationships that only go so far before dissolving? Notice what frustration comes up at particular times in your relationship, and how these feelings are similar to how you felt in situations from your past.
“Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.” ~Marshall Rosenberg
5) Notice where you blame, judge or dislike others that triggers and keeps your anger going.
It’s About Having More Choice
We all get angry. We all get upset. Begin to notice where and when you find yourself spiraling down into anger. It is a pivotal choice-making invitation. You can continue to react in old patterns that increase stress levels or use anger as an opportunity to move into new emotional territory. Take a pause, and give yourself some time with your feelings underneath. Through mindfulness, you can begin by looking at your choices in what you are creating with your life energy. You can begin to choose what is more loving and supportive of your life. This becomes a vital force in creating positive change. By doing so, you plant new seeds for growth and nurture.
Detoxification of the body-mind system is more than just physical. If you have ever done a detox, you realize that emotions come up like anger, frustration, grief, tears, etc. stored in your organs. Healing both your liver (anger) and kidneys (fear) are essential for experiencing new possibilities towards getting your needs met in a more productive way.
Resonance Repatterning® sessions build the bridge within your body-mind system so you can experience wellness and well-being by creating more harmony and balance where you need it specifically. Personal Repattern Your Life© sessions with Kimberly Rex, MS sessions are a great opportunity to detox holistically so that you have greater choice for dedicating your life energy to your positive intentions. To register for a session, register with this link: https://www.windowstotheheart.net/sessions/
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