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.
Read MorePosted 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.
Read MorePosted by Kimberly Rex
Creating Coherence in Your Relationships
Creating coherence in relationships from the Resonance Repatterning perspective involves working with consciousness science. Sessions addresses different aspects of your life from interactions wih aquaintances, family, friends and intimate relationships. The quality of your experience is regulated by your beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts you hold at both the conscious and unconscious levels. This contributes to your perception, choices, reactions and actions over time.
Resonance Repatterning® works to increase the quality and coherence of your responses and actions with all types of relationship you encounter in your life. In the Energetics of Relationship collection of repatterning processes it is possible to work with charged issues you experience with a aquaintence or colleague. You can address challenging situtations you experience with a physical, emotional, mental friendship, or even with a spiritual or therapeutic relationship.
Your family relationships can be considered in your mothering, fathering, and child interactions, It is a beneficial process for working with couples in sexual and commited relationships. By working with birth, early attachment and family patterns, a session can identify any bonding or separation negative experiences that cast a shadow over your current relationships. It is by working in the present and with the patterns of your lifetime relationships that you can step into a new way of being in relationship as you free yourself from the pain of abandonment, disloyaliy, abuse, grief, fear or resentment.
Consciousness Science and Relationships
Creating coherence in your relationships in Resonance Repatterning is based on consciousness science. On source of the repatterning process is based on the Gottman’s research of relationship and family interactions over many decades. They found that five positive interactions for every one challenging interaction created the greatest success and longevity in relationships. This means five interactions with relaxing, constructive, loving, laughter-filled, eye-gazing, fun, touching and happy interactions balance out every one challenging, bond-threatening, irritating, or frustrating interaction.
It is not the conflict as much as how you resolve conflict that matters in this formula. It is how each person creates greater personal and relationship coherence. This can happen by taking a pause, giving yourself time and space to be better able to get in touch with what is happening within you, to identify your triggers, unmet needs, and to identify what action or communication is needed. .During this time you get in touch with the charged issue that is within you. This can lead to both personal and relationship understanding, mutual growth, and contribute to the vision for your relationship with love.
With the process of Resonance Repatterning, it is possible to transform inner conflict by taking a look at your primary conflict resolution style, and to identify where you feel you are not speaking your truth, or not living your truth in action. Working with the resistance with any type of interaction you are experiencing allows you to identify your values, take a look at your intentions, and realign with your true self.
The Discovery Process with Relationships
By creating coherence in your communication you can experience greater capacity for making positive change. Knowing more about yourself can also give clues as to how your partner, friend or colleague reacts or responds to you in conversation and this would allow you to better understand their responses.
You can discover what your true values are for relationships, as well as how to apply your values to bonding and self-care that work best for you. People who have experienced difficult relationships in the past might still be triggered by them in the present. In these cases, it is important to work with releasing the burden that is still carried from negative earlier experiences to be able to move into new possibilitie for creating coherence in your relationships.
Resonance Repatterning sessions work with creating inner safety in relationships by transforming suppressed negative relationship imprinted images that trigger them from the past that hold the blockage to being in the present more fully. Other repatternings in this group of Energetics of Relationship session work with developmental phases that support more coherence in the process of forming loving and bonding relationships.
Identifying what keeps you separated from love allows you to choose a new direction that creates greater wellness and well-being for your life. This harmony and balance contributes to the coherent loving energy in your relationships.
This is your personal invitation to experience the benefits of Resonance Repatterning to heal relationships in your life. Through the process of working with resonance muscle-checking, your body-mind-spirit system reports what is most needed to build coherence in your body-mind-spirit system. You can schedule an appointment here.
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.
Read MorePosted by Kimberly Rex
Creating Life Energy: A Message from Eagles
The eagle’s life cycle story is a message for us all in regards to reclaiming and creating life energy even in the depths of winter’s cold and gray. Over the New Years Weekend, I made my annual winter pilgrimage up to the North Nooksack River in the Cascade Mountains to see the Bald Eagles in the early morning. Even though the dawn light did not make it easy to spot them at the beginning, you could hear their sounds from the trees on the banks of the river. They return to their nests built along the river that holds a plentitude of salmon at this time of year.
This is a yearly pilgrimage for them as they return to their nests built along the river that holds a plentitude of salmon. The eagle’s journey is a message for us all in regards to creating, reclaiming, and restoring life energy even in the depths of winter’s cold and gray.
In the Chinese Five Element System, a system matched with the cycles of nature, winter is the time of year to look within at your inner energy resources and how you store them. If you will, it is time to build your nest for restoration and rejuvenation to take you through the upcoming seasons of change. The gifts from this element include creativity, resourcefulness, cleverness and perserverance.
Water Element asks that you look at your fear, the issues that keep you stuck or frozen, or expending all of your energy depleting you in the end. It is important to acknowledge the sound or messages your thoughts, beliefs and feelings are giving you. Like the eagles in the trees at dawn, you might not yet be able to see what is available, but your inner voice calls out to let you know what is going on.
When Dawn Arrives
It isn’t until the sun has made its way above the horizon that you are able to clearly see the eagles gliding above the water. They fly down to the river to feed on the salmon to restore their energy reserves. It is no accident that their nests are hidden close by.
You can see the outlines of their nests perched high in the trees. They are massive structures made of twigs, plant material and down.. Over time, due to the need for replenishment, their nest can grow to be as massive as one ton in weight. Yet, they are creative and strategically position the nest to hold that weight while supporting new life when their eaglets arrive.
The message from Water Element is to look at your vital energy to take account of what will restore and rebuild your energy. Questions you might ask yourself might include: “Where has my energy been depleted in this past year? What can I do to rebuild my energy? How can I pace myself in a way that will conserve my energy over time? What creative resources can I tap into to protect and enhance my life energy bank? What other resources should I consider? “
In Broad Daylight
Eagles pair for life, and return to the same nest yearly. However, they are also likely to have one or two other nest sites in case the original nest is damaged or destroyed. This resourcefulness conserves vital elements, and is integral to protect and conserve the life cycle process over time.
During the day you can see the eagles in branches close to their roosts. The parents are near the nests in the same or nearby tree. They take turns hunting for food and sitting on the nest. This allows each parent to pace themselves in the process of gathering food, repairing the nest, sitting on the eggs and caring for the eaglets when they arrive.
Resources for Perseverence
The sharing of responsibilities not only makes good use of resources, but benefits each of the eagle’s abilities to persevere through every part of the process from start to completion so they can sustatin their abiilties for necessary tasks needed for success.
The lesson from Water Element for us is about pacing yourself over time. It allows you to be in the flow of life in a way that conserves, protects and replenishes your life energy. When you make time to take care of your life energy you resource ways to build integrity in your wellness and well-being. This means prioritizing care of your body’s needs in the winter , taking inventory of your negtative thoughts, and realigning with your essence..
Resonance Repatterning sessions create positive change. These important aspects of self-care create ripple effects for you personally, and in your relationship as you navigate change. In the process, you experience new opportunities for restoring and creating more coherent life energy for your positive intentions as you move through the year.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Master Wellness and Well-being Life Coach, and Person-Centered Expressive Therapist
Receive life-enhancing modalities and experiences through Windows to the Heart Repatterning. Sign up for our FREE monthly newsletter here.
Read MorePosted by Kimberly Rex
Going Upstream to Resource Your Life
“I asked how did we get here? What can we do to change?
The water replied, “There is always an upstream, a current, and a downstream
The upstream affected you
Your heroes, your choices, your lessons,
Your thoughts and your dreams.
They are your upstream
Where you are right now is this moment
The moment that determines the change
To create the rhythm and pulse of how the current runs and what proceeds, (journal poem by Kimberly Rex)
Resonance Repatterning® draws on information that goes upstream to resource your life today. When a session brings up an earlier experience at a particular time, level, and place in your body-mind-spirit system it taps into the impact of life-depleting patterns as well as positive resources that originated upstream. We all have basic needs that contribute to physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellness and well-being related to physical safety and security, connection to others, and the need for purpose.
. When an unmet need is present in a session, it indicates what part of the puzzle has been missing. For example, the need for “giving and receiving loving touch,” can point to an absent, stressed out, or abusive pattern in the family. In some cases, this pattern originates with the client’s parents.
At other times, the pattern of neglect, stress, or abuse can be generational and begin upstream with your ancestors perhaps due to separation, war, illness, or addiction, to name a few.
The importance of identifying the energetic material upstream is to access the disruption of energy that blocks you from the potential to meet the need for “giving and receiving loving touch” by clearing the pathway of the obstruction. By doing so you are connected to the gifts, lessons, and positive attributes of your Family System as well.
The beauty of this possibility is that you can then take the life-enhancing material from your system even if you don’t know the ancestor. In fact, the material might be single or double-digit in a number of generations to access a time, place, and person (people) in your family system who can give you the life energy connection to that need for giving and receiving loving touch.
In clearing the pathway, the information becomes available to all of the people in your Family System to work with the lessons from the past to contribute to the present with encouragement from your vital energy line while updating patterns in current situations and relationships today.
As an example in my own life, in working with the upstream of a repetitive pattern of abandonment of members on both sides of my family, I was able to access compassion from their stories. In the process, my awareness shifted from feeling aligned with this pattern to resonating with the gifts of these family members. They were artists, poets, wonderful cooks, generous spirits, and immensely creative. When I now look at my life through this new lens, I activate these strengths as part of my own legacy, and this gives me hope, courage, and an expanded vision of what life can be today. I may not be able to bake at the level that my grandmother did, but I think of her every time I am baking and call on her for encouragement.
It is like adding a missing page that has been left or ripped out of a book you are reading. This gives you insight into the disruption of energy you have experienced in your attempts to create something new without the guidance or permission to expand your awareness to include both the wisdom from the past related to the life-depleting pattern, and, the access to the flow of energy related to resourcing life-enhancing patterns. This happens with a change in vision about your life and can begin to create small steps to reorganize your beliefs about what is possible.
Life-depleting feelings accompany the lack of resolution in meeting unmet needs. Fear, anxiety, hurt, confusion, anger, sadness, etc. point to material that needs compassionate attention. This attention connects you to the underlying need that has not been activated in your current life.
Coupled with the unmet need and feeling, the mental aspect of a life-depleting pattern determines the thoughts that fuel the continued search for attempting to get unmet needs met from the perspective of a stress or trauma-reactive living state. This can color your discernment in your ability to move toward or away from people, actions, and situations that are safe, and life-enhancing. or depleting and dangerous.
Your ability to begin to align with your own inner values starts with evaluating these patterns, and recognizing where you sense that your actions might be reinforcing generations of conflict and limitation. Where you feel you need a change in perspective, you can begin to sort out the depths of harm to your inner values that have kept you from putting your positive life-enhancing values into action in your own life today.
It starts with insight to be able to step into a new experience of life. This ability to reach into the wounds of the past allows you to find the light that comes from your core essence. And, from this place, you can build a new life experience created with activating coherence with your values connected to greater vitality, joy, loving interactions, compassion, and well-being.
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 so you can live from your core values to create integrity in your wellness and well-being. Sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
Read More