Posted by Kimberly Rex
Making Change Based on the Wisdom of Nature
Making change based on the wisdom of nature benefits your wellness and well-being. At this time of year you can begin to appreciate the harvest of nature’s wealth of offerings in fruit, vegetables, and flowers. In every phase of development, there is a purpose. Nature nourishes the process of development from seed to flower to fruit in every stage. A plant puts its energy in particular parts with right timing. In winter, the energy is focused in the roots, in spring the stem and leaves, in early summer, the buds and flowers, and in late summer, the fruit of the plant with seeds.
This leads to the question of Earth Element’s gifts at this time of year. In Chinese Medicine, this element is related to your stomach and spleen, and related to nuture and support on all levels. There is a quality of this element in every transition in your life, and especially between seasons. As in nature, the process of change from one season to another is gradual rather than sudden. Temperature, sunlight, rain and steadiness in direction all factor into making transition. So it is about pacing yourself over time in any change that gives you the ability to nurture yourself in the process while practicing self-care.
The ability to take support from resources in your life is a process of giving and receiving. For example, in nature at this time of the year fruit and vegetables offer their seeds for the next stage of development to preserve the overall life cycle of the plant itself. It is a preparation for what is to come. In fall, the leaves fall to make room for new buds set for the following spring.The leaves that fall nourish the Earth below to support the lognevity of the roots, and to make fertile the opportunity for new growth.
The Universe doesn’t waste anything. This is a wonderful way to look at transition in our own lives. How has the past prepared you for where you are today? How can you use that nformattion to support and nurture yourself today? It involves looking at the nourishing inspirational aspects as well as places where you have felt grief, remorse or sadness. Held between Earth Element’s invitation to look at support and nurure so you can feel more at home in your body in any circumstance and Metal Element, the prominent energetics of fall, there is always a place for you to process what is happening within.
Feeling at home in your own body whether you are starting or seeding something, growing from an experience, harvesting what you have learned from life, or needing to root and ground yourself to preserve and protect your energy in the process of change makes all the difference in how you move forward. Being in sync with nature allows you move from a place of resistance to resilience.
Supporting Yourself with the Wisdom of Nature
The following articles on this website give nurture and support for your life as in nature for where you are in the process at this transition time.
For Grounding in Your Roots: https://www.windowstotheheart.net/grounding-yourself-to-get-centered-and-oriented-to-the-present/
For Growing: https://www.windowstotheheart.net/creating-nurture-and-support-within/
For Flowering: https://www.windowstotheheart.net/faith-hope-and-wonder-essential-for-change
For Creating Seeds of New Possibilities https://www.windowstotheheart.net/reaching-depths-for-new-possibilities/
This is your personal invitation to take nurture and support from the For Every Season Fall Repatterning Program starting on September 1, 2024. Get details for this enriching process with reflections, virtual Group Repatterning and Expressive Arts Therapy modalities with this link: https://www.windowstotheheart.net/for-every-season-fall-repatterning/
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 repatterning processes.
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
Repattern Your Brain, Repattern Your Life
You can repattern your brain to repattern your life. The automatic responses that drive your responses to situations you meet in life are based on your emotional and survival memories created by your life experiences. Whether you have experienced physical, emotional or chronic stress, you can work with the brain-body connection to experience greater integrity in your wellness and wellbeing.
“Whatever the circumstances of a child’s early life, and whatever the history and current state of that child, every human has the built-in power to improve, to change for the better, to significantly restore, and often to recover. Tomorrow, that person you see in the mirror can be a stronger, more capable, livelier, more powerfully centered, and still-growing person.”~Michael Merzenich
. The good news is that neural pathways can be altered through neuroplasticity. Resonance Repatterning® The process accesses established pathways that register in your muscles, tissues, muscles, organs, and glands through the Resonance Muscle-Checking process. Natural modalities of color, light, sound, movement, breath, fragrance, energetic contact, and consciousness science introduce new brainwaves, awareness, and neurotransmitters to create neurosynthesis and plasticity. This relies on the memory information stored in your body-mind system to create neuroplasticity by updating and changing function.
The Brain-Body Connection
These brain areas are examples of how thinking, feeling and action are connected between your mind and body.
Pre-Frontal Cortex: When the Pre-Frontal Cortex is in control, it allows you to be fully engaged in the present of your life so you can resonate with expanding your awareness, feeling, thinking, and acting as you open to new possibilities. This is where you can explore your connections with others. When the pre-frontal cortex is under-active in this brain area you can experience brain fog, difficulties with attention, focus, ability to follow through, decision-making, and disorganization.
Limbic Brain: The Limbic Brain colors how you process your emotions. This part of your brain affects your autonomic nervous system including blood sugar, hormones, temperature, respiration, and heart rate. This portion of the brain discerns feelings of safety or danger through the Amygdala. The Hippocampus embeds memory into the nervous system related to life-enhancing or depleting experiences. This creates the connection between your thoughts and feelings that influence your body responses through the HPA Axis.
The Cerebellum allows your system to create implicit memories that become automatic starting with learning skills and mastering a task. Over time this recall becomes automatic and unconscious affecting your thoughts and behaviors.
“Conscious thoughts, repeated often enough, become unconscious thinking.”~Dr. Joe Dispenza
Resonance Repatterning and Brain-Body Connection
The process of Resonance Repatterning, from the brain’s perspective, works by transforming the neural pathways through awareness, new information and experience. This changes while working at the frequency levels in specific brain areas, brain waves, and neurotransmitters. Changing neural responses in your brain is a conscious process that shifts your resonance with what nerve responses take place in your body and your mind.
As a hypothetical example, let’s say that in a session the issue in your life is related to an inability to focus, disorganization, and impulsivity. The issue thought statement might be “I can’t get anything done.”The feeling state your share might be “I feel scared and confused.” Checking in with how to create coherent neural pathways for new behavior through muscle-checking the statement “I focus on the task at hand,” might be the new possibility. The neurotransmitter or peptide that would support the shift would be checked from a list along with its benefits to enhance neural communications in your mind and body A frequency of light for the Hypothalamus with a color that muscle-checks for the missing color/light frequency would be considered to energize your system. Natural activities would be checked to enhance new connections in your body-mind system. for this example, let’s say the action of deep breathing checked in. A coherent statement from the identified brain area would be included. In this case, we work with the pre-frontal cortex. The coherent statement would be “I stay calm and focused and manifest my plans through effective actions.” A frequency of a brainwave would be fused into the mix as well. For the sake of this example, an Alpha brainwave with a range of 8-13 cps would be muscle-checked for the exact frequency among the four options for brainwaves including delta, theta, alpha, and beta to decrease anxiety and bring focus.
All of these parts work at the frequency level with the material to create greater coherence, harmony, and balance in your body-mind system.The muscle-checking system in this process is then used to check for shifts in your system. You are ON or resonate with your new intentions when your thoughts, emotions, and body are wired for specific neural pathways that fire and connect your responses related to your positive intentions. You are OFF when neural pathways are inhibited or do not fire in the same habitual way related to the issues you brought to the session.With muscle-checking at the beginning and completion of the session, your system registers the shifts with your change in resonance.
These nerve impulsesin your brain communicate thoughts, feelings, sensations, and responses throughout your body. When your body and mind experience greater harmony and balance between your Autonomic, Parasympathetic, and Sympathetic Nervous Systems, this is reflected in the way you think, how you feel and respond to life, and what actions you take to create new possibilities.
Resonance Repatterning® Sessions are based on working with your body-mind-spirit systems’ ability to repattern your body-mind-spirit system. This means that the pain 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
Hosting Love Within
Hosting love in your life starts from within. This is created by nourishing safety and trust in your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs you choose to communicate and act upon in any given moment . It is rooted in self-love, setting healthy boundaries, self-reflection and self-regulation.
“Find the love you seek, by first finding the love within yourself. Learn to rest in that place within you that is your true home.” ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Hosting Love Begins with Self-Love
Self-love leads to self care. This means that you develop compassion for your life on the emotional, mental, physical and spiritual levels. By doing so you embrace all of the parts of yourself that experienced pain as well as the parts that have been there for you when you needed to meet challenges. Being able to listen to what is happening within gives you information that supports your beliefs, thoughts and behaviors that have molded your life, as well as giving you a template to work with to sculpt the new life you would like to experience
Early in life, your response systems to stress were structured by what you learned from your family and caregivers. Difficulty loving yourself shows up in your adult relationships when you have experienced a painful experiences created by absence, inconsistency, or abuse that instilled a lack of safety and trust.
As you learn to compassionately take care of your needs and wants in life today, you give yourself a way to ground and expand your awareness beyond your automatic responses. This allows you to be present in the moment with a more expansive view of what you are experiencing. It also then allows you to call up on these insights to see what is happening with other people.
Hosting Love with Healthy Boudaries
Boundaries are necessary for your health and well-being. Your body gives you signals that tell you when you feel elated or ill at ease. Your stomach might churn, your muscles tighten, and your heartbeat races. Over time when you do not establish boundaries based on what will create safety and security for your wellness and well-being, your body signals in stronger messages. This could include headaches, difficulty with digestion, physical mobility, or life-depleting conditions. These signals speak to you on the cellular level to express the need for establishing limits.
Through resonance on the unconscious level, you will continue to draw to you the relationships that contain the puzzle pieces of your early Social Engagement System.Your adult relationships will continue to give you the components of your first relationship with your parents. The limiting embodied protective automatic responses will create anxiety, stress, mistrust, fear of being vulnerable, emotional unavailability, neediness, or caretaking,
Your system might have learned to tough it out, tolerate or ignore signals that indicate danger or boundary crossing due to conflict resolution styles of your parents, abandonment, separation, loss, traumatic experiences or addiction to guard against pain.
Today, as an adult, when faced with the need to set a healthy boundary in your life for yourself or with others, you might not speak up, lash out, isolate, leave, or attempt to please the other to keep the peace. Your system defaults to early and habitual patterns you learned to handle trauma.
Loving yourself gives you the ability to connect to others in new ways that create discernment, safety and trust. It allows you to trust your internal feelings, body sensations and values. By doing so you create a healthy environment for trusting yourself and others that are worthy of trust, moving toward what is life-enhancing or away from what is life-depleting to allow healthy bonding and connection with self-care and boundaries in place.
Anatomy of Trust with B.R.A.V.I.N.G. from Brene’ Brown
Hosting Love with Self Reflection
Hosting love with self-reflection is key to healing limiting beliefs, thoughts and automatic reactions is through bringing to awareness or making conscious how these limiting patterns established through your life and Family System. Your parents and likely their parents experienced these life-depleting ways of dealing with closeness and conflict. You received this teaching through their words, actions and behaviors. The resulting negative beliefs get projected onto your adult relationships with automatic limiting beliefs such as “Love causes pain,”You cannot trust (fill in the blank),” It is my fault,” “They will leave me,”“Love hurts.” (They is used to represent any type of relationship).
It is important to acknowledge that you have the ability to work with and change these automatic reactions from the past by examining the roadmap of these patterns when they come up.According to Gabriella Kortsch, PhD, self-regulation starts with your intention and desire to become aware enough to be reflective with your ability to notice how you are perceiving whatever is happening. This includes your ability to notice how you are reacting and interpreting what is happening through your thoughts, feelings and inner dialogue. This awareness then leads you to remembering that you have choices about next steps throughout the entire process, and you can choose what is good for your own life.
Hosting Love with Self Regulation/Soothing
Taking time to self-reflect is vital to hosting love within.This is where choices show up. Triggers show up in everyone’s life. Smoking, drinking, binging, shopping, high risk or adrenalin rising behaviors, overeating, shopping, binge watching movies, workaholism, etc. can be external go-to’s when unease arises. While this might work on a short term basis, this doesn’t lead to resolving the issues so you can experience something new in your life related to what you would truly like to experience.
How you regulate your response to triggers that create agitation, anxiety, fear, grief and pain that numb or delay the pain temporarily feeds the established neural pathways of pain from the past, or you can choose natural ways to create nurture and support within.
Hosting love by choosing natural ways to self-soothe to create calm in your system trains your body-mind-spirit system by regulating how you respond to stress leads to greater wellness and well-being for the long-term. You are designed for self-healing. Focusing on new go-to’s that respond to the question, “Is this kind?” while considering next steps is a great way to work with Self-Reflection.Will the response you choose lead to new healing pathways within by activating your Sympathetic Nervous System (rest, digest, calm, and heal)? Will the choices strengthen your ability to host more love within as you navigate your life and relationships?
The following two articles give you some ideas for this purpose:by finding neutral to create positive change in your life and using your innate senses to create natural endorphin stress responses. You can explore this website for other natural modalities including breath, movement, acupressure, meditation, gratitude, aromatherapy, light, sound, etc. for more ideas.
Posted by Kimberly Rex
Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth
As we enter Earth Day Week, it is important to acknowledge the part we play in the process of taking care of the thread within us and the threads that connect to all other life on this beautiful planet.
“At this very moment, the Earth is above you, below you, all around you, and even inside you. The Earth is everywhere. You may be used to thinking of the Earth as only the ground beneath your feet. But the water, the sea, the sky, and everything around us comes from the Earth. Everything outside us and everything inside us comes from the Earth. We often forget that the planet we are living on has given us all the elements that make up our bodies. The water in our flesh, our bones, and all the microscopic cells inside our bodies all come from the Earth and are part of the Earth. The Earth is not just the environment we live in. We are the Earth and we are always carrying her within us.”~Thich Nhat Hanh
The Five Element and Meridian System is based on the wisdom of nature.The earth and your body function in an interconnected way . All of the elements support, balance and harmonize each other while creating greater integrity in the function of individual parts within the unified system.
It’s All About Relationship
This means, for example, that Wood Element, prominent in spring.is a time of new growth, planning and hope coming out of the seaon of winter and moving toward summer. On the physical level it is related to your Liver and Gallbladder. Its primary sense is your vision. This element ‘s primary purpose is processing toxins, anger and frustration. The coherent spirit of this element creates growth, optimism, hope and unhesitating action.
If the Wood Element pathway is unable to naturally flow, it is a signal to look at the qualities of relationship with other meridians. There is a place for each of the elements on each pathway. This includes the wisdom, support and nurture from each of the other organ systems and seasons to create harmony and balance. This collaboration enhances communication that results in more optimal functioning throughout the system.
This happens by identifying the issue in the primary element itself. For the purpose of this article, we will continue to consider Wood Element, and the beneficial qualities of some of these relationships. Let’s take a closer look at the Shen Cycle (mother-child or feeding relationship), Ko Cycle (limiting or balancing relationship) and the order or disharmony between element in the overall flow of energy in the body. By working with other elements, it is possible to support the function of the identified element to enhance greater harmony and balance throughout the system.
Shen Cycle: Water on Wood to Create Harmony
In nature water is vital to feeding new growth. This is a nourishing Mother-Child relationship.Throughout nature water is life. In spring, water nourishes new growth. It is the creative juice that allows for new beginnings and change.
Water Element places you more in the natural flow of life and its creative energy. This allows you to be more clearly in touch with your inner reserves of cleverness to support your vision for life as you let go of fear while pacing yourself over time.When you drink water you nourish the communication within your bio-energetic body-mind-spirit system, and this can diminish pain while also supporting more optimal brain-body connection. The fluids of your body circulate, transform, support, and protect your body-mind-spirit system. These fluids also allow you to let go of that which is not beneficial to your system.
Ko Cycle: Metal on Wood for Balance
New growth emerges from the Earth with purpose. It provides shelter, food and space for new life. Metal Element qualities offers value when considering new beginnings. These points on Wood Element meridians offer strength and courage in your life that call you to new possibilities. This is helpful when your life feels meaningless or your self esteem is low. This point invites you to recognize who you truly are and to express your unique qualities. It supports you in finding value with your choices when you have more than one decision to make while letting go of what no longer serves you.
Fire on Wood to Create Order and Harmony in the System
“In nature nothing exists alone.”~Rachel Carson
Fire Element follows Wood on the Five Element and Meridian Wheel. At times the following element can be out of balance, and this affects the previous element’s ability to function and flow. In this case, Fire Element, the child of Wood Element might be challenged with imbalance related to discernment, intolerance, long term agitation, anxiety, or anger. Fire Element points on the Wood Element Meridian bring warmth through humor and compassion.
This is helpful when you need more joy and creativity to relieve the congestion in your Wood Element locked in anger and judgment to create balance. Fire on Wood assists with sorting through what is truly in your heart for your greatest good aligned with your vision for life. From this place Wood Element can then take optimism and hope to take action that will create positive growth in your life while connecting to your heart.
Earth on Wood Element for Grounding
The soil of the Earth itself provides roots and stability during growth. Earth Element offers nurture, support, and grounding as you process change. It allows you to feel more at home in your body no matter where you are in this world. This can be especially beneficial when you feel toppled or overwhelmed by feelings of frustration or obstacles in your life. So it can be helpful when you are stuck in details without the ability to access a long-term plan. Earth Element points on Wood Element Meridian bring you back to your center through your senses with your core self.
The Earth is Speaking
The Earth reports in on what is happening to its resources and elements through Earth events and climate change. So it is important to acknowledge that the elements and systems of the earth are letting us know the importance of connecting the dots between water, the soil, sun, air, weather changes, plants, animals and trees in relation to each other to give value and quality care to life in all its forms.
The planet tends to imbalances to create greater harmony and balance. In the braid of connection with the Earth we are entwined in every breath, every glass of water we drink, every plant we are nourished by, every animal that brings gifts to the world for survival and companionship.. It is vital to listen to the messages the Earth is sending to each of us. You can feel and see the changes happening all around you.This conversation is happening with your choices impacting the whole.Through mindfulness you can be the needed element for sustainable and regenerative support and change on the planet locally and at large.
“There is no difference between healing ourselves and healing the Earth.”
~Thich Nhat Hanh, Love Letter to the Earth
Your body-mind-spirit system gives you messages in an attemtpt to get your attention. These are signals to motivate you to tend to your own wellness and well-being. You are a thread in the tapestry of life. Through self-care you receive the benefits from all the elements of the Earth. In return you can be a steward who contributes to the interdependent flow of life by enhancing the connection in the natural tapesty of life that connects us all. A new book release etntitled, Life As We Know It (Can Be) written by Bill Weir can give you some ideas for this purpose.
This is your personal invitation to experience a 30-Minute Personal Meridian Repatterning to create optimal energy flow in your body-mind-spirit system. This repatterning quickly gets to the root of what is needed on the emotional, mental, physical and spirit levels. Through resonance muscle-checking and the Resonance Repatterning process, a session starts by identifying specifics related to issues limiting your ability to experience positive change within by enhancing communication throughout your system.
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
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.
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