What is the unspoken voice of your body? This is the question Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. explores and answers in his seminal book with the title, In an Unspoken Voice. Your body stores and knows the terrain of your past experiences. It is from this history, whether pre-or post-verbal that you are facing the world today. As a practice of truly listening to the voice and language of your body, you can experience new awareness to bridge the connection between body and mind. Becoming familiar with the vocabulary of the body can give you clues as to how to monitor and potentially change outcomes where you have felt disconnected from the intelligence within and to learn to trust what you are experiencing to create positive change.
Accessing the Unspoken Voice of Your Body with SIBAM
Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. in his book, In an Unspoken Voice goes into more detail about working with self and others that paint the picture of this process of identifying what your body-mind-spirit system is reporting based on your somatic experience. SIBAM is a way to bring awareness to the channels of communication your body-mind system is offering you at any moment.
Sensation Channel
These are physical sensations that arise from within your body. This includes the tension or relaxation of your muscles. These sensations are stored in your joints, in the position of your body in space as well as in the velocity or speed of your movement. Additionally, this includes your visceral sensations including your gastrointestinal function as well as your blood vessel condition related to circulation. Your gut (enteric brain) actually sends 9x more information to the brain than the “upstairs brain” sends to the organs of your body. Your gastrointestinal system is also responsible for 95% of the serotonin production to create more calm, flexibility, and a sense of peace.
All of this feedback gives you a report on how stressed, anxious, relaxed, frightened, energized, or de-energized you might be right now. Even the absence of sensation can give you feedback about what you are not experiencing, or what you are attempting to avoid.
Image Channel
This channel accesses all of your senses creating responses to the external environment you experience, and this gets translated into your sensory memory. The overall stimuli of color, movement, sound, taste, smell, and touch transfer information that gets interpreted through the lens of your perception and body-mind system. For example, the quality of light entering your eyes is impacted by frustration, fear, grief, jealousy, unfriendliness, or competitiveness. This can create tension and have an impact on your visionwhen your ciliary muscles, your iris, or the six extrinsic eye muscles are overstressed or distorted. Sensory input not only affects how you connect to yourself but also to others,
Your body gestures, facial expressions, and body posture report on your intrinsic movement from within. This can translate into holding yourself in a fight-flight-freeze or collapse posture. Your behavior can also be observed through the quality of your breath cycles, heart rate, and the muscle lining of the blood vessels. Flushed skin can report embarrassment, shame, and even rage.
The pupil of your eyes reflects your state of being in the moment. When the pupil is wide open this gives a report on your arousal state and activity in your Sympathetic Nervous System wired for action. When your pupil is small this can give feedback on vulnerability, or even dissociation.
The position you take with your body when you are alone or with others can give feedback from archetypal postures. For example, pushing away, pulling toward, expanding, or collapsing your chest and shoulders, the position of your neck, standing or sitting in open or closed positions, and movement of arms, hands, and legs give feedback from the somatic perspective.
“Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim within the energies of the (body) senses.” ~Tathang Tulka
AffectChannel
Your emotions give you feedback on your experience somewhere on the spectrum of this feels “good”, this feels “bad” comfortable, or uncomfortable. Feelings of joy, anger, disgust, sadness, or fear are all windows to what is alive in you right now. Becoming aware of your feelings allows you to register trigger moments, as well as the experience of pleasure, beauty, and return to calm.
MeaningChannel
The meaning you give to what is alive in you right now determines how you face the world. The attitude you have about yourself and others become labels that determine your experience. Your attitudes and beliefs are influenced by your life experiences over time. Premature cognition, as Peter Levine describes, is an embedded imprint arising from past trauma and early negative conditioning at a time when your body-mind system did not have the opportunity to complete a necessary recovery process. When a sensory or memory imprint is not resolved or released, the trauma body becomes the conductor in identifying the meaning your give to your experience in life.
Puttingthe Unspoken Voice of Your BodyTogether
Putting this all together: If you had a traumatic experience in your life related to an accident or verbal abuse, for example, your body-mind system might still be registering this information in the present even though the threatening event has passed. This happens based on your earlier experience, If you believe that the world is dangerous, or that you are powerless. You might hold yourself in a different way than you would if you believed that the world is safe and you have the power to initiate the optimal movement toward or away from the direction you choose in your life. Your eyes might be wide in expression or you might look down when you speak with another person. Your shoulders might be held tightly or curved toward your chest. You might feel more rigidity in your muscles and your breathing pattern might be shallow or held in response to how you interact in triggering social or environmental situations. In response, your gut might feel knotted, and you might feel nauseous. All at the same time, you feel anxious or fearful, and your hands feel clammy or cold.
These detectors are indicators of your state of mind through your body’s voice, and it is good to become more familiar with your body’s vocabulary. Issues can arise over time when chronic stress, immobilization, fear, depression, and fight-or-flight patterns become the norm. The over-activation of your Vagus Nerve and Sympathetic Nervous System over a long period of time can lead to illness, depression, and loss of energy for your positive intentions for life.
When you acknowledge what is happening within you it is then that you have greater access to the point of choice. Changing any of these patterns: breathing, posture, movement, attitude, beliefs, facial expressions, pace, etc. can create windows to new possibilities for inner change.
Resonance Repatterning®sessions work with all of these somatic channels within the process. Resonance Muscle-Checking gives direct and particular feedback response on the physical, emotional, mental, and spirit (core essence) levels. This method accesses every muscle, tissue, organ, and gland in the body. This is done with the language your body truly understands: color, light, sound, movement, breath, aromatherapy, consciousness science, and energetic contact. And, as illustrated in the SIBAM Model, the mind goes hand and hand with what is happening in the body reflected in limiting beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions. This awareness builds the pathway for letting go of limiting patterns 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 online, phone, and proxy.
Find out howResonance 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 sessionshere.
You know that your heart is affected by emotions. Heart rate, pressure, and even shape and size change with the intensity of grief, heartbreak, sudden change, or loss. Our hearts break.
So what can we do to give tenderness to our hearts in the midst of all of the cacophony? This article will offer some simple and natural modalities related to foods, herbs, essential oils, teas, stones, sound, acupressure, and energetic contacts for tending to your heart. Please use any that call your name. Your heart carries the wisdom, intuition, memory, and compassion needed for this time.
Natural Modalities for Tending to Your Heart
Modality
Specific Modalities
How to Use
Energetic Contacts, Sound, and Color to Treat Your Entire Body-Mind-Spirit System
Acupressure Points for Depression, Overwhelm, and Heartbreak
*Listen to calming music *Medical Qigong Under Healing Blue Skies Article
Clary Sage for grounding and coming back into center Rose for grief and broken heart
Diffuse in the room, inhale, surround yourself with fragrant roses, or apply to acupressure points with a carrier oil
Teas
Water
Green tea for serotonin; Lavender or Chamomile tea for calming; Bergamot or Linden tea for anxiety; Chai or Tulsi tea for grief Hawthorn Tea for your heart Rose petal tea
Eat dark leafy greens; Omega 3 foods; foods with Tryptophan (a precursor for serotonin). Eat root vegetables for grounding.’ Cook with sage associated with relieving sorrow.
Take a walk, stretch to relieve anxiety, tone, and sing
Walk next to or near water or in the forest. Spend time in a garden.
Stones
Rose quartz for unconditional love; obsidian for absorbing negativity; Amethyst for restoring balance*
Carry the stone with you or wear the stone; use it in your bath water or make solarized water with stone; hold it in your hands (sub chakra of your heart) or near your heart.
Now is the time, more than ever that you take good care of yourself by tending to your heart. Be well, sleep well, and eat well. T Let’s use our hearts to create new opportunities for sustaining life, love, and compassion starting with ourselves. Get additional support related to anxiety, trauma or overwhelm
Kimberly Rex, MS
If you have any questions about how to use these modalities in this article, feel free to contact me at kimberly@windowstotheheart.net. If you are experiencing heartache at this time and would like a personal Resonance Repatterning session, this is also the place to make contact.
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. TheSerenity 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 Statementsfor 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 online, by phone, and proxy.
Find out howResonance 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.
Finding gratitude and appreciation in your life can change how you feel and respond to what is happening in front of you. It can change your perceptions, and your physical responses and impact your thoughts. This can change your sense of boredom, apathy, or displeasure with life.
You can change how you see yourself and the world around you by choosing to find reasons to appreciate your life, who you are, and what you have right now. Even if you have felt isolated these past few years, find yourself trying to find calm in all of the changes taking place, or wish you were someplace else, there is the potential for choosing to find what is life-energizing. This has a positive effect on your health, relationships, and outlook on life. It can happen with simple gratitude and appreciation.
By creating a Gratitude and Appreciation Practice for yourself you can build a presence that feeds your body-mind-spirit system daily. This can contribute to your satisfaction with life. Physically, you might express appreciation and gratitude by acknowledging the wonder of your body and how it carries you from moment to moment, day by day. By doing so you reduce stress and calm internal conflicts. Your relationships can also improve through gratitude and appreciation to become more constructive with actions and interactions.
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation Right in Front of You
It is easy to get so lost in daily routine and automatic responses to life that you take for granted or become blind to all the nurture and support that is right in front of you. To make the shift, you first notice and allow your senses to take in your surroundings. Start by getting in touch with your breath. Then allow your eyes to scan and rest on the contents of the space you are in, your home, the sky, plants, flowers, and trees outside. Rest your awareness on the significance of each particular place you rest your eyes or what you notice. This can be a vase of flowers, a bud on a tree, or the sound or color of a bird.
You don’t have to look or travel far to give to find beauty or something that brings you pleasure. You live in your body 24/7 and on the Earth 24/7. Take it in what is right in front of you with appreciation. By doing so you create positive benefits for your wellness and well-being.
“Upon awakening, let the words “Thank You” flow from your lips, for this will remind you to begin your day with gratitude and compassion.”~Wayne Dyer
Start where you are, literally. Appreciate your bodyand what you wear on your body each day. This includes the vibrancy of colors, the patterns, and the texture of the cloth, warmth, fun, comfort, and joy you have experienced from your choices. What meaning and energy do these colors and feelings are you experiencing when you wear these clothes?
As the weather is changing and there is more opportunity to get out into nature or to safely attend gatherings to connect, I have opened my closet to what seems like a brand new wardrobe! Putting on earrings, and wearing a scarf or sweater I haven’t worn in a few years, is an absolute joy! And, I experience appreciation for these new opportunities.
Since the pandemic, I have limited the amount of clothing I cycle through weekly. I have also donated clothing with the thought in mind that someone else can also appreciate the items that no longer fit or have a place in my clothing choices. And, this makes me smile with the thought that paying it forward can multiply appreciation.
How about applying appreciation to the foods that come from the Earth to nourish your body? These foods come to your table from a wide diversity of places. Appreciate the soil, seeding, farmers and workers, and the growth process each of the foods you eat has taken, and how this, in turn, energizes your body. Appreciate the color, texture, and flavor of your food.
Acknowledge how food has created a story and connection with your family and friends. Perhaps there are favorite dishes, a particular holiday, or a ritual that has made your food story a special memory or has an emotional positive meaning for you. Bring this appreciation practice into your selection of foods and preparation as well.
Cook with love and with the intention of nourishment and well-being. Become aware and discerning of what foods are energizing to you and bring them into your kitchen to combine in creative ways for health and well-being. As you do so, you can also consciously become aware of foods that are not energizing to your body-mind system. And, express internal conscious choice to create even greater potential for your life energy, your moods, and well-being to appreciate.
Finding Joy and Appreciation for the Small Things in Life
It is often the small things that change your perceptions. A smile from someone, the laughter of children, a word of encouragement, a favorite song, someone holding the door open, a beautiful sunset, or appreciation for truly being seen and heard can mean the most.
Allow appreciation to take in the people in your life who have been there at a special time, made you laugh, consoled, or listened when you needed it most and who you learned from as you shared time with them. Appreciate the ups and downs of your own life as they have created who you are today. Notice and appreciate what is happening and speaking in your body-mind-spirit system today.
It might sound like a small thing, however, throughout the pandemic, my mother and I, both isolated, have had a daily appreciation and gratitude exchange close to sunset. She has a view of the bay in the West while I live in a circle of cedar trees. She sees the sky light up as it moves into twilight each day. Each evening by phone, she describes the colors of the sky and the shapes of the clouds to me. By doing so, we each experience the expansive qualities of the beauty unfolding through our senses and imagination.
https://youtu.be/UtBsl3j0YRQ?si=fwhitheHfeGElfCs
“Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you. Then it will really be a good day.” ~David Steindl-Rast
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation for Others
By making appreciation a practice, include words, prayer, affirmation, journaling, drawings, movement, making music, toning, or spending time in places locally that you love or might not yet know. Your gratitude and appreciationmeditation might become a walk or even a wake-up or calm-down around your sleep routine. No matter what you choose, this practice can easily become your daily experience as you recognize the value of life and its gifts each day.
In the same way, be sure to use appreciation with others. Everyone needs to feel they are appreciated and have a purpose. This can be done when you express gratitude for something or to someone in your life by including the reasons you appreciate an action or presence. This contributes to the health of your relationships and also supports creating greater motivation and life energy whether in personal or business relationships.
Research shows that gratitude and appreciation stimulate oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin neurotransmitters and hormones to build pathways within your body-mind system to create a sense of calm, satisfaction, safety, love, joy, trust, and bonding. This happens for both the giver and the person who receives it.
I am reminded of a recent experience running around doing errands while in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s in my town. As I pulled into the parking lot, I could hear the sound of singing and Native Drum. There was a Native American man with a sign next to him asking for support for his situation as his house flooded in the recent storms in this area. Instantly, I was taken into the space I have experienced in sweat lodge rituals, and when parked, I sat for a few moments with my eyes closed just to listen. I was brought back into my center and relaxed. I remembered the connection to the Earth and to each person in the lodge and with all my relations. And, although I only had a few dollars cash on me, I walked over to him and said, “I’m sorry, this is all I have.” He took my hand between his two hands and smiled deeply. The gratitude exchange between us was enormous and made something seemingly small more than enough.
With practice and over time you can see how small steps in the direction towards creating an internal and external environment for gratitude and appreciation to thrive that you will begin to experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
Making a daily appointment and commitment to create new neurotransmitters that communicate life-energizing vitality to your body-mind-spirit system can also expose or illuminate negative patterns and beliefs. By consciously choosing new ways of seeing and experiencing life, you actually gain more confidence and motivation for the process as your internal barometer begins to change. So the takeaway message is to start the process and keep coming back to find gratitude and appreciation with conscious choice.
Kimberly Rex
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 online, by phone, and proxy.
Find out howResonance 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.
The impact of intergenerational trauma is a topic that has come to the fore as we process what is happening with families, refugees, and soldiers in Ukraine with the devastating images alive in the news we receive from another part of the world. First, there is the question of how this traumatic experience will affect each person experiencing this directly. Second, how will the aftershocks affect each person in the future in the generations after this war?
We can see through the history of Europe that the residue still lingers from previous wars and traumatic experiences. This is true in the United States as well as in the trauma endured by Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Historically, immigrants fleeing from other parts of the world over time bring their own trauma history into the mix in the repetition of the victim-perpetrator cycles. It is this intergenerational trauma that continues to impact life on the emotional, physical, mental, and spirit levels.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Emotional Level
Intergenerational Trauma can be expressed through fear, depression, hyper-vigilance, worry, PTSD, codependency, anger, inability to attend or focus, and memory issues. It can also result in pervasive social anxiety with an inability to engage with others in a way that nourishes your needs for safety and trust. Addressing the roots of these de-energizing reactions needs compassion, safety, and trust to heal these wounds at their source.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Physical Level
Intergenerational trauma physical manifestations can be expressed through loyalty to your Family System as well as mobilized energy blocked in your body can show up as eating disorders, addiction, a lack of vitality, pain, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. The energy of a traumatic experience through unresolved epigenetic memorycreates continuing stress behaviors that impact descendants from your ancestors to your parents, and then to you. These behaviors influence gene expression as a response to the stress in your environment.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Mental Level
Bruce Lipton, the author of The Biology of Belief, proved through his research on stem cells that genetic expression is managed by epigenetic (above the genes) factors related to your environment. The expression of the genes is impacted by stress, blockages, and interruption of energy flow within your body-mind-spirit system. The good news is that you have the power to change your environment and your perception of your environment now. This change happens when you change your resonance with beliefs and attitudes about life created by negative earlier experiences and generational patterns stored within your system. This has a rippling effect on righting your ability to turn towards nurture and support with your thoughts, your communication, and your relationships. This means that you do not need to be a victim of your genes.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Spirit Level
Spirit Level is the core essence of Self or your true self. This is your potential for wholeness that is cultivated under ideal cultural and social circumstances. When personal, family, and systemic trauma experiences go unresolved, this creates a disconnect from your ability to express your truth with your communication and your actions. It results in numbing your ability to be able to listen to your inner guidance and body sensations.
The important message here is that restoration of the informationwithin theweb of life can happen over time. Even now, countries that are providing food, shelter, and transportation for refugees from Ukraine are offering the support and nurture so needed at this time. Therapists are creating spaces for children for art therapy now.
In this time, it is an invitation to offer ourselves the compassion needed to heal both our personal and collective wounds of the past. By doing so we create a healthy environment within, around us, and collectively.
Resonance Repatterning® sessions are a wonderful tool to update your body-mind-spirit system so that you can experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being. The process works by identifying roots of intergenerational trauma so that you can feel more present, and live a more authentic and expanded version of your True Self.
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 online, phone, and proxy.
Find out howResonance 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.
Resonance Repatterning® works with updating your mothering and fathering aspects in your life today by repatterning your life to experience greater integrity in your wellness and wellbeing. The process gives you a way to access energetic material from your pre-natal, pre-verbal, and early experiences as well as ancestral patterns through your DNA.
As you move through life the quality of the relationship you had with your mother and father impacts the mothering and fathering aspects of yourself, in how you respond to life and take care of your needs as an adult based on your early experiences. This includes both the positive and limiting qualities you took in through growing up in your family related to the qualities of absence or presence, criticism or nurture, suppression or expression of emotions, neglect or positive attention, neglect or encouragement, danger or safety, lack of safety, or the building of trust and protection.
Your mothering aspect is translated into your life today through how you experience nourishment and support. This is reflected in your ability to feel at home in your own body and in the world around you. The ability to feel stable, grounded, and imaginative while being about to digest and integrate experiences in your life create greater experiences of harmony and balance.
Your fathering aspect is related to your ability to move out into the world in an assertive way. In Chinese Medicine particularly related to Father is Metal Element. This element relates to your values, the Divine Masculine, your ability to draw upon your own truth, money values, your self-worth, inspiration, and letting go and connecting to your inner brilliance.
This also rolls out into what you observed as a child related to the conflict styles of both parents. According to theGottmans, it is not so much that children experience conflict, as much as how children observe conflict resolution or the lack thereof in their family that determines personal conflict responses and attraction to partners with similar compensation, resistance, or conflict styles as their own parents.
Updating Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects
In Twelve Step programs, the importance related to mothering yourself is vital. The work of accessing your inner child with your adult self is essential in that you are invited to nurture and support the earlier parts of yourself by updating your mothering and fathering aspects.
To survive early on, you might have had to compensate for your basic needs being met by your parents These early patterns became wired into your developing survival and emotional brain as implicit memory imprints in your unconscious. It is then no coincidence that your association with survival and bonding continues into relationships in your life as an adult.
If your body-mind-spirit system experienced significant fight or flight experiences early on, you are wired for that frequency and continue to activate those neural, biochemical, and thought pathways related to those limiting beliefs about who or what is safe or dangerous.
This creates repetitive interactions and situations that replicate your early learning as it is familiar. You are actually matching up conflict styles, and stressful frequencies while en-training with another through your own Nervous System.
Becoming aware of these internal patterns is actually the first step to moving more into your ability to self-nurture through moving into the safe zone with self-regulation. In fact, the more you can see of yourself equals your ability to see more of another by expanding your ability to calm, nourish and support your decisions, values, and mental health.
By doing so, your mothering aspect becomes more aligned with your unmet needs from your earlier experiences. This means where there was neglect, you give yourself time and space for self-care. Where there was abuse, trauma, or chaos, you offer yourself the warmth, compassion, safety, and care your need. Where you felt unsafe being in your body and trust your intuition, you begin to check in with what your body is telling you and follow through with self-care.
https://youtu.be/ec3AUMDjtKQ
Polyvagal Theory offers an avenue to bring your body back into the safe zone for healthy social engagement that allows you to move back into a greater sense of calm, relaxation, grounding, and stabilization. Acquainting your body with this information, interoception and neuroception give you the opportunity to learn how to identify the triggers that have served as gateways to the states of fight-flight or freeze.
“Trauma is chronic disruption of connectedness.”~Stephen Porges
This also gives you an opportunity to work with returning to natural states of safety that create calm, expanded awareness, and ease. By doing so you add your body’s memory bank to be able to resonate with greater choice, discernment, values, and direction. This leads to your ability to attune your body-mind-spirit system to safety, nurture, and support within and with others. This changes the internal biofeedback of your experience related to the dynamics at work in your relationships.
Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects: Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation
Through the lens of your social engagement system from your earlier experiences, you interpret other people’s facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and words. These interpretations are orchestrated through your Nervous System. Some feedback might be comforting while other states feel destabilized or uncomfortable based on past experiences leading to misinterpretation.
When you identify and work with the root of limiting earlier experiences that shaped your social engagement responses, you can then feel more at home in your own body and can begin to recognize and discern your own internal biofeedback, attention, and focus in the present. This then creates a new connection within and updated reading of another person through your energy exchange.
The possibility of registering your experience while with others leads to your ability to choose relationships that contribute more to your safety and calm. This translates into creating more co-regulation in relationships that are built on safety, trust, curiosity, and mutual choice.
Through updating your mothering and fathering aspects, you create greater integrity in your body-mind-spirit system that results in better health, less stress, and more appreciation for your own choices with your ability to experience a more fulfilled life.
Kimberly Rex
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 online, phone, and proxy.
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