​
When asked what surprised him about humanity the most, The Dalai Lama replied: 

“Man. Because he sacrifices his health to make money. Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health… He lives as though he is never going to die and dies having never really lived.”

The key to better health lies in recognizing and addressing whatever is creating stress within us, which can be quite a task in today’s day and age. There are many types of stress: everything from the physical (like accidents and illness), to chemical (like caffeine and alcohol) and environmental (like pesticides and herbicides) to emotional (family tragedy, second mortgages and single parenting).

All stress knocks the body out of balance and a combination of all those things creates chronic conditions.

Looking at the lifestyle many of us are running with today, Dr Libby Weaver says, “it’s not the physical threats like a tiger coming at us that is creating stress, what leads us to creating adrenaline and cortisol today are things like caffeine and our perception of pressure and urgency”.

Like many, my day used to begin with an email inbox full of stress and pressure and urgency. When I wake up and see my day as difficult, or that everything is urgent – whereas, maybe in reality two things are urgent – I put my body in sympathetic nervous system dominance (essentially the flight or fight response).

This elevates blood pressure, directing blood away from the digestive system to the peripheral limbs ready for ‘flight’. And while the body has two types of fuel it can use, glucose or fat, in that state it can only use glucose. Apparently many of us have lost the ability to use our body fat effectively as a fuel because we are always running on glucose due to stress hormone production.

Nick Polizzi (of the Remedy series I dived into in Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing) asked why it is that our society is so unhealthy – physically, mentally and spiritually? Why are more people addicted to painkillers and antidepressants than ever before? He asserts the truth is startlingly simple:

We humans have forgotten how powerful we truly are.

I can attest to this. I recall going to our local doctor’s surgery as a child, a place that had multiple family physicians available to see patients with their day to day ailments. The doctor was someone we held in a position of trust and respect, this is who we would go to for answers when we had more than a common cold.

As a kid I had many of the typical childhood illnesses, like chicken pox and mumps, but generally I was considered to be in quite good health. In my teenage years I’d been physically very fit as a competitive swimmer, so the doctor’s surgery wasn’t a place I frequented often.

​This changed in my early twenties. Fresh out of university, floundering to find my path in life, I was working three jobs and entertaining a rather unhealthy relationship after having had my heart broken the year before.

One day, as I was taking a bus into town to meet my boyfriend, all of a sudden I felt as though my heart was going to burst through my chest. This was accompanied by a vice like sensation around my head, I thought I was going to pass out and tried to focus on my breathing. Desperate for fresh air, I got off the bus and began to walk the four or five miles to my destination in the city.

Despite this episode occurring over a quarter century ago, what is marked in my memory is having to lie in a cold dark cupboard (in my boyfriend’s office) for two hours, feeling totally ill, while his boss had him work overtime on an urgent issue before he was allowed to leave. Once home I promptly crawled into bed and stayed there for a number of days vacillating between horrible chest pains and throwing up, which I now reflect upon as a reaction to the distress I’d experienced.

Back in the early 1990’s, panic attacks were synonymous with silly overreactions to something someone said or did, certainly they were not seen as an actual condition causing very real physical symptoms that a doctor would diagnose.

Trips to the doctors surgery resulted in several courses of antibiotics, the chest pains being taken for some sort of chest infection, which then resulted in several bouts of candidiasis treated by anti fungal medication that only served to exacerbate the condition – probiotics were not something seen as anything other than woo woo at this time and not widely available.

There was no internet to use for research in those days, and I found myself at the rather small section of self help books in the library. As a result, I tried an anti-candida diet, which was pretty grueling back then as the range of non-standard healthy foods available was fairly limited.

One of the books I read was by Dee McCaffrey, an organic chemist who had found her way back to health by cutting refined flours and sugars from her diet. Aside of the now well known data on refined sugars and flour, one of the things that always stuck with me reading her story was that she had been one of the scientists in the USA who had come up with the iconic food pyramid.

But the food pyramid the scientists had come up with had been practically inverted by the government in its final publication. Having always pooh poohed the idea of conspiracy theories as the domain of those with overactive imaginations, this was probably one of my first wake up calls that business – money – often runs this modern world, not the best interests of its people.

Ultimately I found my answer to overcoming panic attacks after a psychiatrist finally diagnosed them and then I happened upon a fantastic book by Christine Ingham called Panic Attacks in a grocery store pharmacy. Once I understood the anatomy of what was happening and how to switch out of flight or fight mode by invoking the parasympathetic nervous system, I was on the road to recovery.

In the docu-series Transcendence, Dr’s Bruce Lipton, Libby Weaver and Joe Dispenza remind us of some of the fundamentals for keeping our bodies in a good state of health. They tell us that 90% of illness today is based on lifestyle and stress, not genetics.

“Optimal health is based on the perception of the mind. If I open my eyes and see someone I love, the brain releases chemicals related to love like dopamine/pleasure, oxytocin/bonding, and vasopressin/making you more attractive, growth hormone. So when a mind perceives love, the chemistry from your brain enhances vitality.

The same person, if they open their eyes and see something that scares them, will release stress hormones and inflammatory agents that affect the immune system (cortisone, norepinephrine, and cytokines). When we are in fear, the stress hormones shut down the immune system.” Dr Bruce Lipton

Dr Libby Weaver finds one of the most common things people get stressed about is the fear of letting people down, of how other people see us. This is certainly a pattern that I adopted in childhood. As I talked about in Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling I keenly felt my mum’s angst and stress in ordinary day to day life as she was parenting.

Like most kids, I learned to recognise the signs around this and wanted to smooth things out, bearing in mind kids depend on the adults around them for survival. This would obviously be more marked in abusive households but, since we are all human and experience a gambit of emotions, I suspect it happens to a certain extent in all households.

Dr Joe Dispenza also talks about indoctrinated fear as a major cause of stress, “be afraid of criminals, be afraid of terrorists, be afraid of drugs” …. and so on. Since stress shuts down our blood vessels in the conscious part of our brain, effecting less intelligent decisions, essentially this renders us powerless. And as long-standing British Member of Parliament (1950-2001) Tony Benn once said “Governments do not want a healthy, intelligent population because they are difficult to control.”

“When you turn on the stress response and can’t turn it off, now you are headed for disease” says Dr Joe Dispenza. No organism can live in emergency mode for extended periods of time. Chronic conditions require lifestyle changes. I can totally appreciate this if I take my panic attacks as an example. I had to change the way I thought and the way I felt, and that required me to become conscious of how unconscious I was.

Dr Libby Weaver explains the effects of chronic stress from a physiological standpoint:

Phase 1 – High adrenaline creates a lot of inflammation which is the beginning of most degenerative disease.

​Phase 2 – To keep you alive the body has to damp down that inflammation; cortisol elevates (its job is to slow your metabolism to get you through a famine). So clothes get tight, you diet (confirming the perceived famine), which slows your metabolism further and melatonin levels go down (you’re not going to want to sleep because your body thinks it has to be on guard).

In this mode, it’s not a time to create, imagine, learn, open your heart, or go within, it’s a time to run, fight, hide; so people naturally cling to their fear, worry, wherever is perpetuating the stress. Our attention is ‘out there’ where the perceived threat is, we obsess about time.

I quickly learned to get myself out of flight of fight mode as soon as I became aware of it (and still do today in any stressful condition). I would start to focus on my breathing, slow it down, take belly breaths and extend my exhalation; this invokes the Parasympathetic Nervous system – this is our rest, digest, repair and reproduce system. From here our body works more effectively, it’s also able to use body fat as a fuel, simply because it’s getting the message via the body “it’s safe”.

Another thing we can do is to take micro breaks throughout the day. At the traffic lights, instead of checking social media, become breath aware. While waiting for the kettle to boil, the lift to arrive etc, check in with our bodies. Regular meditation, though, is the best way to increase awareness (read Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success).

As well as making lifestyle changes, eating better, exercising, getting out in fresh air, and spending more time with loved ones to name a few, there are also methods like tapping (also known as EFT Emotional Freedom Technique) to reduce stress.. 

Dr Josh Axe talks about how certain emotions cause disease in specific organs. Emotions of fear affect the reproductive organs, the kidneys and adrenals. Think about a child getting really scared and they wet themselves. Why? Fear directly affects the bladder and the kidneys.

He goes on to say emotions of frustration and anger are toxic to the liver. Grief, sadness and depression affect your colon and lungs and also your immune system. Anxiety and nervousness affects the heart, small intestines and nervous system. Worry affects the spleen, pancreas and stomach.

Taking care of the emotional aspect of health is vitally important, as discussed in Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey. This premise has been known in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. As I mentioned in that previous blog, I personally like Lise Boubeau’s Your Body’s Telling You: Love Yourself and Annette Noontil’s The Body is the Barometer of the Soul to help me fathom what is going on in my body from a thought pattern and emotional standpoint.

I believe it’s time for us to start reclaiming personal dominion over our own bodies. Our body is far wiser than our mind, and it is always trying to communicate with us at a level of absolute authentic need (unlike our mind).  All in all, there is a lot you can do starting today to take ownership of your health and ensure you have a healthy relationship with life’s stress.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other health related articles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“Healing is really about self empowerment, whether we use doctors, herbalists or other practitioners, they should be used to guide us only, to empower us to make the right decisions. But when we hand over our power to them we become at the mercy of everything around us and we are not steering our own boat” Rosemary Gladstar

This is one of the opening comments in the first episode of Nick Polizzi’s docu-series Remedy. It presented quite a compelling and concise history of healing that also explained why so many of us are feeling polarized around (what we refer to as) the conventional healthcare system in the western world.

It is a topic close to my heart. For decades I’ve been researching many aspects of health and healthcare in order to manage my own health and, more recently, that of my children. Remembering the details of all that research, however, is definitely not on my list of strengths. Once I’ve formed an opinion, I usually forget all the details that led me there, with the exception of a few golden nuggets and my final conclusions.

As a result, and given I only started publishing articles in the last few years, those I’ve written on different aspects of health and healthcare to date usually pertain to issues that hold my attention in the moment.

However, that Remedy episode inspired me to write a short series of articles that tell the broader story. Since it summed up the history of healthcare so beautifully, I thought I’d start there. This will provide context, especially in cases where people haven’t had much need to look beyond conventional healthcare. Then I’ll dive more into the insights I’ve gained from my own health issues, and some of the healing modalities I use, over the next couple of weeks.

I’ve focused on the salient parts of that first episode and interjected with my own thoughts and insights from other sources (as indicated in italics). Of course, truth is subjective and entirely personal, but this perspective may just give you a fresh lens through which to look at your health, or the words to share with others to help explain your own experiences and feelings.

History of Healthcare

Historically humans were hunters and gatherers and, as omnivores, essentially herbalists by nature; for most of human history food and herbs were conjoined. Then, roughly ten thousand years ago, we started planting intentionally and – as a result – bred a lot of nutritional and medicinal value out of our food.

In our modern world we’ve been filling this deficiency with chemical medicine. While a large percentage of pharmaceutical drugs were (and a proportion still is) derived from plant extractions or synthesis, it is ironic that we call herbal medicine an alternative when it’s arguably the natural form.

Anthropologists, herbalists and scientists commonly agree that this natural form of medicine was discovered, honed and safeguarded in large part by women. It would have been rare to find a woman who didn’t know the plants around them for both medicine and for food because people were always gathering. With a few exceptions like Hildegard of Bingen, this knowledge was passed down orally from generation to generation within families.

That takes us to the point in the patriarchal age of our history where the church began to fear that knowledge women had to alter physiology with plants. So much so, they began to burn and drown women who carried that knowledge in witch trials and inquisitions. Certainly in Western culture we thereby broke the oral chain and our history is written by the then victors.

Within these texts you will find hints of women’s involvement however. For example, there was a famous medical treatise written in the 17th century by a physician named William Withering introducing (not discovering) Foxglove and its medical uses. To his credit he at least acknowledged that he learned from a woman herbalist although she (as was normal then) remained unnamed. Whereas some of the 19th century books would lead one to believe their male authors invented herbal medicine.

From a scientific perspective, these herbs and spices - and the recipes passed down from grandmother to daughter since time immemorial - are literally epigenetic inheritance systems that keep our genome patterns healthy and optimized in relation to our environment. These are as essential to our health as the hardcoded protein genes in our genome.

However, oblivious to this, in the last two hundred years we started getting away from plant medicine altogether in the developed world. This had its roots a little further back with the likes of Paracelsus, when we started moving towards mineral based medicines and then chemical medicines which have taken over in the Western world.

In the US this created a division between people called the Irregulars and the Heroics. The Heroics liked to experiment, doing things like giving people mercury for everything, and a lot of people died because of it. The Irregulars were those who were the natural healers.

In 1847 the AMA (American Medical Association) came into being and the put in place certain regulations that split these two groups. A large part of the split was caused by the need to become licensed through a specified procedure, but women, African Americans and Native Americans (effectively many of the traditional healers) were excluded and could not be licensed.

Also, those who chose to be part of the AMA and be licensed could not discuss a case with someone who wasn’t, even if their therapy was not working.

Then in 1904 the AMA put together a council (promoted by Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefeller family) to evaluate what was going on in the educational system of medicine. Abraham Flexner – author of the resulting Flexner report in 1910 – went around visiting the various medical schools to see what they were doing.

Remember the movie Titanic? This gives me the framework for imagining the pursuits of these men. It was felt to be an age of great discovery, it was that thirst to be first, biggest and greatest that marked the era.

The outcome was that the way medical education would be taught, and ultimately funded, was very codified. So, for example, at that time there were several prominent medical schools of homeopathy –an integral but not so profitable part of what was then deemed conventional medicine – and, after the Flexner Report, funding was essentially gone for those homeopathic medical schools.

If someone wanted to become a physician, the only choice was to learn (what we now call) conventional medicine; focused on pharmaceuticals and invasive techniques.  The travesty was that, after that time, instead of trying to find a way to integrate some of these other modalities they were just left out and even vilified.

​So here we have Scottish-American industrialist and business magnate Andrew Carnegie, and the industrial, political and banking family, the Rockefellers, involved in the way things were progressing in the medical field.

What evolved from this was the understanding that if drugs (through the pharmaceutical industry) were put together with the AMA’s control of the practice of medicine and other factors, it would create a conglomeration that could politically and financially control healthcare.

As I understand it, while the details and the stories are different in other parts of the Western world, they follow a similar theme. Europe fared better in some ways, but today with decades of misinformation and government budgets under pressure, many of the modalities that are considered to be outside of the mainstream are being cut (in ignorance and arrogance in my view).

For example, if you look at the history of the Royal London Hospital for integrated Medicine, you will see that was part of the public health system until very recently. Queen Elizabeth II remains its patron and the royal family (a rare example of a Westernised family that remains rooted in traditions that have been passed from generation to generation) are highly vilified as both users and advocates of alternative forms of medicine.

Yet if people could see past the media hype and look at the facts, they would see that what we now call conventional medicine has coincided with a dramatic increase in most of our civilization’s diseases...

The fact is we don’t have medical cures for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, on and on, yet we’ve been convinced healing is a thing we can do overnight with a pill.

One of the commentators in Remedy remarked “it’s as if we are part of the biggest human experiment in history, one that poses the question: if we take all these toxins, chemicals and growth hormones are we going to live longer?” It’s basically a bait and switch…

Antibiotics and Vaccines

We’ve been convinced that because we have had the use of antibiotics to cure something overnight (although we are now losing this ability as the human biome is adapting faster than we can produce new antibiotics) that we can cure anything. This is far from true.

The convergence of the development of antibiotics and the vast improvements in sanitation and hygiene implemented in the developed world, gave the impression that we have conquered all kinds of diseases.

The same could be said of vaccines. Most of the diseases were well and truly on the decline before vaccines were introduced. For a balanced view about this topic – and facts and data –I like this report by JB Handley.

In contrast when I looked up the WHO (World Health Organisation)’s website for facts on vaccines what I read was startling to me as it basically just denies what it calls ‘the misconceptions’, without directly providing any data to support its claims.

My own feeling is summed up well in a video I was watching by another layperson talking on the subject:

“Injecting a system with some kind of attenuated virus is not a substitute for giving your system a fighting start with a good diet and healthy lifestyle. Our bodies are polluted (think processed foods, caffeine, environmental factors and so on), it’s those choices we make that make our bodies susceptible to illness.

Remember we are talking about intentionally infecting a human system that is in perfect health. There is nothing more profitable than making well people get sick.

Regardless which side of this argument you are on, you do not want to lose the ability to make this choice for yourself and your children. Do your homework; there are scientists, doctors and researchers speaking out and, while often blocked by mainstream media, information is widely available if you look for it. Trust your intuition.”

The truth is, as we have raised our wealth, our lifestyles have led us to a path of chronic disease and illness. These miracle drugs aren’t fixing us anymore. People understand when they go to see their doctor or go into hospital with these chronic illnesses they are not likely going to come out cured, they are going to come out with more medicine.

This is leading many back to the question of prevention, and alternative remedies. People want to feel well.

We have got here because we have put a lot of faith in people other than ourselves, people we have put in an ivory tower. We don’t allow ourselves to be the masters of our own knowledge or investigation. When you get on a healing path, you take your power back.

When we are self responsible we can heal.

Herbal medicine, the oldest and most natural form of medicine became illegal to practice in the US, and still is today apparently. In that country, while the pharmaceutical companies indirectly own and control medical care, it’s felt by some that the insurance side is more insidious. Regardless, it is money that is controlling availability and promoting skepticism and fear, not the realities of the far less costly and more freely available alternatives to the pharmaceuticals.

In the current climate it is positioned that unless a drug is a FDA (or equivalent in other countries) approved drug, it is not effective and may be harmful. A thousand or more years of human trials with a plant such as chamomile is not counted as evidence, could this be considered symptomatic of our arrogance?

No one denies that botanical medicines can have side effects, there was one study done which reported 37 deaths a year due to herbal medicine between 1992 and 1998. But in that same time pharmaceutical medicines caused hundreds of thousands of documented deaths. 

The laws are becoming so repressive in the US that, let’s say, someone wanted to make ground-up Echinacea, you could not print on the bottle that it supports the immune system unless there have been two studies that are published in mainstream literature (bearing in mind most of those publications are paid for – in terms of advertising dollars – by the pharmaceutical companies) and it costs a lot to get the studies done.

You have to have two studies showing not just that Echinacea worked but that the exact form that you’re going to market it in worked i.e. the same exact amount, the same extraction process and the same isolated component etc, which is far more than is needed to know that these plants work.

​There is no money in herbs, they can be grown in our garden, so no one puts research into them. People in medical school are taught “here is how we treat this problem, with this chemical”, there is little – if any - holistic training, not even on nutrition, and medical conferences are generally sponsored by pharmaceutical companies.

For clarity, I’m not against what we now call conventional medicine, as Alberto Villoldo says, it’s diagnostic and surgical techniques are extremely valuable.

Having said all that, I’ll bring this article to a close by coming back to the point Rosemary Gladstar made at the outset. “Healing is really about self empowerment, whether we use doctors, herbalists or other practitioners, they should be used to guide us only, to empower us to make the right decisions.”

My personal belief is that there is no one right way for anything, no one truth, there is only what is right for you right here and now. There is help out there far beyond what you may hear or be offered in your doctor’s office. Is it time to investigate a little more and to start steering your own boat?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other health related articles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, I wrote that it is no coincidence that we form relationships with people who trigger us. Whether it is an intimate relationship or a more distant one, we are drawn to people who, in some way, match our own issues and they both challenge us and help us heal and grow.

A great question that arose out of that was “How do I know when to break away from a bad relationship or situation and when to stay”? While in my experience there is no one right answer to that, I think there are some basic questions to ask and principles to apply that are of benefit.

I do acknowledge that there are conditions that can make life extremely difficult or impossible for some people to make changes to anything other than their mindset at particular points in time, for that read What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances), but here I’m assuming a choice.

There was an exercise I heard Sonia Choquette taking someone through a few years ago I thought was extremely pointed and useful for making decisions like these. In her example the person was deliberating over whether to stay where she was or move to Marin, which was a major upheaval for her family.

Sonia said "Tell me your thoughts on it" and allowed her to answer before saying "and?" three or four times. This gave the rational mind the opportunity to fully air its pros and cons. Then Sonia asked the lady to close her eyes, take a deep breath, feel into her intuition and then open her eyes. She asked "What is the true question here?" and the lady answered "Can I spend the rest of my life living apart from my sister?"

Interestingly the sister hadn’t even been mentioned until this point. So Sonia asked her "How do you feel about that?" Her response was "I have to move to Marin". Sonia checked in "Is that true?" to which the lady said "It feels true". Upon which Sonia felt the lady had got her true answer because it was something felt rather than part of the back and forth mind objections that needed to be given their say first. 

​In my life I’ve made conscious decisions to leave relationships, jobs, careers, teams, homes and many other things I likely just can’t call to mind right now. Equally I go through the same process if I decide to stay. I’m not a half hearted person, when I commit to something I take it seriously.

Change has been necessary for my survival. I don’t mean that in a physical sense, though that would be a legitimate reason, for me it’s been about self love, growth and authenticity. Given what I know about the human experience, I suspect it’s the same for all of us.

If I’m feeling lack, and I know I’m not living life from a standpoint of self love, there is only so long I can deal with that before my body starts breaking down (see What is Your Body Telling You?) in even minor ways such as a cold or a headache through to more serious wake up calls.

The way I look at people and situations that trigger me now is always from a perspective of “what is this person or situation teaching me?” but to help me figure that out I need distance, objectivity.

When I’m not able to personally achieve that, I go to the people I have in my life whose opinion I respect and value and ask them to help me figure it out. I have a couple of friends who also look at situations in their life from a point of inquiry. When I can’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak, I explain my predicament and another starts questioning in a similar way to Sonia Choquette. We learn from each other through this process time and again.

But there are many other methods of inquiry I use: journal writing, writing with my non-dominant hand (to access the subconscious brain), emotional release techniques like tapping and applied kinesiology. I also have a trusted mentor I can call upon to give me a broad spiritual perspective and that helps to lift my thinking on any topic, plus my trusted set of reference books on the metaphysical causes of illness and accidents.

What I am always looking for is something to lift me out of my thoughts and the fear they hold for me (the “what if’s”) and something that helps me to figure out what is right for my highest good. All of which is underpinned by my daily mediation practice that helps me to understand the difference between being in my head and simply observing what is in my head while being in my heart.

For example, when my partner and I got together thirteen years ago we had both been married before and, when we talked about our future, my partner really had no interest in saying wedding vows again. At first I felt quite insecure about this; I wanted a forever promise no matter how irrational that was since we had both broken that same vow previously.

I’ll never forget the moment I broke away from that thinking; I was on a long car journey and, suddenly, this question of marriage popped into my head and I looked at it with curiosity.

Why was it even an issue for me? Why on earth would I do that to myself again? How could I promise someone forever? I didn’t want to, I wanted and want to be free to be me, and I don’t want him to ever be anything other than who he is either. I’d had enough of trying to change people, or compromising who I was and what I wanted in life.

It occurred to me that being married was just a concept I’d been brought up with (in the family home and indoctrinated by society), believing it part and parcel of committed relationships. It was tied to a whole heap of multi-layered emotions about security, self worth, sex and children among many things.

Needless to say I let go of that belief there and then, it was liberating.

I find situations and people that trigger me are often just signaling outdated beliefs I’d taken on either about myself or the world in my upbringing, and I am continuing to adopt even though they are no longer serving me. This trigger then delayering process is a constant source of learning and growth for me.

If you have ever approached life in this way you are one of the few. It seems to me most people go around thinking life is being done to them. Yet it is has been liberating to take my thoughts and emotions into my own hands. That said, this has been a huge journey for me, I did not learn any of it overnight. But I have every confidence that anyone can learn how with focus and determination to claim their best life.

One thing I do firmly believe though is that no one need tolerate being abused by another physically or emotionally, for this you might want to read Why Does She Stay? … and What Makes You So Different?

But whether that is (or has been) true for you, most likely you are tying yourself up in knots and what is going on inside your head will be far more insidious than whatever happened or is happening on the outside; it seems to me that most of us have the tendency to beat ourselves up mentally and emotionally almost constantly.

​As to whether to stay or go, like I say, there is no one right answer, there is only ever what is right for you in that moment. And regardless of which you choose, a silver lining of personal growth towards a more authentic you is always possible with many awesome ways to make a breakthrough towards it.

Feel free to comment on or share these thoughts with others if they inspire. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my blog.

It’s no coincidence that we form relationships with people who trigger us. We are drawn to people who are, in some way, a match to our own issues, and they both challenge us and help us heal and grow...
Read the full article here on Tiny Buddha

Being passive is often regarded as weak in our society. I remember teachers barking phrases like “have some gumption”, “think for yourself” or “have some backbone” to various students, which is ironic given the modus operandi of most school systems is for students to do as they are told. Most systems and authorities tend not to like being challenged, yet we respect those that do.

Early in my high school years I recall listening to a talk by someone differentiating between being passive, assertive and aggressive, and being assertive was the obvious choice of the three. I see the benefit of assertively walking down the street, keeping my head up, shoulders back, hips square and looking people directly in the eye (with a good natured smile and nod of acknowledgement).

It conveys “I have my wits about me”. And when I have my wits about me, it means I’m calm and alert; it’s the ability to think quickly, especially in times of stress. Yet, interestingly, while I grew up being someone who proved good in a crisis, I suffered from chronic anxiety the rest of the time.

Like most people, I grew up with an abundance of mixed messages, but the predominant beat of the drum was to submit. Psychology tells us that when faced with something we don’t like, it’s perceived as a threat and thus we flee, fight, freeze or fold.

In the face of being told no: “no you do not know what is good for you”, “no the way you are feeling is not acceptable/ridiculous/unwarranted”, “no you cannot express yourself that way” and so on, I – like most young children – had  harsh choices to make to survive in the family home and community.

I think I fragmented, freezing the soul-led part of me, and moved forward with a persona that was the most acceptable compromise in my world.  Much of the time I strove for perfection in order to avoid criticism or conflict, and became highly anxious in doing so.

At home I wasn’t given criticism in a constructive way, so I am relearning how to hear it as a grown woman without becoming so defensive. That said, I was far from being a quiet mouse as a child, there were many times I just couldn’t suppress that undeniably big warm heart beating in the somewhat frozen soul-led part of me.

When I felt the heart of my soul beat, I acted in response. I found the best way to get what I wanted and needed was to present a rational argument, fighting against whatever decision had been dished out. When that didn’t work, I was like a dog with a bone until I had worn out my oppressor.

In a highly controlled and disciplined environment, being passive was not useful.

Being ready to fight for myself and being persistent paid off. It paid off in the years of growing up, and it has paid off as a grown up in making the decision to find a way back to that authentic part of me. But there came a point that it no longer served me. The authentic part of me does not know how to fight, and does not want to fight, it simply wants to stand in its truth and shine.

Becoming a parent has just amplified everything that was going on inside me. When I find myself chuntering or yelling the same criticisms I heard, I cringe and I stop. That old part of me has so many years of momentum, but it’s slowly slowing down in the light of awareness and active healing; I know one day it will become so still and quiet I’ll hardly hear it at all.

The word passive has popped out at me a number of times lately. When I was asked to repeat an affirmation “you are confident, grounded, passive and comfortable”, I just couldn’t connect with passive; it did not feel affirmative.

Yet, a few days later, when I heard Matt Khan say “Passivity is how we evolve in the journey from the small I am to the big I AM. When we all evolve, we will break down the systems of society” I was in complete agreement.

When I put it in the context of living a more soul-led life, passivity really takes on new meaning. After years of setting goals and fighting for my place in the world, it takes practice to make a shift to a place of surrender and allowing. And it’s not about surrendering to the whims and desires of the world around me; it’s about allowing the world within me to see the light of day.

​Passivity is not about suppressing things that trigger me, it’s about observing what is triggering me and what it is trying to teach me. It’s about acting on inspiration from within, rather than feeling the need to take action because of a voice in my head that is fearful and deems me a failure otherwise.

​It’s about dismantling the defensive armour, the ideas and beliefs I thought were mine, to rediscover that who I am is far more connected to everything and everyone than I could ever have anticipated in my learned state. Passivity is about allowing who I truly am at my core shine out into the world.

Being passive in this sense is honestly powerful and liberating. It’s a relief to ditch the effort involved in presenting a front to the world, and all that senseless worrying about what people might think of me. To become more passive and stand in my truth in all my relationships, and in all situations, has become my goal in life.

​What about you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling and Do You Need to Cherish Yourself? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
​

Lately I’ve been focused on healing my body of the traumas it has endured over my life and it’s really brought home to me what it means to embody my spirituality. I think of it like peeling an onion layer by layer, slowly uncovering all the things that – over the years – I’ve either suppressed or repressed.

I discovered that suppression refers to denial of impulses on a conscious level (for example, if I was deliberately holding back from expressing my true feelings during a conversation), whereas repression involves denying impulses at a subconscious level (for example, if I was born into a family where expressing my anger was not allowed, I may have long since numbed myself to even feeling anger arise in me).

Of course, what has been suppressed or repressed will find a way to be expressed. There are many ways this can happen and life is always presenting me with clues. A quick read of any good book on metaphysical causes of disease, or a chat with any healer that works with the energy in our bodies, will usually point to the thought patterns and emotions that need to come to light in order to be healed.

Continued denial, conscious or unconscious, just seems to manifest in more and more debilitating accidents, events and diseases. This, I believe, is why there are so many people who develop terminal illnesses after many years of locking away their true feelings, and most of the time they are completely oblivious to the links.

When dying of bowel cancer, my mum was much happier just chalking it up to fate rather than reexamining the relationship with her abusive alcoholic father who died very early in her life. Not that it would have reversed what was happening in her body necessarily, but it may have created some healing and slowed things down.

But since I started living life more consciously, the feelings, thought patterns and behaviours that stem from traumatic events are usually quite obvious now I know what I’m looking for. As I mentioned in a previous blog, some of my favourite go-to reference books for this are Lise Boubeau’s Your Body’s Telling You: Love Yourself and Annette Noontil’s The Body is the Barometer of the Soul,

Traumatic events are not just about abuse though, or the horrors of war, there is also a whole raft of developmental and more commonplace traumas that we each experience. These amount to anything that cause us to go against our true nature, for example:

• Early life parent-child attachment issues
• The culture within the family home, community or country that places more value on certain behaviours than others (for example, extroverted behaviour is valued more in Western society which is not so great for sensitive types like me)
• Normal childhood diseases or immunizations
• Accidents, illnesses, surgeries, medications etc
• Other emotionally significant events like parents getting divorced, or me getting divorced, made redundant or the death of someone significant in my life

In essence, anything of significance creates an emotional signature in the cells of my body whether I lock them out of my conscious thinking or not. The body, in a bid to create healing and equilibrium, will continue to attempt to get my attention for as long as I am in it.

When I set my sights on leading a soul-led life, I knew there was a bit of work to do to unpeel the layers of my own metaphorical onion. But, I’ll be honest, I really wasn’t fully thinking through that each layer is also multi layered (in terms of mind, body, spirit) and discovering what is locked away in the cells of my body didn’t cross my mind.

Yet I have lived through each trauma moment by moment, time and again I have had experiences that jolt my nervous system and do unseen damage within organs. I’m discovering that a broad recognition of, say, a troubled relationship with a parent, and sweeping forgiveness doesn’t really cut it.

So committing to unpeeling the layers of trauma is a bit more involved than I imagined, not unlike parenting. It requires dedication, patience and its own time and space to unfold.

I’m particularly enjoying a sequential honouring of my timeline (starting at the present day and working backwards) using a mix of homeopathy and emotional work. This has been surprising and downright painful at times as I said in Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight, but, in reality it’s quite benign compared to the years of trauma now being expressed.

Left squashed down, my body will try to express what is locked in there in a way that gets louder and louder, so by starting to work through the most recent traumas it simultaneously works through the older, related ones.

For example, I have just had root canal work, a dead nerve being the cause of an excruciating facial neuralgia and a subsequent painful abscess; this is a further expression of dental work that took place a year ago. More importantly, it’s an expression of the pain I felt in being taunted as a child as I described in Play Big in Life, Stand Up and Be Seen and the related anger and sadness that I had never really addressed.

Physically clearing out the dead debris is the same as dealing with the underlying thought patterns and emotions, they are just the physical, intellectual and emotional expressions of the same thing and it allows the issue to dissipate.

One of the techniques I like to use to address my emotions is a visualization where I sit with younger me and hear what she has to say about the issues, and then I invite in (in my imagination) someone wise to give their views, and then I let present day me express how I am now feeling and how it has changed my thinking. This allows me to let go of the old feelings that – having now been heard and understood - are no longer serving a purpose in my life.

For years a mentor of mine has talked about change beginning first at a soul level, then – once I have got up my nerve (to do something) - it filters though to the nervous system , then the electrics come online as little sparks go around my body and fire up my sensory system. Once my body is fully online, my heart begins to feel the change, and finally – lastly – my intellect understands it.

Now that my authentic self has managed to get all systems online, in a good few areas, I can really appreciate intellectually the multi faceted way I was sabotaging my own authenticity for much of my life. I also have a greater respect for my body, which is clearly wiser than my mind, and listen to it far more.

I was told a story today of a little boy who had such a troubled start to his life. When he was first able to talk he would get all agitated and kept repeating “I said no” (to coming into this life). His mother, with loving patience and persistence, has taken the time to spend with him in nature and focus him on the beauty of being here, and now he is far more at peace.

I’m sharing this little story as a parting thought on this topic, because recently when asked what the purpose of life is, this (still) little boy said “to experience true love coming back to you”.

That, in essence, is the purpose of embodying our authentic, spiritual self; to experience true love coming back to you. Now isn’t that a worthy goal?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling and Do You Need to Cherish Yourself? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.