Experiencing Our Experience

"If the only thing people learned, was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world." - Sydney Banks

Many teachers talk about the need to be present with our experience of the world or our experience of our body.

The way you think of your body has a big effect on the actual health of your body. An uncomfortable sensation can turn into lasting chronic pain if you add a lot of negative emotion to it or continuously tell yourself that it shouldn't feel that way.

More than half of the experience of pain is from heightened emotions. If you can be present with your experience of your painful body part without any emotion or story about how it ought to be different or what it means, the actual sensation is much different and lessened in severity.

The same is true of how we talk about our bodies. One often hears people talking about their bad back or "oh, that's just my bum knee". It seems mild however we are dismissing our own bodies as bad and ignoring the message for change within the actual pain or sensation. Practice listening to your own language to see if you have body parts you don't value.

But what message is there in the pain or dysfunction? It just hurts and I don't like it.

When we can be fully present in a state of no thought with our body the sensation or pain transmutes. It can move to another spot. It can reduce or go away. It can change into pure emotion that you weren't allowing space for. It can intensify and then turn into joy or certainty. It can be the messenger for an insight about something in your life.

The wisdom of an insight can be literally anything. For example, it might be as simple as "oh wow, I need to stretch my arm" "Strengthening my body might help this, I wonder if there are any videos on YouTube" or so-called bigger things like "I need to quit my job". One of the most common things I hear from people is "well I know I should do..." We often know.

We suffer when we’re feeling powerless or helpless. Not from pain itself.

What do we do when we feel helpless or powerless? We may freeze up, withdraw or roll up into a ball. We may try to self-talk our way through it: “it’s gonna be alright, you’re going to get through this”. We may get angry or upset and lash out. We may develop a neurotic habit like an obsessive compulsion. This list is not exhaustive by any means.

When we suffer, we may actively deny/ignore/disconnect from the feeling of helplessness. Over time, this can become an unconscious habit or M.O. Which can further evolve into a part of our personality. This in turn can create more pain. So, while we suffer, we try to avoid feeling helpless.

The remedy for suffering is to acknowledge and accept in the moment that we are feeling helpless and that nothing is working. The more fully we can accept this, feeling it with our bodies, a transformation occurs. It’s as if a vortex opens up, our defences soften, energy can flow once again which leads us to our inner resourcefulness.

The antidote to feeling helpless is to reconnect to our inner resources such as peace, strength, patience, love and flow.

Listening to Our Deeper Self

There are many ways or pathways to listening to ourselves

People talk about their own sense of themselves quite differently. Different types of spiritual teachers or mental health practitioners have different words and definitions for following your own wisdom.

I hear about listening to your heart, not your head. Listen to your gut. Sometimes these 3 different intelligences we have within us may be telling us 3 different things. Head, heart or gut? Who to listen to? What do I do? What choice do I make?

Our thoughts are very powerful in that they can take control of our neurology. Our brain and nervous system can’t tell the difference between the thought of a future negative event or the actual event itself. Both create stress. We are wired up to create emotions based on our thoughts. Your feelings in any given moment are a clue to your predominant thoughts. If you are scared; you are thinking scary thoughts. If you are angry; you are thinking angry thoughts.

Being aware of how thoughts and feelings or emotions work in our body is one step towards one type of listening. Practice this without judgement. Ok, I feel frustrated. I’m thinking frustrated thoughts. We then see pretty quick that we then have a choice. Do you want to feel frustrated? The answer might be yes. Maybe no. The one answering this is the deeper part of ourselves that is always at peace.

Then people often want to control their thoughts “Well I will only think joyful thoughts because I want to feel joyful.” Ok. This will work for a while. Then life happens and we might feel sad or angry or happy or whatever.

When we realize that we live in the feeling of our thoughts a magical space can open up. Things don’t look quite so solid anymore. It’s just a thought and I can turn around and think again, and again, and again as many times as I want. It’s like having a bright orange crayon and a blank sheet of paper to create over and over and over again.

And underneath it all, is who we really are, peaceful, loving, at rest. This is the part of you to listen to. It speaks most often when we feel good. You know it’s the ruth you are hearing when there is a beautiful feeling alongside. Some describe this as just knowing, feeling spaciousness, expansiveness, joy, calmness, or clarity. It might be an uncomfortable knowing but you are calm and you know what to do or what you want.

Entrainments help to clear your nervous system of built-up stress and the effects of our thinking so you can connect more easily with your own clarity and knowing. With who you really are.

If You Do Anything Do These 3 Things

I had the amazing opportunity to be a guest on Susan Rosin’s “Healthy Tips After 50 Podcast”. Susan is a coach helping professional women optimize their busy work and family lives and she has a passion for living to her fullest. In her podcast, she shares the best of what she has learned over the years and has interesting guests.

Here is the link to listen in with Susan and I in conversation about World Class Wellness and aging with optimum vitality.

In talking with Susan, I realized that in my twenty years of practice there are 3 main areas that if you pay attention to these things as you age, you will have huge benefits in overall health and vitality.

If you consider how you Eat

How you Move

And how you Think

It is impossible to overstate the beneficial effects of optimizing these 3 areas as you age. It’s also never too early to start and never too late to get going. Think of it as an investment in your life.

A big reason for why these 3 things has to do with the effects of Toxins (what goes you’re your body hint: what you eat), Trauma (physical injury and how you move) and Thoughts (how thoughts affect your emotions and thereby your spine and thereby your whole being). These 3 areas are the main causes of unnecessary inflammation in the body.

In future articles, I will focus on each of the three areas of Eat, Move and Think and how we can optimize our vitality at any age.

Do you ever just listen?

Do you ever just listen?

To others

To yourself, your own wisdom.

Truly listening with nothing on your mind. Seeing the all of someone. Feeling them as they speak and listening without agenda.

Just listening or easy listening is a way of being with someone else or yourself that allows them to truly hear themselves and to be fully seen and heard.

It is in a way the opposite of active or reflective listening as you aren’t thinking about what to reflect back or what to say next but you are truly present with the other person in a way that is deeply honouring of who they are.

It’s not distracted listening or not paying attention. It’s being fully present and just listening.

I’ve heard it described as listening like a rock with ears or listening like the camera. Without trying to be helpful, judgement, or opinion. The other person will feel the difference and blossom.

It is also a profound way of being with yourself and hearing yourself. Most people either don’t hear their own knowing or they hear it and dismiss it. “I’m making that up”. To deeply listen to yourself without censoring yourself, fully accepting all aspects of yourself is extremely freeing. And healing.

Homework: For just today really deeply listen to yourself without judgement. Whatever comes up is okay. Listen to yourself like a rock with ears. You might be surprised.

With love,

Dr. Sara

The Wonder Of How Healthy You Already Are

Symptoms are the body returning to health.

There are 2 broad categories of how this happens.

The first is things like when we eat something bad and we vomit it up to keep ourselves healthy. Or fever is our body’s wisdom asserting itself to kill off bacteria and viruses so we can keep the outside out and the inside in.

The second way that our bodies return to health is in the case of chronic stress.

We are made for a hyperalert stress state for a half-hour every 2 to 3 days.

This system is in place so we can do things like fight for our lives and run away from lions. And it works beautifully if we let it.

In our modern lives, we rarely use this inborn survival system how it was designed. We keep ourselves in a mildly hyperalert state a lot of the time. We do this with the three main categories of stressors: Thoughts, Toxins, and Trauma.

When the fight or flight system is activated a whole cascade of physiological and biochemical responses happen in our super smart bodies. We down regulate non-essential systems e.g. sexual drive, reproduction, digestion and the immune system. Fighting off microorganisms or reproducing doesn’t matter when you are running away from a hungry lion.

We also up regulate other lion fighting essential functions e.g. mobilizing blood sugar for quick energy, increasing HDL cholesterol for wound healing, sending blood flow to the central organs and away from hands and feet to slow bleeding, and clenching your jaw so you don’t break it.

Operating in this mode for more than a half-hour every 2-3 days causes your body to start to breakdown. It’s too physiologically expensive. Systemic inflammation goes up and over time joints start to degenerate leading to arthritis. Aches and pains develop. Blood pressure and cholesterol increases and our platelets get sticky inside the blood vessels. A whole host of chronic degenerative diseases begin to appear. These symptoms and diseases are our bodies attempts to return to health by conserving energy.

Culturally, we generally keep running our systems hot and just deal with the symptoms. We go on high blood pressure medication or take an anti-inflammatory for arthritis. We do exercises for degenerated hips and knees. We get chiropractic adjustments or massages for sore bodies.

Sometimes we look at what is causing the stressed state. What is our body attempting to tell us? We change our ergonomics, we improve our diets and lift weights to be stronger. Meditate and do yoga.

One of the more upstream ways we can help out our body is by noticing our thinking. When we become aware that we are using our thinking to run our systems “hot” we start to disengage from the stress and shut off the survival mode.

Our bodies don’t believe it so much anymore.

When we don’t buy in to the illusion our natural health begins to reassert itself.

Entrainments for your nervous system can be used to help you notice your own thinking patterns and it gives your brain the space to reassess a perceived scary situation with more resources. You then relax and allow your body to heal itself.

It is always a wonder to me how beautifully we are made, how perfectly we work and how healthy you already are.

With love,
Dr. Sara

Stress In A Wheelbarrow

Stress isn’t actually a thing. Wait! What? Everyone says “Stress – It’s a thing!” Dr. Sara, you’ve been telling us for years that stress is a thing and it’s a bad thing. Yes. I know.

I was wrong.

Stress is something called a nominalization. It’s a non-tangible process that we shorthand into a “thing” to talk about it more easily. But it’s not a “thing”. You can’t put stress into a wheelbarrow. That’s a handy test for “Is it a thing?”. If you can put it in a wheelbarrow then it’s a thing. If not, then it’s a process our minds are creating. And good news, if you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow then it’s up for grabs to change or shift as it wasn’t “real” to start with anyway.

Ok but I still feel really tired and anxious, and you told me my low back pain had a lot to do with stress. You told me, Dr. Sara!

So what now?

Understanding how your brain creates stress can help us do something different. In chiropractic, we talk about 3 main stressors or sources of stress. These are physical, chemical and mental-emotional. The first two tend to be well understood by most people and the last one is rarely understood or even looked at.

Physical stress is things like a car accident, a broken arm or even soreness from exercising. The effect of the stress can be negative (e.g. car accident), creating a breakdown or positive (exercise soreness) creating growth.

Chemical stress is things like eating McDonald’s every day, alcohol, or an industrial chemical burn. Being exposed to these things requires your body to use more energy to clear them from your system just as physical stress requires more energy from your body to heal. This requiring energy is an extra load on your body or “stress”. Again, this can create growth or breakdown.

Mental-Emotional stress is the things we tell ourselves. It can be habitual thought patterns or just random thoughts. Our thought patterns are powerful as they dictate our posture, our energy levels, and the possibilities we allow ourselves in life. Like the previous two types of stressors, Mental-Emotional stress can be a trigger for growth or breakdown. We can tell ourselves wonderful joyful thoughts or terrible scary thoughts.

The awesome thing is that our bodies and minds are designed to return to a calm expansive, relaxed state once the stress is done. Once the broken arm is set and healing, once the chemical is cleared from our system, and once we allow the scary thoughts to settle we can return to factory settings ready for anything.

Mental-Emotional thought patterns are the day-to-day main reason why we don’t return to “factory settings”. They are so habitual and run beneath the surface of our awareness creating tension and tightness throughout your body and spine. Our brains can’t tell the difference between a thought in our head and a tiger on our doorstep. We create states of worry, fatigue and anxiety by replaying all the scary thoughts over and over.

The first step to changing this situation is to just notice that we are doing it. Notice that your thoughts are having an effect on your body. It could be a good effect or a bad effect. Decide if you like the way you are feeling. If yes, carry on. If no, then notice “Oh look! I thought about a tiger (or scary thing) and I contracted in, my breathing got shallow, I tightened up my jaw.” Noticing allows your brain to become aware and do something different.

The second step to changing is to become aware that we can choose our thoughts internally separate from external events. An outside circumstance happens and we are the ones who put meaning on it and create a thought with that meaning. Our body then reacts to that thought/meaning as “real”. Noticing that we have a choice is huge in itself. It opens up a path to freedom.

Noticing that you are the wizard behind the curtain is the most important part of opening up to more possibilities and eventually resting in a deeper space of aliveness for longer and longer.

With love,
Dr. Sara

The Space of Expansion

Humans are made for responding in the moment. When we are alive to the present moment we respond to what is happening around us beautifully without overthinking or analyzing. To me, this feels like a space of expansion. There’s an energy that flows through us and we take action as needed or we are quiet and still as needed. Many call this Going with the Flow or a flow state.

We are literally made to exist in this space of flowing expansion. Our brain and nervous system works best here. We can use thought as a tool to make things happen. We use them; they don’t use us.

Your thoughts and your spine are intimately connected. What we think about shows up in our spine as habitual patterns. It can be a dominant tension pattern or a habitual pattern of flow. Spinal entrainments are one way to connect with a deeper part of ourselves that remembers our own flow. It allows for expansion into possibilities.

We are made for this space and we forget. An entrainment is a remembering of who we are.

With Love,
Dr. Sara

Goals Vs Miracles

I’ve been giving quite a lot of focus lately to what I’d like to see more of in the world. Many inspirational quotes come to mind along the theme of “If you don’t like it; change it”. One of my favourites is from Mahatma Gandhi “Be the change you want to see in the world”.

I recently came across a definition of Goals versus Miracles by an author and coach that I follow, Michael Neill.

A goal is something achievable that you can do through hard work and putting in the hours. A miracle is something that lights you up, you have no idea how to do or how it would come about but if it landed in your lap you would take it and be delighted.

A goal is often SMART and is usually uninspiring. A miracle is something where you come alive. It causes you to gasp and then grin. The possibilities of what could happen then start to flow.

There is a space that exists where you are alive to the nature of creation and you allow life to express through you. This is the space of miracles. How you know you are in the space of miracles is when you feel giddy expansion and ideas just come to you. They are usually not realistic ideas. They are more along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be fun if” ideas. You also generally will think these ideas are impossible. Impossible just means that you currently can’t see a way to make it happen from where you are now.

When we make a goals list we operate from a different space. It’s the space of the known. There is little opening for the unexpected or for a miracle. We get what we expect through overcoming obstacles and hard work.

I would invite you to play with being and creating from the space of miracles which is the space of inspiration and pure joy. Babies and young children live here. What would life be like for you if you spent more time in the space of miracles and less time in the space of goals?

With Love,
Dr. Sara