I Cannot Lose Myself

Anxiety and The Fear of Losing Yourself

I used to be afraid of my feelings. I would be caught up in fearful anxiousness to the point of severe panic attacks. I was also afraid of going into an attack. What if I didn't come out? What if I never feel good again? I thought that I was somehow broken and wrong.

I have found in practice that this is a fairly common misunderstanding of how feelings and thoughts work in our body-mind. Many people experience this. I can tell you it's no fun.

I came across this piece of writing by Jeff Foster recently and found that it encapsulated this phenomenon better than I've heard before and gives lovely direction as to the question everyone asks which is "What do I do about it?".

"I Cannot Lose Myself" by Jeff Foster, author and poet

I used to be terrified of feelings, my own feelings and the feelings of others.

I believed that if I went too deeply into feelings, if I let them exist for too long in me, if I allowed them to live in my body, I would go mad, or I would be destroyed by them somehow. Or they would never leave, and I would get “stuck” in them forever, sucked into their dark heart, no way out.

I feared “losing myself” in feelings.

I feared my own fear. I had anxiety about having anxiety. I was angry with my own anger. Like many, I believed that I had dark, sinful, dangerous energies inside of me, and that I had to avoid these ‘demons’ at all costs. This was all a child’s superstition, of course, totally reasonable conclusions for an innocent child to make.

But as I stepped into presence, into my adult and out of my trauma, I came to realise that ALL feelings are safe, even the super intense ones. They come and go in the body. They are not permanent, and they just want to be felt, blessed, loved, offered safe passage, and move on.

I did not have to fear or resist my feelings any longer, even the intense and uncomfortable ones. I could just relax, breathe, open, surrender, trust, and let them pass through.

I cannot lose myself for I am present even at the heart of loss.

With Love

Dr. Sara

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.

The Power of Subtlety

I am often asked "Why do you use such a light touch?" "Don't you need to use more force to create a structural change?" "Why so subtle?"

The power is in the subtlety or rather the depth of force, the lightness. More force doesn't result in more effectiveness. If you want your spouse or children to empty the dishwasher, for example, being more and more forceful with your request doesn't get them moving quicker.

If my contacts weren't so subtle, your brain wouldn’t know to pay attention to them. If the touch was more forceful or obvious, the brain would have a tendency to ignore it.

We live in a world of constant information flow and stimuli. Many people are not used to consciously paying attention to subtlety. It can take a lot to get our attention these days. When you start to notice the more subtle sensations in life, the world around us comes alive. Sunsets have brighter colours, food tastes more delicious, and the voice of a family member is sweeter.

From a neurological point of view, whenever something touches us, whether we bump into someone or we’re having a massage, we feel the touch and depth of touch because we have all kinds of receptors in our tissues: in the skin, in the muscles and in the connective tissue. These receptors send information to the brain when they’re stimulated. This is what gives us a sense of what is touching us, how deeply, and for how long. Different types of receptors are activated by different types of touch.

The human brain is estimated to use roughly 20% of the body’s energy. With information traveling at 260 mph, more than 100,000 chemical reactions occurring per second, 86 billion cells and over 10,000 types of neurons, the human brain is probably the most complex entity that is known.

With over 100,000 chemical reactions happening at any given time, how is it that we can pay attention to anything? Your brain has evolved to be able to parse and discern what is important to pay attention to and what’s not. It’s at this level of consciousness that a gentle touch is better able to get the brain’s attention.

Once the brain is aware, it’s able to set into motion changes in muscle tension, blood flow, breathing, heart rate, … and the healing begins.

If you’re still not convinced that a small stimulus can cause major change in the body, consider the gentle caress of a lover, or when you’ve had someone give you a look of judgement and shaming. In both cases your body is filled with emotion, tension and energy, albeit very different types of emotions, tensions and energy.

Have you ever been so angry or upset only to have someone lovingly put their hand on your shoulder? You can feel your body starting to calm down, slow down and your mind starts to settle.

A gentle subtle touch can have a huge impact on our bodies.

The gentle touches that I make along your spine are designed not only to get your brain’s attention; They are designed to create physical changes in structure, changes in how your energy flows, and changes in levels of consciousness; all of this gives your brain a chance to integrate information to allow for healing properties to evolve.

That is the power of subtle touch.

Shared Humanity is Where It’s At

Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.

I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense

Rumi

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I’ve recently been looking in the direction of differences and sameness, group vs individual, the body vs a relational person interacting and I keep coming back to the realization that it’s all one, we are all one or it’s all one solution.

Humans are all very different one of the other. And yet we are all humans. We have a shared humanity. Deep down all people have the same needs and wants. I might want chocolate and you might want vanilla but everybody wants ice cream. We want to feel safe and loved and warm at night.

What is the same between you and me and the guy down the street is that we all have our own inner wisdom. A knowing that feels expansive and is separate from any supposed rational explanation. Our bodies are the interface between this wisdom and the “real” world around us. Our spine and nervous system is the literal software/hardware that runs this interface between you and the world you perceive as real.

In waking up to this deeper aspect or dimension of ourselves we realize that life happens from inside of us outwards. Many teachers in the wellness field encourage us to “look within”. Most of us look within and see lots of habits of thought, judgmental thinking, and old programs. If you stay looking in that direction, you’ll find that who we are is beneath all this thinking. We are not our thinking. It’s not even real. It’s an illusion.

In the depths of who we are there is expanding joy, peace, compassion, infinite creativity and unconditional love. At this level or in this space within ourselves we realize that there is a oneness to all humans, a shared humanity.

This space is untouched by circumstance, past trauma, or current world stressful event. It’s always there, always who you are and always whole.

Spinal entrainments can guide you to the doorway or the gateway to this space and then it's up to you to step in and it's really up to you to learn to live from this space.

Lie Back

I recently was on a group Masterclass session with Dr. Dicken Bettinger, clinical psychologist and founder of 3 principles mentoring.

He read the most beautiful poem to us in his most relaxing beautiful voice. The poem is First Lesson by Philip Booth.

The author is teaching his little daughter to swim in the ocean and it’s a beautiful metaphor for learning to swim in the flow of life.

Here is the poem for your inspiration:

First Lesson

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

~Philip Booth

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

Our Bodies Are Miraculous

A local sugarbush owner tells me that for the last 2 weeks the sap has been running freely! The trees are waking up for Spring!

Are you? Time to thaw out!

We often forget that humans are just as much a part of nature as the trees.

Our bodies are designed so miraculously and our automatic systems work beautifully.

Did you know that your cells are constantly renewing? On average the cells in your body are about 7 years old!

Some cells are much older, like the lenses in your eye and some are much younger, like skin cells. New red blood cells are made every 120 days. We have new intestines every 10 to 16 years. Our skeleton even replaces itself over time.

The DNA in each cell replaces itself based on inborn instructions and the environment of that cell. If our skin cells have a low collagen environment, then the replacements won’t be as robust or last as long.

The great news is that the environment of our body is under our control!

All the things that we know to do to keep healthy is what helps your cells replace themselves with optimal cells.

Eating a healthy vitamin rich low inflammatory diet to give the cells the building blocks is important. Exercising stimulates your body to strengthen muscles and bones. Practices that quiet the mind help to ensure an optimal cellular environment.

And you guessed it, optimal spinal health and flexibility helps the nerve supply to every organ which ensures optimal cellular replacement.

Certain breathing practices (eg The Wim Hof method) bring more oxygen to all your cells to create more happy cells. Cell biologist James Oschman found that standing on the earth in your bare feet “completes our electrons” and helps all our cells old and new have more vitality.

Spring is a great time to get back to basics and connect to our natural rhythms of good diet, healthy exercise and a relaxed flowing mind allowing our inborn systems to work at their best.

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