Category: Healing Truths

Meditation for Healing Trauma?

11/15/2020

Does meditation help us with trauma and healing? The short answer is kind of, but not often. The reason that I say that is what most people call meditation and your ability to go into more meditative states is dependent on the wiring of your Subtle Body.

Meditation is not purely a mind thing because we're not thinking. That's what I think people don't even stop to think about. Meditation calms the mind, but it calms the mind because it's touching in with the values or the energy channels. It's focusing your layers of your Subtle Body in order to be more harmonized.

The reason that we feel refreshed is that we are more integrated when we're trying to settle the mind or focus the mind so that it's not interfering with the rest of the Subtle Body. It's not often that meditation helps your trauma. It's true that spiritual practice in general, ultimately everything will be brought to the surface and unified and healed in your own process towards oneness with the one, but it is a long process. It might take you a couple of lifetimes.

What I've seen, and I've been a part of different spiritual communities and traditions and qi gong and yoga, and I've really had been blessed to be in the company of spiritual masters of different traditions, and also had mentors who were therapists and worked in that way. I've seen the different sides that people can approach this from.

What tends to be more true is that trauma work ends up supporting and helping to go deeper in your meditation. Because if you have a block in your Subtle Body, it's going to be very difficult to go into any deeper states of meditation without a super deep dive.

The exception to that is doing pretty intensive spiritual practices that most people are not really set up to do. Like doing a deep dive, 10 day silent retreat, working with a qualified teacher one-on-one, meditating for long periods at a time over a series of days. For most modern people that aren't in a monastic tradition, that's really harder to do.

In my experience using Subtle Body techniques is the way to start to heal your Subtle Body. So then low to moderate meditative types will be able to function better and lead you into that deeper way more organically.

RELEASE THE TRAPPED TRAUMA FROM YOUR BODY
(WITHOUT YEARS OF THERAPY)

Disclaimer: This program is not intended to be a substitute for professional mental health or counseling services. No practitioner-patient relationship is established and the training content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA and nothing here is intended to diagnose, cure or treat any disorders.

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Release Trapped Emotions

11/15/2020

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It's a really big topic. I can't teach you 12 weeks in this two minutes, but I'll give you the basic overview.

Releasing Emotions

It's two questions—releasing emotions, and then releasing stuff that's not ours. To release trapped emotions, you have to have a Subtle Body-appropriate process because there's always an emotion and then there's the source of the emotions themselves in a Subtle Body technical way are like the wind that comes through the trees. They're something that is naturally generated by the movement of air pressure and other things. That's the root.

We want to be careful to not believe that emotions are the source of things. Emotions are just the wind that is generated by something else by a deeper cause. What we're really looking to release is not the emotions, but actually the cause of the emotions, which is the kink in the Subtle Body.

In Sanskrit, we talk about what's in your Citta , which is sort of like your karmic bag of all the impressions that you have. Sometimes those will get stirred up and that creates these whirlpools of emotions. We see that it's not really the emotion, it's actually the source within the person. Two people can experience the same event and have different emotions come from it. So if two people go through the same experience and they can have different emotions that come from it, that means that there must be something different at the source. Otherwise the emotions would be the same.

To release emotions, we have to use a Subtle Body process to move past the emotions. We let the emotions and the wind guide us to say, "Whoa, there must be a fan around here, something blowing up all this wind". We go through a process, which we train people in what we call the Basic Procedure and the basis is NTB.

NTB

N we Notice it, "Oh, it seems like there's a little wind here. I wonder where the sensation is in my body.
T we Turn towards it. This seems simple, but it's huge. Most of us are used to pushing away and avoiding that sensation whenever we feel that emotion or that wind come up. We turn the other way and try to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Although that's a natural reaction, it actually causes the emotion to stay stuck.
B Bring it closer. This is where we really have to use Subtle Body energy-appropriate techniques like the ones that you will learn through the 7 Days To A More Grounded You Audio Course.

Remember, you are a soul with a body and your path reflects that. Sending you lots of love!

RELEASE THE TRAPPED TRAUMA FROM YOUR BODY
(WITHOUT YEARS OF THERAPY)

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Get Through Tough Times

8/6/2020

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How do I deal with the difficulties that happen in life?

This starts to get us down to this deeper level of what our working spiritual hypothesis is in the world, because one of the things that many spiritual traditions understand (depending on your viewpoint) is that suffering is a part of life. The Eastern school of thought is that we have to recognize that no matter what, whether you are spiritually enlightened or an average Joe, nobody gets out of here without difficulty.

One of the important lessons that I'm often coaching people on is a stepping stone that we have to start to separate out the difference between what is difficulty in life and what is suffering.

People will say, "well, what about this issue with my friends?" or "what about this issue with my family? I really feel stuck."

You'll notice that when you bring up an issue, it's like this big jumble of a lot of different feelings and emotions and sensations in your body and reasons why it should be somewhere, should be another way. This is always a recipe for disaster.

What we learned to do is a two-step process.

What is the Objective Part?

We start to use our mind a little bit and we can start to say, "okay, of all this jumble, what is the objective difficult part?"

I want you to make two columns on a piece of paper. One column is the objective difficulty.

"It's actually very difficult that right now I'm low on toilet paper."

"I'm stuck at home and I'm homeschooling my kids."

Whatever the reality is for you, the things that go on this list should be objective.

What is the Suffering Part?

What you start to put over on the other category is that the suffering things are the meaning that I put onto those things—the fear and the worries, stories that start to creep in that aren't necessarily an objective difficulty. It's a story that I'm making about the objective difficulty.

It is more of the fear stories.

"I'm worried about that we're going to end up losing everything."

"I'm worried about that my parents are going to catch this virus and be in the ICU and I won't be able to get to them and then they're going to die. And then I will be a terrible daughter"

We have to start with this knowing. Then, we start to apply subtle-body-appropriate skills to trace these things down to their source because another body wisdom truth is that it's never about what it's about.

Even though on the surface it's a worry that I'm gonna end up living under a bridge and lose everything, underneath we trace it down to what I would call the basement, which are the main causes of things.

Even just doing this with your mind will cut down on your suffering tremendously. What you start to realize is that it is possible to go through the difficulty of life without the mind stuff and the fear and the stories that really causes the suffering.

Difficulties in life are unavoidable, but the suffering aspect is optional. This is what we're really working on in subtle body work.

Sending you lots of love!

release the trapped trauma from your body
(without years of therapy)

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Spiritual Perspective of Fibromyalgia Pain

4/23/2020

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Fibromyalgia and chronic pain are a big deal. Most people that aren't dealing with these symptoms don't have any clue how much of a life-altering condition this arrangement of symptoms can be, but what people don't often talk about is the spiritual, energetic, emotional side of what's going on and how to approach actually healing from fibromyalgia and chronic pain using a more of a spiritual interface.

So in this blog we're going to approach fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue from the spiritual side and talk about the spiritual symptoms that are going on with these kinds of conditions.

I've been doing natural health for 10 plus years. I'm a trained acupuncturist and Oriental Medicine Practitioner and over my 10 plus years of clinical practice with people, I've seen some themes come up with folks with fibromyalgia and chronic pain.

Now, I didn't really want to do this video because fibromyalgia and chronic pain is a heated topic. There's a lot of emotion here. If you are suffering from these things, you know that there's a lot of charged emotions and difficulty about it. I know that this video is actually gonna make some people angry. You might feel offended, you might feel like I don't get you. You might feel like I don't understand or I'm minimizing your symptoms. That's possible.

So I hope that this video will be helpful for you and please know that my intention is to really be of service and it's this area of spiritual and emotional symptoms of fibromyalgia that I think a lot of people miss.

We're going to talk about four main keys to really making a difference in your symptoms with a more somatic body-based, spiritual and emotional approach.

4 Keys To Make A Difference In Your Chronic Pain

Address the Trauma Trapped in Your Body

Point number one, the first thing that I see necessary across the board to really make a difference in your chronic pain or Fibromyalgia is to address the trauma trapped in your body.

There's trauma with a big T, which are the things that we're all familiar with—accidents, physically abuse. That's outright. But what we don't realize is that sometimes not outright abusive situations that were still difficult or emotionally challenging actually land in the body as trauma. In many ways chronic pain is the result of a long standing, trapped emotional pattern in the body. This is a large topic on how to address the somatic things.

I recommend really finding and working with a practitioner who is skilled in these. Those people could be anywhere from someone who does psychotherapeutic work, body-based psychotherapy or things like acupuncture and body-based trauma work, which is what I've traditionally done.

Finding someone that you really align with where you can start to release these patterns. What I hear people say all the time is, "Oh my God, after a session, I feel so much lighter" and that continues. There are ways to unlock these kinks in the mind-body system that not only feel help you feel lighter and more emotionally peaceful, but actually can make a difference in chronic pain.

I had a student once in one of my Subtle Body Certification groups and as we were going through the program, she just sort of jumped in. She had done the initial coursework. There wasn't really much about pain in that particular training and we'd been apart for a while. She came back to the group and she said, "You haven't talked about pain Leslie, but I've been implementing these techniques that we've been learning and my pain is 40% less without me doing anything differently".

I know that these things work. It might seem like a little bit of twist that it's not a medication, it's not another supplement, but it can actually make a physical result happen.

Heal Subtle Body Image

Number two, you really need to heal Subtle Body damage. Now what does this mean? Your Subtle Body in many ways is the technical side of your mind, body, spirit connection.

What I want you to know is that physical pain can come from physical issues, but as we know with fibromyalgia and chronic pain, there's not so many things that doctors can find physically wrong to explain the amount of pain that someone feels.

So often pain is coming from some kind of damage in the way that your Subtle Body or mind-body-spirit system is wired so it has rules and functioning just like any other type of physical body or otherwise. Doing various things like somatic work and working with trauma can help that system heal that will not only give you more pain relief but will also help you in your interpersonal functioning and just the way that you feel about yourself on a soul level.

Make Up with Your Body

The third key that I want you to take away is that you need to make up with your body.

What I've seen over and over again is that most of us walk around in these bodies our whole life acting as if it's some enemy that's trying to get us, it's some enemy that's giving me pain. When the truth is your Body is really the best friend that's been with you your whole life.

It's just that your Body has been calling you, sending you messages, and you are always swiping those calls to voicemail. So what I challenge you to do in this moment is to make up with your Body, to say, "those things are in the past and I choose to see you Body as a friend, even if we're having a hard time".

Think about a good friend that you've had. Maybe you had a fight at some point. Maybe there was a period of time where you weren't getting along, but eventually you come back and recognize that you really are in this together and that you have a relationship that can really be co-supportive.

Here's two concrete ways to make up with your Body.

Number one is to understand and to make it your healing mantra—"My Body has my best interest at heart. My body has my best interest at heart."

What that means practically is that whatever comes up from your Body, whether it's a painful sensation, whether it's something that you don't feel is working, I want you to turn towards that sensation and say, "Thank you Body. What do you need me to know?"

Now this is quite different than what we normally do. My arm starts hurting, I go, "Oh, stop hurting. I don't want to think about you". So this is really a mind shift that I'm asking you to make. Knowing that your Body is doing everything for your benefit. Sometimes it's just a little misguided.

Whenever something comes up from the body, I want you to, whether you believe it or not, turn towards that part of the body and say out loud, "wrist or pain, thank you. What do you need?"

Then just breathe for a few minutes and listen. If nothing comes, that's okay. But you're starting to rewire your brain, your neurophysiology to react differently to pain and to bring your Body into more of a friendship relationship.

The other thing under this point number 3 that I want you to know is that the Body does not hold a grudge.

I've heard so many clients say, "Oh, I really beat up on my body"

"I ran track and field"

"I was a football player and I beat up on my body, so now my body's getting back at me".

I have to tell you that this is not true and this is not how healing works. Even if your Body's a little pissed off at the moment, maybe just for not listening, everything can and will be forgiven. Bodies do not hold a grudge.

I ask you to take this as your working hypothesis and start to change your mind about how you and your Body are having a relationship.

Break Up with Fibro

Key number four, and this is a big one and the one that is likely to make people the most angry. The number four key to healing some of the spiritual background of chronic pain is what I call "break up with fibro".

Now you'll notice that a lot of folks, and you may be in this category that have fibromyalgia because it's been so difficult, because you've been in chronic pain, because people don't understand what you're going through, that it makes sense that you would find support groups and other people who get it and have bumper stickers that say, "I speak brain fog, I have fibro".

It's natural that all of us want to belong but in order to really heal from chronic pain, we need to break up with fibro.

What that means is stop identifying with yourself as someone that has fibromyalgia. Stop giving yourself the label of being a chronic pain person. Stop speaking about fibro as if it's a separate person.

You might even hear yourself say on a regular basis, "Oh, I can't do this because of the fibro."

"Oh, I wanted to go to that party, but I can't because of the fibro."

What you don't realize is that you have an intimate, loving, interactive relationship with fibro and that can become a barrier to your own internal healing.

One of the things that I would encourage you to do instead as you let go of these labels is doesn't mean that you have to be in denial of what you're feeling or denial of the pain or denial of the difficulty. We want to save space for that and to let it be there.

What I would ask you to switch to is instead of labeling it fibro and identifying it that way, start to become an objective describer. Whatever is happening, describe it objectively, without a label.

If you're having a bad day, instead of saying, "Oh, it's the fibro", be very descriptive.

"I really don't feel like going to the meeting right now because I'm having a headache and it feels difficult to think and I feel some emotional sadness."

"I am not able to work in the way that I want to because I have frequent pain in my wrists and it's hard for me to sleep sometimes at night."

I know that this is a challenge and it may seem disconnected, but when we start to really get objective, it trains the mind in a way that opens more doors to healing.

It's my hope and prayer that your challenges and your illnesses will be a blessing and a gift on your life because your personal and spiritual growth is important!