Episode 1 | Wellness Ways

Wellness ways:

“A charmed life isn’t so much about escaping adversity, as much as its about overcoming it once it arrives.”

Everyone is a fallen angel.  Everyone is in recovery from something.  Everyone is flawed.  The things that happen to us in our lives are not meant to bring us shame, guilt or self-doubt.  The unfortunate circumstances that occur in our lives are put there to test our mettle, our fortitude, to see if we have the abilities to overcome what has brought us down, so that, like The Phoenix, we can rise from our ashes brighter and more brilliant than we could have ever imagined.

Things happen. Some of these we cause, some we allow others to put onto us,  and some happen in which random chance, or an “external force” happens upon us, and it is no one’s fault.  

Things are supposed to happen, that just makes us even with everyone else.  The question really becomes: “ok, not that thing has happened upon us,  WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT!

In the beginning, until we discover are true sense of empowerment and come to realize that ‘CONTROL”  is an internal mechanism and not an outside force. 

We get angry, sad, frustrated, because whatever this something is that happened to us isn’t fair.  It screwed us up. It put us off track.  We pout, blame, do nothing, project our frustrations onto others, and whatever else we can think of, rather than take action.  We deny ourselves the belief that we have the power to change just about everything that happens in our lives.  Yes, most things are quite fixable.  We isolate and disintegrate into a sense of shame, guilt, stubbornness we live the lies.  . . we allow ourselves to live myths and false beliefs about ourselves as truths . . .we do this, sometimes for long periods of time,  because when we stay in a position of doing “nothing” about what has occurred, again, regardless of fault, doing nothing further reinforces a sense of helplessness, and a wish or need to be rescued by someone else for situation. That’s how powerful doing nothing can be and doing nothing can take over our lives rather quickly.  But doing nothing is never the answer.

Here are some things we all can do, without ever going to see a therapist, although seeing a therapist to help us through this difficult times is a pretty damn good idea.

• Recognize that many times the worst things that are ever going to happen to you are going to serve as the foundation to the best things you will ever achieve in your life. In the throes of despair, if you want it, your greatness lies.  It just won’t look like the form you want.  It will not be delivered in a Fed Ex truck, with “no assembly required. The very best of you can only be asked of you when you are at the very worst in your life.

• Yesterday is over. . . thank God. C. Alexander Simpkins, “The past, even though it has been filled with obstacles, is not the determiner of next.”  It’s time to move forward, in any way possible as long as you do 1 simple thing.  Do not make today a carbon copy of yesterday.  Repeating yesterday in today guarantees failure.   Change 1 small thing each day, and it really doesn’t matter what you change.

•  Don’t second-guess or stop to re-think.  If you do, you’ll change your mind and hesitate.  Seek what is new, refreshing, inviting, invigorating, and most of all seek that which you know absolutely nothing about.

• Surrender to your flaws.  Big deal! Having flaws makes you even with everyone else—doing something about them is an entirely different manner. .

• GO SLOW.  A sure-fire way to sabotage yourself is to want to have everything in your life resolved by yesterday.  You will fail until you abandon that philosophy. The slowness of the moment is where you find all the information you need.  Seek the joy of uncovering all that there is by taking nothing for granted.  There is plenty of information in the moment.  The moment will tell you when it is over.. . . 

• Learn how to engage in deep meditative breathing. Slowly inhale for 5 or 6 seconds. . . hold for a second and then slowly exhale for 6 or 7 seconds, make sure you exhale much longer than you inhale.  Slow exhalation activates your brain’s parasympathetic nervous system, which then secretes “stress-calming” neurotransmitters and hormones. Yes, “calm” in your brain is a chemical reaction, and deep meditative breathing is the best way to access calm.   Clearing your mind, focus on one thing and only one thing, and your brain will not allow the voluminous flow of other thoughts to get in the way and confuse things. Anchor your day both in the beginning and at the end of the day in this routine of creating calm.   Never act immediately. Anything you’re thinking of doing, you can do in 5 or 10 minutes.  But if you respond impulsively, you’re compounding the issue.

• Begin to recognize that THE BEST THING TO EVER HAPPEN TO YOU IS YOU!

• The over-riding principle of life:     STAY IN THE MOMENT:

Feelings, thoughts, and actions per/se, don’t exist in the moment. If you make yourself attuned to only what is going on now, in front of you, you cannot experience painful experiences of the past or the dreadful experiences of anxiety and worry about the future—what is to come next. 

• BE Mindful—What are you aware of right now? What is happening around you right now? What emotions are running through your body?  Where are they located? What are your senses picking up? In short: what are you feeling and what do you feel like doing about what you’re feeling? Try not to analyze. Try to simply and as honestly as you can, just respond.

• Trust your instincts.  Trust that what you “think” you are feeling is exactly what you are feeling.  What am I feeling?  If you can’t answer that question as quickly as you can answer this, then don’t do anything until you are sure.  Here’s the question:  Whose buried in Grant’s tomb, or what color is George Washington’s white horse? When answers come that quickly, that’s when you know you are making good decisions.

• Lose the bitterness in your life. Your fault, my fault, everyone’s fault, no one's fault. Try to keep in mind the big picture—and that is the people that are important to you in your life-your family. Every moment you spend in bitterness is a moment you do not spend being connected to those in your life that actually mean something to you. Every moment you spend in any negative feeling state sabotages the process, because you are not in the moment at all, you're preoccupied with negative feeling states.

• Remind yourself of the grace that already exists in your life. Yes, things can always be better. But there are things currently in your life that truly are filled with the sense of grace. Don’t think of them as little things or big things, just find the grace. Is it in the front porch where you sit, in the faces of your children, in the quiet of your favorite room in the house, in your health, just work on finding the grace and most importantly reminding yourself that you do have graceful things in your life, even though not every component of your life is where you would like to it to be. Your life is a canvas that will never cease to amaze you, and believe their life to be more fully completed or graceful than yours, you think that way because you don’t really know what is going on in others’ lives. You are making a value judgement on a very one-dimensional cardboard cutout of the public life they are allowing you to stop seeing, as it is the one-dimensional cardboard cutout of life, you are allowing others to see.

• Cultivate something:  take care of a plant or animal. Develop a relationship with someone or something that is totally dependent on you.

• Work with your hands. Dig in the ground. Play with mud, play with clay, real potters clay, make pinch pot wheels, feel the texture. Close your eyes and just move the clay, squeeze the clay from hand to hand. Move it throughout your hands slowly. Experiment with it. In short, if you don’t like clay, sensitize yourself, your tactile sensation to many different surfaces and textures

• Pray. Anyway, you would like, but pray. Be quiet, still, and pray.

• Unplug from your electronic world for at least 2 days per week. Feel the quiet or the lack of noise. Remember to remind yourself that most of social media, most electronic amusement is noise. Find the beauty in the absence of noise.

• Listen to music that you find relaxing and soothing. Slower is faster and less is more. Everyone from time to time likes to jam out, but your senses need time to reset, and a full-blown musical assault without relief is too much stimulus. Find time for the jams as well, especially when you’re engaging in a motivating or invigorating activity, but find your peace and quiet just as much.

• Sleep well. There is no way around it. Sleeping well sets up every next day.

• Exercise well. Move your body, in some way, in some form. Build muscle, stretch, aerobicize,   do yoga, feel your body getting stronger, and visualize what you are doing as you are doing it. This is not about becoming a “gym rat” or someone who takes 3 cycling classes a day to “ keep up her look,” this is about becoming in control of your body.

• Eat well. Now that does not mean you can never eat another slice of pizza. But it does mean to begin to cultivate an understanding that what you put into your body has an effect on your overall mental and physical functioning. Learn to cook. Maybe not every not, but for the sociality and enjoyment and creativity of it. 

• Healthy and regular sex. A healthy and risk-averse sex life is a normal part of our circadian rhythms, along with sleeping and eating. If your life with your partner isn’t working and you’d don’t have a healthy sex life, that's one area that you must address.

• ADD NEW THINGS to your life. This will help limit the intrusiveness of the past. You add these new things just a little each day, and you build on them. Evaluate and decide. All new things don’t have to be kept in your repertoire of how you are going to choose to function as you move forward. Rather, they are all starting points. Some of them you may love, and they may be wonderful additions to your life, others may not suit your needs, temperament of likes at all. The key is in the experimentation process.

• FIND NEW WAYS TO SHUT OFF YOUR MIND/BRAIN/THOUGHTS. Yes, it is great to be alone with your thoughts, but it is also great to be alone with no thoughts, just totally relaxing and giving your brain a break from all the thinking you put it through, and remember, your brain was designed to think. So, the more practice you give it, and the more time you give to your brain to think about things, the more it will do just that.

First: the initial understanding:

At the moment of trauma—even though there was no possible way of escaping what was soon to happen—in the moment that there was that feeling of a loss of control—the brain/body system was not passive . . . it was not frozen in fear or immobilized . . . it was very active. The brain/body system was furiously sending surges of neuro chemicals through our entire body. This unnatural and heightened state of chemical arousal made us “hypersensitive to the stimulus that was causing the response. At that moment that neurochemical surge becomes our “new normal’ in terms of emotional arousal and functional behavior. Thus, consequently many of us, in an effort to “feel,’ can only feel normal; when we engage in exceptionally thrilling, or risky behaviors, because those such behaviors are the only things that actually awakens our sense of “how to feel.”  Consequently, we have normalized this intensity, and in fact seek out these intense moments, be they physically or emotionally dangerous, we really don’t experience them as being dangerous. These behaviors are the only experiences in life in simulate the intensity of the neuro-chemical surge that the brain/body system felt when was initially caught in the intense feeling of “loss of control.”

The paradox:   THE SHAME.

Feeling alive shouldn’t have to come at the expense of somehow someway reliving a traumatic or painful incident. But, since shame is a factor—feeling good or alive, even though deep down feeling some guilt for having to put yourself through this in order to feel anything—NO TRUE SENSE OF INTIMACY—can ever be achieved.

We somehow come to associate pleasure only when we are engaging in ‘death defying feats.”  The brain body system has made a new chemical balance in our bodies, and pleasure is in the “ultimate arousal of our senses.

The brain/body system has become somewhat addicted to the activity that causes these intense feelings. Interestingly enough, the pain—the actual physical, mental or emotional pain of possible withdrawal—not having the thrilling activity to participate in—thus becomes more of an intrusion into a person’s life, than the actual “death defying feat”  that is needed to seek the

feeling of feeling or relief of non-feeling. .  Like everything else, at-risk behaviors, and thrill always tends to be progressive, and we always we seek eve3n greater risk to engage in the activity of feeling . . . anything—it becomes the only way to gauge of sense of ‘being alive.

The strength of the emotionality of the experience also causes us to block pain, so at least we can result assured that we are not feeling any type of pain. Thus, the re-exposure of stressful experiences actually soothes our internal flee floating, non-descript feeling of anxiety and inner dread that pass though. on regularly occurring intervals, sometimes vanishing as quickly as they appear, sometimes staying longer than we had anticipate, and most times, without us really knowing why we are even feeling this either physical—in the body, or mental—in the mind, inner dread.

Repeating that which doesn’t work only leads to a further feeling of futility and self-hatred, and this only further strengthens, reinforces and ingrains or neurochemistry to fuel faulty feelings, which fuel faulty thoughts, which fuels faults behaviors.