Time to Heal

We heal when our buried past surfaces and can be released.  We all have some buried blocks as we've all had stress in our pasts which we couldn't resolve, but for the most part they stay buried.

We carry on with our lives, our often very busy lives and we tell ourselves we don't have time to relax, let alone be ill.  However sometimes that's exactly what we need to do.

When blocks start to surface, they often feel uncomfortable.  Sometimes we don't understand why we're feeling that way and even find that we can't actually pinpoint our exact symptoms. We're not exactly "ill", but we're definitely not feeling ourselves.  This is often the time we reach for our addictions: a bar of chocolate, a cigarette, a glass of wine or even a pattern of behaviour.  These addictive behaviours may make us feel better in the short term, but what they're doing is numbing us to what's happening and pushing the blocks back down into our bodies.  Be warned, however, our bodies want to heal, so they will resurface again and again until we release them.

Space also encourages our blocks to come up. This is why some people feel uncomfortable when they find themselves on their own with a whole day to fill and no clear objectives. We may moan about the pressure we find ourselves under in our lives, but it keeps us safe from having to deal with our past and having to feel the discomfort that can arise.

However, I find that this discomfort is usually worse if we resist the process.  If we give ourself the day off, listen to our body and address its needs, whether that's a day in bed, or a long walk, or curling up with a good book, the process will progress all the more easily.  If we can't give ourself a whole day off, an hour each evening when we do nothing can be extremely beneficial.

Also, it's important to remember that these emotions can't hurt us.  It's our associations with the feelings and our resistance to the emotions that cause the problems.  Also our panic that we don't know what to do about them.  The word emotion comes from energy in motion and the motion bit is important.  In fact, all we have to do is notice them, breath and watch as they flow through us, probably changing a few times on the way, and eventually go.

And to do this, all we really need is time to heal.

Clearing Out the Blocks

I'm often asked how exactly we clear our blocks and how long it will take.  Recently I used the analogy of clearing out a cupboard to explain this, so I thought I'd reproduce it here.

You know how it is, over time we accumulate possessions that we don't know what to do with.  We have people coming round and need to clear up, so it gets put away in the cupboard (substitute drawer, box, etc). Gradually this cupboard fills up so that we can no longer fit anything in to it.  And when we do open it, things fall out and have to be shoved back in.  So after a while we don't open it unless we have to.

So it is with our emotional clutter.  Often we can't process an event when it happens. We are either just too young and so we're going to be more sensitive to external influences, or the event was to sudden and unexpected to be able to get our heads round it.  Either way, most of us have had may of these such experiences throughout our lives. Add to that growing up in a culture of pretending we're OK and a lack of information and support on how to process traumatic experiences and the emotional clutter piles up.

Then comes the moment when we want to take control of our lives; the time that we have to start de-cluttering the emotional cupboard.  So how do we do it?

Well, as in de-cluttering our physical cupboards, everyone does it in a slightly different way. Some people will assume that as they haven't looked in the cupboard for several years, there can't be anything that they need in there. So they hire a skip and out it all goes.  But for many of us, (me included) we can't just throw away things without going through them first.  I know that I have to check every individual item before I can throw it away because there might be a little gem that I'll want to keep.  Often I can't throw something away one week, but a few weeks on and I'm suddenly able to let it go.  I can have days when I clear out bags of stuff and other days when despite my best intentions, there doesn't seem to be anything I'm able to let go.

So it is with our emotional clutter. Some of us will clear it quickly, others will clear it gradually.  There is no way someone else can force us to let go of our blocks, we have to be ready ourselves to do this.  A friend told me yesterday that he was building up to booking an appointment with a therapist - that was just the way he worked.  I totally understand this.

The beauty of kinesiology is that the way we clear our blocks is determined by the muscle testing process, which is tapping into the energy of the client. The session will only move as quickly as the client is able to cope with.  Therefore the client can be assured that I'm not going to come along and throw away their entire contents of their emotional cupboard without their permission.  

Now you may think that doing just that would be a good thing, and on a conscious level, I'm sure many of my clients would be quite happy for that to happen.  But on a subconscious level, what happens is that it triggers the blocked emotions and we feel huge amounts of fear or stress.  The way of kinesiology is to do the work gently in cooperation with the client.

So now you know this, hopefully you'll understand why I can't give a detailed prediction of how long it will take a particular person to clear their blocks. But also, maybe it'll encourage you to open the door on your own emotional cupboard and start letting the contents go.

Are you Aligned to Your Goals?

I use the word "aligned" a lot these days, but when I had to spend an evening explaining what I actually meant by it recently, I figured there may well be lots of other people out there who have no idea what I'm on about too.

The dictionary defines the verb to align as to bring into line or agreement.  I work with energy, so I'm referring to the act of bringing our energy into line or agreement with our goals.

Now, although this might sound a strange thing to try and do, we are actually doing it every day of our lives.  In order to wake up, we move our energy from subconscious to conscious. In order to go to sleep, we wind our energy down from active to relaxed.  When we go to work, we become the person who is an expert at our job.  When we are out with friends our energy may change to a slightly different version of ourselves.

People who reach their goals easily can align themselves to their goals.  However many of us find this difficult. The most important thing to know about this is that we can tell how aligned we are by the results we are producing in the world.  If we are aligned with what we are wanting to do, we physically produce results.

If we wish to go on holiday, we'll be aligned when we actually make the booking and go.  If we wish to set up a business,we'll be aligned when the clients come.  If we wish to change a habit, we'll be aligned when we actually make the change.

As regular readers will probably have guessed by now, the reason we are not able to align with our goals is that our blocks get in the way.  Maybe we want to go on holiday, but we're fearful that taking time off work will cause more stress.  Maybe we wish to be self-employed, but relying on such an uncertain income leaves us feeling insecure.  Maybe we wish to give up smoking but it's very ingrained in our social culture.

But what's more likely, is that we think we're aligned but the results aren't coming because these blocks are hidden from us.  What we may experience is resistance to taking action, or we may feel that our heart isn't quite in it, or we may just have no idea why the results aren't coming.

The good news is that if we remove all the blocks, we naturally come into alignment with our intentions and therefore our goals.  That's the law of attraction: we attract things that match the energy we give out.  So as long as we are giving out the energy of being in alignment with our goals, we will attract the physical results of these goals.

The even better news is that kinesiology can help even if we aren't aware of our blocks.  It has a rather uncanny and brilliant way of bringing them to awareness before clearing the stress they bring.

So, now you understand this, I ask the question again, Are you aligned to your goals?

Our Healthcare Culture

I've wanted to write about this for a while now as it's a subject that is dear to my heart - and as I run a holistic therapy business, my bank balance.

Culture is defined as a state of manners, behaviour and intellectual development at a particular time of place.

So how do we behave when we're ill?  How do we go about returning our bodies and minds to optimal health?  Do we even actively do this?

This is traditionally the season of colds and bugs.  Now I know from my days of working in an office, that there was definitely a culture of not having time off as people had "too much work to do".  I was never in favour of this strategy as it seemed to me that if you have time off, you can heal better and return to optimal productivity quicker.  But, alas, it was difficult for me to go against the culture, so I struggled on too.

We also have a culture of going to the doctor only when we can't fix our health issue ourself and when it's got   so bad that we feel we won't be accused of wasting time.  This is backed up by advertising campaigns directing people to a pharmacy or a phone service for "minor complaints". This is obviously a necessary strategy by an underfunded organisation, but it still creates a culture.

Now along come holistic therapists.  We can help prevent disease by treating blocks in a person's system before they manifest into nasty symptoms.  So ideally I'd like to see clients earlier rather later.  However the majority come to me when they've been suffering, for longer than they needed.


We also have a culture of free healthcare, which I'm very grateful for.  I'd never advocate getting rid of the NHS, but at the present time myself and similar practitioners aren't funded by the NHS, so we have no alternative than to charge our clients directly for our services.

This seems to be quite a large block. I often hear people say they can't afford sessions. Whereas this may be true for some people, after all therapy isn't cheap, I believe many people are just choosing to spend their money on different things.

So my question to you is what is the most important thing you could be spending your money on?  My personal answer to that would be health and wellbeing.  In this section, I'd include food (of the healthy variety, of course), a warm roof over our head, and healthcare support. For those who are familiar with Maslov's Heirarchy of Needs, this relates to the lower levels of the pyramid. If our base is rocky, the higher levels aren't going to be firm and reliable either.

So how would it be to go on a great holiday, but spend it worrying about going back to a stressful job. How would it be to buy new clothes, but to feel ill when you wear them.  How would it be to subscribe to a TV service, while wishing you had the energy to be out actually living your life.

Now I'm not criticizing anyone for spending their money on these things. Everyone makes choices about what they do and where they spend money is one of such choices. However, if you have any unwanted symptoms, I would invite you to challenge our culture of healthcare and invest in your health sooner rather than later so you can lead a more enjoyable and fulfilling life.

Phobias, Addictions and Obsessions

What do these three things have in common?

The answer is fear.

Phobias are pretty self-explanatory. We fear something to such an extent that it causes us problems in our present lives.  They may have come from a past trauma.  Maybe we were bitten by a dog when we were young and still become very frightened when a dog barks or bares its teeth. They may also be inherited from another person.  Maybe your mother screamed every time she saw a spider, so you learnt very early that spiders were something to be scared of, even though you didn't know why.

Addictions are habits we have developed in our lives, that produce a negative emotional response when they are taken away.  Often they are something we take into the body - common examples are cigarettes, alcohol or drugs.  However we can be addicted to patterns of behaviour or to people.  What happens here is that we are blocking a negative emotional response by seeking so-called "pleasurable" behaviour.  However, what that does is push the negative emotion down into our body, so it isn't resolved.  Every time it re-surfaces, our bodies tell us we want the addiction.  This gives us a positive "hit" and the pain is pushed aside for a while.  The trouble with this is that the pain will keep trying to resurface in order to be healed. So often we need bigger and bigger "hits" to keep it suppressed   Alongside that, we can have a physical response to addictive substances, but this is much easier to deal with if we've dealt with the emotional residue.

Obsessions are fears projected into the future.  This time there will be an initial negative experience from our past which we worry about happening again in the future.  Like the phobias or addictions, it could be experienced by us or learned from another person.   Things like believing we'll get ill if we don't clean things several times a day or worrying we'll forget to do something.  Often we create rituals to cope with these things; checking something several times or obsessive cleaning.  Alternatively, we avoid the triggering situations altogether, for example, not being the last to leave the house so we don't have to check the door is locked several times. Superstitions also come into the category of obsessions.  These are usually learned from another person. Like addictions, if we treat the underlying fear, then the ritual becomes a simple habit which is much easier to break.

So, if these patterns are causing you problems in your life, kinesiology can help you find and clear the root cause and take back control of your lives, even if you have no conscious idea of where they came from.

When you can't go with the flow

On Friday, I wrote about how we can all choose how we respond to any situation.  I told you all  that you have the choice about how you feel.  But I expect there are some of you out there shaking your fists at the computer and saying, " But I can't just change how I feel about things. She's talking a load of rubbish."

So, what's going on when we feel like this.  Well, what's happening is that we're triggering our past.  The sort of past we wish we hadn't had to experience.  The sort of past that leaves a negative residue in our memories.

We may have buried the memory. We may have consciously forgotten about it.  But if we didn't resolve it, it will affect our current reactions to the situations we find ourselves in.

So, for example, if we previously had to miss something very important because of the snow, we may not look too favourably when it snows again.  If we've had a bad reaction to changing our plans, we may not look favourably on having to change our plans due to snow.  And the list goes on - there are many things that could affect it and not all of them will be as obvious as those.

Luckily, with kinesology, we can get rid of the past triggers and re-empower ourselves to make the choices and have the reactions that will serve us best in our lives.  I'm always amazed how a session can bring such insight into how we can to have the pattern we are running, before clearing the stress and giving us back our choice.

Please contact me with any other questions you may have or book an appointment.

Go With the Flow

It's snowing here. I'm wrapped up in several jumpers and working from home.

But I had planned to have a singing lesson, do my shopping and then head over to see my boyfriend in Marlborough.

So what to do?  Well, the singing lesson was cancelled, so that decision was out of my hands. I've now been sitting here, listening to the radio and reading Facebook updates, both of which suggest the roads are getting worse.  The advice is very strongly "don't drive unless you have to".  So I'll probably survive without a trip to Sainsburys.

That leaves the 3rd trip. Obviously I want to see my boyfriend, but I have to put safety first.  I'll see how conditions progress, but it's not looking good.

Now, the point of this article is to talk about how I feel about these changes.  I have options; I could feel stressed and angry.  I could resent the weather for affecting my plans. I could feel hard done by.

Or, I could accept the situation and appreciate the beauty of the landscape covered in its blanket of white.  I could make the most of the extra time to get jobs done.  I could go out for a walk and enjoy the surroundings close up. And I can phone my boyfriend.

We all have a choice in how we respond to situations we find ourselves in.  And this goes for any situation. We have a choice as to whether we see ourselves as a victim or as someone in control of our lives.

So decide how you'd like to respond to the snow, and make the most of the circumstances you find yourself in.