Unlock the Door to Your Healing Through Mind-Body Connection
This is the third and final post in a series about healing from chronic illness. Once again, there’s lots to share, and as part of my ‘Magnets and More’ mantra for healing from chronic illnesses such as Lyme, I’ve included resources, ideas, knowledge and empowering information to do the work of healing.
Taking charge of healing from chronic illness means embracing practices we’ve previously discussed – adopting a cleansing lifestyle to support effective detoxification, and investing in your gut health as a foundation to your overall health, vitality, and immunity.
The third essential anchoring practice is emotional grounding, embodiment and containment.
What do I mean by Grounding, Embodiment and Containment?
In practical terms, this anchoring practice takes basic self-care to the next level of self-awareness, self-responsibility, and self-containment. The practice ensures ownership of and authority over how you experience and navigate your life, as you heal from your illness. Emotional grounding, embodiment and containment supports your mind’s connection to your body, and the ability to release and receive healing, be present to yourself, and access and harness your inner resources through energetic containment.
Grounding – to release and receive healing
Climbing on my massage table, getting comfy and relaxed is great. But this component of the healing process is about more than “relaxing”. Being grounded is an actively cultivated in-flow and out-flow energetic state.
“We vibrate in harmony with the Earth’s field through our grounding cord that is anchored from our first chakra down into the Earth’s central core. The grounding cord synchronizes with and offers access to the Earth’s energy. The grounding cord is a conduit for energy flows and it continually nurtures harmonious collaboration with the Earth. By sourcing energy from the Earth through the grounding cord, the energetic relationship between the body, mind and emotions and the Earth is refreshed and replenished.”
Source: Jill Leigh, Energy Healing Institute
When we’re grounded, we’re not only aligned with the planet that we call home, we’re able to release energy consciously and organically, which benefits our whole being.
Beyond that, if we’re grounded, we’re present, operating in current time, and our body and awareness can engage in the process of healing.
Everyone uncovers places where they’re stuck when they do the work to heal. Clients routinely speak about their perseverance on symptoms, their fears of being able to heal, and their traumatic or difficult stories that impact their sense of themselves. None of these stuck places need inhibit a healing journey.
The emotional energy of perseveration, fear, trauma, and limiting beliefs is held in the energy field, and can be released to unstick what’s stuck. Grounding is the first step in learning how to clear out and let go, and when you’re lying on the table, I’m working on this very thing! And, I’ll teach you how to continue the work in between sessions. What’s not to love about that?
Embodiment – be present to yourself
What does this mean? It means choosing to be “in body” rather than “out of body”. It means trusting your body and its healing process, letting go of fears that inhibit that trust. In your partnership with me, it means trusting my muscle testing, magnet treatments and energy clearing, and knowing that your body is doing the essential task of healing. If you’re tracking me and what I’m doing, and asking me to share every detail of the treatment, you’re actually not letting go, you’re out of embodied awareness and into mental spin!
Other symptoms of lack of embodied awareness include: holding, clenching, unrelenting tension and stress, a reactive nervous system triggered by unresolved trauma, deprioritizing your healing by putting others before yourself.
Embodiment means prioritizing your healing and saying “How do I move through this?” instead of buying into the permanence of a diagnosis, and losing hope. Imagine instead, loosening the hyper-awareness of symptoms, old storyline and beliefs, and which super-powered supplement to try next. Living in the present moment, you’ll fully inhabit your body and can own and actualize your healing.
Energetic Containment
If you’re emotionally reactive – anxiety or anger, fear or hopelessness run the show, or if you are frequently embroiled and awash in other people’s emotions, your energy lacks boundaries and containment.
Imagine trying to pour a gallon of water into a pitcher with no sides! The water will not be held in that pitcher, it will simply spill all over the table. A pitcher contains the water, maintains its integrity, and makes it accessible for drinking.
Because your emotions and physical body are interconnected, your emotional energy needs containment for your physical body to access its vitality, for you to know when you are on ‘go’ or need to rest.
Your emotions need anchoring and grounding. I’m not suggesting that you avoid your feelings; rather, I’m suggesting feeling, processing and resolving them through context, perspective and conscious awareness. Without containment that can’t happen!
When you have energetic boundaries in place, you become aware of what’s yours, and what isn’t. You begin to understand that what exists outside of you is not your responsibility to manage.
You connect with your innate safety and security, and inner knowing. And as a result, your energy turns toward fostering healing, inner peace and the trust that you and your physical body are a unified front, with health and vitality as your primary goal and objective.
It’s not too late to do this work, and as you do so, your capacity for emotional intelligence, and your physical body will reap the rewards.
[For a free introduction to the energetic tools for Grounding, Embodiment & Containment, check out this self-paced, 1-hour course, The Present of Presence.]
How to know if Grounding, Embodiment and Containment is needed
The symptoms of ungrounded, disembodied, uncontained energy can be:
- trouble concentrating or staying focused
- disconnection, derealization, dissociation
- a busy mind, rumination, all up in your head
- hyper-vigilance, fight-flight-freeze, overwhelm
- catastrophizing about the future or shamefully regretting the past
- people pleasing, over-functioning
- persistent anxiety
- perfectionism, high control needs, lack of behavioral flexibility
- empathic sensitivity, highly-sensitive to criticism, social anxiety
- lack of inner authority, victimization, “collapsed”, depression
- defended, resistant, close-minded
- angry or confrontational, reactivity
- an empowered trauma story, rather than an empowered healing story
- spiritual by-pass, “love and light, high vibes only” attitude
Interestingly, when we truly understand the mind-body connection, we can also recognize that there are physical symptoms that can accompany this emotional, energetic dysregulation.
- mystery physical symptoms conventional medicine can’t diagnose
- headaches, migraines
- digestive issues, IBS, constipation, diarrhea, gas/bloating
- reproductive issues, hormonal imbalances, painful monthly cycles, endometriosis, PCOS
- joint/muscle pain, autoimmune diseases or myalgia-type pain syndromes
- adrenal fatigue, depletion, exhaustion
- heart palpitations, high blood pressure
- insomnia
- TMJ
- “brain fog”
As your energy evolves through grounding, embodiment, clearing and containment, your body’s physical symptoms can abate or lessen as well.
Mind-Body Connection – that’s what it’s all about!
Do these lists of emotional and physical symptoms sound familiar? We don’t often consider how our physical symptoms may be exacerbated by unresolved emotions or behavior patterns. When these are held inappropriately in the body through avoidance and repression, they negatively impact the body. This is how “connection” between mind and body plays out. By doing the work of Emotional Grounding, Embodiment and Containment you work in concert with your body and its innate potential for physical healing.
It’s inspiring when my clients begin to make the connection between their emotional and physical state, and as they do the work to heal emotionally, using energy tools and practices to support their evolution, they realize that healing is a whole body experience! It’s not just their symptoms, it’s not just the magnets. It’s not about years and years of treatment and wishing for normalcy, it’s about returning to the business of living by committing to a practice of self-care, trusting the body’s innate desire to be aligned and in balance.
“People do not become ill despite their lives but rather because of their lives. And life includes not only physical factors like diet, physical activity and the environment, but also the internal milieu of thoughts and unconscious emotions that govern so much of our physiology, through the mechanisms of stress and the unity of the systems that modulate nerves, hormones, immunity, digestion and cardiovascular function. Much disease could be prevented and healed if we fully understood the scientific evidence verifying the mind-body unity.”
Source: When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, Gabor Mate
