Today I’m going to dive deeper into how to help you regulate your nervous system by orienting you to your environment. This is a key step for allowing your body to feel safe and I’m walking you through this process in the audio below.
Ahhhh the nervous system. I’ve been trying to get my mind and body out of survival mode (anxiety, fear, terror, overwhelm, etc.) for over a decade now and it’s taken me many years to be able to regulate my nervous system so I can finally feel safe. This has been no easy task but it has been SO worth it and has made such a huge difference in my health mentally and physically.
Trauma, Energy + The Nervous System
If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t realize you’re holding onto trauma. Surprisingly, we’re all holding on to some shape or form of trauma and it’s shocking to hear this because we think trauma is going to war or witnessing a shooting or seeing a scary movie but it’s actually everyday junk that we experience on a daily basis as well as suppressed emotional pain from our childhoods that we can’t consciously recall.
I’ve talked a lot about trauma in the past, especially in this featured article, How Trauma Impacts Your Health, and it’s been a topic I’ve been incredibly passionate about bringing awareness to throughout the last six years of my twelve-year healing journey. If you’re new to the concept of trauma and your health, I suggest diving into my featured article, The Trigger that Pops Your Balloon, to acclimate yourself with these concepts before moving on and understanding how when our emotions aren’t dealt with they become trapped energy in our body because, well, emotions are ENERGY IN MOTION.
Because our conscious mind isn’t handling these emotions (ex: because say we feel anger or rage at something that happened in our day and we’re at work and we can’t scream, so we push these emotions down and ignore them), these emotions get repressed into our subconscious mind and become our lens for how we see life and we’re walking around with this energy inside of us, which we’re often not aware of. This is what starts to trigger our mind and our body out of whack because when energy cannot flow properly in our body, it leads to physical, emotional and energetic blocks that appear as physical ailments such as headaches, self-sabotaging behaviors, unconscious reactions and so forth. This is why energy work and energy medicine are so powerful and why I’ve talked about them extensively over the years here on this website and throughout Instagram because solely treating the physical body with a supplement or a bowl of spinach isn’t going to heal and restore the body when it’s out of whack on the emotional and energetic layer, as well.
Survival Mode
Because the majority of the world is in survival mode right now because of the coronavirus situation, I wanted to share an easy way you can help yourself on a daily basis to pull yourself out of survival mode (fight-or-flight) and calm down your body and any maladaptive stress responses (anxiety, overwhelm, etc.). I’ve learned many different protocols and somatic exercises to support and regulate the nervous system, which will all be addressed in my upcoming retreats, but I’m sharing a short audio snippet below of how you can help yourself in your day-to-day life when you feel your stress response come on and you can’t seem to pull yourself out of it.
Now, along with helping you regulate your nervous system, I highly suggest checking out and reading a few personal resources from my journey that I know will support you throughout these next few weeks and beyond while the majority of the planet is in survival mode. If you haven’t read about survival mode yet, I suggest my featured article, How to Get Out of Survival Mode and Heal Your Body as well as How to Trust Your Body Again part I and part II.
And lastly, there are many personality traits that pull us into survival mode without us realizing it, so I suggest looking into the following featured articles to help you understand what your own stress response might be stemming from: The Highly Sensitive Empath and The People Pleaser and Worthiness and Not Feeling “Enough”.
If you are someone currently experiencing physical symptoms during this coronavirus time, I recommend reading my featured article, How to Feel Safe When Experiencing Symptoms, to help guide you through this process of fear when your body doesn’t feel safe.
And lastly, before we move on, I must share one of my favorite pieces of the healing journey, which is softening the armor we wrap around ourselves to “toughen up to life” because of traumatic experiences in our past (breakups, fights with a spouse or partner, job layoff, a painful argument, and so forth).
The softening process is key for allowing your nervous system to relax and reset. Trust me, it takes time to consciously be aware of when your body armors up to protect itself and you can do this. Self-awareness is something you’ll learn as you move on with this journey and will be a huge asset in trusting yourself and your own internal wisdom (intuition). I hope you enjoy this featured article, How to Soften: A Key Step to Healing.
The Movement™ is also incredibly helpful for this un-armoring to get us back into our bodies and heal ourselves. If you’ve been on one of my retreats, you know how powerful this is!
LISTEN
Please stay safe during this time of the coronavirus, and I am sending you all a huge hug from NYC. Stay well and please feel free to ask any questions below.
Much Love,
Amie xx
Thanks for sharing your insights and resources on this topic
I am enjoying discovering your cookbook, and I have worked in holistic health myself as an IV nurse. Yes, integrative health is expensive but that is the way the system is set up. Everyone needs to document their recovery from chronic illness the way you have, to prove to the insurance companies at some point that looking into things like fasting, pure food, meditation, health retreats, etc, should be counted as medicine. . . really curing long term conditions is cheaper, of course, in the long run. But the powers that be have a monopoly, our current system is far from good. If every holistic center, and every person who wants natural remedies covered got together, we would be a powerful force and could possibly change the situation.
I was gonna buy your book but decided not to after reading this:
” After visiting countless doctors and the Mayo Clinic with no results, Amie was able to heal herself from a decade of chronic pain and multiple ailments, including Lyme Disease, C-diff Colitis, Poly-cystic Ovarian Syndrome, Hypothyroidism, Adrenal Fatigue, Leaky Gut…”
You didn’t ‘heal yourself’. You went to holistic doctors (like Mark Hyman, who almost no one can afford) who helped you turn your condition around.
Must be nice to be so wealthy and have wealthy connections.
Hi Kelly! Thanks for your comment. I did work with many integrative medicine doctors and racked up a ton in uncovered medical expenses. I have sacrificed and worked extremely hard to be able to put my health first. I am not a doctor so yes I have worked with doctors in my healing journey, but I have done tons of my own research and earned a degree in integrative nutrition along the way. The mind body connection is so important and you cannot give away your power by listening to whatever your doctors say. I wish you healing and happiness and will be happy to help you if I can!
Thank you Amie for walking through the short awareness exercise.
I am working on healing myself from trauma.
I am going through perimenopause and anxiety has come with that and has made me realize that there are things in my life that I have not dealt with.
My children are grown and I am having a difficult time letting them go because they are what I have invested my entire being into.
I am working on myself now, trying to discover myself.
Hi Amie, thanks for sharing your insights and resources on this topic. It’s so hard to come out of survival mode once you’ve been in it for a long time.