Secrets to a satisfying life

Do you think to yourself, “I work so hard to create a satisfying life…why aren’t I there yet?”  Well maybe you are, and you just don’t see it, hear it, feel it, taste it, smell it…got the picture?

Probably not, since I just began with the end in mind.  Let me rewind and start at the beginning…

Today was a stunningly beautiful day at the Secrets in the Garden Festival.  In my opinion, this is a festival which joins many influential women, with some not so influential women, yet all women who have a passion for achieving their dreams and creating themselves a satisfying life.  No woman “better than” another, simply women living a soulful life through connecting with each other, connecting with their dreams, connecting with their passions and pleasures.  And when women get together to do this, magic happens.  I see it in my Nia classes regularly, people make connections with their bodies, their souls and each other and little lights go on all over the place.  Illumination point number 1! 

So back to the festival…I had the pleasure of listening to 3 women speak, and it was quite fascinating that all these three women had similar messages.  One of them Annette Stanton, even said in her talk…when you hear something 3 times, then you had better listen.  Michelle Bridges being 1 of the speakers also recognized this point and her take on it was “what you resist, persists”.  The message you need to hear, will continue to call to you and become louder and louder (and that loudness is not so pleasant, can be rather drastic in fact)...  Been there, and know that one well, but that is another story.  For me, the festival was a reminder of just how powerful the inner world really is.  And when I say inner world, I mean that magical place inside us that loves to experience with all the senses, that place that really hears when we listen and truly sees when we look.

When we take the time to tune into this, we tap into our wisdom – a very useful start to creating a satisfying life.  Then to take action on the messages we receive is the fuel we add to the fire of those heart’s passions.  And that is such a simple secret to success…

Tune in and Take action.  Illumination point number 1b!   So why is it not being actualized for so many people?

Throughout our life, we are gifted with what I call Melting Moments.  These are touchstone moments where it appears that this moment is so loud, so significant and so charged up, that it burns into your memory like no other moment.  It is more obvious when you look back on it and sense just how powerful that moment was, because it is embedded in your psyche as an easily accessed file, that just seems to pop up to the front of your brain, when it is most relevant.  If you subscribe to the teachings that all answers exist within, then this is a useful tool to have…Ask the question, let the answer arise.  And I am not guaranteeing it will arise immediately, but I am saying that there are opportunities literally everywhere for your consciousness to be illuminated.  Illumination point number 2

As an example, in this past month I have been acutely aware of my masculine overdrive tendencies affecting my life.  So I have been asking for support to become more attuned to my feminine and flowing abilities.  To cut a long story short, simply by being amongst women who have been where I have been and who are walking the path I am walking and sharing this so openly with the world, I recognized I am exactly where I need to be, doing exactly what I need to do, hearing just what I need to hear and taking all the necessary steps.  I have been doing all the things the coaches are suggesting to do and each step I have taken has been in the right direction.  That is what the feminine flow is all about – connecting with others and working with inner wisdom and intuition.  TICK!  It was always there, all it took was for me to take a soulful journey outside of my everyday grind and then acknowledge it.

There are so many reasons why people get stuck on the “Tuning In” aspect, or on the “Taking Action” aspect.  In this day and age, with so many distractions, so many people in our lives and so many products being sprouted and spruked, it takes a lot of awareness and focus to remain attuned to the song of the heart and to continue believing in that.  That is why we do what we do at Soul Nurturing.  We want others to share the soulful transformations that we have experienced.

So many of us are trained to “use our head” and this over activity in the head, or rather the mind, is like a wet blanket on a fire.  It is extremely difficult to get anything done when there is a whole panel of voices arguing their different standpoints (and you don’t have to have schizophrenia to experience this).  It is also difficult to be present to enjoy a moment or to enjoy the beauty of your soul when you are in your head.  The body is the vehicle for your soul, and it has nothing to do with your mind.

 Make a daily practice of connecting with your body and your senses and ask yourself, “Have I created enough opportunities to listen to my heart?”  “Have I taken a step to honour my heart on this day?”  And then you will know that vision by vision, song by song and step by step, you will be living your satisfying life.

If you would love to explore personalised strategies for you to achieve more presence with your soul and its wisdom, email us and we will get in touch with you for a free introductory consultation on the phone. info@soulnurturing.com.au

INSIGHTS INTO CHRONIC PAIN

Why is it that women are more likely to experience chronic pain than men?  While in Cusco at the beautiful hotel “Tikka Wasi” (translated as House of Flowers) , I came across a rather interesting article on chronic pain in a psychology journal.  It gave more passion and validity to our work at Soul Nurturing.  Women are the primary users of our service and usually driven by a pain of some form, physical or emotional.  And not only that, sorry more bad news for women, your gender also makes you more likely to have longer and more intense pain experiences than men.  It does beg the question of WHY?

The answer is in the hormones.  Oestrogen and progesterone play a role in pain processing and the pain experience.  I have always thought that oestrogen would be the perfect form of torture (not that I entertain the idea of torture).  It just occurred to me in a writhing PMT state one day, what an ordeal it is to be in a body that is overburdened with oestrogen.  It is quite common for women to have low progesterone levels which correlates with experiencing headaches and joint pain.  So it definitely pays to keep your hormones in check, more on that later.

There have been other interesting research findings into the condition of chronic pain – thanks to the Oppenheimer Centre for Neurobiology of stress, the pain medicine division at the University of Southern California and Northwestern Universities Journal of Neuroscience publication…

Brain imaging studies have found that people with chronic back pain have less grey matter in the brain than non-sufferers.  The longer people suffer with pain, the greater the loss of grey matter and this certainly does MATTER because this is the functional part of the brain that does all the processing and thinking.  Having this functionality is a damn site better than the foggy brain experience.  And for those of you who like numbers, if you suffer chronic back pain you could be losing between 5 to 11 percent of your brain size in a year, which is what a person would generally lose in 10 to 20 years as a result of aging processes.  And in fact, it is not only the grey matter, white matter is also involved.  That is pretty much the whole brain covered!  It has been found that white matter irregularities put you at risk of being a chronic pain sufferer.  White matter is the part of the brain that transmits the signals, ie the communication lines.  We all know how important communication is.  If you have ever lost your mobile phone or internet connection, you know what kind of angst occurs.

Much of the research has been focused on the internal mechanisms of pain processing and perception rather than external influences which emulates the core philosophies of Soul Nurturing.  We believe that true power comes from internal mastery, not from changing the world around us.  The phenomenon of centralization has been an important research finding in chronic pain studies.  The finding here is that even after the initial injury or source of pain has been removed the nervous system has centralized the perception and commands of pain and essentially is continuing to run that program without the stimulus.

And now for the good news…

The solutions revealed in the article were focused on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a psychology intervention which is basically modifying your behaviour through changing your thinking.  People whose personalities tended to catastrophise and whose thoughts remained focused on the pain and over-reacting to it, were less likely to make a good recovery.  An obvious change to make, and easily said, yet not so easily delivered. 

In the 15 years I have been working with people with anxiety and pain, I have found that the key to the solution is in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.  Put simply it comes down to our primal survival mechanisms.  Number 1, there is nothing more important for the functioning of a body than that of survival.  When we are in a survival mode because of persisting stressful or traumatic situations, the body’s functioning is geared to that, and is not managing the hormonal system so well because of it. 

Over time people will develop deep survival patterns that govern their underlying modes of operating in the world.  The more we enact such patterns, the stronger the neural pathways become, and the harder it is to break that pattern.  Addressing the unresolved stresses that are plaguing the mind plus finding new ways of being, is the key to success, and it sure pays to have some help and support in this process.  Kinesiology is a marvelous tool in assessing exactly what survival patterns are running for people and diffusing the charge in that neural pathway.  This reduces the strength of that patterning, creating freedom to think and move in new ways.  Kinesiology also has some excellent methods to release stress that affects the white matter of the brain and therefore allow more pathways to be open for communication.  There are many success stories for women finding more hormonal balance using Kinesiology.  It can be a very illuminating experience for a woman to explore the causes behind her hormonal imbalances.

Soul nurturing offers many strategies to practice connecting to relaxation, inner wisdom, joy of movement and pleasure.  The more the brain focuses on these types of experiences, the more natural it becomes, leaving thoughts and feelings of pain and hurt in the past.

References:

A. Vania Apkarian1, Yamaya Sosa1, Sreepadma Sonty2, Robert M. Levy3, R. Norman Harden5, Todd B. Parrish4, and Darren R. Gitelman2,4, The Journal of Neuroscience, Chronic Back Pain Is Associated with Decreased Prefrontal and Thalamic Gray Matter Density

17 November 2004, 24(46): 10410-10415; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2541-04.2004

Steven H. Richeimer, MD with Kathy Steligo, Confronting Chronic Pain: A Pain Doctor's Guide to Relief, John Hopkins University Press, 201