Integration of Near Death Experiences

I recently completed Dr. Peter Levine’s Eye of the Needle course Part 2 in San Diego on the integration of near death experiences (NDE’s). NDE’s can arise following a broad range of experiences, common ones include: cardiac arrest (heart attacks), serious accidents and injuries, surgeries, use of anesthetic, suffocation, near/drowning, life threatening illness, poisoning and high fevers, fetal birth conditions of anoxia/hypoxia, coma, concussion, severe emotional distress. Many peak experiences also resemble NDE’s.

The Eye of the Needle in particular refers to a transitional state between life and death, like thanatosis, e.g. a state of shock when all voluntary activity ceases or when one’s body is feigning death.

“A near-death experience (NDE) is a profound psychological (psycho-physiological) event that may occur to a person close to death or, if not near death, in a situation of profound physical or emotional crisis. Because it includes transcendental and mystical elements, an NDE is a powerful event of consciousness; it is not (in itself) mental illness.”

The characteristics of an NDE often include: peace, tranquility, calm, and joy; a review of one’s life and other memories; an experience of being all-knowing; a sense of hyper awareness; a deep depersonalization, including a sense of complete separation from the body; detachment and loss of emotion; a sense of cosmic unity; transcendence of the physical world and/or an experience of a void, nothingness, a realm of total non-existence.

When people experience NDE’s they transition between states of freeze, extreme pain, and terror. When they dissociate, they discover the absence of this hell realm and enter into the beatific state of non-being. People are often left needing to make sense of this experience because it can leave them in a state of confusion and stuck in one or both of these polarities ~ the hell and/or the heaven realms.

If left unintegrated, these experiences and that of the polarities following, can profoundly affect people’s day to day lives. Especially as according to a new study, one in 10 people have ‘near-death’ experiences. “Near-death experiences where people report a range of spiritual and physical symptoms, including out-of-body sensations and seeing or hearing hallucinations, affect 10% of people, according to a new study analyzing participants from 35 countries.” ~ Eureka Alert/AAAS  June 28, 2019.

Many people describe out of body experiences (OBE’s) that have not been integrated, of which 95 % occur in a medical setting. The trauma ~ hell realm and it’s opposite ~ the beatific, heavenly realms need to find their way to integrate together so that the whole being can recover physiological, mental, emotional and spiritual wellness.

When we can pass through the eye of the needle, and return to ourselves and our bodies here and now, life becomes much more livable, fruitful and real again. This is my wish for us all.

Sending so much wellness and blessings,

 

The Window of Tolerance

As babies when we have healthy attachment with attuned, available, nurturing caregivers we lay the foundations for the optimal development of our brain and nervous system. This co-regulation offered by our caregivers helps us to effectively self-regulate independently as we grow older.

“Window of Tolerance” is a term coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, which denotes normal brain/body reactions, especially following adversity. The idea suggests that we have an optimal arousal level when we are within the window of tolerance that allows for the ups and downs of emotions, e.g. hurt, anxiety, pain, anger that may bring us close to the edges of the window of tolerance but generally we can use strategies to keep within this window. Similarly we may feel exhausted, sad, or shut down but we generally can find a way to shift out of this. The below diagram demonstrates what happens when we move out of the window of tolerance into high or low arousal, experiencing activation followed by a settling.

 

Picture

When we experience challenges through trauma and unmet attachment needs this can drastically disrupt our nervous system’s capacity to self-regulate. Our senses become heightened and experiences and reactions are intensified and strategies are less accessible than usual. Challenging adverse experiences can also shrink our window of tolerance, e.g. we have less capacity to ebb and flow and a greater tendency to become overwhelmed. Learning how to track and shift our emotions can be a powerful tool to support and encourage regulation and integration throughout the body, mind and brains. Otherwise we can get stuck on “On” or “Off” as depicted in the below diagram:

 

Regarding hyperarousal, calm arousal, and hypoarousal.  

  • Calm arousal is optimal, and we often fluctuate within various levels of calm arousal throughout the day.  However, when we become too over-stimulated by fear, pain, anger, trauma triggers, etc. we can find ourselves outside of our window of tolerance in hyperarousal.  
  • Hyperarousal has excessive activation/energy often in the form of anxiety, panic, fear, hypervigilence, emotional flooding etc. This keeps our system stuck on “On” and impacts our ability to relax, often making it difficult to sleep, eat and digest food, as well as manage our emotions. If intense, it can also result in dissociative rage/hostility. 
  • Hypoarousal can occur when we have too much hyperarousal, surpassing the pain/emotional overwhelm our brain/body is able to tolerate, which causes us to move into a state of hypoarousal (shutting down or dissociating). In this state our system becomes stuck on “Off” and shows up as exhaustion, depression, flat emotion, numbness, disconnection, dissociation, etc. This also impacts our bodies’ basic functions, e.g. we may want to sleep all the time, affects our appetite and digestion, and may make us feel emotionally deadened. 

However, humans have capacity to stay in one state for so long before the brain and body shifts us. For example, we can only tolerate so much pain, anxiety, fear, before the brain and body numb us to this excessive energy. Similarly people will only stay in a shut down state feeling emotionally deadened before the brain/body shifts us out of this often by gravitating towards things that make us feel alive, e.g. high risk behaviors to bring about a sense of excitement, activation, and vitality.

Without having experienced regulation in infancy and childhood or following unresolved traumatic experiences that remain activated in the brain and body, many people may grow up in a manner that they don’t know how to self-regulate. Instead, they often attempt to self-regulate and bring themselves into a calm arousal level any way they can. For example someone with excessive fear may gravitate towards a depressant to calm their brain and nervous system, whereas someone feeling emotionally deadened may gravitate towards a stimulant to make them feel alive.

Parents and loved ones can help by identifying and labeling (making observations based on how each other are presenting) “It looks like you are feeling overwhelmed, why don’t we take a break” etc.  Dan Siegel refers to this as “name it to tame it”. Naming it allows for a sense of understanding and being seen as well as validation. When we stop to notice (within ourselves or others) this can be a powerful grounding tool. Children, youth, and adults should be encouraged to focus mindfully on noticing how they feel, how their body feels, and identifying what they need to feel right again. Our goal is to essentially broaden this window of tolerance increasing capacity for people to hold emotional experiences, even those of higher intensity, without become dysregulated or going into hyper or hypo arousal.

I hope that this is helpful to better understanding and helping your own as well as your loved ones nervous systems!

Somatic Experiencing Resilience Exercises for Kids & Adults

I was listening to a really helpful interview with Peter Levine PhD, the founder of Somatic Experiencing (a neurobiological approach to healing trauma), and Dr. Maggie Kline, a Senior Somatic Experiencing Faculty Member, a Psychotherapist and Retired School Psychologist, that offers tools that caregivers and Somatic Experiencing Practitioners can use during these times, particularly with children. This excellent 45 min video interview can be accessed here.

In short, it shares that kids can often being frightened, confused or sad during these times because they don’t know what’s going on, especially when they pick up on the anxiety and fear of their parents. It’s important for adults to ground and balance so that our challenging emotions aren’t passed onto kids. It’s also good to let the kids know that they will be protected, kept safe, and can share their thoughts or fears with parents whenever they feel it. (Note that when adults experience external threat, they fight, flight or collapse in overwhelm; children can’t fight or flight and respond to threat by attaching to parents to create safety).

Peter Levine suggests various activities to help kids such as: making up stories together, singing, dancing, cooking, exercising and walking outside in nature whenever possible. Also practicing deep listening, and laughing together, which kid’s love and helps them to return to their natural creativity, confidence and resilience.

Here are a few Somatic Experiencing exercises from Peter Levine in an 8 min video that can help adults (and kids) to reset our nervous systems so that we feel less trapped and/or paralyzed by fear or panic at this time. Click here to access them.

There are some additional exercises in a 5 min video, also from Peter Levine, and especially for kids, that you can access here.

Keep well and finding ways to nourish yourself and thrive everyday!

What the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study Means for Our Health in Adulthood

Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood that can significantly impact our health as adults. Unresolved traumas can leave the body in a state of chronic stress, which releases a chronic, low-dose of inflammatory chemicals and creates unregulated inflammation that can eventually translate into symptoms and disease.

Research strongly supports the relationship between stress and physical inflammation. “For example, adults under the stress of taking care of spouses with dementia display increased levels of a cytokine that increases inflammation. Likewise, if an adult sibling dies, your risk of having a heart attack rises greatly. If you’re pregnant and face a big stressful event, your chance of miscarrying doubles. Encountering serious financial problems raises a man’s risk of falling down and being injured in the months that follow. A child’s death triples a parent’s change of developing multiple sclerosis. States of intense emotional fear or loss can precipitate a type of cardiomyopathy known as ‘broken heart syndrome’, a severe physical weakening of the heart muscle that presents almost exactly like, and is often misdiagnosed as, a full-blown heart attack.”

So if as a child you were:

  • experiencing violence or abuse
  • witnessing violence in the home or community
  • having a family member attempt or die by suicide

Or your environment undermined a sense of safety, stability, and bonding while growing up in a household with:

  • substance misuse
  • mental health problems
  • instability due to parental separation or household members being in jail or prison

Then your overall health may be reflecting some of these early stressors as ACEs are often linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance misuse in adulthood and can also negatively impact education and job opportunities.

“The more categories of ACEs a child has faced, the greater the chances of developing heart disease as an adult… a child who has 7 or more ACEs grows up with a 360 percent higher chance of developing heart disease. More than half of women suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome report childhood trauma. People with ACE Scores of 4 were twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer than someone with an ACE Score of 0. For each ACE score a person had, the change of being hospitalized with an auto-immune disease in adulthood rose 20 percent. Someone with an ACE Score of 4 was 460 percent more likely to be facing depression than someone with a score of 0. An ACE Score of 6 and higher shortened an individual’s life-span by almost twenty years.”

“According to ACE research in the US, 64 percent of us grew up in families in which at least one thing went wrong: we’ve had at least one Adverse Childhood Experience.”

“Today more than 1,500 studies cite ACE research and the World Health Organization now utilizes the ACE Questionnaire in fourteen countries to help screen for emotional distress and trauma that might lead to poor health. In the United States, twenty-nine states and Washington DC, are using the ACE Questionnaire to help improve public health.”

Feel free to take the ACE Quiz here by answering 10 quick questions. You can also visit the official website for the ACE Study here.

“I am extremely grateful for the 8 BodyTalk & Somatic Experiencing sessions I recently received with Jaya. I have seen a tremendous shift in my mind, body and spirit. Inflammation in my body, especially my colon has reduced (when my Doctor recently tested my Rheumatoid Factor, it had lowered significantly). I have a sense of calm now and no longer feel that I am hypervigilant. This allows me to be able to attend and engaged in social activities without anxiety. It has also helped me to be more present to each moment and feel more fully alive.

Jaya is an amazing, knowledgeable, gentle healer and has the expertise to support you wherever you are. I have learned so much about myself and appreciate each session that I have. I wish everyone to experience the wonderful transformations that I have experienced with Jaya. We are worth the investment.”

– Carol, Ottawa

We all deserve to live vibrant health on all levels. It’s time to take back our lives and thrive!

 

  • Quotes taken from, “Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal,” written by: Donna Jackson Nakazawa

A little bit about Jaya

Although Jaya’s health is quite good overall, a little voice inside in the Fall of 2020 said, “You need to take a couple of months off in the New Year to fully recover your health on all levels”.

Despite various kinds of social pressure to not take that much time off and/or not to go away, Jaya listened and did just that. She went to Austin and Mexico with her son and friends and received healing sessions and then played in the beach and sand for weeks.

By the time that Jaya returned to giving sessions in early March, her health has almost 100% back on track! Various issues that she was unsure of how to heal, did, because she was able to rest, spend time in the sun, ocean, run down the street in the mornings, swim and surf in the afternoons, drink amazing fresh juices and eat food right from the sea, write poetry, pray, meditate and listen to Spirit.

At this point many people may say, that is okay for her but I could never do that for this and that reason. Jaya wants you to know that she is a full-time single parent and a self-employed entrepreneur who is the sole financial provider for her son. She took the time because her body needed her to before it forced her to. Because her health and happiness is central to the life that she wants to live, and the well that she wants to offer to others from.

Many times we may think that we can’t do the things that we feel called to or know that we have to do for our health and our wellness but the truth is, we can. We just have to muster up the courage to listen to that infinitely wise voice arising from deep inside, and do it anyway!

How trauma can resurface during these times

I read a blog post by Somatic Experiencing Colleague Madeline Dietrich that inspired me and so decided to extrapolate further.

She wrote, “In my Somatic Experiencing work, I remind people that humans are mammals. In our basic make up we’re pack animals. Instinctually, we know our survival depends on being part of a tribe – on belonging. So, here we find ourselves in this very odd contradictory situation of opposing messages – your “supposed” survival depends on avoiding people and yet our survival, especially our emotional survival, depends on being in connection. It feels helpful to just articulate this cross current of imperatives.   

My concern is that this current situation will be our reality for some time to come, and I wonder what will be left of our social fabric by the time it’s over. How will we repair this rupture?  Maybe friends and family will be okay, and will make those repairs, over time, but what about the bigger social matrix that holds us together?”

Her words impacted me as the same thoughts and feelings have been inside for sometime. I can see the disruption of our core human tendencies that encourage us to connect, now shift to wanting to protect, and I wonder how this will affect our nervous systems and psyche’s over the long term, particularly our childrens’.

As lockdowns come and go across the planet, the collective is having to “shut down” to protect ourselves from a virus that doesn’t allow us to either fight or flight, as we cannot locate the threat with our senses. For some this exacerbates existing freeze in their systems, which can feel intolerable and triggering of collapse states arising from childhood trauma and/or other acute or complex traumas.
 
Our collective and individual traumas inevitably surface as our governments make laws that tell us what to wear and how to conduct our bodies, businesses, and lives in greater detail than I have ever remembered in my 42 years, including the added fear of punishment (e.g. fines) for not obeying.
 
For those that have lived, or have had ancestors that have lived in fascist and/or totalitarian regimes, this level of control emanating from a centralized power can be triggering of intergenerational or other lived traumas, particularly with the building of isolation/quarantine camps across the country.
 
For anyone that has lived physical abuse of various kinds and/or medical trauma with masking and anesthetic, having your mouth covered with a mask can be overwhelming, panic inducing and retraumatizing.
 
For anyone that has been neglected, the lack of connection created by social distancing and/or lockdowns can also feel threatening of our ability to meet our own survival needs.
 
I also occasionally wonder how many people force themselves to dissociate on a daily basis in order to implement various rules and regulations, so as to avoid more threatening social exclusion. I know that this is the reality of various clients of mine who for example, wear a mask even though they are medically exempt. 
 
Conflict, separation and division also often arises amidst the limited contact that we have with our families, friends and communities in relation to a variety of issues, e.g. mask, no mask, vaccine, no vaccine, to hug or not to hug, etc.
 
Meanwhile, many of us know that we are all doing our best to live a truth that allows us to remain connected to our own core human values of: integrity, respect, responsibility, and caring for our fellow human, as well as to our bodies. Most of us are living a compromised version of this and our previous “realities”, which some reap the benefits of, some suffer, while others experience a mix of both.
 
I share these insights as a Somatic Experiencing (trauma integration) Practitioner, primarily to elicit heart-felt awareness, kindness and understanding; to encourage our eyes to hold one another with compassion even if we don’t know the details behind what others are doing. Not everyone, especially those living in a state of functional freeze, has the strength, energy, time or voice to verbally articulate the reasons behind their behaviour to each person that they meet. If their childhood trauma was pre-verbal, sometimes they don’t even know why – they just know what they can and can’t do if they are to remain embodied and continue to act as resources for their children, families, friends and communities.
 
My own assumption in this context, is that everyone is considering others’ health and well-being as much as possible, while prioritizing their own their physical and/or emotional health. It is my hope that we can all preserve both, and in particular, our humanity.

Healing & Inspiration in Challenging Times

I am so grateful for the downtime that these times of “social lock down” have brought, and the space that it allows my body, mind and spirit to let go deeply. Also to have the time to be with various emotions as they arise; to cleanse my liver, to run on the river, to dance and do yoga daily to keep me healthy, strong and peaceful inside.

Something that I have been aware of regarding the fear that is prevalent in these times, is that if our nervous systems’ were conditioned to be fearful at a young age, they will most likely be reacting more fearfully now (the amygdala actually grows larger in this case). So when I see different things happening and/or read other things, I do my best to hold this in awareness and meet those around, including myself, with compassion.

Following our Government’s recommendations re: social distancing, I am only able to offer sessions online via Zoom or by phone at this time, until we are advised that we can do otherwise. I am happy to have been offering distance sessions for about a decade, which already comprise approximately 25% of my practice. (If you would like more to read clinical studies carried out on their efficacy, please feel free to visit the Appointments page of my website and scroll down to read under Distance Sessions). If people are working from home, this may be the perfect time to add a remote session into the day to help to move through whatever is coming up in these challenging times.

I am so grateful to be able to continue to offer therapy sessions at this time, as it feels that we all need to reset now in order to work through the fears, etc. that are arising, and that we are all beings asked to face. I am also grateful that working online allows me to keep the doors of my small business open.

Feel free to click on this beautiful video that I found about ways to be grateful for the experience of our interconnectedness and the opportunity to reevaluate and redesign our lives during these times.

Also please use any of the free guided meditations and other helpful tools available on the Tools page of my website to help you to reconnect with yourself. 

May we all rediscover how to thrive in unexpected and forgotten ways during these times of deep remembering of what it is to be truly alive!

Touch Work for Trauma

I just completed my 3 year Somatic Experiencing (SE) Professional training! I am feeling grateful to be skilled to help so many people to heal from developmental, acute and complex trauma by transforming trauma physiology.

In this last 6 day module, we incorporated touch work to enable us to access some of the deepest shock states held in the body, originating from either “big T or little T trauma”, occurring anytime from birth up until recently. We do this by supporting affected joints, diaphragms and the viscera (gut), to allow them to unravel bound survival energy that becomes stuck inside when the nervous system is overwhelmed by traumatic events (we only use this touch technique with consent ~ there are other ways of practicing SE.)

I myself experienced various healings during this recent training via our practice sessions. (Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the tension that is locked inside the body until we experience it’s release!)

Overall, SE supports regulation of the autonomic nervous system, which underlies every aspect of our physical, emotional, and psychological functioning. It also supports mood regulation, the reworking of addictive patterns, and the prevention or resolution of PTSD.

Since trauma can contribute to the formation of many complex syndromes and diseases, SE can also help to unwind challenging health conditions (sometimes with the assistance of other healthcare professionals). SE techniques are further effective in reducing or eliminating chronic pain and trauma-related symptoms presenting in the musculo-skeletal system.

If you would like to learn more about this modality, please feel free to visit my website below and/or the main SE website by clicking here.

May all beings be well and thrive!

Healing Complex Trauma and Syndromal patterns

I recently completed another 6 day Somatic Experiencing trauma integration training, as part of the Advanced year of the 3 year Professional training that I will finish in February 2020. We learned how to work with people who have complex and interwoven traumatic symptoms reflective of the highly disorganized physiological systems that occur in syndromal patterns. These often arise from the huge efforts required to manage extreme levels of disruption in the physiology, or in the face of extreme threats to survival.

Integrating complex trauma through the nervous systems is particularly helpful to resolving the various syndromal diseases that often arise in relation to it, eg. Migraines, Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, IBS, autoimmune disorders, pain syndromes, etc.

When syndromal patterns are in place, both the dorsal vagal parasympathetic system (freeze) and the sympathetic systems (fight or flight) get stuck on ‘on’, eg. the “brakes” and the “gas” of our nervous system, which drains all of our systems, including vital energy, making it difficult to heal symptoms. In these cases, healing happens when the nervous system learns how to grow the ventral vagal (parasympathetic relaxation/social engagement branch) and begins to self-regulate; healing also when coping/management strategies are able to be integrated and not relied upon to keep our systems stable, which is the only safety that many people with these patterns regularly rely upon.

I am so grateful to have gained even more tools to help people to heal from these clusters of symptoms (syndromal patterns), which Western Medicine often has difficulty naming and healing via the related dysregulation in the nervous systems. Particularly as Syndromal diseases often respond poorly to treatments and have people going from practitioner to practitioner for years, getting so little results.

I personally experienced so many healings in this past week as my nervous system rebooted itself in the most incredible way that it ever has, followed by a similar reboot to my immune, as well as other systems. Two areas of pain and/or lack of sensation also integrated and have completely left me. I feel so incredibly new again on all levels and would love to facilitate the same experience for you.

May all beings be well and thrive!

Repatterning your 3 Brains

Energetic patterns exist throughout space and matter and their alignment and structure is fundamental to good health, whether in our bodies or the Universe at large.

So, if the energetic patterns in our brain (and/or heart and gut brains) become dysregulated, how can we help to repattern them to reflect previous good health? And, how can we do this to address various related symptoms that arise such as, ADHD, depression, anxiety, heart or blood issues, or digestive and immune issues, etc.?

One way is to ask our innate intelligence, which parts and systems and/or which of the 3 brains need to resynchronize communication between and within them so that their functions can be reset to perform more optimally.

This is where BodyTalk Energy Therapy can help. The BodyTalk System harnesses the innate intelligence of the body and mind by using neuromuscular biofeedback to uncover the unique communication pathways that need to be reestablished so that the body can heal itself. As awareness is brought to ill adapted health patterns and suggestions for change are made, the body and mind integrate these so that old patterns can break up and reconfigure the neural circuitry to better reflect your optimal health possibilities. While this unfolds, people begin to watch many of their physical symptoms reduce or disappear, and feel more vibrant, alive and connected than ever, just as nature intended.