First Step On The Map Of The Healing Journey
Hi there Jay here at the Network Life Center in Louisville, CO. Incidentally I have an office in Boulder now I should mention too. Above the Lucky's Bakehouse. It's in the Lucky's Market parking lot in North Boulder just off of Broadway. There's a great little natural grocery store there. So stop by and get some organic food and come by my office there.
Last time I started a conversation about the Map of the Healing Journey. What I was trying to convey there was that there are certain characteristic twists and turn, ups and downs, certain themes as people progress along the path to healing that tend to be common to everyone's experience. So that's really important. There are certain themes that are common to everyone's experience.
Why is that? the reason is because there's this larger sort of thing that's holding the healing journey which is life. The life journey and the healing journey are synonymous. There's a way in which life is constantly nudging us in the direction of our healing; our wholeness. That's the natural flow of the current is going in that direction. That's a pretty strong current... the current of life.
But there's a way in which from the time that our nervous system is developing in the womb, when we're babies, when we're young kids, the part of our nervous system that's really online, the part that's just feeling into our environment. We're just relating directly to the energetic cues of the people around us, the culture around us and gleaning messages from those cues. And one of the main messages that we can get is that the flow of life is not to be trusted, especially if there are uncomfortable things involved with that flow. If there are uncomfortable things involved we need to push those away.
So there's a way in which we're resisting the flow of life, pushing uncomfortable things away and there's a certain amount of friction that gets created in our body and our life when we're doing that. It's like driving around in your car with the parking brake on. There's friction that creates heat in the brakes and eventually that creates smoke maybe or maybe even fire which hopefully will get you to stop and do something about the situation. Take the brake off right. Well the same happens in our body and our life. The friction that's created is from resisting the flow of life and pushing that which is uncomfortable away causes back pain, it causes organ systems that aren't working like they're supposed to, it causes emotional issues. Again those symptoms are designed to get us to pay attention, to stop and pay attention to what's happening and to take the brakes off, to let the flow of life happen.
As soon as we do that, as soon as we look at what's happening, as soon as we give ourselves permission to feel what's coming up, as soon as we go towards as opposed to pushing away there can be a huge release that happens as the background resistance starts to drop away.
The way that that looks here at my office is that generally breath starts to happen. Breath starts to move to parts of the spine where previously there wasn't movement before. The body uses breath to connect with tension that's being stored there and let go of that and so people's bodies start to feel better and work better. Over time the symptoms that people experience start to go away and/or start to change.
That's kind of the way it looks for the first two to four months of care depending on how often I'm seeing people. People come they leave generally feeling a lot more relaxed, they notice their breath more, their symptoms start to change in a positive way. But then things change. As there's been enough safety that's been created in the system... enough space. In order for us to notch into the next stage of our journey we have to... things have to look different and so the next theme of the process starts to happen and that looks a lot different than what I've just described. And really different to the point where it can be really scary for people if they don't know that it's a natural part of the healing journey.
