Our physiology has equipped us with the ability to fight, flight or freeze in the face of imminent danger. This natural autonomic response served us well in pre-historic times. After the danger was over, we settled back into a rest and digest, nervous system response. But today it’s a different story. Today’s stress creates dis-ease and sickness in mind, body and spirit.Today our stress filled lifestyles, work schedules, poor postural habits and weakened resiliency mean that the threats to our nervous system health are exponential – leaving us chronically overstimulated and out of balance causing tension and pain.
Do you have a hard time shutting your mind off?
Is getting a good night’s sleep a challenge?
Do you know that you spend way too much time on your digital device?
Is your body screaming for relaxation and you feel the pressure to push through, in workouts or yoga practices that leave you feeling more agitated than before you arrived?
These are the real causes of the epidemic of fatigue, sickness, chronic pain, anxiety, and hypertension.
And this is amplified by society’s needs to attune to the outside world, the thirst for more material possessions. All of this misses the gift of inner connection, the art of listening to and giving our soma’s what they really need.
Stress creates dis-ease and the key to relieving stress is to listen, sense and feel.
Habituated Stress Reflex
As Pain Resolution Therapists we see an epidemic of clients that are stuck in Red Light Reflex – the term that describes the habituated stress response to freeze and protect our vital organs. As we explained in a previous blog post Forcing yourself upright, will not “fix” your slumped posture habituated Red Light Reflex shows up in a variety of symptoms including: poor breathing, head forward, slumped posture, tension in the neck and shoulders, shoulders rounded forward, tight hip flexors, poor digestion, inner knee pain, TMJ, headaches, dropped arches, low mood, anxiety/depression and more.
Learning to Rebalance Somatically
What if we learned from a young age how to balance the autonomic sympathetic response to perceived threat, and what if we practiced regularly to lessen the effects of this crazy world we live in? Would the next generation be healthier and happier?
We believe so.
The good news is, it’s not too late. The key to relieving stress is to listen, sense and feel, using your brain to re-educate and reverse habituated responses to ways that stress, trauma and the events of life show up in our bodies.
Thomas Hanna, the founder of Hanna Somatics, one of the most effective self-driven methods to alleviating pain and resolving postural, functional and movement imbalances that affect the body-mind was the first to say that Aging is a Myth – or maybe more accurately, that there is a Myth of Aging.
He never believed for a second that getting older meant that we had to experience pain, that we were going to shrink, walk hunched over, succumb to chronic illness and could no longer do the things that we loved. In fact, he dedicated his career to proving that many commonly diagnosed medical conditions could be resolved through neuromuscular re-education, a restoration of breath, functional movement patterns and self-awareness (interoception).
Stress creates dis-ease and the key to relieving stress is to listen, sense and feel.
We have seen hundreds of clients facilitate their own healing through conscious practices that re-educate and rebalance the somatic nervous system and body-mind.
SomaYoga Therapy
SomaYoga Therapy is one of these brilliant practices; a moving meditation that efficiently taps into the innate self-correcting qualities of the nervous system.
And each time we move somatically, we tip the scales back towards balance.
We invite you to deepen your experience and knowledge and tap into your own power to heal. Visit our On Demand Video Site and get practicing!
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