And yet to live, we have to keep ‘doing’ things that take the body ‘out of regulation’.

Thankfully the body has many automatic ways of regulating itself and it does this all day and all night out of our awareness.

Sometimes though, the things we choose to ‘do’, or things that happen to us, or are not available to us, block the body from regulating, so what does it do?

It has to find a way to get your attention, so that you can make a different choice that allows regulation. 

If your body can not get your attention for whatever reason, then it needs to communicate more intensely and if this still does not work, then the body switches to Emergency Mode, taking over the controls, using Automatic Survival Reactions.

These actions are likely to be old and outdated, which is why I name them REactions, as you are reenacting what worked in your past, despite what might have changed since then.

These could be active actions or inactive actions, meaning we get energised using anger, disgust or fear (often labelled as anxiety) or we start to preserve our energy in various ways of slowing or shutting down (often called fatigue or depression).

The body uses a lot of energy to stay alive and until relatively recently, energy sources were scarce, which means the body is often trying to be energy efficient, meaning it does many things automatically, according to an internal, learned rule book. 

Emergency Mode uses this rule book!

Thankfully the rule book is updatable, but as any programmer will tell you, you need to identify the source, recode and then release an updated version of the programme, otherwise the same issue just keeps repeatedly happening.

Therapeutic reprocessing is very similar to this process, efficiently looking for the root cause (source), reprocessing using the body’s natural updating resources (recode), releasing blockages and reestablishing more natural regulation, using awareness until the body can take over automatically. 

 For some this can be done easily and efficiently over a few sessions, for others, the rule book has become complex and contradictory, as there have been too many significant incidents that needed Emergency Mode and for some, they are actually consistently living in Emergency Mode and a lot of trust needs to be built for the body to feel safe enough to return to a more consistent regulated state.

 This was the state I lived in for many years, which makes so much sense when I think about my parents’ early years. They did literally live in a ‘state of Emergency’, they were trying to exist in the east end of London during the second world war. Either there was the constant threat of being bombed, the constant threat of there being spies or the enemy amongst them or the threat of starvation as the everyday way of life disintegrated.

Things did not immediately improve when the war ended, there was still scarcity and a need to survive and the enemy changed. At that point, sadly your own neighbours or even your own family were competing for the same scarce resource that could help sustain life.

At this point there is a mixture of Responses and Reactions. There are those who still have their own internal and social rule book intact inside, who are trying to reinstate what they lost, there are those so wounded they are not able to access their rule books and then there are those whose rule books were formed during this extensive period of Emergency. This last one applied to my parents and those of my neighbours and teachers etc, their Survival rule book became my everyday rule book! 

It took a long time for me to realise it does not have to be that way, slowly and with CARE, I have been updating my personal and social rule book, moving from the unkind mind I inherited and creating a kinder mind that allows my body to regulate and Thrive.

 I have been learning and studying for years, always using myself as the person to practice on and with. Recently I have realised that I have crafted a unique perspective on living and healing, integrating all these various ways of understanding and working with the body. It may not be a good fit for everyone, and yet I know from feedback from my clients, it has been such an important fit for them. If I am to remain regulated and healthy, there are only so many people I can work with on a one to one basis, and even though this is my preferred way of working, I want to find ways to help more people like me. I hope you will accompany me on a journey of finding people who share my point of view of healing from within and developing a kinder mind. If you have not signed up for my sporadic newsletters, please consider doing so and if you think my Point of View and way of working with depth might support someone you know, please consider passing this on to them in some way.

Please know, the kinder your mind, the more chance your body has to be able to regulate, which is the core of health and wellbeing.

If you would like to work with me to help you develope A Kinder Mind please contact me