(Feels Like) Starting Over
Getting started on any new modality for healing purposes can feel like starting over. It’s not. It’s starting where you’re at. When I started therapy in 2016, I was starting where I was at. Six years later, when Jonny and I signed up for nervous system training together, we were starting where we were at. Dr. Maxine Haller and Dr. Rhonda Duesterberg teamed up and created a wonderful nervous system fitness training program that they adjust to fit the needs of the individual(s) taking it. For us, this looked like us training and fine-tuning our relationship nervous system, and our individual nervous systems.
My biggest take-aways from the program were learning our individual brain dominances, understanding our saboteurs, and consistently practicing in-the-moment coherence techniques.
Brain Dominance applies to the eyes, ears, hands, and feet. You can have a dominant left brain (which controls the right side of your body), and when in a state of stress or a hyjacked nervous system, the corresponding right side body part goes “offline”. For both Jonny and myself, this means our hearing goes offline when we are stressed. We literally would have arguments about the other not listening. SO MANY times we had this same argument. We finally have an answer as to why this is, and can do either visual cues to communicate we need to take five, or even say “I’m stressed and I’m not comprehending what you are trying to tell me. Can we revisit this in about ten minutes when I can really listen?” A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE this has made in our relationship.
Our saboteurs were discovered from the quiz on the Positive Intelligence website. I have shared this on my Instagram, and also added a tab here on my website for anyone to access some of my favorite personality tests. (I left out 16 Personalities because I feel like most people start there on their own). Saboteurs are the subconscious voices that tell you different stories like you are a victim, be on high alert, judge everyone, avoid everything, etc. These can work with you or against you. It’s a classic every blessing is a curse situation. One of my top saboteurs was The Pleaser. No shock here, I am very open about my people pleasing ways. This can go one of two ways, I can get resentful feeling like I am giving and everyone is only taking, OR I can reframe my mind to say that I am choosing what I give to others and if I feel it is too much, it is my responsibility to pull back.
Quick-coherence practices can look a few ways. These can be things that ground me, activate my whole brain, send energy from my heart, etc. One of the quick-coherence techniques I learned I shared in reels and is to rub your pointer finger and thumb together with the intention of feeling my fingerprint. This focus brings me into the present moment and shuts off the train of thought causing me to feel stress in that moment. Another good one is to simply imagine a place I feel at peace. The brain doesn’t understand when something is real or imagined. Everything you see in your mind your brain and nervous system will react to as if it is happening in front of you. A great example of this is the following:
Read this out loud.
You are coming home from the grocery with a bag of fresh, juicy limes. You place the bag of limes on the counter and take out a cutting board and knife. You cut one of the limes into four pieces and place one of the wedges into your mouth and take a bite.
Did you salivate? I did just writing that (haha).
This is the impact your thoughts have on your whole body. By imagining myself walking, holding Jonny’s hand, on a beautiful beach at sunset and putting our toes in the water, my brain takes me there, and sends signals to my nervous system as if I was really there.
The primary idea of this course was to understand that 95% of what we do each day is subconscious. The best way to make quick, long term changes is by changing our subconscious mind. This comes from listening to subliminals provided in the course, doing the exercises, listening to different frequency therapies, and genuinely changing the way I think about situations. Everything can be a choice if we want it to be. It takes awareness, accountability, and dedication to make different choices than we made yesterday, and even if I am only getting .5% better each day, I am still improving and working towards being the person I want to be.
