Our bodies and minds work together. The force that holds them together is energy. Your body is the machine, like a computer, and your mind is like the software or operating system. You need a power source, your energy, to run through things. Your energy is the conduit between the two that makes things work.
Inside your mind, in your programming, in your very cells, is how you heal. Your body knows how to do it. We’ve just got to get your body and mind working together by using your energy to connect it all together.
Acupuncture and acupressure are both alternative therapies that place pressure or needles on specific points on the surface of your skin. These spots on your skin correspond with points of energy in the meridian flow inside your body. Eastern medicine calls this life force your Qi or Chi. If you have blockage in your Chi, you have discomfort or disease. The idea is to massage, apply pressure or insert needles to allow the blockage to break up and free up your energy, free your Chi.
CranioSacral and Reiki therapies are both energy-moving techniques where the healer will use light touching to release tensions, relieve pain, relax, restore, remove stress, align your energy, clear your toxins, release suppressed emotions and feelings, balance organs and glands, strengthen the immune system and promote self healing. A good CranioSacral and Reiki healer should make you feel safe.
Restorative Yoga is gentler and kinder to your body that other types of yoga. The goal is relaxation and unity between your physical, mental and emotional parts. They will give you props like pillows to help support your body. You can target specific parts of your body if you are recovering from an illness. (I did specific poses for my lungs and hips.) Restorative yoga activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which enables control of the body. This gives your sympathetic nervous system a rest, lowering your stress levels.
Tai Chi has you pulling your Chi and holding it like a ball in front of you. You can hold this ball of your energy and engage in a meditative practice of graceful, complimentary, and deeply contemplated movements. Each posture flows into the next without pausing, keeping your body in constant motion. If you’re going to take a class, make sure it’s focused on health maintenance, not on the martial arts aspect, which has different movements.
Laughing as healing – Speaking of our Limbic system, (we were, weren’t we?) laughter is controlled through the Hypothalamus, which also regulates indirectly the response you have to emotional circumstances via your Autonomic Nervous System.
If you remove the humor aspect, what is laughter? According to Encyclopedia Britannica, laughing is “rhythmic, vocalized, expiratory and involuntary actions” where you have a set of gestures and a sound going at the same time.
When we laugh hard, or “heartily,” we have changes happening in our arms/shoulders, legs and trunk muscles, along with fifteen facial muscles, while at the same time, our throats are half-closing thanks to the epiglottis, which makes us gasp. Sometimes we even cry-laugh when our tear ducts are activated.
Laughing is thought to strengthen human connections. It helps us bond. It helps us get over uncomfortable situations. It helps us relieve tension and let go of the absurd. Laughter is contagious because it triggers neural circuits in the brain when we see someone else doing it, which makes us do it.
When it comes to healing, laughing in general helps people cope with a chronic illness or stress. But more than that, it actually helps fight disease by lowering our stress hormones – those same stress hormones used in Fight or Flight that suppress our immune system, making us more susceptible to disease. When we laugh we naturally increase deployment of killer cells that destroy tumors and viruses and we increase manufacturing of T-cells and B-cells, both huge parts of our body’s immune response.
If your laughing makes you start coughing or gives you the hiccups, there’s an up-side. That can help dislodge pesky mucous throughout the respiratory tract and increases the concentration of infectious-fighting salivary Immunoglobulin A. When it comes right down to it, laughing 100 times, ho-ho-ho, ha-ha-ha, whether you mean it in a funny way or not, is equal to about 10-15 minutes of aerobic exercise and that equals about 3 hours of higher oxygenation.
If you’d like to combine yoga and laughing, that exists. Look it up.
All of these therapies would be good choices to help you get in touch with your energy. I do all of them at different times and in different combinations. There are any number of resources to help you find out more about them. Check your libraries, online, Yelp, friends and family for recommendations of healers, studios, teachers and classes.
Why it’s important – As we grow up, we encounter Life. Life is wonderful and sometimes it’s also amazingly hard. We get sick. People are mean to us. Our childhoods are hard. We experience trauma. Sometimes we are the ones that are mean to someone else and we feel ashamed about it. We get angry at someone, furious, and that anger has nowhere to go, so we swallow it. Life. It happens.
Those experiences are all still with us, living in our tissues and cells, clogging up our energy. We need to release them and let them go.
Talk therapy can take you so far. You can speak with a therapist about your childhood and relive the memories and work out a strategy of how to cope with them. That can work pretty well. I’ve done that, and maybe it’s an important step for you.
You can get on medications to help cope with the feelings you have about the traumas you’ve experienced. A psychiatrist can help you find a good cocktail. You’ll probably have to try a few that don’t work, to find one that will. I did that. You may need to do that, too.
And some imbalances are very tricky and you may need those medications for a long time before your body learns how to replace and regenerate what the medications are doing for them. And that’s ok if that’s what you need.
The thing we ultimately want to do, though, is allow our energy to be cleared completely, and that energy is being blocked inside our cells and tissues themselves. Every time you encountered something traumatic, it was stored somewhere inside you. Those blockages are contributing to your illness. We want to release them, clear the toxins, so your energy can move completely without stopping all throughout your system.
The way to clear them is to spend time with yourself and feeling. In those quiet moments of feeling, real change happens and energy starts to shift.
Go to Restorative Yoga and while in Balasana pose (Child’s Pose), ask yourself how you’re feeling. Be quiet and listen. Breathe. Notice how your heart feels, how your chest feels. Maybe you’ll cry a little. Or a lot. Maybe not. There is no right or wrong way to do it.
When you go to your CranioSacral healer, ask her to help you clear your energy and tell her if you are having particular pain in any one area. (A good healer would know that, anyway, but it’s always good to tell them ahead of time.) When she does Reiki for you, you will feel heat and shifts of energy happening within your chest and wherever she is working to put you in balance. Feel it. You might cry. Maybe not. There is no right or wrong. But here, especially, you will do some deeper emotional work. Your CS/R healer has access to your cells and tissues that your other energy therapies do not touch so deeply. Try not to be afraid. Try to be open. Try to listen to what your healer tells you. Cry as much as you need to, without trying to push it down. Let your energy clear.
Our tears contain lysozyme, an antibacterial fluid that can kill up to 95% of bacteria in just a few minutes. Releasing tears onto your skin helps keep you well. Crying is a way to release built-up chemicals (like the endorphin leucine-enkaphalin and prolactin) and the act of crying lowers stress and blood pressure. Our tears lubricate our eyes and literally make it possible to see. Perhaps you’ve had a good cry and then been able to see a situation more clearly, with a body and mind that feel cleansed. Crying is in harmony with our limbic system cleaning out old programming. If you feel like crying – cry. If you never feel like crying, that could be a problem.
Acupressure has been more helpful to me than Acupuncture, although I’ve done both and experienced benefits from both. Unfortunately, I have an unreasonable fear of needles in my face that didn’t go away even after many visits. After the ninth time, I told myself it was ok not to go again. I’d given it the old college try, and I let it go. I reasoned that whatever benefits I got from the acupuncture might not be outweighing the trauma I was inducing by forcing myself to go when I was so afraid.
However, if you can handle it, acupuncture is quite good at aligning energy. After the needles are placed, you will be in a quiet room for some length of time where you can reflect and feel. Sometimes you will cry. That is very healing.
The acupressure sessions, once I helped the healer understand how hard or soft I wanted him to press, were also good, but you don’t get the same experience of reflection time alone. It’s more like a massage. For me, that meant I was less in tune with my own energy during the actual session, but the beneficial effects of being aligned would last for a few days.
Other healing things to try are Core Synchronism, Trauma Release Exercises (TRE), Integration Based Stress Reduction (IBSR), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). I’ve found EMDR particularly helpful in overcoming old stories that replay in my mind that aren’t helpful and induce a lot of stress.
Adding essential oils topically or aromatically with any of these energetic modalities is a wonderful way to add another level of healing. Check this guide on essential oils usage for ideas on emotional healing.
Energy Testing/Muscle Testing – Muscle Testing is a diagnostic tool to test muscle strength to determine how a person’s body is functioning and responding. The outcome of the test will tell you the best therapy for your body. You can learn to do this for yourself if you practice, but in the meantime, use one of your trusted healers to help you test if you are unsure of any of the products you are putting in your body. If you’ve been told by someone to take a bunch of supplements, protein boosters, vitamins and even all the essential oils you’re unsure of, take them to your healer and ask them to help you energy test and find out what your body wants.
This can change over time. What you are in dire need of now, you might need a very small amount of in 6 months. If you get tired of smelling it, your body might not need it so much anymore. Test your muscles to find out. (I loved and craved bacon for about 4 months straight. Every single morning, bacon please. Just thinking about how it smelled made my mouth salivate. But then one morning I woke up and it didn’t smell that good anymore. And it didn’t taste that good. And I believe I got my choline levels back up to normal and my body said, “Time to move on.”)
How does Energy Testing work? When you tell the truth, your muscles are strong. When you “lie,” it takes more energy to hold that lie, and your muscles get weak. It’s a natural law in play. You don’t even have to think about it. It just is.
For suggestions on how to muscle test, I would guide you to Donna Eden and her energy work. You’ll also find 5 ways to try on yourself to see what works best for you here. There is no wrong way, there are just ways your body will respond better.
If you want to get good at testing yourself, simply test yourself as often as possible about everything you put in your body. The more you do it, the better you get at understanding how your body communicates a “strong” and “weak” answer. I sometimes try a few different methods, one right after the other, to figure out where and how I’m testing the strongest/easiest.
Practice Something Good
Decide on what snack you want and test your muscles to find out if your body really wants it or not. Whatever answer you get, go with it and teach your body that you’re willing to listen.