This is a close relative to the cat hissing posture, but looks more like a body builder flexing their upper body.  Instead of just the shoulders, the arms are held up and curled forward for extended lengths of time.  I could see a boxer or martial artist with their hands up, ready for a fight.  They can be leaning forward or up on their toes, too.

In nature, this looks like the defensive posturing of an animal protecting it’s turf, which is exactly what is happening subconsciously for us, too. 

This can also like be a puffer fish, which instantly expands to look bigger than they are to scare predators away from attacking. 

I see people whose faces are forward as another way to keep people back, even if it seems this person is happy and outgoing.  It’s like the overwhelm of their big personality keeps people out of their personal space.

I also see people trying to stick their chest out and pulling their shoulders back, especially when they are tired.  This makes for very tight armpits, somewhere that people never realize that they are carrying stress.  They just feel tension in the neck and shoulders, or maybe in between the shoulder blades.

A quick way to feel relief in the neck and shoulders is to let the arms fall to the sides and slide the shoulder blades down the back and flex in between the shoulder blades.   

Another great remedy for tight shoulders is to really push your head back into a car headrest, then rolling you chest forward, but chin back.  I like to drop the shoulders back to the car seat then pulling on the steering wheel.

Pulling up your shoulder blades really high and rubbing them against the base of the skull is another way to break up tension. 

With you arms hanging down to your sides, roll your thumbs outward and look up, letting your chest arch up with a deep breath all the way from your lap to your chin.  This is so good for the heart and mental balance!

This is the opposite of the bulldog posture.  Opposite muscles should be worked for stability and posture.  So if you are in one posture often, the opposite posture needs to be used to counter-act it. 

Here’s food for thought:  Let down your guard once in a while bulldog!  You need it.

After having started the last long and wordy post, I noticed something curious.  The topics and examples I had gotten reacquainted with were starting to play out in my life again. Deep feelings and memories were being stirred up.  After a conversation earlier today, I realized that instead of focusing all my attention on the subject of crisis interventions, I needed to be re-focusing on the positive.  So here goes…

I have been a fan of affirmations for quite a while, but sometimes life happens and I have had to re-orient myself.   Affirmations were my first step forward beyond trying to get healthy with only diet and exercise changes.

The book, “You Can Heal Your Life”, by Louise L. Hay opened new doors for me.  Now, there were other options for me, other than what I previously believed I was fated with.  I started to incorporate my mind as well as my body, as well as my spirit, or emotions into a healthy outlook and plan for my life.

I had mental patterns from my early environment, my parents, and my own experiences that I thought were the only way to view my world and spiritual development.

When you experience something (over and over again), that makes it true, right?  Maybe not.  We can get so wrapped up in our emotional worries, fears, and frustrations re-playing in our minds that we feel trapped and those emotions become self-fulfilling prophecies. 

What if we could re-write our perceived outcomes to our experiences?  What if there were other options?  What if you could re-frame your problems into a “perfect” scenario and give your mind a break, and therefore relieve some perpetual suffering?  Just for a moment, you could take a break from your problems, or as Louise says, “Have compassion for yourself. You are doing the best you can.”

I will tell you, it can change your world.  Now, it does take practice and determination.  Under duress, sometimes you have to be very patient trying reign in a mind stuck in an anxiety loop.  But knowing it is only a phase you have to ride out gives you focus to be present and strategic and ride out whatever drama is going on.  With patience and faith, you will get your ship righted again.

One key thing I have figured out with affirmations is that wrapping them in positive emotions enforces a good outcome.  It’s one thing to say a positive mantra over and over again like in an autistic fit, and another to find a peaceful breath to put meaning, or intention, into your words, allowing yourself to relax into the moment.   

I have found that writing my words helps me focus my intentions.  I don’t call it journaling, but it is similar, just all positive, like prayer.  Some people need to record their positive messages to themselves to hear them audibly, or even make a poster of visual images of what they want to see in their lives. Some people have suggested that affirmations are best done in the morning to focus your day, and/or right before bed, to get a good mind set to let go of the day and rest easier. 

I have also found the affirmation, “I love and approve of myself,” not only helps one support one’s self, but also holds you accountable to be true to yourself.  Under stress, it’s great to have all the support you can get, especially from yourself when you need a little courage.

Glad Tidings!  -Mandy

O.K.  Are you in pain?  Has trauma crept up and steam rolled over you?

Was it fast train wreck or a slow dawning, like a pot of water slowly reaching boiling, that “Things are NOT O.K.”?

How are things ever going to be good again?  Well, they may or may not ever be, but, here you are now, and that’s where the healing takes place.  You are right here, right now in “ The Present Moment”.  Right now, is a sense of urgency, because “We all obey pain.” (Marcel Proust)

What does the pain and trauma need?  Rest?  Acceptance? Decisive action?  A responsibility for follow through? Some kind of therapy?

Here are some of my thoughts on the road back from crisis:

A friend going through a crisis once told me “We all have tragedies; for some it could be loosing a child, for some it could be not owning a Gucci bag”  (It took me a couple of years to find the latter, but her loss of financial and social status was deep and soul scarring.)  We think that because we hurt this badly, no one could understand what we are going through. There is no hierarchy in trauma. It hits us at gut level, and it affects us all in our own way.   It affects us all intimately and profoundly.

I remember having a college friend die suddenly in a wreck.  I was strong, helping everyone else until the funeral, and then broke down during the funeral.  For many years after I spent a long of time saying good-bye to people in common social events, so I could feel I had spent every last moment I could with someone, just in case I would never see them again.  It took me many years to realize that that 1.) I was clinging, and 2.) my clinging farewells were a little excessive, and had become a little annoying/embarrassing to my friends, so it was time to get on with my life and let this go.

Trauma brings us into an unreal world that forces us to recon with our situation.  Often times we start judging others or ourselves. We jump to saying: “ I should have”,  “They did it to me”,  “If only”, “Why me”?  This is the first thing that should be let go of.  Crisis isn’t a normal state, and it should be temporary.

Having the attitude that getting to another state of functioning should be your primary goal, not judging yourself.  Compassion for yourself, letting yourself off the hook helps direct your energy to a more productive state.  Beating ourselves up emotionally just ropes us into whatever emotion grabs you.  Some of us get stuck here in anger, sadness, rage, worry, fear, depression or panic.  This can cause so much extra pain, but some of us need to sit in our mud puddles splashing until we are “over it”.

Sometimes people are so stuck in the shock mode that they are not “in their bodies”.  “The lights are on, but nobody’s home.”  Being physically in the present moment helps with this.  I remember sitting at a stoplight many times orienting myself to my physical senses when my mind was racing with anxiety.  I would stop and focus myself to feel myself sitting in my drivers’ seat and holding on to the steering wheel and what that felt like.  I would look around me and take in my range of vision.  I would slowly breathe and listen to what was on the radio or check on the kids in the back seat. The light would change and I had had my moment of “meditation”.

Some of us, O.K., all of us reach for something to comfort us under stress.  Maybe it’s caffeine, to allow us to keep going even when our body starts to tell us “Warning, Will Robinson! Shut down is imminent.”  Maybe it’s excessive sugar when our life’s not sweet enough.  (I reached for convenience store doughnuts when I had to euthanize my cat.)    Endless Internet surfing or gaming, cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, retail therapy, and binge eating sounds like a normal list of addictions to me.  We reach for comfort to help us deal with uncomfortable emotional states.  There, yes, I said it.  We start judging ourselves that we are helpless for not having enough will power to “conquer” our addictions, when maybe, not only is that counter productive, but not going to the actual causes.  When Life has been seriously out for a while this becomes our way of doing things, or our habits.  This seems like normal.  Is this the normal you really want?

Being aware of being restless and having cravings are the first step to finding actual answers.  Your body is a team player.  It is giving you signals to divert disaster, but we beat it up and judge it.  Our modern western culture tries to focus on “mind over matter”.  There is a place for training to survive and endure, and there is a place for “Ah, that feels good!”- Like coming home, and now I can relax and really breathe.

I figured out over time that I lived for the concept that “Life is hard”.  Again, and again I was choosing the harder path when the solution could be “Keep it simple!” I could be making my life a lot less stressful in the course of my normal daily life!

Many of our stressors are psychological, real or perceived real.

“They depend on me.”

“My emotions are too much to deal with.”

“They will be angry or disappointed with me. (-and leave me)”

“I’ll have to go without.”

“No one else will…”

We have expectations and expect certain outcomes.  It all comes down to choices and the courage to make them.  Sometimes the fear surrounding your choices is holding your stress to you.  Here is the emotional piece, the relationships.  … And it is always about the relationships.  Loosing someone, power plays, people that “sap” your energy, these are expectations and interactions that affect how we perceive our relationships.  Stress can be real or perceived, but it affects us the same.

We now segue into boundaries.  Boundaries are the walls that protect and define our relationships and us.  At the threshold of stress, we can lash out at others or withdraw inside ourselves.  With time, a few pieces of your puzzle will be back in place.  It will make a prettier picture and you will be better able to handle events with more grace.  Until then, know you are in a state of flux and you can let yourself off the hook, you are going toward normalcy. When the battle has been too long or too much, too fast, there may not be energy to maintain your relationships and your health.  We reach for will power and determination.

Here’s a note to those in established relationships.  You may expect your significant other to give you 100% support in your journey to normalcy, but that may not be realistic.  Realize you are changing your side of your (plural) relationship.  Because you are tethered together, when you move off the expected trajectory of your relationship, you are pulling them with you.  They didn’t exactly choose this outcome, so it would be normal to expect some resistance. If your relationship is healthy, they might bring you a desert when you are trying to avoid sugar to cheer you up because that used to be the norm for emotional support.  But this sabotage may be more subversive when they are stuck and need to make changes, but become “a bear” instead of changing their diet, for example.  If they are loosing a “drinking buddy” to help them not deal with their own issues, you can count on resistance.  Pick your battles, and as I learned, don’t “bean them over the head” with all the passionate information and advice you are unfolding.  Sometimes giving them a “heads up” that you are in flux and “please, be patient” with you is all they need to flow better with your change.  They are just trying to process who you are now! You are actively changing, and adapting to survive.  If you start to realize that this is not a healthy relationship for you anymore, spend money on a counseling session with a certified therapist to talk over your options.

Some strategies that have helped me are:  going slow on purpose, affirmations, breathing, doing healthy “self care” with exercise, getting enough rest/sleep, reasonable choices with respect to diet and supportive, nurturing relationships, and acceptance for your current situation. Bodywork and massage can also an excellent choice for self care. The more extreme the crisis mode, the more it is imperative to use as many healthy strategies as possible within your means to get real results to gain hope and results.  Having an end strategy in place for stressors gives you a mental health break.  I will post more on my strategies in coming posts.

Grace and peace to you on your journey.  -Mandy

“We”, who we are, includes our bodies, but we are more than just “pieces and parts”.  We are “beings”, living in a body.  We are emotional, spiritual, relational, beings.  Sometimes we get so busy that we run ahead of our bodies, so to speak, and our bodies talk to us with pain and tension.  Sometimes trauma happens to us and we have to search for the thing that will give us peace and “wholeness”.

We feel and move as a unit, one body.  We are intricately woven together with a number of different energy systems, organizing and communicating between all the remote locations or outposts of body parts to synthesize movement and responses to outer stimuli.  I think this depth of complexity is one of the amazing features that draws me to the healthcare field, this mysterious and mystical body that we inhabit.  There is always more to know!  I love the analogy that the movie “Osmosis Jones” uses to compare the body to a bustling city.  There is so much going on in here, in an environment “out there”!  There is much to balance, internally & externally.

The most recognized of the systems of energy organization is the one manipulated in Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Acupuncture works with meridians, or energy lines that compare to a “streams” or as I like to imagine them as electric wires, carrying electricity around the body. There are twelve major channels that form one long circuit through the body, running on the skin’s surface and plunging deep under to organs, connecting everything together.  There are other meridians, also.  Acupuncture uses needles and other methods to break up blockages (log jams in streams) along the path to facilitate health.  Where blockages form, stagnation breeds in the cesspools behind the blockages.  Here is where bacteria breed, and free radicals rage, and disease can set up camp, inflicting damage on the surrounding tissue.  Clearing the blockages allows health and vitality to circulate again around the body. The meridians need to each do their own job, just like everyone in a successful company.  Communication is vital, and arguments and power plays tend to affect the whole group, therefore affecting the body’s overall health.  This is a very old and complex system.

Another Chinese system is the Five-Element Theory. It has also been called the 5 transformations, or phases.  This is a relational view of everything, including our bodies, nature, relationships, personalities, the cosmos, etc. It is comprised of the qualities of:  Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Wood.  The dynamics can be seen for example with water:  Fire would be the clouds, Earth would be a lake, Metal would be ice, Water would be a river, Wood would be steam in a kettle.

Chakras come from the Aryvedic tradition of India.  I sense these as 7 (major) toroids, or electrical dynamos (spinning donuts, tornados…) based in the spine for different areas of the torso, forward (and backwards), with the top one going out the top of the head and another one going out the tailbone toward the ground, sort of forming a “tootsie roll” shape all together.  Each chakra holds a different “database” of emotional and experiential information, like on a computer.  They can spin clockwise or counter-clockwise from their base in the spine.  Any given distance from the body can spin either way.  They reach out interacting with our environment. It is good to delete old emotional baggage to make room for fresh and vital opportunities for the system to function at maximum capacity.  Yoga works with the chakras and meditation.  This is also another very ancient and complex system that takes some study to understand.

The Aura is an energy system, much like Earth’s protective atmosphere.  It surrounds us in a “bubble”.   It encompasses our personal space, which can be encroached upon, and we can intrude upon others. We sense this when someone is confident or charismatic.  If you notice someone walk into the room, you are noticing someone with a large aura that is preceding them.  Angry auras can reach out and zap you.  People that are sick or weak have a small protective field.  Auras can hold lots of pollution and can get holes in them, and then toxic environments and people can have more of an effect you.  The aura connects and communicates with other auras and gives us “vibes” about the other person.  This is where intuition comes in.  There are really very few secrets that are not visible and projected out into our environment for someone who is resonating with their intuition in their interactions with other people.  I have noticed that we all form body postures and give facial clues that project our feelings and reactions to relationship dynamics.  I believe real or perceived power struggles cause many health issues.  An example of someone who is fearful would form a posture like a “dog with its tail between its legs”.  I see this as patterns of tight muscles in a person’s body as I work through a massage session.  I have seen the “fetal” position, the “hurt bird wing”, the bulldog”, the “cat hissing”, just to name a few.  The postures are another whole article… but there is a Habit Field, which is related to the postures.  I think it is sort of like an automated response system, much like a phone answering service.  These can be unconscious and respond to situations whether real or perceived real.  These habits can take time and attention, and sometimes will power to shift to something a step towards the better.  Addictions show up here and that is also another article…

There is also subtle energy, or “strange flows” in Traditional Chinese Medicine.  These have to do with intent and attention/or focus of our energy.  Chi Gong and Tai Chi work with these.  This is the deeper level of the martial arts.  The Dan Tien line helps with focus & balance.  Many people use affirmations, and these are the conscious use of intentional energy, or will power.  It is most powerful when tapped into emotions, but the habit of a peaceful mind in meditation is also very powerful to be able to see what is going on around and in you.  The arts and exercise are other ways of bringing this energy into focus.  Again this about how You do things and flow with that energy.

Reiki, as a tradition, originates from Japan, and taps into an organic flow of intuitive energy, sending energy to where ever it is needed in the body, or around the world, very much like prayer. I relate Reiki to the Christian tradition of “laying on of hands”.  I believe we are all intuitive, even if we don’t feel ownership of any psychic gifts or see auras.  We just need to figure out and own what tools, or “spiritual gifts”, we were born with and then cultivate how to use them.

I have heard of other systems, but these are the ones I am most fluent in for now.  Many “uncivilized” cultures are much more aware of and in tune with these energies than our “civilized” culture.  We have gotten so far from nature that we are not connected any more to these vital energies.

There are teachers everywhere when you ask questions.  You just have to be open to receive what you asked for!   Follow your own path. No one is on your same trek, only you.