Sanctuary for Heart Magic

HEALING YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM

Energy & perspectives

The nervous system has received a lot of attention in the past decade. People have come to understand its role beyond just a physiological structure in the body that relays impulses across nerves. It is now being seen in connection to trauma, addictions and looping or repetitive patterns that feel challenging to shift. We are also seeing the nervous system as the intermediary between the mind and body and recognizing the direct connection between our thoughts, feelings and physicalness. The inseparability of these aspects of ourselves is beyond mere conceptual understanding and we are now acknowledging the nervous system as the vital bridge between them. The nervous system is also a conduit of consciousness. The tone, tension and positioning of the nervous system allows us to tune the antenna of our spine to different frequency aspects of our larger self . In this way our nervous system is the enabler of communication between our physical and higher nonphysical aspects.

When we discuss healing the nervous system we are not talking about the structural aspects of it, but rather healing the psycho-emotional perspectives that have created the patterning within the nervous system, which in turn directly impacts our experience in our body. 

The nervous system is moldable and adaptable. It can rearrange its flows of energy across the nerves and through the body based on the information it receives. The information it receives comes from how we perceive(d) our experiences throughout our life. If we continue to have the same perception about something, such as a person, a situation that occurred or even a part of our body, then that person, situation or part of our body will continue to appear to always respond in the same way to us. It is not that the thing is the same, but it appears this way because we see it in the same way. This is how we create the illusion of sameness.

This is also how it can seem to us at times that we don’t ever seem to heal or that nothing changes. Things are constantly changing, but our perspectives about what is aren’t changing with the changes that are always happening. We aren’t bringing in or accessing different information. We do however have the capacity to do so. What it requires is more energy. When we have a limited amount of energy bound up in survival and managing life, we don’t have enough free energy to expand our awareness to take in new perspectives. Without this things never seem to change. However with more energy, new information can come in and we can widen our perspectives. This is where healing happens. When we are able to see what we think is or what we thought happened differently, then new patterns lay now in our nervous system that allow for expanded experiences, of which some of those we might call healing.

ACCESSING ENERGY

Integration & embodiment

You might wonder how you access more energy. The first step is always self-awareness. We need to become aware of our patterns of survival and life management, because this is where we bind energy in our body. When the energy in our body is bound there isn’t capacity to exchange energy with larger aspects of our being. We are just looping inside of what we think we know and aren’t even aware that this is what we are doing. What we are aware of is that we don’t feel as good as we would like to, can’t seem to get rid of tensions or ailments in our body, or we feel stuck someway in our life. It seems that all of those things are somehow separate from us, as if we have no power. We are underneath them and can’t find our way out. The way out isn’t actually that far away, we just have to be willing to be with what is present. Once we take the time to cultivate self-awareness and pay attention to what is occurring beyond the mere appearance of it, only then can we start to discover what is really going on and how we are contributing to the pattern of it.

Healing your nervous system is less about having something done to you or your body to fix it and more about increasing your capacity to pay attention. 

Through increasing your capacity to pay attention you are faced with the challenge/opportunity to make changes in how you see and interact with things in your life. I could also call this preliminary shift a transition from overwhelm, or what we often call sympathetic dominance, into more of a relaxed or parasympathetic state. This is the foundational state of being required to be able to be self-aware. Without this first neurological shift in state of being people often feel like they don’t know what is going on or they can’t see clearly, thus they feel powerless. This is because they don’t have the capacity to be self-aware in their current state of being.

In order to reprogram or change the neurological patterning (what we might call healing), taking action on what one discovers through self-awareness is required. 

Without action it just becomes an insight. While insights feel good, if we want the information which insights provide to become a sustainable state of awareness then we need to integrate them. Integration comes through action or change in perspective and/or behavior. This is frequently where people drop the ball. They get excited about the discovery of new information, but then fail to implement it in some creative way in their life. The excitement of revelation only lasts so long before they drop their energy state back down again and feel as though nothing has changed. It is through implementation and taking actual action that we increase our energy, and with that our neurology can respond and reprogram. We could also call this embodiment.

Healing is an engaging and interactive process. 

It is not something that passively just happens to you. While things, tools, methodologies and the like assist the process greatly, they can’t do the healing for you. Support is important in providing new templates, information and energy into the system, but your system still has to be able to take them in and utilize them for your own healing. The beauty of nervous system healing is that it doesn’t have a plateau. I think of it as expanding your capacity to learn, which appears to be infinite. We can always discover new things, transform perspectives and behaviors, and come to experience ourselves and our life differently. As we walk through the process we learn it better and better. We increase our capacity for self-awareness and with that see more clearly the actions to take moment by moment. This allows us to continue to expand our experience of ourselves as we journey through our human experience.

Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, DC, MSA, L.Ac

Network Spinal Chiropractor & Somatic Healer at the Sanctuary for Heart Magic, a Mentor for Heart-Led Healers at Soul Luminaries & the Writer of The Everyday Divine.