Sanctuary for Heart Magic

SPINAL UNWINDING: A PATH TO HEART CONNECTEDNESS

The spine as the vessel between mind & body

On some level everyone desires to be more connected to their heart. Being connected to your heart doesn’t mean that you are an emotional mess, taking on everyone else’s feelings or that you are vulnerable to attack. Rather it means you are rested in yourself feeling calm and stable, while simultaneously maintaining the capacity to be dynamic and flexible. It means that you can hear your inner voice, relate with others in ways that feeling honoring and that the communication within your body is smooth, organized and coherent. In heart connectedness you aren’t grasping in fear, nor are you only concerned about your physical, social and emotional survival. Purpose, meaning and true service are birthed through you from heart connectedness. Much of the psychological distress and physical illness we experience is a result of disconnection from our hearts. At some point people will really understand this and stop clinging to things outside of them to solve their problems or fix their ailments. The power to heal lives within our very own being, it is simply a matter of finding the connections back to our heart.

How do we find our way back? 

As I often say we are born fully connected to our heart. It is our natural state of being. As we develop and have experiences of pain, hurt, upset and not having our needs met, we fragment and create patterns of protection. Those patterns live within our nervous system and they become the filters through which we experience the world. Most people are perceiving through these protective filters without even knowing they are doing so. They believe how they perceive is clear and accurate because that is the way they have always seen things. When one way of seeing dominates our perceptual landscape it seems like the truth, even when it isn’t. It’s not until some of our filters relax that we can find different perspectives and develop new pathways in our nervous system to view our world.

The spine is center to this process because it is the physical vessel between consciousness above and matter below. It relays and holds the information of our mental and emotional perspectives and informs our body accordingly. In response to our disconnected perspectives it tightens, tenses, twists and stretches the fibers (ie. nerves) of our nervous system creating protective posturing and defensive physiology. A continuous loop of information gets created between our perspective and our body that sounds something like this: “I am not safe” and therefore I must “tighten up in order to protect myself.” For most people this is entirely unconscious, yet very much present. Just because we aren’t aware of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it is just happening underneath our radar. Our spine is the interface where our subconscious mind meets our conscious mind. Therefore it is the place where we can become more aware of our unconscious perspectives and reprogram our nervous system with new information thus enabling our body with different options for response.

HEALING IS LEARNING

Returning to home base in the heart

Our nervous system operates through impulses. Repeated impulses, which contain information within them, illuminate and energize pathways. The pathways we run the most are dominate within our nervous system. It doesn’t mean that other pathways aren’t available, they are, but in potential. Turning a potential pathway into a dominate pathway requires that we feed that pathway over and over again. This is often where the ball gets dropped in the healing process. How it works is: we have “ah-ha”. That ah-ha is a new perspective, insight or awareness. We see or feel something in a novel way. If we simply take that new perspective or “ah-ha” and do nothing with it except feel it for the one moment when we initially perceive it, then our nervous system doesn’t have enough of the new information to lay down a new pathway. We feel good when we have the novel perspective, but if we don’t consciously participate with it over and over, it’s lost to us. Whatever our dominate pathway is, starts to automatically operate and the feeling and perspectives associated with that pathway flood our experience.

Healing is not a “one time and I am done” kind of event. 

It is a process of both seeing one’s self in novel ways that feel safer and more true, along with repeatedly running those perspectives and feelings throughout our body consciously and actively. This is how learning occurs that co-insides with healing and the result is that we energize pathways within our nervous system that enable us to feel more whole. Wholeness is the healed state. Well most people are looking for a quick path and easy fix, it simply doesn’t exist. There are many magical moments along the way and times of pure grace, and simultaneously there is a hefty dose of deliberate and intentional work. It took quite a few negative or painful experiences, along with repeated internal perspectives in response to those experiences, to reinforce and lay down the pathways of defensiveness and disconnection. Most of us were open-hearted as children and then slowly over time, into adolescence and beyond, we disconnected and harden. Not on purpose, but as a way to survive our life. Therefore we must equally invest in re-establishing connection through intention and action.

Altering the tone and tension of our spinal cord enables us to temporarily suspend our neurological defense patterns and see more available perspectives. In the beginning this occurs unconsciously for most, the experience is simply “I feel lighter or better” or even “I don’t know what I feel”, but with time and repetition it becomes more conscious. The breath and movement shift the underlying grip that many are holding in their spinal cord without knowing it. As this grip lets go space arrives. This is a pivotal piece because we need to have the spaciousness of ease in order to allow something new in. As we become more aware of this shift we must follow it up with our transformational focus of attention and reorientation. By reorienting to goodness and safety over and over again it becomes the default and creates an internal environment where we can grow and expand.

The heart is our home base. 

When we are rested here we feel at home no matter where we are. Its frequency is interconnectedness. In the heart we return to connection with the greater self, or the all of what we are, rather than being consumed solely with our individual personality. The individual personality is limited by what your mind knows, but the heart is connected to a vast field of energy and information that the separate mind simply can’t grok. When you return to the heart this all becomes available to you. Those things that seem hopeless, confusing or lost become hopeful, clear and found. We are all trying to come back into connection with the heart and unwinding our spine helps us find our way home.

Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, DC, MSAc, L.Ac, OTR/L

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