Whatever your goals are when seeking healing, you are likely to face certain challenges. These challenges can be like road blocks or they can be like speed bumps. And even though we can feel impeded by these challenges, like a treasure chest, they contain lessons and gifts. In fact without these challenges, we would not fully heal.
The first challenge is awareness. Awareness relies on how well we can pay attention. You know how when you’re at a party and you’re trying to have a conversation with someone and there’s so much background noise from the music and other people, that you find it hard to follow the conversation? That background noise can be so distracting.
That’s how it is when we’re going about our days. There’s often so much background noise coming from outside ourselves that we find it hard to be aware of all the information that is inside of us, that we’re experiencing moment to moment. And not all distracting noise comes from the outside. Often times we have background noise coming from the several voices in our heads.
Negative thinking, head in the clouds thinking, reviewing our to do list, or thinking “what the heck is he doing?” distracts us and disables our ability to pay attention to what matters: the present moment.
How we focus and what we focus on helps to rewire our circuitry. If we continue to focus the same way on the same things, our nervous system patterns won’t change long term.
The next most common challenge is acceptance. Being able to feel what you’re feeling without judging it as good or bad is important because as soon as you’re judging the experience, you’re no longer having the experience. When we’re judging, we are thinking, so we end up thinking rather than feeling. What’s more is that if we’re judging a feeling as bad or ‘not wanted’, we trigger the fight or flight reaction. And as I’ve mentioned before, you can’t heal when you’re in fight or flight.
Another way that we don’t accept what we are feeling in the moment is by trying to explain or diagnose what we are feeling (why it’s there or problem solving).
The third most common obstacle that we face during the healing process is when we start to take down the walls that we have put up over time to defend ourselves. If we are going to heal, those walls have to come down eventually. Our defences show up as behaviours such as when we’re being defensive, as structure such as the tension that our bodies hold and perception such as the beliefs and world views that we’ve adopted in the pursuit of insulating ourselves.
This third challenge can sometimes feel like an insurmountable obstacle because when the walls start to come down, we start to feel disturbed, emotionally and mentally. We can feel uncertainty to the point where we don’t know who we are anymore, and we don’t recognize the world around us. We can feel shaky, unsteady, emotional and defensive. This in and of itself is not an inappropriate reaction, it’s completely normal.
If healing is the objective, then at some point in time we will have to traverse what some people refer to as the ‘dark night of the soul’. Our ability to stay the course and to weather the storm of uncomfortableness is dependant on how much energy we have access to. So sometimes we’ll need to circle back and strengthen our energy and resilience before we can make another charge.
It’s at this point in care, when some patients decide to stop their appointments while others choose to increase their visits. Either way works, they just have different outcomes.
During NeuroSpinal Optimization sessions, we have the opportunity to work on these three obstacles: Practicing awareness and how we focus, learning to observe the feelings rather than the thoughts and supporting you as you disassemble the walls that once protected you but are now keeping you imprisoned.
The gift of practicing awareness and focus is connection with the present moment. The gift of accepting your experience in the moment as it is results in you finding your truth. And the gift of practicing grit or stick-to-it-ness is freedom; life beyond your walls.
We can turn adversity into our advantage. All we have to do is practice.