Journey To Self-Healing

The first phase of our healing journey begins with restoring the brain, body and nervous system to release you from the shackles of living in survival mode. To do this, it helps to have an understanding of the neurobiology of stress and the impact that chronic stress and adversity has on our minds and bodies. In today’s lesson, I’ll be teaching you about the brain and how each of its components can support your healing.

Before we dive into the first meditation of this course, I’ll be sharing with you a few guidelines to be aware of when meditating following an acutely stressful or traumatic experience. This will ensure that you’re not re-activating the survival state at any stage throughout your ongoing meditation practice. After this, I’ll guide you through a healing body scan to send the message to your Reptilian Brain that you’re safe and secure.

Once you have begun to establish a sense of safety within the mind and body, you can start to move out of working with the reptilian brain and into working with the mammalian brain, the part of the brain that is associated with emotions, love, connection and community. In today’s lesson, I’ll be sharing a nurturing approach to navigating the strong emotions that arise during life’s difficult seasons.

You might have noticed in the previous few lessons of establishing safety and security and honouring our emotions that there’s been a subtle emphasis on becoming more embodied. This is because really feeling into your body and the life inside of yourself is a critical component to healing. Today’s lesson will focus on just that; healing from a somatic perspective by engaging your physical being in a mindful, purposeful, nourishing way.

One of the overwhelmingly strong emotions that arises during the midst of our struggles is an acute sense of loneliness, as if we were the only ones who had ever been through an experience like this, or the only person to have ever felt this way before. The driving force behind this deep sense of isolation is the emotion of shame. Today’s lesson will provide you with the principles of releasing shame and re-harnessing your ability to connect with yourself and your community once again. (Note: The journalling practice in this lesson includes music without spoken guidance from 8.30 - 11.50)

There’s no doubt that working through the themes of the past few lessons can feel confronting and energetically draining at times. As much as we would all prefer to bypass the uncomfortable emotions of healing, they are simply part of the human experience. Our challenge is to learn to adopt healthy, nurturing ways in which we can start to tend to these emotions, rather than habitually trying to escape them. Today’s lesson will help you to become aware of the changes you can make in order to effectively self-soothe.

There inevitably comes a time during the healing journey where you will find yourself in the liminal space between the old and the new. Somewhere between merely surviving and once again thriving. The uncomfortable in-between when you’re not quite one thing but also not yet the other. Today’s lesson will guide you through this crucial part of the healing process, the metamorphosis that occurs when you are transcending a previous way of being.

In today’s lesson, we’ll be focusing on the aspect of our healing journey that is one of the most challenging, yet the most empowering. That is, consciously restoring the relationship you have with yourself. This lesson will focus on ways in which you can set a daily framework for holding yourself accountable for the changes you are making as you heal.

Yesterday’s lesson focused on the practical abilities of the neocortex, while in today’s lesson, we’ll be exploring the lighter side; the ability to imagine, wonder, be curious, and experience a heightened sense of presence.

Over the past nine lessons, we have worked through the many layers of restoring the brain, body, and nervous system to release you from the darkness of living in survival mode. And while the healing journey is not necessarily as simple, uncomplicated, or as linear as working through a handful of steps and lessons, you are hopefully starting to see that a glimmer of light does in fact reside at the end of the tunnel. Today’s lesson will focus on the impact, wisdom, depth, and growth that occurs after a period of difficulty.

While healing from stress and adversity is an ongoing process, by taking this course you have begun your journey towards reconnecting with your wholeness once again and that’s something you should be extremely proud of. This final message is one of deep gratitude and appreciation for taking my Journey to Self-Healing course on Insight Timer.