Often when healing PTSD our systems can be so overloaded,
Our nervous system is so on edge that we can react.
So whatever your go-to emotion is for reacting it could be frustration,
Anger,
Worry but ultimately you're gonna go there more often than you're not.
This can cause a lot of duress onto our body and mind.
We're actually stuck in a loop and our emotions and the way that we're actually seeing the world is fulfilling our cortisol and our adrenaline and our levels for us to actually stay disconnected from our own body.
When we're in this reactive state we actually have less chance of being in our parasympathetic nervous system and having time to process our emotions of the past.
Our emotion of anger or worry has become a constant state of survival and our body is just self-fulfilling the anger or the worry over and over so we don't actually have to go back and process any difficult emotions from the past.
So allowing us to change our story with our default emotion being anger or worry is really powerful and also actually start to focus on some of the positives that exist in life for us to retrain our brain.
If you've been in the military or an emergency responder or suffering from PTSD for quite some time our mind can be very negative and stuck in a very negative loop.
So it's going to take time and effort for you to break these.
So what we're practicing today is gratitude.
By us focusing on the positives that exist in our lives we can start to retrain our brain and this is so important.
If we don't get out of this loop of anger or worry we're just going to be injecting dangerous levels of cortisol and adrenaline into our system.
By us starting to focus on the positives that exist we can actually allow our mind to relax.
We can stop our fight-or-flight responses and we can actually be more present in the moment and feel safer and this is so important when healing our PTSD.
We need to allow our body to feel safe.
We need to turn off these fight-or-flight responses and gratitude is an amazing practice for us to do that.
So what we're going to do is rewire our brain.
So what I'd like you to do is breathe into your belly,
Place your hand on your belly and it should sound something like this.
And as we start to relax into the present moment we're just going to start to think of some of the positives that exist in our life.
Even being alive is a positive.
Even us having a body that is suffering from PTSD can be viewed as a positive.
So if you're really struggling and this is the first time you've ever practiced gratitude I really encourage you to just break down the simple things.
Even us having the Sun or fresh water can be viewed as gratitude.
So I'm going to leave you here for a couple of minutes to start to retrain your mind.
You you you you you you you you you you you you As we start to retrain our mind and start to focus on the gratitude that exists around us,
We allow ourselves to chase the positive,
To come back to the positive moment that always exists.
And when our mind is not wired into negative emotions this really allows us to drop into healing our body and starting to prepare ourselves for visiting the past and dealing with some of the emotions that have us caught in this frame of mind in the first place.
We truly can't go back to the past and start to heal our negative emotions if we haven't created a nourishing environment for ourselves in the present.
So gratitude is a really amazing way for you to retrain your brain,
For you to make your body feel safe and your mind to feel safe.
We can't go back and process the deep attachment that we have to trauma and stuff within the past unless we do the work to create the safety in our present moment.
For me being in the army for 10 years I had a very very unhealthy disconnected mind.
I was caught in loops of anger and I was projecting my anger onto everyone and my environment and every day.
So this has been an extremely powerful practice for me to come back into myself and for me to be the best version of who I am.
My name is Matt.
I really hope you enjoyed this Thriving with PTSD meditation.
Please reach out to our Facebook or our Instagram if you have any more questions and we really enjoy you joining us today and we know that you'll get back to thriving in no time.
Thanks for listening Matt.
