By Wellbeing Specialist
I have been reading and observing a lot lately how many of us are fine one day but feel suddenly completely overwhelmed, and unbalanced the next. It’s like being struck by an emotional cyclone of ALL the feelings happening right now in the world.
Worry & fear creep up on us in many ways. What if I lose my job? What if I can’t provide for my family? What if I lose my business? What if I have to start over from scratch? What if I need to change my lifestyle? What if my family isn’t okay health-wise? What if I lose control of my life? SO MANY WHAT IFS!
These can be scary thoughts running through our minds, and realities for some too!
In isolation, we have to be very present with ourselves. Some of you might be trying to avoid that by distracting yourself e.g. playing video games all day, drowning in multimedia, in alcohol etc. This is only putting all our burdens on the shelf and letting the pile get bigger and heavier. No matter what the distraction is, it is numbing you from being with your true authentic self. We need to allow all the feelings and give our emotions time and space to emerge. Normally we would have been too distracted to let this happen naturally, but we have been given the time and space to TRULY BE with ourselves. Like it or not. It’s essential for our emotional and mental health.
I am not saying it will be like this all the time. You might experience anxiety for one hour and be fine the next. You might have a full day with a range of emotions or an emotional purge. It comes and goes. AND THAT IS OKAY!
We are basically facing a new reality and many decisions to be made in our near future. For many, it can be an extremely uncertain and confusing time right now. We are basically transitioning into the unknown.
This is a perfect time to heal you and do some inner self-work and upgrade yourself to the next level.
There is more than just the mind – the three brains
In my previous blog, I mentioned about different practices to help deal with stress and calming our powerful mind. This time I want to share with you about one technique that has helped me during my dark, hard times of life. This technique has helped me with my stress reduction, my anxiety, making big choices in life and building up courage in the scariest situations. What I’ve been doing is MULTIPLE BRAIN INTEGRATION TECHNIQUES or mBIT.
You might be thinking, what does she mean by “Multiple brains”? Well in neuroscience a brain is a complex neural network and findings have shown in the matter of fact that we have three brains: The brain, the heart and the gut.
These three brains connect through the vagus nerve, our connection centre. Each brain manages its own different aspects of our being. They are also a different sources of our innate wisdom. Call it Intuition, inner wisdom or a gut feeling, this inner wisdom has many names.
Our three brain functions:
HEAD BRAIN PRIME FUNCTIONS
- COGNITIVE PERCEPTION – cognition, perception, pattern recognition, etc.
- THINKING – reasoning, abstraction, analysis, synthesis, meta-cognition etc.
- MAKING MEANING – semantic processing, language, narrative, metaphor, etc.
-The highest expression is creativity.
HEART BRAIN PRIME FUNCTIONS
- EMOTING – emotional processing (e.g. anger, grief, hatred, joy, happiness etc.)
- VALUES – processing what’s important to you and your priorities (and its relationship to the emotional strength of your aspirations, dreams, desires, etc.)
- RELATIONAL AFFECT –your felt connection with others (e.g. feelings of love/hate/indifference, compassion/uncaring, like/dislike, etc.)
– The highest expression is compassion
GUT BRAIN PRIME FUNCTIONS
- CORE IDENTITY – a deep and visceral sense of core self, and determining at the deepest levels what is ‘self’ versus ‘not-self’.
- SELF-PRESERVATION –protection of self, safety, boundaries, hunger and aversions.
- MOBILIZATION – motility, the impulse for action, gutsy courage and the will to act.
– The highest expression is courage
We usually choose one in favour of the other brains e.g. going with your “gut feeling”, your “mind” or “following your heart”. Imbalances and problems arise when we choose logic over intuition. Both are equally important. By aligning and connecting to all three brains, we can authentically function and thrive in life. We make better decisions, take action and see life and our values clearer than ever.
It’s a beautiful technique that Vivienne Berry (our practitioner) has combined with deep breathing and visual heart coherence measuring. *
While learning to breathe deeply, Vivienne helps visually guide the client using the monitor to navigate their heart coherence into a beautiful state of peace, calm and safety. It trains you to go from your stressed, worried state “the red zone”, to your “happy place” or the “green zone”. After this session, by practising this method for only 2 minutes a day you will live your life more from your green zone than your red zone.
*(Coherence is a measure of the pattern in the heart’s rhythm, which is independent of the amount of HRV, and reflects an orderly and harmonious synchronization among various systems in the body such as the heart, respiratory system and blood-pressure rhythms.)
I highly recommend mBIT if you feel you are struggling in making big decisions in your life, feel confused or need guidance during these uncertain times. If you are lacking clarity, courage or compassion and are too wound up in the emotional whirlwind. I personally found the more open-minded I was in the session and less resistant, the more and faster benefits I received.
If you are interested and would like more information, feel free to contact us on the website and we’d be happy to help you.
We learn something new every day.
Wishing you a beautiful day
Wellbeing Specialist
Global Health Clinics, 409 Lake Rd, Takapuna, Auckland 0622
www.globalhealthclinics.co.nz