by Amy B. Scher
Pain-Related Conditions— These types of manifestations are often linked to self-punishing patterns such as blaming yourself, feeling like you deserve punishment for not being perfect, holding guilt about the past, absorbing the pain of others, or being hypersensitive about being hurt by others.
Sleep-Related Conditions— Insomnia, disrupted sleep, and trouble falling asleep are all related to having an unsettled heart. What is hurting your heart? What is not allowing your heart to feel at peace? Any internal unresolved conflict will affect your heart and ability to rest peacefully.
Questions to Uncover Clues, Messages, and Metaphors
There are so many metaphors your body could be acting out that will be wonderful clues for your journey. For each symptom or body part, there might be several different messages. Again, my interpretations are just examples and a place to start. It’s important to simply start thinking in terms of the body’s language and really look at what yours might be saying in the context of your own life. This practice will be invaluable for you moving forward.
Here is a list of questions to ask yourself, which will give you a really good start at figuring out what your body is trying to communicate to you. Make notes of your answers and ideas so you can reference them during your deep clearing work in the next part of this book.
• What is this symptom helping me avoid? If the symptom is in a specific body part, does that part represent something to me that I’m afraid of ?
• Is this symptom or condition linked to a fear that makes sense according to the body part or chakra it’s located in?
• What does this symptom represent/symbolize that I may be resisting?
• What is the physical function of this body part? Am I allowing myself to do the emotional equivalent of that? Do I fear the emotional equivalent of that?
• How do I feel about this symptom or this part of the body? Does that emotion correlate with what could be at the root of symptoms related to it?
• What experience in my past could still be stored in that specific part of my body? Can I use what that part of the body represents in order to figure it out?
You now understand the language of the body and have knowledge that will help you big time in part three, coming up next. The clues you discovered in this chapter will give you a clear lens to help you discover which specific types of stress reactions, themes, and experiences will be most beneficial for you to clear.
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9 . Deepak Chopra, “The Real Secret to Staying Healthy For Life,” The Huffington Post , July 30, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/healthy-lifestyle_b_1694029.html.
Part Three
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Change Your Relationship
with Stress
Remember how we’ve talked so much about cleaning up the soil so that big, beautiful tree (you!) can reach an optimal state of well-being? Well, this is how we do it. We change your relationship with stress.
This requires focus on these four main areas:
• Unprocessed experiences
• Harmful beliefs
• Unhealthy emotional patterns
• Fear
For each of these areas, you’ll be learning primary techniques to address them:
• Thymus Test and Tap
• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
• The Sweep
• Chakra Tapping
• 3 Hearts Method
You are about to be guided through each of these main areas and techniques in great detail. As mentioned in the introduction, I suggest that you read through and practice them in order to understand them thoroughly. Once you understand the larger picture, you’ll be able to determine exactly what works best for you.
The tree analogy we’ve talked about is the basis of my entire process. We’re going to be cleaning up that soil. In chapter 11, I’ll be offering you a Healing Tree illustration, along with directions on how to use it, which will help you streamline the entire process. This will be a snapshot of all that you learned in part three.
Let’s go!
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Chapter Seven
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Clear Unprocessed Experiences
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.
—jane hirshfield , the lives of the heart
Emotions help us understand our experience, feel alive, relate to others, and so much more. But the trouble comes when our emotions become stuck, the experience of prolonged feelings. When this happens, we feel our emotions intensely, often permanently, without having a way to deal with them—and they create stress reactions.
In this chapter, we’ll be exploring the untapped potential of clearing old experiences from our bodies. You’ll learn exactly how old feelings remain in our bodies long after we experience them, what their impact is on our well-being, and how to clear them out in order to allow the body to relax and heal. You’ll also learn two very powerful techniques for clearing: Thymus Test and Tap and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).
We Are Meant to Let Go of Old Emotions
In my workshops, I put a pen and piece of paper at every seat. I then ask the participants to simply write their name on the paper in front of them. I give them a few seconds and wait until everyone is done. When I look around the room, about half of them are usually still holding their pen in hand even though the purpose of the pen has been fulfilled. This is a great opportunity to explain how emotions work similarly to this task. We are meant to call upon and use our feelings for a specific reason—to express ourselves, to protect ourselves, and more—but once we don’t need them for that purpose, we are meant to let them go.
Feelings from our past often remain in the body after their original purpose has been fulfilled. When an animal in the wilderness experiences a stressful event, it shakes, trembles, runs, or does other physical activities to discharge the effect of the stress chemicals in its body. The animal brings itself out of that fight, flight, or freeze pattern by discharging it. It rebalances itself and is then able to go back into nature. The natural human tendency is to do this too, but we are often told (by ourselves or others) to “calm down,” “get it together,” “stop being so sensitive,” “grow up,” and “suck it up.”
Purging the survival chemicals after a stressful experience sends a message to our primitive brain that we survived and are safe now. This sends a signal to the cognitive brain to process the information and release any associations related to it that are no longer needed. If the energy of facing and surviving a stressful experience is discharged in a healthy way, it can actually help us feel more empowered and able to handle things in the future. It can even help create a sense of security.
If we don’t discharge this energy (that is, process and release it), then the primitive brain freezes the experience in our systems. All of the emotions we were feeling at the time remain alive and vibrating inside of us. Candace B. Pert, PhD, author of Molecules of Emotion , was the person who opened my eyes to this concept. Her work is based on important findings about how feelings and unexpressed emotions from experiences can get stuck in the body at the level of cellular memory. In Molecules of Emotion , Dr. Pert writes: “A feeling sparked in our mind—or body—will translate as a peptide being released somewhere. [Organs, tissues, skin, muscle, and endocrine glands], they all have peptide receptors on them and can access and store emotional information. This means the emotional memory is stored in many places in the body, not just or even primarily in the brain. You can access emotional memory anywhere in the peptide/receptor network in any number of ways. I think unexpressed emotions are literally lodged in the body. The real true emotions that need to be expressed are in the body, trying to move up and be expressed and thereby integrated, made whole, and healed.” 10
Defining the Unprocessed Experience
The way most of us see and understand “trauma” is only half the story. What often come
s to mind when we hear the word trauma is abuse, neglect, and catastrophe. But what trauma actually means is a “deeply distressing or disturbing experience.” The kind of events we normally consider traumatic are not always the kind of events that actually traumatize us. A traumatizing experience could be something obvious, like a sudden death in the family, or something seemingly less traumatizing, like a hurtful thing your friend said to you on the playground in second grade.
When unprocessed emotions from those experiences live in your body, you may feel them at some level all the time. But here’s something else that happens. We also make meanings from our experiences that are not necessarily accurate. These meanings or interpretations then become harmful beliefs that we live by, which you’ll be learning about in the next chapter. The unprocessed experience is the reference point or “proof” for the subconscious mind that the belief is still valid for you. You need to clear and neutralize the energies still stuck in your system in order to prove to the subconscious mind that you’re okay now and it’s safe to relax and move on. This is not necessary for every belief, but for many it will be. Regardless, clearing unprocessed experiences is always beneficial for your well-being.
Let’s learn more about what unprocessed means. Any disturbing or distressing event or emotional experience in your life that you have not properly acknowledged , processed , and released may be traumatizing you. This means the feelings from that event are still stuck in your body, or “unexpressed,” as Candace Pert refers to them. Trauma, in other words, is less about the event itself and more about it being unprocessed and still in your body. So from now on, we’re ditching the stressful word trauma and just calling it unprocessed . Isn’t that less intimidating already?
We can break down what this means even further by looking at the three steps to healing an unprocessed experience: acknowledge, process, and release.
• Any event that you have not acknowledged means you most likely said to yourself in some way, even if subconsciously, “Oh, that was no big deal!” when you really were feeling, “Whoa, I’m scared to death” or “That was mighty upsetting!”
• Any event that you have not processed means that you don’t yet understand it or have not yet come to peace with not understanding it—and it remains unfinished with your spirit.
• Any event that you have not released means, because you have not acknowledged and processed it, it might still be stored in your body. If this is true for you, you will most likely feel a “charge” when you recall it. This could show up as a pit in your stomach, a fluttering in your chest, tears welling up in your eyes, a racing heart, sweaty palms, and so on. It is also possible, and even probable, that these events or unprocessed experiences are not ones that you even remember.
Here’s my analogy to demonstrate how unprocessed experiences work. Imagine there is a little glass capsule in your body. When you have a stressful experience and don’t acknowledge, process, and release it, all of the emotional energy vibrations (feelings), images, scents, and other details get stored in that capsule and remain there. When any current experience or its details match what’s inside that capsule, that unprocessed experience can get triggered, “waking it up” in your body. That’s when you feel retraumatized, anxious, or a variety of other things as if you were having the original experience again. To take you out of that pattern, you need to find the various triggers and simply clear or neutralize them.
The goal is to get you to a point of accepting that the experience happened, without an intense emotional charge or energy disturbance that accompanies it. You will never have to like or be happy that this experience happened, but you do have to accept it and be at peace with it in order to move on. This goes back to Candace Pert’s view that emotions must be expressed and integrated in order to be healed. This will not only help you release that stressful reaction in your body but also allow you to go on to collapse harmful beliefs that were built on the experience.
The really interesting thing is that you may have many of these experiences that you don’t even remember, which has caused a bigger challenge for you. These can be things that happened at a very young age, or things that might seem so small you just don’t recall them. I’ll be showing you how to clear even things that you don’t remember shortly.
Make a List of Memories
A very useful exercise that you can do right now is to make a list for yourself. Jot down all of the experiences in your life that are still bothering you, that you still think of from time to time, or that you wish never happened. What do you remember that you were “never the same” after? What experiences can you recall that you had right before this challenge showed up in your life? What still turns your stomach or makes your heart race when you think about it?
This list may be very long, but it’s worth the time to make. This way, you will be able to have a running log and slowly and surely work through it. Do not judge anything as “too small” to go on the list. List everything you can think of. They are all important. I tell clients that I see more “trauma” come from experiences like being humiliated in front of the first grade class than from major car accidents or seemingly more traumatic events. That’s because when things are “big,” we tend to talk about them, work with them, and process them rather than ignore them.
Your list does not have to be in any particular order or include great detail. Only you need to be able to know what experience you are referring to.
Whether you consider memories from your past meaningful or not, they can be having a big impact on your well-being. It’s the same whether you remember them or not. They are always important to clear. And that’s probably easier to do than you think.
Identify Your Unprocessed Experiences
with Three Methods
So how do we figure out what’s really unprocessed in our bodies in order to release them and move on? You now have a list of memories you made to give you a start. Still, you will need to narrow them down and decide what to work with. There are a couple of solid ways to find experiences that are affecting you most: muscle testing and using your list of memories. Choose whatever works for you; there is no wrong way to go about this.
Method 1: Muscle Testing
This is my absolute go-to because it requires the least amount of work and is the most accurate. You don’t have to remember the experience or need the ability to remain objective in deciding what experiences are really causing an issue for you. You just ask your subconscious mind, which already knows the answers and is just waiting to share the information with you.
With muscle testing, you can use the Standing Test or the Arm Test that you learned in chapter 5. Simply ask your body, “Do I have an unprocessed experience contributing to _______?” You can fill in the blank with “stress in my body.” You can also fill it in with the specific challenge you’re working with, like “insecurity in social situations” or “difficulty digesting food.”
The answer to this question will most likely be “yes.” You will probably have lots of these types of experiences, but it only takes one to get the ball rolling. You can then determine through muscle testing at what age this event occurred, getting a clue as to what it could be.
Ask, “Did this event occur between the ages of 0–20? 20–30?” and so on. Keep asking until your body answers “yes” to a specific timeline, then ask about each year within that timeline to get the exact one. Remember to ask the questions slowly and allow your body a few seconds in between to recalibrate.
When you’ve determined the age, simply stay open and allow ideas to come to you. Remember, it can be anything from an obvious experience, like a death in the family, to something you might consider minor. Just go with whatever comes up.
If you are unsure, you can ask more questions, such as asking what this experience was related to—a person, your career, health, and more. It’s really a big guessing game!
Your body will keep answering you, and eventually you will probably remember the experience,
or simply have enough information to work with. Even just knowing, for example, that there is an experience from age five that had something to do with school and your teacher will be enough if you can’t remember more.
Once you do, it’s wise to double-check it through muscle testing. Remember, your conscious mind often thinks it knows what’s linked to what, but the subconscious has the final word (and original record). Ask, “Is the experience _______ (describe the experience briefly) contributing to stress in my body?” You can also use anything relevant to you for the last part of this sentence, like “contributing to these migraines” or “contributing to this fear of heights.”
Once you get your confirmation, you will have a tangible experience to work with. If you can’t identify or recall the specific experience, just identify as much information as you can. Perhaps, through muscle testing, you will end up with information such as having an experience at age twenty that was linked to Mom, but you can’t quite figure out exactly what it was about. No problem. Usually the body will allow us to work with just a few key details if we approach it the right way.
Tip: Remember those past-life and generational energies we talked about earlier? Working with unprocessed experiences is one of the opportunities you will have to address those energies. For unprocessed past-life experiences, simply ask your body using muscle testing, “Do I have a past-life experience causing stress in my body?” If you get a “yes,” you can use the same process that you did for getting more information about unprocessed experiences from this lifetime. This just means that the energy of the experience was carried with you from a past life into this one. Just guess what it might be connected to. For generational experiences, ask, “Do I have an unprocessed generational experience that is causing stress in my body?” We are just asking if an experience (and its energy) from one of your relatives was passed on to you. If you get a “yes,” you can ask your body which side of your ancestry it came from—your mother’s or your father’s. Think back to things you know your ancestors went through and see if you can locate the person from whom it was passed, and the experience. To clear past-life and generational experiences, you’ll use the same techniques you’re about to use for your own experiences, but you’ll tweak the wording to fit. I’ll explain this more in the coming pages.