Emotions, Choices & Beyond Wellbeing

Today I want to talk about choices and what I call “beyond wellbeing.”

Typically, most people go on living their lives day after day not making changes until some sort of a symptom appears. Symptoms can show up in your physical body, your financial life, your relationships, at work, etc. For most, symptoms are the first sign that something is “off”.

At this point you have a choice. If you have a headache, you have two options: you can do something with the sole intent of getting rid of the pain, i.e. take a pill, OR you can actually look at WHY you have a headache. Is there something wrong, is there something off? What do I need to do differently; do I need to see things in a different way than I have ever seen them before? Maybe I need to organize my life differently. This self-questioning leads to a previously non-existent awareness of all the different possible choices that can be made in any given moment

For example, you decide that you are tired of taking aspirin and you want to figure out what is causing your headaches. After looking back on all of your recent headaches, you realize they have a lot in common and you start to identify particular perceptions, behaviors or structures in your life and body that may contribute to the headache. As you think about these headaches and discover that every time a specific scenario happens, you react to it in the same way. For example; you get into a disagreement with your significant other and you get upset. You notice yourself feeling angry, projecting that anger in your behavior and you also notice how your body tenses up with shoulders rolled forward, head forward, heart pounding, breathing changes, butterflies in your stomach, etc. You notice as you go further and further into this “stress response” it becomes more and more difficult to stop the anger, behavior, etc. It becomes automatic and seems to take on a life of its own, as if you didn’t have a choice anymore - like a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger and going faster until it can’t be stopped anymore. When the event ends, your body is left with all this tension in its nervous system (particularly the brain and spinal cord) similar to the snowball that started out small and manageable and turned into, and remained, a huge boulder of snow that is completely unmanageable! This excess tension that has not been released / recovered from properly stays in your nervous system like an afterimage of a flash bulb on a camera and is called STRESS PHYSIOLOGY/DEFENSE POSTURE. This tension raises the overall TONE of your nervous system which has been associated with virtually every disease/illness out there today! (See April 2018 blog post "Watch Your Tone!") The lucky ones are the ones who feel a mild symptom (i.e. headache) before the more serious illness (i.e. heart attack).

You look back and see the progression of: A disagreement (or any stressful event) lead to a negative emotion (i.e. anger) lead to an alteration in your body from ease to tension/high tone (STRESS PHYSIOLOGY/DEFENSE POSTURE) lead to a symptom (if you’re lucky!) to a more serious disease/illness (i.e. heart attack).

So now you’re starting to make different choices. You are starting to pay attention (increased awareness) to what your emotions are doing. If something happens to us and it makes us angry, we can keep getting angry and getting the same result or we can choose to change our emotions around the situation (i.e instead of being angry - be compassionate). The choices we make become habits: You can have habits of illness or habits of wellbeing. Said differently, you can practice illness or you can PRACTICE WELLBEING! 

As we engage your higher brain more and more through low force spinal contacts, your body's innate adaptive responses are able to suspend those automatic, lower brain habits associated with illness. Once these habits/patterns are suspended the opportunity to make different choices exists. MAKING THE CHOICE is up to you! Over time, choosing to Practice Wellbeing (i.e. choosing "higher frequency" choices over and over) will lead to what I call Beyond Wellbeing.

Beyond Wellbeing is when your choice options continue to grow not only past where they have been previously, but beyond to new choices that were never before experienced or even entertained as an option! These options are heard as whispers, not big, loud smack-in-the-face symptoms. We call it hearing the lion's roar. It is known that one can hear a lion roar from 5 miles away. If there was a lion loose in your neighborhood, you would want to find out by its roar - not its breath! If by breath - you would be in big trouble. But if you were sensitive enough or aware enough, you would hear the roar and take appropriate actions. Beyond Wellbeing has to do with increased awareness so you can "hear" the symptoms before they gobble you up like a lion. Once you hear the lion’s roar, a whole other set of choices and options open up for that you didn't even realize existed or were important for you to look at.

With more choices come new levels of health, wellbeing and BEYOND WELLBEING!