One of the reasons why we don’t address the root cause is because we do not want to feel the choices that we have been making or the pressure or strain we have been putting ourselves under. We become caught in our emotions, we react and feel hurt by what others say and do and often we don’t take responsibility for the part we play.

We then choose to bury what we are feeling and ‘get on with life’.

There are a myriad of ways in which we can bury our feelings and I could write a whole article on this alone. Food is a big one – alcohol, sport, staying caught in emotions, pushing our bodies and hardening them. In fact any activity or movement that we do in a way where we disconnect from our body and do not honour the true delicateness and tenderness that we are has the potential to bury what we are feeling.

When we bury our feelings we push those feelings that may be just on the surface, deeper into the physical body so that we don’t have to face the pain or hurt of what is actually there. As human beings, we get very good at doing this and find all sorts of ways to distract ourselves from feeling our bodies and we therefore stay caught in the mental activity of our minds.

So having understood what our hurts are and why it is not good to bury them, how then do we work with this?

Here is a simple guideline that can support you to reconnect to what is going on in your body and become more familiar with addressing your hurts.

1. Nominate the hurt when you feel it without blame. Let yourself acknowledge that the incident/person/event that has happened has actually deeply affected you and that you feel hurt by it. At this stage it is important to do this without blame. You are simply nominating what is there.
2. Feel where this hurt resides in your body. You may feel a tightness in your chest, in your lower back, in your jaw. In fact, it could be held anywhere in the body. Make this exercise physical so that you feel how the hurt affects your body rather than staying in the thought process in your mind of “he said, she said” etc.
3. Stay with what you feel, without judging or trying to fix it. Simply let yourself be with what it is that you are feeling. Practice self-acceptance and that this is a process that you are going through. Let yourself truly be with what is there without fighting the urge to not go there. Stay out of the mental dialogue that may be running in your mind and stay with the sensations that you are feeling in your body.
4. Notice if there are any patterns or behaviours that you go into to stop yourself from feeling the hurt. Try to avoid using those things as medications (chocolate, alcohol, coffee) and instead let yourself be with what you feel (as explored in point 3).
5. You may like to seek support from a friend or a practitioner so that you can see the situation more clearly. Be careful to seek assistance from a person who will not allow you to ‘wallow’ or go into blame, but who will reflect a steadiness and openness so that you can go deeper within and learn that this is a healing process for you and for you to see and own your part in it.

The way to heal our hurts is to not bury them but let them come to the surface so that they can come up and out of the body. If we over ride what we feel, pretend that they are not there and push them back down – we bury emotions deeper into the physical body and at some point this will show up via an injury or illness.

 We are all deeply sensitive human beings. Let yourself be and live in with your sensitivity. This is not weak, but in fact our true strength and power.

For further reading, here is a great article We are Not our Hurts by Jean Gamble, Psychotherapist.

Donna Nolan offers Esoteric Healing, Connective Tissue Therapy, Massage , Yoga/Meditation at the Balgowlah (Northern Beaches) and Cammeray clinics. She has a love of working with people to understand the root cause of their ill or injury and works with these modalities to support her clients to return to true health and wellbeing. For bookings contact Donna donna@yogaandhealing.com.au

The post Healing our hurts appeared first on Yoga & Healing | Therapies Massage Exercise Corporate Wellbeing | Sydney, Balmain & Northern Rivers.

Yet when we truly practice yoga, we learn to develop a relationship with our body, where we listen to what it is telling us and respond and move in a way that is deeply honouring. After all, yoga means union and how can we be in union if there is not a true respect for the body.

This means no pushing, no hardness, no pain.

With this, there is much to actually gain.

Pain is the body’s feedback mechanism to say stop what you are doing. Our mind can often override this signal, but at what cost to the body? When pain is felt the body responds by causing the muscles to harden up around the injured site for protection to avoid further injury.

So what happens when we actively go into a movement that stretches the body to an extent where there is pain? The connective tissue (or commonly known as fascia) also hardens up in order to protect the body.

Connective Tissue is a system of tissues that runs throughout all the muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, nerves, blood vessels and organ overlapping and enveloping soft tissue structures like cling film.

So if our aim is to loosen and open the body, to have more fluidity, then why would we induce pain and cause more tension? It just doesn’t make sense.

So if we apply this in the true practice of yoga, then it only makes sense to apply this across the board with all bodywork therapies including massage.

As a yoga teacher, connective tissue therapist and massage therapist, I have come to understand that the best way of releasing tension in the body is through the quality of connection – not force. A stronger stretch in yoga or a harder stroke in massage may offer temporary relief, but does it solve the underlying problem in the long term? I would beg to differ.

For long term healing, the approach that I take as a bodywork therapist is to respect and respond to the connective tissue by working with the body in a connected and gentle way.

As an example, in massage, rather than forcefully working into a trigger point (a point of tension held in the muscle) to access the deep tissue and muscles, the body requires lots of repetitive strokes to first of all warm up the outer layer of muscles allowing access to the next and deeper level of muscles (hence the name deep tissue).

If you try to access the deeper muscles via force and without truly understanding the role of the connective tissue in the body, the outer muscles harden and go into protection going against what we are trying to achieve, which is to relax the muscles. Once the outer muscles have been warmed up, then we can access the deeper tissue in a gentle manner, with no force and without inflicting pain.

With the modality of Esoteric Connective Tissue Therapy we work with gentle hands-on healing techniques performed with slow rhythmic motion on various parts of the body. The therapy works directly with both the physical structures of the body (muscles, joints etc) and the energy that flows through the connective tissue system and in turn releases tension and tightness in the muscles.

By listening to the body and treating it with absolute care and gentleness it leads the body towards it own natural state of healing with no pain inflicted.

Donna Nolan offers Remedial Massage, Esoteric Massage, Esoteric Connective Tissue Therapy, Esoteric Healing and Chakra Puncture. For bookings please call Donna 0408 7838187 or email donna@yogaandhealing.com.au

The post Bodywork Therapies – It doesn’t have to hurt to benefit appeared first on Yoga & Healing | Therapies Massage Exercise Corporate Wellbeing | Sydney, Balmain & Northern Rivers.