Many of the clients I work with, whether they be senior executives I am coaching, or clients I am doing relationship coaching with, often have a goal of wanting to get better at being with their emotions. They want to be able to respond better to the challenges that life throws their way.

The only way to do this is to work with the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Your ANS state drives your thoughts, feelings and emotions. When you feel safe, connected and regulated you will experience different feelings and think different thoughts than when you feel unsafe and disconnected.

Most of us, over years of experiencing chronic stress or traumatic events, have a nervous system that is really struggling with the capacity of what it is experiencing. That means our band width gets very small and we can get overwhelmed quickly. The key is working with the nervous system to build the capacity to feel all your feelings. You cannot just block one out and expect to feel everything else. Our system is not that clever. When you repress one, you repress them all.

My other observation is that many of us experienced emotional neglect growing up. Our parents are the children of people who were very traumatised by wars, the depression and who lived in survival mode. There are many parents out there who think that their job is to provide a house, warm clothing, food and schooling and that that is enough. There was no capacity, focus or understanding of how to nurture the emotional life of their children because this was not role modelled to them. In the broader context of what these generations experienced this is understandable.
It doesn't have to be this way anymore.

We can be the generations that change that, we don't have to continue these patterns.

Talk therapy or coaching does not work because it does not work at the level of the nervous system. You have to work with a somatic approach with someone who is trained to work with the nervous system and trauma.

The benefits to your overall health and wellbeing are huge. You will have more energy to function each day and doing this nervous system work frees you from constantly having to spend huge amount of energy to calm yourself down when you feel anxious, reactive and unable to switch off. It helps you make some choices and start to take action when you are feeling constantly stuck and disconnected because your body is in shutdown.

Best of all it allows you to put your precious energy into what matters most to you. Into the relationships you care about and to enjoy life. It reduces your needs for experiencing big highs and lows and to learn to feel safe to feel contented and even sometimes bored. That life is made up of long period of contentment and experiencing joy from the simple things in life.

Dr Kathryn Theodosis joins me for this fantastic podcast where we are talking about our amazing bodies, in particular our nervous systems. Kathryn is a chiropractor who works with clients to allow their nervous system and energy system to move out of a state of stress and fear and into one of greater safety and connection. This shift allows a greater sense of safety to be held by the nervous system and the energy system, giving space for us to connect with parts of us we have not felt safe to prior

Kathryn started off as a traditional chiropractor and was introduced to network spinal analysis a gentle mode of adjustment using contact points on the spine. This transformed her own healing experience and she then completed further professional training in network spinal analysis, a modality of chiropractic care created by Donald Epstein. This then lead her to two years of professional training in Integral Energetics with Dr John Hare and Dr Fred Swan, who have created this modality that works with the body’s energy system.

In the podcast we talked about:

Different nervous system responses and how they show up in our bodies,
How our life experiences and our life story are held in our muscles and organs and we can often see this in a person’s posture and stance,
How network spinal allows the body to unravel, reorganise and integrate its life experiences in a gentle way allowing it to continually adapt and become more flexible,
That our brain loves novelty and new experiences and this helps our brain stay young and have capacity to create new neural pathways as we age, this means we can keep on learning and this is supportive of good mental health outcomes as we age,
How repressed emotions and old trauma and stress are held in the body and how that can sometimes manifest as pain,
The heart and its energetic field are another area where we pick up on the emotions and energy of the environment around you. Often it is our heart reaction picking up on the emotions of others that reacts before our conscious brain,
Different body holding patterns such as rigidity of the spine and what the somatic story behind that is,
What practices suit what nervous systems. We talked about meditation and it not being for everyone and how in fact it can for some people, reinforce a trauma pathway of avoiding their body,
Why creativity is so important for our emotional well-being,
The current trend in cold water exposure and heat through saunas and why they don’t suit everyone,
Women’s bodies and listening to our cyclical natures, taking queues from our body and not punishing ourselves for not able to be ‘on’ all the time.

You can find Kathryn on her website www.theenergychiro.com or on instagram @drkathryn.theenergychiro

Ep 49 How do we get better at being with our emotions and regulating ourselves

Ep 38 The energy chiro, on nervous system healing with Dr Kathryn Theodosis