Letting Go: The Power of the Mind-Body Connection

Letting go seems to be a challenge that every human experiences. Letting go of unmet expectations, past traumas, regrets, and anxieties is an important process for creating growth, mental headspace, as well as peace within our lives. It is also an important aspect of being able to be conscious to the present moment. Letting go involves the release of a memory or an experience’s ability to affect you in a negative way, to the point that when you reflect on it, you are not bombarded with the difficult emotions surrounding the event. Letting go therefore means that your physiology is able to create peace and ease surrounding difficult memories and events. How is this possible?

To understand the process of truly letting go, we visit research from Candace Pert, PhD, author of Molecules of Emotion. Our brain is the thinking and processing center of the nervous system, while our spine is the emotional center. Throughout our lives, when information from our environment was too big or traumatic for our brain to process, our spine would move into a different posture to compensate (often called our defense posture or pattern). Depending on the patterning your body learned, that posture may have involved torquing your hip, shifting your weight to one side, hunching your shoulders, tucking your tailbone, jutting your neck back, etc. and spinal cord tension was distributed in different patterns throughout the body.   These defense patterns helped to process or regulate the amount of input coming into the nervous system. As they were utilized repeatedly, these patterns also created a vibrational state or tone for the cells of the body that became a part of who you are, but also affected the range of emotion you experienced on a biochemical level by changing the shape of receptor sites for neurotransmitters. While these defense postures are great short-term strategies, when they become our long-term way of being, they create dysfunction, pain, and limit our sense of wellbeing.

Think of the traumas or difficult situations you have experienced. Usually, these events are associated with fight-or-flight physiology. Think of how during these events you may have felt a surge of adrenaline (shaky, rapid breathing, rapid heart rate, tight muscles, and maybe later, digestive disturbances and/or sleep issues). Between the sympathetic overdrive as well as moving into your body’s defense posture, your body learned a way of being to cope with life’s difficult and/or overwhelming experiences. When these postures and physiological compensations are used repeatedly, the body learns to maintain the defense posture/state that it moved into with trauma. This defense posture becomes the body’s new normal state with decreased range of motion and emotion, tightness, and inflammation.

The experience of long-term fight-or-flight physiology, defense posture and the pain it creates, is typically where most people seek our help. So, how does NSA address this? At its most basic level, NSA is used to help the nervous system develop new strategies for dealing with stress by discharging tension stored in the spinal cord and nerves, dissipating fight-or-flight physiology, and improving the mind-body connection. Why NSA has gained so much attention in the world of alternative healthcare, psychology, and mind-body healing, is that it allows people to work through traumas and emotional issues by learning to release pent-up emotional energies automatically, without confronting the issues directly, as they would in a more psychological treatment. As spinal tension is released and the brain starts to reorganize into new neurological patterns, the body can sense safety—even creating safety around old, traumatic memories. This can take the physical charge out of these stored experiences.

The different aspects of NSA make it possible to let go of trauma on a physiological level. We can get so caught up in just the mental aspects of letting go, but remember, a calm body equals a calm mind. Our goal is for a calm body to not just be a temporary, rarely achieved state.  Instead, NSA works to develop greater and greater strategies for you to achieve a peaceful, healing state while at the office receiving NSA care but also when you are not at the office, living life.

You can do this! Be consistent with your care. The more consistent you are, you will stay ahead of clearing everyday stress, you will create an environment for physical healing, but you will also get to deeper layers of healing old patterns that you may really be ready to let go of! A few pro-tips:

  1. When you are at the office for an adjustment and are ready to let go of something, visualize what you are ready to let go of leaving your body. Because the nervous system is adapting constantly to thoughts, emotions, and stimuli, this can help us identify and shift patterns through NSA that can facilitate the letting go process as well as create increased safety surrounding the memory. Whether you wish to share that with us or not, is completely up to you. Verbally speaking that aloud or writing it down isn’t necessary.  It is completely up to you!
  2. Somato-Respiratory Integration sessions will take all of this healing and letting go to the next level.

Best wishes for wellbeing and remember, Create Health by Choice, not by Chance.

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Monday
8:30 am - 11:20 am 2:30 pm - 5:20 pm
Tuesday
8:30 am - 11:20 am
Wednesday
8:30 am - 11:20 am 2:30 pm - 5:20 pm
Thursday
8:30 am - 11:20 am 2:30 pm - 5:20 pm
Friday
Admin Hours 9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Saturday
Closed
Sunday
Closed