When I speak of the mind and emotion and its affects on the physical body, I speak of something much more powerful than thinking positively or keeping a happy mindset. Those are surface level emotions in my opinion. I speak of traumatic experiences that become lodged in the musculature of the body and wreak havoc until released. I speak of
Fight or Flight.
When we experience something deeply traumatic on either a physical or emotional level, our body releases powerful neurotransmitters and hormones that prepare us to either fight or run. Whether this is done during a car accident, being raped, screamed at by your father when you're three, or any other countless scenarios, one thing that ALWAYS happens is various muscles in your body tighten in anticipation of running or fighting. We evolved so that once the need to be in Fight or Flight is over, we then shake (ever seen a small child shake when consoled over a frightening experience?) and/or cry. Problem is, our society has made it so that for a variety of reasons, we often no longer release that pent up energy by shaking or crying (we bottle our emotions, ever heard that before?) so it becomes lodged in us. On a physical level, that traumatic experience causes deep muscle contractions because we never properly released the tension associated with that fight or flight response.
Think of it as a garden hose. When there aren't any kinks in the hose, water runs free. But if you put kinks in that hose, all of a sudden water stops running like it should. Now think of that as your body. Put enough kinks in your body, and all of a sudden everything from your blood to lymph fluid might not be getting to where it needs to be. It's kinked, like a hose. How can we expect the cells of our body to properly function if they aren't getting the nutrients they need and/or able to remove the junk they don't need? I believe this is how a lot of disease comes about.
For YEARS I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was choking to death. This would happen maybe once a month and it was terrible. This no longer happens. Why? I released the trauma that was associated with it. I finally properly processed a long held trauma so that the muscles that were deeply tensed in my neck and throat were able to properly release. Allow me to give more background.
About six years ago I was practicing yoga in my then girlfriend's bedroom. I went into child's pose and my right shoulder began to twitch. Normally when we twitch, we tense up to stop it, right? I got curious and relaxed into the twitch more. The twitch became a shake. I relaxed more. The shake became a convulsion and all of a sudden the story of how my professional baseball career ended graphically popped into my mind which I felt a compulsion to tell my girlfriend. As I told her this story, my arm and shoulder began to convulse more to the point that it was, "Alarming" according to her. And frankly, I was terrified as well. I have no doubt that if I went into the ER as my arm was convulsing that they would have pumped me full of all kinds of drugs.
But there was a part of me that felt this convulsion was a GOOD thing. As I let go of the story of my career ending, I felt this wave of peace and relaxation fall over my being. Yet there was also a part of me that was saying, "Dude, you're going to die. Go to the ER!" It was a battle between ego and something else. After this happened, I was left feeling so much better having had the powerful release, but also feeling fear as well as having a lot of questions.
About one month later I found myself in my yoga studio on the ground, with my full body shaking. I looked kinda like this:
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I was taking a workshop put on by a man named Dr. David Berceli of
Traumaprevention.com. What I realized as I was laying on the ground shaking was:
1. What I was experiencing was basically the same thing I experienced with my shoulder, but across my whole body.
2. This man had figured out how to systemize the process so that it could be brought about pretty much anytime we wanted as a healing method.
3. It was a GOOD thing.
There was around 60 people in the room and it was an amazing experience. People were laughing, crying, and shaking uncontrollably as they let go of tension and emotion from years gone by. A truly powerful and eye opening experience. I was excited and now that I knew how to cause this shaking in my body, I dove head first into the process.
As I dove headfirst into this process I did it day after day after day. Sometimes I'd have a little shake and that was it, other times I'd access something and a little emotion would come up. One day as I lay on the ground shaking my throat started to get tight. I relaxed into it and the next thing I knew, a graphic image of my choking on a hot dog at a fair when I was five popped into my mind. I literally felt the hot dog lodged in my throat and the next thing I knew, I felt my body hack up this hot dog. When it happened when I was five, my dad saw me choking, ran over, and pounded me on the back. I remember not being able to breathe and being terrified. When my dad pounded me on the back, I hacked up the hot dog on the ground around a bunch of people. My dad cleaned it up and went back on his way. He didn't console this terrified child and the terrified child didn't cry because he didn't feel safe, he didn't understand anything except that he just went through something very scary.
Well, THIS TIME, I cried. I released the emotion that wanted to be released more than 20 years previously (this happened about 5 years ago). And the adult David also consoled that child that was still within me. And since then, I haven't woken up in the middle of the night choking.
I believe these deep emotional traumas are what Jesus was speaking of what he said, "“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." I finally brought forth something that was destroying me and good god did it feel good.
Over the last five years, I've experienced similar releases of traumatic experiences. It has destroyed many of my belief systems and been both liberating and terrifying at times.
Through the shaking, meditation, yoga, and other introspective work I have made huge inroads to being a more emotionally whole and mature person. But I still have plenty of work to do. Can my IBD be cured by this? Is it the manifestation of some old traumatic injury or injuries? I have no idea. What I do realize is that my ego does everything it can to stop me from accessing those old traumas. That's why I created my ego 31 years ago, because I didn't want to ever experience trauma again. My ego would protect me from it. The thing is, to heal these traumas, me ego has to let me access them. And boy howdy does it use every defensive and offensive tactic in the book to ensure I don't. It's quite the protector.
Has a lot of my physical, mental, and emotional problems been all in my mind? Yes. But that's because they got stuck in my body because I never processed the underlying issue correctly. It's nothing for me to be ashamed of and the physical manifestations are most definitely there. Does this apply to any of you? Could your IBD be a result of past traumas that you've not dealt with on a deep emotional level? I have no idea. I don't think for a second that IBD has any single cause. What I do feel is, at the very least, all of this deep, chronic muscle tension from past traumatic experiences we never processed that causes our hoses to kink, sure as hell doesn't help our conditions. Our mind, our ego, is stopping us from releasing those kinks. And unfortunately, all the positive thinking in the world won't change that.
