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So many people have so many masks on and sometimes they have been putting on a face to get through life so much so that they have forgotten that they are doing this.

A way to know if you are in alignment with who you are and that you are being honest and true to who you are is via the spine!

That is right your spine shows us what you put in the back of your mind and try to push it down. Your spine is where the subconscious mind is located. Your spine shows us if you are angry but pushing it down.

We can use the spine to help you get your life and you back in alignment with yourself. Your real impulse.

There is a woman who recently starting coming in for her spine. She came in with the complaint of I have disc herniations in my lower neck and it doesn’t feel good and my friends suggested I come and see you for this. She had the most together demeanor I had seen in a while. But as I spoke with her I sensed so much anger behind the super high strung smile and polite mask she was presenting herself to be. I later on found out she was also taking antidepressants.

On the outside her life looks like one to emulate. On the inside she was like a pressure cooker. She was so much a pressure cooker that her discs herniated in the lower neck, this doesn’t happen to people who are relaxed and at peace with themselves. Especially when you are below 40 years old.

I shared with her how she has to let herself feel. To feel the anger, to feel the sadness etc. She was terrified that if she felt then she would go into depression and loose it. Again these were concepts she had.

She started to let herself feel as we started working with her spine and helping her connect more and come more into alignment with herself and her spine.

I asked her one time; what would happen if you were fully with your sadness? She attended the discover SRI class I was teaching. She started to do SRI with herself mostly stage 1.

She learned to feel into and receive the range of feelings she was experiencing rather than intellectualizing her way through them or suppressing them.

She said; I stayed with my ickiness until it turned into listlessness then mounting anxiety and instead of turning to Xanax at this horrible horrible point or running home to hide, I told myself and genuinely felt, I give up. Ickiness take me. Then I started to feel better! The spot that felt so horrible started to feel good and connected and I started to feel a lot of love in that spot.

I felt my concentration and focus coming back and managed to get productive at work. I feel so much better now.

What she learned in her words again; I am a soul having a human experience and I need to fully ACKNOWLEDGE and embrace what my human self experienced.

1- This woman realized how much pain she was covering up.

2- Feeling the pain and being terrified of it and thinking it would last fever so resisting it.

3- Surrendering to the pain and where it was located in her body.

4- Feeling connection and peace and love for herself!

5- Her spine is remodeling and the reversal of her neck curve is starting to shift.

6- She becoming more at peace with herself and more congruent.

7- The mask is melting and her true face is starting to show!

8- This is what beauty really is; congruence.

We have these strategies we develop to get through, to cope, to fit in etc.

What might have worked in one phase of our lives might be expired strategy for another phase in our lives. Imagine if you ate the same way today as you did when you were 5years old. Imagine the way you handled relationships when you were 20 years old today would that be ideal?

Imagine if your parents fought a lot and didn’t really communicate and you learned this from them. Now you are married do you think you will need some updates in some strategies of how to relate ?

We can’t use the same strategies that we have used in the past today or strategies we have today in the future.

As we get older, as our lives deepen and change we must also upgrade our approaches to life.

Look at how many times we update our electronic devices.

Life is constantly asking us to adapt, change , to remain responsive and dynamic to life.

Heart rate variability is an interesting thing. The more healthy your heart is, the more variable and dynamic its rhythms are through the day. The more sick your heart is the less variable it is.

Have a new client who was sent to boarding school when she was 13years old. A 13 hours flight form her home country.

She learned to be tough on the outside to make sure she didn’t get bullied.

She even said everyone knew not to mess with me. So this was a “persona” she developed to cope with a new and scary environment.

Now she is in her 40s and she’s still going about life in the same way, the “though” persona. At this point it is causing a lot of tension especially in the lower neck. She came in with a complaint of tight neck and shoulders.

When we are using anger and toughness to push people away to make sure we don’t get betrayed; the part of the spine it tends to affect is the lower neck part of the spine, which also affects the shoulders and arms. It tends to pull the lower neck into a forward posture and even in some people creates a dowager’s hump.

As she gets NSA care; the wave will help her connect to her authentic spinal alignment and rhythm. This re-alignment to who she really is will allow her to be more authentic, vulnerable, will allow people close to her and that fear of betrayal will not be there. So much more will unravel from there.

This is how your spine is related to your life and the difference between living life from alignment with who you really are rather than “personas” we had to develop to survive certain aspects of life. Which cause us to misalign from ourself; which show up in the spine as spinal misalignments.

What expired strategies are you using?

How is it affecting your spine and health?

I am using a very personal story to myself and my family to illustrate how there is so much more to our physical pains than we might know.

June 15th 2014, Father’s Day, my mom had a stroke. If my dad hadn’t been around her she would have died. He resuscitated her and she was airlifted to the hospital. She was in coma for months.

Back story on what was occurring around the time of the stroke, as things are hardly ever random if we pan out enough. I had met Marcus, March 2014 and moved out of LA days before she had the stroke. To my mom I was her everything. It all happened so fast, from meeting Marcus to moving. My mom was so happy for me and apparently she was freaking out about her loss. My younger brother is retarded, in some ways it has felt like I have been their only child.

The first stop after leaving LA was Fiji, taking care of Anthony Robbins as he conducted one of his seminars. Midway through the seminar I get the call that my mom had a stroke. Marcus arranged for the first flight out of Fiji and into LA. I can’t tell you how much magic had to occur for this to happen so quickly and the wonderful Fijian people and their heart fullness rather than enforcement of rules that allowed us to leave ASAP. We arrive in LA not knowing if she was going to be alive.

Fast forward. I have been living abroad since the move out of LA. My dad has been working and caring for my brother and mother. Mother is “functional” and has short term memory loss and needs lots and lots of hours of sleep daily and gets tired very easily. Brother retarded and lives with parents.

My dad used to tell me on every FaceTime call that my mother is improving, when she wasn’t. He was hoping and wishing that if he kept on encouraging her and holding a positive possibility that she would step into that reality. Positive expectancy, is when we see things as they are and we hold a vision for what can be. Denial is not seeing things as they are and convincing ourselves that there is great possibility. He was in denial and I accepted that he wasn’t ready to see things as they were.

Fast forward to today. July 2, 2018. Almost coming on 4 year anniversary of the stroke. My dad says his right foot hurts a lot to the point her can hardly walk. I ask what he thinks its about. He says is is uric acid crystals? Gout? I ask is it in the big toe? No its not its in the foot not the toe. so then we could rule out Gout. What struck me was when he was speaking of his foot pain, it felt like the ground had been pulled from under his feet and he felt terrified. The symptom and the feelings around the symptom didn’t match. The magnitude of the feelings had a lot of charge, so I knew there was more to be uncovered. This is when its more than just physical pain! I asked him how he felt about his foot pain. I asked what did his pain mean for him? What was he afraid of now that he has the pain? Bam, my father isn’t one to cry nor one that allows a lot of emotions to feely flow, he is “strong” and like a rock and very rational. This is what men of his generation were taught to be.

He burst out crying when I asked the question, what was he afraid of now that he has the pain?

He said my mom isn’t improving. I said yah I am glad you finally are coming into terms with this. He said he is afraid if something happens to him, and now that he realizes she isn’t improving and will not be independent once again who would take care of my mom and brother. He felt that it was all on him to take care of them and he is happy to care for them, but what if something happened to him, who would care for them? So because he is a rational strong man, he hadn’t let himself feel the fear of the who will take care of his wife and son. When he had the symptom, now he had a diversion that is acceptable to him to have a freakout about, which was having foot pain. It was ok in his eyes to freak out about something physical.

I reassured him that I would care for them, if something were to happen to him. He cried some more and felt relief and all of a sudden his concern about his foot wasn’t so concerning.

When you have pain. Some great quality questions to ask:

How do I feel about what I am feeling?

What does my pain mean for me?

What is this pain really about?

And allow your subconscious mind to float up and to reveal itself to you.

How NSA helps; the more NSA you receive, the more you connect to the prefrontal lobe.

The prefrontal lobe allows you to know in more real time, what you are feeling and how you feel about what you are feeling as life is happening. You can observe life and your response and meanings you give to life as it is occurring. Also there is more of a connection between the mind and body so when you touch your body or area of symptom and you connect to it, you can get more knowing or wisdom from the body part of symptom. It is easier to have a sense! So you can get to whats happening behind whats happening more quickly.

If you have a story like this please share it with me!