Feeling tense or shut down? Try this!

The tone of your body & the tone of your life,

You know that feeling, when anger pulses through your veins, it hits and you want to fight back or run? Imagine watching someone in this state, their body suddenly gets very tense and rigid. 
You're also familiar with shame and guilt - it comes on suddenly and you feel frozen, words won't form, and you can barely move. Imagine watching someone else go through this from a birds eye view, you may see this persons body slump, eyes glaze over, or look like they've "left the room." 

Our bodies share a lot of subtle information about where we are at internally, we can call this body language. Vice versa, the biochemistry within our body responds to our change in state and creates a chemical cocktail that keeps it going, like a feedback loop.

The tone of your body and nervous system is like the radio frequency running through a stereo. If you can remember an old stereo, you'd recall the tuning wires on top, you would move them around to find a good connection. 

The frequency is high & the connection is good in your body when you feel good, energized, and receptive. The frequency is lowered when you are stuck in the past, processing a heavy emotion, or in fight/flight or freeze.
News flash - we're not supposed to always feel good, it is natural and healthy to cycle through highs and lows, it is when we are stuck in a lowered frequency that we can find ourselves less happy overall, experience dis-ease, or unwanted symptoms. 

Notice the state of your body right now: do you feel rigid and tense? Do you feel absent, disconnected, or slumped over?
It may be obvious when you feel angry or shutdown, but most people continue to carry this energy into their lives and this can really influence how you feel and function. 

A slumped and shutdown body overtime creates a depressed state, low energy, and disconnection from the higher vibrational states like inspiration and joy.
A rigid and tense body overtime creates burnout & exhaustion, you'll feel like you have nothing left to give, and will therefore be drained of your energy and yet still wired to "keep going no matter what."

Next time you notice yourself tense or shutdown, try this!
Bring your spine into a tall neutral position, ears over shoulders (tuck your chin), shoulders over hips, hips over ankles. Bringing your gentle awareness to the backside of your body. If you feel rigid, you're going to soften or imagine the tissues melting down around your bones, your shoulder blades sink down along your back and your chest gently raises. If you feel slumped and shut down, create the same tall neutral state in your spine and imagine a gentle upward pull from the top of your head, your spine feels taller (your rib cage remains tucked in rather than flared out), it opens your chest, and for a boost add a smile to your face :)

Stay here for a few moments, & return here as often as you think about it. By doing this you are tuning yourself to the channel of calm and ease. Your nervous system is regulating into a place where healing and more bandwidth is available for life.

The tension and tone of your body mirrors the tension and tone of your life.
Let me know how you like this exercise!
 ____________________________________________________
 

With love and gratitude, 
 Dr. Jessica

Does your life need a spring clean?

I've been doing some serious spring cleaning.
I mean an overhaul. I recently listened to a podcast about fung shui and it inspired me to look at the areas of our home that have clutter. It created a burst of inspiration to go through items that haven't been touched since moving into our home a couple of years ago, yikes & yay all at once!

Our environment plays a big role in our lives, for example having your running shoes in a place where you see them daily can make the difference between getting exercise or not. Having fresh fruit visible to you, could be the difference between making a healthy choice or going for processed foods. Having bills or junk mail somewhere that you see daily could cause a lot of unexplained stress. 

The thing is, whether we see things or not, our nervous system holds onto the information of what's in our lives and our homes. 
A couple of questions to take this deeper:
Take inventory, what's visible in your home/world?
What's at least one thing you'd like to make visible to help you align with health & vitality? What's at least one thing you'd like to donate or place out of eye sight to support your daily ease & vitality?

You may choose to do this for every room, or dive off the deep end like I did :)
Let me know how it goes for you!

 ____________________________________________________

With love and gratitude, 
 Dr.Jessica

Are you doing all the "right" things & still feeling out of balance?

A friend recently shared with me that she is meditating, doing kundalini yoga, eating well, and getting into nature daily and yet she says her body is still triggered by stressful situations.

Can you relate? 

These are the top 3 reasons you're still feeling impacted by stress:


1) You have a reduced capacity to process
Our bodies & nervous systems are brilliant. They are constantly adapting to the world around us, but let's be real, your nervous system hasn't evolved much since we were cave people. In the meantime, our world has evolved in exponential ways - one of the most impactful on your nervous system is the magnitude of information coming in every single day. From our news feeds online, to pollutants in food/water, you are taking in hundreds more inputs daily than your grandparents did in their day in age. 

Our nervous systems have a processing capacity, and for most of us, that high level of information coming in daily combined with overextending ourselves for work, parenting, or other responsibilities in our modern worlds has had us operating beyond our nervous systems capacity. Any time we operate beyond our nervous systems capacity our bodies start to compile the experiences (physical, mental, emotional) we couldn't fully process in that moment - that stress gets stored in our body and, as a safety feature, our nervous systems have less capacity for today. This might lead to us snapping at demand from our child, or stuck in overwhelm while packing for a vacation you were thrilled to go on.

2) Modern day life is not supportive to your healing
In a perfect world, when we sleep at night we would process and integrate all of the information that has built up throughout our days, like the stressful text we received, or a challenging workout. We would wake up with a clean slate, and lots of bandwidth for the day ahead. However, our modern day technology, stress, and lifestyle is influencing our ability to get deep restorative sleep. Modern day diets and lifestyle habits like low nutrient and toxic laden packaged foods, and lack of movement add up and interfere with our body's natural ability to heal. 

3) You are running on old programs
When we wake up in the morning and habitually check the news, or social media, without knowing it we are pushing play on old habits, patterns and programs. We begin to stimulate the same thoughts & feelings we had the day before, so if they're not serving us, like "I'm not good enough" or "the world is not a friendly place" we further cement old patterns into our reality.



Here is a list of my top 8 keys to optimize your nervous system in the modern day world:

1) Remember to breathe: practice taking slow & full breaths regularly, and elongate your exhale longer than your inhale. This is the simplest way to shift your body out of reaction or stress.
2) Do less: create 1-2 priorities in your day, reduce the pressure to overexert yourself.
3) Set yourself up for successful sleep: remove tech from the bedroom, put screens away 1 hr before bed, get into a relaxed state before sleep by reading or journaling, sleep in a dark cool room, and sleep with your spine aligned to receive the most healing & rejuvenation.
4) Be intentional in your mornings & evenings: they shape the tone of your day. Move slowly. Set an intention for how you'd like to show up today and revisit this throughout the day. Do something for your wellbeing first thing when you wake & last thing before you fall asleep. This is a great time for a gratitude practice.
5) Create Coherence: coherence means creating connection in the body. Creating coherence lays down new neural networks for calm, health, ease, and abundance. Specific meditations, heart coherence, even petting an animal can create coherence in your nervous system.
6) Neural Integration: hands-on nervous system healing that helps your body to process & release the stressors that are built up. Free up stuck energy and open your capacity so that you have more health, vitality, and bandwidth for today. 
7) Co-regulation in community: when we come together with another person with a balanced nervous system, our nervous system benefits and becomes more balanced. 
8) Moving the needle forward: healing is a process, not an event- celebrate small shifts, even 1% shifts in the way you care for yourself, or respond today builds momentum to the change you wish to see.

 ____________________________________________________

With love & gratitude, 
 Dr. Jessica

Emotions are the Language of our Subconscious,

Last week, I was emotionally triggered.

The feeling came on unexpectedly, and I felt the ripples of adrenaline and cortisol run through my blood, making me feel alert and on edge.

This used to be my norm, I would spend much of my day operating under stress, and moving from this reactionary place.
It snowballed into an experience of anxiety for me that was very present from my teens to early twenties.

Now, thanks to being on this vitalistic journey for close to a decade, I no longer experience this feeling regularly. Today, when I get a glimpse of these feelings, it a great reminder to realize what this biological response is designed for and to share with you what I do to help my body as it returns to homeostasis.

First, stress responses are natural, they are a part of our biological design. We all experience them from time to time, and the key to maintaining our vitality is that we want to be able to down regulate and returns to balance afterwards.

Here are 3 tools that support my body to move through a stress response:

1) Slow down my breath. Breathe into the diaphragm, lengthen my exhale. Close eyes, reduce stimulus, place hands on my belly.

2) Tune in. Do I feel an EXCESS of energy or a DEPLETION of energy?
In accordance, I will either MOVE my body, in other words utilize the adrenaline and cortisol released. Or I will REST, lying flat on my back eyes closed, supporting my body in down regulating from this state.

3) Default to my values. When I am emotionally triggered, I am not as clear-minded. This means my perceptual lens may be tainted by hurt feelings, judgements, etc. and I need to rely on what I value rather than my underlying emotional state to guide me in the moment.

Emotions are the language of the subconscious, they can indicate where we are at internally "below the surface," and they can be utilized to access more of our potential. This month we will continue to explore the relationship between our mind-body-emotions and our full potential.
If you have any questions you would like me to address, reply to this email :)


"To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art."
-I. Duncan
____________________

Vitality Spotlight: Optimal Mind-Body-Emotions

I talk about our states of wellbeing on a spectrum all the way from dis-ease to optimal health, in that same way we can view emotional states on a spectrum.
Dr. David Hawkin's scale of consciousness is a really visual for emotional states and how they rank. All the way from guilt and shame to love and enlightenment.

Emotions are the most powerful language of the body, and that is because they access our subconscious, 95% + of our biology's potential. In contrast, thoughts and feelings are the language of the mind or the conscious, the 1-5% of our biology's potential. Our thoughts and feelings can indicate what is going on below the surface, but they're typically not powerful enough on their own to create change.

This is why we can harness the power of emotions by simply allowing ourselves to feel them. I have learned that there are four highest vibrational states, they are: Love, Gratitude, Enthusiasm, and Inspiration.

This week, I invite you to free write on these emotional states.
Perhaps you write about memories of these feelings or dreams you have around each of them. In windows of time throughout your day revisit these emotional states, close your eyes, and feel them with all of your senses!

Avoiding Pain or Chasing Pleasure will keep you Unhappy 💜

The Pain-Pleasure Loop,

From a young age we learn the "ways of the world" from our parents and adults around us.  These are like the non-verbal "rules" or "guidelines" on what is acceptable or not as a human, like what kind of play is acceptable to do at home but maybe not in a public library... etc.  

We will all differ based on personality traits, sensitivity levels, and what drives us, but at the end of the day - we are pack animals. We are born to want to be a part of the pack - and hence these non-verbal "rules" stick with us and shape us as adults today because they keep us from be outcasted from "our pack"
They become learned patterns below the level of our awareness, also known as subconscious.

As children we observe and learn, most of us have in very subtle ways learned to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. 
For example, your parent may have been overly protective about you getting hurt, to a point where you were afraid to take safe risks, and this translates to you avoiding getting out of your comfort zone as an adults. Now you're feeling stagnant and stuck, and don't know why.
Another example, you were taught to solely seek pleasure and always be happy. So in your everyday life unless there is a party you feel really under-stimulated and dissatisfied, you constantly need to create the party or you don't feel happy. You also might have taken on an exhausting role of always trying to make others happy.

The solution to both avoiding pain and pleasure seeking is to transcend this dualistic way of thinking and to find your POWER.

For as long as we try to avoid pain, and solely seek pleasure we will oscillate between the two. We'll all experience highs and lows in life, but they will feel extreme if we are living this way subconsciously. If we can accept the uncomfortable moments in life, and even train ourselves to find comfort within the discomfort, and if we can enjoy the highs equally as much as every other shade of life, we will have met our power. 

Our power is almost like finding neutrality amongst these two opposites, pain and pleasure. If you've been in this loop, you've most likely been numbing out other feelings too. It may feel like a sigh of relief to hear this or like there are a lot of other feelings below the surface. Pause, breathe, it's perfectly okay. You'll know you're on your way to a powerful place when you are not afraid of, resisting, or grasping at the highs or the lows, instead you allow yourself to move through them and the lessons that each has for you. 

Practice getting comfortable with something uncomfortable today, or finding neutrality in a high or low moment of your day. You've got this! :)

 ____________________________________________________

With love and gratitude, 
 Dr. Jessica

My body keeps score of what?

Your body remembers,
 

Ever get an overwhelming feeling that you need to reach out to someone? Or do you ever start to melt into relaxation when you smell a certain scent? It's as if your body is responding to something before you do!

This is very normal, and is actually happening most of the time whether you realize it or not.

Maybe you've heard the phrase "your body keeps score," but you didn't realize just how often your body is responding based on memory stored within your nervous system. 

Your body and nervous system are brilliant (I can't seem to say this enough)! 
Every experience (physical, mental, emotional) is an opportunity for your nervous system to process, adapt, grow, & evolve. 

Your nervous system can either process a life experience real time (think easy breezy biking to the library) and grow and evolve from it. Or if it's outside your bandwidth (think: a car cut you off while biking and you almost went down, and you found yourself pissed!) your body may not have the capacity to process it real time and will hold onto this information to process later. 

You'll form patterns of stored stress and neural networks based on experiences and whether or not you have processed them. Say hello to your bodies memory! 

An unprocessed experience, is remembered in the nervous system and can cause us to be tense or jaded in the future. (Ex. You don't want to ride your bike to the library anymore, or you do but you're pissed off at all the drivers around you regardless of who it is!).

Our body also creates neural networks when we process and grow and evolve from something. (Let's say after you got cut off on your bike you paused took a few deep breaths, and when you got home you did a meditation to move your emotions. Your body learned from this, you now choose to ride a new way to the library and always check your right shoulder. These new ways of riding, and checks become second nature, they become an automatic learning and your body naturally takes on less stress this way. When you do experience another close call, your body processes through any fear or anger much quicker this time.)

Neural networks are like autopilot programs that help us better respond to future stressors. Neural Integration is my favorite way to lay new neural networks, and meditations that help create more coherence in the nervous system.

For those that receive Neural Integration on my tables, your body is learning to re-process past experiences/stressors in a safe and calm environment. After our work you may experience an old trigger, or experience that would've been stressful but you watch yourself in awe as you brush it off and move along. 

Now, that's your bodies memory working for you!

Feeling Tense or Shutdown? Try this!

The tone of your body & the tone of your life,

You know that feeling, when anger pulses through your veins, it hits and you want to fight back or run? Imagine watching someone in this state, their body suddenly gets very tense and rigid. 
You're also familiar with shame and guilt - it comes on suddenly and you feel frozen, words won't form, and you can barely move. Imagine watching someone else go through this from a birds eye view, you may see this persons body slump, eyes glaze over, or look like they've "left the room." 

Our bodies share a lot of subtle information about where we are at internally, we can call this body language. Vice versa, the biochemistry within our body responds to our change in state and creates a chemical cocktail that keeps it going, like a feedback loop.

The tone of your body and nervous system is like the radio frequency running through a stereo. If you can remember an old stereo, you'd recall the tuning wires on top, you would move them around to find a good connection. 

The frequency is high & the connection is good in your body when you feel good, energized, and receptive. The frequency is lowered when you are stuck in the past, processing a heavy emotion, or in fight/flight or freeze.
News flash - we're not supposed to always feel good, it is natural and healthy to cycle through highs and lows, it is when we are stuck in a lowered frequency that we can find ourselves less happy overall, experience dis-ease, or unwanted symptoms. 

Notice the state of your body right now: do you feel rigid and tense? Do you feel absent, disconnected, or slumped over?
It may be obvious when you feel angry or shutdown, but most people continue to carry this energy into their lives and this can really influence how you feel and function. 

A slumped and shutdown body overtime creates a depressed state, low energy, and disconnection from the higher vibrational states like inspiration and joy.
A rigid and tense body overtime creates burnout & exhaustion, you'll feel like you have nothing left to give, and will therefore be drained of your energy and yet still wired to "keep going no matter what."

Next time you notice yourself tense or shutdown, try this!
Bring your spine into a tall neutral position, ears over shoulders (tuck your chin), shoulders over hips, hips over ankles. Bringing your gentle awareness to the backside of your body. If you feel rigid, you're going to soften or imagine the tissues melting down around your bones, your shoulder blades sink down along your back and your chest gently raises. If you feel slumped and shut down, create the same tall neutral state in your spine and imagine a gentle upward pull from the top of your head, your spine feels taller (your rib cage remains tucked in rather than flared out), it opens your chest, and for a boost add a smile to your face :)

Stay here for a few moments, & return here as often as you think about it. By doing this you are tuning yourself to the channel of calm and ease. Your nervous system is regulating into a place where healing and more bandwidth is available for life.

The tension and tone of your body mirrors the tension and tone of your life.
Let me know how you like this exercise!
 ____________________________________________________
 

With love and gratitude, 
 Dr. Jessica

New Year Reflections and Possibility!

"Optimal living is not about perfection...
 

... It’s being able to grow stronger from the events and challenges we experience everyday.”

When approaching the holiday season and the end of the year it's easy to get wrapped up in "busy-ness" or become critical, focusing only on what we need to do better. We can tend towards perfection, or just plain get overwhelmed.

When our focus is Perfection, life's circumstances look black and white, the world is skewed based upon our perceptual lens of past experiences. 

If instead, the goal is Integration, life looks full of possibility, we can learn and grow from our past experiences and change how we show up, as we become more whole, and feel more happiness.

Happiness is more than just an emotional state,
happiness is the feeling of progressing in your life,
and becoming more whole as a result. 

Our corner of the world heavily focuses on resolutions for the new year. 
Or "resolving mistakes from the past," but when I hear this, I believe we are missing a big piece of the puzzle, when we resolve something we are coming from a limited viewpoint of the past, what has already happened. In quantum physics we learn that the matter or material world, anything we see, is less than 1%. The other 99.9% of this universe is the energy and life force that animates you, the field where infinite possibilities exist. 
Therefore, we may be limiting our perceptual lens from seeing all that is possible if we only seek to resolve our past. 

In order to open yourself up to more of what is possible,
I invite you to spend time in reflection of the last year.

Set yourself up for success by carving out some time that is solely focused on this, be intentional and kind to yourself.
-You can have fun with it, light a candle, use a fun journal and pen, or sip your favorite warm beverage.
-Reflect on each category of life and ask yourself what is going well here and what needs work or improvement (example areas of life: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, quality of life, character, family, social, vocation, finances).
-Be honest, and don't forget to celebrate your wins, no matter how small.
-Reflect on big and small gratitudes for the last year. 

Once you have reflected and processed your year, you're in a more whole place, from here ask yourself:
If I were doing this reflection one year from now, what would the most amazing and empowering reflection of 2023 feel and look like for me?

Journal, or visualize in your mind in full detail. Forget "how" it's going to done and simply let yourself feel as if it's already here.
From this place of "it already being here," ask yourself:
-What would I do differently this year?
-Do I have a word, intention or phrase that sums it up and I can reflect back on over the year?
-Are there specific actions I would start or stop doing?
-Who must I become to live this year I just imagined? How does this version of me walk, talk, interact with the world around me?

I hope this process opens up more possibility for you, and know that you can revisit this any time of year and as often as you like. 

At Heart of Life, it’s our absolute pleasure to help you integrate your life’s experiences, stresses, challenges, and to reconnect you with the powerful intelligence within you, so that you may experience true happiness more fully.

 ________________________________

With love and gratitude, 
 Dr. Jessica

What is Tonal Chiropractic?

Part 2:

In part 1, we covered: what is tone? How does it influence health? What controls the tone of your biology?

Essentially, poor tone means poorer expression of health,

Our physical structure may show imbalances,

our body systems may experience dysfunction,

our mental/emotional state may be poor, etc. 

What changes the tone of your biology?

When our nervous system experiences what we perceive as stress, this changes the tone of our biology depending on whether we integrate that experience or not. 

For example, let's say you twisted your knee skiing. If with time and healing your body integrated that stress the next time you go skiing you will respond differently with learned movements, muscles and ligaments that will help prevent injury. A body that did not integrate this experience may hold tremendous fear even thinking about skiing and could even increase the likelihood of re-injuring themselves.

The body that has not integrated the experience holds tonal/tensional patterns keeping that person in the frequency of the experience. Our nervous system does not know the difference between the past, present or future and will run patterns of stress until they are integrated - kind of like an agitating noise in the background of your life continuing to influence your mind, body, and soul. This stress could be physical like the example, or it could be mental, emotional or chemical and as long as it remains unintegrated, it’s changing the tone of your body, the response of your nervous system and your overall expression of health. Unintegrated stress can show up in many ways, like overwhelm, anxiety, depression, aches/pains, PTSD, irritability, poor posture, and other symptoms. 

What is a tonal adjustment?

Gentle specific contacts into the areas where tone is not optimal, and patterns of tension are stored, stimulate the nervous system to reprocess and reintegrate that stress so that our system grows and moves beyond it.

As the body begins to rebalance tone and create homeostasis via the nervous system our body is able to better communicate. With proper communication our bodies are able to do what they are designed to do, which is heal, repair, regenerate and continuously evolve and express optimal health and lives.

When greater levels of homeostasis AKA balance are restored, symptoms often disappear as a side effect of a better tone in your biology. 

Our sessions are called Neural Integration sessions, which is just a fancy word describing that process above. 

Simply stated, an optimal life starts with optimal health, and it begins within!

Who does it help?

Many ages and stages of life can benefit from tonal chiropractic care. First of all, the sessions use gentle and energetic light touches that produce noticeable changes in tone in your biology, and are very friendly to most bodies.

We all experience stressors, from children all the way to grown adults. For example kids may experience birth trauma, falls, stress from school. Young adults may have a lot of personal and professional stressors to manage. Older adults have more life experience, and have most likely experienced more transitions, loss, sickness, etc along their life's journey. Anyone can be subject to stressors in their life, if they're showing symptoms or signs of imbalance they may benefit from an assessment of their tone and support processing the stress they've experienced. 

Sound like anyone you know?

We'd love to help. 

 Click Here to Schedule an Appointment 

__________________________________

“True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are in balance. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.”

__________________________________

With love and gratitude, 

 Dr. Jessica