Hello missing piece,

"I've got my nutrition dialed, I am working out regularly, but why I am still not sleeping?"
"I've been practicing meditation, but I can barely sit still, let alone my mind is going a million miles per hour."

So often, we're doing all the right things but missing a central piece of our wellness puzzle, the nervous system.

Your nervous system is quietly working in the background, to keep you safe, using autopilot habits to save energy, and looking for evidence of all you believe is true. 

"The nervous system is the key to unlocking your body's innate healing abilities." - Andrew Weil

"It takes a lot of work to stay well in our modern world." I heard someone share the other day, and I nodded. If we're not intentional about the life and health we are creating, it is very easy to fall into patterns that are unsupportive of our vitality. 

One of the most powerful ways to learn and embody habits and a lifestyle that supports you and your nervous system is in person, where we can co-regulate together. 
 

I hope you'll join us this Thursday at
Creating Coherence: A monthly healing gathering 

We meet Thursday, 6/15
Time: 5:30pm-7pm
To bring: Wear comfortable clothing to move, sit, lie down. Bring a mat or blanket for the ground. Bring a journal. Bring water.
Description: Come gather alongside a small group in a community healing circle in nature to signal deeper levels of peace, safety, and expansion within your nervous system. We will learn from Dr. Jessica (nervous system healing practitioner), we will get into coherent states through movement, breath, healing touch (if consented), introspection, and guided meditation. This monthly gathering is oriented around you deepening your connection to the wisdom and vitality that already resides within you.
Location: Our forest sanctuary location will be shared upon signing up for the class. 

Enter your email & to receive the link to register HERE.
Shelby, of Fe Earth to Body, is co-facilitating, and we are so lucky to be receiving some amazing flower essences handmade for our healing.

Life is an inside-out journey

Have you ever felt overwhelmed, had a pounding headache, or felt deeply frustrated and got yourself into a tailspin trying to identify the cause? Since we're consciously aware of just a fraction of what's going on within our biology (1-5 %, yikes, that's next to nothing!), it's easy to miss the underlying roots (those live deep in our subconscious, the 95-99% we're unaware of) and to point a finger at something or someone outside of ourselves. The more that I have come to understand how we heal, the more I have come back to this concept that life, health, and wellbeing is really an inside-out journey. 

When life feels chaotic or overwhelming, I now take it as an indicator to create more coherence within.
Coherence is a fancy word for how the nervous system fires when it's synchronized & balanced. In this state there is increased harmony between mental, emotional and physiological systems.  “Coherence is the state when the heart, mind and emotions are in energetic alignment and cooperation,” HeartMath Institute Research Director Dr. Rollin McCraty says. “It is a state that builds resiliency – personal energy is accumulated, not wasted – leaving more energy to manifest intentions and harmonious outcomes.” 

So, when I have a headache or feel in a funk, my answer has also become to create more coherence within. When things just aren't working and I'm feeling frustrated or angry, it goes without saying that I need to create more coherence within.

Coherence is a balanced state deep within the nervous system impacting the autonomic and subconscious nervous system, or the 95-99% of your biology (that's a profound impact!), training the entire nervous system to fire more harmoniously. This means creating habits of relaxation, easier processing of stress, deeper levels of connection to your body and intuition, better functioning of organ systems (think digestion, sleep, hormones, etc).

Begin creating coherence today:

• in meditation

• heart coherence exercises

• receiving a healing session at Heart of Life

• walking quietly in nature

• petting a pet or cuddling a loved one

I know you and others in our community are longing for more in-person opportunities to learn and grow together. 

That's why I am inviting thrilled to invite you to:
Creating Coherence: A monthly healing gathering 

Our first gathering: Thursday, 6/15
Time: 5:30pm-7pm
To bring: Wear comfortable clothing to move, sit, lie down. Bring a mat or blanket for the ground. Bring a journal. Bring water.
Description: Come gather alongside a small group in a community healing circle in nature to signal deeper levels of peace, safety, and expansion within your nervous system. We will learn from Dr. Jessica (nervous system healing practitioner), we will get into coherent states through movement, breath, healing touch (if consented), introspection, and guided meditation. This monthly gathering is oriented around you deepening your connection to the wisdom and vitality that already resides within you.
Location: Our location will be announced shortly. 

Be the first know when our sign up is open by entering your email HERE.
Shelby, of Fe Earth to Body, is helping me put this together, and we are so lucky to be receiving some amazing flower essences handmade by her for our gathering.

I've never heard a fitness instructor say this before...

I tried a new workout class last week and heard something I don't think I have ever heard before in a fitness class... the instructor asked:
"Can you move slower?"

My brain said: "What?" 
My nervous system said: *sigh of relief* & "thank you."

I was brought back in time, to all of my high school lacrosse conditioning workouts, it was always about how hard and fast can you go?

Don't get me wrong, there is benefit to this, physiologically on a cardiovascular level and a mental level of surpassing what you believe is possible.

However, so often we're in a rush for one single appointment, it blurs into all that we do, and our whole lives become a rush. Our bodies are not designed to constantly be under this level of pressure and stress. 

When we live this way for weeks, months, and years, we start to create neural firing that believes fast/pressure is better than slow, and rest. This is when our body takes a side step away from healing. It may get stuck in fight, flight, or freeze. Or even having a hard time resting or healing from something you'd normally heal from. 
It does not need to be one OR the other, both speeds can benefit us.

Our bodies need slow and rest to process our days, to integrate, and to heal. 

I invite you to check in with yourself with the following questions:

• Is fast my only measure of success?

• Do I have a hard time slowing down, or resting?

• Is rushing or pushing hard bleeding over into other areas of my life that do not benefit, like time with my children? Or in self care time? 

• How can I see the benefit in the different speeds I move at?

• Can I move slower?

• Can I move slow enough to allow healing and integration to be a natural part of my life?

You may even put pen to paper and see just what comes up when you start to explore these questions and the idea of moving slower. 
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Check out our summer specials for returning & new in-person clients below.
Later this week, I'll be sharing more about an in-person healing circle happening mid-June.Lastly, a sneak peak for you: I am working on my newest online offering behind the scenes: think daily intentional practices to anchor back to yourself, your health, and your purpose. I cannot wait to share more with you soon :)
 ____________________________________________________

With love & gratitude, 
 Dr. Jessica

Is your mood shifting like the weather?

"It's raining again" or "it's so cold here"
Do you ever find yourself in the loop of complaining about the weather?
I have been there, and it's funny how something so out of our control can influence our mood so powerfully.

Now, you have every right to feel a certain way the weather changes - but the weather is just one example of how quickly we can push play on an old pattern in our nervous systems. 

If you feel easily influenced by others, by the weather etc it's as if you are a thermostat that is constantly changing up or down to accommodate everything or everyone around you. If someone's mood is low, you drop lower. If the weather is not conducive to your plans, you drop lower. If someone is agitated, you become agitated too. It can feel exhausting, and hard to be content if you're always reacting to the world around you. 

Now, imagine the freedom you might feel if you could stay steady in your heart no matter the "weather." Imagine you set the tone, and can maintain that level of elevated mood, and energy, rather than be brought up or down by the world around you. 
In that case you'd be like a thermometer holding the temperature, setting the "tone" of the room, rather than the thermostat - constantly shifting. 

If you'd like to be a thermometer more of the time, listen up!

Reacting means you're running old programs in your nervous system. (No shame here, most of us do or will at some point).
One of the quickest and simplest ways to stop an old program from running is to run a new program. 

Here's a simple exercise to help you and your nervous system run the program of pure presence, where you are more connected, which means you can hold your energy, mood, vibration, and intention with ease. 

Pause whatever you are doing. 
Close your eyes, and slowly rub your hands together, really feeling this touch between your hands. 
Tune in to each of your sense, 
What am I smelling right now?
What do I see right now?
What do I hear right now?
What do I taste right now?
Take a few more breaths through your nose, with a slightly longer exhale than inhale.
Bring a smile to your face, and repeat this throughout your day to come back to the present moment. 

This is one stepping stone to help you anchor into your steady heart.
What else can you do to bring you into the present moment?

 ____________________________________________________

With love & gratitude, 
 Dr. Jessica

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