This episode has been inspired by my own process of moving from stuckness + fear into action and loving self connection. It seems like wherever I am in my process, these principles are essential for change, noticing, curiosity, and consent. Recovery from neuroplastic symptoms is a dance of intimacy, intimacy with ourselves. And being on board with doing this work takes bravery, stubborness in the best way, stubborn for our future selves. And it also takes getting into the heart of love. In this podcast I share some ideas I've been using for myself to help shift my physical and emotional energy. I imagine there's at least one idea I offer here that might inspire you. I have openings in my schedule for new clients. Have you wanted a coach to ride alongside you on your healing journey? Do you hate the words, healing journey? No problem, I can help you find just the right way for you to conceptualize these ideas and move you forward in your unique to you process. I'm kind of like one of those sleep mattress number beds, soft when you want and more firm when you need. Book a free curiosity call and let's talk.
This episode has been inspired by my own process of moving from stuckness + fear into action and loving self connection. It seems like wherever I am in my process, these principles are essential for change, noticing, curiosity, and consent. Recovery from neuroplastic symptoms is a dance of intimacy, intimacy with ourselves. And being on board with doing this work takes bravery, stubborness in the best way, stubborn for our future selves. And it also takes getting into the heart of love.
In this podcast I share some ideas I've been using for myself to help shift my physical and emotional energy. I imagine there's at least one idea I offer here that might inspire you.
I have openings in my schedule for new clients. Have you wanted a coach to ride alongside you on your healing journey? Do you hate the words, healing journey? No problem, I can help you find just the right way for you to conceptualize these ideas and move you forward in your unique to you process. I'm kind of like one of those sleep mattress number beds, soft when you want and more firm when you need. Book a free curiosity call and let's talk.
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Curiosity Cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker hypnotist, trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder. Fat human on planet Earth. Here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity, so you can feel more, better, more of the time in the body you have today, and build the rich full life that you want to live.
[00:00:39] A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey. But always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:56] Hello, my feelers and healers. This is Deb with the Curiosity Cure Podcast and I hope that you have been enjoying the amazing interviews that I've been showcasing on the podcast recently, and if you have not listened to them, I urge you to go back and listen to them. Listen to these incredible colleagues of mine in pain recovery field, who also share different marginalized identities who share this knowledge of pain reprocessing and also kind of how to be a human in an inhumane world. This is a lot of the focus that I have right now, because that's the world that, I mean, in a lot of ways, that's the world that we're always living in. And the volume dial is turned up and so then that might mean the volume dial is turned up on your inside.
[00:01:57] And so that's what I'd like to talk to today, which is about how to become aware of the volume of fear and becoming aware of our avoidance strategies, and also how to do that gently with curiosity and self-compassion and, and not urgency. Because our ability to meet this moment. Just whatever moment it is.
[00:02:23] Being able to take a breath or tend to our body and our nervous system or be in community and feel resourced, really requires stepping back from a sense of urgency. That can be really hard we've got different mechanisms that are operating at different speeds, and the greatest gift that we can give ourselves is this ability to notice and tend to ourselves and begin to build that muscle of attention and awareness.
[00:02:57] And shift away from the urgency of fixing, knowing that this kind of global process is the process of neuroplasticity and bioplastic. Right? So I, I want you to imagine the end result of doing this internal work. What is it that you would like to be feeling? For me, a lot of this is coming up around, literally around work, around being embodied in my work life. Um, I definitely feel very overwhelmed with confusion and not knowing where I wanna expand into my practice, how I wanna help people. And maybe it's not even a problem to solve. But what I'm noticing is there is this line of fear that I can trace back throughout my life to different moments.
[00:03:56] And when I rest in this present moment, I'm able to actually let those memories come up and start to shift my reactivity to them. I. And that's memory reconsolidation, that's healing. That's this kind of nervous system tending and resourcing that is going to help me create this amazing foundation for my nervous system to take action both currently, like currently, I'm actually recording this podcast, so this is me taking action and taking action in the future.
[00:04:36] Which is being able to take this knowledge, this information, the way that I help people and start to create more ways that we can work together and helping me find my own sense of, clarity, of simplicity, of embodiment in safety with the unknown. So if you look back, I have a podcast about uncertainty and how that affects our soma, our soma is our body. It's both our kind of physical body as well as our energetic body. So when we are stuck in a cycle of having symptoms related to stress, related to the perception, conscious or subconscious, the perception of threat or danger. We feel those things in our bodies that can be felt as pain. It can be felt as a subconscious tension, can be a kind of holding quality, holding our breath, our muscles or our fascia holding itself tightly, a sense of protection. That's the intention. But the result of constantly feeling and holding ourselves in protection actually increases the sense of a lack of safety.
[00:05:59] So in MINDBODY work, the way that I conceptualize it is a dance that there is an invitation to move towards something that feels uncomfortable, either, whether that's a physical activity or a physical movement. It could be sitting in a chair, it could be taking a walk. It could be not taking a medication like in the habitual way, like if it's a medication that you take as needed giving yourself some time to experience a symptom without rushing in and taking a medication to get rid of something. There's a quality to it. So the quality of the curiosity of the moving towards what we want to start to cultivate and evoke is one of kindness. One of maybe even a sense of awe. Of mystery, not in a haunting, threatening, horror movie, quality of mystery.
[00:07:02] But if you're spiritual, there's a quality of the mystery of the universe. There might be the mystery of beauty or the way that we feel when we listen to some music. There is this opportunity to shift our physiological experience with the way that we are paying attention. And so in this work we want to turn towards, and I've had a podcast about avoidance as well, so maybe I just recommend going back and listening to the podcasts and really noticing. What resonates for you? Noticing what makes you wanna avoid something. Like if you're hearing me talk about a way to relate with symptoms, and a big kind of feeling of resistance comes up, that's something to pay attention to.
[00:07:56] That's something to get curious about. So really just getting to know ourselves deeply and to know ourselves through this lens of love of cherishing, cherishing all of these parts of ourselves, our protective parts, our reactive parts, our collapsing parts. You know, really just gently creating habituated process for noticing and what that might look like can be different for everyone.
[00:08:34] I tend to do a lot of things on the fly because my sensitive nature, what I notice is I will run into what feels like a wall, and what a wall really is, is this kind of embodied sense of resistance. And resistance isn't a true story that like, yes, you should resist. It is an opportunity to be like, huh, I wonder what's happening.
[00:09:04] And also just creating space for whatever emotions want to move through and becoming adept, right? Learning to practice just as you might learn to practice an instrument in the beginning it will be slow, it will be frustrating. It will have a lot of negative aspects to it. If we think about it. There's a lot of not knowing, a lot of not being good at things, a lot of frustration with the kind of progress you're making, and yet there's this envisioned outcome of what it will be like when you can play the piano when you can read that piece of music, when your body and your fingers know what to do. The same process happens in sports, right? We run drills, we practice things before we are good at them.
[00:09:56] So this mind body work is no different than any other kinds of work, than any other kinds of creative force, any other kinds of expression. So I want you to just take a moment and gently, if it feels comfortable to close your eyes, I wanna invite you to close your eyes and start to imagine what would be different for you if your symptoms went away, if your reactivity was different, if your sense of safety was increased physically and emotionally, what would be different for you?
[00:10:37] What do you imagine that you would do? What would become available to you? Sometimes when we sit down and have a vision like this, we think, oh yeah, maybe it's gonna become a really big vision, right? I'm gonna do all of these things. I'm gonna create something big and, and I wanna honor that.
[00:10:58] I love a big vision. And also it can be simple. It can mean the difference between the balance of effort and ease. So that even imagining something that you even are doing now, but doing it with more ease, what would that bring to your life? Maybe it's getting up and taking a walk in the mornings.
[00:11:22] What would be different if getting up and taking a walk in the morning was so easy that you didn't have to think about it? That it was your body being on autopilot, that it was a practice that has become so habituated, so loved, so non-conscious that your body was already ahead of you in putting on your shoes and walking you out the door.
[00:11:47] There's so much to unpack in all of these things. We always have a sense of mixed desires. There is these ideas of things that we should be doing in order to be a good person, in order to be a healthy, quote unquote healthy person and underneath those shoulds and those social expectations, there is still you a human being who has a desire, who has multiple desires, and sometimes what's difficult is how do we know what we want outside of everything that we've been told that we should want.
[00:12:29] And that process only kind of reveals itself through making contact with those thoughts, those feelings, those actions, and really then tapping into the body and noticing what arises. And there's the difficulty with conveying this work is we want it to be as prescriptive as a literal prescription, take this medication three times a day, and then you'll feel better or do this thing x number of times, and then you'll get this result.
[00:13:03] And there's a, there is a prescription, but it's also personal. It's personal to you because the way that our mind and body work together is personal because it's steeped in meaning, and it's steeped in this sense of you, this uniqueness of you, this incredible being of who you are and everything that you've ever been through.
[00:13:28] And your relationship to it and the meaning that you place on it. And so of course you are unique and it is personal, and then there's a global quality to this work that everybody has a nervous system, everybody has a body, everybody has a conscious mind, everybody has a subconscious. There are all these things that are happening under the hood for everyone, and our access point to moving inward safely can be different for different people.
[00:14:02] In my previous episode with Vanessa Blackstone, she talks about, of course, you feel like you are uniquely broken or uniquely affected by the pain that you're experiencing, and I, I really loved how she languaged that because she really validated that feeling that can happen when you are in pain or when you are suffering, how it can create a feeling of isolation and solitude and really being alone. We are alone and yet not alone. This is where having a guide can be incredibly helpful. Having somebody who's outside of you being able to show you, to mirror to you, not because you are doing it wrong, but because we can't always see what we're doing when we're in the middle of experiencing it until you become adept at noticing. Until you become much more aware of catching it in the moment, noticing what are the thoughts I'm thinking? What are the feelings that I'm having? What are the sensations arising in my body? What am I responding to?
[00:15:15] We all have different sensory experiences, like different sensory thresholds and some people's sensory thresholds are very sensitive, are set to be highly tuned to the world around you. And some people's sensory settings are lower. And so that means like certain things don't affect you as much.
[00:15:39] There's a way in which using MINDBODY skills, awareness, hypnosis, different things that we can have more agency and control over our own settings. But what's important in the exploration is to do it with consent. Consent with yourself. Because when we just try to force change, there is an equal pushback.
[00:16:06] There's a force that pushes back because not everyone, not all the parts of us are on board. We can't override these self-protective mechanisms just through will. Just through overpowering. We need to make contact. We need to be in connection with, we need to soften, get curious, have conversations, bring along different parts of us. Because some of those self-protective mechanisms formed when we were younger and are still operating today, so, right. It's like being inhabited by lots of different parts of you. This is the idea behind IFS or parts work, that are different ages and different stages and have had different strategies that have worked or been effective.
[00:16:59] And to unlearn those strategies, to let them go really requires being in contact with them and curiously checking in and being like where did I learn this? When did this come from? And being able to honor and say thank you to those mechanisms of survival. Then from this adult place, from this place of awareness and knowledge, create that corrective experience, create that ability to let go of that strategy because we're making a new one.
[00:17:36] We're making a new, updated, more effective strategy of survival and of creating safety. And if safety is not a word that resonates with you, it can be the idea of not dangerous, right? We want to move into action believing that these actions are not dangerous and. You know, there's a lot of different levels that can be explored, right?
[00:18:05] We have the actual physical level of doing the physical activity. We have the emotional level, and we have the community level, right? What, what does this mean about who I think I am? What parts of me do I share with other people? How safe or dangerous does that feel? What am I creating to stay connected with others?
[00:18:28] And how is that serving me or not serving me? Right? So there's a million questions. So I think MINDBODY work leads us inward into curiosity, into a sense of becoming safe with that inner exploration. Also unlearning, like holding ourselves and moving past these repeated, unhelpful, learned conditioned responses that we've had around pain and you know, and celebrating them, right?
[00:18:57] Like any strategy that we've had to avoid pain, really deserve celebration before dismantling it. Celebration, inquiry and consent are really important in this work. So I want you, again, if it feels comfortable to close your eyes when you're listening to this, just pick one thing. Imagine one thing that you would love to be different in your life, whether that's how you feel when you wake up in the morning, the kind of internal dialogue or the even external dialogue that you have about yourself when you first wake up in the morning, whether that's like how you respond to stress, what you notice around symptoms, what you believe about yourself, what's possible for you in terms of feeling better. So I want you to take a moment and there might be some feelings that arise when you do that, and that is okay. Of course you will have feelings that arise when you think about changing something that even though you don't like it has been with you for a long time.
[00:20:08] Even that change that may feel unimaginable, the first response might be fear. The first response might be tears. And I just want to invite you to notice what it might be like to imagine that change. And maybe even start to imagine the smallest step towards that change. And sometimes it can be as simple as catching yourself when you're saying disparaging things about yourself, what might it be like? How will your life be different if that voice is not the loudest, most prominent voice in your head? What if there is a softer, loving version of you that's already there. That's just waiting to be the voice that meets you in those moments of failure, in those moments of disappointment, in those moments of this thing, whatever it is, isn't working right? What if that softer voice is the one that speaks the loudest? That is for me the point of mind body work. It is to create this change on all of these different levels and being able to give you the skills to continue that process throughout your life. Because as Nicole Sachs says, there is no cure for the human condition.
[00:21:39] Right? To be human means to feel things pleasant and unpleasant. High arousal, low arousal. It also means to have emotions. There's a certain quality of vitality that can feel both exciting and anxiety producing and feeling fear often means that we are moving towards a desire. We are moving ourselves towards something that we want so much.
[00:22:13] The answer isn't to want less. The answer is to want while creating this container of safety, so that we can feel more safe with more clarity, feel more safe asking for help, reaching out to others, being in connection. And we can be free to fail. Because if we don't allow ourselves the freedom to fail, then we're always gonna hedge our bets on trying to meet our desires, which doesn't mean go full force at all times.
[00:22:47] And just like, woo, go full on chaos, means learning how to titrate. Means learning how to notice, but also not squashing down a desire just because we might not know today how it will unfold. What I do know in reflecting on my life and the course that my life has taken is, so many times when I started something, I had no idea how it was gonna turn out.
[00:23:15] I had an idea in my head, and so much of the time it was different. The results were different. Sometimes the results led me to amazing things that I never could have imagined, never could have preplanned. I didn't know that I was gonna open a clothing store. That was nothing that was ever in my imagined trajectory when I was a child.
[00:23:39] I didn't know that I would become a massage therapist and that that was something that I would absolutely love. And then I didn't know that suddenly, dramatically that would all go away. Like I couldn't pre know any of those things. And then what I figured out how to do is how to transition into doing other work that I also equally love and I feel like I'm on the verge of another transition while it's still, I think the same work, there's a yearning I have for coming back to some kind of in-person experience. I don't right now know what that is. I'm trying to listen to that yearning with curiosity and the message that I'm getting from my nervous system is like, whatever you do, could we just do it a little bit slowly.
[00:24:27] So I'm gonna give myself a long runway, but really noticing that I have a desire and what is the point of being alive if we're not in our own curiosities, imagining futures for ourselves and for our families and for our communities and for our friends.
[00:24:47] If we are not out here, in our beautiful imaginations, even if we know that what we want to create may or may not come to fruition, but we can't just sit around and let other people tell us what we're allowed to have and the smallness of what we can expect. Because as we know in this world there's a lot of people who don't want a lot of us to exist at all. So I think we really owe it to ourselves to develop a really beautiful relationship with our imagination. I just read somebody's quote and I can't tell you where I found it from, but it was online somewhere. Somebody said, I want to have people start to imagine fiction differently where, somebody would say the definition of fiction is that something that is not real or fake. Versus, wanting to think of fiction as learning through imagination versus nonfiction, which could be learning through facts. So I want us to learn through our imagination and learn through creating these corrective experiences, leaning into what we think we know is true about our symptoms and imagine different futures and learn, then we're teaching our brain literally what to notice.
[00:26:12] I have a whole podcast about the Bader Meinhof effect and what we do with our brains when we are using our attention like a tool. So using our imagination is another piece of that. And I'll just leave you with this little thing. I've decided that I am imagining myself running. I don't know whether or not I will be running at all, but I decided that I actually wanna imagine myself running.
[00:26:39] Because there's a quality about running that I want to embody. I watched a ,video a digitized video of myself as a child. And I was at a cousin's club hangout. And so I was with my family and I was running around all over the place. Maybe we're playing catch or tag. There was actual evidence of me running. It touched me deeply. It also felt shocking, like, oh, right. I had a body that used to run freely and whether or not I have a body that wants to run, or even if I have a self that wants to run, I want to get in touch with that run heart, 'cause what running is is like you just go. It's that short moment between being still and taking action. So it's that ability to launch yourself with that quality of freedom. I've only been doing this two days, but it's been really interesting, when I'm laying in bed in the morning, I have imagined myself running. Not imagine myself as an adult trying to learn how to run because that's different, just me now in my imagination running.
[00:28:00] And what I noticed the first time is that I had this wild increase in symptoms and my body, my, all of a sudden, parts of me felt tight. Uh, my head started throbbing. There was a, a reaction. And I was laying in bed. I was not doing anything, so it was so interesting. I had a reaction and I just kept with it, and I kept bringing myself back to that feeling of freedom of running and just imagining that that feeling of freedom was something that I was feeling Then.
[00:28:39] And the symptoms abated. And I got this kind of all over body tingly feeling, and I did it again this morning. I was a little distracted, I mean, also, here's the thing, not expecting the same thing to happen is really important when you're practicing. But I still felt kind of an energy flowing into me, and that's what I'm gonna keep practicing with for a little bit because I'm so curious to see what the results might be. And yeah, my body's been feeling pretty good like even doing some weightlifting and squatting at the gym. Uh, and my legs were sore. And then I noticed this morning after having done my running in my mind felt better.
[00:29:24] Felt a little less sore and then I jumped up and down on the rebounder. So for me, a lot of what seems to work is both taking action in my imagination, in my mind, body, and then inviting in the action that feels safe to do in my body body. So that's jumping on my rebounder, bouncing on it is a really beautiful and safe for me, contained way to get lymph flow, blood flow, get my calves pumping, moving up and down on my feet. You know, there's this quality of hitting the ground and resisting, but that doesn't feel quite as hard and intense as doing it on the pavement. And it's also fun. So there's this shift that happens in like the first minute, the first 30 seconds, there's a lightness and a quality of aliveness that. Literally I feel shift. It's like somebody's turning a dimmer switch up and all of a sudden my body feels alive in a way that I feel really so grateful for. And maybe it is that same feeling that I had when I was a kid running around.
[00:30:37] Right? So it's this idea of revivification. We're revivifying the feeling, even though maybe the activity is different. What I do feel is more potential, more lightness, more self connection, more possibility, more promise of this imagined running. And maybe be it will turn into running and maybe it won't turn into running.
[00:31:02] Or maybe if I have to run for a bus, my body will be like, yeah, I know how to do this. We've been practicing running every day, so I'm not gonna worry about it because I don't have a goal around running. I have a goal around feeling the feeling of running, feeling the freedom in running.
[00:31:22] It involves this sense that my body wants to move, and that is a feeling that I have come to cherish. Having moved myself emotionally from feeling overwhelmed, scared, disappointed, shame, like every negative emotion you can imagine. I have moved myself from those negative emotions to both feeling pretty neutral around moving my body or feeling really joyful around moving my body.
[00:31:53] And, that is a big trajectory of change. So I wanna invite you into believing that this is possible for you. So listen to this podcast again. I offered you some opportunities to notice, to start to imagine, and to get curious about where you are placing your attention. And I wanna invite you both to listen to this podcast, to share it with people, to connect with me, follow me on Instagram, pain coach Deb, and book a curiosity call.
[00:32:25] I have room in my schedule for new clients please, reach out. Start laying your own runway for your change because it's possible. Everything that I do here and share here helps give more evidence that change is possible no matter who you are. Thank you for listening. I hope to connect with you soon. Thank you.