Empowered Wellness and the Benefits of Having a Wellness Mentor
Guest Blog by Michele Pedersen, Transformational Wellness Mentor & Healing Arts Practitioner
It’s that time of year again! Everyone is declaring their New Year’s resolutions and sincerely wanting some part of their life to be different than it is. Desiring change will not lead to you experiencing sustainable change unless you know how to effectively close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
First and foremost, for clarity’s sake, I’d like to offer my definition of wellness. Wellness is a state of wellbeing that is cultivated by optimizing the areas of your life that are foundational to your sense of “wellness.” Living from a conscious state of wellbeing may prevent disease, lessen disease, or alleviate it altogether.
One of the most important decisions you can make toward cultivating a lifestyle that promotes a state of wellbeing is choosing to adopt an empowered mindset and vocabulary. The purpose of becoming aware of your recurring thoughts and word choices is that repetitive habits create pathways in your brain that are associated with certain feeling states.
Emotions create physiological/chemical responses in your brain and body that affect your nervous system. Your nervous system is responsible for keeping you safe and alive. If, for example, you have a habit of worrying or ruminating about all the things that could go wrong, your nervous system is living in a chronic state of fight, flight or freeze. Your muscles become tight, your body becomes inflamed and you may experience chronic pain, insomnia, digestive disturbances and eventually mental and physical imbalances, referred to as disease. The majority of this is preventable.
Maybe in your quest for better wellness you’ve heard about epigenetics, which is when your environment (inner and outer), lifestyle, mindset and nutritional habits turn certain genes on that are associated with genetic predispositions you were born with. Once these genes are turned on, it is a lot harder to address and turn them off. It is more empowering to make lifestyle and nutritional choices that keep these genes from expressing themselves in the first place.
Choosing different thoughts and behaviors is easier said than done because not only are certain genetic predispositions passed down, but patterns of thinking and behavior can be inherited, as well. Mental and emotional patterning tend to reside just outside of your awareness, while dictating the majority of decisions and experiences you have. This tendency is wonderful if you have supportive, loving thoughts and self-concepts, but the majority of your decisions come from your subconscious mind, where unsupportive, fear-based and self-destructive thoughts can reside, leading you down roads of self- destruction, lack of fulfillment and disease. All of this, again, is your nervous system’s way of protecting you.
How do you become aware of the thoughts that are living in your subconscious mind so you can break this feedback loop?
There are many effective mindfulness tools and therapeutic approaches available that will support you in accessing your subconscious mind and thoughts, so you can begin to live a more empowered and intentional life, one where you feel vibrant and fulfilled.
Hypnotherapy, Theta healing, Interfamily Systems and Biofield Tuning are just a few I’ve delved into and have had great success utilizing with my wellness coaching clients. The human psyche is very complex and some approaches are more effective for certain individuals than others, and during different seasons in your wellness exploration.
Hypnotherapy is something I have studied through HypnoBirthing and have seen great success with. This approach serves the purpose of supporting pregnant women in having calmer, more peaceful, confident and empowered birthing experiences.
During sessions, the pregnant woman is gently guided into a deeply relaxed mental and physical state. Certain breath patterns, visualizations and relaxation exercises are taught and practiced throughout her pregnancy.
Unsupportive thinking patterns around birth, pain, being capable of navigating labor and becoming parents are addressed. Unconscious fears and beliefs are brought into conscious awareness so they can be reconciled and more supportive, and empowering beliefs can be adopted in their place.
Women who have taken these classes and practice the tools regularly have easier and calmer births, babies and adjustments to postpartum parenthood. I find that this approach works very effectively in my wellness coaching sessions with women who are not pregnant or also for women who want to conceive.
Theta Healing, another wellness tool, teaches certain meditation techniques that help you go into a deeply relaxed state and access areas in your consciousness that have stored certain beliefs, those that are associated with unwanted life experiences and habits. These areas can be located in your core, adopted from the collective consciousness and/or history, and can be genetic or inherited. Locating these beliefs and dissolving them leads to changes in perception and experiences, and may release you from longstanding patterns and disease.
The InterFamily Systems Approach addresses “parts” of the whole integrated “Self” that disassociated or fragmented as a result of experiencing unprocessed trauma. It is the psyche’s brilliant way of protecting you and helping you to cope with the trauma event or events. Accessing these parts from your adult-self and forming a dialogue for the purpose of re-instilling a sense of safety and trust with each of these parts that live in your subconscious is often necessary when longstanding patterns are keeping you from making progress or experiencing a sense of fulfillment in your life and relationships.
Biofield Tuning is an approach based on the understanding that we have an electromagnetic field around us. This field is a consciousness field and carries memory. It is an extension of our physical body, which includes our cells and cell memory. The field that surrounds us, along with our physical cells and tissues are thought to contain memories from conception (or prior) onward. Some of these memories are associated with unprocessed traumatic events and they remain ‘frozen” as a result.
Everything emits a frequency. All of your thoughts and emotions emit a frequency. Frozen trauma emits a frequency, which is out of resonance with your natural state or flow. It is like a discordant note playing in a symphony. The biofield or the bio-magnetic consciousness field that surrounds you, can be tuned using specific tuning forks or sound bowls that emit certain frequencies. This vibration begins to “unfreeze” the trauma and allows your field to reset itself or “retune” to its original energetic blueprint.
When I have used this tool and process with my wellness coaching clients, they often have images or memories of forgotten events or just a sense of feeling lighter, freer and connected with themselves in a way they can’t recall having experienced before or in a very long time. I refer to this as a “homecoming.” The vibrations of stuck grief and trauma can be very dense and heavy, and once they are vibrating at a different frequency it can lead to the feeling of lightness and release.
These are just a few of the approaches I have successfully taught my clients in our wellness sessions in order to amplify and accelerate their progress. It is my experience that if we only focus on nutrition or changing thought patterns, without treating the underlying causes, we don’t get very far.
You are a whole person and made up of many moving and integral parts. All of these aspects need to be addressed in order for you to experience more sustainable life changes, rather than temporary fixes.
Incremental changes made consistently over time that do not stretch you too far outside of your comfort zone too quickly are most effective. I have found that it is important to cultivate trust and safety and to continue to re-instill a sense of trust and safety in your nervous system in order to make sustainable progress, rather than attempt to make too much progress too quickly. This can lead to overwhelm, discouragement, sabotage and shutdown or “freeze,” which is counterproductive to making real progress on your healing journey.
It is important to clarify that healing is not a “quick fix”. Everyone has a unique blueprint and a unique history. Healing is not a “one-size-fits-all" approach. Healing in my definition is guiding the mind, heart, body and soul back to homebase; the remembrance of your essential wholeness, where wellbeing lives and breathes. It is important to honor your organic pace, which will support your nervous system to release, restore and assimilate new information and feedback with a sense of safety, as your anchor during this process.
When I work with you, I work with your body, emotional patterns, thought patterns, subconscious, inner “parts,” meridians, chakras, nervous system and your electromagnetic field. I start where you are, we set an intention for the session, and I follow the path that opens up before me as I lay hands on you.
The majority of the clients I work with experience a very immediate and profound shift in their emotional state, express a feeling of lightness that is difficult to describe, a sense of connection with themselves (like being plugged back in), and a feeling of being at peace and grounded in their body. Some clients need time to process and integrate their experience over time.
All of these approaches support your nervous system in resetting and restoring equilibrium. When this happens, your entire system (mind, heart, body and soul) benefits!