Grounding Guide for Your New Year Resolutions

As I investigate, through Zen Shiatsu and Somatics, the harmony and flow of life and getting curious about how mind, body and environment are woven together, the more I agree with my teachers that it is important, every day, create a “practice of change” to create for ourselves the physical space and the momentum of experiencing “BEING”.

What do I mean by this? The practice of change means giving ourselves the tools to step out of our usual stream of consciousness, to break our habitual behaviours and stress patterns, and re-pattern them.

More and more medical doctors are coming to acknowledge how mind and body affect each other and that some chronic diseases are caused by an overload of the nervous system: diseases such as fibromyalgia, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome and depression, for example.

I feel it is a very important self-help tool: this knowledge that our nervous systems can self-regulate and heal, and therefore we can re-appropriate our own lives, re-pattern our own felt experience and use our bodily sensations to support our brains and our experience of the present. Our brains are plastic and these sensations support the plasticity: this means that as we expand our sense of living in this very moment, we affect our brains positively, and so affect the nervous system, calming and regulating, and flowing back to the brain again in a ‘virtuous cycle’.

Instead of endlessly planning or reacting to life, we can “make memories” by simply BEING. This sounds like it is an impossible goal, but not so! Here’s a simple exercise. Consider how the perception of time passing is so subjective: remember when you were at school, how slowly a lesson might pass…yet breaks would fly by? We can affect our sense of the passing of time consciously. Today as you go about your life, try focusing on the happy moments of the day, expanding your body to welcome sensation as it arrives, whether pleasurable or not, letting it come and go, without fighting it or dwelling on the harsher moments. This then will ripple out, affecting your relationship to yourself, to others and to your life events.

This is re-patterning. It lets us see the bigger picture: who we are and what we are in the stream of life. As a massage therapist, I often encourage my clients to watch and acknowledge the shifts in their bodies “sensation-wise” in the moment, a precious effect as it supports your inner understanding of your vital forces inside.

My own methods include immersing myself in the natural beauty of Hong Kong, enjoying fresh running water, the hiking trails, the birds and scents and the spaces around, and the many hikers who smile back at me, and TRE® ( Tension Release exercises). When my heart beat and breath are in a comfortable state, I physically am experiencing a more optimistic flow of being. See for yourself how inner peace from the body affects the mind, and so forth.
I am interested in your comments, experience and any personal questions you may want to ask, feel free to visit our great team at Balance Health in Central, or email me.

Warm wishes again, Namaste,
Anne Cousin