Multi-Dimensional Mastery - June 2015 - Santa Fe

Our Wounds are our Medicine

By Dr. Judy Scher

 

Your body holds your life’s secrets: every time you’ve been hurt, traumatized, overwhelmed, your body remembers.  It remembers these wounds not in words but in tension patterns. The body remembers the reaction to the trauma or wounding and the energy state you were in when the stressful event occurred.  

 

This is key. Your energy state, whether low, neutral, or high will determine how you are able to cope with (or transform) your experience. If you were in a low energy state, where it felt like all you could do was survive, then you will perceive the event as traumatic. If you were in a resourceful energy state, then you might perceive the event as an opportunity. Your body assesses if it has enough energy to process the information of a stressful event. If the body doesn’t have enough energy to be present with whatever is happening, it will wall off the energy in a short-term solution of protection.  

 

To be present with what is happening means to be able to experience the entirety of the stressful event, so that whatever you need to feel is felt. Emotions must be felt in order to create a behavior change. Energy in motion is E-motion and it’s important to be able to respond rapidly. If you are not able to respond authentically to e-motion, the energy is not resolved and therefore will be stored until you can be present with it.

 

Ideally, if a stressful event occurs and you can be present with all the feelings and energies it creates, the e-motion passes through and has no need to be bound up or held in your body. For example, if the event triggers the e-motion of anger and you are present with it, you might say, “I feel angry -- perhaps I need to confront a person for resolution or I need to go for a run to gain perspective.” This is the behavior change required by the energy.

 

When you don’t have the resources to feel everything you need to feel in the moment, the energy becomes walled off.  Walling off the energy is a physical phenomenon as well as emotional. The muscles of your neck, back and hips can contract. Your head may come forward and get locked into that position. The small ligaments and muscles in front of your vertebral column may tense, creating rigidity in your spine; the curves of your spine become compromised and your breathing becomes shallow. This all happens in an effort to keep you protected in a time when you can’t process your experience. Over time, without resolution, this state leads to chronic and debilitating conditions. You know that you have bound energy when you feel tightness in your muscles, your posture is compromised, you’re fatigued, your head is positioned forward (defense posture), or when you can’t seem to recover from a condition. In this state, your body is not able to communicate between your muscles, vertebral column and spinal cord, which in a healthy response has a synergistic and cooperative relationship in helping you respond successfully and move energy effectively through your spine and body.

 

Our wounds are our medicine, the disease is the cure. You don’t heal from cancer, you heal through it; you don’t heal from migraines, asthma, irritable bowel, sciatica, chronic fatigue, cardio-vascular disease, anxiety, depression, you heal through those things. In order to heal ‘through’ you need energy. When your body is challenged with a disease, trauma or chronic illness, it looks for any available energy to heal. If there is not enough energy, the body shuts down functions, downgrades your life experience. This wisdom allows the body to survive -- a great short-term strategy, but in the long term it has a high cost.  

 

Where do we get this essential energy we need to heal? One very significant way is the energy that is stored in our body from our wounds, in our musculature, bones, ligaments, which is called BOUND energy. This bound energy, the tension patterns from old traumas, is what can be liberated and utilized to help you heal. A powerful way to access bound energy for transformation is to be present in your body with your experience.  

 

The moment you are truly present, the body releases the bound up energy. And when you are present with the truth that your body shares with you, you can receive its wisdom, become more whole and heal.