Mind trip follow up

Rowan Sleeping

Rowan runs through her days with wild abandon 

and at night she dreams of running wildly through her days…

I'm ready to do some more psychological self-exploring.  It's been 5 months since my last trip, enough time to fully process and integrate that experience.  I'm left with a strong sense that I was releasing hurtful body memories.  

Some background on body memoire from Psychology Today 8/27/17: ...we could do therapy for years, talk all day, and if we don’t address your body not much will happen for you.  When something traumatic happens, the brain functions differently. 

Anytime that we process information, we form explicit memories and implicit memories. Explicit memories are the factual information, general knowledge, and autobiographical information. Implicit memories are the emotional responses and body sensations—this part doesn’t have to do with fact, but feeling. These two types of memories travel in different pathways in the brain and have to be integrated later to form one unified memory.

In a traumatic situation, your “fight or flight” response gets triggered. Your body senses danger and sends out red alert signals in the form of hormones. Your bloodstream is swimming with chemical messengers that tell you to “get out now!” The primary goal under these circumstances isn’t encoding the memory, but getting you to safety. This is the reason that so many trauma victims have gaps in memory: the attention was focused on getting the body to safety. The symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress, and often anxiety itself, are the same signals that the body sends when you are in danger: your heart beats fast and your breathing races to get oxygen to the muscles to run, your body shuts down extra impulses like hunger and needing to use the restroom, your palms sweat, adrenaline fuels your energy so that you can get out- sound familiar? These are normal responses to stress in the short term. The problem is when you get stuck.

When you get stuck, your amygdala—the primary culprit in the fight or flight response—gets really really sensitive...This part of your brain screams "get out" when It feels that you are in danger. Your brain stops processing and focuses all of its energy on getting you away from danger. The memory doesn’t get fully processed and is fragmented in the brain in chunks of implicit and explicit memories. This is why sometimes a smell, the way a person touches you, or even tone of voice can trigger a trauma victim.

Here’s the problem (and this is important): your body cannot tell the difference between physical and emotional danger...Your brain, the very primal part of your brain involved here, thinks that you are in physical danger, which is why you have the physical symptoms.

We need to address the physical in order to solve the problem. So the issue is twofold: we need to bring the body’s response down, calm down the hormonal messengers who are telling you that you are in danger and then we can work on the mental and emotional aspects. Otherwise, we are setting you up for failure.

So, the next time that you are struggling with healing from your trauma, remind yourself that your body is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. It is protecting you. You just need a little work on recalibrating the alarm system. 

Recalibration, understanding, feeling, clearing, letting go physically, that's what I've been doing and I sense that I've go more work to do in that way.  I've been doing yoga several times a week, meditating and tuning my mindfulness practice towards my physical & psychic body. All to good effect.  I feel better both physically & emotionally.  My range of motion in the leg that had it's knee replaced is way better and almost 100% as good as my other, uninjured knee.  The range of motion of my whole body had significantly improved.  My physical stamina too is much better.  As to my emotional wellbeing, I'm feeling quite well lately.  

Houses - Our mothers might be considered out first houses.  Beings that provided us food, shelter and protection every before we were borne.  Our minds might be considered our second and possibly our most important house, the home that we grew up in might be our third.  Later, dorms, barracks and apartments may have followed on later until finally many of us are fortunate to own our homes but in this case I've always felt that I've never owned any of my homes even the ones I've owned free and clear including one I built myself when I was in my 20s.  All those houses will probably outlive myself, going on to have lives that are completely separate from me.  The one home that I'm the closest to "owning" is that of my mind but the jury is still out at to whether it's truly 100% mine.  I'm still considering that.  My father died from complications related to Alzheimer's disease.  I watched as his very fine mind seemingly dissolved within a healthy body.  Homes, it's probably better to not become too attached to any of them.  

There was something else that happened in that last trip too, something that was something quite as subtle as a mere change perspective.  It took a wile for me to notice.   It happened in my reflections upon the original trip and when the realization finally dawned upon me it felt obvious.  One of the strange feelings that I felt leaving myself during and after that trip was a sense of unworthiness which is an odd thing for me to contemplate as I've felt a sense of self-assuredness most of my life, but there it was.  I didn't believe or credit it at first but then I realized that it was one of my main drivers most of my life.  The thought that I wasn't good enough as I was and that meeting expirations was never enough.  I had to work extra hard no mater what I was working on in order to exceed.  

Circling back to the original topic of self-exploration of my mind, I'm ready to peal back some more layers if posable and continue to explore.  To that end I'm planing on another taking another psychedelically enabled mind-walk at the earliest opportunity.  It's a tough thing to schedule in as it takes up pretty much of a full day to complete.  As my fall to-do list shortens I'll be on the lookout for that preface day...