More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 3 - January 25, 2025
deeply constricted by a free-floating sluggishness and dissatisfaction that made me question the point of everything.
Moving, moving, moving. If you didn’t look too closely you might admire my type A efficiency. But dig in just a little bit, and you’d realize that I was moving my body to distract myself from some deeply rooted unresolved feelings. In the middle of the woods, without a thing to do but read about the lasting effects of childhood trauma, I could no longer escape myself.
I realized that a disconnect among mind, body, and soul can manifest as sickness and dysregulation. I discovered that our genes are not destiny and that in order to change, we have to become consciously aware of our thought patterns and habits, which have been shaped by the people we care for, and have been cared for by, the most.
Healing is a conscious process that can be lived daily through changes in our habits and patterns.
It’s important to understand that the practice of Holistic Psychology is rooted in freedom, choice, and ultimately empowerment.
The familiar feels safe; that is, until we teach ourselves that discomfort is temporary and a necessary part of transformation.
To truly actualize change, you have to engage in the work of making new choices every day. In order to achieve mental wellness, you must begin by being an active daily participant in your own healing.
When we change our relationship with our thoughts, we change the cascade of emotions that floods our bodies and persuades us to act in certain ways, which is a cornerstone of the work in this book.
me the inextricable link between our bodies and minds, as well as the central role of the nervous system in mental wellness, a topic that we will discuss in detail later in this book.
And why did almost all of us feel panicky and unsafe almost all the time?
Addiction and trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Maté, for example, has written extensively about the deep imprints emotional stress leaves on the structure of the brain, causing many common physical and psychological illnesses.
We can and should help heal our bodies and our minds to create wellness for ourselves.
when we believe we are going to get better or feel better, we often do. It’s a testament to the power of the mind to affect the body with mere suggestion.
I geeked out on the new science of polyvagal theory and the role of the nervous system in mental and physical well-being (all things we will tackle later in this book).
Healing is a daily event. You can’t “go somewhere” to be healed; you must go inward to be healed. This means a daily commitment to doing the work. You are responsible for your healing and will
be an active participant in that process. Your level of activity is directly connected to your level of healing. Small and consistent choices are the path to deep transformation.
Future Self Journaling (you can grab the whole guide for free at https://yourholisticpsychologist.com), and created for my own healing. This practice enables you to consciously create new neural pathways in the brain that will lead to new desired thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
The more she wrote about herself in a kinder way, the more she began to notice the constant chatter of negative self-talk running through her head all day long. The more she started to trust herself, the quieter the chatter became and the more her daily acts of self-care and self-love started to extend out into the rest of her life.
and during lunch breaks I would take a walk, attempting to fend off an approaching anxiety attack. I gravitated to the beautiful Romanesque brick Church of Saint Michael the Archangel near the Empire State Building. I would sit outside it, breathing in and out and pleading “God, help me through this.”
For our purposes, however, it means something much more expansive: a state of open awareness that not only allows us to witness ourselves and the life around us but also empowers choice.
You may label these thoughts as “you,” but they are not you. You are the thinker of your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.
There is, however, such a thing as relying too much on our thoughts. When we’re in the “monkey mind,” as the Buddha first described it, we never stop thinking; our thoughts jumble together; there is no space to breathe and examine them.
We all have an intuition, a psychological and spiritual concept that refers to an innate and unconscious wisdom. It’s the evolutionarily driven gut instinct that helped keep us alive throughout human history and still speaks to us; it’s that feeling of the hair on the
back of our neck standing up when we walk down a dark alley alone, it’s the deep belly feeling of distrust we get when we encounter someone we have no logical reason to doubt, it’s that spine tingle we get when we meet someone we know is special. This is your intuitive Self speaking from your soul through your physiology. Typically, as children, we are in touch with this spiritual Self-knowledge and have strong instincts. As we grow older and fall under the influence of others, we tend to become disconnected from our intuition. Our sixth sense gets muddied. It’s not lost, just buried.
Every time we make a choice that is outside of our default programming, our subconscious mind will attempt to pull us back to the familiar by creating mental resistance. Mental resistance can manifest as both mental and physical discomfort. It can take the form of cyclical thoughts, such as I can just do this later or I don’t need to do this at all, or physical symptoms, such as agitation, anxiety, or simply not feeling like “yourself.” This is your subconscious communicating
to you that it is uncomfortable with the new territory of these proposed changes.
For many people, physical movement is useful in honing the attention muscle that is so key to consciousness. Yoga, which is considered a “top-down” practice (meaning that the brain sets the intentions that the body follows), can be an especially powerful means of helping the mind settle into the present moment by focusing our attention as we practice channeling our breath and challenging our body. The attentional control she developed through her yoga practice helped her to begin to take a second before reacting. This helped her create a space for her to begin to consciously witness more fully
what was going on for her. It was from this foundation of consciousness that she would create future change.
The more engaged she became with her yoga practice, the more she started to live in the present moment. She began to switch out of autopilot mode and see a glimmer of herself instead of merely jumping from one feeling to the
next. As she became more present, she was able to pause and witness her thoughts and behaviors for what they were: transitory states that could be managed. Her attention muscle helped her develop more awareness of her thoughts; then she learned how to sit through the discomfort of witnessing them, building a sense of resilience and empowerment. That became a catalyst for her inner transformation.
Research shows that practices like yoga and meditation that help us to focus our attention on the present moment, are especially powerful in restructuring the brain. When new neural pathways are forged, we are able to break free of our default patterns and live more actively in a conscious state.
Other forms of compassion-based meditation (or just closing your eyes and thinking about someone you love) help strengthen an area called the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. All of this work helps to rewire our brain, disrupt our default thought patterns, and wake us up out of our subconscious-driven autopilot.
Witness without judgment. Just observe. The path forward is to learn yourself. Learn how to spend time alone, to sit still, to really hear your intuition and witness your entire Self—even, and especially, the darkest parts you’d most like to keep hidden. There is tremendous freedom in not believing every thought we have and understanding that we are the thinker of our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. Our minds are powerful tools, and if we do not become consciously aware of the disconnection between our authentic Selves and our
thoughts, we give our thoughts too much control in our daily lives.
Our senses allow us to leave the monkey mind and find a deeper connection to the present moment.
If it happened to one of us, it happened to all of us. We were united in a cycle of outrage and anxiety.
The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury.”
As you dive deeper into this work, it is important to keep in mind that sometimes old scars will be opened and an outpouring of feelings will come with the process of healing wounds from childhood. Just remember: this, too, can be a moment of witnessing. Begin to practice being kind to yourself and your loved ones, regardless of what comes up.
If your childhood thoughts or ideas are not “heard,” your mind feels dismissed. If your childhood Self-expression is not “seen,” your soul feels diminished. This lack of acknowledgment can also take the form of your future being spoken for or predetermined before your passions and life’s path can be fully known. Experiences such as these make it hard for us to learn how to trust our inclinations and follow our intuitive needs.
The practice of emotional regulation enables us to remain centered and calm through the various stresses that life brings and return to a physiological baseline.
I found myself very caught off-guard, as my mom rarely if ever showed this degree of emotion, making this outburst destabilizing for us all.
Looking back, the reality was that I was stuck in conditioned patterns that were all coping strategies, or ways to manage and control my inner turmoil.
Lazarus and Folkman outlined adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies. Adaptive coping is an action we take to help us return to feelings of safety, such as facing a problem head-on or redirecting negative thoughts. The key here is being active; adaptive coping requires effort and a conscious acknowledgment of the discomfort. It can be harder to use an adaptive coping strategy when we were not modeled them or taught how to use them.
It was all individual issues with individual treatments. Nothing was connected.
I remember walking into the hardware store, feeling dizzy and thinking about how hot it was under the harsh store lighting.
Stress is more than just a mental state; it is an internal condition that challenges homeostasis, which is a state of physical, emotional, and mental balance. We experience a physiological stress response when our brain perceives that we don’t have adequate resources to survive an obstacle or threat (which is the general state of affairs when it comes to unresolved trauma). Addiction and stress expert Dr. Gabor Maté, who is the author of many books including When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, calls this the “stress-disease connection.”
Normative stress, for example, is a natural part of life: birth, death, marriage, breakups, job loss—these are all part of the human experience. As an adaptive response, we can develop coping strategies to help return us to our psychological and physiological baseline: seeking supportive resources, learning how to self-soothe, and assisting our often stuck nervous systems to return to homeostasis. This process of leaving and then returning to our baseline of balance is called allostasis. It allows us to develop the biological capacity for resilience.
Whereas normative stress helps us grow and adapt, chronic stress—stress that is constant and persistent—wears us down and harms every system in our body.
In cases of chronic stress, our adrenal glands release cortisol and other stress hormones, such as adrenaline, continuously. Stress also activates the body’s immune system, prompting it to become hypervigilant and primed to react at the mere suspicion of trouble.
The impact of stress and trauma on our immune system and brain is so significant that scientists have launched a new field of inquiry into the mind-body connection called psychoneuroimmunology. Inflammation in the brain has been identified in various forms of psychological dysfunction and mental illness—from depression and anxiety to outright psychosis.
