Whole Body Revolution

Rewire yourself for greater health, happiness and success.

Pain Relief

41 Pain Relief

They’re Called Feelings Because We Feel Them…Like, Physically.

One of the best things you can do to calm your frazzled nervous system is to start to notice the felt sense of feelings.⁠
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Usually when people talk about emotions, they’re intellectualizing them — not actually experiencing them.⁠
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How do you know what you’re feeling?⁠
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How do you know that you are angry or sad or happy?⁠
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I’ll tell you what, it’s not in your brain.⁠
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Your body tells you what emotions you are having and then your brain labels them.⁠
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But often we get stuck in PAST emotions that we never fully processed, or we get triggered by current circumstances that cause us to have knee jerk reactions based on past experiences.⁠
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Neither is ideal because neither is living in the present moment.⁠
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You can only experience sensations in the here and now. ⁠
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Tapping into felt sense gives your body a way to discharge old, blocked stress, trauma and emotions that have become part of our conditioned responses.⁠
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Most people haven’t spent a lot of time consciously noticing their bodies, save for when they’re in too much pain or discomfort to ignore.⁠
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Learning to pay attention to felt sense — the physical sensations of an emotion — takes a little practice but it’s not difficult or complicated.⁠
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Simply put your attention on an area of your body that seems connected to the emotions you’re experiencing.⁠
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And describe what you feel.⁠
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Is it heavy or light?

Big or small?

Sharp and angular or round and smooth?

Does it have a color?

Temperature?

Does it feel pleasant or unpleasant?⁠
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That’s seriously all it takes to start tugging apart the threads of stress and trauma that live in your body and hold you back from being the person that you truly want to be.⁠
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If you’d like to learn more about this, I’ll be sharing more about tools like in a FREE class this Friday:

How To Release The Emotional Roots Of Pain And Tension In Your Body

You’ll learn the three core skills required to finally let go of old traumas, blocked emotions and limiting beliefs that are holding you back by causing pain and tension and zapping your energy.

Register here>> 

(Yes, it’s free.)

25 Pain Relief

Your Mind Is Intangible. But Your Brain Is Physical.

Here’s a PSA for you:

Your brain is embodied!!! Like, it’s not a walnut in a shell embodied…the tendrils of your neural networks entwine themselves with your muscles, tendons, organs and bones.⁠
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Never forget that your body is your unconscious mind!⁠
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And when you move your body, you move your brain, too.⁠
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You create new neural connections, new possibilities, connect new concepts and ideas.⁠
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You rewire old programming that’s not working — that’s causing you pain and tension and stress and anxiety.⁠
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Programming that keeps you STUCK. Behaving in the same way you always did.⁠
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(And hurting in the same way you always have, too.)⁠
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FRUSTRATED that no matter how hard you work and sweat or how much you learn you can’t break through your own internal limits.⁠
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BUT YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LIVE A LIMITED LIFE!⁠
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Not only can you shake off the pain and strain…⁠
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You can also use three key embodied tools to reprogram yourself for greater health, happiness and success from the cellular level on up.⁠
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Because thinking it is one thing. Actually embodying a concept in your life is a whole ‘nother.⁠
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Curious what these three foundational keys are for brain-body transformation? I’m going to be teaching a *free* class on them coming up soon.⁠
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If you head on over to The Nerve Method and get yourself on the waitlist, you’ll be first in line to sign up when it’s announced.⁠
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19 Pain Relief

How to Avoid Spine Surgery

Do you want that ache in your back to just up and disappear?

I’ll tell you how to make it go away…but first, did you know that only about 20-30% of back surgeries succeed?

That means that 70-80% of them FAIL leaving patients the same OR WORSE than they were before the operation. And according to spine surgeon David Hanscom, there is often no direct correlation between physical dysfunction and pain levels.

So, what do we do about that?

Well the good news is that non-surgical, drug-free approaches which focus on breaking neural habits are extremely effective. People who use this approach not only get rid of their pain, they are often happier and find life more fulfilling afterward.

But there is a catch. You have to be willing to take charge of your own healing process. You cannot outsource this to a doctor or a physical therapist or massage practitioner.

You have to be willing to do the work to become someone new. Because you can’t be the same old person and hope your pain will go away. You have to rewire your nervous system, and that requires change.

If this is a challenge you’re up for, I’ll be opening the doors to my signature program that helps you to heal your body and move pain free again shortly.

Head on over here to put your name on the waitlist so you can get notified as soon as doors open.

17 Pain Relief

Muscle Tension Is The Physical Manifestation Of Your Thoughts

Do emotions get stored in the body? Absolutely they do!

But it’s not just some weird wacky woo-woo energy spiritual phenomenon.

The fact is, every thought or feeling you experience has a corresponding physical reaction.

You cannot separate the two. Think about something stressful and your body tenses. Think about something pleasant and your muscles relax.

Your brain is a giant knot of neural wiring. And all those wires connect to your muscles. So tension in your brain means tension in your muscles, too.

But when you release stored stress and muscle tension in your body, you also release it in you brain.

Yes, that’s right. You can change your thoughts by changing your body. And since your thoughts determine your reality, you can also change your whole damn life.

This is what I do with folks in my 10 week transformational program. We release pain, tension and stress that stems from old trauma and blocked emotions in your muscles.

Quite literally, we move your mind by moving your body.

Curious? Want to check it out? Click here to get your beautiful self on the waitlist.

Enrollment opens in December. Don’t miss out.

3 Healthy Aging

Why Stretching is Probably Overrated

If you have tight muscles, you probably think you should stretch more.

It makes sense. Stretching helps your muscles to relax, increases flexibility and eases pain.

Right?

Err, maybe not.

Recently I had a question about why I’m not very pro-stretching. And it’s true. I talk a lot about the fact that stretching alone won’t necessarily improve mobility or relieve musculoskeletal aches and pains.

And that’s true even if you’re in a happy mindset, filled to the brim with self-love and compassion.

So if mechanically stretching your muscles isn’t helpful, why do we see expert advice everywhere to “stretch more” when we’re tight and achy?

The sad truth is…

Merely stretching won’t help much, and here’s why.

Related:

Why Stretching Doesn’t Actually Work

The reason I talk a lot about stretching not being as beneficial as we tend to think is that on the whole, we’re pretty hyper-focused on what we’re doing.

Not so much on how we’re doing it.

Obviously what you’re doing is important. But it only accounts for about 20% of your results. Eighty percent of it is where your attention is at.

We’re kind of stuck in this model of Cartesian duality where the mind is separate from the body and, though they’re connected, on some level we think of them as being able to function independently.

Your muscles are unintelligent lumps of meat that just need to be pulled longer. (#sonottrue)

In reality, tension is a function of consciousness. If we put you under anesthesia, you’d be a floppy yogi and we could tuck your foot behind your head.

But wake up, and all that tension comes right back.

Tension is in your brain — not in a too-short rubber band of a muscle.

If your operating system is malfunctioning on your computer, you don’t take the hard drive out. You reboot the operating system.

Same for your muscles.

Mental focus and attention are fundamentally important to movement and mobility practices — whether stretching or otherwise.

In fact, long term neuromotor maps in your brain (your movement patterns) don’t shift without some level of awareness.

Experiencing Movement Is As Important As Doing It

Doing the stretch is not the same as experiencing it.

I’m sorry, what?

I know, heady stuff…

Listen, most of us have been taught to largely ignore signs and signals from our bodies. Even when pressure — from a foam roller, say, or a vigorous massage — is aggressive and painful, many people when asked will say it’s “fine.”

If pressed, a few may admit their muscles feel sore. But they didn’t think that was relevant.

Why?

Because we’re taught that pain is productive. That without it we’re not getting anything done.

(Don’t even get me started on the larger cultural constructs related to this line of thinking…AHEM toxic work culture.)

We are taught to ignore what our bodies tell us. Therefore, we live up in our heads, narrating our experiences rather than feeling them.

And when I say feeling, I don’t mean emotionally. I mean sensorily. As in, the sensation of an experience.

What your muscles feel. Not what your brain thinks about what your muscles feel.

Most of us skip right over the former and go directly to the latter.

When you pay attention to what your body feels during a stretch or movement, you’re giving your brain a surge of new information that it can use to re-map movement patterns in new and more efficient ways.

But that physical experience has to be there. You can’t just intellectualize it.

You gotta feel it.

Sensory Experience And Self-Locating: Why It’s Important

It’s twelve p.m. — do you know where your body is?

Umm, hopefully with you. If you are reading this without a body, you are officially a ghost and you should email me because I have questions. So many questions.

Okay, but in all seriousness, most of us are sort of “missing” from our bodies. Like, there’s a buffer between the you that you identify with and your physical self.

Many fitness practices focus on overriding your body through willpower and aggressive approaches that basically subjugate your body. The mentality seems to be: “You will behave.”

This aggressive approach to stretching creates a neural tug-o-war where you’re fighting against your own muscle guarding. When you stretch aggressively, you’re trying to override your body’s defense systems.

And your body is no dummy. It doesn’t want to give up so easily.

But if you give your nervous system new input by focusing your attention and awareness on what you’re doing, it allows your brain to get a better idea of where you are in space and adjust tension patterns accordingly.

This is called self-locating, and it’s like hitting the master reset button.

Providing what we call “novel proprioceptive input” (don’t memorize that, it’s not worth it) — or basically new sensations — gives your brain the opportunity to recalibrate its movement maps to better suit your environment.

It gives you the space to start changing mobility, flexibility, and pain without having to override your own self-protection.

So, Is Stretching Totally Useless?

Stretching alone might not be all it’s cracked up to be, but that doesn’t mean you should give up. Again, how you’re doing what you’re doing is equally as important (or more!) as what you’re doing.

I have found personally and with clients that intention is essential, and so I tend to focus on movements designed to stimulate your brain with novel sensations which bolster neuromotor coordination.

This is what we do inside my Posture Rehab course, and while enrollment is currently closed, you can still get on the waitlist to be first in line when it’s re-released.

The practices I’ve cultivated aren’t so much movement or exercise as they are an entirely new take on life.

Click here to jump on the waitlist and see what it’s all about >>