By Dr. Sue Morter

We all know what it feels like when we go into a new experience. A gathering of people we don’t know, some kind of new job that we’re employed in, or some kind of social situation where we don’t know the people, we don’t know the circumstances, et cetera. There is a sense of tension in the body because we don’t know how we’re going to be received. We’re afraid we won’t know what to talk about or we’re not sure that we’re going to be liked by others. We’re not sure that we’re going to be able to relate to the other people or be able to shine in the situation the way that we know we can.

Creating a Story

When the mind is in an uncertain place, it starts to rattle, and it starts to look everywhere for something to lock in on to feel more secure. When this happens the mind has a tendency to go into stories and judgments. It may judge the other people in the situation, or it will start to judge the self. It does this all in the attempt for the mind to have something upon which to focus.

What we know is, that over time, as we become more comfortable in the situation, start talking to our new coworkers in the new job, or become more familiar with the circumstance that was once unfamiliar, we start to develop exchanges that eventually become some kind of relationship, or some kind of relational engagement. We become more familiar with the situation and the people we’ve met, and the body tension starts to release.  What starts to happen is an uprising of joy that comes from engaging with and connecting with these other people.

Eventually due to familiarity, we begin to open up and feel more relaxed in our new-found surroundings, and the invitation is for us to do so consciously and intentionally at the onset at the unfamiliar experience.

For instance, if you knew that eventually you’re going to fall in love with people because you enjoy their personalities, and you’ve enjoyed engaging with them, then why not go ahead and go there now? Why wait for several hours through the dinner party, or several days with the new job, or several years with some circumstances that it may take us to ever reach this place of feeling calm, more confident and comfortable, because it’s become more familiar?

Your comfort and confidence level is truly about familiarity and feeling safe as far as the mind is concerned.

The subconscious mind is supposed to protect us, and keep us alive, and so safety is one of the first things that it will implement in order to do so. Anything that is unfamiliar will put it on alert as it begins to determine if you will be safe in the moment you’re in or not.

The invitation is to consider the following:

If you knew you were eventually going to be comfortable, why not go ahead and get comfortable now?

If you don’t have much experience with the type of situation you’re currently in, another invitation is to simply “make it up.” Use your imagination to envision a situation in which you’d be more comfortable and consider what it would feel like if you were in that situation. What would the body be doing? How would it be releasing and how would your breathing change?

Allow this feeling to settle into the core of our being and allow this opening to be something driven by right use of your own imagination. From here you’re allowed to open to the flow of love more readily, more easily, and certainly more quickly.

When we’re in the vibrational frequency of love, everything opens.

The body begins to heal, to flow, and allows us to open to our creativity, rather than being locked into our survivorship. Our disposition of uncertainty causes alarm in the body right up until it doesn’t. I like to refer to this saying that, “Life is hard, right up until it’s not.” It’s “not” hard the moment love moves into the picture.

So, next time you’re in a situation like this when you’re feeling unsure or uncomfortable, what if you were able to love sooner or to be the first one that opens up? You can be the one that finds the way to say something loving in a tense situation, or to say something joyful. You can be the one who begins to engage and deeply connect when there’s concern, or uncertainty, or unfamiliarity in our lives. You can do this, rather than waiting for six months to pass to feel familiar, or for the external world to do it for us.

The way to do this in the moment you’re feeling uncomfortable, is to drop into your own body. The way we remain uncomfortable is when we remain up in our heads, trying to figure out, “What am I going to do? What am I going to say? How am I going to present in a way that is well received?”

When you do this, you step out of your authenticity and into pre-planning what you should do or what you think you should be doing in that moment, instead of what you’re actually feeling. We have to consciously drop back down into the body, and find the place from which we can bring the love first in any situation.

The exact same thing is true in an argument, in a situation of discord, in a long-standing family dispute.

What if we were willing to be the one to bring the love first? To love sooner, to love more fully, to love faster, to come to that place that we’re eventually going to come to anyway?

Because we all return to love.

In my profession, I’ve had the opportunity to sit beside those that are departing this life, and they share some very deep, heartfelt conversations in those moments. As death approaches, so many things are laid down. Long-standing issues that have plagued a family dynamic or deep friendship begin to melt away when our priorities begin to shift.

We drop into our hearts and we recognize that the only thing that really mattered was how much I loved, and how much I felt the experience of love moving through my system.

If, in the end, we’re all going to get to that loving place eventually, the invitation is to go there now and be the one that is willing to love first, to love sooner, and to love again, more often than anyone you’ve ever known. By doing that, you’re stepping into the creatorship that you are destined to discover.

And, as you do, you will experience more freedom in your life and joy in your heart. Taking the guessing out of ‘how to love’ and dropping into  that loving space, you can  dissolve any situation you are in and bring it back to love – mirroring back to the other person that it actually is possible, and is available, even in the most challenging  moments.

 

By Dr. Sue Morter

Stress is our body’s natural response to life-threatening situations. If a hungry bear is coming towards you, your body immediately sends a stress signal to your system that tells you to, “Run!” This is a good thing when it comes to survival instincts.

Stress and its harmful effects, seem to be running rampant in our culture more than ever before.

According to The American Institute of Stress, stress is the basic cause of over 60% of all human illness and disease and costs the United States an estimated $300 billion in healthcare and lost productivity, every year.

Modern-Day “Bears”

Apart from bears attacking us, the stress response also occurs when we anticipate one thing happening and instead, we experience something else. When we have an expectation and it’s not met, we don’t accept or trust what is taking place. When this happens, we experience resistance and press against what’s actually occurring. This creates a reverberation of energy in our own system that initiates a fight or flight response in the body and the body kicks off the exact same life-saving responses, as if a bear was actually chasing you. When this happens, the system doesn’t know the difference between you actually being chased by a bear, or just being upset with what you thought was going to happen but didn’t.

Stress can also come from an unresolved emotional memory of a “bear” or unwanted/life-threatening situation you encountered years ago. It could have been in the form of a “relationship” bear, a “work” bear, a “child who’s having trouble at school” bear, an “addiction” bear, or a “chemical imbalance” bear. Whatever the situation, the fight or flight response was triggered and your system can still be responding to something that occurred five years ago, as if it’s still occurring.

In today’s hectic society, oftentimes too many “bears” happen all at once and our system becomes so overwhelmed that it shuts down. The final and lasting message we receive is, “run for your life!”

 

Results of prolonged stress

Our system is now running for its life, day after day, week after week, month after month, perhaps even year after year. Our system isn’t designed to endure that kind of prolonged stress, so the adrenal glands, which have been constantly pumping adrenaline into your system so you can run from that “bear,” begin to exhaust. When this happens, the thyroid kicks in, trying to help with what the adrenal glands are no longer able to do and pretty soon your whole hormonal system is unbalanced.

Byproducts of this are:

• Sleeplessness: We don’t sleep at night, because the body doesn’t want to drop into a deep restful sleep if it thinks that a bear is breathing down our neck. In fact, an estimated 44% of stressed people lose sleep every night.
• Overeating: Instead of being able to manage the stress that’s occurring, to override it and not have to experience it, we reach for foods that are comforting but unhealthy, or we eat stressfully. 40% of stressed people overeat or eat unhealthy foods.
• Addiction: We might divert, or deflect, or become addicted to any number of things, whether it’s alcohol, or drugs, or shopping, or thinking, or over-analyzing life.
• Premature Aging: The chemicals of stress acidify the body and cause premature aging. We become exhausted and begin to have cellular breakdown in the body. It’s been proven that stress even shrinks the brain.

All of these symptoms occur because we were unable to have a trusted relationship with the way things were going.

 

How to Deal with Stress

We have to develop the trusted relationship with the world, trusting that what is happening in my life is not happening to me, it’s happening through me, and happening for me, to awaken to my greatness. In order to shift from a resisting, distrustful state to one of acceptance and trust, we must employ a few easy tactics:

1. Ask “Am I really okay in this moment? – Whatever is taking place in your life, or whatever worries you’re carrying, stop and evaluate in that moment, are you ok? What will happen is the subconscious mind will answer, “Yes, in this particular moment, right here, sitting here right now, I’m actually okay.”

 

2. Ask again – If we can get the subconscious to recognize that in this moment you’re ok, then a few moments later ask the question again, “In this moment, am I okay?” When we begin to check in this way periodically throughout the day, we start to send a message to the subconscious mind saying “all is well.” Regardless of what is taking place, in that moment, you are ok.

 

3. Squeeze – In the moment you are ok, take a breath through the body, squeeze the muscles in the base of the pelvis, seating yourself there, and squeeze your heart just a little by squeezing your shoulder blades together and dropping them down. As you breathe in the belly, squeeze your throat just enough that you can feel your breath traversing up and down.

 

4. Breathe – Squeezing everything together, as if you’re giving yourself an internal hug, then take a breath from above your head down through your body and into your heart. Exhale down from your heart, through your belly, and into the earth. When you do that, you’re eliciting a response in the body that calms everything down. The breath is bringing you closer to the core of your body, where you can pick up enough power to drop into a feeling of security and a greater sense of self and presence.

 

By doing these four steps, in that moment, the subconscious begins to register again and again the feeling of, “I’m okay.” This begins to clean the slate, so that we can start to have a new creative and life-affirming idea come forward instead of continually reacting as though, our life depends upon things going the way we think they should go.

Instead of resisting, we begin to TRUST what is taking place around us and allow our life, and our energy, to flow with ease.

 

Establishing a Practice of Trust

It is so important when you’re under a stressful time in your life, when you’re trying to recalibrate on the notion of accepting whatever is taking place in your life and trust it is for your highest good, a ritual of self-care is crucial. Developing a practice for yourself so it becomes engrained when the stress rises is important because what you do in a stressful moment depends on what you do in the in-between moments.

Below are a few tips to establish a practice of trust:

1. Diet – It is so helpful to bring alkalizing foods into your diet at this time because the chemicals of stress acidify the body. If you’re eating foods that are processed and pre-prepared and chemically based, it bogs your system down with extra energy that it requires to digest those foods and that energy is now not available for you to deal with the stress. Up to 80% of what you’re consuming everyday should be fruits and vegetables and 20% everything else. The more of that, that you can consume raw, if your system can handle raw, the better. The chemicals of proper nutrition can alkalize the body and bring that up to a balanced state where cellular rejuvenation and regeneration can occur. Then, the digestion and filtering and cleansing and detoxifying replenishing your immune system and allowing your whole conscious being to be more creative will happen under alkalizing conditions.

 

2. Meditation – I cannot recommend enough the value of slowing down the breath and stilling the mind, allowing yourself to experience yourself without the thinking mind that’s trying to process everything at once. Learn how to meditate, drop in to this deep core presence, and breathe in a way that allows the subconscious to experience a state of well-being and wholeness and stillness, aside from these specific things that are happening in your life at that time.

 

3. Nature – Take your shoes off, or walk in the grass. Better yet, lay down in the grass with your spine down on the earth, if you can. It allows the sensory nervous system to be grounded, to slow down into the same wave frequencies of 10 cycles a second that the earth has, which slows you into a healing mode.

These practices are so incredibly valuable, if we learn to put them together. If we can remember to do them under stressful moments. The recommendation that I have for people under stressful moments is to have been doing these practices regularly in between the stressful moments, so that the stressful moments are actually perceived as less stressful.

By Dr. Sue Morter

No one likes to feel pain, yet chronic pain has become so prevalent in our society, it almost seems to be the norm for many people. According to the American Academy of Pain Medicine, pain affects more Americans than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined. One in 10 Americans experience pain every day for three months or more with an estimated 1.5 billion people suffering from chronic pain world-wide (National Institutes of Health).

Chronic Pain Is A Blockage of Energy In The Body
When looking at pain through the lens of Energy Medicine, chronic pain is nothing more than a blockage of energy flow. In our most natural state, energy flows freely through our bodies constantly. When it becomes blocked, it begins building up, much in the way water pools when restricted by a dam. It’s this “pool” of energy that creates overstimulation, irritation and inflammation, resulting in pain in our physical bodies.

TIPS TO CREATE FLOW AGAIN IN THE BODY AND REDUCE OR
ELIMINATE PAIN ALL TOGETHER

Pay Attention to Pain
As a culture, we often turn to medication, surgeries or other tactics to help deal with the pain we feel. So often we focus on alleviating the symptoms of the discomfort rather than addressing the original cause of the pain in the first place.

To get the energy moving, we need to get to the root cause, or the initial blockage of energy.

When we do, we allow the body to access its natural self-healing capacity. The body knows what to do to heal chronic pain as well. If it isn’t healing the pain pattern, there is a reason.

The body was designed to heal itself. If you cut yourself, it heals. If you break a bone, it heals.

Hierarchy of Healing
The body heals on a first priority basis, and its first priority is survival. If we experience pain for a prolonged period of time, it’s because there’s a more important issue the body needs to try and heal first.

If you have a chemical imbalance created by stress or improper nutrition, your body will work to remedy the chemical imbalance rather than deal with a less important issue such as back pain or headaches. Unresolved issues can also delay the body in healing itself. If we are currently under a state of stress, or experienced stress from years ago that never really resolved, it can keep our system in a fight or flight mode, which keeps the nervous system from activating its other main mode of function, which is healing.

Whatever the issue, the body won’t heal because it has to deal with what it considers the most important issue first. So chronic, unrelenting pain patterns in the body are caused by the body not prioritizing that issue.

Squeeze. Breathe. Move the pain.
How do we alleviate our pain when the body is focused on other, higher priority issues of healing? We find the area of pain, breathe into it and move it through our body consciously.

1. Make a connection with the painful area
   So often when we have pain, such as chronic hip or knee pain, we move away from the pain by disconnecting from our body and the area that is hurting. Instead, we need to focus on the painful area and squeeze it. This allows the body and mind to connect with the painful area, and from here, the nervous system can start to evaluate what is happening.
2. Breathing to dissipate the blocked energy
   Next, breathe through the painful area. The breath will help dissipate some of the energy locked in the area. When doing this, see if you can feel where the energy is flowing and where it’s not. Find where the pain is and squeeze it as you breathe deeply into this place.
3. How to move the energy through the body
   Finally, as you squeeze into the area that is hurting, imagine breathing that pain up toward your heart. From here, exhale it up and out of the throat, and then as if you were breathing out the top of your head. By doing this, you are moving the energy beyond the painful area and distributing it through your entire body, thereby decreasing the buildup of energy, which is causing the pain and pressure, and ultimately irritation and inflammation in the tissues.
   We can decrease inflammation rapidly in this fashion, if we learn how to breathe this pattern of energy up through the central channel of the body and exhale, releasing it out the top of the head.

Does this actually work?
Someone suffering from chronic pain might think, “So, I’ve been hurting for six months and you’re telling me that I just squeeze this, and breathe a little, it’s going to go away finally?”

And the answer is, yes.

If you do this practice with your full concentration – heart, mind and breath – the muscle fibers that have been knotted up will start to stretch open, allowing the energy to start moving. It’s important to keep our concentration on the central channel of the body, as well as the area that is hurting, as we relax and continue breathing through the affected area.

The more you can open and release this area through your breath, the more all of our resources can come together and begin to establish the healing patterns in the nervous system again.

From muscle cramps to cancer
This simple “Squeeze – Breathe – Move the energy” technique can work with any level of pain including muscle cramps, slipped disks and even cancer.

Muscle Cramps
When muscles are contracted for a prolonged period of time, lactic acid begins to build in the tissues causing pain, cramping and soreness. When we squeeze the tissues and breathe into them the way it is described above (similar to a massage in the body), the breath begins to break up the lactic acid deposits and starts to mobilize the chemistry in the body once again.

Bulging Disk
When you knock a vertebrae out of position, which pinches a nerve or causes a disc to bulge and press on the nerves, this too is a result of an imbalance in the flow of energy through the system. When this happens, go inward toward the pain, squeeze it and breathe upward through the central channel. Your body will begin to reestablish its natural system that would have been healing that situation all along.

Cancer and Chronic Disease
The physical pain of chronic degenerative diseases such as cancers, arthritis, heart conditions and other circulatory issues, are all improved and enhance by getting the body’s energy moving through the breath work again. As that breath begins to happen though the body, chemistry changes in the body, and alkalizing chemicals are then more prevalent, which decreases the irritation and inflammation that come with so many chronic degenerative diseases.

Easing the Pain of Recovery
Someone who’s just gone through open heart surgery or going through chemotherapy can use the same techniques between their sessions and after their surgery to help alleviate pain and facilitate a faster recovery period. The “Squeeze – Breathe – Move the energy” technique also works to flush the system and get energy and vital life force moving through the body again. In between chemotherapy sessions, an individual might experience extreme nausea and other discomforts. When they focus on the painful area squeeze it with a gentle squeeze, as if you’re hugging yourself, then breathe up and down the central channel of the spine, allows the system to distribute this energy more profoundly and holistically throughout the whole system, thereby eliciting the healing response even faster.

Not Only Heals, but Strengthens
The above technique can not only help alleviate the pain and get the energy moving again, but can also be used to strengthen the affected area. In pregnancy, for example, when a woman reaches her third trimester, she often has extraordinary back pain that comes with carrying the extra weight of the child. By flexing the low back just enough to take the strain off and squeezing that area, rolling your attention up the spine while you breath, allows you to build new circuitry and communication of the electromagnetic energy flow in the body. This technique distributes that strain throughout the whole body and allows it to be dissolved.

Dr. Sue Morter from Morter Institute bridges science, spirit and human possibility.

For over 30 years, she has been teaching health care practitioners, patients and students integrative approaches to wellness, based in quantum science and energy medicine.