I have a few questions about a client of mine
Khadro, I have a few questions about a client of mine:
I have a 35 year old female patient who presents with shallow breathing and a 20 year history of anxiety and panic attacks for which she has never (consciously) known why. She spent years holding this in, avoiding situations and not telling anyone about it. There is a family history of the same in her mum and two sisters.
She has a lot of holding patterns in her hips and abdomen and breathing seems forced and awkward when you ask her to increase it.
Furthermore when I get to the upper right quadrant, an area I feel is crucial, she becomes dizzy, disoriented, dissociated mentally, and nauseous. She appears faint, has a weak pulse etc but it eventually passes after 5 minutes or so. In that period, she cannot concentrate on what I am saying, nor can I get her to stay with the feeling.
Is it that all the energy has gone to her head? Or that she has learned to dissociate from any feeling there, as it is not safe?
My strategy has been to create space everywhere else, and to approach the area from the margins. She now tries at home in bed to palpate the area herself, whilst previously she would not even touch it. She feels she has learned, though, that her anxiety seems to originate from there.
I need to know whether to use some healing sounds at the time or if there is some way to keep her with the feeling instead of her zoning out.
-Dave
Dear Dave:
I am very happy that you are going forward with Khadro Chi Nei Tsang and working it and learning from your experiences of it. From your email you are using your knowledge and skills very well and I am very pleased and these are my comments below::
Breath as you know is the motor that drives movements in the body. Not breathing means we have decided at some point that the memory and energy of a certain situation is not safe and it is better that we not allow ourselves to feel it, know it and in this way we can pretend that everything is alright. Though this is a deliberate attempt at first, as you know, and over time as you know we forget that we are doing this, and the weird feelings we get we learn to ignore as being how we feel. We then think that this is normal.
So increasing her breathing capacity is crucial and to help her get in touch with the feeling of what is weird. As you know the good news is she will feel more and the bad news is she swill feel more, so the good news and the bad news is the same. When you are able to get her to breath in the upper right quadrant, you are increasing breath there and consequently increasing awareness of what is held there. Her efforts not to breath there is to keep herself from knowing her sensations there. Now by breathing there she is able to feel the sensation and so she might feel overwhelmed and faint, but she is not going to. It is this fear that kept her from feeling what is there.
So it is absolutely vital that you explain to her that you cannot fix her conditions, and there is always a good reason why she needed to protect herself from feeling these bad sensations (feelingsemotions) because she was young, vulnerable, lacked a sense of self and likely did not have emotional maturity then. I have explained this in class, fear is not a bad emotion, it can help you survive. As in the case of meeting a wild animal on your path in the jungle, in order to survive you better run, and by the same token there is nothing so good about gentleness when you cannot afford it.
It is the over-reaction of fear that keeps us out of touch. Ah! This is another reason why we cut off feelings that we think will make us look weak, bad or stupid. We learn that as whole people we have all our positive attributes and also our negative attributes and we accept them without judgment as both are necessary for life and for the circle of life to continue. As you also know this is not an easy process but it is the only one that I know of that brings permanent change and empowers the individual to own their feelings, sensations (fears) without judgment.
Now, when her body is having these symptoms, (messages) it means she is ready to do the work, because her knowing self is not going to let her get away with not feeling whole. As you know when we disassociate with parts of ourselves, we in fact cut off communication from those parts and those parts in fact feel alienated and are also out of the loop of information. As beings of consciousness we strive to be integrated whole people. To be whole every part of us must be in communication with each other and from the source.
When we read Candice Pert's work we understand that a part of the brain called the hypothalamus is the command center, and it sendings directives in the forms of neuropeptides to affect our emotion, state of mind, and being. The body, emotional body loops responds back and sends sensations/feelings by chemicals and nervous impulses back to the brain and to the hypothalamus to make more of the same neuropeptides or different ones. So The message to transform and change and to make different kinds of neuropeptides can comes from the conscious decision of the individual through the hypothalamus. This is the process of transformation and change and it is this that allows us to be our better selves every moment.
As you also know this is not an easy process but it is the only one that I know of that brings permanent change and empowers the individual to own their feelings, sensations (fears) without judgment. Ah! this is another reason why we cut off feelings that we think will make us look weak, bad or stupid. We learn that as whole people we have all our positive attributes and also our negative attributes and we accept them without judgment as both are necessary for life and for the circle of life to continue. I have explained this in class, fear is not a bad emotion, it can help you survive and the over-reaction of fear that is what keeps us out of touch and by the same token there is nothing so good about gentleness when you cannot afford it. As in the case of meeting a wild animal on your path in the jungle, in order to survive you better run.
When we accept ourselves as whole and as human and within our humanity we are all things depending on how much energy we have to deal with what is coming to us. This is what allows us to be good human beings, and there is no such thing as perfection. We accept ourselves with compassion as a good human beings with all of our good and bad stuff and that is enough and we don't see ourselves as perfect.
Perfection is a thing that is fabricated by the mind (Wood) we think and the thinking is faulty and foggy, and when we think too much we start to project outside of ourselves all of our sensations, feelings, emotions and we blame every person for the way we feel. That way we become perfect and blameless and everyone else out there is to be blamed.
So we have to come back to ourselves. Your client needs to know that she is going to have to make sure that she has a good support system in the form of family, friends, therapists who can support her for when she starts to feel things, it is not going to be easy at first. She will start to feel her weird feelings and while she is feeling them her energy becomes free to flow, she will feel more alive and more energetic and she also will feel her weird feelings and now she has the energy to deal with it. Still it is not an easy patch that's when friends, family and therapists come in to assist her. To let her know that she is not crazy and that she is doing great. She will need validation and support for the way she will feel.
Also taking small baby steps are important, so keeping her to be more aware by touching the places where they feel strange and weird and doing healing sounds are great
Take good care and please keep in touch
Peace
Khadro
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