Your Vital Heart

Vitality is about finding a balance between all spheres of your life. A healthy body, open heart, clear mind, and vibrant spirit. This blog will center on your emotional center. How do we cultivate that open-hearted space we all crave so much? How do sustain the ability to love freely amidst all of our pain and suffering?

One of our biggest obstacles to living in this space is a negative self narrative. Maybe you have been telling yourself the same story since you were a child. An event, perhaps a series of events led to a particular conclusion: I am not worthy of love. As our Woman’s Vitality Summit speaker Diane Zimberoff puts it: “So many women have grown up with negative images about themselves. We have all these great ideas that we want to do but it’s this underlying low self-esteem or self-effacement that I think drains our energy and sucks the life force from us.” We have the choice to be our own greatest friend or greatest enemy. We have the freedom to draw those conclusions. But oftentimes it’s not that simple, right? There can be years of accumulated pages written from a self-critical voice.

If we don’t consciously remove ourselves from “the victim trap”, we get stuck. The operative word here is “consciously.” It takes radical self-awareness to first identify the patterns, and then action to remove ourselves from them. One useful tool for action is heart centered hypnotherapy. Hypnosis can be used to look back and discover a root cause of an addiction, a past trauma, or any event that caused you to view yourself in this way. In an altered state of consciousness we can move freely beneath the chatter of the conscious mind and access those hard to reach spaces that might be too painful. I have done this work myself and helped facilitate it for many others. It’s truly transformative and can be a huge shift in vitality for people!

Your story is so important. During my conversation with summit speaker Kim D’Eramo, she emphasized the importance of non-judgment. When you “slip up” and eat a piece of cake that you “weren’t supposed to eat”, it’s not bad. You’re not bad. If you constantly find yourself in this space, Kim refers to it as “a contracted state. Energetically, it overruns your adrenals, and it changes your brain patterning, so you’re in a more limited mindset. Any time you’re living in a conclusion, or in judgment, it puts you in that emotional, energetic, physiologic state that creates disease.” Your heart space is so powerful and being able to set yourself up for success in this area affects all aspects of your vitality!

In addition to more in depth work like hypnotherapy, you can work to combat your negative narratives on a daily basis. Try this:

Watch Your Language:

Listen to the way in which you speak to yourself. Is it impatient, judgmental, excusing, or compassionate and loving? Every time you hear your self-talk move into a demeaning, defensive, or deflective pattern, STOP IT!

Bob Newhart had a great skit about this. I found it on You Tube and you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw

So the idea is to shift your language when you find you are not treating yourself in a loving, compassionate way. Use your journal and write down statements your little girl self would have liked to hear rather than the ones she remembers from an overly-stressed or critical parent.

Let me know how it goes!

Love,

Dr. Keesha