Aloha Hive family!
Let’s talk about bowels and vowels 💩 😮 And how to get off the medical merry-go-round!
In my previous blog post here I discussed how self-regulation brings us into a feeling of safety in such a way that we don’t need to rely on so-called “authorities” or the media to determine our emotional state.
Another benefit of self-regulation is self-healing.
When we know how to heal ourselves we free ourselves from the dependency upon the profit-driven medical system.
I learned early on in my life that health-care did not involve “health” or “care” in most cases.
I got this lesson early on as a young girl being raised by a mother and father who were both nurses. Bless their hearts, they were doing their best! 🙏
Not counting all the antibiotics I had been on since birth, I started my first prescription medication when I was eleven years old, for a diagnosis that the doctors weren’t even sure of (Pleurisy…fluid in my lungs).
More medications were piled onto that one, as I became sicker and sicker. My glands in my neck were so swollen and hard they felt like tumors.
When I was 12 years old I was having frequent urinary tract infections and eventially had to be catheterized because I couldn’t even pee. My kidneys were so damaged by the medications and the toxins backed up in my body that they were bleeding.
Ultimately, in my mid twenties there was nothing the medical system could do for me except make me feel like I was imagining or faking everything.
For many years, my whole body ached, I couldn’t sleep, I was passively suicidal and self-medicating with pain killers, cigarettes, cannabis and alcohol.
I couldn’t have a normal bowel movement and food often made me so bloated and sick that I often had to make myself throw up to feel more comfortable.
No one, (not one specialist) among the dozens who I paid to help me, made the connection between my bowel issues, my anxiety and all the other issues I had including kidney inflammation, bladder infections, autoimmunity, hypoglycemia, chronic pain and depression.
As I scoured the google-sphere I started to understand how I ended up where I was and how to reverse it.
One common denominator with all of those diagnoses is a nervous system that is dysregulated.
Specifically, that individuals with sympathetic dominance (or dominant fight/flight mode) tended to have a similar cluster of symptoms involving high cortisol levels, low pain threshold, sexual dysfunction, poor digestion, anxiety, insomnia, abnormal bowel habits and difficulty relaxing in general.
Prior to learning this, I had tried every extreme diet out there. It was a game-changer to learn that diet changes, herbs and supplements could only take me so far when I wasn’t addressing my nervous system.
Now that I’ve healed myself from most of those symptoms, one of my primary focuses for the patients I provide therapy for (as an OT for 22 years) has been “self-regulation”.
I’ve mainly used myofascial release, sensory integration and therapeutic touch to retrain the body to relax after traumatic events.
If they are open, I also share what I’ve learned about food and how it can cause increased stress on the body, toxicity and hormonal chaos.
It wasn’t until the past 5 years that I experienced a major shift in my personal experience of dysregulation, and it was partly brought on by my focus on Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
The device I’m holding in the picture is called an EmWave Pro.
It is a portable, handheld device that provides biofeedback for HRV, which helps you to retrain yourself to be in parasympathetic dominance.
The parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is responsible for many things including lowering heart rate, digestion, stimulating urination and bowel movements, healing, regenerative rest/sleep, normalizing blood pressure and general homeostasis.
When our PSNS is active, we feel calm and safe and we have high HRV which means we have high adaptability to stress and the ability to respond logically rather than in a “knee-jerk fashion” to triggers.
The EmWave indicates high HRV levels by signaling the user with a green light and a soothing tone, which provides external feedback to maintain that state of relaxation.
With this tiny device I have been able to test out dozens of self-facilitation techniques and narrow my focus down to a handful of the most effective ones at increasing HRV.
And thanks to my patients, I’ve been able to increase my sample size to close to a hundred subjects.
Here’s a short list of the techniques I’ve experimented with…
Singing favorite songs
Singing vowel sounds
Chanting Om sound
Listening to wood flute
Box breathing
Wim Hoff and Buteyko breathing
Pelvic rocking
Valsava Maneuver
Meridian tapping
Prayer
Appreciation journey
All of these techniques show improvement in HRV.
The ones that I found to produce the most rapid results AND are the most accessible include:
- The Valsava Maneuver (pelvic floor relaxation)
- Appreciation Journey
- Chanting Om or vowel sounds
I prefer the first two because they can be done anywhere and anytime without making an ass of yourself 😂
If you want to learn how to Om chant there are many free video tutorials online.
Here’s the previous hive post I made on pelvic floor relaxation…
@becominghuman/becoming-a-self-regulated-sovereign
In the above post I also covered why it’s important to learn to regulate our emotions in a world where chronic fear and anxiety leaves us unable to make independent decisions and vulnerable to mind control.
And in my next post I will describe the “Appreciation Journey technique” that I developed to bring more meaning into my life and to feel a sense of interconnected mess with all thing, which enables me to move through addiction, loss, grief and despair more easily.
What are your favorite techniques for self-regulation?
As always…loving ALL of you!
❤️Pachee