Emotional Alchemy: Healing from the Heart | Catherine Ewing | TEDxFredericksburg

[Applause] an expert in childhood trauma once said trauma is not what happens to us it's what happens within us as a result of what happens to us trauma is that scarring that makes us less flexible and more rigid less feeling and more defended now I agree with this expert but in my 40 years of working with people to heal their trauma and to heal my own trauma of losing my parents young of teenage rape of growing up with a brother with mental illness who I lost four years ago this week I know that we can heal our deepest wounds through the processes that I've developed called emotional alchemy so alchemy as you may know is a mysterious or magical process or power that transforms one element into another think crazy scientists trying to turn lead into gold in my work with clients we use emotional alchemy to unearth the shattered and discarded pieces of their lives that have been hidden deep below the surface of their conscious awareness we revisit the stories we grieve the pain and loss we sued the inner child all in a sacred container of compassion and acceptance and forgiveness and love and then we celebrate and honor that person's resiliency and courage and in the process we transform self-doubt into self-acceptance self-criticism into self approval and maybe even self-loathing into self-love I'd like to share a short exercise with you to show you how you might use emotional alchemy in your own life so I'm going to invite you to put your feet flat on the floor close or lower your eyes bring one or both hands to your heart and you awareness to your breath and just notice as your breath moves easily and effortlessly perhaps even imagine it moving in and out of your heart like a gentle wave that comes up onto the beach and then flows back into the ocean and now I'll invite you to slow down that breath even more inhaling for five seconds and exhaling for five seconds breathing in and breathing out and into this flow of slow and easy breath I'm going to introduce some words that have a high vibration appreciation gratitude care compassion appreciation gratitude care compassion just allow the energy of those words to float through your body perhaps even imagining that every cell is opening up like a sponge just soaking up the healing energy of those words I'm just taking another breath or two and then allowing your hands to gently fall back into your lap and your eyes to float open on the next wave of breath taking a moment to just notice how you feel in this exercise by closing our eyes bringing our attention to our heart and slowing our breath we send a message to the amygdala which controls your fight-or-flight response that you're safe and you can relax when we add the high vibration words we literally flip a switch in your limbic system that turns off the flow of destructive heavy chemistry stress-related that's moving through your body and actually turns on the flow of lighter constructive chemistry that heals your cells and your organs as it's moving through your body research by the institute of heart math has shown that if you do this heart brain coherence exercise for three minutes that positive chemistry will continue to flow through your body for six hours not a bad return on your investment right imagine the healing possibilities if you were to do this exercise once a day or maybe even two or three times a day or get 24-hour coverage amazing healing so how does this mysterious transmuting take place well we have to start with energy because everything in the universe is made of energy right even your thoughts and emotions I was blown away when I heard that emotions are actually energy think e motion energy in motion so whatever you've heard about your emotions they're not good or bad they're not right or wrong there's simply information in the form of chemistry that moves through your body in response to what you're experiencing either in the outside world or maybe in your own inner world that's telling you whether that experience is supporting you or detracting from your well-being pretty amazing right you can see or maybe I hope you can on both the emotional guidance scale and the map of continent consciousness that there is a continuum of emotional energy at one end or the higher lighter vibrating energies like love and joy and appreciation and gratitude and again these move through our bodies quickly we feel good as they're moving through and they repair and here are heal ourselves in our organs as it moves through our body on the other end of the continuum contrast are the heavier denser emotions like a guilt and shame despair and powerlessness you can even feel the difference as I say them right this energy is heavy and it moves through our body much more slowly like molasses and it actually detracts from our well-being wearing down ourselves and our organs an honest emotional guidance scale we each actually have what I call a personal energy signature it's kind of like a set point or a bandwidth where we just naturally hang out as we're doing life and it depends on our life experiences and the emotions that we've experienced along with those life experiences so your personal energy signature has its own unique vibrational signature now because energy attracts like energy you are actually attracting people circumstances and things to you that match your personal energy signature that may not be what you think you want what's happening up here in your thinking mind is not a match for what's actually in this energy field so you may not be getting what you want in my work and in my personal life I've discovered that doing the work of emotional alchemy discharging the heavy dense energy is the thing that allows us to move up that vibrational scale begin to shift our beliefs in our mindset reframe our stories and actually create a new personal energy signature which now allows us to attract more of the things that we want imagine the Titanic as your mind just as a demonstration or this iceberg three to five percent is actually your thinking mind what you know that you know everything else is below the surface of your awareness 95 to 97% of what you have taken in through your life is stored in that sub or unconscious mind most of this the overwhelming majority was divine from the time you were six months in utero to about six years old where your brain was developing and you had no ability to monitor what was coming in so so everything came in through your senses and literally was just story it was like somebody was a data operator was just putting this information into your system and every time we want to experience change our survival mind wants to bring us back to that original default planning so dr. Bruce Lipton has told us in his work of epigenetics that there is one really important way that we can begin to change this old programming and his research has shown that when we can switch our thoughts from thoughts that make us feel angry or afraid or ashamed to thoughts that make us feel happy or joyful or appreciative for as little as 17 seconds 17 seconds we literally begin to change what's going on in our DNA we can they they can see the change in the markers in our DNA in that short period of time again that blew me away when I found that out what's the possibility then for healing ourselves mentally emotionally and even physically simply by changing our thoughts well that sounds easy right change your thoughts change your emotions heal your DNA live a long and happy life awesome not so easy I'm sure everyone in this room knows that it's not that easy to quiet your inner critic or to change an unhealthy habit why is that well I've alluded to it already your survival mind the primitive part of your brain we heard Matt reference is wired for your survival it sees change as dangerous maybe even deadly so if you try to go off course it's like setting off alarms in your mind and that will try to get you back on track with your default programming so the alarms go off and the next thing you know your body is literally creating anxiety your mind body as a way to get you back on track and then you're doing the very thing that you were trying to change now as a way to deal with your anxiety this is what I call self-sabotage 101 and then you add in this idea that all of these programs were created by the time we were 6 years old well that's a little frightening isn't it so just like the captain of the Titanic we can't really change our mind just like he couldn't avoid that iceberg because he didn't know what was underneath the surface we have to change what's under the surface in order to make really any real and lasting change to what's going on up here so how do we do that how do we get below the surface well we just did it in the heart brain exercise we literally dropped from our heads into our hearts we lost their mind and came to our senses we dropped out of our cortical brain and into our heart brain yep with a brain in your heart it was actually created before this brain and it has its entire own system that takes in information process it sorts it remembers it and then actually sends it out to the rest of your body it sends information to your cortical brain and to the rest of your body amazing right and this brain is extremely powerful but as we go through life life happens right and we'll hear more about that today and we can begin to be boxed in by these emotions of powerlessness and shame and pain and fear and betrayal and before we know it we're cut off from the power the healing power and the intuitive power of our heart brain we're share a story about this from one of my clients Anna was a six-year-old very shy little six-year-old girl and she had to move with her mom and her brother to a new state while her dad stayed back and finished up his job now Anna was not a great student she had trouble reading an interview school her teacher was very strict and that made it even harder for her to read and she started to get picked on by the other kids it was not a happy time in her life but her dad finally arrived and he was actually started to read with her at night he even came to school and uniform a couple days and that you know built up her credibility so life was better for a few weeks and then one day without any notice dad said goodbye picked up a suitcase and walked out the door Anna tried to make sense of this in her six-year-old mind and his children do imagined it was all about herself because that's what children do I'm bad my dad doesn't love me I'm not smart enough in that moment Anna created a belief system about herself and the world that stayed with her for many years in that moment the scarring around Anna's heart began to take hold Anna called me about 25 years after that experience and she was desperate her anxiety and depression and anxiety were just out of control she was afraid of losing her job and the man that she loved but she was actually more terrified of coming into therapy because she had tried it before and it hadn't worked and she was so terrified that if she came in and she didn't start to feel better and had to face the idea that she'd have to live her life and she as she'd been living it she wasn't gonna be able to do that well we finally calmed her down enough she came in she sat sort of in the corner of my couch wrapped up in a big sweater almost looking like a six year old and we started to do the heart brain and some other energy exercises so that she could calm down when she finally did and she told me that story about her dad so it made perfect sense to me that she had anxiety and she had depression and she didn't think well of herself she thought you know she wasn't good enough but Anna had never put those pieces together and when I connected the dots for her it was like this light went off in her head and she was finally able to do the work to discharge the heavy energy to see that experience now through adult eyes not the eyes of a six-year-old to realize it was not her fault that her dad had left and then to release the self blame that she'd been carrying all of these years now I know through my own life walk and through my work on this planet that none of us gets through earth school without a few bumps and bruises right or some real traumas and I also know that it is possible to heal those early core wounds in a way that they that becomes in the fertile ground for our greatest gifts as I wrap up today I'd like to leave you with three truths and this is my why as simon Sinek would say you are not your story or your history you're a spiritual being here having a human journey you are not broken beyond repair or crazy even though you may have adapted some ways of behaving that have until we served you and your deepest wounds can become the fertile ground for the development of your greatest gifts with the right support Anna is a perfect example of that she went on to reconnect with her boyfriend she actually even reconnected with her dad to begin to heal that relationship she bought a house she went to grad school she started doing presentations but most importantly she continues to work with children who struggle academically and emotionally a passionate calling for which anna is uniquely suited and qualified as we each heal our inner wounds we raise our own vibration and as we raise our own vibration we just naturally begin to raise the vibration of the people around us and this is how I believe we start to create heaven on earth and I hope that you will join me in that journey in whatever way that red it's with you thank you and namaste

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 9,821

Rating: 4.9084969 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science, Brain, Emotions, Exposure, Health, Heart health, Pain

Id: 2TiRhydTdEc

Length: 17min 57sec (1077 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019