If you are new to holistic philosophy it might seem that these methods are ineffective, vague and maybe rely on wishful thinking. We have made some real advancements in our understanding of the nervous system and how our body systems work as a whole. These findings now demonstrate what all indigenous and holistic traditions have always maintained; that our emotions and thoughts are intimately connected to our physical health and our experience of life.
Unalome Therapy has an extensive library which you are welcome to borrow from during your journey if you are interested in reframing your thinking and perspectives around life and holism in any area of interest.
However, while understanding can assist you greatly; mentally understanding is not a requirement to experience change with these holistic modalities. You absolutely can decide you will receive no benefits and block your own healing but you would also have to prevent yourself from relaxing at all during your sessions.
The conscious mind does not control the nervous system, although it can influence it. If the conscious mind did control the nervous system you could just tell your body to heal. Your thinking is powerful but where the mind and body are not communicating you need to reunite them to really operate in the fullness of your whole self. If you were to actively try to prevent your own healing; it would be a waste of both of our time and your money and I would suggest Unalome Therapy isn’t for you at this time.
Having doubts is so human, we can have doubts and still be openminded. Being discerning about who you work with and trust with your health is so important; don’t believe me or anyone about what is best for you without careful consideration. You are the authority on your experience so far; what I am offering is a journey to experience and discuss your body’s wisdom as you and your body direct lots of different healing sessions and you make observations about the changes. If changes are not happening and you don’t think the experiences are worthwhile for you I wouldn’t expect you to continue. There will be changes every session and I will communicate with you about anything I have noticed. You will not leave your session without clear communication about my observations of changes.
Holistic philosophy can be applied to so many areas of our lives, it is a way of thinking about the world that helps us navigate choices; rather than a way to live following particular rules- in fact rule following wouldn’t be holistic. Holistic decisions are made in balance of all things, full of nuance and depth. This is why it can seem vague, especially when we have limited information or perspectives from our minds experience of linear time.
In holism we see that everything is interconnected, each of us as people and every system in our bodies. We are not isolated we are connected to our families and everything that has come before us, our wellness is connected to the wellness of our loved ones, communities, people we don’t even know, all other species and environments on our planet. Maybe some aspects do not impact us directly or suddenly but the connection is there.
As everything is connected within the body, strengths via these connections can support weaker areas, this happens in our bodies. The body as a system can manage stress and toxins, it has systems to manage all sorts of things- we are miraculous.
Overtime and through all sorts of stressors our systems start to come under pressure, things start to weaken further and some things begin to collapse. Your body works so hard and loves nothing more than you- its entire reason for being is to hold you through your life journey.
From a holistic point of view your body’s actions may be misunderstood but never, ever, would your body harm you. It may sacrifice one area to protect another, it may shift this strategy around the body. It may become confused, especially by the many unnatural chemicals it is exposed to and asked to process in our modern environments. It may lock something up to protect you, saving it for later when you are better resourced to resolve or release it.
For this release to happen you actually have to reach this level of adequate resourcing. Your body needs to know you have the safety, support, resources and skills to cope. Your body’s decisions are always holistic; the process the body engages in to make these decisions is based on what the body has come to expect from past experience. If your past experiences have set you up to stay stuck in survival your body will need more time and care to build new ways of working.
The body keeps storing this type of material in a beautiful mess, completely personal and unique to you, the cultural containers you live in, the environments, the health and strength of the body’s parts and systems have available. The body remembers patterns and if storing something early on worked pretty well it will keep using that strategy until it can’t anymore. The body has experienced and remembers every second of your life, it has been listening and remembering in its own way and your overall wellbeing and survival is its number one priority, even when you have not understood its actions and not thought or spoken kindly to or about your body.
Your body wants you to thrive and heal but it cant prioritise this unless it knows you have the capacity and safety to take this type of journey, to release your lifetime’s worth of survival patterns (and maybe some ancestors’). If you have the capacity and safety, a state of joy and calm will be your everyday normal, your body will be detoxing and healing constantly in the moment. As the systems overall have more space and capacity, the body can move to other areas to heal and clear what may have been there most of your life, even before your birth.
Epigenetics is now showing us that these patterns are remembered far longer than just your lifetime. Of course your ancestors would pass on patterns for their own survival in their genetic material- your patterns are their patterns too. So while this healing might seem woowoo and illogical if you understand the storing of survival patterns it becomes the most logical explanation for what we experience during ongoing stress, conflict and traumatic events. We have inherited the nervous system of our ancestors. These inherited patterns and systems are continually impacted by the environments we grow up in and collect information about the world around us to decide how best to use the system we have. We have our different ways of coping and in the busyness of life, our ways do not mesh well with the coping strategies and patterns of others. This conflict then shuts down so many of our opportunities to naturally release by crying, speaking our truth, moving, sighing, screaming and being soothed by caring humans.
This is how holistic modalities work; the body leads us to what is working well, it clears these blockages allowing them to resolve or release. This is also why consistency matters in this work. You will not experience any long lasting effects from one session, you may have short relief, limited until the next stressful situation that occurs in your life. To undo the blockages and patterns built up in your nervous system over your life and to allow you body to work the way it was meant to; you need to return it to deep relaxation and supercharged healing as often as possible. Longer sessions do not equal stronger results, more frequent sessions do. Longer session may be of benefit if you are carrying a lot of stress and trauma as it will take a little longer for you to be able to enter the state of deep healing. Longer sessions with extra talking time can help if you find integrating and processing your sessions challenging. Having time is an important factor in healing, rushing and pressure stalls the process.
As the body begins to clear more and more areas of the nervous system there is more capacity available and then longstanding issues may resolve themselves in what can feel miraculous. Your body is miraculous; we just have to give it the environment and experiences it was developed to thrive in. There may be capacities and capabilities that were turned off because of your very early experiences, they are hidden there in the deep just waiting to be of service. Maybe they have been dormant for generations, you ancestors have gifts and strengths to contribute too.
A lot of our current definitions of health are really focused on being functional, adequate, “normal”- our normal should be a thriving state not a survival one. We have normalised average, fine, good enough, even when we joke “I am still alive”, it communicates a normalised perspective that we should all lower our expectations of living vibrantly beyond childhood.
“It’s all downhill from here”; a healing journey is about being brave enough to test if that is in fact true. A healing journey is about testing everything we have been told is true for us.
In a medical model of illness, you have a problem, you look at that problem and want to fix. There are so many wonderful advances and choices available to us through modern medicine and the professionals that deliver these benefits to us. Your journey with Unalome Therapy Dunedin can sit alongside all other treatments because the philosophy and focus is very different. From a holistic point of view diagnosis is not overly important, two people with the same diagnosis may have very different stories to unravel and they will definitely have different areas of strength, which is where we work. From a holistic perspective the problem is often a symptom of something larger and probably complex that would be very hard to untangle and impossible to untangle from the symptom. The symptom is the end point so it is wonderful to notice improvement but it won’t be a direct focus for treatments.
We work with what is healthy and increase it rather than focusing on the issue, we are looking for changes, even if they seem unrelated to the area that you are most trying to get relief from, because the body, the whole, knows the root and the pathway to return to health. From a holistic point of view an unpleasant after effect of the treatment, say a headache, is a marvellous sign that something is happening, that the body is working hard.
This can be a dramatically different way of understanding health and wellness. It may be that you come to a treatment to fix migraines and end up realigning your pelvis. Maybe you have back pain but end up releasing trapped emotions and the back pain ceases to be an issue. What brings relief may not be logically connected as far as your memory of how and when the issue presented itself. These journeys can bring clarity and closure to a variety of issues that you never knew were holding you back. These journeys can be empowering to those with mystery illnesses, unexplained symptoms or caught in long hospital processes awaiting diagnosis or tests and procedures.
If you find yourself with a health challenge or feel stuck, you can wait and worry and feel like the process is outside of your control; or you can refocus on a complementary side-project where you are a brave adventurer feeling into the truths your body has been storing for you. You may as well focus where you have some power. You can work with what flows, where wellness springs from even if you do not have a diagnosis for a health issue. You do not have to have a health issue to inquire into your mind/body connection. You might find that your “normal” can be beyond far more than you have been accepting and observing in others around you.
There is also a deeper aspect to holism, that we are so much more than the body. Emotions play a huge role in this type of healing, this is often because culturally some emotions are allowed, tolerated or valued over others in different contexts and this can make it difficult for people to release these. This creates a build up and patterns of shutting down.
In the western medical model a decision was made to group and categorise our mental and emotional experiences as only mental health this subtle naming matters to how we understand our challenges and the challenges and experiences of others.
Mental health was also see as completely separately from physical health, although science and research has shown that this was never the case and most medical practitioners do understand this, this thinking persists and is embedded in our language and the structure of the system developed under this incorrect assumption.
Our medical system is organised on those previous decisions with specialists with incredible knowledge about isolated areas of the body. This makes seeking help feel very disjointed and complex having appointments and waiting to see a large number of professionals for help for different aspects of your challenges and issue. This may mean that the wholeness of who we are, the completing or confusing advice and information is not considered. How our emotions impact and are tied to the physical injuries we carry or how emotional and traumatic events may have triggered medical issues may not be seen. Or there just isn’t time in quick appointments and our body and nervous system must have time and care. Holistic approaches may be the first time you have been asked for your whole health and life journey; in holistic approaches we are looking for a little link somewhere in that full picture that can help us understand where things started and what was added over time.
Humans are designed to heal in relationship to themselves and others; so finding healing in a disjointed system can become very complex and that can hurt even more. The struggle to heal within a system that seems to make things harder can be addressed by sharing the journey with people who understand and care about your experience of the individual treatments, the shock of diagnosis or news, the decision making and the grief and what it all means in your unique life and who you are in your wholeness.
Healing is not the same as curing, it is so much more. Healing is about change and growth. It is about the bigger picture. Healing is about respect, self determination, connection and values. It is about a person making sense of their own experience in a way that empowers them, seeing new possibilities and it is about grief. Grief is sane, it is our release system, it kicks in when something has ended and it help us reinvent or find power in otherwise pretty terrible situations. There are many situations we do not control, that is a fact that many people waste their lives fighting. We all have to accept limits in the material world, our bodies will take us on journeys we may not want to take.
We always have agency over our perspective and thoughts even when we do not have control of situations, we can prioritise walking through difficult experiences being caring and cared for. When the very harsh realities of our lived experience occur; healing still offers love, companionship and the flow and wisdom of grief. Tapping into those resources, resources that modern life often sanitises, is what healing can bring that trying to cure and fight with reality and everything that is wrong does not offer. All of these abilities and resources are stored in the fabric of our bodies and were spoken of by every ancient peoples, in unique ways, with different stories and metaphor but these capacities are deeply human. Healing environments are spaces where grief is welcome, where difficult situations that may be unacceptable to speak of can be spoken. If the rawness of a situation is not allowed to be acknowledge it can never be healed. Witnessing the truth opens the door to healing and we keep it open for the unexpected surprises that life might still hold- that is healing. Not controlling, not judging, open to possibilities, surprises, change and creation.
The treatment experiences with Unalome Therapy Dunedin are designed to help you connect deeply to something much deeper, richer and mysterious than being one isolated human. Bringing that inner knowing deep into your body is healing that can make so many fears completely obsolete. Living in gratitude, joy, creativity and your sacred uniqueness is so much better than feeling ruled by fear-based decision making.
The Unalome is a Buddhist symbol for the learning process, life’s process.
We are born into a swirling journey, we go through uncertainty, darkness, confusion and in all the chaos and mess.
We take steps, we try things, we stay open, this helps us learn and gain skills. Even though we go around in circles and feel at certain points along the way that we are going backwards; overall- holistically, we are still making progress.
Eventually, with so much deep understanding of the whole journey we are enlightened.
I created this symbol by carving a sliced tree trunk, the natural rings of the tree were the same powerful metaphor as the Unalome symbol.
So many symbols in nature are pointing us to these same lessons. I left the cut marks from the blade that sliced the wood to represent challenges and very real abuse that takes place in our world.
The gold in the areas of symbol is what increasing our life-force energy and the cranial-sacral fluid through our nervous system feels like for me when I do this work with people. This is the work of our releasing and repair systems in the body and what we are building over your journey. A system that can hold huge amounts of wellbeing and cycles this everywhere under your own power; just as you were born to. Your spirit flowing beautifully through your loyal and miraculous body. This is sacred work to me and I feel blessed to witness the power of human healing every day with every client in mind-blowing, unique creative ways.
