What's Possible with Expanded Understanding?

Where are you finding curiosity to expand your understanding to expand your approach to caring for you? Or perhaps dissonance? Either is an entry point.

This section gives you some reflection exercises to explore potential motivation for expanding your understanding so you can expand your approach to caring for you.

Review Your Notes about Your Current Approach

1. How similar or different are the messages you hear from the people - experts, TikTok-ers, and friends - you are listening to?

   1. Who talks about things in a simple cause-and-effect way? Just do X to manage Y. Breathe and you won’t be anxious. Just take this medication and your panic will reduce.

   2. Who talks as if the only ‘cause’ happened in the past, as if it can’t be changed now. You experienced emotional neglect, so you have anxious attachment (unsaid and implied…so you’re stuck with it).

   3. Or they can do nothing about it (unsaid and implied…so there’s nothing you can do about it).

   4. Which parts of your current work are failing to understand you and your context?

2. What attributes and conditions have you been led to understand as personality, genetic, or not changeable?

Listen to Yourself

Within us, there is a biocomputer connected to a superhighway of pathways - nerve pathways, fluids, chemicals. These run between the brain and the body, throughout the inseparable organ systems, and through the cellular matrix. The explosion of information gathered around aspects of human functioning can flip our paradigm of understanding from a ‘machine’ to an integrated supercomputer with integrated layers of control systems. In a word, we are fascinating!

Yet much of it runs out of our awareness. It developed it the spirit of our survival in the habitat. We would not be able to do any of the ‘higher order’ functioning if we had to put attention to all of the decisions and adjustments that are made in the body 24/7.

So let’s pause and see what you can detect in your internal processing.

Your Thinking

1. How rigid is your thinking about what you currently know? How strongly do you believe management, control, and coping are the only strategies?

2. How strongly do you compliment yourself for sticking with a regime (exercises, eating, chiropractic adjustments…) or judge yourself for not being disciplined enough?

Your Feelings - emotions and sensations

1. What emotions came up as you read about my perspective? How much do you ‘know’ what emotions are there compared to feeling the emotion is there?

2. Did you at times notice overwhelm or too much? Was it in your thinking or a felt experience?

3. How about glossing over, checking out, glancing over words yet disconnected?

4. Does your energy increase or decrease with the idea of expanding your understanding? It brings hope. Or burden.

5. Does the body get tight and turn inward? Do you feel a lift in your spine and look outward?

There are no right or wrong responses to these. Simply an opportunity to listen to you. A first exploration of the plethora of information from within you that only you have access to. It’s of more value to you than any research study.

Approach of Industries

1. What are your thoughts and feelings (name them separately) about the products you routinely use?

   1. What makes each worth the effort and expense?

   2. Do you suspect any of them might have an unintended consequence?

2. Have any of the doctors, therapists, or service providers described how what they do is related to what others do? Might things be synergistic or antagonistic?

3. Do you have any intuition or gut instinct about such? What do you notice, in you, when you change your routine use?

Expanding Understanding

1. What current challenges - physically, emotionally, mentally, energetically, relationally - might you be able to understand more completely?

2. What have you been led to believe is unresolvable? Is it possible there’s something more that hasn’t been explored?

I do not know whether there is or isn’t something more that can be done. However, I have seen repeatedly that truly new ideas and pathways for resolution follow new understanding and new perspective. Wrestling with dissonance is a necessary part of the process. It doesn’t matter if it is with a project, a relational conflict, or a symptom. New understanding is an invaluable first step and goes beyond merely having new information.