Nature is a potent healer. Turning to nature for healing is a free way to pour into yourself daily. As humans, we need to be in nature to be balanced. And when you’re recovering from trauma, being out in nature during the day is even more important.
What’s behind the healing benefits of being outdoors in nature for your trauma recovery? It’s the circadian rhythm.
Read MoreWhen you start your healing journey of recovering from trauma, you will need to begin with self-regulation and stimulating your vagus nerve in order to support your nervous system and calm down. A first step on the way towards such practices is the creation of a safe space that you can retreat to whenever you want to practice grounding and do healing work like meditation, yoga, writing, breathwork or bodywork. I’ll show you how!
Read MoreRecently, while discussing our dinner plans, a friend of mine offered me various options and then asked me what would make me feel safe. And I realized how incredibly important this underestimated love language is. So, I wanted to dedicate today’s blog to this topic and provide you with some useful tips on how you can make a loved person feel safe as your support them on their healing journey towards the Self.
Read MoreWhen healing from trauma, grounding and reconnecting with your center is not the only thing that matters in order to move forward. If you can’t move, or release the stress from a perceived or existing threat and the resulting trauma, that energy and stress is stored in your body. This is why moving the energy is an essential part of healing and trauma recovery.
Read MoreWe live in a time that triggers deep childhood wounds and trauma on a daily basis. Every day is bathed in uncertainty and you are challenged to ground yourself within.
Not only do you need to find ways to self-regulate and step out of fear to think clearly, sleep well, or connect with others. Finding ways to calm the nervous system down is probably the best thing you can do for your own health today, because fear weakens the immune system.
Read MoreThe world can be a triggering place and for the past two years our collective is going through a potentially deeply traumatizing time. One organ that is involved in navigating your response to the world is the polyvagal nerve (or vagus nerve). While your polyvagal nerve influences your nervous system response and in turn, your body’s response to what is happening to or around you, there is way to integrate your body in your healing work and work the opposite way around: Various bodywork techniques allow you to stimulate and influence your vagus nerve and consequently can help you calm down whenever you are triggered or experiencing episodes of anxiety and panic attacks. A brilliant, free and accessible way to do this is humming.
Read MoreAnxiety is a common symptom many experience as a result of unhealed trauma. When considering a holistic approach to recovery, healing might be facilitated by supporting your body with a focus on specific nutrients. Mindfully incorporating foods high in these nutrients or supplementation can make sense to provide your body with the nutrients it needs to manage the effects of traumatic stress. Magnesium is one of these nourishing and soothing nutrients that can support your body in being able to calm down, and in managing your blood sugar.
Read MoreSleep is essential for healing and wellbeing. During your sleep your body gets to regenerate, heal, detox, recover from the day. Cell regeneration, promoted by the so-called “growth hormone” mostly happens during the REM phase of your sleep, which is the deepest sleep and the time you are dreaming. Under normal circumstances, your brain processes your day and everything that happened during your sleep. It makes new connections and transforms negative thoughts and sensations into lessons learned during the deep sleep phase (called REM). But why is sleep an issue when you’ve made traumatic experiences? And what is the role of sleep in trauma recovery?
Read MoreFood is an often overlooked link in the realm of mental health, especially when it comes to trauma and recovering from trauma. But what you eat during recovery can make a difference: Research that goes back as far as 1982 shows that the sympathetic nervous system responds to changes in caloric intake. Certain foods can trigger your nervous system acitivity and along with it your trauma response.
Read MoreIn this day and age, we have become fond of the term “mental health”. There’s a mental health awareness month and celebrities engage in openly sharing their mental health struggles online. The bravery to share is applauded, but the focus on mental health as a disease is still incredibly narrow.
So, what exactly does mental health mean? How do you “have” it? How come someone does not? How can you really heal?
Read MoreTrauma still has a reputation of being something haunting, dark, an almost abstract thing that we humans only go through when faced with extreme situations. What do you immediately associate trauma with, if someone was to ask you what it was about?
Read MoreChasing freedom is like chasing a butterfly. It is always ahead of you if you're not free within.
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