Is it our Body or Mind or Both?

Rocky describes how our psychological and physiological components affect us. If you could turn your body inside out to see all the damage, would you do things differently?  Would self-care mean something different for you? 

Transcript

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Well, hello there, and welcome to another episode of Rocky Unfiltered. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about. I love how many people don't realize how the psychological and physiological patterns we have created are so important in our lives. These patterns create a blueprint and how we store what we can't see on the inside, but notice it on the outside. And I want to give you an insight into why this affects us so much. How many of you know some highly intelligent people that only learn in patterns and must translate it into English for all others to understand? Remember in school when your teacher said, I need you to show your work, and you tell them I can't or I don't know how. Your brain doesn't work that way. You store the patterns with repetition and it's familiar to you. It's the most comfortable way of communicating. For example, you are at work and you have been chosen to do a training and you must be in front of a Zoom group. You know why you were chosen and can have all the confidence in the world. But something about being on camera makes you want to shit yourself. This is important for you to be promoted and to take a leadership role, not only in terms of advancement in the company, but because you know personally you have a lot to offer. You know you're shit, but you must figure out how to do this and not fuck up. You put so much psychological stress on yourself to blow this out of the water. So picture this. These are the nights leading up to the big day. You haven't slept much, you notice your body and mind going on an unplanned vacation. You start freaking the fuck out, thinking about all the things that could go wrong. You have anxiety, fear, nervousness, for example. Where do you think these emotions are stored? Sure, you feel like shit because of all the outside noticeable changes, but you can't figure out how to get it to stop. You need to figure out how to make this madness go away so you can concentrate. You think to yourself, oh my god, my head hurts. Oh shit, am I getting sick? What if I can't do this? You have created a massive fucking blowout in your head and throughout your body. But again, where does all of this go? We are programmed that nothing is wrong until we feel it, right? Sound familiar? We tell ourselves how many times that we don't have time to go to the doctor. We don't make time for ourselves. I can't call out sick of work. I have things to do. People rely on me. I'm a mother. My kids have X, Y, and Z, and I must be responsible for them. We don't psychologically catch up until our physiological side runs out of gas. Our bodies hold and store all the emotions we feel in the moment and over a period of time because we don't ever stop to think about what it looks like inside. What if you could turn your body inside out? What the hell do you think it would look like? Fun fact our left side of the body holds emotion and the right side of the body holds physical protection. Our tissues store memories. Congratulations, this is where it all goes. Have you ever heard a doctor tell you after a procedure or surgery to take it easy for a period of time? Even though you feel fine and you can get right back into life, this is because we heal from the inside out, but we can't see it. We only see what the outside looks like. And if it looks good, there's nothing to worry about. So let's think about how you sleep at night. For example, are you a right side or a left side sleeper? Do you have to have noise to go to sleep, or do you fall asleep in the dark in complete silence? Do you wake up a lot in the night if you hear a noise, or maybe you get too hot or too cold? All of these are signals of both our psychological and our physiological sensors that are crossing wires and getting confused. We get frustrated as hell, but do you really stop to think about what is truly causing this? Do you suffer from anxiety like I do? Where do you think those emotions are stored? The anxiety is felt mostly in our chest, arms, hands, legs. It's what gives us that panic feeling of not being able to breathe. You possibly start to sweat, get nauseous, you feel your heart rate increase, like your fucking heart is gonna pop out of your chest, or even sometimes cry. Your thoughts are firing all over the place and you can't get control of them. It's an uncontrollable neuroreaction that can be debilitating if not controlled. Every time you have an anxiety attack, you store the response in your fascia. It's like a spider web that protects our muscles. And when you finally recover from an episode, you feel exhausted. You literally just gave yourself a fucking workout. All the energy, muscle movement, and cardio it took to get a hold of yourself isn't something you see. If you knew every time you had an anxiety or panic attack, would you treat yourself differently knowing what it does to us inside if you knew what it looked like? I know people don't believe that anxiety is real, and I'll be more than happy to debate with them any fucking day, by the way. But if you can relate, you know what I'm talking about. Anxiety is torture on the mind and the body. The way we store the thoughts that blast through us without notice keeps us in fight or flight all the time. The attacks are not always predictable, therefore, the body takes a hit every time you have one. I will explore anxiety more in other episodes. I think there are several ways to break anxiety down in more detail. In a psychology class in college, we had to come up with a therapeutic way to explain how the psychological roadblocks could affect us in other ways. Of course, I was like, hell yeah, I got this in the bag. At the time, I was still practicing as a massage therapist, and this is a great way to share how our body can provide a story we can't see. At the time, I told myself, I have an idea of how to explain how both components go hand in hand. I'm a visual person, so I went out and bought see-through backpacks at this outlet mall near my house. I went out to a park and found three different sizes of rocks. I used colors and sizes to determine the top three things that I felt were a good representation of what I was struggling with in my life at the time and what kept me held down. The biggest and heaviest rock represented the hardest and most consuming issue. Then the middle rock was second and weighed a little less, and of course the third rock was smaller and didn't weigh as much. I decorated it and wrote on them using phrases, and I put them all in the backpack together. I put the backpack on to see how it felt. At first I thought, yeah, okay, this isn't going to work, Rocky. This isn't that heavy, and what is this really gonna prove? My thought process was to show what we store inside, and if we could flip our insides for us to see, we will certainly see how much we destroy ourselves in ways we don't naturally see but only feel. The idea is to wear a backpack with rocks for 24 hours every day. You sat to eat, work, go do your normal routine at home, shower, use the bathroom, and sleep. My nephew volunteered at the time thinking, oh yeah, no big deal, this shit is easy. We began the experiment. My nephew didn't make it more than two fucking hours before saying, fuck this shit. I don't want to do this anymore. He was crying, his back hurt, he was tired, and there was no way he could even go to the bathroom, and realized quickly that he wanted to take it off and just figure out another way to deal with his shit. Of course, the supportive aunt I was, I had to laugh and was teasing him. Yeah, no shit, you're carrying this all day, every day. Of course it's gonna be a pain in your ass, literally. And I followed up with, yeah, you ready to get rid of your shit now? Without getting into details of his rocks and what he was carrying, he quickly realized and proved my point that we can't see how we destroy what is held inside of us. So this experiment showed him that what we can't see does affect us in more than one way. So you decide if you want to continue to carry this shit every day. You start by removing the heaviest of the rocks. You decide in that moment what controls you and what you allow to hold you down. You let it go, you remove it from the backpack, give it back to whoever or whatever put it there to begin with, and repeat this until you have an empty backpack and are ready to take full control of your life. Eventually you release the heaviness of your issues so that you can psychologically and physiologically heal from the inside out. I have used this method since then, and that included myself. It's not pretty all, but it's so rewarding and cleansing. As a massage therapist, I immediately could sense and feel the energy of a client. It was important for me to be in a good space to provide a service that positively affected my clients when they walked in and out of my door. If I'm pissed, sad, fearful, etc., I can easily transfer that energy on to my client. Touch is a serious commitment, especially when in session with people that might have some trauma. I can't express how important it is to be in the right space mentally and physically before starting a session. It happened before and I thought I could fight through it. My very first intern massage in school was a fucking disaster, thinking I could handle anything that came my way. I was in a good mood, amped up that finally I got to put what I learned into action, right? So my client came into the Bay Area. I went through the spiel, and when I started the session, I realized this dude was full blown naked. It didn't bother me per se, but something didn't sit right with me, but I just kept going on. So I am working on his back, and this motherfucker starts humping the table. I'm having to tell myself to keep calm, but it was pissing me off. I stopped the massage thinking maybe he needed to adjust himself. I continued, and the moment I touched him, he began gyrating the table. I put more pressure on his lower back to give him a little warning. I tell you this asshole wouldn't stop. So the moment he went up, I smashed the shit out of him downward. I don't have a penis, but I know that fucking hurt like hell. I then told him to get the fuck off my table. And my instructor heard the commotion and had me leave the bay and asking him to get dressed and leave. Well, if you know me, I wasn't letting that asshole get away with that. So against my better judgment, I went back in the bay and lo and behold, he was jacking off. That set me off. And I started yelling at him to get the hell out. He was so scared that he ran out of the bay naked, trying to grab what he could. This asshole ran straight out to the lobby and into the parking lot naked and afraid. My instructor wanted to debrief with me, and all I wanted to do was pack up and go home. I didn't know if I wanted to continue with massage therapy, if this is what I had to deal with. I was pissed and felt violated. That's just one story of the bullshit I've come across, but made me think hard about continuing. I quickly realized that I wasn't going to be doing massages the rest of the day because I didn't want to transfer my energy onto anyone else. That was my first introduction of how the two components worked parallel to each other. What a fucking way to start my career, right? My standard for every client is that they get the best from me that day, not the rest of me. I have worked with a lot of people that have sought out massage therapy that want to overcome trauma. This is what I call trauma bod. These sessions were very tailored to the needs of the client based on their tolerance and depth of trauma. The energy and environment almost must be perfect for bodies specific to work. Clients that hold trauma that can be related to emotional, spiritual, physical, sexual, verbal, or having triggers from PTSD must be handled with a different type of care. There are areas in the body that store the most common emotions, and you never want the client to physically feel unsafe and threatened. I will go into this on a deeper level in another episode. When I became an instructor, I wanted to share all my real life experiences through my time in the field. So I waited 10 years to become an instructor for that reason. I taught post-secondary age students, so basically anyone 18 and over. I had students with different backgrounds, ethnicity, ages, and with that came their stories of why they wanted to go to school to become massage therapist. I felt it was super important to me to hire instructors and vet students into a program, making sure that they were in the field for all the right reasons. The most common answers I would get, I want to help others. I want to help keel others. My friends said I give good massages. I'm sure you can guess why I vetted hard as hell for the right people from all the horror stories of massage parlors. The amount of education, research, and time I've spent making my career meaningful, these types of people pissed me off. But I won't waste my breath on that subject. I had one student that came into class and I immediately thought, oh, this one's going to be a good one. Throughout the program, she wanted to know everything I had to offer. She wasn't scared of anything. I started to realize that she was holding herself back in certain ways, and I couldn't really put my finger on it. I noticed a change or apprehension, not when she was giving bod, but of when she would get the bodywork. I would work on her in class and quickly realize that her left side of the body, that holds emotion, was causing an SER, which is a somatic emotional release. She would start to sweat, shake, tense up, and tears welped up in her eyes. Her breathing increased, so I had to ease out of the area that was affecting her so much. What I noticed right away was that the neck and chest area seemed to hold the most trauma. The emotions associated with this area are usually pain, grief, and shame. If you don't know what SERs are, I highly encourage you to research it. You will find what I'm talking about in more depth if that interests you. After doing some more work, I quickly realized that she was holding on to some deep trauma. Well, of course, we got to know each other better as we spent 40 hours a week Monday through Friday, so how could we not, right? So I did some deep work on the trauma areas, and she quickly realized where where she was holding on and what it was stored there and had a choice to change it. The anxiety, fear, and confidence all changed. She became my rock star. When she opened up to me about what was going on, we pinpointed those areas of the body and concentrated releasing the stored emotions and what she was holding on to. The interesting part of body work is that the body can tell a story without a single word. Of course, her personal life was different, and she had choices to make to change her situation in the meantime. Massage School helped her in so many ways, and I'm so happy to report that she changed her situation, became my many-me, is a very dear friend of mine today, and has the most successful career. We ignore the symptoms that scream at us when we are living life to the fullest. We are wired to keep going, like I mentioned. If you had a moment to yourself, what is it that you feel the most? What is the first signal or symptom you experience? In what ways do you carry your stress or exhaustion? We want quick fixes, and I'm guilty of being a fucking peach when I'm in pain. And trust me, it's not pretty. Even though I provide body work to others to relieve a lot of things, such as pain, discomfort, or even emotional baggage, I'm the worst fucking person in that way. I've said I wish I could clone myself and do the work myself when things pop off. But yeah, that's not possible. So instead, I taught myself to grab the ice, heat, and ibuprofen, bitch about it until it goes away and go through it all over again. Taking care of ourselves mentally and physically is more important than we want to admit. It's hard to introduce a new method of self-care when we are so conditioned to ignore the cues. So I want to challenge all my listeners to find one thing that you have wanted to do for self-care that you've always made an excuse not to do. I'm giving you the permission so you can blame it on me. So until next time, stay unapologetically. You stand your ground and keep your bullshit meter on high alert.