The 2nd Arrow’s Optional: How to ALIGN Your Mind with Your Body

🤔 What if you’re at your Most Powerful when you ALIGN with what’s already inside of you?

In our STUDY, SAVOR, & SUPPORT Each Other CHAT☕️🍵, we’re doing a deep-dive into our Book Club selection! This week is Chapter 6 of REWIRED: The Breakthrough Tapping Method to Stop Overthinking, Calm Your Body, and Finally Feel at Ease by Nick, Jessica, & Alex Ortner.

In Chapter 6, we learn what to do When Frustration Builds: Releasing Pressure Before It Explodes.

AKA: When Life Feels Like An Endless Pile of Crap

Face it: we all know what it’s like to experience the seemingly minute frustrations that pile upon us day after day. They eventually compound and grow into an exponential amount of background stress that’s always impacting us on a biological, as well as experiential, level. Each individual issue causes a release of cortisol in our system, and as that cocktail of stress hormones snowballs, it can grow into what the Ortners dramatically call…

“The Full Spectrum of Fury”

On the low end, you’ve got the “Daily Drip” of small annoyances that bother us every day; to the “Personal Wounds“ when acquaintances, colleagues, friends and family say or do something that cuts us deeply; to the “Systemic Rage” that causes us to feel angry about the state of our world and society, sometimes on a level that we cannot personally control, change, or escape; and, last but not least, the “Helplessness Rage” when one thing after another gets in our way, making us feel like we can never get ahead, like getting a traffic ticket, then having our dishwasher breakdown.

Worse, we not only suffer from these anger-inducing thoughts, but there’s a double-whammy: the pangs of guilt that we pile upon ourselves, because these “should” be minor annoyances, compared to the “real problems” many people deal with on the regular.

My MINDFUL Reflection

At some point in all of our lives, life strikes us with an arrow. It’s the unavoidable pain and suffering that all humans suffer from, merely because we are alive, in this life, in this world, in this universe. It’s simply part of the human condition. None of us escape unscathed.

But, sight unseen, there’s a hidden, second arrow — one we launch into our own heart. It’s the way we condemn ourselves and make ourselves “wrong” for, many times, things that are not within our control. It’s the way we use shame and blame to reject ourselves. To deny ourselves the compassion, understanding, and love that we all deserve.

This is the second arrow that’s unnecessary. It’s the second arrow that we all have the power to prevent.

The solution seems simple: Observe the first arrow, without piling on unnecessary guilt or shame.

But, when our brains and bodies are swimming in stress hormones, the solution can be quite slippery in practice.

What if there was a better, easier way to do it, by aligning with our brains and bodies, in a powerful somatic practice?

By aligning with what’s already inside of us?

When Life Tries to Get You to Play Tug of War, Drop the Rope. Tap into EFT instead.

Rather than strain and struggle to change things that are outside of our control, we can draw strength from our upset and anger, by taking the time to pause and tap, to acknowledge our upset first, then use it in a constructive and purposeful way.

This makes sense on a physiological level: when we are caught in a dysregulated, Reactive Loop where our Sympathetic Nervous System’s caught in a state of fight, flight, fawn, or flop, the thinking parts of our brain shut down, and we are not able to use the creative strategic parts of our brain to come up with any solutions.

That’s why our EFT Timing Matters

Most people say “just let it go,” and “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” but the Ortners say this never works because our frustration “isn’t a logical choice; it’s a biological survival response.”

The only solution is to tap precisely when we are upset. The Ortners go so far as to call this the “Tap While It’s Happening Rule“ because it takes advantage of the physiological state we’re stuck in anyway:

When our thoughts are focused on the upsetting subject, our brains are actively retrieving the memories, sensations, and thoughts surrounding the subject. It’s like the operating system in our computer-like brains has opened the exact program file that we need to edit. That’s why this time period — during the upset — is the critical time when we can access our programming and rewire it before our brain saves the file again. And, this time, EFT lets us Rewire it to suit our well-being instead of our downfall.

My MINDFUL Epiphany

The somatic mechanism behind Rewiring — needing to tap during our upset — makes perfect sense to me.

Not because I learned it from tapping.

Not even because I learned it from meditating as a lifelong meditator. Nope.

I realized this from another somatic practice: yoga.

A long time ago, yoga was something I enjoyed every once and while. Usually when I couldn’t make it to my regular lifting class. Or, on the rare occasion I felt inspired to slow down.

Little did I know how life-transforming yoga would become for me.

After a month of going a few more times than usual, I noticed something strange: I thought I was relaxed or calm before class but, by the time my yoga class ended, I felt a deep-abiding feeling of relaxation beyond what I was used to feeling in my body.

As an experiment, I started going to yoga once a week and, soon, I noticed another pattern: whenever I skipped yoga, I didn’t feel right. I wasn’t upset. I was even-keeled. But I didn’t FEEL as good, within my body.

Now, I go to yoga twice a week. First with an instructor who does lots of flowy vinyasas. And second with a different teacher who does a lot of challenging binds and stretches that have vastly improved my physical and mental practice.

My lower back pain is completely gone. But — far better than that — I leave class in awe, thinking, “Wow. I thought I was fine. I thought I was calm before class. But, THIS is what calm really FEELS like.”

What I find fascinating: If someone had just told me that yoga could do that — completely transform the quality of calm I feel in my body — I wouldn’t have believed them. I could not have known the qualitative difference it’s made if I had not experienced it in my body, for myself.

It’s encouraging me to see just how far a somatic practice like EFT can take me.

And it reminds me that there’s tremendous power in what seems small…

• Yes, some of the mightiest, most powerful personal transformations can happen in the Littlest Shifts:

• And there’s tremendous Power in A SLOW Move:

That’s precisely why I LOVE this quote by Yoga Teacher Savira Gupta, that (Yay, Synchronicity!!!) my own yoga teacher read aloud in my class this week:

I want to feel that same miraculous sense of CALM I feel in yoga, not reserved for once or twice a week, but in real-time, as soon as life’s many paper cuts starts slicing me.

I want to use EFT like the finger-yoga it can be.

We don’t even need to “get in a class.” We don’t need anyone else’s permission to do it. We can take back our power, no matter how full our plate gets, no matter how chaotic life becomes. We can tap for ourselves whenever we want.

In the moment. As soon as possible. During the upset.

Now, Take a Mindful Moment, to ask yourself:

⭐️ Want to join me?

⭐️ What if we’re at our Most Powerful when we ALIGN with what’s already inside of us?

STAY TUNED!

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