Melanie is a certified EFT therapist with a multi modal approach and years of practice in health care. Melanie takes her knowledge, experience love and light and successfully mentors others. She has coached hundreds into a world of self fulfillment and freedom. She helps clients who feel stuck, find ways out of darkness and bondage by incorporating simple but effective practices that create neural pathways to positivity and happiness. She specializes in difficult challenges, including PTSD, addiction, depression and anxiety. Melanie is a best selling author of the book happy, joyous and free, as well as a sought after inspirational speaker. 

The Freeze state is part of the parasympathetic side of our nervous system. It can be a little confusing because social engagement and calm also is parasympathetic and we think of freeze as bad and social engagement as good. So today we’re going to work IN to the freeze state and talk about what it is, what it’s purpose is, what it looks like and feels like in humans and how we can safely move out of that state if we find ourselves stuck there.

safe self regulation lives in that in between space that overlaps between the somatic and the autonomic. And this is where we can actually get in to the nervous system, it's where a lot of our best safe self regulation tools lie. We have this beautiful harmony between our reflexive actions to the world, and the deliberate actions that we can choose in response to our perception of the world. And that is really important to remember as we are trying to develop a toolbox or an arsenal of ways to handle all of our experiences, past, present and future, and to build and retrain resilience, especially if we're coming out of a place where we have felt stuck or disconnected

Physical pain is no different than feeling abandoned. It's no different than... our nervous system doesn't recognize emotional pain from physical pain, it's all the same. So whether you're someone who's dealing with anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, chronic pain, acute pain, if you can learn how to tune into your nervous system. Become aware, learn to titrate, give it what it can accept, and keep trying to give it just that little bit more and then always bring it back to the safety when it's at a point where it can't quite handle it anymore. And then go there again. It's amazing the changes that you can see.

if people listening get no other message I hope they get the message to meet yourself with kindness and compassion, because these are subconscious responses that are happening outside of your awareness. 

Now the good news is, and that we'll talk about that in a moment is, you can start to bring in your conscious awareness to start to pull yourself out of those states, but your system is doing that for you at an unconscious level to protect you. You're not making that choice, so free yourself from any judgment and guilt and meet it with kindness and compassion,

The overarching theme throughout our discussion was connection, making, keeping and healing connections throughout the body and the nervous system. In this four part series, we're going to explore those connections between chronic pain, the nervous system. Integrating movement and breath and finding new ways to befriend our body and fully experience life. This is part one of our connection series, chronic pain and the nervous system. Please welcome my guest. Colleen Jorgensen.