brainwaves ≋ ocean waves
Our brains are pattern pros.
The science behind that is simple: Patterns are fast and often effective ways for us to make sense of the world around us and learn how to interact with it based on what has happened before. But sometimes, we want to change our patterns, and we find it challenging.
We often say we’re feeling “stuck” or “set in our ways.”
Our bodies store the patterns our brain learns.
Everything that has ever happened to our physical form is encoded in our tissues and tendons, down to the cellular level. This is useful much of the time. For example, it’s how we learned to walk and now we can do so without conscious thought. But it carries a cost: When we experience dysfunctional patterns, they persist. We move through the world burdened — stuck.
We can harness this natural process for healing.
Just as the ocean waves change form and shape based on both internal, oceanic conditions and on-shore, external conditions, our brainwaves change based on internal forces — our “inner terrain” of thoughts and emotions — and external forces — the pressures in the world around us, from gravity onward.
Through intentional work that honors and holistically addresses our full psychosomatic experience, we can alleviate the pain and rewrite the brain patterns that caused that pain, so it’s gone for good.
pain is a messenger begging for change
When we feel pain, we are experiencing our body communicating back up the chain to our brain. The pain messenger is asking for a rewrite of the pattern, for protection and healing.
In Western medicine today, we often focus on the body parts that are sending that message. We seem to have decided as a society that the goal is to quiet down the message, to make the pain go away.
But that’s missing the point.
To effectively heal, we need to listen to the messenger, not silence it. We need to understand what is not working about the current pattern — which first requires fully examining the current pattern as it is — and to decide how we want to change, then live into that change.