by Dr. Heléna Kate | Oct 18, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Recently, I was asked in an interview: do you have any advice for people who struggle with fear?
The interviewer pointed out that everyone struggles with fear as they move towards what they really want.
And I have to agree. Whether it\’s a fear that stops us in our tracks or a low-level feeling of anxiety, our ability to deal with fear can make or break us.
So, for this week\’s article I\’d like to start a conversation about what fear is. At it\’s most basic level, fear is a biological response. When we feel afraid, certain chemicals flood our brain and, in turn, motivate our behavior. When we\’re able to understand our fear at a cellular and bodily level, we\’re better equipped to manage it\’s effect on our everyday lives.
If you struggle with fear, I highly recommend that you check the book, Rewire Your Anxious Brain. It\’s one of the resources I used for this newsletter.
How You Can Break the Spell of Fear
Let\’s be clear here – fear is a response to an actual threat. Anxiety is a response to an assumed or possible threat. So, check in with your feelings. If you\’re truly afraid, listen to your body. Maybe you\’re headed in the wrong direction or maybe you need to take extra measures to protect yourself. If you\’re anxious, this is a different story.
Skills that help us deal with anxiety most often effect the frontal cortex of our brains. This is important. When we change the way we think about a given situation, we can feel more confident and less fearful. Recently, neuroscientists have concluded that the amygdala – an almond sized part of our brain involved with our experience of our emotions – plays a vital role in the way we respond to our environment. And because of this, new approaches to working with fear are emerging.
The amygdala causes a very quick physical response to certain stimuli. It drives you to be hyper-attentive to your surroundings and provokes a fearful response when it sees a potential threat. This has a powerful effect on our feelings of anxiety. Yet, it should be noted that the amygdala has helped us survive throughout time by attuning us to potential danger.
However, the amygdala can sometimes produce unwanted symptoms. The most noticeable of these being panic attacks. The chemicals released by the amygdala influence the way our brain works. When your amygdala is hyper-active, you may experience a feeling of chronic anxiety and changes to the way you think.
So, if you\’re feeling stuck and unable to move forward in your life or business, if you find all sorts of reasons not to do things you know you should do, if you overwork yourself to the point of ineffectiveness, or if your avoid important steps forward, you\’d benefit from cultivating a greater understanding of how your body\’s response to anxiety might stymie your efforts towards success.
There are two main components to clearing up this primal fight, flight or freeze response. The first is learning to relax the body and the second is building new neural pathways around certain stimuli.
Relaxation can take the form of deep breathing and meditation. This is best done on a daily basis. Research has shown that a meditation practice of 15 minutes a day can provide quick, measurable and positive change for those suffering with anxiety. When you learn to relax the body and quiet your mind, you\’re able to reverse the effects of an activated amygdala. This process supports our efforts to change our thinking when we\’re triggered by things that happen in our personal or professional lives.
Building new neural pathways can include efforts to eliminate established pathways that lead to anxious thinking, to train the body to have a different response when exposed to a triggering stimulus, and to create a positive connection to a trigger rather than a negative one.
Eliminating the connection between a trigger and an emotional reaction is the purpose of therapies such as EMDR and EFT. Both therapeutic modes work to create new associations in the brain. To do this, a therapist will ask a patient to recall something that triggers them. Then the therapist provides the patient with an alternate stimulus to break the connection between that stimulus and the anxiety response.
Peter Levine is responsible for much innovation and growth in our understanding about how anxiety can be treated somatically. Levine believes that traumas are locked in the body and may not be available to the conscious mind. This means that the process to free ourselves from anxiety begins when we recognize where we\’re holding our traumas and assist the body to release them.
Positive associations to triggering stimuli can be made through guided imagery, imagination, and real time exposure to triggers with a deliberate focus on a positive outcome. Because it takes time to develop new neural pathways, the more ways that we can approach a trigger and build new connections the better.
I leave you with a parting thought about anxiety. The most important thing you can do to help yourself overcome anxiety is to deeply care for and affirm all of who you are. The act of doing this doesn\’t just change the brain and alter the chemicals in your system that allow you to feel better and less anxious. Self-care and self-affirmation supports the essence of who you are. And this makes you stronger and more resilient in all aspects of your life.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Oct 8, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
This week I made the bold move to move to a country farmhouse outside of Providence. This has been part of my plans for the last 10 years and is the first of many steps forward. I always knew that when my son went off to college I\’d decide what I\’d do next.
Yet, this is easier said than done.
My life is changing in major ways now that it\’s no longer organized around raising my son. I\’m responsible only for myself for the first time in years. At times, this has left me feeling like I\’m 20 years old and trying to figure out what I want from my life all over again.
Rather than coming up with a concrete plan, I\’ve decided to explore different options and leave the door open to opportunities that feel right to me. I have no idea if I\’ll spend my next 10 years on a farm or if I\’ll quickly recognize my move as vestiges of a long-past dream.
One thing is for sure, though: open space and nature connects me to my spirituality and ultimately awakens my best self. So, one way or another, I\’ll build the natural world into my plan.
Reconnect With Your Spiritual Self
There are times in our lives where the spiritual aspect of our experience moves to the side-line. And, for some of us, spirituality may not be part of our lives at all.
There are many reasons why this happens.
For some people, the religion they subscribed to ceased to make sense to them. In the process of putting down their religion they put down their spirituality as well. Many people who do this cannot see how spirituality and religion can exist separately.
For others, the day-to-day is so overwhelming that there is little room to attend to the spiritual aspects of their lives. As Maslow clearly outlined: we cannot begin to address our higher needs until we address our base needs for food, shelter, and water.
Some people have never had a connection to the spiritual. They were raised in an environment that did not honor the spiritual and so they did not learn how to connect with their internal sense of spirituality.
Spirituality means many things to many people. Some people might associate it with a magical feeling, others a state of inner calm, and others a sense of being connected. Personally, I define it as the knowledge that there is a consciousness to all things.
People often tap into their spirituality when in a specific state, such as how they feel after meditation, yoga or a sermon. They link their spiritual experience to an event and then seek that event with a measure of satisfaction. Yet, spirituality is not so much a goal as it is a process.
With this in mind, it becomes easier to reconnect with our spirituality in an everyday way, especially if we feel we\’ve lost touch with it.
Let go of what doesn’t work so you can let in what does work
If your religion no longer aligns with your beliefs, if you\’re turned off by some of the atrocities committed in the name of religion, or if you can not put science on hold to believe a literal interpretation of the creation myth, put down these thoughts.
Why? Because, despite the idea that faith requires you to accept the beliefs of your religion whole-cloth, most spiritual teachers think for themselves. Past atrocities made in the name of religion have less to do with faith and more to do with small-minded human behavior. Spirituality does not create harm to others. Hateful, fearful, and judgmental people do.
I encourage you to look for what makes sense to you, what creates meaning for you, and what helps you be a better person. Make these things part of your spiritual life regardless of what they look like.
You\’ve got something to learn from the disconnect
Maybe you once felt very spiritually connected, but you do not feel that way now. When this happens, we can feel that we\’ve lost something and we jump to all sorts of conclusions about what this means about us.
Yet, our moments of spiritual disconnection are just as meaningful as our moments of spiritual connection. These difficult times have their own sweet reward and often teach us how to open more deeply to our spiritual truths.
When we learn to surrender to our heart, reach toward higher ideals, and let go of our shallow needs our experience becomes more profound and meaningful. We learn that what we need to be deeply fulfilled is here and now in the present moment.
Instead of looking for change, take a look at what you are resisting and see if you can embrace it.
Hit the pause button
A moment of pause is infinitely important and almost always helpful.
Simply put, if we stop and let what is happening around us sink into our consciousness, we reconnect to the truth of our experience. The only thing we need to do is to stop long enough to let this happen.
We can stop in different ways. We can go on a retreat or spend a weekend at home being quiet. We can stop the raging of our anger and create space for love in our heart. We can stop the chatter of our mind and allow for more presence. Ideally, we can do all of these.
If you don’t have time to pause your life, do what you can. Even brief pauses like stopping to take a few deep breaths can bring in a deeper connection to yourself and what is around you. Over time the effects will become noticeable.
Remember, spirituality is a process and it doesn\’t come with dogma. So, open up, explore and find your own pathways to your spiritual connection.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Sep 30, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
A few years ago, I watched as many of my friends who owned their own businesses ran themselves ragged. I watched as they over-worked themselves and moved further away from the benefits of being an entrepreneur. I thought to myself, \”this is not right. Why be in business for yourself if you\’re going to sacrifice your quality of life?\”
I decided then and there to better understand why many of my fellow entrepreneurs make this sacrifice.
I\’ve come to see this issue as bigger than an out-of-whack life-work balance. I see it as a happiness crisis.
We tend to look for happiness in all the wrong places. We leave dysfunctional jobs or relationships only to recreate the same dysfunction all over again. We give our all to something that we think will bring us joy, and in the end we just tire ourselves out.
The want for happiness is a great engine for change. Yet, when we know we\’re unhappy and don\’t know how to create the happiness we seek, that engine can stall out.
Everyday I see how our ideas about success hoodwink us. Because as much as we think that reaching a certain level of success is going to bring us the happiness we seek –it\’s just not.
I\’m on a mission to support people in growing their whole lives in ways that bring them TRUE happiness.
And TRUE happiness comes when we learn to care for ourselves, each other and the world. This is the next major social revolution – and it\’s going to happen at both an individual and collective level.
4 Creative + Inspiring Things You Can do to Care for Those You Love (Including YOURSELF!)
According to Caroline Myss, \”the self\” that we now talk about is an idea that emerged in the nuclear age. By the 1950\’s, psychology and psychoanalysis had become accepted as a way of thinking about people and their behavior. In turn, the rich inner life that we all experience became just as real as the outer life we live.
This new way of thinking about \”the self\” ushered in the birth of self-care! Up to the 1950\’s people didn\’t talk about self-care. They didn\’t think about balancing their everyday life demands with things that foster their well-being. Fast forward to today, and self-care is a multi-billion dollar industry and an everyday conversation.
I think that the conversation about self-care leaves out one major thing: and that\’s inspiration. Inspiration is more than just happening upon a cleaver idea. It expresses our creativity and forges a path to real change in ourselves in our world. When you\’re inspired, you feel alive!
Ideas about self-care are mostly directed at how to eat, exercise, or think positively and less toward how to get inspired. Yet, how can we feed our spirit and nurture our soul without inspiration?
Feeding your soul is self-care. Self-care is all about honoring and caring for yourself in ways that matter most. When you\’re able to practice self-care your life becomes less of one huge to-do list and more of a field of abundant meaning and joy.
So to kick off the self-care revolution, here are 4 easy, rich, and deep ways YOU can bring more inspiration into your life.
Write a poem about someone you care for.
Inspiration is within reach most of the time. So, cozy up to your inner-bard and write a poem about your partner, your child or a good friend. See if you can capture what you love about them in this expressive form. If you brainstorm adjectives, qualities or feelings you associate with this person, you\’ll quickly create phrases that inspire you.
Notice the tiny, beautiful details and riff on them.
Say you\’re sitting at home or taking a walk through your neighborhood. Look around you, and free associate with what you see. For example, if you see thin blades of long grass growing by a wall, maybe they remind you of a time when you saw a piece of beautiful graffiti on a wall with grass just like that. Perhaps the grass near the wall reminds you of the eerie beauty and loneliness of neglected things. Let yourself wander into your thoughts. You\’ll be amazed where you wind up!
Create the most luxurious and perfect experience, FOR YOU.
If your version of self-care is to take a bath, a walk in the woods or get a massage, then it\’s time to take it up a notch. Make a decadent, fantastic, and yes inspired experience for YOURSELF. Try new things. Mix and match your experience. Take a bubble bath with candlelight, wine, chocolate, the smell of jasmine and opera music. Or, walk in the woods bundled in soft fabrics singing a song to yourself and noticing how the light hits things.
Give an impromptu gift that will make someone\’s day.
Tap into your inspiration and find something – or make something – that will let another person know how special they are to you. When you think about bringing pleasure to someone else’s life, you naturally think creatively and playfully about what\’s in the world and how to use it. And even better, when you give a gift your heart opens up and you feel satisfied on a deeper level.
It\’s too easy to let days slip by where we\’re distracted from what matters most. So challenge yourself to spend an hour each week doing one of these activities. It won\’t take long before you\’ll feel more inspired and your spirit will feel more nourished.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Sep 3, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
When I work with people in my LifeWork Community program, we look for the easiest ways to effect big changes. Why? Because, often it\’s little shifts that create major transformations.
These little shifts tend to get overlooked because we\’re looking for the major breakthrough, the AHA! moment that changes everything. Yet, when you make the small changes the big moments will happen as they do and when they do. The benefit here is that you\’ll be further along in your personal transformation having made small changes along the way.
And so, the focus of this article is about the little ways you can fall in love with your life again.
Fall in Love with Your LIFE Again
Our lives are filled with lots of repetition and routine. It\’s common for many of us feel numb and bored from time to time.
Perhaps you have asked yourself questions like these:
Why has there been little change in my life over the past weeks or months?
Why is it that I\’m no longer excited by my relationship?
Somewhere along the way we came to believe that happiness was a place we were destined and entitled to arrive. We also came to believe that happiness came with having everything we want. These mistaken beliefs can really mislead us. If we aren’t feeling happy or we\’re not getting what we want, we tend to feel like something is wrong. But, nothing is wrong with your life and nothing is wrong with you.
To really access the marrow of life we need to learn some skills that help take our focus away from what we don’t have or should have and instead connect us with what is.
Here are three things you can do today to shift your thinking and to love the life you have before you.
Look for what\’s amazing in your everyday life.
Most of us have unconscious expectations about how our life should be. At the very least, we all have hopes that our lives will turn out in a particular way. When you\’re preoccupied with comparing what you have against what you think you should have, you\’re not able to appreciate what you have for what it is. One of the easiest ways to figure out if your expectations are keeping you from being satisfied with your life is to pay attention to your habits. Do you crave a sugary snack in the afternoon? Are you dissatisfied with your relationships after the initial honeymoon period? Do you start getting bored with work after the initial newness wears off? While there can be many reasons these habits develop, one of them is a lack of ability to see what\’s amazing in your day-to-day. If you\’re in the habit of waiting for something amazing to happen to you, challenge yourself to find what\’s wonderful in what\’s around you.
Find something to be grateful for.
One of the fastest ways to fall in love with your life is to look for things for which you\’re grateful. Take time to celebrate these aspects of your life. We\’re the meaning makers of our life. If we don’t create the meaning, appreciate the little thing, or feel gratitude for what is, then regardless of how good it really gets nothing is going to feel that special.
So, how do you get started? It\’s actually fairly simple. Take a moment during breakfast or dinner to turn to a loved one or friend and tell them one thing you\’re grateful for/ excited about/ intrigued by from your day. Or, you can keep a gratitude journal where you write down three things that happened during the day that you thought were special. Another approach is to tell one person per week how grateful you are for them or something they\’ve done. The great thing here is that when you express your gratitude, you feel good and those around you feel appreciated and noticed. It\’s a win for all involved.
Try to be intentional.
It takes intention to approach your day-to-day life from a place of gratitude. While this mind-set can take a little bit of practice, more often than not it really just requires that we be aware of what we want. When we\’re feeling bored or checked out, that\’s our reminder to check back in with our intention.
Here are some tips to move through your day with intention. When you wake up each morning, think about how you would like to go through the day. How would you like to feel as you move through it? If there\’s an aspect of your day that you anticipate will be challenging, see if you can come up with a way to go through it that\’s ideal for you.
As you go forward, you can build on and develop these skills so that you can add more enjoyment to your life. But, don’t worry if you have some days where you feel flat. It\’s normal. Remember that you can always wake up tomorrow and ask yourself, “what would I like today to be like?
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Aug 21, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
When it comes down to it, everything I\’ve studied and practiced over the past 20 years has been about healing. I\’ve looked at healing from spiritual, material, creative, energetic, psychological and physical perspectives. Today, both my business and personal development work focuses on how I can best facilitate and teach healing practices.
And so, for this week\’s article, I\’m going to talk about ways you can incorporate healing practices into your everyday life.
Paths to Healing
What helps us heal? This is a big question.
From my experience, I can say that healing methods help a person – or in some cases a group of people – heal themselves. These methods often include one or more of the following perspectives or techniques:
The Big YES!
The first step to healing comes when we honor our truth and accept it fully. This easy access to healing could be called the big YES! And this YES! is ultimately about alignment. Our joy, our natural flow, and easy expression of our core selves is most present when our actions and choices are in alignment with how we truly feel.
We can use the big YES! to bring healing to institutions, ecosystems, and even home environments. This happens when – as a business or as a society – we make sure our actions match the missions we collectively set for ourselves.
To bring more healing into your life, first pay attention to what you love. Then, chose to do more of it. When people talk about “doing what you love” and “finding your bliss” they are acknowledging this healing tenant.
Bring Together What is Supportive
When we heal, we bring together things that add to our well-being. Think of this in terms of nourishment. We take vitamins and minerals to feed our bodies what they need to heal. So, if we see a lack of health in one area of our lives, we can ask ourselves: what\’s undercutting my sense of well-being and what can I bring into my life that will support it?
To bring healing into our lives, we can exercise, feed ourselves good food and surround ourselves with good company. We can turn to supportive friends and institutions when in need. And we can turn-inward and ask ourselves what things or which people truly support us.
Remove What is Unsupportive
Sometimes, adding support to our lives is not enough. Sometimes we need to remove what\’s not supportive. The climbing wisteria might be destroying the building. The delicious meal might contain an allergen. There are times when what was once supportive stops being so. For example, you may have shared a supportive relationship with someone that stopped being supportive as you and the other person changed. If this is the case, it might be time to end the relationship. And, sometimes things appear to have no use – or at worst, might be doing harm. We cut out cancer. We medicate depression. These illnesses interrupt our health, so we work as best we can to remove them from our lives.
One thing we can do to partner with our health is to pay attention to our inner critic. When we observe our inner critic at work – and especially when we catch ourselves in a moment of negative self-talk – we can chose to tune into a more positive inner voice. Over time, we can work to remove our inner critic from our inner council.
We can also look through our life to find the things that no longer serve us. We can elect to let these things go even if our sense of nostalgia has us hanging on.
Focus on What We Want
The whole point of intention and positive thinking is to help orient us in the direction we want to go. When we bring an intention to our lives, we focus our attention on a desirable outcome or behavior. We might dedicate our intention towards our self-empowerment or towards creating an ideal business.
If you want to use intention and positive thinking to bolster your life, add things to your environment that remind you of your goals. You can also set your intention at the beginning of every day or each event. This will keep your intention fresh and will help you steadily achieve your goals.
Mend What is Broken
One of the words associated with healing is \”mending\”. Sometimes things get torn apart. We mend a broken bone, a busted fence and even a broken heart. In Shamanic traditions, soul retrieval is a form of mending. It reconnects a person with previously disconnected parts of themselves.
Mending usually emerges out of necessity. We mend something after it has been broken. So, pay attention to how many things in your life are broken. Do you have broken objects, broken relationships, or broken agreements that need to be mended so that you can move in the direction of your healing? If so, begin to put effort into fixing these things so that they no longer drain your energy.
When you bring healing into your life, you\’re likely to be working with these basic techniques to promote your well-being. As you become more and more familiar with these healing methods, it becomes easier to build them into your life, business, or environment in ways that maintain and strengthen your health.
