When you have Alive Spirit – embodied loving presence
- You can feel confident about taking risks and learning without having to have it all mapped out beforehand and working hard to control the process.
- You can tolerate differences of opinion, making discussion in work and intimate relationships deeper and more ‘real’
- You can be fully present to what’s happening inside and outside in the moment so you can respond appropriately, and if triggered, know how to bring yourself back to safety
- You have more energy available for the things you enjoy, and for new challenges
- You do things without holding on to expectations which leaves you more flexible and response-able
- You do things with enjoyment and in the timing that’s right for yourself
- You feel less susceptible to doubt, pressure, stress, confusion because you find your truth inside and trust that
- You experience greater sense of optimism about life
- You have a realistic sense of how to adapt to life’s ups and downs, fast-forwards and go-slows
- You feel connected and more alive to what’s around – people, planet, animals, eco system – and make decisions from that holistic awareness
Alive Spirit Programme
In this 3 month programme, I guide you into a connection and deeper communion with the Divine within, your Alive Spirit.
Alive Spirit is the intrinsically healthy, thriving, joyful, loving, fearless aspect of you.
Alive Spirit is driven by the forces of evolution (growth, change, expansion) and involution (spirit entering into the body and energy made physical).
We lose our aliveness piece by piece through traumatic experiences, where we parcel up parts of our healthy expression before burying them. This is our earliest innate drive to survive which requires two seemingly conflicting actions:
1) to stay close to our caregiver for safety, nurture, nourishment;
2) to explore with curiosity for expansion, growth, learning.
What we need is to feel loved and safe in the natural ebb and flow between these two behaviours. What we often experience is fear and disconnection from love when our actions meet with anger, disapproval and shaming.
Neuroplasticity: our greatest strength and our dilemma
We don’t knowingly choose to fracture ourselves in this way. In the mind of a baby, there is no concept of choice. We are naturally designed to be adaptive to our surroundings, and if we find them harsh or unstable, we do our best to arrange our behaviours for optimum health. This can happen prior to birth and continues through our developmental stages.
Over time, what was originally a healthy adaptive strategy, e.g. to not speak the truth of our eyes or our felt senses so as to avoid a parent or teacher’s or sibling’s disapproval, becomes something that restricts, constricts and limits our life and health. The now widely known study of ACEs( Adverse Childhood Experiences) has shown how our early experiences are closely linked with later health and well-being.
Our thinking and our emotions and our physiological responses are all intricately interwoven, in a complex system of nerves and hormones. The way they work today is a function of how they adapted to your developmental environment. You only have to recall an embarrassing incident which happened when you were a small child in order to experience facial flushing, accelerated heart beat, butterflies in your stomach and other changes in your body. This can then give rise to thoughts such as “I’m not safe”. Those thoughts then trigger further changes in your physiology, heading into the notorious fight/flight response.
We also have a freeze response, which is what happens when fight/flight seems to be a losing game. We can see this in animals which can ‘play dead’ when the lion brings them down.
The lesser known fawn response is seen in creatures who live within a hierarchical social structure. Fawning is also known as people pleasing, but it isn’t a considered conscious choice; it is a pattern arising from the nervous system which inhibits functions such as aggression, opposition, fight.
The Drive to Feel Better
The self-help industry along with Gabor Mate’s groundbreaking work on addiction has revealed that we have an almost insatiable drive within to make ourselves feel better. We create our patterns of protection, and then seek to remove them later as their cost becomes too much to bear. We become desperate to find a way out of the chronic illness, the depression, anxiety, panic, self-critical thoughts, chronic fear.
I believe that we have within us a strong drive for health and well-being. Instead of focusing on growing and supporting our health though, we get sidetracked into focusing and fixating on the problems. We go to a doctor who convinces us further that we have something wrong with us by providing a diagnosis; this potent magic spell has been named the nocebo effect.
By turning this around and focusing on the already existing health within the body we can harness and work co-operatively with the body’s innate intelligence and plasticity. Health is a natural contaminant, by which I mean that it seeks to expand. It is also a more coherent and organised energy. Coherence is the term used to describe our most efficient physiological state in which the nervous system, cardiovascular function, hormonal and immune systems work efficiently and harmoniously together. This is where we experience optimal health and well-being. This coherence state can also re-train the incoherence of ill health into coherence. I have called this drive for health our Alive Spirit and it can be strengthened through focus, attention and dedication.
During this programme I show you how to create a strong connection with your Alive Spirit, to partner with it for expansion of health and well-being. With higher rates of coherence in the heart field (according to the HeartMath Institute) functions such as presence, attention, awareness, perception, memory and problem-solving are accessible. Some are also calling this a peak or flow state.
Alive Spirit lives with abundance, awe, wonder, delight, acceptance of diversity, creativity, peace and love. It is a balanced inner eco-system which extends outwards into the environment. Alive Spirit lives as a cooperative player in the Divine order of the cosmos.
When we are in coherence and filled with alive vitality we can meet others without the layers of protection around our heart, knowing that we can embody the resilience to rebound from disappointment and hurt, to overcome self-doubt and criticism, to tolerate misfortune and challenges and still persevere with our visions.
Living as Alive Spirit you can listen to someone else’s view without judgment; can choose how to respond rather than reacting unconsciously from past pain; speak your truth with peace and respect; can change your mind in the face of new information; can be mistaken without falling into shame or guilt; can trust yourself to be doing the best you can whilst still leaving room for improvement; and you can choose actions according to your values and principles.
Alive Spirit creates harmonious relationships with other people and with the planet. Self care becomes self love becomes love for all.
As Alive Spirit you will be more effective in the world, working in harmony with nature no longer in resistance
- you can be contributing more in your work
- you can be happier in your relationships
- you harness the enhanced mental, emotional and spiritual faculties of flow for creative thinking, new visions, deeper perception of people’s needs, and you work in harmony with the forces that come in to meet your commitment