What if you really love your life – no need to change it – you just wish it didn’t feel so frantic to get through a day?
You love being a parent, having a career, planning trips, staying busy, being involved in the community and living life to the fullest. You just really want to be able to do it all without waking up exhausted, forcing aside your cravings, putting on your happy mask or relying on a glass of wine to get a moment of peace from the chatter in your mind.
You hear the messages everywhere: Heal yourself. Set yourself free. Slow down. Self-care! And at some level they make sense. But let’s be serious: You wouldn’t be true to who you really are if you didn’t have the robust life you’ve built. Why give it up in an effort to experience an ounce less anxiety or an hour’s better sleep at night?
You’re probably tired of the usual advice: Change your diet. Get more sleep. Exercise often. Spend less time at your desk. Develop your support network. Ha! If only it were that simple, right? And yet, this seems to be the only answer to everything from insomnia to chronic illness, from indigestion to cancer. Aren’t there any better ideas out there? Does no one know what it’s like to raise a family in the 21st century?
Perhaps you’ve already tried it all – yoga retreats, acupuncture, psychotherapy, couples’ counseling, using all your vacation days, melatonin gummies, meditation, support groups – and the most you can show for it is temporary relief followed by a flood of catch-up because there really isn’t enough time to make any of it stick.
Forget it, forget the “healing journey” talk. Healing journeys are too time-intensive with too little guarantee of a positive outcome. And anyway, what really needs to be healed? Life is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things.
Here’s what I love most about applied neurology:
You don’t have to believe it can change your life, and it will still change your life.
And here’s what I’m enjoying most about introducing clients to applied neurology: Their utter relief at not being asked to make huge changes combined with their utter astonishment at the results.
An approximate quote from an actual client: “This is totally not what I was expecting from our session. I thought you were going to tell me I have to learn to say ‘no’ and do less.”
(I’d just shown her how to tell whether her nervous system liked an input or didn’t like an input, and we’d found a few very simple drills that her nervous system positively loved.)
No, she doesn’t have to slow down or give up any parts of the life she loves – not if she doesn’t want to. And if she does want to, great. But our goal is to increase her capacity and resilience – not define her limits and live within those bounds.
Listen, I’m one of the most jaded, cynical people out there. At least, that’s who I was before I started training my nervous system. Hard to believe, I know, especially if you didn’t know me back when I was fighting my way through a highly political careerpath and denying all the good and sensitive parts of myself. It took a major mental breakdown to wake me up, and even then, it took another three and a half years to decide I actually wanted to heal.
When I finally did set out to heal, I knew I needed to find a methodology that was faithless, non-dogmatic, meaning that it could heal me regardless of whether or not I believed it could heal me. I am, at heart, a major Doubting Thomas. I am a skeptic, and as such, I distrust such things as hope, faith and optimism. And yet, it is absolute fact that when someone really, truly believes they can be healed, they can. Which means people like me can be failed by even the most faithless solutions (like medication, a prime example).
True, a part of me wanted applied neurology to work – just like I wanted to believe yoga would work, and psychotherapy and cranial-sacral treatments and acupuncture and everything else I’d tried but eventually abandoned (including anxiety medication).
But something strange happened: applied neurology started working. The differences were almost immediate. And they were significant enough that I was more than a little bit spooked. My curiosity outranked my trepidation though, and I pressed on. And on. And on.
The thing about doubters like me is that we are skeptics right up until we’re proven wrong. And once that happens, you can’t shake our faith in the least. Show me something works, let me experience it working, and I don’t need faith to believe it will work because I already know it’s true.
Such is the case with applied neurology. And that’s why I just can’t shut up about it.
That’s not to say the other healing modalities don’t work. In fact, they very much do – but they depend on having a nervous system that feels safe enough to lean into them.
How do I know that to be true? Because with applied neurology in my life, meditation, support groups, journaling, self-healing books and so many other modalities are working wonders. I bet if I went back to psychotherapy, I’d see massive change too. But guess what? I don’t feel like I need it anymore. I really love my life now.
So yes, by all means, keep the life you love. Keep your busy calendar. Stop shaming yourself for your cravings. You don’t have to limit yourself – and you can build your capacity and resilience by tending to your nervous system to take off the edge.
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