Renew your self-image to match who you really are?

Renew your self-image to match who you really are?

by | Feb 26, 2025 | Blog, Changing the story, Ignite your sparkle

Very early on, our brains create an image of ourselves that has its roots in our earliest life experiences. Our brain uses this self-image as a kind of roadmap to predict who we should be and how we should be in relationship to our environment, and others. This self-image directs how we move, talk, think, feel, and perceive ourselves in the world. It drives our behavior and relationships, and it shapes our model of the world.

As toddlers, we learned by trial and error what was safe to feel and express in order to receive love from our caregivers. We learned to suppress certain sensations and copy certain behaviors for fear of rejection. In other words, we learn early on who, how, and what we need to be to belong and be safe.

A self-image is a complex composition of image, movement, emotion, sensation, and perception. Depending on how it sees us in the world, it forms attentional habits that then act as a filter, a kind of glasses, distorting all our perceptions, images, emotions, thoughts, and sensations. And all those perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and sensations inform our neuro-biology about what the world inside and around us is like.

So you could say that our self-image colors our inner experience and our perception of the outside world. If this keeps repeating itself, it creates patterns in our neurobiology that in turn affect our lives, relationships, and well-being.

Suppose you have a negative self-image…This can become an endlessly repeating circle that culminates in hypervigilant attention habits that revolve around what is wrong and constantly reinforce our negative experiences. Resulting in our neuro-biology running survival programs that deplete our body systems of energy. We might not feel very well in our skin all-together which in turn reinforces our negative self-image. An endless circle…

How can you create a new self-image that matches who you really are in the heart of your being?

Our body tells our story. It’s like a history book. The way she stands, sits, moves, dances, and expresses inner movement. They are all expressions of how we are in the world and how we are in relationship with ourselves, and others. They also reveal how our nervous system has organized itself based on our self-image.

Our body also knows the way out of a negative self-image. That is out of neurobiological survival patterns rooted in negative attention habits. If we only dare to trust her and entrust us to her guidance, she will show us how to write a new story. A new story through the physical senses and how she receives the environment through them.

When we put our minds in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin, we experience the world as it is. A world that is not necessarily about us. It’s neutral and it helps our brains map themselves into the here and now that isn’t colored by the attentional habits of our self-image. It gives our brain an accurate world map of the moment.

Our brain has the task of mapping out a route to the next moment that is as energy-saving, enjoyable, and pleasant as possible. This means that the brain makes a prediction and a strategy to face the future, the next moment. Our biology and body systems then use this information to do their magic. You can imagine that the uncolored objective reality of our senses provides a better roadmap for that route than the colored subjective negative world map created by the self-image.

And in time with the real-time roadmap of the senses and the updated strategies of our brain, our genius system starts to form a new self-image that is rooted in the here-and-now story of how we belong and are embedded in the greater web of life.

And then the circle starts again. Attention habits form that inform our biology which in turn informs us through how we move, feel, sense, give meaning, dream, and envision. Only this time the attention habits tell us about what is, and reflect our nature back to us by what we receive from the present world around us. And those will be messages of beauty, goodness, kindness, and ease that recalibrate our inner compass to our inner sparkle, to genuine well-being, and authenticity

And to have again an inner compass that guides us to our inner sparkle, to our north star, to the essence of who we are… That is what I wish for us all.

Natural impulses to heal

Natural impulses to heal

by | Feb 2, 2025 | Blog, Body Intelligence, Nervous System Health

Let´s have a look at our brain´s agenda

In the former blog I wrote about the importance of a sustainable energy budget for healthy emotional, mental, and physical being.

Maintaining a sustainable energy budget is one of our brain’s priorities. It is constantly adapting to the environment in the most economical way to keep the system in a dynamic balance (homeostasis) with minimal impact on the energy budget.
By natural design, it does so by mapping itself into the here-and-now environment through the senses. Then the brain asks the somatic communication channels emotion, sensation, image, and meaning about ´how the information that the senses bring in feels. Our brains then can get to the task of predicting how best to adapt to the environment based on the maps that it has created. That is, maintain a dynamic balance in the system without using precious energy when it is not needed.

But what if our past gets in the way?

Painful past experiences, and associated attention habits, movement- and postural patterns, limiting beliefs, negative self-image, and intense feeling states such as excessive worrying, anxiety, sadness, anger, or shame disrupt the spontaneous in-the-moment flow of information through the somatic channels of sensation, emotion, meaning, and image.

Rather than commenting on the input of the senses those channels then send signals related to these painful inner experiences to the brain. As a result,  your system stays stuck in a self-repeating cycle of rapidly building intensity, over-arousal, and collapsing that demands more energy from the energy faculties in your system than is available.  Instead of the brain making accurate predictions based on its maps of the present moment, the predictions come from intense inner experiences that push the system over and over again into high energy-cost survival strategies such as fight, flight, and freeze.

As you can imagine, this erodes your energy capacity which then leads to even more stress, overwhelm, anxiety, and exhaustion, risking serious long-term chronic health issues.  So it is important to break this cycle to allow the brain to get back to doing what it is meant to do so that your system can function optimally and you can dance through your life in healthier, resilient, and joyful ways.

Addictive patterns in attention

Yet over time, many of us have quietly become addicted to attention habits rooted in the idea that something is wrong and that life is supposed to feel like a struggle. Ideas like “You have to feel worse first to feel better” or “No pain, no gain” still underlie most forms of therapy, coaching, and movement education. Many of us have been taught that we must attend to our painful experiences to heal, or push our bodies and minds to grow.
But rather than leading to healing and growth, these ways reinforce the hypervigilant, painful trauma patterns that underlie the ´What is wrong´ attention and belief that we have to be hard on ourselves or struggle.

The first step to breaking the cycle of stress, overwhelm, anxiety, and exhaustion is to follow the natural impulse of your system. 

Our organic intelligent system teaches us that living and feeling in the present moment is a much more rewarding, healing, and economical way to recover from our trauma and maintain vitality, joy, and resilience. It restores our energy budget, giving our brain the energy and capacity to process life better.

When you learn to eliminate this parasitic attraction to inner disturbing, very intense signals, your movements, thoughts, feelings, and life choices become more coherent. You then no longer fight against yourself, and the living system that you are. Rather you begin to collaborate with your system’s self-healing impulses and potential. You will find that this gives you the energy, peace of mind, and space to create a meaningful, authentic life in a fluid and sustainable way. And you will start to feel better in your body, mind, and emotional faculties as well.

Unlike what you may have learned so far, you then don´t attend to the inside voices that tell you that something is wrong. Instead you let your senses freely roam in your immediate environment and receive what is here and now. And this sensory orientation to the present moment helps your brain make a renewed prediction of what might happen next. And that will most likely be much more neutral, and positive than letting your anxious inner experiences create a future that is reliving your past wounding.

The neural programs that result from this sensory orientation are attuned to what is needed for the system to effortlessly, and economically keep a dynamic balance while dancing with the constantly changing environment. It is a systemic form of energy efficiency and automatic regulation that sets you up for ease and growth and allows your body systems to function optimally. This creates the space to be creative, find solutions, enjoy inner peace, and live life with more lightness and equanimity.

I have two reflective questions for you:

  1. How often do you turn your attention to pleasurable sensations and thoughts as you move, talk, work, cook, think, feel, or do nothing?.
  2. How often do you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the immediate world around you?

Are you curious to learn more about restoring your internal energy budget? Learn more about this in the Retreat ´Somatic Movement Journey from Freeze to Flow´

When there is not enough energy for what you need

When there is not enough energy for what you need

by | Feb 2, 2025 | Body Intelligence, Nervous System Health

What does your internal energy consumption look like?

There is a lot going on about energy efficiency and how to minimise high energy bills. We all have households with many energy-consuming appliances like smartphones, refrigerators, washing machines, lighting, and computers. We subscribe to an energy supplier for X amount of energy. Often, we don’t have to think about this because we only see the effects of our usage reflected in our bill. But every now and then we may face a shortage of power. The capacity has been reached and the power system says Nope. The demand for energy exceeds the amount of energy that can be supplied at that time.

Often it is quickly resolved by turning off a device. But what if we constantly run out of energy for the appliances we need to keep us warm, give us light, keep our food fresh? If a power outage lasted a long time, it would be disastrous for the food we keep in our fridge, for example.
We all have things that need to be permanently on like a fridge, things that only need electricity when we use them like lights and there are things we put on standby in case we need them like the television or an electric toothbrush. They may use a little energy instead of full power but they still take from the power net.

If our power grid capacity is exceeded, we need to look at what is really needed and where we can cut back by turning off appliances or using them at other times of the day. For example, where we live in Spain, we only have a very limited power supply at our disposal. We cannot use a washing machine and a heater at the same time. And often the light comes on when we turn on the food processor. So we have to think carefully about where and when in the day we need energy to do everything we want to do. And you probably do too now that energy has become so expensive.

But what about the cost of your internal energy usage?

As living beings, we also consume internal energy generated by the energy faculty of our system. And much works the same as in our outside world. There are body systems that run in the background and need energy 24/7 to keep us alive: like our respiratory system, nervous system and brain, heart, immune system, digestive system, part of our motor system, and so on. There are body parts’ that we use consciously and often, such as our muscles that need energy to generate power to move, hold us upright, hold us together, speak, look around, hear, smell, eat, and express our emotional states. Like our mind that needs energy to think, and so on. And all these physical energy processes have to stay within a certain range for us to be on the safe end of survival.

One thing is certain, we cannot buy more capacity for our internal energy system. Each of us has a certain capacity available. So our system has to manage its capacity well to keep everything within a safe bandwidth. If we exceed that bandwidth, we risk an energy outage. And as you can imagine, that can be disastrous. Fortunately, our system then has a preservation system that kicks in as a measure of first aid. it is the Freeze response and it preserves our energy currency ‘Oxygen’ by turning off all systems that do not pose an immediate threat to our survival when they are more or less de-activated, so that our heart and brain can continue to do their work. But the freezing system is not a solution for long-term excessive use.

How energy efficient is your system?

That said, imagine if an energy consultant came to your “home” to check your internal energy meter and look at the efficiency and sustainability of your internal energy consumption patterns? How high would your consumption be? Maybe just look at your movement habits, your attention ahbits and your emotional and thinking habits…

Are you working harder than you need to?
Are you constantly overthinking or worrying?
Do you experience a lot of intense emotions on a daily base?
Do you experience a lot of stress in your day-to-day life?
Do you often tighten your shoulders and clench your jaw to hold yourself together? 
Or do you tighten your muscles to keep yourself upright?
Do you squeeze your buttocks and abdominal muscles together when you speak out? Or perhaps to look a certain way?
Do you metaphorically walk on eggshells and hold your breath to avoid conflict with others?
Do you try to push your physical limits when you exercise or do yoga? 
Do you often have muscle pain after working out?
Are you hard on yourself? Maybe a perfectionist?

Some of these questions may be easy to answer. Some may be about unconscious stress,- and tension habits. Nevertheless, all of these habits and patterns in moving, acting, thinking, and feeling lead to the depletion of your system’s energy budget. This can eventually make you feel stuck, flat, disconnected, overwhelmed, and anxious in your daily life.

In the next blog, I’ll reflect a bit more on how our brain takes care of our internal energy budget and the ways it can become disrupted in the process.

My first Feldenkrais experience

My first Feldenkrais experience

by | Jan 16, 2025 | Blog

“Please make yourself comfortable on the table.”

A moment before G. watched me walk and made some simple dance moves.

I have an un-bearable pain in my hips and a heavy tension in my body for what seems like ages. It’s been examined so many times, I’m almost desperate.

With my clothes on, I lie down on my side.

She curls her hands over my ribs.

I feel lazy rolling, a tiny movement sets  my right hip free.  My vertebrae follow – one by one – forwards, backwards and sideways… I turn, I twist…

My breath flows in places where I’ve never been with my mind before. I sink deep into my body. My muscles soft and heavy. The table moulds itself gently around my bones.

I sigh from my toes…  as time stands still…

“Was I asleep? “

Mmmh you were for a split second.” a twinkly wink in her voice.

I’m turning on my other side. My achy hip… Her hands move me slowly and distinctly. I wait for the famous pain, but no… This new sensation makes me laugh out loud…”Aaahh” years of tension glide out of my body..

Her hands playfully explore, she makes my bones dance…  “ohhh divine ” my head swings happily  along. I think of the domino effect: where one falling stone sets all the other stones in motion.

Forgotten is my pain. My hips roll with joy in all directions… like a fluid, sensual dance.

I thought I was flexible, but… WOW! This feels so easy and free… 

After this delicious session I walk, I dance like I have wings, I feel free, I swing!  What a delight to move again, without tension, without pain.

(From ‘my first Feldenkrais experience’, Pingel)

Three sessions later and the pain in my hips was completely gone. I could dance my high heel tangos again and enjoy my yoga class again. I was completely under the spell of the Feldenkrais method and signed up for the first following training to become a Feldenkrais teacher.

Now, 15 years later, I still marvel at the power of this method with every session I give: How amazing the way such subtle movements transform lives at the level of the nervous system and brain.

Would you like to experience a session?

 

The power of your self-image

The power of your self-image

by | Jan 16, 2025 | Blog, Changing the story, Movement as Medicine

How do you feel? And how do you want to feel?

These are the most important questions for me when guiding someone. These questions led me to how a person experiences herself or her body and has created an image of herself. And for many women, that self-image is anything but positive, with all the misery that entails.

Our self-image is like a filter of thoughts, beliefs, and feelings through which we see ourselves, our bodies, our actions, and our environment. It has a huge impact on how we move through our lives, and what decisions we make for ourselves. It creates our signature as well as our habits.

Our self-image manifests itself in the body through the way we hold ourselves and the way we move. The more negative our self-image, the more postures we adopt that can really hurt us physically. Our self-image also reflects in the health of our body and in our outer appearance. Do you sparkle? Do you open your heart to the world or close yourself off? Do you feel heavy, rigid, or light, expansive? Our self-image guides us through life, for better and for worse.

I experienced first-hand how my self-image steered my life.
My self-image told me early on that it was not safe to be me, that I was not loved, not good enough and not worth being seen. That I should be ashamed of who I was and that I would never belong. And my way of coping with this image was by trying to be perfect in all sorts of ways and by doing that, I was actually creating more of a harmful self-image and its associated harmful habits. Do you recognise that your self-image makes you feel smaller and more scared than you actually are?

Our nervous system is very vulnerable in the early years of our lives. It absorbs energy from our caregivers and our environment. However, the brain is not yet sufficiently developed by then to understand and give words to all these stimuli. Until our 5th year of life, all life experiences, positive and negative, are experienced with the same intensity. Our nervous system at this stage explains all signals into pain or pleasure. As little ones, we are completely dependent on the love and attention of our caregivers to survive, so we will do anything to get it.

During this period, we often create the painful pieces of our self-image and all the emotional habits that stem from it. This limits us in our later life to step into our light. Our self-image has the power to hinder our nervous system from creating opportunities that put us in our power with regard to our health, our feelings, our thoughts and the way we move and act.

I know you need to change your self-image to get your sparkle back. And that this requires small actions. One step at a time. How wonderful that you can easily achieve this by starting through your body and at the level of action: namely, moving.

Movement is the language of the central nervous system.
That part of our nervous system that organises and coordinates our thoughts, feelings, actions, and movement. It receives all input through movements that take place inside and outside the body and that we experience through sensations, for example. Think of the movement of breathing, cell activity, the organs, the skin, the blood flowing through the veins, the beating of our heart, the life energy that flows through us and expresses itself through emotions, among other things, and so on.

With this information, our nervous system organises all the activities in our body. Not only our physical movement, but also our thinking, feeling, and acting. It has the ability to create endless new connections and opportunities to dance with life. And this is why, through the body and with movement, I can create lasting change for the women I coach.

May I dance you home?

 

Break your habits through movement

Break your habits through movement

by | Dec 30, 2024 | Body Intelligence, Feldenkrais Neuro Somatic Movement Coaching, Quantum Human Design

There are so many invisible rules we follow, often without knowing it. Whether it’s an instruction your mother gave you in childhood about sitting up straight, or that as a woman you should keep your knees together as an expression of virtue, or that you shouldn’t raise your head above the ground because that’s haughty…As well as physical advice from your sports or yoga instructor to raise your shoulders a certain way or keep your belly in… Postural patterns that they once thought were ‘right’ for everyone.

Most of us walk around with a lot of conscious or unconscious instructions and assumptions about how we should be in our bodies. And slowly we are losing the ability to listen to our body -our natural intelligence- in the first place instead of giving our responsibility and sovereignty to another person ‘because they will know what is good for us because they are the expert’. Another such assumption!

Two years ago, I started training as a Quantum Human Design coach. Human Design is like a personal energy map of you. It teaches you how your personal energy field works. It acts as a roadmap that gives you an entry point to discover who you are, how you experience and process the world, how your system can help you make good decisions and what you can do to stay closer to your true self. It helps you get to know your inner sensory compass. And it helps you live that story you have felt in your heart all your life. The story your soul came to earth with to share its gifts, gain life experiences and complete old lessons.

Looking at a Human Design body map is also a bit like looking into a Mirror. It shows you your personality traits, your talents, your wisdom, and your vulnerabilities. And it shows you where you are disconnected from your true self. Where you think about yourself in a fragmented way instead of in your wholeness.

It also shows you where you struggle with limiting beliefs and where you live by rules imposed on you by the world or where you have unconsciously or consciously adopted beliefs and thinking patterns of others, or adopted or reinforced the energy of others. In (Quantum) Human Design, this is called conditioning. Conditioning is the way you have learned to behave in response to your life experiences, your family patterns and beliefs, and how you experience the energy of the world. Some of it is great and some of it really limits us to be in touch with who we are in the heart of our being. Your neurobiology also has conditioning in the way neural networks work in your brain that create habitual patterns of thoughts, feelings and actions.

The latter is what makes the Human Design roadmap overlap very nicely with what Moshe Feldenkrais -the founder of the Feldenkrais method– says about learning habitual patterns, and how our system plays a role in this by the way it functions and is programmed to protect us from emotional/physical pain.

Feldenkrais practitioners approach movement as a mirror for becoming aware of what you have consciously and unconsciously internalized in terms of rules, learned instructions, beliefs, and values throughout your life. It shows you how you have come to attach certain meanings to certain words, stories, and images, which have led to a misalignment with your physical-emotional being. It shows you where you are not in connection with yourself and where you think fragmented of yourself instead of sensing your wholeness. On the other hand, it also puts you in touch with the voice and wisdom of your body and who you are beyond the stories and in the here and now.

To mature, in both the Feldenkrais method and Quantum Human Design, means becoming aware of this unconscious conditioning. and what is true for you in this. And that you start making other choices, choices that are in tune with who you are and what you need and want for yourself.

It invites you to explore where can you let go of what limits you in being authentically yourself and taking good care of yourself. Where you need to create a more accurate self-image and start living more of your truth in the way you perceive, feel, think, react, make decisions, choose, do, and give meaning to what you perceive, feel, and think.

From both the Feldenkrais neuro-physical point of view and the Quantum Human Design metaphysical, and archetypical point of view, this is what really aligns you with your unique energy blueprint: your potential, power, creativity, health, the talents of your soul and how you use your body and life energy most joyfully and efficiently to live the story in your heart.

Do you want to get to know yourself better?

Check out this retreat in which I help you discover how to use your energy more optimally so you can enjoy yourself more, be more yourself and ‘use’ your body and nervous system more kindly and according to their way. So that you can start to release prolonged tension, pain and overwhelm.