Don’t underestimate the power of nature on your healing journey with inflammation
Inflammation would be the most common condition I see in my clinic. It has many faces which can look like muscle and joint pain, skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis, headaches, brain fog, menstrual pain, and gut problems such as bloating and irritable bowel syndrome. Inflammation in the cardiovascular system can cause high blood pressure and in the fascia will cause pain and stiffness. High blood sugars from poor diet or metabolic dysfunction causes inflammation and can look like irritability, sugar cravings, feeling insatiable, brain fog and weight gain. When the mitochondria of the cells instigate inflammation, your energy will be low and you experience fatigue. This is because the cells are no longer in energy producing mode, they are using energy to fight infection or any other environmental or psychological threat.
Wherever you experience pain and/or redness, there will be inflammation. This is your body’s way of saying that it is in a cell danger response and the body is mobilising its resources to fight a pathogen or a toxin. For example, redness and pain in the case of eczema can be toxicity affecting the skin. The skin is an organ that helps with detoxification and if other detoxification organs are poorly functioning, or if the amount of toxins exceeds the bodies ability to clear them, they can affect the skin in this way. Often compounding this is a nervous system that is highly strung or in chronic stress because of environmental stressors.
The increase in electromagnetic frequencies (EMF’s) from multiple devices, streaming services and 5G towers etc. has added an electrical burden to our planet. Our body has its own electrical system and electromagnetic frequencies can be overbearing on our innate electrical frequency, another factor contributing to inflammation. Just think about how hot your phone or laptop gets when it is charging or is in heavy use. The same thing can happen for the body.
Inflammation is also common when there is a chronic psychological threat. If you are constantly in anxiety, fear or worry, or viewing situations of threat such as watching tragedies happening on the news or playing war video games, the body will respond in fight/flight survival mode, which contributes to inflammation in the long term. The brain does not discern between real or imagined stimulus with its threat responses. The body will have the same physical response, whether it is real or not. Auto-immune conditions are inflammatory states in the body and they will often arise after periods of chronic stress - physical, mental or emotional. It is well documented in many studies now, that chronic stress suppresses stem cell function which is responsible for the body’s ability to regenerate and repair.
When the body is stuck in the cell danger response for any of the above reasons, chronic physical inflammatory symptoms will persist. The first step to healing is to support the nervous system to re-pattern into feeling safe and secure. This could mean changing your environment, putting less pressure on yourself, leaving a toxic relationship or workplace. It may look like building into your day extra space between appointments, or creating still time or down time earlier in the evenings to support you to have more recovery time. You may wish to start a gratitude journal or changing thought patterns from worry or catastrophizing to optimism, faith and trust.
Sometimes those neurological survival pathways for fear/threat/danger are so hard wired from years of being in a threatening environment or situation that it is not an easy reset. The brain pathways for survival are more strongly wired and operate more quickly than our conscious brain, which can cause the nervous system to stay stuck in this hypervigilant or hyper inflammatory state. Bit by bit you can chip away at it by using breathing techniques to calm the nervous system. Don’t underestimate nature’s healing and balancing abilities for calming inflammation - sunshine and forest bathing are simple measures you can take for supporting the biorhythms and regulation for the body.
Sometimes the factors creating your inflammation are complex and multi layered. I love kinesiology for this reason. It has a way of attuning to your body wisdom that knows how to heal and knows the exact order of events and support required for recovery. Using muscle testing and working with acupressure points we can identify what you need and when, to calm down survival patterns, resetting those inflammatory pathways that have been over-active for so long. You can hear more about kinesiology on this podcast interview I did with Ebony on her channel ‘Aligned’ https://open.spotify.com/episode/5CwkqXVeHv7UjXKdKtM5IW?si=Xl8BLsWQRs-uueyRbZwIcA
Simply put, inflammation, pain and fatigue is your body’s way of asking for a reset. This involves moving out of sympathetic/stress states of functioning and into parasympathetic/rest/digest/recover states of being. Identifying and resolving your unique triggers for inflammation is also a necessary step for recovery. There may be conscious factors that you identify and eliminate or avoid. There may also be unconscious threats or triggers that activate inflammation, including foods, people, situations, EMF’s, pathogens or toxins. Muscle testing is a great skill to learn to support yourself with this process. You can access my self muscle testing course on my Soulful Support Subscription site. https://www.soulnurturing.com.au/member-homepage At this same link you can find in the Tools section, my guide to Inflammation with a deep dive into its ins and outs, and the factors to consider for recovery.