Stress Toxins, Healing and Human Design
I believe that chronic symptoms or illness are deeply entangled with emotions. Emotions cause stress. Stress is the root cause of many physical symptoms:
exhausted mitochondria and adrenals
increased inflammation
decreased immunity
altered digestive enzymes & disruption to the microbiome
metabolic inflexibility and insulin sensitivity
dysregulated hormones
interferes with detoxification
Stress creates a cyclic domino effect that impacts every organ system. The most fascinating one, to me, is how stress affects adrenals, impacting minerals, digestive enzymes and leading to leaky gut and autoimmune issues. So how does stress do this? Toxins! As I keep telling people, if we use the Sherlock Holmes method long enough, we can eventually get to the root cause of our physical symptoms. It almost never fails to trace back to the cellular health and balance of the microbiome. But when it comes to the emotional, there is a deeper level that boils down to stress and fear. Turns out, our life experience is the only real test for that. That test is noted in the choices we make!
Stress is an endogenous toxin that can keep the nervous in a state of being hyper-alert to danger, aka a Sympathetic state or fight-flight syndrome. Traumas, micro or macro, create cellular chemical toxins that flood the body. Most people know what this feels like. When we are alerted to a potential that might something might cause the same discomfort as the original trauma, the body releases chemicals to move us toward taking action to survive or it paralyzes us from taking proper action. When we say we have been “triggered”, we are referring to this physiological and psychological process. This process is subconscious, but we can become conscious and learn to work with this very human process.
Sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do for our physical discomfort is to deal with the chemical toxins that are created from emotional discomfort. In Human Design language, most humans experience distortion and amplification of emotions when these chemicals flood the body. I used to describe them as a hot black ink running through my viens. Sometimes, those are our emotions, but other times we carry and express the emotions for others. It is not their fault, really. I mean, who would not be happy to allow someone else to disperse our emotional discomforts. But that is a very unhealthy process in which the person who is projecting their emotions onto others will never truly be free of those emotional triggers and the person expressing emotional pain that is not their pain will eventually burn out and that can show up anywhere on a spectrum of depression to rage!
Learning to detach from others and get clear on what is ours and what is not is critical to healing. These are deeply subconscious things for many of us but if we can get to the triggers, blocks and trauma's which have set a trajectory for our life patterns, a trajectory that has been antithetical to who we really are and the purpose we are here to serve, life is lived with more grace and ease. Grace and ease invites healing! Human Design has helped me understand so many lessons and I wanted to share a recent lesson that has taken me to another level of appreciation and gratitude for the power of this system!
Authenticity is not about whether others deem us as authentic. Most people can fake authenticity, at least with people they do not live with. Authenticity is about being authentic to ourselves first. Once we can be brutally honest with ourselves, holding our own personal integrity, we “become” authentic, rather than working on "being" authentic. It becomes effortless when we are listening to our authority. But often, people cannot see how much the energy of others or our fears can muddy the water and block the flow of our individual energy. Then we end up feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, frustrated, and angry. No matter how much of a helper or empath we are, we do not have the reserves to carry and express, or stuff, all those feelings.
However, there is something to understand about this as many of us are aware of this dynamic but it can take a while to figure out what does and does not work once we are ready to stop feeling responsible to fix things that are not ours to fix.