There’s a beautiful irony in the fact that I was running late in submitting this article because of writer’s block. Right up to and even a bit beyond the deadline, I had no ideas – no words – nothing!
This is ironic because as well as being a wellness coach, I’m also a writing coach, and one of the things my clients learn is how to get themselves out of negative states like overwhelm, perfectionism, and procrastination.
These are the things that usually lie at the base of what we call writer’s block. Acknowledging and smiling at the irony, and practicing what I preach, allowed me to eventually ease back into flow, clarity and creativity.
I’ll tell you about the how and the why of the whole book writing part of my coaching business later, but for the moment I want to focus on the question of energy.
So think about this for a moment. When we talk about writer’s block or being blocked in any way for that matter, what is it that’s actually blocked? In spite of what we might call it or think it is, it’s not thoughts or ideas that are blocked – its energy.
Energy is one of those things that’s meant to be in motion. Like water, it’s a healthful and wonderful thing when it’s flowing, and a potentially putrid and dangerous thing if it stagnates for too long. This is graphically demonstrated by the work of Dr Masaru Emoto.
Dr Emoto is well known for his experiments on water.
He took photos of the crystals that formed when he froze water that he’d subjected to different circumstances with substantially different energy attached to them, with a dramatic contrast resulting between water that was exposed to ’negative’ words like hate for example, and water that was exposed to words like kindness and love.
I particularly love the crystals that resulted from exposure to children. These crystals were purple in colour and arranged in a beautiful pattern that you might see on a brooch or some other kind of jewelry.
Whereas in contrast, the water that was exposed to heavy metal music formed crystals that were a dirty brown colour with a dense blob in the middle.
Emoto asks us to consider the unsettling question that, “If thoughts can do that to our water, imagine what our thoughts can do to us”.
I’d urge you to look into his work if there’s any doubt in your mind about the fact that not only is there a fundamental connection between consciousness and the physical world we live in, but also that this connection is considerably more dynamic than the one-way street most of us were taught to believe in when we were at school.
As evolved as humans might seem to be, it’s still the case for the majority of the population that it’s one thing to accept that our physical reality affects the way we feel, and another thing altogether to accept that the way we feel affects our physical reality as well.
The implication of this interplay of energy is that if we want to maintain our health and wellbeing, we need to work toward a free flow of energy between our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual worlds, because at the end of the day even though there are different words to describe these worlds, ultimately they are one and the same.
Things like stress, sadness, anxiety, and fear can disturb this flow, causing energy to be blocked and stored in the body. This then leads to physical symptoms like fatigue, which will in most cases intensify and develop into disease if the root cause of the disturbance isn’t addressed.
Sometimes illness will run its natural course and recovery will take place in due course, but in other cases health and wellness can only be restored by addressing the disharmony that lead to the symptoms in the first place.
All too often though it’s conventional medicine that people turn to for help, and all too often we see things go from bad to worse. Don’t get me wrong, conventional medicine has its place, but unfortunately it often involves an intervention of some sort that only masks symptoms without going anywhere near the root cause of the problem, and in so doing, further blocking the flow of energy.
This is how people wind up walking around with time bombs ticking away in their body without even knowing it.
I went through the first few decades of my life oblivious to any of this. I was one of those people who spent all of their time in their head.
Then I experienced a connection with my unconscious mind at the age of 45 when I was studying NLP and everything changed for me.
All of a sudden things that had baffled me for years started to make sense. Clearing the emotional white noise I had lived with for decades with NLP enabled me to see that I’d suffered a significant trauma when I was in my mother’s womb, and that the learning I took from that experience translated into my not being able to feel my feelings.
Healing the trauma took exactly what I said we need to do to maintain health and wellbeing above. I needed to create the conditions where a free flow of energy on all levels could be initiated and sustained.
Believe me, this was easier said than done for someone like me who had only just started dabbling in holistic approaches to wellbeing.
Before this piece of the puzzle dropped into place, my life was ruled by Binge Eating Disorder. Unconsciously I was using food to numb myself to avoid being overwhelmed by the emotions I had suppressed since shortly after my conception.
Sure enough I had consulted a number of medical professionals and ‘conventional’ therapists in an attempt to get myself to a place where I could be healed of Binge Eating Disorder over the years.
But of course it wasn’t my relationship with food that needed to be healed. The problem that needed to be healed, was the well of unfelt emotions stored in my body that had needed to be processed and released.
This is kind of where the writing wing of my coaching practice came in to the picture.
Even though I had processed a fair bit of this stuck emotion when I did my NLP training, as well as through dabbling in a number of other modalities like rebirthing and EMDR, by far the biggest chunk of the healing took place when I was writing my first book “Thrive in Midlife”.
Specifically it was when I wrote about the fact that even though my mother’s life only overlapped with my daughters life by a little over 12 months, I was incredibly grateful for the fact that they both got to know each other, that I experienced a catharsis the extent to which I have never felt before or since.
As I wrote the word ‘grateful’ in the context of my mother’s time with my daughter I felt my heart open so fully that it felt like I wasn’t even in my body anymore.
Among other things, after a lifetime of never being able to bond with my mother we finally formed a bond a little over ten years after she passed away.
That experience helped me towards feeling whole, and to be able to keep the energy in and around me flowing a little bit more freely.
That experience also got me fired up about the immense benefits of writing, and I now run writing programs for people who are hankering to get their story down on paper, and/or others who want to experience the business-related benefits of being a published author.
I have experienced both of these kinds of benefits, and I’m now incredibly grateful for the difficulties that got me to the place where I finally got around to writing my first book because it changed me in ways I never could have imagined.
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Jane Turner – Woman’s Health Expert
