"The Physiology Of Muscle Growth. After you workout, your body repairs or replaces damaged muscle fibers through a cellular process where it fuses muscle fibers together to form new muscle protein strands or myofibrils. These repaired myofibrils increase in thickness and number to create muscle hypertrophy (growth)."
This is how the human body gets stronger. This is how we build muscle. We need stress to grow. Our bodies are a perfect example of how our intention can change the shape and substance of deeper tissues and fibres that create our physical outer shell. And at this time of intense crisis, could this be how humanity makes it through the pain and confusion we are confronted with? We are currently breaking down all barriers to seemingly to make new ones... On a global scale and also in our personal lives, the cracks are appearing everywhere. Could it be that we will in fact grow, to be stronger, healthier and more fulfilled.
We are all different flavours of the human species. Different flavours of colour, race, gender, religious beliefs, sexuality, nationality. These are the things that divide us but do not define us. A healthy ecosystem depends on diversity, if only we could see that by having so many flavours and differences it actually gives us strength as a species.
We are a bag of bones surrounded by a sack of skin. We have journied to the outer edges of our solar system and to the most intimate parts of the human body. We know how we are made, where we came from and speculate about where we are going but we think this "intelligence" absolves us from the responsibility of treating our home and our mother with profound respect. I'm talking about Earth. Everything we could ever possibly need comes from her, yet we put more value on numbers, figures, bits of paper, ideas, words and concepts.
It's the world we live in. And it all seems a little bit nuts to me.
But we are still just human. We are learning. We are infants compared to other species. We are making mistakes and sometimes we are fixing them. We are here for such a short time. We are really just visitors. I like to see us as the most quickly evolving species on the planet. But that does not make us the most clever nor the most compassionate.
We share this planet with each other, and with many other species yet we have forgotten how to share and how to be resourceful. In our thirst for knowledge we have denied a part of ourselves that links us to our ancestors, and in doing so we have become deeply affected by trauma, reliving and replaying traumatic events so our body actually feels like it is experiencing the event again. It is pain, sadness, anger but most of all fear that resurfaces and holds us back from being our best selves. We feel it and then we want others to feel it too, thinking this will take away the pain. So we inflict and we project. We are all guilty of it. But perhaps guilt is the most damaging of all the emotional viruses we spread around. So it becomes a vicious cycle.
Through Somatic Experiencing I have been able to connect with a deeper part of my being, a part I try to ignore, disown, judge and override with my rational mind.
"Somatic experiencing (SE) is a form of therapy aimed at relieving and resolving the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental and physical trauma-related health problems by focusing on the client's perceived body sensations (or somatic experiences). It was introduced in Peter A. Levine's 1997 book Waking the Tiger.[1] In it, he discusses at length his observations of animals in the wild, and how they deal with and recover from life-threatening situations. He concludes that their behaviour gives us "an insight into the biological healing process" (p. 98), and that "the key to healing traumatic symptoms in humans lies in our being able to mirror the fluid adaption of wild animals" (p. 17–18) as they avoid traumatization in reacting to life-threatening situations.
SE is based on the understanding that symptoms of trauma are the result of a dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system(ANS) whose inherent capacity to self-regulate is undermined by trauma.[2] SE bases its approach on mammals' ability to automatically regulate survival responses from the primitive, non-verbal brain, mediated by the autonomic nervous system. In the wild, animals spontaneously "discharge" this excess energy once safe. Involuntary movements such as shaking, trembling and deep spontaneous breaths reset the ANS and restore equilibrium.[3]SE restores this capacity to self-regulate by facilitating the release of energy and natural survival reactions stored during a traumatic event. According to founder Peter Levine, "Trauma lives in the body, not the event."
And so as we live out traumatic experiences on a grand scheme as well as in our personal lives we are presented with incredible opportunities to heal on a deeper level. Through awareness we are able to see and feel the rifts that separation, conflict and trauma creates. But without that separation we would not achieve the awareness. It's how we learn, how we grow, how we are able to work on our relationships and how we can take space to process things.
Like a beam of light piecing through a crack in a wall, we would not be able to register the light if it wasn't for the broken boundary.
We have not evolved so that every day we can run from our fears. We must find a way to repair and to heal the separation and not get caught up in the devastation it leaves in its wake. We have to focus on letting in the light rather than trying to fix the crack.
We have the potential to walk slowly, consciously and gracefully through our fear and towards love. It's not a challenge or a requirement. It's a choice. Making that choice every day becomes a way of life. A path to higher living. We can do it together or we can do it alone, but we must remember that we made it here and the hard work has already been done.
We know we want Transition, Change, Transformation, Trancendance - it is clear because that is the what we have chosen before this point. . Now we have to choose again. Let's choose love. And light.