Emotional Detoxification Helps with Physical Toxins Too!

There’s a growing awareness concerning the damaging impact of toxins on our health and the need to detoxify. The ever-increasing list of detoxification strategies can include herbs, fasting, special diets and supplements, saunas, colonics, salt rooms, sweat lodges, and more I’m sure.

I’ve tried them all with varying degrees of success and comfort … and it’s not by chance that ‘sweat lodge’ was at the end of the list. Maybe more about that another time.

An often overlooked impediment to effective detoxification has to do with suppressed, buried, or toxic emotions. While we can and often do lose conscious awareness of feelings and emotions, their underlying energy doesn’t go away. On an unconscious or bodily level ignored emotional energy is stored and fuels the stress response while impairing the detoxification process.

Emotional Stress Inhibits Your Body’s Ability to Detoxify

The stress response, which is triggered by suppressed emotion and other perceived threats, disrupts the smooth functioning of your autonomic nervous system (ANS). This is the part of your nervous system that guides the function of your glands and organs.

When your ANS is balanced your body’s natural detoxification pathways are optimized and you detoxify naturally. This spontaneous detoxification process is part of your body’s normal maintenance and repair functions, just like a balanced ANS supports normal blood pressure and digestive functions.

So the first step in effective detoxification is to make sure that your ANS and your detoxification status is functioning properly. Then, with a balanced ANS and an activated capacity for detoxing, any other external detoxification strategies will become significantly more effective.

The Simplest Strategy for Balancing Your ANS … and Emotions

On a daily basis, I assess the heart rate variability of my patients. Heart rate variability is an assessment of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and is an indication of the degree to which stress is involved in creating the symptoms an individual is experiencing.

It is not unusual to see a dramatic change in the functioning of the ANS within a few minutes with proper guidance. When practiced over time these changes in the ANS can become more permanent, or effectively reprogrammed, in the support of greater health and well-being.

The key element in altering the function of your nervous system is the experience of safety. Feeling safe neutralizes the stress response and activates the healing capacity of the vagus nerve. These two shifts in neurological balance can potentially change anything.

We can provide the nervous system with cues that we are indeed safe. One approach is to feel bodily sensations without judging them, or analyzing, or trying to change them. While simple, this ‘feeling’ state is very different neurologically than our habitual ‘thinking’ state.

Another strategy for signaling safety is to breathe slowly. Since individuals under threat tend to either hold their breath or breathe more quickly, slow breathing is a simple but eloquent method for shifting the balance of your nervous system and for ultimately benefiting your overall health and well-being.

The steps I’ve just described are simple. However, they are almost universally resisted as a regular practice. I believe this resistance is due to the fact that most humans have learned to protect themselves, to keep themselves safe from threatening feelings that were never processed thoroughly. We do this by disconnecting from them and living in their heads. 

So the return of awareness to the body poses challenges that tend to be resisted unconsciously. My Biofield Coaching offering is designed to dissolve resistance while fostering a connection with the fields of awareness and information that support wholeness.

Here is a link to my introductory process for connecting with the breath and feelings called Heart Breathing.

Here’s another link that’s tangentially related to the topic of detoxification. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaks eloquently at a press conference about how the pharmaceutical industry’s political lobbying efforts adversely influence the health of Americans, and in particular their children.