Getting to the root cause of pain and tension
Are you working hard on yourself through your own personal development work or talk therapy, but you still don’t see the changes you want in yourself and your behaviour? Why?
Because to make life long shifts you ALSO need to engage with the unconscious patterns held in your body.
Core Energetics is a process that helps restore you restore the natural flow within your body and connection to the Core of who you are, so you can experience more pleasure and fulfilment in your life.
At CoreExplore online, we focus on you. What you hope for and what your unique gifts are, and then guide you step by step at your pace to resolve the unconscious patterns holding you back.
Emily’s journey below is just one example of how the Core Energetics process and our CoreExplore principles of change, work in practice; and how they can help you make lifelong changes that can completely change your life.
Emily had a healthy lifestyle and couldn’t understand why she would easily become anxious and triggered. She also was experiencing debilitating jaw tension which was causing lots of health issues and lots of expensive dental work.
“Pretty much all the health professionals I had seen said that the jaw tension not resolvable. So, I felt a sense that the things happening in my body were emotional’.
Emily was at the point where she had exhausted the medical options to relieve her jaw tension and had Botox injections for some temporary relief as a last resort.
“I felt that the mind body piece was really the next thing to delve into.”
Emily didn’t engage with CoreExploreOnline until she had serendipitously been referred to Dana by a colleague and two acquaintances.
“At that point enough people had randomly suggested it, so I felt I had to go”.
Emily started by attending the CoreExplore group classes before she decided to commence individual sessions. The classes gave her a chance to ‘suss out Dana. I felt the vibe and I was into it’.
With all our clients, we are constantly working with our 6 key principles of change.
For Emily, there was a lot of fear about the process of therapy. She was concerned that ‘it would be a set process and too much for me.’
Soothing these fears for Emily was about moving slowly and sensitively to Emily’s needs and capacity (as we do with all clients). This was not about telling Emily about how we would work together. It was about focusing our work together on allowing Emily to feel when she was safe, respected and could trust herself to speak up about her experience and trust me to listen and respond.
“It was a huge relief to discover it would be suited to me and at my pace. There wasn’t a process that we had to follow – it wouldn’t be too much.”
This meant that much of work in the early days in sessions was about more subtle grounding techniques and in classes was about giving Emily some modifications that would support her to modulate the intensity of any movements in class to suit her.
“Sometimes I would come out of session or class and just feel different, even though it was a really gentle session. I learned it could be really impactful and really quiet. Seeing change off the back of gentle, quiet processes was what allowed and encouraged me to commit.”
As Emily grew in her trust that we would work at her pace and gained a greater sense of grounding and awareness of her sensations, it became clearer and clearer to her that she had lived a lot of her life disconnected from herself. ‘In hindsight, I was borderline dissociated for years’.
Where sensations or feelings would start to reconnect Emily with her body and experience, the reaction was often anxiety.
Through our work together, we began to unpack what ‘anxiety’ meant in terms of sensations, feelings and thoughts/beliefs. When we peeled this back together, we found a couple of patterns underlying her responses.
Emily is highly sensitive and has a great capacity for compassion and care for others. However, it was sometimes easier for Emily to feel through others rather than to really feel herself. This meant that Emily ended up feeling like she would receive a flood of feelings from others (which she liked at first but ended up feeling overwhelmed by) and really struggled to feel vulnerable and share herself. Emily felt like she would be overwhelmed by others and only be able to feel peaceful alone. Both of these options felt painful for Emily in different ways.
“I became aware of how difficult it was to be vulnerable. I had a lot of anxiety about being judged. I realised that was at the core as to why I either was or wasn’t in a relationship. Not being able to be vulnerable really played a key part in a recent breakup of a meaningful relationship.”
Emily is a very loving and heart-centred, but numbness and tension in her pelvis made this hard for her to express or connect within her romantic relationships.
“After doing more of the classes, I became aware I couldn’t feel into my pelvis - I wanted to explore more because I wanted to know what was there.”
Over the first 6 months, our focus was on supporting Emily to become conscious of these unconscious patterns – or as Emily describes it, ‘discovering, learning and showing up.’
Over time, ‘I became much better at being more in tune with my body, honouring my experience and taking better care of myself – that was a major goal for me.’
As Emily’s awareness of her body and the impacts of the past on her experience grew, Emily was also able to connect with her own truth and feelings about some of what she experienced, including how she holds herself back. Over time we worked with the stored experienced throughout the body, with focus on the pelvis and jaw.
With each emotional release of anger, grief or fear, Emily noticed a physical change.
“After 6 months I noticed less physical jaw clenching. Other pains like shoulder or neck pain or niggling pains actually resolved in sessions when something emotional shifted.”
Emily became more and more in touch with her full range of feelings. Our gentle, consistent work together allowed Emily to practice allowing her feelings to move through like a wave. As her capacity to let go of control over her feelings grew, ‘I experienced much less anxiety’.
While Emily describes it as ‘I feel less out of control of my emotional reactions’, I have seen Emily’s capacity to feel grow to an extent that there is less need for her to control how she reacts. When Emily started classes and therapy, she expressed in various forms that she wanted the intensity to be turned down so it was manageable. While this was our focus at the beginning, over time we were able to instead grow her capacity to be comfortable with more intensity. This is where the release and transformation really happened.
This way Emily could allow the natural flow and intensity of her feelings rather than seeking out intensity through others or withdrawing from others when she felt overwhelmed.
With more feelings, Emily was also able to feel what she really longed for within herself. Part of that was a longing to ‘be able to open up to somebody and connected the way I want to’.
“The work has made it much easier to be vulnerable in situations in life - I've come to learn that it is safe to actually show people how things affect me.”
Emily is able feel the change in herself and her relationships.
‘I do really feel different. It's great getting to know myself - it's really valuable to me. I am feeling myself and learning to share myself with others.’
The holistic approach feels like the right way forward to Emily.
“This really is the only way for me. This work genuinely addresses pain holistically and gets to the root cause.’
Emily hopes to continue deepening the work to resolve physical symptoms and have more connected relationships and is open to the next frontier for her – sexuality!
‘I want to keep supporting my ability to form deep connections with people – family relationships, romantic relationships, friendships. I also feel like sexuality hasn't been central yet, but it will be. There's a big piece around my sexuality that I'd like to explore - that's the next mysterious bit to be revealed!’
Thank you so much to Emily for sharing your experience so generously and courageously.