The Parasympathetic Life
Do you work hard at being healthy yet still feel you have a lot of issues? Are you constantly working on improving yourself yet always find more to work on? Do you notice yourself reaching for more and more “hacks” to feel well and function better? Do you practice stress reduction techniques but frequently still experience life as stressful?
“The Parasympathetic Life” offers you a tool you can incorporate into your routine that will allow your Nervous System to come out of chronic Fight or Flight states. The stress response is meant for surviving physical threats, but it is getting activated when the train is delayed, your friend didn’t call, or someone offends you. This work is about how and why we have gotten to this point where we no longer have resilience and adaptability in the face of even mild adversity, despite our best efforts.
In your session, I will explain why certain practices you are doing might not be giving you the results you want. (It’s not that you're doing them wrong; it’s the nature of the practices.) And why The Fajardo Method can give you the results you desire if you decide to explore it. You’ll discover which standard ideas about health and fitness may actually be making you less healthy and why. You will learn how to come into the present moment without lengthy practices that require you to isolate yourself in a quiet room, unless you choose to. And you will be introduced to a philosophy that over time addresses all aspects of your physical, emotional, and mental being within one system. Best of all, this method isn’t hard work! Like most things, you’ll get back as much as you put into it. If you choose to make it a part of your life, then you will have a way to know how your nervous system is doing in response to stress. With a simple awareness practice, your nervous system will move towards balance which in turn will regulate all your other systems.*
Sharing this work became an imperative for me when I discovered that everything I was doing to be healthy and feel good wasn’t necessary if I wasn’t in Fight or Flight. Since I was doing a lot of modalities (meditation, yoga, CranioSacral Therapy, and more) that supposedly take one out of the stress response, I wanted to know why I was still stressed. Thus began my journey to a place I had never actually been: my Parasympathetic Nervous System. Parasympathetic is where your body can rest, digest, repair tissues, move lymph and other fluids, sleep when needed, and respond appropriately. Sadly, most of us are not living in that part of our nervous system. Instead, we are in various stages of our Sympathetic Nervous System that we label as “stress” or Fight or Flight.
After a whiplash/concussion injury, I couldn’t raise my arms, use my thumbs, and had frequent nerve pain down both arms and legs. I started getting reflux, tooth decay and receding gums, and breast cysts. I was diagnosed with Epstein-Barr Virus, and spent most days quite sad and without motivation, doing only what I had to do to get through the day in a brain-fogged state. Not only did The Fajardo Method return me to health when nothing else did after the injury, it liberated me from the reductionistic living and thinking that occurs in our Sympathetic Nervous System. No longer do I practice meditation for my mind, yoga for my flexibility, strength training for my musculoskeletal system, receive bodywork for my fascia, therapy for past trauma, eat a special diet for my digestion, or consume multiple supplements for my genetics. I just do one thing: Live a Parasympathetic Life with the Fajardo Method of Holistic Biomechanics (FMHB).
In addition to my body reversing all the conditions named above, my health has improved in ways I couldn’t imagine before FMHB. My body can digest dairy and gluten after many years without, with no stress to my brain, gut, skin or thyroid. I am no longer histamine intolerant, a change which represents an epigenetic shift turning on the genes that code for enzymes needed to process histamines in foods. The apnea that used to wake me up is gone, representing structural reorganization in my throat, tongue and palate. Stubborn fascial patterns have actually shifted on their own with only Fajardo Method. There’s much more that has changed and is in my past now!
As a Movement Therapist and Yoga Teacher, for years I had directed many clients to follow in my footsteps and engage in some of the practices I had adopted in order to manage my physiology. Now that I have an experience of The Parasympathetic Life (when one’s Nervous System governs the physiology instead of requiring hacks to keep all systems go), I feel obligated to spread the word. Too many of us are working too hard to try to be healthy, and there is another way. I call it The Parasympathetic Life. Learn more about working with me here.
As Maya Angelou said, "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." - Maya Angelou
*The 12 different body systems include the skeletal, nervous, muscular, respiratory, endocrine, immune, cardiovascular/circulatory, urinary, integumentary, reproductive, and digestive systems. I would argue that fascial or connective tissue should be added to the body systems. All these systems respond when your Nervous System moves you towards Parasympathetic.