​There is a moment — maybe you've lived it — when a doctor looks at your test results and says: we're not sure why this is happening. The scans show inflammation. The markers are elevated. Your nervous system is in overdrive. And yet, the story that preceded that diagnosis — the grief you swallowed, the years of walking on eggshells, the shock that never quite left your body — doesn't make it onto the chart.

But what if it should?

What if your body has been doing exactly what it was designed to do — and what we call disease is actually the body mid-conversation with an unresolved experience?
This is not a fringe idea. It is increasingly supported by neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, and the emerging field of trauma-informed medicine. It also sits at the heart of a controversial but quietly influential framework called German New Medicine (GNM) — a body of work that asks us to look at illness not as a malfunction, but as meaning.
​

​The Body Keeps the Score — and Then Some
Most of us understand, at least intellectually, that stress affects health. We know that chronic stress raises cortisol, disrupts sleep, suppresses immunity. We know that trauma can live in the body long after the event has passed. The phrase the body keeps the score has entered everyday language precisely because so many people recognise it as lived experience.
But the mind-body conversation is far more intricate than we typically appreciate.
The field of psychoneuroimmunology — which studies the relationship between psychological states, the nervous system, and immune function — has demonstrated clearly that our emotional experiences do not stay neatly in the mind. Unresolved emotional stress creates measurable physiological change: altered gene expression, inflammatory cascades, hormonal dysregulation, shifts in the autonomic nervous system.
Trauma researcher Dr Bessel van der Kolk documented what many trauma survivors already knew: that unprocessed experiences reorganise the brain and body in ways that affect health, perception, and resilience for years — sometimes decades — afterward.
The question that German New Medicine goes on to ask is both simpler and more provocative: what if every chronic illness has a specific emotional or biological conflict at its root — and what if the body's response to that conflict is not random, but intelligent?

​German New Medicine: A Different Map of the Body
Developed in the 1980s by German oncologist Dr Ryke Geerd Hamer, German New Medicine emerged from Hamer's own experience of cancer following the sudden death of his son — and his subsequent observation that nearly every patient he treated had experienced a significant emotional shock prior to their diagnosis.
Hamer went on to propose what he called the Five Biological Laws, the core of which holds that every disease originates with a Dirk Hamer Syndrome (DHS) — a biological conflict shock. This is not ordinary everyday stress. It is described as a shock that is:

• Unexpected — it catches the person completely off guard
• Dramatic — it registers as a genuine survival-level threat
• Isolating — it is experienced alone, without resolution or witnessed support

According to GNM, this biological conflict initiates a very specific, measurable response in three places simultaneously: in the brain, in the corresponding organ, and in the psyche. The brain acts as the relay station, and specific conflicts activate specific brain regions — which in turn affect specific organs.
For example: conflicts involving territory, identity, or self-worth are said to correspond to particular areas of the brain that relay to the skeletal or muscular system. Conflicts around deep fear, or the experience of being unable to catch a breath — whether literal or metaphorical — may correspond to specific lung tissue responses.

The body is not making mistakes. It is making meaning. Every symptom is a signal, and every signal has a story beneath it.

This is where GNM diverges most dramatically from conventional medicine: rather than viewing the symptoms of disease as the body malfunctioning, GNM proposes that they represent the body in an active biological survival program. In the conflict-active phase, the body mobilises resources. In the healing phase — when the conflict begins to resolve — the body repairs, and it is often during this healing phase that we experience the most pronounced symptoms: fatigue, swelling, inflammation, pain.
Whether one accepts German New Medicine in its entirety, the core insight it offers is radical and worth sitting with: the body and the psyche are one continuous system, and what goes unresolved in our emotional life does not disappear — it finds another language.
​

​When the Nervous System Cannot Rest
Long before a diagnosis, something else is happening. Something quieter. Something that, if we knew how to read it, might change everything.
The autonomic nervous system — the part that governs fight, flight, freeze, and rest — is designed to respond to threat and then return to baseline. It is a brilliant, responsive system. But it was designed for acute, time-limited stressors. Not for years of hypervigilance. Not for the chronic low hum of unresolved fear. Not for the body that learned early that it wasn't safe to relax.

When the nervous system is chronically dysregulated — stuck in sympathetic activation or cycling between highs and lows without true rest — the downstream effects are enormous:

• Elevated cortisol and adrenaline suppress immune function and increase systemic inflammation
• Chronic inflammation is now understood to be a root driver of conditions including heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, and depression
• Disrupted vagal tone — the measure of the nervous system's capacity to self-regulate — is associated with reduced resilience and poor recovery from illness
• A body in chronic survival mode diverts resources away from repair, reproduction, digestion, and cellular renewal
• 
  

This is the hidden cost of unresolved stress and unmetabolised trauma. Not the acute experience — but the accumulation. The body that never got to complete its response. The grief that was pressed back down. The shock that was never witnessed. The childhood that asked too much and gave too little safety.
The research is clear: the greatest risk factor for chronic illness is not genetics alone. It is the long-term burden of unregulated stress on a nervous system that has never learned — or never been permitted — to rest.
​

​The Fascial Web: Where Trauma Lives in the Tissue
There is a structure in the body so pervasive, so intelligent, and so long overlooked that researchers are only now beginning to understand the full scope of what it does. It is called the fascia — and it may be the most important tissue you have never heard anyone talk about.
Fascia is the continuous web of connective tissue that surrounds and permeates every muscle, organ, nerve, and bone in the body. It is not a background structure. It is not inert. It is a living, dynamic, electrically active tissue that responds to mechanical load, emotional state, and perceived threat — in real time.
Think of it as the body's inner skin: a three-dimensional matrix that holds everything in relationship to everything else. When one part of the fascial web tightens or becomes restricted, the tension is transmitted — sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically — throughout the whole system. A holding pattern in the jaw can pull on the neck. Contraction in the diaphragm can compress the organs. A braced pelvis can alter the mechanics of the spine, the shoulders, the breath.

Fascia is the body's memory made physical. Every bracing, every collapse, every held breath — written into the tissue and waiting to be read.

What makes fascia particularly relevant to our conversation about trauma and chronic illness is this: fascia is richly innervated with sensory nerve endings. It contains more proprioceptors — receptors that sense position, pressure, and threat — than muscle tissue itself. Recent research has identified the fascia as a major contributor to what scientists call interoception: the body's internal sense of its own state. This is the system that tells you when you feel unsafe before your conscious mind has worked out why.

In other words, fascia is not just structural. It is sensory. It is communicative. It is part of the body's threat-detection and threat-response system — and it has a very long memory.

How Fascia Holds — and Communicates — Threat
When the body experiences a threat — whether physical, emotional, or relational — the fascial system responds immediately. Muscles brace. Connective tissue tightens. The body organises itself around protection. This is a brilliant, necessary response. In an acute situation, it may save your life.
But when the threat passes and the body is never given the signal that it is safe — when the nervous system remains in activation and the resolution never comes — the fascia holds the bracing pattern. The tissue does not release. The contraction becomes chronic. And over time, these held patterns layer upon each other, creating what bodyworkers have long described as armour: a physical structure of protection built from the sediment of unresolved experience.

This is not metaphor. Trauma researchers and fascial specialists including Dr Robert Schleip — one of the world's leading fascia scientists — have demonstrated that fascial tissue contains myofibroblasts: contractile cells capable of maintaining chronic tension independently of the muscles. These cells can hold a bracing pattern in tissue long after the original stressor has gone. They respond to both mechanical and emotional input — meaning the body's perception of ongoing threat, even a subtle one, keeps the tissue contracted.
The fascia is also intimately connected to the autonomic nervous system through a dense network of mechanoreceptors. When fascial tissue is chronically tight or restricted, it sends a continuous stream of low-grade threat signals to the brain — maintaining a background hum of sympathetic activation even when the person is objectively safe. The body, reading its own internal landscape through the fascial receptors, concludes: something is still wrong. Keep guard.

This is one of the most important and underappreciated mechanisms by which unresolved trauma perpetuates nervous system dysregulation. It is not only that the nervous system tells the fascia to brace. The fascial system tells the nervous system to stay braced. It is a loop — and it can run for decades.

The body is always listening to itself. And if the fascia is whispering 'danger' — no amount of positive thinking will convince the nervous system otherwise.

There is also a profound emotional dimension to fascial holding. Pioneering work by researchers including Dr Peter Levine — developer of Somatic Experiencing — and the late Dr Wilhelm Reich long before him, describes how specific emotional experiences create specific holding patterns in specific regions of the body...
The contracted chest of grief...
The braced jaw of unexpressed rage...
The collapsed belly of chronic shame...
The frozen pelvis of unresolved fear...
​
These are not poetic descriptions. They are observable, palpable, and — crucially — changeable. When the fascial tissue is given the right conditions — warmth, safety, gentle support, vibrational input, and above all the consistent message that the threat has passed — it begins, slowly and often profoundly, to release.
And when fascia releases, the nervous system receives a different signal. The threat loop begins to quiet. The body updates its sense of its own safety. And the capacity for genuine, cellular-level rest — the kind that makes prevention real — begins to return.

​Prevention as a Practice of Coming Home
What does prevention actually look like through this lens?
It is not simply eating well and exercising, though both matter. It is not white-knuckling stress with willpower. True prevention, at the level the body needs, is about teaching the nervous system that it is safe to return to rest — consistently, deeply, and often enough that it becomes the body's new normal.
It means working with trauma — not just talking about it, but completing the incomplete responses the body has been holding. It means giving the autonomic nervous system repeated experiences of regulation so that it gradually expands its capacity to remain calm in the face of life's inevitable challenges.

It means addressing the fascia — not just as a structural tissue to be stretched, but as a sensory, communicative system that needs to be reassured at the level of the tissue itself.

It means, in the language of German New Medicine, resolving the biological conflicts that the body is still carrying — so the healing phase can proceed naturally rather than cycling in a loop.
This is not about crisis management. This is the slow, patient, profoundly important work of coming home to your own body — before illness has to make you.
​

​A Practice for the Long Game
The most important thing I can tell you about preventing chronic illness is this:
You do not have to wait for something to go wrong.
The work of regulating your nervous system, releasing held trauma, softening the fascial patterns that have been standing guard for years, and returning your body to a state of genuine rest is not reactive medicine. It is the most proactive investment you can make in your long-term health.

Regular sessions with the Entle® Acoustic Dry Float Bed — as part of a conscious wellness practice — offer the nervous system and the fascial body repeated, safe opportunities to down-regulate. To complete unfinished cycles. To release what has been held too long. And over time, what was once an extraordinary state becomes more accessible as an ordinary one.

This is the shift that changes everything. Not one dramatic intervention, but a steady, patient, compassionate practice of returning — again and again — to your own natural rhythm.

Because here is what I know to be true, in both the science and the soul of this work:
You are not broken. You have never been broken. You are a human being that has been doing your absolute best with what you were given — and you are more ready to heal than you know.
​
The rhythm is still there, waiting. Let's find it together.

Is this work for you?
The Entle® Acoustic Dry Float Bed and Acoustic Restoration Therapy may particularly resonate if you:

• Carry a sense that stress or unresolved experiences live in your body
• Experience chronic tension, pain, or tightness that doesn't resolve with physical treatment alone
• Have been diagnosed with a stress-related, inflammatory, or autoimmune condition
• Notice that your nervous system struggles to fully rest, even when circumstances are calm
• Are drawn to preventative, holistic approaches to your long-term health
• Want to support your body's innate intelligence to heal and regulate itself

This is not about fixing what is broken. It is about creating the conditions for what is whole in you to come forward.

Sessions are available at my practice in Loganholme, Queensland. I'd love to help you find your rhythm.
​
       Jane Sleight-Leach is an accredited Acoustic Restoration Therapy Practitioner
                                     trained by The Entle Institute Microvita
                                                      janesleight-leach.com.au

A note on German New Medicine: German New Medicine is a complementary framework for understanding the relationship between emotional experience and physical health. It is not a substitute for conventional medical diagnosis or treatment. The ideas presented in this article are offered as a lens for reflection and self-understanding. Always work alongside qualified healthcare practitioners for medical concerns.

How the Entle Bed speaks to the water, tissue, and trauma held inside your body.
​​

​There is a moment, somewhere in the first few minutes of lying on the Entle Bed, when something in you recognises what is happening. Not intellectually. Not consciously. Something deeper than that. Something that lives below language, below thought, below the stories you have been carrying.

Your body begins to exhale...

And to understand why — and how — we need to go somewhere most of us were never taken in our understanding of ourselves.

​We need to go into the water. Into the tissue. Into the extraordinary, intelligent architecture of the human body that has been, all along, waiting for exactly this kind of conversation.

​PART ONE

You are, at your core, made of water and light.
The human body is approximately 60–70% water. But this is not ordinary water — the kind you pour from a tap or sip from a glass. Much of the water in your body, particularly within and around the connective tissue, exists in what scientists are now calling its fourth phase: structured water, or exclusion zone (EZ) water.

Discovered and extensively researched by Dr. Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington, EZ water is not liquid, solid, or gas. It occupies a state between liquid and solid — a crystalline, gel-like organisation of water molecules that forms along the surface of biological materials, particularly collagen. This structured water carries a negative charge, stores energy, and functions as an extraordinarily sensitive medium for the transmission of information throughout the body.
​
What does this mean for you? It means that your body’s interior is not a passive bag of fluids. It is a charged, ordered, responsive field — and it is exquisitely sensitive to vibration.

​This is where Acoustic Restoration Therapy™ becomes not just a relaxation modality, but something far more precise: a direct dialogue with the biological intelligence of your body.

​PART TWO

The architecture of everything: fascia.
Before we can understand how the Entle Bed facilitates release, we need to deeply understand what it is working with. And that means understanding fascia — the tissue that most of us were never taught about, and yet is arguably the most important structure in the human body.

Fascia is the continuous, three-dimensional web of connective tissue that surrounds and infuses every muscle, organ, nerve, blood vessel, and bone. It is not simply a wrapping. It is not packing material. In the words of movement and manual therapy practitioner Rev. Dr. Joanne Avison, fascia is not a system — it is the architecture of all systems.

Fascia is composed primarily of collagen fibres, elastin, and a gel-like substance called the extracellular matrix — all of it hydrated by that extraordinary structured water we spoke of. Together, these components create a tissue that is simultaneously structural, communicative, sensory, and electrical.

Fascia is your largest sensory organ.
This is perhaps the most important thing to understand: fascia is densely packed with sensory receptors. More than any other tissue in the body. It responds to pressure, stretch, vibration, temperature, and chemical change — often before your conscious mind has registered anything at all.

Your fascia knows. It knows when you are safe. It knows when you are not. It registers every experience — and it stores what it cannot fully process.

The liquid crystal within you.
Collagen — the primary structural protein of fascia, making up over 30% of all protein in the human body — behaves as a liquid crystal. Liquid crystals exist between a purely fluid and a purely solid state, displaying ordered molecular arrangements that are exquisitely responsive to mechanical, electrical, thermal, and acoustic stimuli.

In healthy, hydrated fascia, this liquid crystalline matrix is coherent. It can sustain organised wave-like vibrations — what researchers call coherent oscillations — that travel through the tissue at remarkable speed, facilitating communication and coordination throughout the entire body. Faster, even, than the nervous system.
​
This is the body’s original information superhighway. And it runs on vibration.

​PART THREE
The different densities of fascia: what emotion and trauma do to the tissue.Here is where the story becomes personal. Because fascia is not uniform throughout the body. It exists in different layers, different densities — and each has its own relationship to experience, emotion, and held memory.

How emotional experience changes fascial density.
​When we experience stress, fear, pain, or threat — whether physical, emotional, or relational — the body responds by contracting. The muscles brace. The breath shallows. The fascia thickens and tightens in the areas most associated with that response: the throat (where words are swallowed), the chest (where grief is held), the belly (where fear lives), the hips and pelvis (where the deepest survival responses are encoded).

In an acute event, this contraction resolves when the threat passes. The nervous system completes its cycle, the tissue releases, and life goes on.

But in chronic stress, repeated trauma, or early adverse experiences — particularly where the emotional event could not be fully expressed, resolved, or witnessed safely — the fascial contraction does not fully release. The tissue thickens. The structured water within it becomes less organised. The piezoelectric signalling becomes disrupted. The liquid crystalline coherence is lost.
​
The fascia freezes around the experience.

​What frozen fascia feels like.
Dehydrated, compressed, or trauma-held fascia shows up in the body in recognisable ways. Chronic tightness that does not respond to stretching. Areas that feel numb, armoured, or disconnected. Pain patterns that seem unrelated to any physical injury. A persistent sense of bracing, of not being able to fully arrive in the body, of something always held just beneath the surface.
​
Emotionally, disrupted fascial coherence can manifest as a sense of being stuck, emotionally flat, disconnected from instinct and intuition, or locked in cycles of reactivity that seem impossible to shift through will or understanding alone. This is the body — not the mind — that needs to be reached.

PART FOUR
How the Entle Bed and Acoustic Restoration Therapy™ speak to all of this.The Entle Dry Float Bed, guided by the Aetherix™ system developed by naturopath and acoustic medicine pioneer Thomas Staudacher, delivers structured, precisely organised sound frequencies through a water layer beneath the body. You remain fully clothed and dry. The water is never touched. And yet what happens below the surface — within the water, within the tissue — is extraordinary.

This is not sound applied as stimulation. This is sound arranged as structure — geometric, coherent patterns that the body’s own biological intelligence recognises and responds to. The difference is significant. Stimulation produces reaction. Coherent structure produces recognition. And recognition, in the body, is where genuine reorganisation begins.

The mechanisms: what is actually happening. 

​PART SIX
Why this matters for trauma, emotional healing, and long-term wellbeing.
If you have lived through experiences that left marks not just in your memory but in your body — if you know the feeling of a tension that never quite releases, a vigilance that never quite rests, a grief that lives somewhere behind your sternum or a fear that sits permanently in your belly — then what we have explored in this article is for you.
​
The Entle Bed is not a cure. It does not erase experience or promise a particular outcome. What it offers is something rarer and more fundamental: a safe, coherent, body-level invitation to return. To remember. To release the held breath that the tissue has been taking on your behalf for years, sometimes decades.
​
Combined with other gentle, evidence-informed approaches — EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), somatic awareness, meditation, and appropriate psychological support where needed — Acoustic Restoration Therapy™ works in the register that talk alone cannot always reach. The register of the body. The register of sensation. The register of the fascia, speaking its slow, crystalline language of return.

Your body already knows this language.
You do not need to fully understand the science to feel its effects. You do not need to prepare, to perform, or to try. You simply need to arrive.
The frequencies will meet you there.
The fascia will know what to do.
And when the body finally feels safe enough to let go — that is not a small thing. That is everything.

​What ancient plant wisdom has always known about fascia, blood, energy and sound.
 
​Long before the word “therapy” existed, there were plants.
Long before we had the language of fascia and nervous system regulation, before we understood the vagus nerve or coined the phrase “somatic healing,” the healers of ancient cultures — the Ayurvedic vaidyas, the Chinese herbalists, the Aboriginal elders, the Greek physicians, the druids — were already working with the very same threads we work with today. They just had different names for them.
I’ve been sitting with this for a while now. In my work with fascia, with sanguine gnosis, with energy psychology and acoustic restoration therapy, I keep arriving at the same quiet recognition: the body has always known. And the plants? The plants have always been listening.
So today I want to begin a new conversation. I want to introduce you to the world of ancient herbal wisdom — not as a departure from the work we do together, but as a deepening of it. A homecoming, really.
​

​Your fascia is a living forest
​If you’ve been following this work for a while, you know that fascia is not simply a wrapping tissue. It is a continuous, intelligent, fluid web of connective tissue that communicates, responds, holds memory and emotion, and either flows or stiffens in direct relationship to your experiences — your traumas, your beliefs, your nervous system state.
Here is what strikes me: the ancient herbalists understood this intuitively. When Ayurvedic practitioners used turmeric and ashwagandha, they were not simply targeting inflammation in a biochemical sense. They were working to restore prana — the life force — through the connective pathways of the body. When Traditional Chinese Medicine prescribed herbs to move qi stagnation, they were describing what we now understand as fascial restriction: places where the flow has stopped, where the tissue has hardened around an unresolved experience.
The language was different. The wisdom was the same.
​

Blood, gnosis and the intelligence we carry in our veins
Sanguine gnosis — the knowing that lives in the blood — is a thread in this work that I find endlessly humbling. The idea that our blood carries ancestral intelligence, cellular memory, the coded imprints of lineage, is not a fringe concept. It is ancient. Every traditional culture on earth has honoured the blood as sacred, as a carrier of both life force and information.
Herbal traditions speak directly to this. Nettle, red clover, yellow dock — the great blood herbs of Western herbalism — were used not merely to fortify the physical blood but to restore vitality at the deepest constitutional level. In Ayurveda, rakta dhatu (the blood tissue) is considered the seat of tejas, the fire of discernment and illumination. Herbs that nourish the blood nourish the inner knowing. This is sanguine gnosis made botanical.

​Energy psychology and the intelligence of the meridian system
​EFT and energy psychology work because energy moves through the body along pathways — pathways that Traditional Chinese Medicine mapped thousands of years ago as meridians. When we tap on the endpoints of those meridians while holding an emotional truth, we are doing something the acupuncturists of ancient China understood completely: we are sending a signal through the body’s energy system that something can shift.
Adaptogenic herbs have been used for millennia to support exactly this kind of energetic resilience. Herbs like reishi, holy basil (tulsi) and schisandra were not prescribed for a single symptom — they were given to help the whole system find its equilibrium, to build what the Chinese called wei qi, a kind of intelligent protective field around the body. Sound familiar? It should. This is what we work toward in every session — restoring the body’s capacity to regulate, to adapt, to return to itself.

​
​Sound, frequency and the plants that resonate
Acoustic restoration therapy works with the understanding that sound is not merely heard — it is felt. It moves through the body’s fluid systems, it literally vibrates the fascia, it communicates with the nervous system at a frequency below conscious thought. We are, at our most fundamental level, vibrational beings.
Plants know this too. Indigenous cultures around the world have always used plant medicines in ceremony — not in silence, but with song, with drum, with breath and chant. The sound and the plant were never separate. The Shipibo people of the Amazon understand that each plant has its own icaro — a healing song that carries its medicine into the body. The plant sings, and the body responds.
Calamus root was used by Native American traditions to heighten sensory acuity and attune the inner ear to subtler frequencies. Blue lotus, revered in ancient Egypt, was associated with states of expanded perception — what we might now recognise as a deeply coherent nervous system. Mugwort has been used across cultures to open the dream body, the subtle sensing capacity that ordinary waking consciousness keeps quiet.

 Ancient allies across the healing threads

This is not new. This is not alternative. This is ancient wisdom.
​I want to say something clearly, because I know how this can land for some of you who are newer to this work: incorporating herbal wisdom is not a step sideways from evidence-based practice. It is a step deeper into the understanding that the human body — your body — is an ecosystem. And ecosystems thrive when they are supported at every level.
The research on polyphenols and fascial hydration, on adaptogenic herbs and HPA axis regulation, on nervines and vagal tone — it is growing rapidly and it is rigorous. But it is, in many ways, simply catching up with what the plants already knew. What the grandmothers already knew. What the earth has been offering us for as long as we have been here.
As we continue to develop this work together — across fascia, sanguine gnosis, energy psychology and acoustic restoration — I want to invite the plant kingdom into the room. Not as a cure, not as a prescription, but as a companion. A very, very ancient companion who has been patiently waiting to be remembered.
​

​

I hope you enjoy exploring specific herbs and traditional preparations as much as I do. It's so soothing and, at the same time, vitalising to weave botanical support into your existing healing practice. We can explore together what the science says, what the traditions say, and what your own body — that incredible, knowing, remembering body — has probably been trying to tell you all along.
For now, I simply want to plant the seed.
And watch where it grows.

A note on my relationship with plants: I am not a trained or certified herbalist. What I share here comes from many years of personal research, deep curiosity, and lived experience with plant medicine as part of my own healing journey. Nothing in this blog is intended as medical advice or a substitute for the guidance of a qualified health practitioner. I always encourage you to do your own research, consult with a professional where appropriate, and above all, trust your own body’s wisdom.
​

​
​There is something in the blood that knows before the mind catches up. A pull toward the ancient, the wild, the liminal places between the seen and unseen worlds.

I've felt it my whole life.

So when I sent away for an Ancestry DNA test, I wasn't just looking for names on a family tree. I was looking for confirmation of something I'd always sensed — that I come from a people who walked in ceremony with the earth.

What came back stopped me in my tracks. Celtic/Irish. Welsh. Scottish. English. Four threads woven together, and three of them pointing to the same ancient heartland — the very land where the druids lived, breathed, and kept the sacred flame of knowing alive for thousands of years.

Now, I want to be really honest with you here, because I think you deserve that. DNA testing is extraordinary, but it has limits. No test in the world will hand you a certificate that reads "confirmed druid ancestor." That's not how it works, and anyone who tells you differently isn't being straight with you. Druids were a priestly class — philosophers, lore-keepers, healers, oral historians. A social role, not a biological category.

But here's what DNA can tell you — and this is where it gets genuinely extraordinary. And it's here that the work of Irish writer, researcher and artist Thomas Sheridan becomes something I simply cannot ignore.

Sanguine gnosis — the knowing in the blood.
Sheridan's concept of sanguine gnosis — from the Latin sanguis (blood) and the Greek gnosis (direct inner knowing) — is one of those ideas that, when you encounter it, you feel it before you understand it. It is the proposition that ancestral wisdom is not merely inherited culturally, not passed down through stories and traditions alone, but encoded in the blood itself. That certain people carry within their cellular memory a direct knowing of who their people were, what they understood, and how they moved through the world.

This isn't fringe mysticism dressed up in Latin. Sheridan, in his remarkable book The Druid Code: Magic, Megaliths and Mythology, argues that the druids were themselves the masters of this principle — that they understood human consciousness and ancestral memory in ways that our sanitised, materialist modernity has largely abandoned. He describes them not as robed eccentrics at Stonehenge but as the psychoanalysts of their age — judges, healers, lore-keepers and community architects who used myth, symbol and ritual to speak directly to the subconscious, bypassing the rational mind entirely.

​​What strikes me about sanguine gnosis — and why it lands so viscerally when I look at my own DNA results — is that it names something I have always known experientially but struggled to articulate. That pull I described at the opening of this piece. That feeling of primordial recognition when I encounter certain landscapes, certain ways of knowing, certain ancient symbols. Sheridan would say that isn't imagination. That is memory. The memory that lives not in the mind but in the blood.
And now, for the first time, I have genetic evidence that the blood carrying that memory is exactly the blood it should be.

​The bloodlines that matter
​My four ethnicity results from Ancestry.com paint a picture that surprised me in its coherence. Not chaos, not a muddle of unrelated migrations — but a deeply Celtic story, told through the genetics of the Atlantic Isles.

​Three of those four results — Celtic/Irish, Welsh and Scottish — sit in the regions that genetic science has consistently identified as the least genetically disrupted by the waves of continental invasion that reshaped Britain over two millennia. These are the places where the old blood ran deepest. And these are the lands of the druids.

​What the science actually says
Here's the part I find breathtaking. The genetic lineage most strongly associated with Iron Age Celtic Britain — a paternal haplogroup called R1b-L21 — has been found in archaeological burials dating from 800 BCE right through to 43 CE. The height of druidic Britain.
Those burials are in Wales. In Ireland. In Scotland. The exact three regions where my DNA is strongest.

​A note on haplogroups
​A haplogroup is a branch on your family tree that goes back tens of thousands of years. Standard Ancestry.com autosomal tests don't directly reveal haplogroups — for that you'd need a specialist Y-DNA test like FamilyTreeDNA's Big Y-700, which can actually match you to ancient burials from the archaeological record. It's extraordinary, and worth exploring if this calls to you.

​The Welsh thread — a quiet revelation
​Of all four of my results, my Welsh ancestry is the one I keep returning to. Research consistently shows that Wales — particularly the west — maintained Celtic-speaking populations with the least continental genetic influence of any region in Britain. The Anglo-Saxons barely touched the Welsh heartlands. The Vikings had limited impact. The Romans came and went. What remained was something remarkably old.
To carry Welsh ancestry is to hold in my body one of the most uninterrupted lines of Atlantic Celtic DNA on the planet. That's not mysticism. That's population genetics, and it is staggering.

​I think about this constantly in the work I do — the way the body holds what the conscious mind doesn't know it knows. The way certain experiences, certain ways of being, feel not just familiar but primordially correct. EFT works precisely because it accesses the body's intelligence, not the chattering, rationalising, story-spinning mind. And that body intelligence — that cellular wisdom — is not random. It has a history. It has ancestors. Sheridan's sanguine gnosis gives language to what I have always felt as I work with clients: that when someone finally releases a belief or a pattern that has been running their life, they are often not just healing themselves. They are completing something much, much older.

*Inspired by the teachings of Rev. Dr. Joanne Avison and the science of acoustic restoration therapy*

## Introduction: Rethinking the Body We Live In

For centuries, Western medicine has treated the human body as a machine — a collection of separate parts, levers, pulleys, and systems that can be understood and repaired in isolation. But a growing body of science, and the extraordinary work of Rev. Dr. Joanne Avison, is dismantling this view entirely. Through her podcast *The Joanne Avison Podcast*, Joanne — a movement and manual therapy practitioner, Certified Archetypal Consultant, ordained minister, and Doctor of Spiritual Science — invites us into a radical reimagining of what it means to live in a body.


At the heart of her work is **fascia**: the continuous, all-pervasive web of connective tissue that, Avison argues, changes everything we thought we knew about human anatomy, movement, emotion, and healing. And as we will explore, the emerging field of acoustic restoration therapy offers a remarkable and scientifically grounded way to support the crystalline, vibrational nature of fascial tissue.


What Is Fascia? The Architecture of Everything

Fascia is the three-dimensional matrix of connective tissue that surrounds and infuses every muscle, bone, nerve, blood vessel, and organ in the body. It is not simply a wrapping or packing material — it is the architecture of every system. As Avison powerfully puts it, fascia is not *a* system; it is *the* architecture of all systems.

Made primarily of collagen fibres, elastin, and a gel-like ground substance called the extracellular matrix, fascia forms a unified, unbroken network from head to toe. What makes this so extraordinary is that the body, when viewed through the lens of fascia, is no longer a collection of disconnected parts but a **continuous whole** — a living, responsive field of intelligence.

Joanne's podcast weaves together fascia science with embryology, sacred geometry, movement, and spirituality to reveal the body as something far more extraordinary than a biological machine.


Key Themes from The Joanne Avison Podcast

1. Fascia Is the Body's Largest Sensory Organ

One of the most revolutionary contributions Avison brings to public understanding is the recognition of fascia as the body's largest sensory organ — an organ of love, light, and sound. Fascia is densely packed with sensory receptors, and its responses to the environment often *precede* conscious cognitive awareness. Your fascia may know something before your mind catches up.

This has profound implications. It means that the whispers of the body — the subtle sensations, instincts, and intuitions we sometimes dismiss — are not noise. They are data. They are the fascia speaking, narrating our story, encoding the memory of every experience we have ever had.

2. The Body Is Not a Machine — It Is a Living Architecture

Avison passionately challenges the biomechanical model of the human body, which relies on engineering concepts like levers, pin joints, and mechanical chains. The body, she explains, does not actually work this way. Its architecture is fundamentally **non-linear, tubular, and spiral** in organisation — shaped by fascia and the dynamics of living tissue.

The concept of **biotensegrity** — a term describing how the body balances tension and compression throughout its continuous fascial network — is central to this understanding. Rather than bones as levers, muscles as engines, and joints as hinges, we have a pre-tensioned, globally integrated system where every element influences every other. When a muscle contracts, it isn't working in isolation; it tensions the whole matrix. Muscles, in Avison's memorable phrase, are "turnbuckles" — they tension the entire fascial web.

3. Fascia as a Self-Organising, Intelligent Field

Avison describes fascia as a *self-organising, responsive field* through which structure, sensation, and meaning continually arise. From the very first days of embryological development, fascia is the foundational substrate of becoming. It is not something that appears later; it is the very medium through which we take form.

This intelligence is non-linear. Fascia adapts, reorganises, and responds when awareness and safety are present — far beyond what mechanical models of the body can account for. The body, in Avison's view, is alive, intelligent, and continuously becoming.

4. Sacred Geometry as Biological Reality

The podcast explores sacred geometry not as a spiritual overlay, but as a **biological reality** embedded in the structure of fascia. The spiral, the tube, and the wave are not decorative patterns — they are the fundamental geometries through which the body organises itself, moves, and grows. From the spiral organisation of collagen fibres to the tubular structure of the fascial network, the body is built on geometric principles of extraordinary elegance and efficiency.

In one standout episode exploring fish, fascia, and movement, Avison highlights how spirals underlie human form — drawing on the insights of biomechanist Serge Gracovetsky to show that the "Law of Three" (two planes of motion always creating a third) governs movement across species and across scales.

5. Fascia Holds Memory — Emotionally and Physically
Perhaps one of the most resonant teachings in Avison's work is that **fascia holds memory**. This is not metaphor. Fascia's liquid crystalline nature (more on this below) means it is capable of storing and encoding the signatures of physical events, emotional experiences, and even trauma. This is what researchers mean when they say "the body keeps the score."

Avison openly shared her own journey with a diagnosis of breast cancer, describing how understanding fascia — and its predisposition to serve her — helped her cope and recover. Through micromovements, self-love, and community support, she experienced the fascia as a partner in healing rather than a site of disease.

6. Fascia Connects Soma to Soul

Running through all of Avison's work is a conviction that we cannot meaningfully separate the body from the soul, structure from spirit, or the physical from the emotional. The podcast explores how fascia is the bridge — the tissue through which awareness, perception, emotion, and meaning are embodied. It connects the energetic body to the physical body, and in doing so, it connects us to something far larger than our individual biology.

Fascia as a Liquid Crystal: The Science Behind the Magic

To understand how acoustic restoration therapy can support fascia, we need to understand one of the most extraordinary properties of this tissue: its **liquid crystalline nature**.

Collagen — the primary structural protein of fascia, making up over 30% of all protein in the human body — behaves as a **liquid crystal**. Liquid crystals exist between a purely fluid and a purely solid state, displaying ordered molecular arrangements that are exquisitely responsive to mechanical, electrical, and even acoustic stimuli.

In fascia, this liquid crystalline collagen matrix is hydrated by a very particular kind of water — *structured water*, also called exclusion zone (EZ) water or fourth-phase water. This water is not the ordinary bulk water we drink; it is organised into a crystalline lattice along the surface of collagen fibres, capable of storing and transmitting energy and information throughout the body.

The implications are profound:

**Piezoelectric signalling**: Collagen is piezoelectric — it generates an electrical charge in response to mechanical stress. This means that every movement, every breath, every touch creates bioelectric signals that travel throughout the fascial network, facilitating a body-wide communication system that operates faster than the nervous system.
 **Biophotonic communication**: Fascia may conduct light particles (biophotons) between cells, functioning as a luminous signalling medium.
 **Information storage**: Liquid crystals hold memory — they register experience and are highly receptive to change. Fascia does the same, encoding patterns of experience in its crystalline structure.
**Coherent vibration**: When fascia's liquid crystalline molecules are aligned, they can sustain coherent vibrations — wave-like patterns of excitation that travel through the tissue, facilitating communication and coordination throughout the whole body.

Healthy fascia is well-hydrated, organised, and freely responsive. When fascia becomes dehydrated, compressed, restricted, or "frozen" by trauma or chronic stress, its crystalline order is disrupted — its ability to transmit signals, conduct energy, and self-organise is compromised. This shows up not only as physical pain and restriction, but as emotional rigidity and disconnection from the body's deep intelligence.


Acoustic Restoration Therapy: Restoring the Crystalline Field

Here is where acoustic restoration therapy enters as a beautifully coherent complement to everything Joanne Avison describes.

Acoustic restoration therapy — encompassing approaches such as vibroacoustic therapy, myofascial acoustic compression therapy (MyACT), tuning fork therapy, and targeted sound frequency healing — uses sound waves and vibration to interact directly with the body's tissues. Because the body is composed largely of water, and because fascia is a liquid crystalline, piezoelectric, acoustically responsive medium, it is exquisitely sensitive to sound.


How It Works
Acoustic waves interact with the fascial matrix** at multiple levels simultaneously:

**1. Restoring Crystalline Order**
Disrupted, dehydrated, or "frozen" fascia loses its liquid crystalline coherence. When specific sound frequencies are delivered into the fascial tissue — whether through a specialised sound table, tuning forks, or acoustic compression devices — they can entrain the crystalline structure of collagen, encouraging it to return to its natural ordered state. This is not unlike the way a musical instrument, when struck at its resonant frequency, returns to its natural harmonic.

**2. Piezoelectric Activation**
Because collagen is piezoelectric, acoustic waves create mechanical compression that generates bioelectric charge in the fascial tissue. This cascade of mechanotransduction — the conversion of mechanical signals into biological responses — stimulates fibroblast activity (the cells that maintain and repair fascia), increases collagen synthesis, promotes microcirculation, reduces inflammation, and activates the body's natural regenerative processes.

**3. Hyaluronic Acid Production**
Low-frequency vibration has been shown to increase the production of hyaluronic acid — a key component of the fascial ground substance that hydrates and lubricates the tissue. Increasing hyaluronic acid helps restore the fluid, responsive quality of fascia that dehydration and chronic stress deplete.


**4. Releasing Stored Memory and Tension**
Because fascia's liquid crystalline structure can hold the "waveform memory" of trauma, chronic stress, and emotional experience, acoustic therapy does more than relax muscle tissue. It can help liberate patterns stored in the fascial field — what some practitioners describe as "unwinding" the tissue. Techniques that deliver coherent sound and vibration into the body do not just relax tissue mechanically; they restore the coherent oscillatory field of the fascia, allowing it to release what it has been holding.


**5. Nervous System Regulation**
The fascial network and the nervous system are deeply interconnected — Avison notes that the fascial matrix fundamentally changes how we understand the nervous system. Acoustic therapy, by working through the fascia, helps to shift the autonomic nervous system from a chronic state of activation (sympathetic, "fight or flight") toward parasympathetic regulation ("rest and digest"). This creates the conditions of safety and ease in which fascia, as Avison describes, naturally reorganises and heals.


**6. Rehydration Through Coherent Movement**
Acoustic vibration creates a gentle, wave-like squeezing and releasing of fascial tissue — a process analogous to wringing out a sponge. This rehydrates the tissue, replacing zones of stagnant "bulk water" with the structured, charged, crystalline water that healthy fascia requires. As hydration increases, the conductivity of the collagen matrix improves, restoring the body's capacity to transmit energy, information, and bioelectric signals efficiently.

## The Meeting Point: Avison's Vision and Acoustic Science

What makes acoustic restoration therapy such a profound companion to Joanne Avison's teachings is that it honours the body on its own terms — as a living, intelligent, vibrational field rather than a mechanical structure to be fixed.

Avison teaches that fascia responds to awareness, safety, rhythm, and relationship — not force. Acoustic therapy works precisely in this register. It does not impose, compress, or override; it resonates, entrains, and invites. It speaks the language of vibration that the fascial matrix already understands.

Just as Avison describes breath as a form of inner acoustic engineering — generating coherent pressure waves that travel through the cranial bones, the dural tube, the diaphragm, and the pelvic floor, bathing the fascial network in renewed signal — so too does acoustic restoration therapy bring coherence, rhythm, and information back to tissue that has lost its natural resonance.

When fascia is well-hydrated, crystalline, and coherent, it can do what it was always designed to do: transmit light, conduct bioelectric signals, hold the body in dynamic tensional balance, narrate our deepest experiences, and — in Avison's beautiful phrase — serve as an organ of love, light, and sound.

## Conclusion: Listening to the Body's Deepest Intelligence

Joanne Avison's podcast is an invitation. An invitation to stop seeing the body as a collection of parts and begin sensing it as a living whole — a self-organising, intelligent, crystalline field that is continuously communicating, continuously becoming, continuously healing.

Acoustic restoration therapy meets that invitation with science. By working directly with the liquid crystalline, piezoelectric, and vibratory nature of fascial tissue, it offers a gentle and profoundly coherent path back to the body's natural coherence — restoring structure, flow, and the deep intelligence that Avison reminds us has always been there, waiting to be heard.

Your fascia is not silent. It is, as Avison says, the narrator of your story. Acoustic therapy helps you listen.

*This article draws on themes from The Joanne Avison Podcast, Joanne's book Yoga: Fascia, Anatomy and Movement, and emerging research in fascia science, liquid crystalline biology, and acoustic/vibroacoustic therapy.*

Visit the Joanne Avison Podcast on Spotify and YouTube
SPOTIFY https://open.spotify.com/show/1XLdLtJEJco9hbpWZaNk5U
YOUTUBE:https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=joanne+avison+podcast&sp=mAEA
Contact Jane to experience Acoustic Restoration Therapy
0412 200 515
[email protected]

A I often begin a session with an explanation about the questions I may ask as we journey into the exploratory process of uncovering emotional distress.  One of these questions is about colour in relation to feelings.
"What colour is that feeling?" or "If that feeling had a colour, what would it be?"
I often get a perplexed look as a first response, but as the invitation to receive colour as information is accepted, awareness of this extra dimension of interpretation of the inner landscape expands.
Colours have a universal meaning attached to them, as with the Chakra System and the many published texts about the psychology of colour, but we each have an intuitive and deeply personal connection to colour and how we respond to colour energy and frequency.

Feel colour for yourself.
Find a quiet space for a few minutes, away from interruptions. Take a breath and become present to the time and space you occupy in this moment.
What emotions are present for you right now? It doesn't matter if you can't name the feeling, or if you feel positive or negative, expansive or contracting emotions. Where in your body is this feeling most intensely present? Notice and acknowledge its presence.
​Ask yourself  "What colour is this feeling?"
What colour comes to you? Don't try to get it "right". It will be unique to you. 
For me personally, as I sit here writing this blog, I feel frustration as the neighbours kid rides his extremely loud motor bike along my fence line, disturbing my peace and my focus, and it feels blue in my lower chest.  
Part of this process is learning to trust your intuitive senses. 
It may be that the colour that comes to you is surprising. Just acknowledge it. It may be that you "feel" the colour rather than "see" it. Let it come to you. It could be a combination of colours, there is no right or wrong.

The energy of colour is a powerful way to  influence your energy field intentionally. As you connect with the colour you are feeling, feel it's frequency. If you would like to lift this frequency tune into the colour that is the natural cleansing and clearing colour that will create balance. Ask yourself "What colour lifts and cleanses me?" Again, allow the colour that shows itself to you to rise in your awareness

Raise your frequency
As the colour for cleansing and clearing comes into your awareness, take a deep breath. Take your breath deep into yourself to the place where your cleansing colour lives. It has always been there. Now it is time to allow it to expand. Each breath carries it deep into your mind, body and spirit. Visualise and feel it as you allow it to travel deep into every cell and beyond, into your vast internal universe. As it continues to transform internally, push it outward, beyond your physical body, to your external environment. You exist within this colour and it exists within you.
Feel the qualities of this colour, feel the cleansing and freshness it brings, and feel the shift as it transmutes  lower vibrational emotions.

Colour Energy/EFT Fusion
 It can be difficult for those who have experienced abuse or trauma to name feelings, to be present with feelings or to even  consider facing past events, and overwhelm can easily cause shut down. This is when working with colour can be a very powerful but far more gentle approach. 

Using the soothing kinetic effects of EFT in combination with colour energy creates new and effective pathways to release, that are even more gentle and non-invasive. Tapping to release the colour energy of trauma works in the deeper, subconscious space. No retelling of stories is necessary, no revisiting the past is needed for shifts on numerous levels to occur. 

If you are intrigued or curious as to how The Energy of Colour and EFT fusion might work for you please get in touch. Book a session or ask for more info at:
https://www.janesleight-leach.com.au/contact-me.html

You may also like to listen to my Nothing But Love You Tube series at:
https://www.janesleight-leach.com.au/meditation.html

Enjoy the wonderful world of  colour. I am noticing that since flooding my body with the soothing colour and energy of rose quartz, the motorbike has gone :)

Been there, done that! Putting on the fake it till you make it face isn't going to get you through another year is it? I think many have had enough of the expectation that this time of year brings. Of forcing the positive attitude, really trying but struggling to "feel how it feels" to be successful or happy to activate the law of attraction, when deep inside we simply "know" it's all going to be the same old same old.

It happened to me pretty much every year. It was exhausting trying to be super optimistic about what the new year will bring, because, let's face it, the hindsight on the last few years presents fairly convincing evidence that we just might be stuck on repeat.

No matter how hard we try to do a number on that prophet of doom we call our subconscious mind, the nagging nay-sayer keeps slipping past the gate keeper. Boom, one more positive intention slides into the abyss! And on it goes...

It's OK, it's not your fault. It feels like it is. You tell yourself it is. You beat yourself up because you truly believe that it is, but it's not. You are not to blame.

In fact, self-blame, or indeed any kind of blame, is the normal response to the internal struggle that's going on for you right now, in the looming energy that is about to become 2020, BUT, it's not going to serve you or allow you to make the most of, or even recognise, the opportunities that are coming. You already know it, right? But your looping sense of powerlessness paralyses and frustrates your best efforts.

You are unwittingly giving away your precious vital energy and power to the past. Like handing it over on a plate to the energy drainers, the vampires, the ex's, the betrayers, the mistakes, the distractions and the disappointments.  A lifetime of them.

We are wired to remember and feel the negative shit that we've experienced more strongly than the positive, because that's how we survive and stay safe, despite our attempts to override it, let it go and just get on with life. 

Maddeningly, this mental ping-pong happens in the blink of an eye. It's a spark that ignites in a belief, that catches hold in a thought, then burns up the nervous system like an out of control bush fire. And don't we know what THAT looks like?
​The effect is literally the razing of your positive intentions and all that you are so diligently imagining and listing as your hopes, dreams and goals for 2020. 
You want it to be different! You NEED it to be different, but it CAN'T be different because the saboteur that is your unobserved and inaccessible belief system is running the show, and it has the proof that it's right, in all of your crappy experiences.

So how to tackle the several layers of lived proof that you have developed and the resistance to allowing the vulnerability to the potential of failure of attaining said goals and dreams?

Well, number 1 thing to do is actually get serious and commit to yourself because nothing will change if you don't.

What does that bring up for you?

Yeah I know, there's something stopping you from making that commitment. You've tried right? 

What feeling comes up for you when you think about committing to yourself and what you want? Fear? Anxiety? Are you even able to name it?

See, this is the first step that's so often missed when we try to get ourselves into that positive state, to get the enthusiasm pumping and the neurons making the right kind of connections. 

According to you subconscious programming, you are simply not _____________ enough. Fill in that blank with good, intelligent, worthy, capable, allowed or whatever variation on the theme applies to you. You can't jump into the getting of the goals if your fundamental belief about yourself is you are not worthy of achieving those goals. As weird as it seems, to push for those goals would be a betrayal of your true self, as it exists right now.
It's SUCH a catch 22!

It's a body based feeling, a contracting, and it's inextricably linked to your direct challenge to your internal guidance system. Your beliefs.

I can't tell you what your belief about yourself is, but I can tell you that THE most reported negative self-belief is "I'm not good enough".

So, it's time to get completely honest with yourself and begin to acknowledge and accept that the fundamental basic blocks to whatever you want to achieve is your own unconscious operating system that puts the brakes on when you are pressing the accelerator.

So how about we do a little tapping on this quandary and see if we can't shift it! 

Just look at that crazy face in the thumbnail! It was the best one available. Crikies!
So, I'm back to the writing. Did you watch the video? How do you feel after the tapping session? You can re-watch it and see if anything different comes up. Keep going until you feel a shift and the resistance lessens. The main thing to remember is that this is your process, and this is your year, so let's do everything possible to bring in the very best experiences and opportunities. You have nothing to lose and absolutely everything to gain. Just do this crazy looking little sequence and enjoy the benefits of more peace and balance in your life.
Drop me some comments or get in touch via Facebook or email. I'd also love to know if you have any suggestions of issues you'd like to see in a video.

Here's to all of us stepping into 2020 with clarity and with clean energy ready to make the most of what's to come!

A fabulously prosperous and happy New Year to you and yours :)

A couple of years ago I did TV interview that, unbeknown to me, was edited before airing, and I was introduced as “a victim of domestic violence”.

I had been taking part in an awareness walk which was covered by Channel 7.  The reporter asked me for my insights and the reasons I attended the walk. They chose to ignore my angle, which was highlighting the strength and resourcefulness of women who had left abusive relationships, and they went with their own pre-planned agenda, depicting me and countless other women as something we are not. I was pissed off.

I think it’s fair to say that the general perception of a “victim” is that of a helpless, hopeless, unresourced individual at the mercy of circumstance, and is someone to be pitied or felt sorry for.

Dictionary definition:
Victim
/ˈvɪktɪm/
noun

1. a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.
   "victims of domestic violence"
   synonyms: sufferer, injured party, casualty, injured person, wounded person; 
   • a person who is tricked or duped.
     "the victim of a hoax"
     synonyms: dupe, easy target, easy prey, fair game, sitting target, everybody's fool, stooge, gull, fool, Aunt Sally; 
   • a person who has come to feel helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment.
     "I saw myself as a victim"

Well, I’m certainly no victim, and I think it’s important to recognise that labelling human beings who have had a particular experience adds to the challenges of their recovery. And not just the recovery of the individual, but the recovery of the collective consciousness, from this existing paradigm of violence and repression and the level of acceptance that society has of violence against women.

There is absolutely no doubt that anyone who has experienced abuse in any form has been victimised, possibly targeted and deliberately hurt, but particularly in the case of domestic abuse, and for those who have left abusive situations, we are ignoring one incredibly important common trait.

Strength.

Anyone who has been able to lift themselves out of an abusive relationship, whether it’s their first try or their 20th try, has an extraordinary amount of strength, courage, sheer guts and determination. The neurological, psychological, physical, social and financial barriers facing someone in this position are likely way beyond the comprehension of those who have not been on this soul wrenching journey. Recognition, appreciation and respect need to be given, by the truck load, to the often emotionally ragged humans that keep pushing forward regardless, and this forms a big part of the change that needs to happen around this phenomenon that we currently refer to as domestic violence.

Domestic violence is an experience. It is a transition through many physical, mental and emotional states. It will reshape beliefs and perceptions, it colours your world, it can take you to a place so dark that you question whether light can ever exist again. Abuse can affect the most drastic of harm on a soul, but to label a human being as “victim” or “survivor” or any of those titles that put individuals into a convenient box, eventually turns a lived experience into a personality trait. A human being who’s had an experience becomes defined and assigned. They become the label, and there really is no point in trying to positivise the label, as  “survivor” or “thriver”, because the words are yet another label tethering them to the post that is the victim perception.

Human beings are each unique, yet we are all the same. We are individuals yet connected. We are more the same than we are different, and yet we seek to create and enforce our differences and separateness. We have ALL had experiences, but they are not who we are. One third of women in the west have experienced some type of abuse, yet we avoid identifying with them or as one of the them, because of the perception of the "victim" and the shame that goes with it. 

We are not our experiences
I want you to understand what labelling can do to an already undermined human spirit. It’s like the bonsai effect. Growth can only occur at a limited rate and to a fraction of potential because of the severe bounds placed in those words, these labels.

This is true not only for those who have experienced abuse, it applies to all human interactions where a label is placed and that label is taken on as a part of personal identity. Think about it. When someone asks you what you do for work, how do you reply? “I’m an admin officer” “I’m an accountant” “I’m a farmer” “I AM ...…” You may be in danger of being assigned certain personality traits and judgements according to someone else’s perception of your profession. But it’s what you do, not who you are. YOU are separate from your day job, and infinitely more complex and interesting than merely your activity as an accountant or a barista are you not? But we are conditioned to categorise and label.

And what about labels like depressed, disabled, unemployed, homeless? What are your perceptions of these unique humans? Nobody likes to think of themselves as being judgemental, but I ask you to scratch your own surface and look at your generalised beliefs and unconscious categorisations.

Our experiences ought to be a catalyst for exponential growth, for expansion, for us to fulfil a potential that may not have existed had we not had that particular experience. The ultimate is to transform what we previously saw as a “bad” experience into a force for good, for change, for awareness. Would that be possible if that victim label is taken on and embedded as a permanent personality trait? Probably not.

Perception is everything
How you perceive those around you and what you think you know about them, dictates how you behave toward them. It also creates energy that is strongly felt and transferred. Your perceptions colour your world. We are connected, we know this. Being aware and present to our beliefs and perceptions, the stories that we run about ourselves and others, takes effort, but brings massive reward in the beautiful and deep sense of connection, empathy and compassion that is born from making that effort. 

We are all simply human beings, being and doing our utmost with the resources we currently have.

When you meet someone who has made it out the other side of abuse, and you learn about some of her story DO NOT say “wow, you are so brave” “That must have been terrible” “You’re a survivor”. YOU are different. BE different. You can say it like it is, bold and loud “LADY, YOU ARE A FUQING LEGEND!”, because your beliefs about her experience and your expression of those beliefs and perceptions are AS important to her recovery and growth as her own.

My evolutionary journey has had me travel through some pretty dark places, and I'm not shy in admitting that at times I felt cripplingly victimised. I lashed out, I blamed the world, I was angry and I wanted justice. During those times of deep pain and  rawness I bled. I bled emotionally and spiritually. I didn't know how to stem the flow and to heal, so the scab would form for a little while, bringing a short relief, until another scratch or scrape of life experience tore it off again.

The harshest of judges, my internal critic, poised and ready to swoop down and claw at any obvious exposed vulnerabilities, wreaked havoc on my slow progress, keeping me in a sort of emotional limbo. I desperately wanted healing, relief, release and to feel some sort of normal.

Years went by. Small incremental changes occurred as seeds dropped into my consciousness and sprouted small, fragile seedlings of change and growth. I couldn't feel the growth. I couldn't see the change. It was a long time in the dark, germinating, cracking open and feeling only the pain of that fracturing.

I didn't notice the light. It somehow crept silently, without fanfare, without recognition and without expectation. Just a humble glow that kept steady.

But the light grew.
The light fed me, a tiny drop at a time, so as not to overwhelm me and send me crashing backwards into fear. I took each drop, like a homeopathic essence of life force that eased its way into my cells with the gentleness of a loving infusion. 

And time. Time kept pace. Time, with its ever shifting influence on perception of the past. Time and light, doing their healing, out of my conscious awareness.

I have done deep work, don't get me wrong. The work has been painful, but in a good way, like cracking a dislocated joint back that hurts like feck, but you know there's healing to come when things shift back into the right places. My dislocated emotional body settling back into place. And the light, and time persisting.

Someone, just a few days ago, asked me "How are you?"
It's probably the most often asked question. And the answer is probably the least conscious or honest one that we give in social settings.  It mostly feels like a throw away question, a conversation starter but without the expectation of a considered response.

My answer surprised me, never mind them.

How AM I?
I feel peaceful. I feel content. I feel satisfied. I feel grounded. I feel powerful.
I suddenly experienced a high speed re-run of my life while standing there in polite conversation. The stark difference between who I was when I was gripped by trauma and fear all those years ago, to who I am now, spun me a little, and I laughed out loud.

Confused and amused look from the other person.

I laughed because I realised in that moment that my powerful and persistent inner critic that ruled my life has had to go away and find a new hobby. It just hit me. I now have an inner Sun and I can light up the places where the shadows get too dark, whenever I choose to.

So many metaphors! I hope you can relate, because I find I can express myself so much more fluidly this way.

Looking back to the past from this vantage point in time and space, I feel like I have been reading a book about my past/other/self. It's been a gripping story that I learned a lot from. I have deep empathy, gratitude and caring for the woman in that story. She has a 100% success rate of getting through shit.
I can connect with her any time I need to, without fear of what she will unleash, to infuse deeper healing light when the dark places show themselves, and I can close those chapters knowing the story continues, and I'm the best selling author.

​How are YOU?

​

The side of me that is unloveable
The shadow I won't acknowledge, she waits
She's ugly
She's undesireable
She's destructive
She's unacceptable
She comes in the dark, when the day has wained, when there are no bright distractions, no feeders of ego to keep her at bay
She speaks a truth, a version of it
She speaks and my soul is cut with her sharded words
​Should I look, see finally, this wretch that hurts me?
This girl in the dark
Disowned
Rejected
Forced out
Pushed down
Abandoned....
Should I?
Could I?
Love her...
Anyway
#Shadow #MatrixReimprintingJSL #LoveHerAnyway