We have a view that our body, brain and mind interact to bring us health or disease. Our nervous system connects our body and brain whilst providing a network for our mind to navigate and make sense of our experiences. What forms ‘us’ as individuals from those experiences toward health or disease is a complex interaction of our DNA, behaviours, environmental stressors, cognitions and trauma.

In physical health we tend to have an idea of what we think is ‘good’ for us. But the process of creating healthful change (neuroplasticity) in the body requires effort, perseverance and practice.

Often what is good for us is not known until we have practiced and developed our own knowledge of our body.  Thinking we know what is good for our body is different to experientially knowing.  Experiential knowledge, developing muscles, losing fat or maintaining health can be done in less than 2% of your time.  Learning the needs of your body with yourself not only grows your relationship with yourself, it allows you to figure out what is healthful without becoming trapped in a health fad or lumbered with expensive equipment you don’t use.

We recognize that the natural ebb and flow of being able to give ourselves the time required to be physically well is not always possible.  Even when there is not time for doing we can still hold onto our understanding and it is this understanding that means we are ‘happier’.   That ease of understanding and acceptance is sometimes tested when we have to look deeper at our being and how we have evolved, when we are faced with  chronic conditions of health:  We can surmise that our health and wellbeing has been affected by the interdependence of our body-brain, relationships with friends and family and our mind e.g. when these 3 components of being ‘us’ are not working synergistically.

Emotional and psychological wellbeing is a personal construct and depends on how our minds have accumulated information over the years around our relationships, environmental cues/inputs, abilities, personality and genetics. When we create new neural networks in our brains we create new ‘programmes’  i.e. what fires together wires together, This creates patterns of knowledge and procedures, which continue to reinforce our neurobiological working mode and can lead to either healthy or unhealthy habits and responses. In the case of unexplained ill health or chronic disease (especially when we have had many tests and health screens and are on long term medication) we have to take this whole person perspective and look at how and what we are doing, when it is apparent and what we do without sometimes even thinking about it. We may even find that unwittingly we are actually reinforcing or creating a behaviour that is affecting how we use our brain and the neural connections we form, from past learned reactions or as a learned response to something we are experiencing in our lives at the present time.

Through our clinical experience, we have found that historical data (or the path we have trodden) and how that translates to our automatic or unconscious reactions in our life now, can create hormones and chemicals that affect our body in how we move and remember what to do. When brain patterning and programmes are derived from trauma or dysfunction this can lead us away from a path of health and wellbeing into pain, disease and repetitive injury, sometimes without us knowing until the symptoms are a part of our everyday life and we cannot make the correlation between when the original sensory input changed and now!

Sensory input or sensation is how we interpret ‘our world’ and so the sensory portion of our nervous system is paramount in health.  When we ‘know’ something is right, we get good feelings in our body, we may even notice a surge of serotonin/cortisol to the brain, by way of motivation or happiness or to the stomach by way of butterflies or anticipation.  Similarly when we recognize, either through past knowledge or another telling us so, that something is scary, wrong or stressful, we also get feedback in our body; increased heart rate, change in breathing, negative thoughts, clenched fists or neck and shoulders (increased nervous system tone).  We may even notice how our brain reflects what our mind thinks by sending stress hormones into our bloodstream…i.e. upset stomach, hunger, brain fog, sexual energy, a need to move and get rid of pent up energy or a perceived pain in an old injury site.  When pain does affect an old injury site it can be from our mind or it can be from old damage, therefore it is important to know our own story and what may have or continue to form our incidences of trauma.

During poor health we require a change in sensory input (so we can change the interpretation of ‘our world’) If we create new learning or interpretation we can retrain and educate our brain and body through our mind to achieve wellbeing out of illness, pain and disease.  For example in understanding and acknowledging how interactions alter our mind state on a day by day basis, whether they be good or bad, we can then refine how we move or how we feel thus changing these interactions and inputs and move away unconscious or automatic bad practices that lead to more of the same thing i.e. These different inputs being sensed by the body-brain and interpreted through the mind tell us to act in a certain way and can negatively affect the way the important fight, flight or freeze mechanism, (that was used by our forefathers in more primitive days), is activated. The bias of the brain is to never forget negative things, as we don’t experience new learning with as much power as when the primitive systems in our reptilian brain get activated with fear.

In today’s world with so many different sensory inputs coming at us on an internal and external basis, when we have dysfunction, disassociation, dysafferentation or trauma locked into our limbic system, this can be expressed outwardly as anxiety, depression, and / or a chronic pain syndrome amongst others.   Our body-brain can give rise to pain syndromes by becoming confused or muddled (dysafferentated); injury is not necessary for pain to become apparent. Chronic pain is not necessarily a specific sign to know what needs to be done, whereas acute pain can be obvious and highly anatomically specific.

Bergson said “that each input through our body to our brain and noticed by the mind has a potential to be an important moment” he invites us to realise our own intuition, believing we are ‘able to identify an input and enlarge or shrink it indefinitely’.  Most of the time in our busy lives we can do just this, but when we have too much negative power, time or distance between the original trauma/input, we need help in working through it, as when injured/traumatised our body-brain can heal and work effectively with help from our mind, if we can make sense of our situation we are better suited to finding ways of being happy and healthful.

In our clinical observations and being privileged to work with many complex and varied cases, we have found that we can help change old states of being.  Through sensory inputs from nutrition, refined thought processes, understanding feelings, better interactions and relationships, releasing trauma, understanding environmental stressors and toxins and synthesizing our movements which will effect genetic expression. Medicine calls this field epigenetics.

We believe we are at present living in a chemical world of medicine and a fairer community is a healthier one and that natural, chemical or surgical methods are the choice of the patient to direct their physician in how they’d like to ‘get better’.  We offer an adjunct to this through our approach where we consider every system in our body as highly complex and interdependent and when we can identify imbalances and eradicate the cause or trigger of them, then the brain / body achieves a more balanced and healthful state, leading to a reduction in symptoms and a better quality of life.

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