Luminary by Kate Scelsa

Author:Kate Scelsa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

ALTERNATIVE CARE

You don’t have to look too hard to find information about the ways that the body is perceived energetically in different cultures. Even a very mainstream Western yoga teacher will probably mention chakras, a series of energy centers in the body. Traditional Chinese medicine is also based in an understanding of the body through energetic pathways called meridians. Acupuncture, different kinds of massage, reiki (an energy healing practice), water therapy, aligning your eating patterns with the seasons, or other energetic patterns are all great methods to try when we are looking to bring different kinds of therapy and care to our physical and energetic bodies. We never want to attach a capitalist idea of the “cure-all” to any of these things, but instead to try things out and feel into what our bodies respond to.

To me all these modalities are magic. Lying in a warm pool of salt water in a completely dark, silent room for an hour may not sound appealing to everyone, but I challenge anyone to do a salt float and not come out feeling like their nervous system has been completely reset.

Even if bodywork or non-Western forms of medicine and healing are not available to us, we can use our skills as witches to figure out how to do this kind of work for ourselves. Our nervous system is what transmits signals based on sensory information to different parts of our bodies. So if our cave person brains are in that fight-or-flight mode of feeling threatened and stressed, our nervous systems are on high alert, scanning the environment for dangers. But when we stay in our cave person high alert all the time, we are maxing out our nervous system, which ironically makes us less ready to function in an actual emergency because we’ve so deeply exhausted ourselves. So when we talk about resetting our nervous systems, we mean actually pressing a kind of reset button for our body’s experience of its environment. It’s as if the system of taking in information has overloaded and needs to start again from zero. Remember that person who is watching all the TV channels at once? We have to turn the TV off, take a breath, and then turn it on again to just one channel.

You’re the only one who can figure out what methods of nervous-system resetting work for you. For some people, vigorous exercise can serve to burn off excess anxiety and bring your body back to a neutral place. For others water always does the trick—swimming or soaking in a hot tub with some Epsom salts. Yoga, tai chi, and chi gong are all traditional energetically healing stretching modalities that can be learned through online videos and classes. Moving the body in gentle and loving ways, even if it’s just dancing around your room, can be a huge help in working through feelings of depression and anxiety. Sometimes it’s just about taking a long nap, letting yourself really, truly rest without feeling any guilt around it.

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