Last October when I found out about my former partner passing away suddenly, my body went into instant shock. A deafening scream came out of my body upon hearing the news and my spirit shot out and shattered into multidimensional spit realities. As a person who is already extremely energetically sensitive, I was overloaded with too much information for my physical brain to process. My nervous system was a disaster zone. I was dissociated, dysregulated and could barely function on any level.
It took me about three months to get to a point of starting to feel like a human again and about five to six months until I felt comfortable enough to start being a part of society and getting into a new rhythm of life.
If you’ve ever gone through a shocking life event or know someone who has, whether it’s a physical injury, family emergency or major life transition, you have an idea of what it’s like to have your nervous system shaken up like a snow globe.
In this article, I’m sharing what I experienced on a physical and mental level in the months after that event and what helped me the most in getting back into the flow of life.
Like most things that I share, my way of working through this was pretty unconventional and creative in the tools and resources that I utilized to support myself. I learned things about my body-mind-spirit connection through experiential learning that I would have not otherwise traversed. I hope this information reaches you at a time when something I share is useful to you or sparks a lightbulb moment to explore deeper into your body-mind-spirit connection.
What was it like?
Since I was dissociated, I had no communication with my body. It was like I was floating above myself and experiencing multiple realities, both as a human and as a nonhuman, outside of my physical reality.
I would easily sink into swoons of grief, gasping for air and finding myself looping stories of the past and trying to figure out what had happened. I felt nauseous and lost my desire to eat and had to force myself to nourish myself. Everything around me felt spinning and disoriented. I had zero mental focus and my eye sight was so distorted that I literally couldn’t read! It felt like being severely dyslexic. I felt moments of devastation when I fathomed not being able to read again.
My body would spontaneously start shaking like the aftershocks of an earthquake, and it was often in the first few months where all I could do was lay on the ground and shake, trusting that a higher power was supporting me and leading me to the next moment of feeling just a little bit more secure.
But the truth was, I didn’t feel an ounce of security; everything felt out of control. I had just landed in Charlottesville after Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, and I was already ungrounded in my sense of place and purpose in the world. I didn’t have a job and wasn’t capable of working. I was living in a friend’s guest bedroom and in a panic around overstaying my welcome. And I had no idea how I could start picking myself up from a state of being that felt like a helpless child.
Most people know me as a strong, confident, independent woman who doesn’t show her faults or vulnerabilities in public. The truth is, I can be an emotional mess just like the rest of humanity, and the only reason I’m so good at alchemizing difficult energies is because I have experienced them firsthand and sought creative solutions through difficult circumstances time and again.
This experience of shock was a test in being vulnerable and asking for help, which was reeeeally uncomfortable for me. The first thing I learned was to slow down and be honest with myself with where I was at. This was both humbling and infuriating because I’m impatient and want to find answers and solutions quickly.
Fortunately and unfortunately, the body’s nervous system has a different design that requires time to unravel the physical memory, lifestyle habits of repetition to imprint new muscle memory of ways of moving in and interacting with the world, and most importantly, consistent practice and resilience for it all to make a long-term difference.
What helped me the most
First off, no one can go through anything like this alone. People need people to stay sane and healthy. I feel so fortunate to have had so many loving, caring people in my life reach out, offer support, even the space to listen while I hysterically cried and ranted. Every person, from family members, friends, former teachers, colleagues and even some new acquaintances made the all the difference in being able to find the strength and resilience to continue moving through those times.
We are vibrational beings and our lives move in cycles of rhythm - from the movement of blood circulating from each heartbeat, oxygenation through the in-and-out of breath, to our relationship to the cycles of seasons, the moons and cycles of growth, death and renewal. These cycles literally pulse rhythms of vibrations within our neurology and nervous system.
When there is a big life upset like this, the song of the nervous system becomes distorted and disharmonic. The rhythm skips too many beats, flat and sharp notes interfere and the functions of the physical body, mind and spirit start to suffer.
Thankfully, the body is intelligent and has a natural desire to come back into harmony. From a vibrational standpoint, I notice that simply being in proximity to or in resonance with another human being who is stable and grounded (i.e. in greater harmony) already helps a dysregulated nervous system start to entrain into a more harmonic rhythm. This is also true of spending time touching trees to entrain with a pure frequency of groundedness and thriving.
For me, because I am so sensitive, I know what it’s like to literally blend with another person’s reality like a chameleon. And while that may have felt safer for the time that my own rhythm felt like an earthquake, I have to be mindful of regulating my own vibration so that I am harmonious in my own reality, rather than hanging out in someone else’s.
That leads me to one of my biggest resources.
Tuning forks and singing myself back into harmony
Tuning myself vibrationally is a daily practice for me. In the first several months post nervous system shock, I was getting remote assistance from Marion Hobbs, a brilliant biofield tuning practitioner out on the West Coast (check out Marion’s website). Getting several sessions in the first couple months really helped me to get my spirit back in my body as I was in a process of shedding so many layers of memory, identity and cellular shock. I had already started getting tuned since the beginning of 2024, and this was by far one of the most significantly effective modalities that I have every tried, along with Renee LeBeau’s Acoustic Alchemy soundscapes (check out Renee’s website). Of course, I wanted to know why and dove into the science and research of vibrational medicine and tuning fork schematics (but that’s for another article).
I already knew that humming is an easy technique to calm down the vagus nerve and in fact, it was already something that I unconsciously did in public to put myself in a good mood. In the next months, my humming and toning practice felt like an essential tool for my very survival, something that I could do instantly to start creating a sense of home within myself, even when everything around me felt like it was in chaos.
While getting my biofield tuned became too expensive of an option for someone out of work, I decided to get my own set of Solfeggio tuning forks and the Sonic Slider (with a frequency of 12 times the Schumann Resonance, or the “heart beat of the earth”) in December 2024. This is when I really started to build a relationship with the tuning forks and listen deeper to the frequencies in and outside of my body, neutralizing, integrating and harmonizing my own energy field as I hummed and toned within my sacred space.
Working with the fascia
The fascial tissue is a type of connective tissue that covers every part of the body – muscles, joints, bones, organs, etc. It needs to be flexible and adaptable to promote the health of everything held within it. In cases of physical trauma, nervous system shock or long periods of immobility, it can become stiff and inflexible and affect whole body function.
As someone who has been working with the body in practice for over a decade with oriental medicine bodywork, acupuncture and craniosacral rhythms, it’s curious that I never payed much attention to the fascia. Since my early 20’s, I have enjoyed weight lifting at the gym and studying muscle groups, but never had I considered working out my fascial tissue.
Dissociating from my body was a wake up call that I needed to get physical. In the first couple months, I started getting really into somatic exercises, joint isolation, freestyle dancing and listening to my body’s messages and innate wisdom via somatic movements.
Because I felt disconnected from my physical body to the point where I wasn’t even getting cues of hunger or thirst, I wanted to find noncognitive ways of communicating with my primitive wisdom. It’s amazing how journaling and storytelling can only get you so far when it comes to the nervous system. The physical body holds so much knowledge that is far beyond our cognitive awareness.
Being curious and wanting to learning what my body needed to feel better, I started asking. For about 2-3 weeks, each day I would ask my energy centers what their physical expression looked like. This really surprised me because I found hidden emotions and postures that suggested feelings of unsafety, the need to protect and nourish myself and sheer physical exhaustion. After allowing each center to express through physical movements, I would then ask each center to show me what it needed. To my surprise, this would always exude a completely different movement and would sometimes give me concrete information on what I could do to help myself. As the weeks went on, my energy centers started to gradually uncoil themselves, expressing movements of greater openness and postural stability as apposed to being curled up in a ball in the fetal position, for example.
During that time, a friend of mine introduced me to Human Garage, a free online resource that offers fascial exercises (https://humangarage.net/). This felt outside the box for me, but I was open to trying something new given my precarious state. I tried the three-day challenge, and even from that experience, I started to notice a difference in my balance, posture and coordination.
When I joined the YMCA in December, I also started taking a Yoga Floss and Stretch class, which is essentially working with the fascial tissue to increase its strength and tensile mobility. I have been doing this almost weekly for 6 months now, and it has made a tremendous difference! I notice feeling greater emotionally balance, improved posture and overall greater physical mobility and stretchiness.
Rewiring my brain with Neurofeedback
On February 25, I got an electroencephalography (EEG) to map out the electrical activity in each lobe on the right and left sides of my brain. In this process, I had about 20 electrodes connected to my scalp that transmitted information to a computer, reflecting the Delta, Theta, Alpha and Beta waves in my brain during states of having my eyes open and closed. This snapshot gives a baseline of theoretical information about any inflammation or hyper- or hypoactivity in the brain due to prolonged stress, lack of sleep and nervous system dysregulation.
Like most medical exams, I am skeptical of taking a reading as fact, as I acknowledge that vibrational states of being can change instantaneously and produce rapid healing, differing from the conventional systems of Western medicine that have a very reductionist approach to health and healing.
Suffice to say, I’ve been curious about neurofeedback, also known as EEG biofeedback or brain wave training, for a while. I wanted to see what was going on inside of my brain because of how much stress and emotional grief I was experiencing that was effecting my ability to focus on tasks and get restful sleep. I wanted to know if this type of treatment could help me self-regulate my nervous system so I wasn’t so easily triggered by the stimuli around me.
My Neurofeedback experiment
Starting on March 6, I started receiving a 45-minute neurofeedback session twice a week. This involved connecting five electrodes to my scalp and earlobes to read my brain waves while watching a TV show or movie. The biofeedback would cause the screen image and the audio to fade in and out, making my brain work to activate new wave patterns to adapt to what I was sensing.
Delta and theta waves are related to states of deep sleep and rest, while alpha and beta are related to waking states of clarity, mental focus and hypervigilence in the case of the nervous system’s fight or flight response. I used to be under the impression that we oscillate between they states of brain waves depending on our activity, whether we’re sleeping, meditating, focusing mentally or physically active. The truth is all of these states are happening all the time in relation to each other in different areas of the brain. No brain wave type exists in isolation. However, we say that the brain is in a Delta state, for example, when that specific wave is greater than the other three wave forms.
I learned that there are a number of different neurofeedback protocols depending on the goal of raising or lowering specific brain waves. In my case, we were trying to increase my delta and theta waves, which were otherwise exhausted according to the weekly data collected. I learned through this process that when you start to elevate your delta and theta waves, the brain naturally elevates the alpha and beta waves. What this translated to was feeling extremely intense and on edge. While I felt bursts of energy that I hadn’t experienced before, it was like my brain and spine were filled with a continuous jolt of liquid lightning. Simultaneously my body was exhausted and on edge trying to maintain this steroidal-like state. In theory, over time, as the delta and theta waves increase to an average optimal frequency range, then the alpha and beta waves learn to adapt and self-regulate.
This process was hard work! I tried doing the recommended length of time for the first couple weeks, and I felt like an absolute crazy person. It would take me 2-3 days to reset my nervous system and start feeling some semblance of evenness. On those days, I wasn’t able to work or do anything that required mental focus. After a couple weeks, I lowered my session time to 30 minutes, which still made me feel like my brain had been doing five hours of work on steroids.
Suffice to say, I lasted for four weeks doing biweekly sessions, after which point I switched to coming in once per week with 30-40 minute sessions. While it is difficult to discern what the results are in the first month of neurofeedback because of how much work and adaptability is required, I can tell you what I did notice.
Weeks 1-2: I felt completely insane and dysfunctional. I got 0-3 hours of sleep per night and felt exhausted and inflamed all the time. My circadian rhythm was a mess; my mental focus was a mess; my emotions were a mess.
Weeks 2-4: While the work was still really hard and by then I had created a routine where I was intentionally doing nothing on the days I received neurofeedback, I started to notice that I was starting to sleep again, albeit not getting deep restful sleep. Throughout the process, my brain felt like it was being squeezed and wrung out like a sponge. However, I did start noticing around the third week that my ability to organize my thoughts and my life in general was starting to get easier. I also had a sense that my vision was improving. This was going in and out and seemed to be relative to the quality of sleep I had before doing a neurofeedback session and also whether I choose to where my long distance driving glasses or take them off to look at the screen up close. I noticed that this glasses-on glasses-off test really changed the outcome of my experience.
Weeks 5-7: These were the weeks were I came in once per week for about 30-35 minutes. I noticed that my brain was able to adapt more easily and also had time to rest and recover before the next session. I also felt more at ease because I had more days out of the week to be a functional adult. I questioned whether it was making a real difference to come in just once per week, as biweekly is recommended. Because of the amount of physical pain I experienced in adapting after a session, I finally decided that it was kinder to stop receiving this type of treatment. Typically, they recommend trying 20-25 sessions to start seeing changes, at which point another EEG brain mapping in conducted for comparison to the baseline mapping.
My insights to share with someone interested in trying neurofeedback
It is ideal to be in a position where you don’t have to work and worry about bills to pay while getting treated. Its efficacy is dependent upon the brain’s ability to rest. If you’re retired, have a savings or dependent upon others to get your needs met, this might be an easier option for you.
I did many other things concurrently with the neurofeedback that affected my experience and would recommend getting supplemental support while doing this brain training. One was the neural rewiring visualizations that I share in the next section. Two was eating an anti-inflammatory and low acidity diet (including no coffee). Three was going on hour+ nature walks every day and putting my bare feet on the earth. And four, most importantly, was tuning myself with tuning forks and singing! Sound alchemy was the single best approach that helped me with the brain pain and pressure that the treatment caused. Some days I would endure four or more hours post-session of agonizing pressure and disorientation and then remember that I could tune myself with frequencies. This felt like a cool wave of gentle relief, taking that feeling of pressure out my balloon and often times made the difference between being able to sleep or not sleep that night.
Because I am sensitive to subtle energies and see more of what is influencing in the nonphysical, I took into account that this is a modality that includes a form of artificial intelligence. As a result, I did consciously disconnect myself from any AI interface or energy stream, specifically from where the electrodes were placed, and believe it or not, this made a huge impact on how I felt. I intended to receive only the frequencies that were of the greatest support to me and released the rest. Some of you may be thinking, well how do I do that? I’m here to tell you that you can with your intention and will. State it out loud, and it is. Notice what shifts in your awareness.
I also acknowledge that every brain is extremely unique and has different cognitive and intuitive abilities according to the person’s makeup, DNA and stage in their life and development. In my opinion, these neurofeedback protocols are general and don’t differentiate between the subtle nuances and needs of the individual. In my perception, this technology, while many have claimed great benefits, still needs a lot of research.
Processing emotional trauma and rewriting beliefs with neural rewiring visualizations
Throughout my experience doing neurofeedback, I was simultaneously working with visualizations similar to neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) that I was using to help me process and release emotions. With these exercises, I would identify uncomfortable physical sensations in my body and externalize them with visualizations. From there I used a number of neural processing techniques using color, light and movement to reorient the information in relationship to my conscious and subconscious mind.
I would also identify and write down old and new beliefs that I then spacially externalized and used similar techniques to create a stream of positive, supportive mental feedback. These are techniques that I commonly teach clients to assist their transformational process.
I noticed that when I was able to deal with my mental chatter while experiencing the reorganizing initiated by the neurofeedback and soundwork, it was easier for my brain to relax and my body to feel grounded and at ease. All of this still took a tremendous amount of work and resilience.
Getting musical!
Of course not all healing modalities have to feel like hard work, and in fact, I prefer it that way! Having so much energy pent up in my system required me to come up with creative outlets to transform and move through me to release.
As a result I started writing lyrics and learning how to play the guitar and piano. I noticed in the beginning that I would start toning areas of my body and then replicate them on the instruments. Each area would have a new note, and when I strung those notes together they would form new rhythms and songs. And eventually, lyrics started coming out for some of the songs.
These songs feel like deep expressions of my soul or a way to express feelings and needs that I never knew how to express. I’m buzzing just writing out it!
Creative expression is some of the most potent personal alchemy that anyone can do to move through a major life transition or difficult time. In my experience, the more intense the push is, the more creative I tend to get. There’s like this stretching and expanding into new realms of possibilities, and before I know it, I’ve written a song!
What is your personal alchemy?
Have you gone through a difficult time that affected your nervous system? What helped you the most?
I’d like to keep this conversation going and share resources and experiences. I’m also happy to answer any questions.
If you’d like to reach me, send me an email at soundcreatrix@gmail.com or visit my website at http://MelanieAdrianna.com.
I’m excited to share more creations, adventures and insights to come!
With love,
Melanie Adrianna
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