E 2: Dr Nima Rahmany – Healing Through Lockdown

11 August 2020

Extract from Dr Nima Rahmany - Healing Through Lockdown

Dr Nima Rahmany is a chiropractor, mind, body wellness expert, and a healing and transformative specialist who has dedicated his life to studying and teaching principles of healing in the mind, body and most importantly, overcoming stress.

What do I do? And my only thing was like, I’m an isolation. I’m going to create a new Facebook group. And everybody’s in panic mode. Everybody’s nervous systems are screwed right now that everything that they’ve been afraid of is they’re being confronted by why don’t I give them the tools that I’ve been already giving, you know, to my clients, why don’t I offer it for free so that people can tune in each day, get a transmission and leave finishing the, the transmission listening, usually social media, you use to numb out.

I said, if you pay attention to these, you’re going to actually get reconnected to yourself. And so month or so later, it grew a couple months later it was grown to over a thousand members. And I do a transmission almost every single day. And my, you know, my business has pivoted my wife and I are back together again. I mean, it’s been a crisis, but then, you know, there’s danger, but then there’s also opportunity. And so it’s been an amazing opportunity to share my work with what I’ve been teaching for the last few years in a time that’s needed the most, which is nervous system regulation. So I’ve been doing great and we’re now kind of easing back in and to a different world and I’m ready.

The first thing you’ve got to do is to give up the way you used to do things in service of what people need right now. You must first abandon the way things used to be. Okay. We coined the term, new, normal and stuff. We talk about that all the time. It’s annoying. But the first thing that I did was I had this idea of how things should be used to be like with my events.

And then I said, Nima, give it up. Let it go. This baggage from your past and just, and good riddance. There’s parts of it that you’re like, quite frankly, I really don’t want to go back to those things. So this can be a great thing. So give that up. Okay. That’s the first thing, which is tough to do because the people who are suffering the most right now are the ones who aren’t able to do that. Yeah. You know, cause life is a series of attachment and losses, right? We’re going to go through that many times and our ability to detach and our ability to just let go will be to our benefit mentally.

That’s the first thing that I did. Now I see going inside will reveal a lot of ugly, dark things. And that’s not comfortable feelings of abandonment, feelings of responsibility, feelings of guilt and shame and find a way, this is what I would tell people, find a way to learn how to do something about those feelings rather than avoiding them.

This is why I created the overview method was it’s a tool of self inquiry and self regulation and internal co-regulation, it’s a new word that I of kind of go in it’s self regulation, but it’s not it’s internally co-regulating which means you’re using the relationship with yourself, your younger parts, all of those parts of you that you’re trying to numb out from the guilt, the shame, the abandonment there, those represent little parts of Nima, little, little abandoned parts of NIMA when he was bullied in school.

When he got a divorce, the incompletes from his last relationship that he’s still holding onto resentment, the guilt for some of the really shitty things. Nima did like those discomforting things that I’m using my work and busy-ness to not have to feel, let me just feel them for a bit. And that’s where I created the overview method.

Anybody in the arts knows that some of their best work comes from processing emotions. Remember Alanis Morissette. A pop star who goes through a horrible breakup. And then, you know, through the pain of that entire period of time writes the album “Jagged little Pill” and now becomes like mega famous because of that.

The key is to actually allow yourself to feel it. That’s the first step. And the problem is, is nobody sat down and taught us how to do that. When you’re growing up as a child, feelings will come up, that you have no idea what to do with, and if your parents don’t have emotional Attunement and have the ability to emotionally connect with you and really give you those emotional needs, fill those emotional needs with empathy. Then when an emotion comes up, we don’t know what to do with it. Then we stuff it down or we numb or sedate. And then these emotions stay stuck in our bodies and they dysregulate our nervous systems.

And now we’re stuck in a fight or flight in anger and rage, or we’re in a freeze. We get shut down and we like to associate, and we feel numb. So we do things like cut ourselves like high risk activities just to feel right, because we’ve numbed ourselves out. The journey to heal is to go in and use this opportunity as a time to just go inside and feel those feelings, process them through to no longer be a victim to the circumstances as you’re actually present and aware.

I can’t see opportunity if my nervous system is in dysregulation. So there’s first and foremost, you got to work on climbing up that ladder of fight or flight or freeze in your nervous system. So if I’m in, you know, in the top rung where my creativity is really flowing and I feel connection, then I’m going to find opportunity everywhere. That’s called the ventral state in your nervous system, in the polyvagal theory, the ventral Vegas, when I get triggered and I get activated in stress, I then fire off my sympathetic nervous system.

If I’m angry and enraged. I see a separation between you and I don’t see any opportunities. My nervous system is programmed for protection. So I don’t see opportunity. I see danger, right? And if that keeps persisting, then my nervous, it goes beyond my nervous system’s capacity. Then I go into dorsal, vagal shutdown, where that goes into depression. That goes into sadness. That goes into hopelessness. The thoughts when you’re in that state is it’s not worth it. I’m never going to get this right. I’m not going to survive. And what’s dangerous about this is that you’ll start to believe those thoughts to be true. And this is where depression and suicide is.

I don’t believe that depression is an illness or a disorder. It’s actually a state of being in your nervous system. When you’re in shut down mode, you don’t see a way out. You don’t see a way out. You don’t see any hope because the state of your body is only looking for evidence that nothing is working and nothing ever will. You will never get out of it. And your, your, your, your stories you create are based on the state that you’re feeling. So your number one job to get out. This is what I was saying to everybody is to regulate your nervous system.

Because once I’m in from dorsal vagal, I move up the ladder to sympathetic. I get my body moving. I express my rage. I feel my feelings. I scream my anger. I cry my tears slowly. My nervous system starts to go up that ladder into ventral, where I feel connection. I feel safety. You must first create internal safety first before expecting it to happen on the outside.

The first step is to connect to your breath and realize, ah, I’m triggered. I’m not okay. My nervous system is activated. I feel fearful. I feel scared. I feel angry. I feel bitter. I feel hopeless. I feel unworthy of love. I feel like a failure. And it’s painful. Well, first and foremost, you know, like you, you want to also have a guide helping you through this because depending on your level of dysregulation, it’s not going to be easy for you to get yourself out there. The most important thing is to, to have a safe witness for all of those feelings,

This was such an important interview about Mental Health, we wanted to feature it in Ahead of the Curves. In the Music Real E48, Chiropractor and Transitional Anxiety Mentor/Teacher, Dr Nima Rahmany, from Vancouver, British Columbia has dedicated his life to studying and teaching principles of healing in the mind and body and overcoming stress began a virtual program called Trigger Proof: How to Regulate Stress + Strengthen Immunity during a Crisis in March to support people around the world while going through lockdown. And due to the importance of Mental Health in the Music Industry, especially now at a time of great uncertainty in our market, its important to have a chat with Nima about how Music and Mental health are inextricably connected. 

Connect with Nima:

Facebook

Website

Twitter

Instagram

Subscribe to Dr Nima’s You Tube Channel

Comments are closed.