What is The MindBody Reconnect (MBR)?
MBR is a technique successfully used to teach and guide people to understand and reconnect their mind and body for the purpose of treating conditions such as of ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia, Long Covid, Post-viral Fatigue, IBS, anxiety, insomnia, migraines, depression and other chronic or unexplained conditions and symptoms.
I take an holistic approach to health and empower people to make changes in their life that rebuild connections between their emotional, mental and physical selves leading to improved health and wellbeing.
The MindBody Reconnect was founded by Clare Caldwell and inspired by the teachings of Dr Gabor Mate. It also draws on the knowledge of many indigenous cultures- for most of the world the mind and body have never been separate.
What role do the mind and body have in creating illness?
The role of our mind and body is to keep us safe, both physically and emotionally. When working well together they sense what is happening in a situation and we use that information to respond appropriately to protect ourselves and increase our chance of survival and fulfilment.
Difficult events in our lives can cause the mind and body to become disconnected and these messages can be lost or ignored, often generating negative emotions or leaving us in a state of emotional numbness. There is no clear message getting to our brain so we end up in a constant state of survival mode, where it is preparing us to use all our resources to survive a potential threat but because the threat is internal we get stuck in a constant state of preparation, leading to symptoms of illness and potentially a constant symptom state.
In scientific terms...
This is known as psychoneuroimmuniology- the interaction between thoughts and feelings and our nervous and immune systems (or our psychological and physical selves). The hypothalamus in the brain is responsible for homeostasis- our ability to maintain internal stability whilst responding to what's going on outside of us, for example causing us to shiver in order to warm up the body when it's cold outside. The hypothalamus picks up on signals throughout the body through our nervous system so that it knows when we need more or less hormones, glucose or oxygen, for example. When we are in a crisis situation our sympathetic nervous system is activated (also known as fight/flight/freeze mode) where some of our body systems become very active in order to respond to an emergency and others partially shut down to reserve energy. When the hypothalamus can't clearly receive these messages, because of a disconnect causing some emotions to be repressed, we can experience this activation or reduction of various body systems as symptoms of illness that often cannot be measured medically.
The good news is that although our brains can change to create this disconnect, often leading to chronic illness, they can also change back. This is known as neuroplasticity- the brains ability to reorganise itself.
Changing the way we think and feel through the techniques of MBR supports our brain to reorganise in a way that leads to a healthier and more fulfilling life.
What makes the MindBody Reconnect different?
We are a collective of practitioners who support each other and work together to continue expanding our knowledge and skills. We have all used the MBR techniques to recover from chronic illness ourselves and continue to use them to maintain health and well-being. We strongly believe that in order to best support other people we need to be embodied and connected ourselves. So we certainly practice what we preach.
The MBR is a personalised experience as what everyone needs is unique. We gather information from the body and use this as a guide in taking action to affect the messages the brain is receiving and sending. In this way it draws on some techniques from somatics, life coaching and brain retraining, amongst other things, whilst also being quite different and unique from other modalities. The MBR is not just about knowledge and theory- it is about action and practice, this is the way we really impact our body and mind in a lasting way.