Key takeaway:
Rewriting our stories, practically speaking, is a practice of teaching ourselves truth through sleep, nutrition, movement, meditation, and conscious awareness of what it means to live well as a human. Disciplining ourselves to transmute an updated belief into an automatic habit is the only road to permanent healing.
Hey, gang. Marcus, here.
This course has undoubtedly been a whirlwind of information, assignments, workouts, videos, podcasts, and more. As I said at the outset, the information and tools we’re providing will only work if you engage with them on a daily basis.
Establishing habits that lead to the lasting change you want to see will take more time, but we hope that a lack of information is no longer a hindrance to start healing from trauma.
R+R Elements was not designed for someone with PTS per se, but was born out of the healing journeys of those who did bear that struggle. Because the truth is, what it takes to heal from PTS is essentially the same thing as what it takes to heal and live well as a human being; the struggle is just magnified when dealing with post-traumatic stress.
The beginning of life is traumatic. The continuation of life is understanding that trauma doesn’t need to have the final say. Rewriting your story out of trauma as a victor and not a victim is the only path to your best self.
We started out looking at the remedy for moral injury. I suggested that tying your story to the story of your “higher headquarters” brings meaning to your life. I’ve heard it said, “The moment you make your life about someone else is the moment you make your life.” That doesn’t mean you should be sacrificing yourself for someone else’s sake and creating a codependent pattern. What it means is that the story of humanity is the story of the individual realizing that their actions contribute to the well-being of everyone.
It means that taking care of yourself is a part of the bigger picture of taking care of the whole community.
When I look at this task through the lens of daily habit building and disciplines, I think of it this way: post-traumatic stress occurs when true communication is lost between one part of us and another. One part of us wants to live with purpose and meaning aligned with a bigger story, but another part is stuck with recurring, upsetting memories. We’re not living coherently. We’re not living in a way where true communication can flow from the head to the heart.
Sticking with that idea, this translates to every other component of health you learned about over the time of this course. We can’t sleep if we don’t think our surroundings are safe, although actually, they are. Exposure to light at the wrong time of day tells the brain that it’s daytime when it’s actually night. Food acts as data, and sending data to our bodies in the form of foods we were never supposed to eat is sending a false signal to the stomach. This in turn sends an overabundance of signaling molecules (like the hormones we learned about) and is not passing on true information to the brain. We eat but stay hungry. When we’re inactive and not taking up the voluntary challenge of doing physical activity with other people, we’re short-circuiting the important role of our social connections. By living actively, we’re living the true way our bodies were designed for, the truth is that we need to keep moving to live well.
So now I turn the challenge of finding that authenticity over to you. If you’ve gone through all of the lessons up to now and completed the assignments and exercises, I applaud you. That was truly a lot of work.
However, this last lesson doesn’t mark the end, nor do any of the R+R programs carry you to an ending point. The point of R+R is to get the rocket off the platform, but it’s up to you and the continued work in all these domains to keep going toward the upper atmosphere.
The process is the point.
Now it’s time for you to decide what the next steps in the process look like. You’ve already learned that regular meditation, engaging in healthy social settings, slowing life down, eating nutritious food, journaling, and getting your body moving with other people all lie at the heart of the process of rewriting your story. You can take part in all of the above with the resources you have right now, but you’ll find all the same principles in the longer-duration components of R+R.
In Mission 22’s six- and twelve-month programs, you’ll join a gym, get assigned a health coach, receive supplements, books, biometric tools, journals, and get an invitation to join an online R+R group. That’s what the launching pad looks like, but it will also take time, commitment, personal responsibility, and hard work.
You have now completed R+R Elements! If you believe you’re ready to engage in all the above, I have one last assignment for you:
Follow this link to take the next step. If you have any trouble with the application, contact me at marcus@mission22.com.
Whatever your decision is, take heart. We’re in this together.
– Marcus