I've been praying a lot (for a long time now) for all kinds of direction in my recovery. I was trying so hard to focus on family of origin work, but anger and other negative emotions were completely controlling me. I was out of control!

I knew I was stressed, and I got led to a great book on stress, and the excercises have been extremely helpful.

However I'm in constant flight or fight mode. It's been affecting my health and my physical strength and abilities. I have been in excruciating pain for months now...to the point of not being able to do anything. It has been hit home to me, that I have had stress for so long, and I have reacted to it in such unhealthy ways my whole life, that my body is trained to treat little inconveniences as if they were issues as serious as personal survival. I have learned that mind, body and spirit are linked. What affects one, affects all of them.

I've been concentrating on the mind and spirit with some success, but my attempts on helping the body have been falling quite short. It's as if everything I knew to do was the wrong thing.

I'm sharing this, in case others may be having some almost post traumatic stress disorder/ flight or fight gut-instantaneous emotional reactions that seem to raise up and sabotage the recovery work. Even if it's only temporary, you know? Like, "Who in the heck is that witch? I thought I was over her!" Maybe everyone else has already figured this out, and I'm the only one. But then again, maybe not.

I've prayed, and meditated, done Zen/Buddhist meditation type exercises taught to me by a counselor, I've done medication, I've soaked, primped and pampered myself, massaged, told myself affirmations till I'm blue in the face, gone to coda (liked it..but not one in the area that I can go too), gotten involved in support groups (like this one) I've exercised, stretched, breathed, visualized....and still had immediate uncontrolled emotional reactions and the big bad horrible person who was out of control, in denial, and completely in the throws of her codependency comes back and screws with my mind and heart....and I was sick and tired of it.

And so I prayed again, and said, I need some help. And I got this impression to do research on chakkras (maybe I'm spelling this wrong). I thought, "no way." But kept being told to check it out...so kept reading...did some visuallizing stuff which helped a little...but it was so short term. Knew I had to do something else, and looked into other types of healers. I really looked into it. I actually found one in the area that I didn't get a negative "uh-uh...not that one" about, but there was no way I could ever afford it.

I'm at the point, I'll do anything, you know? I would have even seriously considered acupuncture and I'm terrified of needles. I needed something that I could do myself to help my own healing.

I'm talking healing as a part of recovery. I almost gave up but was told to keep searching sites about chakkras and stumbled upon two things that are helpful for me and my situation.

One is www.emofree.com (exercises based on accupressure that help to reset the energy/electrical centers in the body, and help stop negative emotion..and tons of other stuff), and then to a description on "highly sensitive people." Then a search on that phrase led me to numerous sites that have been helpful.

I know that everyone is different, but if we are here to recover and maybe help someone in the process, we should share all we are discovering.

And so I am. I'd be interested in y'all posting any and all non-western healing type stuff, or other things that y'all have stumbled upon or been directed to in your own recovery.

Let's pool together and share.