What is Remote Acupuncture?

Consciousness Evolution and the Inverted Reality

I have always had the instinct to control things in order to feel safe. If I can predict the future, know what the outcome of my actions will be, see the pitfalls three steps before they become a possibility, then I have a feeling of sense of security that everything is going to be OK. This belief construct is one that many of us carry, especially those of us who have experienced trauma. The truth is that is keeps us small. It keeps us from creating in our grander capacities, and it is part of an inverted holographic energetic matrix that is held in place by fear.

Reading my words may cause your nervous system a sense of alarm because there is a part of you that believed it to be true, as I once did. Breathe and check in with your body. Pull yourself in and ground as you continue to read my words.

 

In my journey of consciousness awakening, one of the biggest insights that I have had is that my beliefs around control and the way it has manifested in my nervous system have been connected to an inverted/reversed reality, and that I do have a choice to flip the inside out and have a completely new experience.

 

When I speak about an inverted or holographic reality, I am talking about one that is inorganic, one that functions opposite to the way that our organic energetic templates function. Self-care turns into self-shaming. The desire for love loops back into a nervous system response that traps us into the same patterns of fight or flight or recreating past-life traumas.

 

In the inverted reality, there is a split between the heart’s knowing and the mind’s need to control. We take guidance and knowing from the mind before the heart. Our actions and intentions stem from fear, the desire for self-preservation, and the forgetting that we have always been held by the Divine and that we are all connected to all of existence.

 

In my journey of remembrance and plugging back into my own organic template, I am reunited with my Source field, so that my body is being guided by my Higher Self, aka my nonphysical self that is connected in to Source.

 

What this feels like is being able to trust my heart and my body sensations first and foremost. My thinking mind is in service to my heart. My body’s natural intelligence is able to show me through sensations, movements and through waves of chills that I am releasing energy, alchemizing the old, and remembering what is true for me each step of the way.

 

Letting go of the old versions of myself feels both exhilarating and overwhelming. It’s like when you get to the top of a tall roller coaster climb, and the cart is moving so fast that you can’t help but throw your arms up in the arm, gasp for air and free fall. This is how I describe my experience of consciousness expansion. It’s like I want to grab on to a piece of furniture to make sure I’m still connected to something physical, but I still have to let go and keep allowing myself to let go even more, trusting that I am completely held by life itself.

Each of us has a unique journey of coming back into our own remembrance. There is no one right way or modality to do it. As we awaken, we remember our own self-mastery.

 

Trusting our body’s intelligence is essential, and being able to release, transform and alchemize through movement, sound and expression are ways of supporting evolution without recreating the stories that hold the old energy in place.

 

Remembering and activating through the physical body is the process of embodiment.

 

May your journey of awakening be graceful and full of joy.

 

Remember that you can always find your way back home through your heart.

 

With great love,

 

Melanie Adrianna

 

If you’re interested in being witnessed and seen in your remembrance and inner alchemy, please visit me at http://MelanieAdrianna.com.

How Trauma and Abuse Become Internalized and My Secrets to Breaking Free From It

Have you ever talked to someone who references the same old memory or time in their life in every conversation? 

“When so-and-so was alive, I used to...”

“Things haven’t been the same since my surgery / physical injury / car accident in such and such year...”

“During pandemic we did things this way... and now everything is different... I wish things were the way they used to be.”

“I remember in my childhood, every summer we used to...” (blah blah blah, same old story)

 

These references to past events and experiences are a good indication that trauma is trapped somewhere in the system.

What is trauma? My definition of trauma is an event or series of events that changes one’s perceptions of their physical, emotional and sensory reality and relationship to their external environment. It can be sudden or gradual, conscious or unconscious and experienced either first-hand or vicariously through another’s experience. 

 

The internalization of trauma is a process by which the energetic imprint of the experience or memory of the event is trapped inside the cellular memory of the physical body. This distorts one’s ability to regulate their nervous system and maintain hormonal and organ homeostasis. It also creates some really interesting habits and coping mechanisms that are often unapparent to the person doing them.

 

External triggers like certain places, circumstances, sounds, smells, images, words or phrases related to the trauma can consciously or unconsciously elicit an over-exaggerated perception of fear and feeling unsafe. This leads to a cascade of physiological dis-regulation that causes brain fog, lack of focus, dread, anxiety, systemic inflammation, weight gain, hormonal imbalance, high blood pressure, muscle tension, the list goes on and on. As a result, one can also develop avoidance behaviors or maladaptive responses to external triggers.

 

Trauma that is internalized emotionally can cause someone to feel blame, shame and responsibility for what happened, and oftentimes re-perpetrate the trauma onto themselves or relive the felt experience through their physical bodies. This is the body’s way of trying to complete the cycle of release of that trapped energy from the traumatic event. Unfortunately, this physiological response oftentimes ends up recreating a hamster wheel effect of limbic system looping that keeps someone stuck in the old nervous system reactions and felt emotional experience.

 

Internalized trauma can cause a deep distorted belief about the inherent goodness or self-worth of the person. What I’m referring to specifically are thoughts like, “What did I do to deserve that? What if I did things differently that day? Am I worthy of love? Am I inherently good?”

 

First off, if you are in a place of relating to any of these questions, I can give you a straight answer to all of them:

 

You didn’t do any thing to deserve what happened. It just happened. And it’s OK.

 

It doesn’t matter if you did things differently that day. What happened happened then. You are living in this moment now. Cherish your life in this moment... Because

 

You are inherently good, worthy and lovable. That is your birthright.

 

 

I’ll give you two good examples from my own experience of how trauma can get can trapped in the system.

 

•  Experience 1  •

 

At the end of 2019, the house that my partner at the time and I were renting burnt down, along with my acupuncture and herbal clinic, car and all our belongings. Six months after reorienting from the shock of the fire, we started to travel across the United States, camping, house sitting, visiting family and friends in at least 20 different states and spent six weeks in Costa Rica.

 

The freedom of escape from Colorado and our experience during Covid was so exhilarating on the one hand, and we have many great memories from our travels. Over time, however, it became clear to me that I didn’t have a sense of home. Moving from place to place without any rooting felt exhausting.

 

After finally deciding to land in Asheville, North Carolina, I had an eye-opening conversation with a family constellations facilitator that blew the top off my understanding of my unconscious desire to move and escape.

 

The facilitator brought up a story of a middle-aged woman who came in for a constellation. The woman said that she moves every 10 years, and this was year 10, and she was afraid of what might happen. After a period of sitting in silence and allowing her words to seep in, the woman suddenly blurted out, “I never felt loved.”

 

In that moment, a deep remembrance and acknowledging brought through chills all over my body. I realized that this pattern of moving and escaping was not new post-house fire. I have been moving on an almost annual basis my entire life, but I always created some excuse as to why that was.

 

The potency of the words “I never felt loved” made me realize how important self-love is; how home is where the heart is, as cliche as that may sound; and how my desire to move really stemmed from my search for love outside of myself. My conscious awareness of my own internalized trauma has started to bring about some radical shifts in my life.

 

•  Experience 2  •

 

After experiencing a traumatic brain injury as a high school senior, I lost my ability to create short-term memories. I could remember everything prior to the car accident, but following it, I had the memory of a gold fish (which, as it turns out, is actually not three seconds, but at least one month).

 

As time went on, the duration of my memory elongated. When I went to study journalism at Marquette University, almost every conversation started the same way, “Hi, I’m Melanie. I’m experiencing post-concussion symptoms, and I will most likely not remember you or your name by tomorrow.”

 

In those years post-TBI, I defined most of my experiences through the lens of someone who was wounded. Having poor memory recall, chronic migraines and sleep disturbance was a spinning hamster wheel throughout my first few years of college. Furthermore, the cellular memory of hitting the break petal on my car turned into numbness from the knee down every time I felt fear.

 

A breakthrough moment in my healing journey occurred about four years later when I noticed that I went an entire day without talking or thinking about the car accident. I remember going to bed that night and the thought hitting like a bolt of lightning. I immediately started crying out of joy.

 

While I may have chosen a longer and more arduous healing path than others might, I have learned so much along the way that I’d like to share so that others can learn from my experience.

 

• Breaking Free from Internalized Trauma •

 

I’ll start off by saying that there is no magic pill to wiping the slate clean from internalized trauma and abuse. And that’s actually a really good thing. Because if that were the case, one would have such a healing crisis that they would go insane.

 

Everyone on the planet has experienced trauma in one, two, or 10,000 forms or another.

 

When trauma is released at the cellular level, it is felt and expressed. Everyone’s way of doing it is different. In my experience, movement, writing, singing, toning, screaming, crying and expressing through any medium of art helps.

 

There is no requirement to relive trauma in order to release and alchemize it. The physical alchemy is still uncomfortable, however, so many of us choose to avoid the discomfort until we can’t anymore due to physical, emotions or psychic distress. I recommend taking baby steps.

 

From my experiential learning, I have a few key tips that I think are essential in being able to successfully move through to the other side of life without trauma.

 

1) Recognize that no matter how uncomfortable and distressed you may feel, there is nothing wrong with you. Holding a space of observing what is active and alive for you without judgment is imperative. That means even holding the parts of you that feel blame, shame and guilt in a space of deeper compassion and acknowledgment. Your body is a bank of memory and wisdom, and each physical sensation and stored emotion is a message that, if listened to with gentleness and compassion, holds the wisdom of your personal medicine.

 

2) Every choice of self-love counts. Self-soothing and gentleness make a world of difference. I know from my experience what it feels like to just want to get rid of something, clear it or catapult it to the end of the universe. What I’ve learned over time is to embrace all my parts, even the ones that feel fractured, broken or hurt. They’re the ones who need your kindness, gentleness and loving attention the most. Because you’re the only one who can welcome them back home. When you create a space for them in your heart and ask what they need, over time they change form and hold sources of inner power and wisdom that you could have never imagined unless you spent the time to be with them without judging them.

 

3) Consciousness illuminates old wounds. Like both of my stories in relationship to looking for home within and recovering from a traumatic brain injury, the pivot toward healing in a greater way came through my conscious awareness. These personal breakthroughs or ‘aha’ moments can’t be predicted or calculated. Being self-aware of your own thoughts, words, actions and habits and making a conscious effort to listen to your body creates the space from which personal evolution becomes apparent.

 

4) Energy that has been trapped in the physical body’s cellular memory needs an exist on a physical and emotional level. That is why self-expression is so important. Again, this can be through movement, art, sound, writing or any form of self-expression that gets you out of your head. Trying to understand trauma by pathologizing it through the thinking mind only keeps it trapped in the nervous and limbic systems.

 

5) Having a witness is imperative. When you are able to speak and express your pain, suffering and truth to another human being, it’s like the energy is allowed to release from the hidden and secret department of your psyche. If you ever felt like you were alone in your suffering and the universe wasn’t listening, having a conscious witness seeing you alchemize and release the energy creates this inexplicable connection to your ability to transform in a much bigger way. There is a resonance of compassion that occurs between people that leads to deeper energetic harmonic and coherency.

 

Much love and respect to you and your journey.

 

~Melanie Adrianna

In my 1:1 work as a facilitator of deep inner transformation, I am honored to be a witness of your inner and outer journey. To learn more about me and the types of support I offer, please visit MelanieAdrianna.com.

Burying the Dead

When I was little I could communicate with and often see the unseen world of ghosts, poltergeists and astral beings. 

Growing up in a '60s home built on top of a Native American burial ground and reincarnating into a family with no shortage of ancestral baggage, I was primed in the best training ground possible to develop sensitivities to navigate the unseen world.

 

I remember sitting on the living room couch watching the shadowy silhouettes of Native Americans and the hunters and trappers who occupied the land. Seeing my mother’s deceased cat Puffer Belly mosey on by from the corner of my eye. Pushing a paw away from my left shoulder as I was writing up a school paper on my laptop.

 

Lynn Drive was exactly half a mile long, and I lived at the dead end, the lowest foundation on the street. During my middle school years, the school bus would drop me off at the top of the long hill after school, and I was the first one to reach home in my family of four. Because I had the house to myself, I took advance of the space to make pizza rolls and lounge in front of the TV watching Doug and Even Stevens.

 

For a series of months or years — time is a blur at this point - I witnessed a strange occurrence during my daily pizza role ritual. It happened at the same time each day. The clunky faucet in the side half bathroom would turn on and run for about five minutes, until, Chachum, it magically shut off. I would sit there frozen on the couch, listening and observing, thinking that as long I didn’t move, the ghosts wouldn’t bother me.

 

Throughout the years, I witnessed many objects move from place to place as if portaling through Narnia’s lost and found or moving spontaneously without human intervention. My mother’s purse handles moving. Lights flickering. Objects flying off shelves.

 

And then there were the angelic and demonic beings. I remember occurrences of witnessing seven-foot-tall bursts of light or light apparitions swooshing across the room. I felt comforted and awed by their presence. The dark silhouettes were less welcoming. Seeing shadowy figures at the foot of my bed made me freeze and bristle like a porcupine. I would squeeze my teddy bear, drape my blankets tight over my body wrapped up like a cocoon, and pray the Hail Mary until I could fall asleep.

 

Fear was one of the predominant themes of my childhood, as was escaping from fear through dissociation and a wild imagination of fantasy, getting lost in books and spending hours and days swimming through my emotions in music and dance.

 

In equal measure, I found some of my greatest joy, solace and comfort spending time in nature — picking blueberries in the summer, talking to trees, plants, birds and animals, wandering endlessly through the Cleveland Metroparks trails, and visiting my animal friends at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Almost every summer I looked forward to three weeks of camping and learning outdoor survival skills with my Ukrainian scouting friends from all around the country.

 

Through my love of the outdoors, I communicated with the nature and devic spirits, the animal and plant kingdoms, the guardians of the land and the fairies. And of course, the dragons were always with me, even when I didn’t know it.

 

•  •  •

 

By the time I reached my teens, I had shut off my sensitivities to the unseen world. Through fear, conditioning, harsh self-judgment and the sheer desire to belong in a world that did not include a context for the kind of being that I am outside of the dogma of religious doctrine. I shut myself out as much as I felt shut out by the world.

 

When I was 18, I experienced a car accident and traumatic brain injury that blew out my protective filters. Over night, all of what I had known and witnessed as a child, the fear included, came back to my awareness. Ghosts, demons, memories of past lives, future timelines, alternate timelines and split dimensions. My orientation to time and space in relation to my human body, which I was not inhabiting at the time, became so disconnected from reality, that I was forced into a healing crisis of magnitude.

 

This is where my healing journey truly began. And it took me 15 years, thousands of hours of self-cultivation, introspection, treatments, workshops, academic studies, professional degrees, mentorships and experiential wisdom to get to where I am now.

 

And in that 15 years, I lost family members and loved ones; got married, divorced and separated again; faced radiation sickness and serious illness; lost all my material possessions in a house fire — and I never stopped searching for answers and meaning.

 

I got to practice Zen meditation in sangha in Milwaukee, Buddhist traditions in temples all over Japan and kriya yoga with the Art of Living in Denver. I got to learn about the transformation of trauma and grief through my interactions with clients as an acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist and craniosacral therapist. In participating and facilitating over 100 Family Constellations, I got to learn about the intricate nature of ancestral trauma and how it can be passed down in the form of health conditions and emotional patterns. I got to travel to beautiful sacred lands and experience many natural wonders in nature. And I got to learn about human biofield mechanics, subtle energies and somatic transformative practices from many teachers and mentors.

 

In the process of my continual becoming, I set up ceremonial and ritual spaces for myself, thousands of times. I dug through layers upon layers of multidimensional traumatic memories, clearing energetic distortions and physical toxins. I am grounded, centered and in my human body. It wasn’t a walk in the park, but I am grateful beyond measure because the depth of my human experience has made my personal insights and transformation that much more magnificent and fulfilling.

 

• • •

 

What does all of this have to do with burying the dead, you ask?

 

As someone who has spent 33 years observing every facet of death and dying, I have come to understand the necessity of the cyclic nature of release in order to allow in new life.

 

We can hold on to the dead in more ways than merely grieving our loved ones who have passed.

 

Holding on to the cellular memory of traumatic events - whether they occurred in utero, in childhood, in major life transitions, in past lives, through ancestral trauma, or even off planet - affects the way that we carry our energy everywhere we go, day after day. Dragging around the past - that which no longer exists, i.e. the dead - into the present moment, truly affects our health, mental clarity, enjoyment of life and overall sanity.

 

Grief and its various nonlinear stages are important in the cycle of transition into new life experiences and must be honored and felt, no matter how uncomfortable it may feel. We honor the process by taking the time that is required on a soul level to feel and release in a healthy way.

 

It consciously occurred to me only in the last six months how much I had been carrying around the dead as an emblem of my own victimhood. Exacerbated by the world events of the last four years, I carried around so much suffering and loss, including that which I inherited from my biological ancestors, that I got to a point where I lost sight of reality.

 

It has taken me some very bold choices to change the way that I see myself and the world to step into a radically new path of self-love. This includes witnessing myself in old negative thought patterns and making a conscious decision to say ‘No’ to the old ways and asking my vaster self what my other choices are (because we do always have a multitude of choices).

 

As within so without. As above so below. When we redesign our inner realities, the external world shows us what we are releasing and attracting.

 

Last week, I held myself a funeral ceremony for all of the old versions or aspects of myself that were carrying the dead or reluctant to be with the living. I gathered two bouquets of flowers, one for myself and one for my ancestors. I then created a sacred space with candles, sage, palo santo, art and journaling to acknowledge and express all that I was energetically releasing. I cried and scribbled and danced to express my grief and felt profound chills of release all over my body.

 

My final ‘aha’ moment came the next day, when I decided to go to a dance class at the YMCA. It was called Dynamic Dance, a name that caught my curiosity. As I entered a room full of people, the instructor looked at me and asked me my name, greeting me with a warm welcome. I thought, “Oh, how nice. I’ve never been to a dance class at the Y before where everyone was so friendly.”

 

As I acclimated to my space in the room and the class began, I quickly came to realize that over half of the participants had Down’s Syndrome and were there with their caregivers. With each Zumba-like dance sequence, I watched my fellow dancers sway, laugh and bounce to the beat of each of their own drums. I watched in admiration as each individual stepped into such a completely uninhibited self-expression of joy.

 

In that moment, I remembered myself over a decade ago. After having experienced a traumatic brain injury, where for years of my life I had the coordination of a fish flopping out of the water, there was no way that I could have imagined keeping my balance and coordination to dance again. And nowadays, I ballroom dance regularly. Gratitude washed over me as I acknowledged how much I have healed in the last 15 years.

 

In the next sequence, the instructor told everyone to lift their arms over their head and walk and shake every limb like a Halloween skeleton. In that moment I could see the holographic reality of what I was releasing at a DNA level from my energy field. I laughed at myself and exited the room, feeling complete.

 

Through this process of death and rebirth, the release and receptivity, relaxing and contracting, inhaling and exhaling through each life cycle, the more that we can create a space to be gentle with ourselves and know that there’s no right or wrong way to feel it, after each choice to transform from within, life gets that much easier and lighter.

 

If you made it this far in my long-winded storytelling, I thank you for hearing my story and I invite you to share yours. While healing is a self-initiated internal experience, it never happens in a vacuum. Witnessing each other in our human suffering allows us to feel and acknowledge our own vulnerabilities with greater compassion and self-love.

 

We activate each others’ conscious evolution through relating and learning.

 

My invitation to you is to Release the Past through your Expression and Creation.

 

Honor how far you have come, and make room for New Life.

With gratitude and respect,

Melanie Adrianna

To learn more about Melanie Adrianna and receive support through your transition into new life, please visit MelanieAdrianna.com.