Pursuing Wholeness – Curated Instagram Reels

A fundamental part of this human journey is taking what we have inherited and started with – our childhoods, our backgrounds, our family culture(s), our environments, our experiences, the influences around us, our communities, etc. and weighing them against the truth of our identity in Messiah and His design for the operation of His image within us. As we weigh and test these things we are in a process of choosing who we are becoming. Do we become more like our Creator who loves us and gave Himself for us? Or do we become more like the counterfeit identities impressed on us by the world and the ancient accuser who hates us?

Scripture provides authoritative truth on many levels as to how our Creator sees us, purposes life for us, and instructs us in ways of living that heal and elevate our identity as children of the Most High. In addition, through understanding how the brain works, the interactions of behavioral and biochemical cause and effect, developing healthy communication tools, and other principles of “tov” (good) functioning within the human design (body, mind, spirit), we can make daily life-giving choices throughout our journey. This topic of pursuing wholeness is a curated collection of thoughts and ideas across a spectrum of sources philosophical, spiritual, medical, scientific, relational, behavioral, and other arenas. As with ALL ideas and principles, we must weigh and measure and test for truth against the authority of Scripture. And at the same time, there can be powerful truths, consistent with Scripture and/or worth mining for nuggets of wisdom, in a variety of sources.

These are snippets I’ve come across that I have found helpful, thought-provoking, or in other ways worthy of consideration. There are some links repeated as they might fit into multiple categories. I do NOT necessarily agree whole-heartedly with everything I have collected here, but I do consider these worth sharing for the sake of exploring facets of pursuing wholeness (which is completeness in Messiah, as He calls it – SHALOM).

IMPORTANT NOTE: With pretty much all of these, the description and comments are also really insightful and worth reading and exploring.

*** ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: I have marked some with *** that I found especially helpful. While every single one of these are really good, and it’s hard to choose only a few “selects” out of such a great pool of sources, the ones I’ve marked are a great place to start if there’s only limited time to focus in or look at a few first.

FINAL IMPORTANT NOTE: I will continue to update these and include something like [ ADDED: 2025.01.01 ] to newer ones with a date so that it’s easier to keep track of ones you might not have seen yet if you check back here periodically.

OK I LIED, BUT THIS IS FOR REAL THE FINAL FINAL IMPORTANT NOTE: The best experience for these might be on your phone where the links will load in the mobile app or at least “remember” the mute / unmute setting so that as each one opens in a new window and starts playing in a way that you can hear it. I have found (annoyingly) that on a computer browser each one seems to default to muted whereas on a phone it will remember the mute / unmute setting.

Laughter Medicine & Humor

• When you’re used to “thinking” about trauma and the therapist asks where do you feel it in your body? 😆
• You can’t worry about what other people think 😆
• Some days are just crap 😆
• What to tell the negative committee inside your head 😆

Identity & Self-Image

• *** You are a work of art. Understanding your identity and purpose and significance requires spending time with the Artist who painted you, who designed you
• *** The distinction between trauma as the affect and impact inside of you versus experiences that were traumatic as a way to help understand the recovery of self process in healing
• *** How our beliefs and perspectives about ourselves can be brought to the surface by things others do or say, but they are not the cause of what we already feel about ourselves
• *** The power of gentleness towards ourselves
• *** The way our nervous system responds to a harshly self-critical mindset is the same as an immediate genuine threat in our environment, locking down and reinforcing everything you’ve done up until this point to survive – including reinforcing the thing your criticizing yourself about. How to produce change in your brain through radical kindness and warmth towards yourself.
• *** [new 2025.01.05] What if the pursuit of success and obsessive productivity is actually a trauma response in the context of past abuse and neglect as a way to find safety in external “value,” which would mean that true success looks more like rest and growth and healing and letting go of a “need” to prove or earn value by doing?
• Emotional maturity and freedom in letting go of others’ opinions and assumptions
• Understanding Functional Freeze and learning to establish safety and connection as a mechanism of inherent identity rather than a mechanism of performance or success
• Self compassion and the importance of forgiving past versions of ourselves who didn’t have access to the things we now know and understand
• The more emotionally intelligent you become, the less you take things personally. You start to see that other people’s behaviors are often reflections of their own struggles, not a statement about your worth
• The healing role of letting the worst version(s) of yourself be loved rather than trying to become some perfect best version of yourself
• The importance of self-respect and avoiding self-deprecating approval-pursuing
• Loving yourself today is your job – caring for the human (yourself) that you were given
• Maybe the journey isn’t about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place
• Friendly reminder: peace is just letting people be wrong about you – know your worth
• [new 2025.01.03] The way trauma works in the brain is that it is not a memory – it is a reliving of the experience and acts upon the brain as if the traumatic moment(s) is/are happening in the present
• [new 2025.01.05] Potential for coping mechanisms to include keeping one’s self in a place where one doesn’t have value

Navigating & Processing Emotions

• *** The only way out is through – the healing power of tears, and going deeper than the mind which cannot handle tragedy, holding onto love, faith, hope, meaning, and purpose
• *** Understanding the critical difference between thoughts and feelings and how freedom isn’t in our thoughts – it’s on the other side of our feelings
• *** The difference between coping and healing – learning how use and move into emotional triggers for healing rather than trying to escape them through coping
• The importance and learnable skill of sitting with, noticing, and observing emotions
• Triggers (getting predictive) as an opportunity to experience old memories in safe ways
• [new 2025.01.03] Triggers are the most powerful internal compass we have
• [new 2025.01.05] Journaling rather than meditation as a much better mode of processing feelings through

Healthy Relationships & Communication

• Satisfaction in our relationships as impacted by our satisfaction with ourselves
• Anger towards others as an outcome of our fears about ourselves
• Importance of working on how we approach others especially when we are frustrated and/or angry
• Using external language consistent with our internal truth for example saying “I choose…” or “I choose not…” rather than “I can’t, because…”
• Quick reminder that you are not responsible for the version of you that lives in someone else’s mind
• The huge differences between men and women in our natural approaches and responses to talking about emotions and stress (eye-opening!!!)
• Description and aspects of enmeshment trauma and healing from it
• The balance between grace, forgiveness, and boundaries of protection against harmful behaviors and unremorseful repeat offenders
• Six psychology-based healthy communication tips for various difficult situations
• [new 2025.01.03] How fear can manifest in anxiety and trauma-sensory sensitive brains as rigidness, panic, anger, or similar unexpected reactions and how to help someone in that state
• [new 2025.01.05] Ability to move through conflict far more quickly through love, humility, and self-ownership in contrast with shame and defensiveness
• [new 2025.01.05] Communication Super Power Tool: “Seek Solutions not Blame, and Seek Understanding BEFORE Solutions” and why it works

Insights for Stronger Marriages

• *** Huge tip for Husbands: the best way to receive emotional connection and support from your wife is to invest in her and initiate emotional deposits to her first
• *** Eight Signs of an Emotionally Mature Man. Men of Yah – do we demonstrate these qualities in our marriages and our families?
• *** [new 2025.01.05] How to love fighting with your spouse because it can result in more connection rather than more conflict through validating feelings rather than disagreeing about and verifying facts
• Conflict can actually bring couples closer together and strengthen a healthy marriage
• Four ways a husband can boost his wife’s confidence, coming from a licensed marriage and family therapist and coach (read the reel’s description)

Parenting Wisdom & Strategies

• Encouragement and reminder for parents about the importance of loving and safe presence with our children as they grow and make mistakes and learn how to regulate from us, our presence, and our responses
• Importance of boundaries and their effect on mental health, especially in the context of parenting
• How to approach our kids when they are acting defiant and disrespectful to prevent escalation, remain calm, and work towards root causes and understanding
• Perspective from a trauma informed developmental specialist, 3 reasons she doesn’t encourage “gentle parenting,” and why she recommends “authoritative parenting (read the reel’s description)
• [new 2025.01.05] Responding to our children’s big emotional reactions with the perspective that there is probably something deeper going on there and how to help draw that to the surface

Perception & Perspective

• *** Hebraic concept of gratitude – looking for the good
• *** Thoughts are like waves in the ocean – we can’t stop the waves from coming, but we can choose which ones we surf
• *** Neuroplasticity, Hebb’s Law, and how our self-talk shapes our brain, which shapes our beliefs, which drives our behavior, which creates our thoughts and feelings and experiential perceptions of reality
• *** You are not your thoughts. You are the Thinker of your thoughts. Think of your thoughts as visitors, and you have a say about how those visitors act and stay.
• *** A beautiful description of “take every thought captive” from a psychological and behavioral perspective
• Confirmation bias – our brains look for proof of the direction in which we orient them: negative or positive
• Slowing down, stepping out of fear, avoiding the stress of hurried movement as keys to having more compassion and loving our moments in this life
• Fear is a mile wide and an inch deep – as we step forward we discover we can keep moving and we’re not going to drown
• A reminder to Dance through the Waves
• Creating the reality we want is directly determined by our willingness to experience its opposite – for example – working out can have us feeling weak even while we’re getting stronger, and digging up trauma can have us feeling broken even while it’s healing us
• Another expanded view on what it means to “take every thought captive”
• Insight about healing from trauma that is often overlooked: the safer you feel in your adult life, the more safe your trauma feels to start to present itself. It’s NOT a sign that you’re reverting – it’s a sign that deeper layers of healing are happening

Grounding Ideas & Self-Regulation Toolbox

• *** [new 2025.01.05] The power for movement and action to transform mood and emotion and how action can impact and change our feelings way more than even journaling or meditation
• *** [new 2025.01.05] The therapeutic and healing power of becoming a better observer of our own thoughts and a couple techniques on how to do that
• Triggers (getting predictive) as an opportunity to experience old memories in safe ways
• Cognitive Shuffling as a technique for pursuing sleep despite intrusive thoughts
• Our muscles as an endocrine organ and the role of exercise in activating the “hope molecules” that our muscles can produce and send to our brain
• The power of gentleness towards ourselves
• The 4-7-8 Breathing Technique for Stress and Anxiety
• [new 2025.01.05] Eye rolling exercises to help fall back asleep

Restorative Exercises, Nutrition, and Physical Healing

• *** A powerful, natural sleep aid combination of supplements: magnesium threonate, apigenin, and theanine
• Massaging techniques for key points in the neck (lymphatics and vagus nerve) inducing release, support, and healing for a wide variety of symptoms including inflammation and reducing nervous system fight-flight-freeze dominant sympathetic mode
• The incredible properties of fascial tissue: polymorphic, metaphasic, viscoelastic, piezoelectric and a simple check that can help identify potential bio-electrical issues in the body like tension headaches, chronic overthinking, anxiety, neuropathy issues which might benefit from fascial release exercises
• Our muscles as an endocrine organ and the role of exercise in activating the “hope molecules” that our muscles can produce and send to our brain
• Understanding burnout through the lens of how it especially affects “the strong”
• Simple body twisting fascial release stretch to help with physical anxiety relief
• Exercising and contracting our muscles is like a built in pharmacy to pump natural anti-depressants and “hope molecules” into our bloodstream which then goes to our brain
• The legitimate NEED of rest during the healing journey
• *** [new 2025.01.05] Best important and key supplements for women including creatine for brain and mood support as well as vitamin D3 with iron and others
• *** [new 2025.01.05] How the brain needs glucose during sleep cycles and a crash in blood sugar can result in waking up because the body is dumping cortisol and adrenaline to fix the brain’s need for glucose and a small snack before bed can help – raw honey and/or collagen and/or MCT oil or mix all 3

Brain Science & General Mental Health

• *** The distinction between trauma as the affect and impact inside of you versus experiences that were traumatic as a way to help understand the recovery of self process in healing
• *** Neuroplasticity, Hebb’s Law, and how our self-talk shapes our brain, which shapes our beliefs, which drives our behavior, which creates our thoughts and feelings and experiential perceptions of reality
• *** [new 2025.01.05] The neuroscience behind “weep with those who weep” and what happens in the brain neurologically when our pain is seen and acknowledged and how that allows frozen trauma to finally move and heal and transform into neutral memories
• *** [new 2025.01.05] Regulate before you rewire – how the brain and a dysregulated nervous system cause the flow of information to be misinterpreted through the patterns of past experiences rather than what is actually happening in the present
• An interesting study revealing the problematic pitfalls in psychological “diagnosing”
• What happens in the brain scientifically when we complain
• Powerful insight about the misunderstood nature of addiction and how the opposite of addiction might actually be human connection rather than sobriety
• How the brain works to maintain homeostasis – a balance between pleasure/pain biochemicals including dopamine – and the impact that has on regulation and addiction
• There is a natural increase in our stress hormone cortisol between 2 and 4am, which accounts for frequent “random” wake-ups at those times for people struggling with anxiety and/or depression
• How abuse / persistent trauma / constant stress biologically causes brain damage

Understanding & Dealing with Narcissism

• Some reasons that narcissists aren’t normally helped by therapy or counseling
• A reminder (and understanding some of the reasons) to NOT have one last conversation with a narcissist
• Commentary on going to couples counselling with a narcissist – two totally different motivations in play
• How narcissistic abuse causes brain damage
• A description of the DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim Offender) response and how it’s employed by abusers including narcissists