When you meet a new person, after you find out his or her name, what question normally follows?  Most commonly, we will ask a person what he or she does.  From there, our whole conversation orients around how that person makes a living or what they do with their time.

Ultimately, when we are trying to figure out who a person is, we end up identifying them by what they do.  We all do this.  When we are asked who we are, we end up rhyming off our professions, our roles in relationships as a man or woman, our accomplishments, our hobbies or our life situations that we are dealing with.

We identify ourselves by the roles we play in the world rather than as the beings we are -- beings that exist in, and enrich, this world.

Early on in life, we learn that genders have different roles and that there are rules for being a boy and different ones for being a girl.  We learn what it takes to be a good person in our culture or our religion.  We are taught the recipe for fitting into society and being a good citizen.  By the time we reach adulthood we have a whole system of rules regarding what it takes to be good, successful, loved, powerful, weak, stupid, etc. 

This complicated system of rules forms a model that becomes our identity, which defines who we are and who we are not.

As long as we can follow all these rules, we can be who we are and life is fine.  When life deviates a bit from what is allowed and our rules are challenged, the model begins to break down.  For example, if being a good, successful man means you have a good job and can provide for your family, what happens if you get laid off?  Or if being a good mother means you work a full time job, take care of the home and cater to the needs of your kids, what happens when you run out of time and energy? 

This is obviously not a good situation when the model in question happens to be the one on which you have based your identity. It inevitably causes you a great deal of stress.

What are the choices?  You could change your rules to make the situation you are experiencing acceptable so you can move forward and adapt.  This involves changing who you are, which tends to bring up resistance.  Or you can try to ignore the things that threaten your rules and pretend everything is fine.

More often than not we choose the second strategy.  This involves locking up the parts of our bodies that respond to the energy of the situation.  When our identity is challenged, we tend to lock tension in the pelvis.  This is the region that needs to be silenced or restricted when we want to ignore threats to roles, status and identity.

This type of tension and pelvic distortion creates adverse mechanical cord tension (AMCT) in the spinal cord.  The particular type of AMCT that is related to threats to the identity is referred to as Phase Three in Network Spinal Analysis.

There are five major AMCT distortions that we address in NSA.  Phase One has to do with being stuck in the past.  Phase Two is associated with trust and the future.  Phase Three is about identity.  Phase Four results from issues with passion.  Phase Five is caused by tension around abundance in your life.

These phases are used to determine what gateways to address when you are being entrained.  In addressing the phase, the goal is to decrease the tension that results from a need to protect yourself from fear and stress in your life that is associated with that phase.

When addressing Phase Three, our goal is to have you become more conscious of how much tension it takes to support your identity.  When you let go of this tension you drop these defences, and will likely find that life becomes more about being than doing and connecting with people -- rather than impressing them.