Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘21-5-800 Challenge’

“Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.”

STEPHEN R. COVEY

I am very happy with Bindu Wiles new post today over at her blog and her wave of creative zen she has been perpetuating with her 21.5.800 Challenge which has been (to my great joy) extended!  In the vein of extending I am trying a new plight to post daily.  That means 7 days a week.  Even if one day is lighter than the next I want to be able to be consistent in the mayhem of life with posts and with post themes.  I am, with this 7 day a week dedication, have decided to try out a new format which I have been mulling over for a few months-days of the week themes.  I am actually very excited.  It is both like the writing exercise of a writing prompt and a motivation and clarification of what is important to me to cover on this blog moving forward into the next 100 posts and beyond!  I would love to hear your feedback on the new formula.

I am very excited about this personal challenge as well as continuing with Bindu’s wonderful 21.5.800 Community of Challenging.  If you have an interest in joining go to her site to join in the fun (yoga, writing, and challenge, oh my): www.binduwiles.com . I will be beginning the 7 day format by the 4th of July weekend.

I would begin sooner but I am in the process of becoming an impromptu foster mama of another abandoned puppy (beagle baby we have named Gambit–like X-Men), quitting my job (last day is next week), dealing with some revisiting by my endometriosis and her pain (grr), and working on some fun projects…including fiddling with a new look and new features for this site!  So, please look for the new format beginning July 4th weekend and some interesting updates and posts coming up in the interrum…including a potential expose on Mr. Gambit with the cutest smile and quite the bounce in his leaps.

I have found that life has given me ample opportunity for facing challenges lately.  Some I have faced with grace, some with panic, some with anger, and some with great clarity.  I appreciate them all (often in retrospect) and I am glad to give myself space and room to stretch and grow.  In this blog and in my life.  What ways are you able to stretch and grow heading ahead in life and into your summer?  Sometimes we forget to challenge ourselves and often that is when we need it most and when life gives us unexpected presents in the form of life’s confrontations.  This has definitely been the last few months for me.  What will be next?

CHECK OUT THE NEW BLOG SITE FORMAT BELOW.

MONDAY: Trauma, Eating Disorders, & Addictions: A Clinical Vantage Point w/a Personal Bent on Surviving & Thriving

TUESDAY: Creative Expressions: Letting Art Inform Your World View (art, dance, writing, reading, music, etc.)

WEDNESDAY: Animals: Relationship, Metaphor, & Musings on the Furry World

THURSDAY: Yoga: Finding Ways to Embody Health in Life

FRIDAY : 10 Things: Life Perspectives in List Format

SATURDAY: Bliss & Rejuvenation: Self-Care, Reprieves, and Finding Room to Breathe

SUNDAY: Faith: Spirituality, Contemplation, & Ritual in A Healthy Life Sphere

**INTERVIEWS will be inserted in the place of daily content when new ones come to fruition.  I hope to have many more wonderful interviewees to come.**

Yoga is a light, which once lit, will never dim. The better your practice, the brighter the flame.

B.K.S. Iyengar

So, given the challenge to yoga-up my life again after a month of incessant day-job that leaves me home late every night and stressed all weekend long I realized that the yoga with a capital “Y” has been missing from my life altogether.  By that I mean the yoga in the essence of how I live my life and bring room to breathe, pause, and reboot.  To be frank–I have had none.  So taking Bindu Wiles 21.5.800 Challenge (21 days, 5 days a week yoga, 800 words written per day) I realized how much I have sucked the yoga joy out of my life since yoga school ended and my new job began.  Yoga back in my life really meant a total overhaul.

So my yoga for yesterday was Savasana on a floatie raft in my grandparents-in-law’s pool.  It was divinity–really.  I have taking the yoga less literal in terms of postures and more to a state of mind–and that I am trying to do 7 days a week.  I am dedicating 40minutes-1 hour a day where I give me a moment to breath and pause and reboot.  I am expanding my Savasana to be more encompassing.  I am thinking the next extension of that is to take up on of my Massage Envy massages (which have been back-logging without use) and Savasana my way into a deep tissue state of the Swedish variety.  Yes, I think so.

That said, today’s yoga will be literal.  I am vacillating between power flow and restorative for my home practice–we will see what the day brings.  The joy of home practice is that I can morph it to whatever I feel the need for.  Although, another aspiration of my next few weeks of the challenge is to add a studio practice one day a week–something I have been missing in the last couple of months.  Communal environment is a great invigorator for a home-study practice that has lapsed.

5 Ways You Can Bring Savasana Into Your Life & Some Room to Breathe:

1. Get a massage.  I love Massage Envy because for a reasonable monthly rate  (about $50-$60 per month; half a usual spa massage rate) it commits you to give yourself a moment to take care of yourself–body and mind.  Also, if you are like me and you lapse for a few months your massages stay in a reserve for you to use when you have the time.

2. Go to the beach or get yourself a floatie and head to your local pool. It’s summer!  So, you can take full advantage of nature’s therapeutic qualities such as vitamin D and head to the beach, pool, or even your backyard and get in a retreat-state-of-mind.  Put on some SPF, sunglasses, and just lounge like (even if it is only for an hour or an afternoon) you are on vacation.

3. Create some sacred space in your home & spend some time there in silence. What we create in our home space says  a lot about our personality and our motivations at home.  If you take just a small corner of a room or room in your house and create a space for meditation, silence, or prayer you give yourself the incentive to spend some time at home in silence, meditation, or prayer.

4.  Follow your bliss. We each have things we love and things that bring us into a state of bliss, peace, and calm.  What is that thing for you?  Art, writing, yoga postures, dance, horseback riding, motorcycle riding–the sky is limit (literally, cause’ it could be airplane flying).  When I ask clients what brings them calm they have named all of the above and more.  Whatever your bliss is can be the yoga in your life.  Do something you love–find your bliss and follow it to a state of calm.

5.  Shut down your devices. Live a day unplugged. Yeah, this is a hard one!  As I write this on a blog I realize the hypocrisy in this moment .  But not indefinitely, not forever, just for an hour or a day log off, sign off, and shut off!  It is so crucial and I do it far to infrequently.  Turn off the phone, shut off the computer, unplug the T.V. and just be in the silence.  It can be very uncomfortable and the more discomfort you feel the more it is a warning sign that you need to do it more often.  The white noise takes us over and we have to remember to get back to ourselves, unplugged.

Have you neglected your own self-care and room to breathe in your life?  Any ways you can think of infusing your summer with some non-literal or literal yoga?  Below are a few I have been salivating over.  If you are interested in investing in some self-care you can also still sign up for my “Room to Breathe: Summer Soulstice Soul Care” Virtual Workshop starting June 20, 2010!  However you do it, summer is a great time to take some time and focus on taking care of you!

“Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.”
German Proverb

Bindu Wiles post yesterday was about fear.  Bindu has been a breath of complicity in my blogosphere and I am very glad to have stumbled upon her writing, her story, and her 21.5.800 Challenge of which I am partaking.  Bindu’s story is one of trauma, survival and a renewal of self through therapy, yoga, buddhism, writing and breath.  Her story is emblematic of what I spoke about yesterday at the National Association of Social Worker’s Florida Conference and what has resonated in my own life story and recovery from trauma and PTSD–a restoration of breath and renewal of self by way of writing, yoga, and contemplative practices (buddhist, christian and yogic alike).  The passion I bring to my work, my speaking about the work, and into my life is one of feeling dedication and onus to perpetuate the discourse on what, for me, has been profound healing in my own life story and the stories of the patients/clients I have treated implementing the very things that brought about change for myself and my life.

“Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is,” or so goes the German proverb above.  I think this statement gets to the hear of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  A primal fear, animal in nature, overcomes us when in a dangerous situation–our survival mechanism kicks in and tells us one of the following,  ”Run, hide, fight, stop where you are” which translates to the built in mechanisms for fight, flight, freeze, submit.  In danger we become like the deer in the wild, doing everything we can to survive.  When PTSD is activated that survival response is locked in, “stuck” inside our body and brain and is not let go of when danger disappears.  We are left a constant state of “danger” or “I am going to die.”  Fear.  We are in a constant state of danger/fear.  Bindu’s post resonates with me because the pervasive fear of PTSD is so overwhelming and all-encompassing; something that logic cannot dissolve easily.  The hair-trigger response to anything that resembles danger (often distorted by a high-alert PTSD brain) takes the traumatized person all the way to the feelings of “I am going to die” before the non-trauma brain could even assess the situation.  PTSD brain doesn’t go from 0-100 in one second because in that “stuck” place it is already starting at 50 before even getting out of bed in the morning–high-alert is status-quo.  And it is exhausting.  I can tell you that from experience.  Asleep is exhausting.  Awake is exhausting.  And every moment is living on the precipice of erupting with fear.

This is much of what I talked about yesterday at the conference as well as how yoga, creative arts, and animal-assisted therapies (equine, canine, and even dolphin) can have such profound healing properties for the PTSD brain and living experience.  To me the combination of these elements combines the essential ingredients for the neurobiological issues of trauma and general brain “stuckness”.  Yoga, mind/body practices, and breathwork help restore our self-regulating and self-soothing capacities, creative arts help to find an outlet for expression outside of talk, give empowerment, purpose, and competency in action to people often very broken by trauma, and animals, with their ability to be both intuitive and non-judgmental relationships for a trauma survivor who may not be able to bring themselves into interpersonal relationships due to trust, shame and fear.  It was so interesting to me, as as I am always intrigued by the synchronicity of writing and happenstance, that while I was speaking about trauma and healing, Bindu was writing about her own plight in the fear of post-trauma, her intimate connection with her dog (an innately therapeutic relationship), and breath as restoration from out of a fear-infused moment.  In two different contexts, but from the same origin, we were talking about the same things.

I thank Bindu, and other trauma survivors I have met, for her eloquent and open vocalization of her experience and her ability to bring her insight and her life practices in to play to combat trauma and PTSD.  I continue to believe in the neuroplasticity of our brains–the ability of our brains to CHANGE.  I believe in trauma survivors ability to heal.  I believe in yoga, creative arts, and animals as amazing conduits to that healing.  I believe in the power of speaking our own truths and how much vocalization can be a catalyst for change.  I thank Bindu for her story and her post.  As well as for her 21.5.800 Challenge which I think is an inspiration and a call for self-care and healing in itself.    I thank all the wonderful participants at my workshop yesterday for their passions, enthusiasm, and the inspiration they brought me in the work they are doing, the dedication to their clients, and their openness to the creative explorations in therapy I was presenting to them.

WORD COUNT FOR TODAY: 804