Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘animals’

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults.  Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.  by George Eliot

My pitbull/lab Guinness loves to lap swim.  Lately, his eager to learn brain has been craving more than just the run of the mill dog swimming laps routine and I have taught him to competitively swim {against me}.  He, the doggie paddle, me, freestyle ala my middle school swim team days.  We both come home at the end of a long, hard, training day sore and limping; the nature of competition pushing each of us to our  max out point.  Sometimes he cheats, and cuts me off, or sticks his bum right in my lane, but I let him get away with it.

Animals can be therapeutic at many levels.  My dog, at present, is teaching me to get back my competitive swimming edge; an unlikely swim team partner, but a companion even in this unique and unorthodox way.  He is a “lap dog” of a different sort and I love him for it.  Meanwhile, in the background, my attention hungry terrier, Gracie, limps from a minor cut on her foot, while jeering with high pitched barks, like a soccer mom on the sidelines of our laps.  Occasionally, she falls in while caught off guard too close to the edge during a boisterous barking fit and daintily swims her way to the steps and shakes off in a huff; how she does hate getting her feet wet.

My beagle/pug Gaia has a slight obsession with my goggles and when I get too close to the edge she will lunge at my face, popping under the water’s chlorinated surface and bouncing back up, eager to get at the plastic encasing my eyes…as if it were some doggie pool toy, taunting her from a distance.

The whole experience is quite comical as I mediate the swimming laps with Guinness, monitoring the sidelines hysteria of Gracie, and the OCD goggle compulsion of Gaia all while trying to get a little bit of Floridian sun and swim in for myself.  I laugh to myself and think, “Is this mess family?” as I can hear my husband in the background grilling up salmon and muttering something about needing the next new Mac product.  I laugh a little bit and think {in response to myself}, “I hope so.”

Just a little tidbit from the pool’s edge on a Wednesday night with the family.  Thinking about the many ways in which animals can be therapeutic in life.  How they can teach us lessons about ourselves and our capacities for caring.  Or even just help us define what “family” might look like.

“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.**

“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