Posts Tagged ‘breath’
Florida NASW Conference, Trauma, and Fear
“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
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Breath as the “Master Key” : An Exploration of Breathwork & The Integrative Mental Health Conference
“It is impossible to be in a state of panic and to breath deeply, slowly, quietly and regularly. It cannot coexist.
The subjective experience of anxiety is often of being out of control. If you deal with this by giving a patient a drug you are reinforcing the notion that the locus of control is outside. If patients can discover that they have within them access to controls over emotional states it is a revelation. And when you try to deal with this with an outside suppressive measure the effectiveness of the measure decreases with frequency of use. Whereas when you rely on an innate measure like this the power of technique increases with repetition. This is the single most effective anti-anxiety measure I have come across (breathing exercise).
When I tell colleagues about it it is TOO simple. How did we get to this state where we think the only effective medical treatment is drugs? ”
BY DR. ANDREW WEIL, BREATHWORK Workshop, INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE 2010.
BREATHWORK:
I am a huge proponent of breath as a potent healing activity and so I was excited when I got my 2 disc CD recording of the first ever INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE in the mail and found an entire workshop with Dr. Andrew Weil on a biological, neurological, scientific and psychological affirmation of the power of breath for healing! His quote above only touches on the mastery of the workshop, the hopefulness of breathwork integration in the field of psychotherapy, and plenty of rich data from the anthropological to the biological as to why breath can alleviate many of the ills we, as a society, might presently over-medicate before looking for alternate solutions. He perfectly synthesizes above the crux of the reason why internal resources can be more potent and long lasting than chemical and external solutions for issues of anxiety.
In Dr. Weil’s workshop “Breathwork for Optimum Health” he discusses breath as the “Master Key” and I could not think of a more apt description of this tool that I have imparted to every client I see–and so, apparently, does Dr. Weil. I feel in good company. He stated that his simple breath exercise, similar in structure to my own, is the one thing he teaches everyone he sees. I take clients through a breathing exercise and ask them how they feel, when they say how relaxed they feel I remind them that THEY not I got themselves to that state of relaxation. I may have said the words but the only thing that got their body and mind relaxed was their own body and mind. Another thing I was excited to hear resonate with Dr. Weil’s description above of the internal resources versus the external crutches that over-medicating can produce. We have such powers for change inside ourselves which I explored in the NEUROBIOLOGY & NEUROPLASTICITY post a short while ago–we just don’t tap into that power for change for the positive nearly enough.
If I can teach one client breath and they can sleep better, calm down faster, diminish their anger in one situation they would not have had the internal resources to deal with prior then, to me, it is a valuable tool. When I hear a COMBAT MARINE VETERAN tell me he is practicing alternate nostril breathing at home for anger and sleep or another telling me that he presses his palms together at his chest and practices nostril breathing for anxiety, both with amazing anecdotal results, then I can say that if it works for them it could work for any of us–given the chance!
If you have not tried a basic breathing practice then maybe just try listening to a quick soundbite, mp3, cd of a simple breathing technique or maybe I can outline a simple one on the site if there is interest.
INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE:
Am I a nerd because I checked my mail anxiously every day awaiting it’s arrival? Answer is: yes! But I was waiting all last week to receive the INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE recordings as I could not make it to the conference but I wanted to imbibe every moment of the rich material with speakers like Jon Kabat–Zinn, Dr. Weil, Amy Weintraub and many other academics, researchers, and practitioners in the field of integrative practices for mental health and wellness. The CDs, which contain 40 hours of material, are a rich and hopeful array of work in this field and an inspiration of what is possible within the field.
The conference was made up of social workers, nurses, doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists and was sold out weeks before the event. If this doesn’t show the hunger in the health and mental health field for treatments outside of the scope of what western medicine is capable of then I don’t know what is. It shows that this field is burgeoning and that more professionals than ever before are integrating holistic approaches into the course of traditional treatments they already provide. The point of INTEGRATIVE is not to get rid of anything just to find the perfect complement of what is being done and what else can be added to the equation for more effective results for a whole person: mind, body, and spirit.
The recordings are phenomenal and I recommend them to any professional in the healthcare field or any person interested in a variety of treatment approaches for their own health–body and mind. The conference sessions can be purchased as a complete set or a-la-carte per workshop for $15.00 per session. Each one has a dense collection of material and each presentation gives a variety of resources where you can learn more about the practices discussed in the lecture–a lovely bonus.
A few of the amazing lectures included:
- The Psychoneuroimmunology of Resilience, Optimism, and Hope
- Mind-Body Medicine: Clinical Hypnosis for Medical and Mental Health Conditions
- Transforming Your Mind: Meditation and Neuroplasticity
- Spirituality and Mental Health: Paradigms and Evidence
- Deficiencies in Omega 3-EFAs & Substance Abuse Mechanisms
- Creating the Chemistry of Joy
- A Vision of the Future of Integrative Mental Health
- Lifeforce Yoga: Empower Your CLients to Manage Their Moods
Can you see why I was in love with these CDS?
For more information on the Conference & The hosting facility ARIZONA CENTER FOR INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE: http://integrativemedicine.arizona.edu/integrative_mental_health_conference.html
For more information on the recordings go to: http://www.conferencerecording.com/aaaListTapes.asp?CID=IMH10
Circle of Spirituality: Two Weekends, Two Rituals, One Spiritual Path
| “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” Douglas Adams, writer
One week. Two rituals. Two spiritual practices. But somehow familiarity in each and universality in the intention. The more I become invested in a spiritual path that includes meditation, meditative prayer, and cultivating inner peace and connection to something divine the more threads of wonderful connectedness I find between myself and every other person, my path and every other spiritual path around me. The greatest element of synchronicity I have been lavishing in has been in my Christian Contemplative and Mystic journey and my spiritually enlivened yogic Sivananda route. I have made an effort to not be overtly “religious” on this blog but definitely openly spiritual. In this instance, and for the sake of the beauty in this element of my life path (as I have found it) I want to go a little into my own personal faith space–as it were. I was raised a Catholic, my husband a Protestant and we have been searching for a space, place, and practice where the twain should meet. The Episcopalian tradition of faith is infused with lovely ritual and ceremony that I always found “homey” elements of Catholicism while also being richly community, mission, and textually oriented in ways that my husband has always loved. Best of all that beyond both of our traditions of origin, the particular community of Episcopals we stumbled upon seem to embody the foundations of faith we both love–inclusion, compassion, universal love, open intrigue into the unknown, and an ability to interweave and converse with every other spiritual path there is to “God” or a cosmically larger entity than self–however one defines it. That was abundantly clear when I discovered their series on Eastern Religions. RITUAL 1: Anyway, we both sort of fell in love with this beautiful evolution of our histories of faith with a core much more akin to where both our hearts are–in exploring the world and faith with open mind, open heart (as one of my favorite contemplatives Thomas Keating wrote of in his book with the same name). And so last Sunday, on Valentines Day we became confirmed into this body of faith that we felt we could grow in and love together. It was a far more intimate experience than I imagined it could be and intimate at every level. I stood in the back of the church waiting for the ceremony to begin and recalled back a moment similar to that–my Catholic Confirmation–from over a decade earlier. I remember standing in the back of that church in that “official” moment of adulthood and having nothing but questions and skepticism and some resentments. I remember not wanting to be where I was and not sure where I wanted to be. I was conflicted at every level of my “self” and I think I spent many of my years following in a multitude of crisis. I wanted to believe what I believed in –everyone was equal, we all had intrinsically good souls, and there was a space in internal silence where a voice could be heard that was not mine but came from inside me at the deepest level…from the root of the root and the bud of the bud. Last Sunday was the opposite of my initial confirmation experience I felt, instead of solidifying a membership into a religion and sect I wasn’t sure about I finally understood more clearly the heritage I came from and the progression of my spiritual journey that led me to the place where I found myself. Where I could enjoy one path of faith and still be committed to learning, understanding, and finding likeness and beauty in all other paths to same source. And without feeling I needed some sort of solitary allegiance to one place, space, and role to be a participant in my own faith; being able to explore all the others with a sense of the communal and eternal in all faiths. I have read much and thought much about the young, childlike faith we all begin our lives inside of–one with strict rules, this not that, good not bad, right not wrong–a very black and white religion. That kind of faith helps us formulate what we believe in at a beginner level and gets us, hopefully, to a space where we are comfortable knowing our own “box” but not needing to live in it. A space where we can live outside of our comfort zone, our known norms, and into the rich and wonderful rewarding place of exploration, questioning, and yearning to know the world at a more multidimensional level. I think I had to get to that space in my own faith before I could enter back into a community of faith without feeling I was placing myself back into a restrictive box. I feel a new sense of adventure about this journey of self, experience, and community.
RITUAL 2: In the circular and cyclical nature of the world and spirituality I participated in a second ritual of sorts this past Sunday. A Swami from San Francisco, a clever wisp of a man, cloaked in saffron with a softness and kindness in his every gesture, came to my yoga school this weekend and I participated in a Mantra Initiation and Naming Ritual. Having missed out on Ash Wednesday, I was again blown away by the ever-increasing similarities of nuances and symbolism I find abounding the more I study faiths, philosophies, and spiritualities in various contexts. Part of the Mantra Initiation includes the initiant having ashes placed on their forehead–to remind us all that ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as we came from the earth to the earth we return. This is also the same reason Ashes on Ash Wednesday are used–the identical reason. I was given the sacred mantra of my choosing–“So Ham”. I chose “So Ham” because it means that we are not our bodies or our minds, we are connected to something larger and more divine. Interestingly the root of the meaning in this Mantra is the same at the root of Christian Contemplative Prayer practice (as well as many other contemplative prayer practices)–we connect to the divine in self through clearing our mind of mental “garbage” and filling it only with sacred words and corollary thoughts and intentions of divinity. Mindfulness is the beginnings of this kind of clarity–something that I have not come close to mastering in any sustainable way…yet. I also chose it because this meditation mimics breath–in, so, out, ham. It reminded me of the story I had heard Richard Rohr tell at his talk a few weeks ago. He spoke about a rabbi he heard lecture who spoke about the origin of the word Yahweh in Judaism as mimicking breath. It is interesting to me how the pace and origin of breath seems inextricably linked, in human consciousness and maybe beyond, with something larger than self, something divine in nature. There I sat, on blond wooden floor and meditation pillow, clothed in the traditional white garb of Mantra Initiation made of gauzy linens and cottons, meditating on my sacred words, seated cross-legged and reveling in the lovely versatility of spiritual paths and experiences I had imbibed in over the last two weeks–of course in contemplating that fact I was leaving my mantra behind and becoming distracted from the very thing I had been working towards–inner silence, contemplative prayer, and peaceful mind. As I smirked to myself at my own irony–I often do that–I found gratitude in being able to explore a world so rich with faith traditions that, while divergent in language, garb, and texts also so similar in nuance, ritual, and intention. What an exciting exploration. What a world of faith we can breathe in. What wonderful new levels and pages of world knowledge I feel privileged to imbibe in as I explore yoga further, expound on christian contemplation further, and find the mystical beauty in every pocket and nook of the world. I remember reading the prologue of Thich Naht Hanh‘s book Living Buddha, Living Christ written by the Dalai Lama where he said (I am paraphrasing) “There are places in the world where rice grows better and so people eat rice. There are places where wheat grows better and so people eat bread. There is nothing wrong with eating what is appropriate for where you live, what grows there, and what you were raised knowing.” We find our faith comforts and that is often where we stay, in what we know, but in that there is no harm in learning and understanding and growing in our own faith by understanding better all those that surround it–because at the root of the root, and the bud of the bud, we all come from ashes and return to the same. Om and blessings on all of your personal paths and journeys of faith and belief and finding what fits for you in a world rich with ideas and spiritual passions. |
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