Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘Florida’

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.

“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

“The secret to humor is surprise.”

Aristotle

I want to say a sincere thank you to everyone reading this blog and to everyone who has passed through the last, almost, year.  When I began this blog 100 posts ago last August I knew there were going to be seismic shifts in my life–newly married, relocating to Florida from NJ, and beginning new work in a new stage of life, state of the nation, and state of mind.  Much has happened that I expected but most that I never could have fortold.  Which is why, as I always tell my clients, don’t project or ruminate on what may be because, as I am continually learning, whatever our brains could imagine is nothing even close to the life we are given.  Day by day I am surprised, for better or worse, in lessons I wanted to learn and especially those I needed but never wanted, how much of life is surprises and how little works out how we choreograph it in our minds. 

At my 100th post, on the verge of a year “on the air”, virtually speaking, and with a plethora of surprises on my plate of life (good, bad, and really ugly) I marvel at life and am reminded that while Hollywood continues to churn out excellent fictions, the real stuff is the best script of all.  I am trying, difficult as it is with a work schedule that seems to bleed into nights and weekends (at least for now), to get back into my creative landscape and start seriously chipping away at the chapters of my book. 

I have many added rich layers of content especially following my recent visit with Shelley Rosenberg and Nancy Coyne in Arizona and I have still one more installment of my series of posts on my adventures with them–complete with boundary goat and all.  My book, as my life, has taken many surprising turns on this journey, morphing into something unexpected and new at every turn–although my once optomistic deadline of New Year’s 2011 for completion may have been a bit on the ridiculous side as I discover the layers and nuances in writing book-length prose. 

The chapters of my book, and the chapters of my life, reveal new material with every page, with every day and I am left thinking and quoting (as I have before) the punk rock song line, “All I know is that I don’t know.  All I know is that I don’t know nothing.”  My blog, as with everything right now in my life, is beginning a metamorphasis and a facelift of sorts.  I have branched off of wordpress.com and their free blog into an exciting and daunting self-run (eek) wordpress.org blog!  I am excited for what comes although bear with my learning curve on the nuances of a page run by these tech-savvy-less hands. 

I hope to explore so much more in the world of mental health, trauma healing, and mind, body, and spirit wellness in the next 100 posts.  Here is a quick teaser of a few of the fun things on the horizon!

• Interview with Margaret Burns Vap of Big Sky Yoga Retreats & Cowgirl Yoga!
• Interview with Elizabeth Plapinger, lawyer, Columbia School of Law professor, and co-creator of the Yoga for Mental Health & Wellness program at The Breathing Project in NYC!
• Interview with Michael Stone, co-founder of Center of Gravity Sangha, author, yogi, psychotherapist, and international lecturer on yoga, buddhism, and mental health!
• And my upcoming speaking and posts about the Florida NASW Conference (June 11th), Region 5 NARHA Conference (August), National NARHA Conference (November), and my upcoming E-Course at WISHSTUDIO on self-care!  Feel free to come and join for any of these events if you happen to be in Florida, Alabama, Denver, or the virtual world–respectively !

I am looking forward to seeing what the next 100 posts of my life will bring!  Thank you again for all those that are on this virtual journey or the newcomers joining in on the bandwagon of self-care, mental health and wellness, healing from traumatic experience, and dealing with issues of disconnect and finding reconnection in our lives, in our souls, and in our minds!