The Power of Breath – Media’s New Find

29th
Jun. × ’09
By Owen

A recent story on NPR talks about how breathing in a slow, easy manner will reduce stress. Many of you who read this blog or practice mindfulness know how focusing on your breath can be the secret to stress reduction. I am glad the media is noticing the power of breath.

“Improving control of the breath while simultaneously learning to relax is critical” to not only reducing stress, but also from everything from singing as the story speaks about to enjoying life. This is a great intro to reducing stress through breathing - pass it on to your stressed out friends.

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A Film on How Stress Effects the Body and How Healing Works

23rd
Apr. × ’09
By Owen


A few nights ago, I saw a new film, The Living Matrix. Just released at a London premiere, it is making its way to the US. James L. Oschman, PhD, an old friend of mine, is one of the dozen scientists in the film, speaking about how healing occurs. These interviews are interwoven between impressive personal stories of healing.

The film addresses how stress influences the body and healing. You can’t heal if you are under stress. A physician highlighted in the film talked about how the key to her healing was traveling into her brain tumor to discover what it was doing for her. Then once she knew in a felt sense, she began to accept the feelings and knowledge. Six months later the tumor was gone, and she’s never had a recurrence.

I highly recommend the film to assist in creating a larger paradigm for your healing. The film covers placebo effects, demonstrating how what we believe creates our reality. For instance. the film cites a study of knee-surgery patients. Half of the subjects in the study never actually received the knee surgery, yet they had the same success rate as the ones who been operated on. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “it’s all in your head.”

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Want to Be Less Stressed? Change Your Life

8th
Apr. × ’09
By Owen

Some of you might have noticed most of my posting is at our new blog: www.wholerevolution.com (WR). One of my goals in WR is to address the underlining causes of stress. If you are an old reader of StressedOut.org, you will know that we discuss many ways to reduce stress.

With WR, I want to support you in creating the change you want in your life. A life that is MORE of what you want has LESS stress. But change can be difficult. We need help. Use Whole Revolution to assist your change.

Recently at WR, I discussed how to sustain change by eating a sustainable diet. Before that, I wrote about changing your context to create the change you want. Using a personal mission to direct your change eases and accelerates your change. The post on how to speed deep change gets to the core of the blog-it walks you through using an instinctual skill we all have for change. Joseph Campbell put it on the map when he called it the Hero’s Journey.

Over the last few years writing for StressedOut.org, I laid out many concepts and approaches that will stay relevant for years.  When I discover a new insight or tool for stress, I will share it with you here. In the meantime, I will be focusing on the Whole Revolution. Join the Revolution, the rss feed is: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/wholerevolution/wsIQ.

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Change Happens - 7 Ways to Make Change Work

20th
Jan. × ’09
By Owen

Be the change. That was Obama’s campaign slogan–borrowed from Gandhi, who got it from his father. Now it’s morphed into an inspirational mantra; President Obama is putting the responsibility for change back on us. Are you ready?

When you hear the word “change,” do you tense? Change is often accompanied with fear. We resist change. Change might mean not being in control.

But at least change produces something new. Without it, we’re bored. So at what point does your feeling shift from excitement to fear? When do you cross that line into the survival response of fight-or-flight? Is this economy causing you to cross that line?

As prey animals, deer are hardwired to sense the slightest change in ambient noise level. The sound of a twig snapping tells her to run.  As the predator, the mountain lion watches the woods to notice a change in the landscape to detect her prey. We also rely on changes in our environment to tell us what we need to do. When the change produces a critical situation, we rally our survival response. Your body might do this even while the rational part of your brain is saying, “Whoa! It’s ok. It’s not that critical.”

How to Change

How do you shift out of fear of change, so you can enjoy the exhilaration of change?  A few simple tactics:

  • Breathe. Taking a few deep breaths tells your body that it’s ok to relax, that you’re safe.
  • Feel the fear-and any other emotion that comes up. Express it. Move that energy out. As you change, keep feeling it. Use that energy, that fear, to move you. You will live.
  • Don’t deny what’s happening. Regardless of how you think you should respond, if you are feeling fear, anger or sadness from impending change, then  feel it! Then you can release it. You can’t release what you won’t acknowledge. Release it by experiencing in your body where these emotions are. As you allow the physical and emotional feelings to exist, they’ll get more intense at first (which is what you’re really resisting). Then they will subside as you release the feelings.
  • After a few good breaths, ask yourself, what is at risk? If this change occurs, what do you risk losing? What don’t you know? What will the new be like? Use these questions as  more than a head-trip. Feel your response. We often avoid addressing the fear directly. When we know it and begin to own it, the fear often dissolves.
  • Learn what the change is teaching you. If you knew the lesson, the intensity of the change would be less. What haven’t you learned before that you’re learning now? It could be that you never learned to express what you want and this situation is prodding you to express your needs.
  • Get help. Is there a person who can help you figure out this lesson? You don’t need to do it alone. Maybe you need to find a person who can model how you dance this change. It could be a person from history. Learn from others’ mistakes and successes.
  • Seek change. Shift from avoidance to allowance. The chaos that change produces can become a wave of pleasure. As a skier, I learn the slopes that once scared me now excite me. Use other venues to build your change muscles.

Change is always present. Today with the economic situation, it is constantly in our faces. We can’t hide - it will find us.

So let’s make change our ally. I believe that to change the planet, we first must change ourselves. It is essential that we begin to integrate the parts of ourselves that we separated from in the past because of stress. As we become whole, change begins to work for us; we naturally start affecting the planet in positive ways.

A small cadre of fellow change agents has joined me in creating www.WholeRevolution.com as a blog that supports us in being whole. Join the revolution.

Photo: Chuckumentary

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Small Town Stress

23rd
Nov. × ’08
By Owen

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn’t understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from.

from Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Cover of

Our community determines our stress and quality of life as described in the above quote. Living in a small town where social interaction is natural and encouraged, I can attest that there is less stress. Here in Sandpoint people seek out their neighbors. Building on this natural tendency three years ago, I started a men’s group. Today that one group is three groups, a women’s group and soon a couple’s group. We are creating a community within a community.

We affiliated with the Mankind Project going into our third year. This large international organization can’t understand our unusual success. We are still Gladwell’s Outliers. Unlike Mankind Project men’s groups, we first serve our men and our community. Listening to what we need and providing it continues to be the key to our success.

Our communities foster caring and pleasure. Enviably walking down our main street, you meet someone you know. It is easy to understand how the quality of life and health improves with the natural social interaction of a small town.

Web 2.0 addresses our unfulfilled need to relate and be supported. I suspect one of the outcomes of our economic shift will be a return to a slower pace supporting a healthier and more satisfying life.

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Finding a New Solution to Depression and ADHD

26th
Sep. × ’08
By Owen

The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently ran a long article on depression, chronicling what life is like for both children and adults with depression/bi-polar problems. Essentially, the primary treatment for anyone suffering from any of these disorders is drugs. The old ADHD diagnosis is now evolving; now it’s called depression, too, and children suffering from its symptoms are being given psychotropic drugs.

The increased frequency of these problems in our culture demands that we look beyond what pharmaceutical science has to offer. The use of more holistic therapies is not even mentioned in the article. In conventional medicine, diet, trauma, somatic imbalance, environmental and stress variables are not considered as co-causes. It saddens me that we’re not looking at—let alone treating—the causes of these conditions.

But some professionals do get it. In another article in the New York Times, Dr. Ronald Pies, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts and SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, comments on the depression diagnosis creating “a bogus epidemic of increasing depression.”

In my practice, I have seen many patients “cure” themselves of depression and ADHD using non-traditional therapies and lifestyle changes. It can be much like getting in shape: at first there is a lot of work and little benefit, but after awhile, the benefits are self-sustaining. The first step is to decide what model of depression you will use to define your condition, from there you can determine your next step.

As a former suffer of Asperger’s Syndrome, dyslexia and ADHD, my healing demonstrates you can go beyond medicating the symptoms to healing the condition(s). Many people will tell you these conditions are not curable, and they’re not—if you use pharmaceutical treatment. But sing bodywork, holistic nutrition, homeopathy, energy work such as acupuncture, and release of emotional trauma and stress, it is certainly possible to be “cured” of depression, bipolar disorder or ADHD.

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What is the hurry?

25th
Aug. × ’08
By Owen

How speed = stress

The Canadian journalist Carl Honore-author of the best-selling book In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed speaks about the benefits of slow living.

Honore claims the linear time paradigm; “time is money” is being replaced by the “slow movement” model. Slow living produces more pleasure and better health. The slow city movement is frosting connecting over speed. He makes a good point about how holistic medicine is inherently slow. The Italians now expanded the slow movement into sex.

As I mentioned before, slow work is producing higher production. Multi-tasking is not productive. From the workplace to the home Honore claims slowness is growing.

Stress reduction needs to integrate slowness for our kids and us. Honore speaks about how kids are lacking spark and passion because of being pushed with homework and extracurricular activities. Fortunately, we are putting the brakes on our speed. We are making conscious choice to have a richer, whole life through traveling through it with less speed.

There are places where speed is good. Having faster Internet connections certainly increases production and reduces stress. The unconscious conditioning around speed that we created in our lives is not good. Being mindful of where speed servers us and where slowing down servers us will enrich our lives. As my mother use to say to me, what is the hurry?

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Back Pain

25th
Jul. × ’08
By Owen

I wrote an article on back pain and stress. It is at Sandpoint Wellness Council’s blog.

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The Truth about ADHD and Its Drugs

5th
Jun. × ’08
By Owen

ADHD has become a veritable plague on our children. Some attribute the rise in the incidence of this condition to us simply being more aware of what always existed. Mike Adams contends that the cause of ADHD is diet. Others argue that this syndrome is only a creation of professionals and drug companies. Many are pushing for more testing and pharmaceutical treatment.

On top of all this, the media is telling us children with ADHD have smaller brains. But Mike Adams points out that the study the media is quoting about the “small brain phenomenon” was done on children taking ADHD medication. Further, he references a longitudinal study proving that children on these meds experience stunted growth. All these study results raise more questions than they answer.

I had ADHD as a child, I had it as an adult, and I’ve had dozens of children and adult clients with it, so I speak from personal experience. To address this issue, to get at the root cause, I believe the first thing we need to do is step back from all the hype. Let’s take a hard look at the culture our children are growing up in. The expectations, constant stimulation and projections from their parents continue to increase. Our children are simply stressed out.

What cured me of my ADHD was dealing with my stress – my old, stored stress – and learning not to reproduce it. I have found that, for most children and adults suffering from ADHD, their way of dealing with stress produces the ADHD responses.

A growing number of studies demonstrate that Mindfulness practices reduce ADHD symptoms. In one study, 78% of participants reported a reduction in total ADHD symptoms when using Mindfulness techniques.

We need to teach our children—and ourselves—to experience stress in a healthy manner. We all need to learn to accept its present effect on us, then release the stress or tension in the present moment. With this conscious response to it, stress does not build. The released stress does not find another means of expression, such as ADHD behavior.

ADHD is only one manifestation of the effects of constant stress; we are seeing more incidences of everything from childhood obesity to violence. Repressing the symptoms of ADHD with a time-release amphetamine is not dealing with the cause. When we finally deal with that root cause—the stressful environment our children live in—our children will be calmer, healthier and blissfully unmedicated.

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Mental Catch-and-Release of Emotions

27th
May. × ’08
By Owen

When you avoid a feeling, you may experience physical or psychological pain. This mind/body connection is a cornerstone of alternative medicine, and it seems that mainstream medicine is finally catching on. A recent New York Times article reports on the growing acceptance of Mindfulness as a valid therapy approach.

The Times article points out something obvious to those of us who practice Mindfulness: studies show some people get worse with Mindfulness therapy. That is true. Some people do get worse-but usually right before they get a lot better. With repressed emotional pain, you must recognize the emotion-and the physical symptom it’s causing-allow yourself to experience that emotion, and accept the emotion before you can release it. The good news is, once you accept and experience the old feelings, you’re done with it. That pain is gone for good.

Old stress frequently leaves the way it went in. For example, if you lost someone whom you cared deeply about, but didn’t allow yourself to fully, deeply feel and release the pain, the pain can turn into tension. That tension in turn creates physical symptoms. Using Mindfulness to treat that pain, the tension lets go. And as that happens, some of the “stored emotions” will release to be experienced in the present moment. But once you’ve caught and released that pain, you’re free of it-physically and emotionally.

As we continue to catch-and-release our emotions, we lighten our load of tension. We also teach our bodies and minds to experience and release on their own. Letting go becomes the default behavior. That is the biggest gift of Mindfulness.

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