Author Archives: MaryAnn Reynolds

About MaryAnn Reynolds

I practice advanced bodywork in Austin, TX, specializing in Craniosacral Biodynamics and TMJ Relief.

The universal language of babies

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Okay, so this is unrelated to most of the posts on this blog, except for me wanting to be of service by providing new-to-me (and I hope to you) information to improve your quality of life.

It turns out that those little noises that babies make before they really start crying actually have meaning. Babies have been signaling us when they’re hungry, sleepy, feeling general discomfort such as needing a diaper change, feeling lower GI distress like gas, and needing to burp.

Each of these has its own distinct sound.

If we can attend to their needs before they start crying, well, then they cry less! This seems revolutionary. What could it do to a population’s quality of life if all infants had their needs tended to quickly?

This was discovered by a brilliant woman gifted in auditory memory who became a mother, figured this out, and tested it around the world.

Watch this segment from Oprah:

The woman is Priscilla Dunstan. Here’s her website, in case you want to order the DVD: http://dunstanbaby.com/

I find it amazing that this has been right under our noses for millennia, and only now can it be discovered, tested, and widely taught.

It’s also amazing to think about how different the world might be if all parents learned these 5 signals and could tend to their infants’ needs better. Less frustration = more happiness.

It could be revolutionary.

With sparkling eyes and good posture!

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From today’s Ocean of Dharma email, this is who we really are:

THE DIGNITY OF FEARLESSNESS

There is more to fearlessness than merely having overcome fear. Beyond that, when we speak of fearlessness, we are describing a positive state of being full of delight and cheerfulness, with sparkling eyes and good posture. This state of being is not dependent on any external circumstances. It is individual dignity. This joy and unconditional healthiness is the joy, the basic virtue, that comes from being what we are, right now. ~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I have to say, the description of sparkling eyes and good posture is how I enjoy living my life, as much as I possibly can. It’s where I return when external circumstances take me out of it temporarily.

Joy and unconditional healthiness is who we are, and I am so grateful to have read this early today, as I woke this morning processing some sad, hurt, disappointed, angry feelings, with tears in my eyes.

This feels more like home, these sparkling eyes and good posture!

Tips for talking to men/women, from Elephant Journal

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10 Key Strategies for Talking to (Wo)men. {NSFWish} | elephant journal.

Loved this down-to-earth approach to getting yourself out there and meeting new people, in service of developing a meaningful relationship. Thanks, Waylon!

Body by yoga: beautiful video

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Love this video of a committed yogi practicing at home, in her underwear, while a man sleeps nearby.

You can read an interview of the yogi in Elephant Journal here. Amazingly, she talks about having body image problems and an eating disorder. She got help through Overeaters Anonymous and yoga.

She’s also a mother.

It’s spring cleansing time! Liver/GB cleared, reduced allergies, reduced anger

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I’m reblogging a post about spring cleansing from last March because it got a lot of views back then and it still applies! I’m currently nearing the end of this year’s spring cleanse, which I started a couple of days after the solstice.

Last spring, after doing the colon/parasite cleanse, I finally cleared my liver and gallbladder of hardened bile (green stones). This may seem like not a big deal, but it is. There appears to be a link between the health of the liver and allergies.

In Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, there’s also a link between the health of the liver and the emotions — specifically the emotion of anger and its relatives, irritability, exasperation, annoyance, outrage, hatred, fury, and so on. You can google “liver anger” to learn more.

Since clearing those organs of stones, anger appears less often and dissipates more quickly in my life. Of course anger is part of a full, healthy range of emotions, but have you ever noticed that some people are inordinately angry (at others or themselves)? That is not pleasant to experience or be around!

If you go through life feeling angry, consider that your organs play a big role in your biochemistry, including emotional, and you can change your emotional makeup toward less anger and more happy feelings by cleansing those organs.

Here’s the original post, dated March 30, 2011:

I started the colon/parasite cleanse today. It’s spring! Time to clean out the system! I do this twice a year.

I wrote about this last fall. You can click this link to my earlier post, which contains instructions for the colon/parasite cleanse, which is fairly simple, and information about the liver/gallbladder flush, which is more complex but worth doing.

I didn’t provide instructions for the flush because it’s complicated, and in my opinion, if you’ve never done it before, it’s best done under the supervision of an expert, experienced health care practitioner who’s quickly available should you have any questions or problems.

One new bit of information to note: The company that makes Paracidin, which rids the body of parasites in the liver, gallbladder, spleen, and pancreas, has changed the name of that product to Paratosin. The labels, including dosage and ingredients, are identical except for the name.

Another new bit of information that I’ve heard or read from several sources: allergies are related to liver toxicity. I’m not sure about this, but thought I’d put it out there. If you have experience or information on this, please share.

My respiratory allergies have decreased dramatically over time. I had NAET acupuncture treatment in 2000 (when I moved back to Austin, allergy capital of the world), and it made a substantial difference.

Before NAET, Seldane or Claritin every day, year round, plus at least one sinus infection per year requiring antibiotics.

After NAET, I’d take an occasional Claritin, and I’ve had only one sinus infection in the 10 years since, when I walked to and from work on a windy day last spring after a long dry spell — exposing myself to lots of pollen. Acupuncture helped me recover from that.

NAET worked pretty well for me.

I’ve done the liver/gallbladder flush twice a year (two nights in a row each time) for about 3 years. I rarely take medication for allergies any more. I feel unpleasant side effects if I take Claritin, so if I’m having nasal congestion and sneezing, I take a homeopathic remedy, Histaminum hydrochloricum, and that does the trick. I use it maybe once a week at peak pollen times. My body doesn’t respond to allergens like it used to. (Another day I’ll post on the NLP allergy cure, which has probably also made a difference.)

So it’s possible that the flush has improved my liver’s health and reduced my allergies. They haven’t gotten worse. (This does not apply to my gluten sensitivity, just to airborne allergens.)

Here’s a link to an article I found with much more information on the liver/gallbladder cleanse, including what actually happens in those organs.

The instructions are pretty close to what my acupuncturist says. She has me test my pH before doing the flush to make sure my body is clearly alkaline, and she has me do it two nights in a row. She also suggests taking magnesium malate when it’s difficult to make fresh, organic apple juice in quantity.

Travels with friends: stories from Paradise Island and Maui

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One of my favorite ways of getting to know people better is to travel with them. I’ve been lucky enough to have taken several trips with people who were friends before we traveled together. Spending travel time together deepened our friendships.

Some of these trips were to other places in the world — the Bahamas, London, Maui (twice) — and some were road trips in Texas, even just to San Antonio, 80 miles down the road from Austin.

An hour and a half with a friend in a car can cover a lot of sharing.

Fanny, Pauline, and I went to the Bahamas together and had a total blast. We stayed in the mega-resort Atlantis, and wandering around Paradise Island and Nassau was hugely fun with them.

I learned how to snorkel for that trip, and one day, Fanny and I took a boat trip to visit a sunken boat used in an old James Bond film and check out a coral garden. We saw the “tongue of the ocean” where the deep Atlantic and the shallow Caribbean meet, where looking down, you see the grassy sea bottom drop off into utter darkness.

At the end of that trip, we snorkeled with sharks. (They were well-fed before we got into the water.) Their skin feels like sandpaper, and I noticed that everyone kept their arms and legs pulled in!

In the marketplace in Nassau, we’d been shopping and my feet were hurting (back in those days — never happens now), and I was tired of kids pestering me, hawking crappy trinkets I didn’t want.

I asked the most aggressive little boy if he would sing a song for me for a quarter. He obliged. Other children gathered, and for a couple of bucks, I heard song after song, many of which were hymns. We drew a crowd.

It was an unexpected tourist adventure, and I’m glad I thought of it — just from thinking that these children must have something else of value to offer besides crappy trinkets.

I still remember one little girl who sang so sweetly and beautifully about Jesus.

~~

Linaka took me to Rice Park on Maui. It’s up the volcano near Kula, and from there, you can see nearly three-quarters of Maui’s coastline and get as close to a bird’s eye view of the amazingly small mountainous island as possible without actually being in the air.

It took my breath away and gave me some navigational bearings I could never have gotten from a map. That map was the territory.

Then she taught me kalani hula, and we laughed.

On another trip to Maui, Glenda drove us on the Hana Highway. I didn’t know her very well before, but we spent over six hours together in the car on that trip, and she’s become a dear friend. She’s blessed my house in a fabulous ritual, and I can request from her a reiki dance for myself and those I care about when needed as well as send love to her when she needs it.

Glenda happens to be one of the most enthusiastic and loving, compassionate people I’ve ever met. She changed me.

There’s something really magical about being on a tropical island with friends.

I camped with Katie and Keith up on the Haleakala volcano on Maui in Hosmer’s Grove. The highlight of that experience was getting up way before dawn to drive to the top of the volcano to watch the sunrise.

When we got there, a crowd had already assembled. It was cold, about 35-40 degrees F. We found vantage points, and at the very moment the sun peeked over the clouds, a native Hawaiian man began chanting in Hawaiian. I have no idea what it meant, but it was obviously a sacred greeting, and he had a beautiful voice.

And then the magic really started…

We could see the tops of two volcanoes on the Big Island above the clouds off to the southeast. As the clouds cleared to the west, we could see the shadow of the volcano falling over west Maui and the smaller islands. Vertiginous… And then there was Nick Goodness, the story teller…

Sometimes when you travel with friends, you have shared experiences that sink in so deeply, your bond deepens.

You feel even more at home in this world. You have arrived in a new, more connected place, an inner, heartfelt place and a worldly, outer place.

Healing and personal growth: knowing when you’re ready for commitment

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Carolyn Hax is a columnist for the Washington Post. She’s sort of like Dear Abby: people write to her with their problems, and she responds.

She has a gift for identifying the key issues for making decisions that lead to healthy, whole lives. I have been reading her for years and often feel awe for her advice. She doesn’t gloss over how difficult life can be, and she helps people wake up and grow up.

Because I’ve been writing here about recovering from trauma, this particular Q&A really seems worth sharing.

Dear Carolyn:

I had a lot of problems stemming from a very hard childhood. If I had entered into a relationship right away, then I would have been a “hot mess.” However, after years of therapy and some serious soul-searching (including very lonely moments of realizing how much I needed help), I am now about to get married.

I worry, because I am not completely healed from my childhood — but I am getting there. Is it okay to get married and move on while healing at the same time? My gut tells me to go with it — and take it one step at a time.

To Be or Not to Be … Insecure

I can’t know whether you’re ready for marriage, but I also don’t believe there’s a magic point where people become “well” or “fully healed” or whatever else we shoot for. Growth is lifelong if you’re doing it right.

That said, here are two things to look for before committing to anyone: the strength to live honestly, and the ability to take good care of yourself and the people you love.

The latter is straightforward, since a “hot mess” by definition can barely manage one or the other, much less both — and, too, meeting your needs and your partner’s tends to be mutually exclusive in unhealthy relationships. Very useful as a DON’T DO IT alarm.

Living honestly is more complicated: If it were easy to spot when we lie to ourselves, we wouldn’t do it so much, right? But, generally, we’re excellent at identifying in hindsight the ways we rationalized doing stupid things (admitting it . . . different story).

So we can take the memory of those rationalizations — the constant explaining and justifying — and compare that sensation to what we’re feeling now.

Since the whole point of rationalizations is to avoid an unwelcome truth, discarding them is no fun. But it still beats the slow agony of living with choices that don’t fit.

Why just honesty and good care? They’re key to preserving your sense of yourself within a relationship — allowing you to maintain good relationships and escape bad ones. That’s really all anyone needs.

Write to Carolyn Hax, Style, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, ortellme@washpost.com. Subscribe at www.facebook.com/carolynhax.

Thank you, readers, for 40,000 views!

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Just noticed the view count has topped 40,000. Not much to say — I’ll do a summary when I hit the major milestone of 50,000 views.

I do want to say it’s a bit astonishing that blog views hit 20,000 in October 2011 and 30,000 in January 2012. Most days this blog gets over 100 views — sometimes many more than that.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, I want to thank you for it. I hope you find something useful, informative, inspiring, and/or nourishing here.

I especially appreciate those of you who keep coming back. I hope it’s worth your while.

Hugs for everyone!

Comment on “Trauma release heavy heart”

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Sometimes a reader responds to a blog post that appeared a long while ago. Today I received a comment on Trauma release heavy heart, originally published on October 4, 2010. I wrote that post after discovering that someone had used those words as a search term and landed on my blog.

The beauty of using search engines is that content can be “new to you” years after it was first written.

So for those who subscribe and read posts as I post them, here’s a recap of that post, if you don’t want to click the link above and read the original (I know, I know, it takes time):

I mentioned that heartbreak can feel traumatic, that time and the kindness of others helps, and that meditation can expand your sense of yourself beyond the heaviness of your heart.

I did bring up some positive things about having a heavy heart: it means your heart center is active and alive, which isn’t true of everyone. Some people have very closed-off hearts.

I mentioned doing EFT, using a homeopathic remedy, crying, and being kind to someone who needs it.

Rubyinparadise commented today:

Lovely post. :) I was just Googling David Berceli’s work and found your blog. I am a restorative yoga teacher, and I am also very interested in the subjects of Radical Acceptance (Tara Brach), vipassana meditation, psoas release, PTSD recovery, inner child healing, and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (Marsha Linehan). DBT teaches the skills of emotion regulation, mindfulness, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness. It is used for people with PTSD, Borderline Personality Disorder, and those who simply struggle with such skills, perhaps due to early childhood trauma, chemical imbalance, a highly sensitive nature, or all of the above. I keep stumbling across references to EFT as well, but I haven’t explored that as of yet.

I’m responding to her directly, as I do for most comments, but I think it’s good to share that here is someone else who is interested in how to heal trauma and is exploring various techniques.

I myself am not familiar with radical acceptance, inner child healing, or DBT. I’m not sure about psoas technique. I know the psoas is the key “fight or flight” muscle — I know how to palpate it but would love to learn a release technique beyond the TREs.

I would like to note that sometimes I struggle with how much I really want to put my energy into trauma healing — learning about it for my own healing and potentially to work with others. Does it retraumatize me? I’m looking at that. I’d like for it not to. I get tired of trauma, recovery, healing, and so on.

I was told by hand analyst Rich Unger that my hand says that I am a spiritual teacher in this area, working with people who have been traumatized. Sometimes I feel drawn to it, and sometimes not. Sometimes I just want everything to do with trauma to be over and done with. I want to be well — and so I am, most of the time.

Right now, I feel like occasional writing is enough, providing a healing story for others who may be less far along on their healing path. It helps to have models who can let you know that recovery is possible, because if it’s possible for me, it’s possible for you.

I’d love to hear others comment with stories on their own trauma recovery and healing.

And… I have just ordered a book of yoga poses for trauma recovery. (I bet they involve the psoas.)

I want to work with my therapist/shaman/friend on how I can learn to not be triggered by other people’s traumas. I don’t even know if that is possible. Maybe we just scream together. But I do believe I can benefit from some changework.

It seems that there were some rapid gains from focusing my attention for the first time on processing and integrating my childhood trauma, but after the first couple of years, or even the first nine months, the breakthroughs haven’t come as quickly or been as painless.

I’m grateful that I have a real life now that includes stability, connection, health, fun, growth, reflection, and being grounded. It’s home base. When I foray from it into trauma (whether voluntarily or involuntarily), I have a sweet, safe place to return to.

Not everyone has that. If I could give anyone just that, I would.

Happy Easter!

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I want to share this wonderful quote from Jean Houston:

Resurrection is essentially a remembrance of one’s true nature and a waking up to this remembrance.

This Easter, may you wake up and remember who you really are.