Author Archives: MaryAnn Reynolds

About MaryAnn Reynolds

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

Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges – NYTimes.com

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Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges – NYTimes.com.

I love this new research about self-compassion. Our culture often gives us the message that we need to be tough and disciplined with ourselves, yet many aspects of our culture are not very healthy, from obesity, diabetes, and the standard American diet (SAD) to politics, greed, and the environment.

How can we as individuals change this? How do we get healthier? You can start with yourself.

A cutting edge of psychological research shows that giving yourself a break may move you toward better health instead of away from it.

Kristin Neff’s book, Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind, is on my to-read list.

People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggest that self-compassion can even influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight.

Dr. Neff, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, distinguishes between self-compassion and self-indulgence. A key question is whether you treat yourself as well as you treat the people you care about. Would you tell your child or best friend what you tell yourself when you are struggling?

Also, having compassion for your own suffering does not mean that nothing needs to be done. You can take a moment to feel what you’re feeling, have compassion for yourself, and then consider what you can do to make it better.

This is one of the reasons I like doing and teaching the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) using the method I learned from Dene Ballantine.

  1. You accept your own not-so-great emotional experience with compassion.
  2. You bring your focus into the present and onto yourself, without judgment, by forgiving yourself and others. You let go of the story.
  3. You create a direction for movement toward a more pleasant emotional experience.

My plans for Black Friday?

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Stay home this morning, blog, do homework, do laundry.

Have lunch with my cousin who’s visiting town at Casa de Luz, our local vegan restaurant. I’ve invited my daughter and granddaughter to join us. Haven’t seen them since Wednesday. By the way, I do not follow a vegan diet, but I eat like one sometimes.

Come home and study some more. I have 5 more days of classes at massage school, with significant homework assignments and tests coming up.

Later I will participate in a day-after-Thanksgiving casual potluck dinner with friends. I’m bringing “special drinks” — confident I’ll figure out what that means and prepare or buy something before then.

Shopping? Oh, no, no no! Not me! Not today, except perhaps at a grocery store for the “special drinks”. (Not alcoholic, by the way.)

I really don’t get why people enjoy shopping on Black Friday when so many other people are out shopping. The roads are jammed, parking lots full, retailers compete for your attention and dollars mightily. It’s overload.

In dance, we move into the empty spaces, not the spaces that people are already in.

Actually, it’s unusual for me to enjoy shopping. I’m pretty matter-of-fact about it — know what I want, get in, get out, mission accomplished, whew. The energy of malls often exhausts me rather quickly. I go when it’s not crowded. I also like thrift stores — pre-worn, soft clothing, it’s often easier to find my size, and it’s entertaining — someone wore that? Really?

When I do go to the mall, the Apple store is my favorite store, followed closely by Nordstrom because it feels spacious, the clerks are wonderful, and there’s a nice little restaurant for an escape from the retail scene. Not that I shop there much (it’s expensive), but it’s the rare store in the mall that has good vibes. Nordstrom makes shopping civilized. Apple makes it delightful.

Whatever your choice is, I hope you enjoy this day as fully as you can and let the gratitude deepen.

Pins and needles: Austin Hakomi practitioner tames anxiety gorilla | CultureMap Austin

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Pins and needles: Austin Hakomi practitioner tames anxiety gorilla – 2011-Nov-21 – CultureMap Austin.

Rupesh Chhagan, Hakomi acupuncturist and zendo and Facebook friend, profiled in CultureMap Austin.

Beauty.

Neurosculpting: Mapping the Mindscape | elephant journal

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Neurosculpting: Mapping the Mindscape ~ Lisa Wimberger | elephant journal.

Given the new discoveries that our brains are elastic and regenerative, rather than hardwired and fixed, what can you do to improve your mindscape? Writer Lisa Wimberger writes that first, we must do something about our stress:

Unfortunately, many of us function in low levels of stress most of the time. Getting our stress under control is extremely important, as it’s both a precursor and a result of remapping or sculpting. We cheat ourselves of all potential transformation when we ignore our stress.

She gives 10 practical tips, including exercising, reframing situations positively, consuming brain foods and supplements, and getting yourself into the alpha state.

Click the link to read all 10 tips.

Upcycle for Fun and Fashion! « 30 Days at a Time

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Upcycle for Fun and Fashion! « 30 Days at a Time.

My friend and fellow blogger Shelley Seale mentioned the upcycled t-shirt that I wore to Community Yoga a couple of weekends ago.

I love Shelley’s year of blogging about her 30-day experiments. She’s currently doing 30 days of learning, and she learned how to upcycle an old t-shirt into a cool messenger bag by taking a local class. Click the link above to check it out!

My girly cut t-shirt with the front and back woven lattice work was something I picked up at Austin City Limits, at Drive By Press‘ booth. It has a screen print of a Victrola on the front.

This video shows how to do the cutting and weaving. I’m not usually that crafty, but I’m going to make myself some out of thrift store t-shirts. They’re especially great to wear over yoga tops before and after class.

And by the way, I take delight in posting a more profound post like the previous one about recovering from trauma and following it with a light-hearted fun post. Why? Because I can.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself.
(I am large; I contain multitudes.) ~~ Walt Whitman

Getting over trauma and moving on with your life: some core questions

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I was revising the About Me page of my blog recently, the page where I tell you guys that I’ve mostly recovered from PTSD.

It occurred to me that if I shared a little more about that, it might be very, very useful to someone. PTSD is becoming more common, unfortunately.

What I’m coming to understand now is that it’s not so much what you specifically do to recover, although some ways of healing work better than others.

The bottom line is that you have to want to heal in order to heal. And nothing outside of you can get that wanting for you. It has to come from within, that desire to heal. You begin intending to heal, and healing begins to show up, and from then on, it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. It may be one step forward, 9/10th of a step back, but the spiral has begun.

Others can influence you to expand in that direction, though. For instance, believing it’s possible to heal. Some traumatized people are not in an environment where they hear that message. Sometimes everyone else has been traumatized, and no one has any resources to help. Some people have erected internal defenses that protect them from really hearing that message because suffering has become such a part of their identity that giving it up might leave a frightening void. Who would you be without your story? How can you intend to heal if you don’t believe it’s possible? 

Sometimes just knowing that another person has done it can make it possible for you. I can just encourage you to know that it’s possible to recover, to explore and discover, and use joy and expansion as navigation tools. Use your brain, too. 

What would it take for you to believe that recovering from trauma is possible for you? 

Honeys, so this is the thing about healing from trauma or loss: At some point, you realize that you’ve given enough of your life to suffering about that past event, and you’re still alive and likely have a good number of years left. What do you want for yourself? What do you really want? 

You can ask yourself these key questions:

  • Who would I be if that hadn’t happened to me? For sure, I’d be a lesser person if I had not suffered. At the same time, I grieve because it took me so long to get over it, to even know that I had PTSD and that I even could get over it. I cannot get those lost years of my life back, which makes my life now so much more meaningful. In the years I have left, I intend to make up for the lost time and be as happy and alive and myself as I can be. And, it is worthwhile to imagine your life if you hadn’t been sidetracked by trauma. What would you have gone on to do? I imagine that if I had really had the courage and confidence to develop my skills when I was a young woman, I might have gone to New York and worked in publishing and writing. So…guess what? I’ve worked in publishing and writing not in New York, and blogging was unimaginable back then. In some strange way, experiencing trauma did not derail my life as completely as I thought.
  • What gifts has your suffering brought? Although everyone’s story of suffering is different from mine, I do have a clue about how hard life can be, and it gives me a lot of compassion for people’s suffering, from war, famine, natural disaster, genocide, the many cruelties and tragedies that we all know exist and that some of us have experienced up close and personal — and the way these terrible events can influence beliefs about oneself, one’s fellow humans, and life in general, beliefs that can perpetuate the suffering, sometimes for generations.
  • How has your suffering shaped you? Knowing that one of the worst things that can happen — if you haven’t read About me, the brutal murder of my young sister when I was a child myself at a time when no one knew anything about PTSD — has already happened has helped me to have more courage. I spent years waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then one day I realized it probably never would. And…if it does, guess what? I have experience with trauma and now know so much better how to move through and beyond it.
  • If you choose not to have PTSD, where do you go from there? I recall a day after I had been diagnosed with PTSD, when I realized I didn’t like having it one bit. I actually was pretty clueless about it then. It was like being diagnosed with any incurable condition. I remember thinking to myself in a very surly manner that I want to beat the shit out of PTSD with a baseball bat. I didn’t ask for this, and I don’t want it! The mainstream psychiatric thinking (i.e., Judith Herman, DSM) back then, a mere 10 years ago, was that PTSD was incurable. Once you have it, you always do. Well, a lot has changed — notably, the work of Peter Levine and David Berceli showing that trauma resides in the body and can be released, and brain wave researchers finding signature brain wave patterns for PTSD that can be changed with brainwave optimization. I had to accept that the PTSD was in me, not outside of me, and if I were going to beat the shit out of it, I’d have to beat myself up! And I didn’t want to beat myself up in any way any more — which left me with this option: I’d need to somehow become sane and healthy. I gave up focusing on anyone but myself. I stopped blaming (including myself), and I put my heart and mind and body and spirit into examining and changing and updating my identity and map of reality. Not that that’s ever done and fixed. Now, I’m not immune to trauma. No truly alive person could be because being truly alive means being vulnerable. But I believe I could move through it now and not become stuck there, which is what PTSD is. Stuckness. Developing flexibility is the antidote.
  • What unknown joys await you? Yeah, I know. If you’ve experienced trauma, you may not be able to imagine them now, but they do lie waiting for you to want to experience them. You can just make a space for them now, and sooner or later, they will show up — maybe in your dreams at first, and then in your waking life. For me now, many of my joys are about relating to other people and connecting with them and loving them as deeply and unconditionally as I am able, being appreciated and recognized and accepted for who I am, and being able to use my gifts and talents to be of service in this world.

Serendipitously, a friend just emailed me this Native American quote:

Give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.

These are just some thoughts I wanted to share with you guys today. I imagine I will have more thoughts on this topic, so please stay tuned. And of course, your feedback and comments are welcome.

What if the human species became really good at recovering from trauma and even preventing it when possible? What kind of world might we live in?

Dana Foundation Blog: Using Mirrors to Reduce Arthritis Pain

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Dana Foundation Blog: Using Mirrors to Reduce Arthritis Pain.

I find it fascinating that by showing people a healthy limb in a mirror, they can remake their maps of their own bodies and gain functionality. Before now, mirror therapy has been useful for amputees. Now it’s being extended to those with osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.

I wonder what other kinds of mirror therapy are waiting to be discovered.

Book recommendation: Listen to Your Pain

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This blog post isn’t about anything especially far out. It’s actually pretty ordinary. It’s about injuries and pain and a book I came across in my studies that I like a lot. It’s very left-brained — and very practical.

Listen to Your Pain: The Active Person’s Guide to Understanding, Identifying, and Treating Pain and Injury is one of my textbooks in massage school. It’s not written for massage therapists, but I know I will find it useful.

I recommend this book for anyone who leads an active or adventurous life, who might occasionally experience falls, twists, or other accidents, who wants to know more about what’s going on.

I wish I had had this book in my library years ago. You might need to have a certain kind of information-freak mindset like me to appreciate this, but it could increase your understanding of your own body, save your medical dollars, and give you realistic information about what kind of time and attention it takes to heal from an injury.

Most of the injuries I’ve had have come from things like falls, bike wrecks, dance, yoga, running, pulling the lawnmower cord, a car wreck, and so on. Some like plantar fasciitis have crept up on me. It would have been helpful to me to be able to learn more about what was happening under my skin. One thing I’ve discovered in massage school is that most of us know very little about what’s going on inside our own bodies. 

Before massage school, I used books like The Anatomy of Movement and The Key Muscles of Yoga to help me understand my body better. In fact, referring to books like that probably helped draw me toward massage school and more study of anatomy. I love the drawings and the insight I get, and the language is a wonderful skill to acquire.

Here’s how Listen to Your Pain can be useful. Say you begin to experience knee pain. This could be obviously from something that happened, or it could be knee pain that gradually appears and worsens for no discernable reason, or maybe it comes and goes.

You can use this book to identify which structure in your knee is injured, how this injury usually occurs, ways to verify that you have this injury and not another, how long it could take to heal, what you can do yourself (ice, rest), what a massage therapist or doctor can do (deep frictioning, injections, surgery), and rehabilitative exercises.

The chapter on the knee is 54 pages long. It describes the anatomy of the knee joint and includes a drawing with arrows pointing to sites on the knee where injuries are felt to help you identify your injury. Fourteen specific knee injuries are described along with descriptions of several other knee injuries and conditions that are more difficult to pinpoint.

Each of the injuries includes a description of what it is, how and why this injury can occur, a drawing of the anatomy involved, ways to test whether you have this injury with drawings, and treatment choices.

The treatment choices section describes the self-treatments you can do — waiting it out, limiting activity, icing, and so on. The author gives some rough guidelines for healing time — for example, for Pain on the Outside of the Knee (Lateral Collateral Ligament Tear), which can happen to yogis who spend a lot of time in the lotus position, it may take three weeks to three months to heal, depending on how severely the ligament is torn. He also lists possible medical treatments and exercises to strengthen the injured tissues.

Note that the book does not include ultrasound or acupuncture as possible medical treatments because the author was not familiar enough with them to include them. The book is purely Western medicine in orientation. From my experience, those modalities can be very helpful for injuries, so don’t rule them out. Maybe the 3rd edition will include them!

The author of Listen to Your Pain is Ben E. Benjamin, a Ph.D. in sports medicine and education. He studied with Dr. James Cyriax, the father of orthopedic medicine. This book has been around for 25 years and is in its second edition.

Student massages at TLC

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I’ll be doing my 50-hour internship at The Lauterstein-Conway Massage School starting in December and ending in early February. I’ve created a page on my blog, Massage Internship Schedule, where you can see my schedule so that if you like, you can schedule a massage with me.

The school and clinic are located at 4701-B Burnet Road, behind Phoenicia Bakery, in central Austin. Student massages are $35 for 60-minutes, no tipping allowed.

Regular massage — weekly, biweekly, monthly, or every six weeks — not only feels good, it’s very therapeutic for the body. It lessens stress, pain, back aches, injuries, headaches, and fatigue.

Regular massage reduces blood pressure, improves circulation, strengthens the immune system, elevates mood, and relaxes. It stimulates the nervous system and helps maintain general health.

Plus, it feels good!

Ninety percent of doctor visits are stress-related. Imagine what getting a regular massage — very affordable at this rate — could do for your health and well-being.

I’d love to see you there and work on you.

Arjuna Ardagh: What Is the Spiritual Meaning Behind Occupy Wall Street? | Huffington Post

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Arjuna Ardagh: What Is the Spiritual Meaning Behind Occupy Wall Street?.

This writer looks at the Occupy movement from a spiritual standpoint and finds separation and disconnection from one another and the planet at the heart of why it’s happening.

I agree.

Then he writes:

The way that the Occupy movement can be a revolutionary revolution instead of a run-of-the-mill ordinary revolution is if we start with ourselves. We can start by dropping our attention deeper than thoughts, rigid beliefs, reactive emotions and prejudice. We can start by discovering the dimension within each of us, not so far away, which is limitless and free, which needs nothing, but offers everything. Then you become a spiritual activist, an empowered mystic. You take a stand not against something or someone, but for something. You take a stand for life, for celebration, for generosity, for values that make everybody stronger.

Amen, brother.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a revolutionary revolution, instead of an ordinary run-of-the-mill revolution where nothing really changes except who’s on top?