Author Archives: MaryAnn Reynolds

About MaryAnn Reynolds

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

Comparing trauma release and shaking medicine videos

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Having just done the exercises along with the Trauma Releasing Exercises DVD for the first time, I recommend using the video over using the book to get up to speed on these.

The extra exercises at the beginning are nice, and they are more pleasant to do with the models on the video. They make it seem easier and get to the shaking part more quickly.

Read the book, The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process, for background and detail.

Get both!

I know some of you are probably confused about these two techniques, trauma releasing and shaking medicine. They are different yet related.

The trauma releasing exercises are specifically designed to strain the feet and leg muscles so that they begin to quiver and tremble and shake and release the deeply held tension from trauma and prolonged stress.

Every body does this a little differently, but basically, you lie on your back on the floor and let your legs tremble. The trembling may move into your pelvis, spine, neck, hands, arms, and shoulders, as well. The whole process is done lying down.

A room full of people may be doing these exercises, but each is in his/her own space, not touching.

Deep emotions may arise during this process.

Here’s a video of people trembling after doing the trauma releasing exercises.

Shaking medicine, as far as I know, is a term coined by Dr. Bradford Keeney, who also wrote a book called Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement (which I’m currently reading but bought used without the 40-minute CD of ecstatic drumming it came with).

I see he has written another book, Shaking Out the Spirits, and released a 6-CD audio set from Sounds True, Shaking: The Original Path to Ecstasy and Healing.

Shaking medicine is practiced in cultural traditions around the world, including the Kalahari Bushmen, Quakers, Shakers, and holy rollers. Shakers may stand, sit, and lie on ground, and move from one to the other “as the spirit moves them.” It also may be accompanied by vocalizations such as shouting and singing.

This kind of shaking is a way to heal and connect with God and let spirit move you. Literally.

It too may be accompanied by deep emotional release.

Here’s a video of Bradford Keeney shaking with some Kalahari Bushmen. It’s pretty long but you can certainly get a sense that this kind of shaking is different. It’s part of a community ritual with singing, drumming, and clapping.

It’s also practiced by individual shamans healing people with their shaking touch, sometimes passing the shaking on to another person.

In my current view, trauma releasing is a form of shaking medicine. Both practices release energy blockages and enhance the flow of chi in the body. Literally, both use shaking to heal, thus they are shaking medicine.

The term shaking medicine sounds pretty woo-woo and far out. The term trauma releasing exercises sounds much less threatening of the dominant paradigm and has a “legitimate” purpose that you could probably get a grant for researching.

The biggest difference I see is that shaking medicine is also an ecstatic practice. That word, ecstasy, isn’t associated with trauma release.

I haven’t had an opportunity to do shaking medicine yet (or have I? I practiced ecstatic dance for a dozen years…)

Both TRE and shaking medicine are kin to rebirthing and holotropic breathwork, which use breath to release deeply held tension and emotion.

I have a hunch that with all of these practices, when you’re done, you feel full of life and clean and fresh, very present, unstoried, and renewed. When you feel stale, you do it again.

I’ll keep reading and report on the book when I’m done, or when I find something too good to keep to myself.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for someone to do holotropic breathwork with me.

Repost from NY Times: Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

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A new field in health research is called “inactivity studies,” and this article reports on its findings.

Here’s one. Two people eat and exercise the same. One gains weight, the other doesn’t. Why?

If you fidget more and move more, but not necessarily work out, you can burn a lot of calories. People who are more sedentary put on more weight.

That seems like a no-brainer, but so much knowledge about this is based on self-reporting, which is simply unreliable. The study used “magic underwear” to track motion.

This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

I’m curious. How much sitting is too much? More than six hours a day, some say; others say more than nine hours a day. Sitting is more lethal than age, sex, education, smoking, hypertension, BMI and other indicators.

And did you know that Steelcase, maker of file cabinets and office furniture, now makes treadmill desks?

That’s the ticket for health at sedentary jobs. That, or fidget and get up and walk around a lot.

“Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”

Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? – NYTimes.com.

Getting a Fran Bell makeover of my walk

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I came out of my third appointment with Fran Bell today with a new walk. I mean, she gave my way of walking a complete makeover! She gave me a taste of it during my first visit, but it didn’t fully stick.

The new way feels so good, I didn’t want to stop walking. And most of it is going to stick. I can just tell.

Before she did anything, she had me walk as she observed and “got” my pattern into her nervous system.

Then she put on my movement pattern as if it were a dress and walked like me, so I could see myself!

Talk about a revelation! Wow! I could see an intention for grace, good posture, and efficiency of movement in my walk, and I could see that my right side was ahead of the left and that I walked with some stiffness in my body.

Fran, who can discern so much more than I am presently able to, showed me how I led with my feet instead of my whole body working as a unit. She showed me how immobile my shoulders were. My arms didn’t swing nearly as much as hers. She told me where to look to discern these things.

She put me on  the table and we did some work together, and she taught me the homework I’ll be practicing this week. Ankles, hips, breath. Leg lifts every other day. Foam roller as needed.

Then I walked. My knees felt slightly rubbery, like sea legs. My right and left sides were the same. My arms swung freely from my shoulders. My hips swung from side to side. My whole spine moved. Even my head bobbled!

I don’t remember ever having so much swinging, swaying motion while walking from Point A to Point B before! I have a hunch I’ll be doing a lot more walking, because it’s just plain fun now.

What’s interesting is that when I observe a lot of people walking and running, such as on the Lady Bird Lake trail, I readily notice when someone’s body is locked up in some way. Maybe they barely lift their knees, or run on the insides of their soles, or lead with their head or chest. I feel for them.

I just never could see myself.

And now I have, and not only that, I gained a new way of walking that — and this may sound weird — appears to recharge my batteries and give me energy instead of draining energy.

Go figure!

Behind the scenes of a blog: search terms that have brought readers here :-)

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Behind the scenes of this WordPress.com blog, I can view my site’s statistics. One of my favorite things to check on is the list of search terms that people have entered into a search engine that somehow got them to this blog.

Besides the usual suspects like yoga, 4 hour body, trauma releasing exercises, buddha brain, spartan carousel, flu, and tibetan monks austin, here are some others over the past three months that have been amusing:

having a good axle-hole (?)

zafu brown (any relationship to Encyclopedia Brown?)

mcrae says dukkha means (okay, William, what’s up with that?)

yoaching yoga coaching

dont fall asleep in trauma (okay, i wont)

4 hour body can you eat refried beans everyday (love it!)

realigious ked wearing people (it’s a cult!)

There are some that are inspiring. I plan to do my own Google searches using these search terms. Some people know what’s important!

synesthesia and gamma waves (I’ll have what she’s having)

playful joy

shaking medicine groups

Repost from Elephant Journal: Drink Beer, Eat Chocolate, Live to 100

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Drink Beer, Eat Chocolate, Live to 100. ~ Jolee McBreen | elephant journal.

Click to read what researchers now believe the link between longevity and stress is.

Hint: It’s not avoiding stress or minimizing stress.

Thanks, Elephant Journal.

Trauma releasing exercises: the video

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I ordered the Trauma Releasing Exercises DVD a few weeks ago and finally found time to watch it.

I recommend it if you are a visual learner and if you want to get up to speed and do the TRE exercises quickly without reading a book or having to find and pay a teacher. You can watch it, learn a bit of the background without too much detail, watch people shaking, and do the exercises in real time along with the demonstration.

One of the beautiful gifts of learning from the DVD is that you can watch and do the exercises with another person and pause when you need to, rewind, fast forward, etc.

One important note: If you have only read the book, the exercises presented here are slightly different. There are some exercises for the feet at the beginning, and more details are provided.

I was just watching the models do Exercise 5 in the book, and David Berceli’s voice-over adds that you can allow your jaw to open as you twist your upper body. I didn’t see that in the book.

The exercises also have different timing, so that where the book says to hold for one minute, the video says to hold for 30 seconds to one minute.

The video also includes testimonials from various professionals — two chiropractors, a marriage and family therapist, a writer/teacher about the psoas and the core, a clinical social worker specializing in trauma, a massage therapist/teacher, and a physical therapist/cranio-sacral therapist.

Resentment and poison, failure and feedback

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Readers, I am processing something that happened this week, and I beg your indulgence as I move through my stuff. Maybe you find other people’s processing interesting. If not, skip reading this post.

Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. – Malachy McCourt

Social work professor and authenticity researcher Brene Brown posted this quote on Facebook yesterday. (No, I don’t know her in person, but her work is pretty awesome, as are her TED Talks.) The timing for me to encounter this quote was perfect. On Monday night I had a meeting with someone who told me he has resented me for a year, since we both came onto the leadership team of a social and educational organization.

Suddenly I got insight into the tension I’d felt coming from him and how he related to me as if I were a bad employee to be corrected or micromanaged, his dissatisfaction and hypercritical attitude toward any mistakes I made, and a lack of support, gratitude, and appreciation for anything I did, even to the point of undermining me (which was why I wanted to meet with him, to tell him I didn’t like that a bit, you jerk).

It had the ring of truth to it. I also felt horrified. Frankly, it’s creepy to have someone tell you that they’ve resented you for a year. A year!

I left after about 20 minutes. Clear that I don’t want to work with him any more, I ended our “conversation” by resigning. I felt disappointed, but also that there was no real choice. Interest has tapered off. I don’t have hope that the organization will survive.

Later that evening, I found out another person on the leadership team had resigned that morning. And yet another person — also a supporter who has shared his gifts with this organization — soon decided after fruitless and frustrating conversations with this person to take his talents elsewhere. After learning this, I quit as a member.

I just wanna say this:

Hey, dude. Maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you.

Maybe members sensed your hidden resentment and decided not to come back. You probably think that’s too woo-woo. But maybe there’s a whole field of awareness that you’ve been blind to.

You were a real pill to work with, and as much as I loved doing my role, even imperfectly, I’m okay with severing our association. Relieved. Let me get away from your poison. I came away with many new relationships with people I do like. I even liked you sometimes, but not as a leader.

Here’s a beef: You don’t use the skills this organization promotes to resolve problems! When I asked you what the outcome was that you wanted, you avoided answering my question. Others have noticed that you have difficulty answering a clear, direct request with a clear, direct answer. The meaning of communication is the response you get.

You went off on a tangent but actually got the outcome I think you wanted — my resignation — without ever directly asking for it.

So, um, you could have just asked for my resignation at any time without all the drama, you know. So why didn’t you?

Dude, where’s your well-formedness?

I don’t even think this has much to do with me. It’s more about his ego.

I understand that he’s working out something karmic in his life. This is not about what he thinks it’s about. It’s about self-revelation. He doesn’t seem to know himself very well or be effective in a leadership role. If people don’t trust him or have confidence in him as a leader, then he’s not a leader, no matter what title he has.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what good leadership is. It seems clear to me that it’s situational. People talk about leadership style, but the style has to match the situation.

What works in an employer-employee relationship where you pay someone to fulfill your agenda will not work in an organization composed of volunteers. That is much more about relationship skills and consensus building, rapport and responsiveness, not command and control.

New awesomeness arises out of the ashes. I am free to pursue my best interests, and that’s already taking shape in a very satisfying way.

~~

Update a week later: Everything is perfect just the way it is. When this guy is my age and looks back on who he was at this current time in his life, he will have great perspective on how much richer his map of the world got. His identity, his role in creating this, his ability to be congruent, his skills in relating to people and in leading people will all be vastly more developed and nuanced.

Follow-up with Fran Bell

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Had another session with Fran Bell today. She did the functional movement screening, or at least part of it, where she directed me to do some unusual movements, and she notices and measures stuff about my body.

Yep, it was as I thought. I need help. I need to get more stable and flexible to prevent injuries.

For this week, I have some exercises to do with a foam roller, working the knots out of my leg muscles.

She’s very sensitive to emotions and shifts in energy.

Also, she’s going to show me later, when I’m ready, how to do the kettlebell swing without injuring myself.

First restore, THEN move in!

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I teach restorative yoga, and a friend and fellow yogi who attended my Free Day of Yoga restorative class last Labor Day, Shelley Seale, invited me to teach a class at her new live/work space — the morning before she moved in.

There were seven of us yogis in this awesome space, getting all chill before the strenuous, stressful work of moving.

I can only imagine what it must be like to move after having a 90-minute restorative yoga session. I want to try it for my next move.

I want to recognize Shelley for having such a creative, collaborative idea, and letting some OMs fill her fabulous new space!

If you want to do something like that, please get in touch!

~~

Another note: My Sunday evening restorative yoga class is settling on just the right time during these lengthening days. We’ll now meet at 7 and end at 8:30.

Thank you, readers

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At the end of January, this blog had gotten 5,000 views.

Today the count is up to 7,355 views. I also have several new subscribers. Welcome! I hope you find some value here.

Just want to say thanks to all of you. I appreciate you reading my posts and especially enjoy getting your comments.

This blog is an outlet for me to follow and pursue what interests me and share what I discover, both in myself and “out there” in the world. I imagine that not every post is everyone’s cup of tea, but to those who read my posts occasionally, or regularly, I really want you to know how grateful I am to have something to offer. And I’m glad you can pass up the ones that don’t resonate, too!

I feel like I’m on a journey, and I don’t know the destination yet, but getting there is a lot of fun. Thanks for being company on the road.