Author Archives: MaryAnn Reynolds

About MaryAnn Reynolds

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

All signs point to rest, quiet, and stillness today

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For weeks now, I’ve been planning to have a party after I closed on my house.

Well, I closed yesterday. Woo hoo! The money after paying my mortgage was supposed to be wired into my bank account! I was ready to make a deposit on a fabulous vintage trailer.

After I picked up my paychecks from the contract agency (big SNAFU in getting me set up, and someone stayed late to give me these checks), I went to the bank to deposit them. I was in a drive-through lane, very crowded on Friday afternoon, and my car was running hot.

(This is the car that I had a collision in on Dec. 23 that has been in the shop more than out since then, that I’ve taken back twice so they could finish the job.  Last week they replaced the thermostat because the heater didn’t work.)

It was my turn. I deposited my checks only to be told that they were dated Feb. 21, and the bank can’t deposit them until then!!!!

So I left the bank and called my daughter to vent, about the car and the checks. Sometimes you just want to tell someone.

Luckily, she had just been talking to a friend up north who could pick me up and bring me home.

Sweet. I left my disabled car in North Austin. Last night I made plans to rent a car over the weekend.

Guess what? I woke with a sore throat and later developed aches and chills and fatigue.

I’d been exposed to strep and the flu when my granddaughter was over on Tuesday while my daughter worked. Been doing the thymus thump to boost my immune system, but alas, it was not to be.

I haven’t been sick in so long, I forgot what it was like.

So I’m sick today, and I’m moving out next Friday, and I need to get boxes and sort through stuff and give stuff away and take stuff to Goodwill and pack.

Oh, and celebrate!

The way I’m seeing it now, with the car disabled, and me sick, the universe has just made arrangements for me to have a day of stillness, quiet, and rest. Because that’s what my body has the energy for. I did make the bed and wash the dishes and cook a little. But mostly not.

Because all I want to do is take naps, drink herbal tea, watch videos, read, and try to stay warm enough.

And sometimes that’s enough.

I did learn that before they were applied to trauma, induced body shaking was used in sports as a way to speed healing.

Maybe I’ll have enough energy to do them today. But not right now.

And maybe that celebration will just have to occur later. Like when I move into my trailer.

Shaking medicine, a Facebook group

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Crazy! There’s a Facebook group called Shaking Medicine. There are several discussions, including one about the historical practice of shaking.

Ever heard of the Shakers and the Quakers?

Oh, yeah, and it’s usually considered subversive.

Check it out!

More on the therapeutic uses of trembling

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Apparently body tremor research is not a new thing in sports. Russians preparing gymnasts for Olympic competition in the 1970s induced trembling. It was called vibrational therapy then.

Since then, numerous studies have demonstrated that low-amplitude and low-frequency mechanical stimulation of the neuromuscular system has positive effects on athletic performance (Cardinale & Bosco, 2003; Torvinen et al., 2002; Bosco et al., 1999). For many years it was primarily used by elite athletes to help increase the strength and coordination of the musculoskeletal and nervous systems and to increase the rate at which athletic injuries heal (Bosco et al., 1999).

I’m not a competitive athlete. I had no idea. Maybe I’ll become more coordinated and heal more quickly!

I must say that I have been feeling really, really excellent lately, even given the stress of a new job, repeated repairs to my car, selling my house and moving.

This is after doing the trauma releasing exercises about eight times this month so far.

The web page goes on to say:

Over time vibrational therapy has developed as a serious field of research known as Biomechanical Stimulation ([BMS], Bosco et al., 1999). It is being used in physical therapy and rehabilitation programs to correct restricted body mobility, range of motion, the coordination of musculoskeletal and nervous systems and to increase the rate of healing injuries (Bosco, Cardinale, & Tsarpela, 1999; Bosco et el., 2000). BMS research has demonstrated that exposure to vibration frequencies between 20-50Hz increases bone density in animals. It is also helpful in providing pain relief and the healing of tendons and muscles (Muggenthaler, 2001). Vibrational stimulation between 50-150 Hz has been found to relieve suffering in 82% of persons suffering from acute and chronic pain (Feldman, 2004).

I could use more bone density and healing of tendons and muscles from my long-time alignment issues.

Hmmm. I’ve heard that cat purring speeds bone healing. That could be related. Thinking aloud here…

My father had Parkinson’s disease. I got excited when I read this! The shaking that happens in my left hand is similar to the Parkinson’s shaking.

Speculation in the field of BMS research suggests that tremors in humans associated with certain diseases may not be a symptom so much as the body’s attempt to detoxify itself through increased metabolism and lymphatic circulation which is produced by the body’s self-induced tremors (Feldman, 2004).

So maybe if I tremble and detox now, I won’t get Parkinson’s disease. It’s worth the effort.

Neurogenic tremors

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I did the trauma releasing exercises tonight. I forgot to do them last night. : ( Lots going on.

I tried a shortcut and did the first exercise, standing on the right edges of my feet, for 30 seconds on each side. I didn’t repeat that 5 times, and it didn’t seem to make much difference. My body is programmed to release now.

I noticed tonight that I had longer pauses between bouts of releasing than I’ve experienced before. I would come completely to a stop, not knowing if they would start again. Sometimes I’d be still for 10 or 15 seconds before they started again.

I had waves of leg shaking, not just quivering.

I did some mild rocking at the same time my legs were quivering. That’s different.

I had one bout of wild releasing from my left shoulder and arm.

After 20 minutes, I straightened my legs, and then they started shaking again! My left arm had one last bout of shaking.

Then I laid on the floor, feeling the energy buzz. It was definitely stronger where I’d been shaking the most.

~~~

I found a video by David Berceli about neurogenic tremors. This video is copyrighted 2005 and posted in 2007, before the book.

Berceli doesn’t talk about the tremors in relation to trauma, but about how they assist in relaxation, pain relief, physiological changes, increased agility, and increased mobility in the pelvic and lower back areas.

You can watch it here. What do you think? Kind of sexy?

Did Marianne Williamson and legions of angels help Egypt?

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Just came across a blog post by the spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson, dated Feb. 2, during the darkest days before the Egyptian people prevailed and dictator Hosni Mubarak stepped down.

Maybe she’s onto something!

February 2, 2011

IN THE LAND OF EGYPT

In a radio interview this morning I was asked if I have hope for the future… whether I think love will ultimately prevail on earth.

From a spiritual perspective, yes love will ultimately prevail. Buddha became enlightened; the Jews made it to the Promised Land; Jesus resurrected. All those are religious tales that inform us of the basic imprint of the universe. No story is over until the happy part, and if it’s not happy yet then the story isn’t over.

But that is only the beginning of a framework for understanding. We mustn’t let the phrase,”Love will ultimately prevail,” be a mere platitude that serves to justify complacency…either spiritual or political. For whether we learn to love one another through wisdom or through pain is completely up to us. How long it takes before love prevails is completely up to us. How much human suffering occurs before love prevails is completely up to us. Free will does not mean we get to determine what ultimately happens, but it does mean we get to determine what happens in the immediate future to us and to those we love.

When you have thousands of people acting out a high-emotion, high-stakes drama such as that which is occurring in Egypt today, almost anything can happen.

On the one hand, we are witnessing the purity and power of the quest for freedom. The demand for basic human rights, the repudiation of a dictator, and the protest of an economic order in which 40 per cent of one’s population lives on less than 2 dollars a day – all of this is a pure, democratic rising up of the human spirit. And if America doesn’t stand in support of those things, then we’ve completely lost our own moral center.

At the same time, this situation has gone from volatile to violent. Freedom is rising, but the forces of oppression are cracking down. Chaos overrides not only the impulse to freedom but also the impulse to basic human decency. Blood is spilling. People are dying. The situation has gone from liberating to tragic.

Right now, let’s pray for a miracle.

May a great wave of sanity and peace flood the minds and hearts not only of the protestors, but also the military and police and government. The phrase “may cooler heads prevail” comes to mind. May men and women of honor and good will within every corner of Egyptian society be listened to, and their words and ideas heeded. May thousands of small miracles that you and I will never ever know about quiet down a conversation over here, cause a peaceful solution to emerge in a neighborhood over there. May a general sense of peace and good will – something we’d seen almost miraculously on display at the beginning of the protests — return to the streets of Egypt.

Try closing your eyes and see, with your mind’s eye, legions of angels roaming through the streets of Cairo. Do this as frequently as you can throughout the day. It is no idle fantasy. This is the exercise of spiritual power, and in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., such power is “more powerful than bullets.” Even when we are materially passive, he said, we can still be “spiritually active.”

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means that as the observer changes, there is a change in that which is observed. Worldly news anchors report the news: miracle-workers help change the news by the nature of their thoughts. And the greatest medium of miracles is prayer. So today, let’s pray for Egypt.

Dear God, please pave a miraculous path for the people of Egypt, to peace and freedom and joy unending. Bless their hearts. Guide their minds. Illumine this moment. May love prevail. Amen.

I’m ready to visualize legions of angels roaming the streets of Tehran. And Washington, DC.

How about you?

Kindness and giving challenges

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This is just informational — I’m doing my own trauma releasing exercises challenge in Feb. and March, plus selling my house, moving out, seeking the perfect vintage trailer, finding just the right place for it, and arranging to have it transported and made ready, and moving in, while I work at a temporary job full-time. I’m feeling stretched a little thin! Just a little, at times, enough to not want another challenge at this time.

So I’m not participating in either of the challenges described below. Maybe later! I love the idea and want to pass the information about these challenges on to you all, to accept or decline as you wish.

The Extreme Kindness Challenge runs Feb. 14-20. It’s sponsored by the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. (Today’s Feb. 15, but you can start today and end Feb. 21. Or never end!)

Today’s challenge is to smile at 10 strangers. You can easily do that in the grocery store!

Here’s the link: http://www.randomactsofkindness.org/extreme-kindness-challenge.html

My friend and fellow blogger Shelley Seale is doing a year of 30 day challenges. She’s already done the “six items of clothing” challenge. You can read her blog here: http://30days2011.wordpress.com/

Now Shelley is doing a 30-days-of-giving challenge. That’s how I learned about the Extreme Kindness Challenge. She started her challenge on Feb. 11 and has donated to St. Baldrick’s Foundation to fight childhood cancer, given a couple of dollars to a panhandler, donated clothing to Goodwill, and today she donated a scientific calculator to St. Monica’s Girls Home in Kenya.

If you would like to donate to St. Monica’s Girls Home, Shelley will pick up donations given in Austin. They need sports bras, bike shorts, flip flops, and some basic office supplies. See the list on Shelley’s blog.

Is your heart challenged to connect to our world in a deeper and more meaningful way?

A love letter to yoga, passive backbend to open the heart center

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Happy valentine’s day!

From Yoga Journal, an enlightened mother writes a valentine to yoga.

Thank you for teaching me how to be more gracious and generous in my relationships.  As my first yoga teacher Ruth told me, “Don’t be stingy!”

~~~

I love the passive backbend, where you roll up a towel or yoga blanket, lie on the floor with knees bent, feet flat, and place it under your lower shoulder blades.

Hang out here for 10 minutes. Adjust the towel up or down if you like. Let your knees fall together and the rest of you melt into the floor.

It’s one of the most refreshing and simple yoga poses I know. You’ll get up feeling good and energized!

You can also use a bolster, stacked blankets, and eye pillow as shown below. If the floor is cold on your hands and arms, put a blanket down first.

Passive Backbend

Is anyone else doing the trauma releasing exercises?

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Just checking. I’ve taught them to one person so far during this challenge and am curious to learn whether anyone else is doing them or has tried them at least once or intends to do them.

If so, would you please comment? I’d just like to know someone’s there.

Last night my releasing was mild compared to the previous wild session. A little shaking in my left hand, but not my left shoulder this time. Mostly my legs shook. I experienced some mild, gentle pelvic rocking. Lasted about 10 minutes.

~~~

This morning I went to Appamada Zen Center for the Sunday service. I got there just as the clappers signaled time to get seated before the service begins.

Had a nice practice inquiry session with Peg Syverson, my teacher. So much has changed since I saw her last, which was maybe in early January. We had a really good connection. She asked what stays the same while so much of my life is changing — selling my house, moving out, doing temporary work — and advised to notice it all.

During the sitting parts of the service, I noticed tight places in my body. I attribute it to the kettlebell swings I’ve been doing to strengthen my body. I’m working my way up from 10 swings with a 15 lb. kettlebell. Right now I’m at 20, and I feel it slightly afterwards.

Then I had tea afterwards with some sangha members, and we chatted about the revolution in Egypt, Islamic finance, the environment, and people’s difficulty in dealing with long-term incremental change like climate change, among other things. Some of my sangha read a lot.

I haven’t been to Appamada for weeks. I’ve been spending time with my granddaughter while my daughter works at her nursing job on Sundays. She had this weekend off, and I got to sit with my sangha.

I’m grateful to have my daughter and granddaughter in the same city as I and to be able to spend time with them.

I’m grateful for Appamada, Peg, the Buddha, Zen, the sangha, and my zafu.

I’m grateful to be exploring the trauma releasing exercises.

The most abandoned TRE experience yet

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Wow. I just got up off the floor after the most abandoned TRE experience yet.

I wasn’t paying that much attention as I did the exercises. I’ve learned them pretty well by now and was doing them by rote. I actually was watching, and then just listening to, a crazy Werner Herzog video called Even Dwarves Started Small, which is in German (with English subtitles), and the cast — as far as I can tell — is entirely composed of dwarves. Boisterous, noisy, German-speaking, laughing, cackling, yelling dwarves.

Whew.

So the theme tonight was chaos, and chaos I got.

The real releasing started with the last step of Exercise 7, when I placed my feet flat on the floor. It started out with my usual leg shaking. Then pelvic rocking.

Then my left hand started quivering, then my left arm was shaking, then it was wildly flapping like a crazy bird! My left shoulder got involved and at times was pounding into the floor.

It just went on and on and on. Two separate times I went through wildly chaotic lengthy releases of my left shoulder and arm.

My whole body released in a way it hadn’t before. I was not only rocking vertically, but I began to roll horizontally as well! I had some big neck releases.

Tonight as soon as I slowed and one movement ended, another one started up elsewhere in my body.

My legs got wild again, knees slamming into each other.

Now, as I type this, my whole left arm feels different, buzzing with a kind of energy I don’t ever remember feeling there.

Left shoulder. What is that? I had a rotator cuff injury several years ago that didn’t go away until months later when I finally got treatment for it. Maybe living with that pain was trauma I stored, and even though my injury healed, my energy didn’t. And now, through these exercises, my energy body is healing itself.

Then again, I’ve had many issues that these exercises could be helping me recover from: birth injury to a sacral nerve, scoliosis, PTSD.

Who knows? It’s a mystery. We’re a mystery.

I just know it’s good to release tension.

And…it’s very sexual without being sexual at all. It’s pure tension release, with that same element of abandonment and surrender to the body’s processes that really good passionate sex has.

I have a feeling that doing these exercises for a couple of months may add passion to my sex life when I have a lover again!

I wonder if distracting my conscious mind with the crazy video helped my unconscious mind let go even more.

Hmm.

My left hand just wanted to do some more releasing.

Okay. That’s better.

The gut’s “second brain” influences mood and well-being

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This article from Scientific American is about the enteric nervous system (gut intelligence).

Some excerpts:

The second brain informs our state of mind in other more obscure ways, as well. “A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut,” Mayer says. Butterflies in the stomach—signaling in the gut as part of our physiological stress response, Gershon says—is but one example. Although gastrointestinal (GI) turmoil can sour one’s moods, everyday emotional well-being may rely on messages from the brain below to the brain above.

The enteric nervous system uses more than 30 neurotransmitters, just like the brain, and in fact 95 percent of the body’s serotonin is found in the bowels. Because antidepressant medications called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) increase serotonin levels, it’s little wonder that meds meant to cause chemical changes in the mind often provoke GI issues as a side effect. Irritable bowel syndrome—which afflicts more than two million Americans—also arises in part from too much serotonin in our entrails, and could perhaps be regarded as a “mental illness” of the second brain.

In a new Nature Medicine study published online February 7, a drug that inhibited the release of serotonin from the gut counteracted the bone-deteriorating disease osteoporosis in postmenopausal rodents. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) “It was totally unexpected that the gut would regulate bone mass to the extent that one could use this regulation to cure—at least in rodents—osteoporosis,” says Gerard Karsenty, lead author of the study and chair of the Department of Genetics and Development at Columbia University Medical Center.

Serotonin seeping from the second brain might even play some part in autism, the developmental disorder often first noticed in early childhood. Gershon has discovered that the same genes involved in synapse formation between neurons in the brain are involved in the alimentary synapse formation. “If these genes are affected in autism,” he says, “it could explain why so many kids with autism have GI motor abnormalities” in addition to elevated levels of gut-produced serotonin in their blood.