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.
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.
I’ve been asked to post this on my blog, and I am very happy to oblige.
NLP Practitioner training, offered by Best Resources/Texas Institute of NLP, begins this weekend, March 31-April 1, 2012. The training takes 16 days, on weekends only, ending in mid-August.
As a graduate, I get to make this special offer:
The first person who gets back to me with a “yes” can attend the first weekend for free. Please call me (512 507 4184) so I can get your name on the list of free guests.
Anyone else can attend the first weekend for only $100. Follow the link at the bottom of this post to register.
The entire tuition is $2,200 if paid in full by March 31. Payment plans are also available for $400 per month or $285 per training weekend, discounting the first weekend’s $100.
NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It has been called the science of subjective experience, and it’s a super-duper set of people skills. (It’s also called “Now Let’s Play”.)
The training is part lecture/part demo and very interactive. You get to practice each skill taught during the training, and (usually) study groups form during the training.
Who can benefit from taking this training?
people who want to understand themselves and others better
people who want to deepen their relationship skills
people who want to experience more congruence and less internal conflict
people who want to improve their communication and language skills
people who want to experience more success in life
people who work in sales, management, and business
parents, coaches, helping professionals, health professionals, and teachers
anyone interested in personal growth and living from their highest values
At the end of the training, you will have more behavioral choices, more emotional flexibility, better rapport skills, better negotiation skills, and more confidence in your choices and decisions.
You may make lifelong friends who become like a second family to you — I certainly have.
Tom Best has been offering NLP training for 26 years. He works in the U.S. and internationally, in South America, Europe, Hawaii, Bali, and elsewhere. He draws on his background in cultural anthropology and interest in shamanism. (NLP unveils the secrets of shamanism!) We’re very lucky to have him offer this training in Central Texas.
Trainer Keith Fail has been teaching NLP for 18 years, with a focus on technology businesses and now individual coaching.
NOTE: I’ve taken this training twice, once as a student and once as a training assistant/coach. Master Practitioner training will be offered in 2013. I highly recommend both.
Steve Silberman, science writer (whom I adore and follow on Twitter: @stevesilberman), has just posted a new piece on NeuroTribes: mind, science culture, one of my favorite blogs. It’s a Q&A with New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg on his new book The Power of Habit.
(And I must say that after the William J. Broad experience — “yoga is not only killing us but began as a Tantric sex cult”– it is sweet to learn of a Times reporter who’s really done his homework and offered something very valuable. Kudos, Charles Duhigg.)
Silberman lets us know up front how habitual we are.
No wonder mindfulness has become something we seek. To connect with someone or something not out of habit, but out of something like our original self — that’s the stuff that peak experiences, connecting to the Source, the most alive life are made of.
It’s as if our brains store habitual behavior in a locked box to prevent tampering by the more mindful angels of our nature…
In his provocative and brilliantly written new book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg … pries open the box with the help of recent research and finds surprising good news: Even the most thoughtless and self-destructive cycles of behavior can be changed, if you understand how habits are formed and stored in memory.
Duhigg breaks down the sequence of ritualized behavior (which he calls the habit loop) into three component parts: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The cue is the trigger that sets the sequence in motion…. The routine is the behavior itself, which can be positive (like a daily running habit) or harmful (like gambling away the family savings). And the third part is the reward — the goal of the behavioral loop, which your brain’s pleasure centers gauge to determine if a sequence of behavior is worth repeating and storing in a lockbox of habit….
Duhigg … maps out a more effective path toward enduring habit change that focuses not on trying to scrap the routine all at once, but on becoming aware of the cues and manipulating the rewards. The encouraging news is that success in making modest alterations in behavior (which Duhigg calls “small wins”) creates a ripple effect into other areas of your life….
We know from studies that almost all cues — the stimuli that elicit the habitual behavior — fall into one of five categories. It’s time of day, or a certain place, or a certain emotion, or the presence of certain people, or a preceding action that’s become habitual or ritualized….
Then you focus on the rewards. The first couple of times you go running, you’re not going to enjoy it. No one enjoys it the first time they run. So you have to give yourself a piece of chocolate when you get back from the run. You have to have some immediate reward. And we know from studies that within two weeks, the intrinsic reward of running — the endocannabinoids unleashed by exercising — are going to become enough of a reward to create that habit. But you have to trick your brain into it by giving yourself a piece of chocolatethe first couple times….
If you want to start running every day, just start by putting on your running shoes at the same time every day. Then you’ll feel more like running. Then you’ll run!
If I want to meditate more regularly, I can tell myself that I just need to sit for 5 minutes each morning, or 2 minutes each evening. Once I actually sit for those small lengths of time, I’m much more likely to sit for 20 or 30 minutes.
These two guys then begin discussing the civil rights movement, the gay marriage movement, and more. To read the whole post, click here.
My friend Carol Waid, co-founder of the nonprofit Truth Be Told: Helping Women Behind and Beyond Bars, tells her story and the story of her work. Very, very moving. Click to read A Co-Founder’s Journey: Carol Waid’s Story.
I served as a board member for Truth Be Told for a couple of years when it was a new nonprofit. I used my writing and technology skills to start a newsletter and help them get organized to track supporters and receive donations so TBT could become stable — which they have!
I have attended several incredibly moving graduations and have gone into the prisons myself to teach writing and the three points of view to the women. I’ve also brought in dear friends who became facilitators. Maybe at some point, I will get to do that too.
Working with Truth Be Told is something I am so honored to have been able to do in this life. It is part of my heart.
Here’s an excerpt from Carol’s story:
I went to treatment some 13 years ago and in treatment I pretty much did the same kind of work that the facilitators guide the women to do, telling the TRUTH about our lives, through a process of using a lifeline to see your life. I did not even know my own story, much less know how to talk about. When I did a lifeline I was able to see the reasons I would try to take my own life at 15 and why I would choose the vehicle that I chose. I began to see why I would choose a violent teenager to fall in love with and obsess over, even beyond his death. I began to see how depression was in my fabric, and the fabric of my family. I was shocked to discover that I had moved 32 times in my short 17 years of life and it began to make sense to me why I didn’t know what a friend was, or how to be a friend.
I also began to understand why I was scared to say my name and be seen. What I didn’t know, for a very long time, and still struggle to accept, is that I am courageous and strong and compassionate and loving and smart and gentle and authentic, but I have to fight off what rules, which is fear and timidity and anger and depression and insecurity and the curse of believing I am nothing and not special.
In treatment I saw my life’s path before me, which gave me a map to work with all these years. This is the work we do with the women who reside in prison, for many of them they are creating a map of their lives and they are discovering what has been the thread that was sewn into their fabric. They are then given the tools to pull out threads that do not belong in their tapestry and to appreciate and respect the threads that remain and so beautifully they get to continue creating a new rows…. This work is crucial to healing. Healing is what opens the door for living a blooming life. A blooming life includes living in the “free” world and becoming a citizen that can help the world change for better.
Sometimes in life, things are going well, and then something happens, and before you know it, you’ve gotten off track. Unpleasant surprises having to do with work, love, friendship, money, health, family, whatever we care about, can put us into an experience of suffering (aka “pain with a story”).
So what do you do to get back on track? Here’s what works for me:
Realize it’s a process and there’s probably not an instant fix. Accept that you’re off track instead of pretending that everything is fine. Relax into it.
Take care of your health. Go to bed and wake at the regular times. Eat healthy food, and not too much comfort food. Drink plenty of water. Exercise in whatever form you enjoy. Dance, run, do yoga, shadow-box. Move your body. A little sweat won’t hurt a bit, either. If you need inspiration, listen to this and try some of James Brown’s moves. You know he taught Michael Jackson how to dance:
Let your emotions flow instead of suppressing them. Movement can help with this too. Walk around and make nonsense noises and start moving how you feel. Waaahhhhh! Grrrrrrr! Listen to music that helps you cry if tears feel blocked — this music can help:
If you don’t feel safe expressing your feelings to another human being, write them out. Or get curious — what is the name of the emotion? Where in your body are you feeling it? How would your body like to move with this emotion? If you could dance it or see it dancing, what would that be like? What kind of music would it be dancing to? What color is it?
Do something that will really make you feel better. There are tons of techniques that can be helpful. The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) works for a lot of people. Now, this may seem crazy, but an even simpler technique for restoring emotional equilibrium is to slowly toss a small ball from hand to hand. While tossing it, slowly look toward the ceiling, close your eyes, and return your head to normal position. (It will take some practice to do this.) If you drop the ball, pick it up and start over (it’s easiest to do over a bed or sofa). It induces the feeling of being centered. Even 2 minutes of it shifts me. For theory and details on this, see Mind Juggling on Nelson Zink’s awesome website Navaching.
Set boundaries that work for you. They don’t have to be permanent, but if you need a break from something that drains your energy, just take one. You being drained contributes to no one’s well-being. One of my favorite films of all time is Office Space. Make like Peter and don’t give a damn. You don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid. Savor your own mojo, and don’t give it away to the unappreciative.
Think happy thoughts, imagine happy pictures, feel the good experiences you’ve had again. Do you know someone who has a radiant smile? Imagine their wonderful face. Has someone been particularly kind to you? Remember that feeling. What words do you like to hear? “Everything is going to be all right” is very soothing. Really, who the hell knows how everything is going to be, but saying that to yourself can feel comforting. Also, I have a big envelope full of cards, letters, and photos that people have given me over the past few years. When I pull that out and look through it, I feel reconnected with the good will of these people who’ve cared enough about me to make that effort. (Reminds me to make more of an effort myself toward that end.)
Do something spiritual. Could be meditation, an act of kindness, reading spiritual books or listening to audiotapes, feeling gratitude, forgiving those who’ve hurt you. Even laughing, because laughter is a gift from the gods. Here’s James Altucher’s hilarious blog post on 60 second meditations. (I love washing dishes.)
This has been my favorite blog post to write, because I wrote it to help myself bounce back. So I guess 8. would be to write up your own methods of bouncing back, testing each step.
Before you know it, you’ve returned to your healthy self.
Today I had three dance experiences, which made it a wonderfully memorable day.
I participated in Ecstatic Dance Austin this morning.
I saw the film Pina by Wim Wenders, about the late German dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch, her work, and her dancers.
My friend Peggy and I walked and played our way around Town Lake.
There is a shortcut to ecstasy. It’s called dance. ~ Gabrielle Roth
I am in love with Ecstatic Dance Austin, feeling so grateful that I have two hours every Sunday morning as an outlet for my energy, movement, physicality, playfulness, experimentation, and connection.
Today it occurred to me that if I didn’t have this, I’d curl up in a ball and die, or at least be really depressed. When I’m struggling over relationships, finances, work, decisions, politics, life, this is a place where I can give all that heaviness over to Spirit and just move, feel, connect, play, and be present. Life becomes a dance.
It is joy to walk into a big dance studio with a great sound system playing the kind of music that invites movement. I move out onto the floor. I begin moving.
Because there’s no talking, I connect with people using eye contact, smiles, and sometimes hugs. Sometimes I create my own space by closing my eyes and dancing.
I smile a lot because I feel so radiant and happy. There’s joy in the present moment, of course. My more personal joy is that I’ve worked on my health for years with bodywork, yoga, and a clean diet, and I feel great. My stamina is good — I stay moving, even through the burning fire of dancing all-out chaos. My creativity is good — there’s no end to discovering rewarding movements that morph into new grooves. My capacity for living and dancing from joy is good — although I have moments when heavy thoughts arise in my awareness during dance, I can move through them and return to joy.
I find ecstatic dance to be a great healing antidote. If I’m suffering relationship woes, I can dance with men who appreciate me, move with me, play with me, honor me. They don’t know my story, and I don’t know theirs. We just dance. A couple of dances can restore my sense of being valued as a woman by the other sex.
And for days when I’m fed up with male egos, I can have playful, fun dances with women.
And of course, I can have dances with men or women, or men and women, any time for no reason at all except that we’re together in the studio, there’s some great music playing, and we share the joy.
The physicality of it, the improvisational nature of ecstatic dance, the freedom and goodness I feel in my body, the wave of rhythms that peaks somewhere in the middle just clear me out until nothing is left but sweat, breath, and oneness.
Afterward we sit or lie spent in a big circle on the floor and give ourselves a couple of minutes of silence. We say names. We have announcements. We mingle and leave.
Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost. ~ Pina Bausch
Pina, the film written, directed, and produced by Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club), is showing at the Violet Crown in downtown Austin. The film has been nominated for Best Documentary for the Academy Awards. (Click the link to view the awesome trailer.)
Pina Bausch worked with Tanztheater Wuppertal in Berlin from 1973 until her sudden death in 2009. Rather than being a biographical documentary, Pina shows her choreographic work and the dancers who danced her work speaking about her.
Here’s a clip (it’s in 3D, by the way — first dance film in 3D, that I know of — thanks, Wim Wenders!):
And here’s another:
And another:
She painted with dancers, movement, costumes. Her dances are not ecstatic dance — they are choreographed — but from what I could tell, she started with improvisation, asking for instance for a dancer to show her joy. Although some of the dance is highly structured, it retains its aliveness.
The film is a revelation — about life, love, pain, loneliness, longing. And creativity and playfulness.
WIM WENDERS ABOUT PINA BAUSCH
No, there was no hurricane that swept across the stage,
there were just … people performing
who moved differently then I knew
and who moved me as I had never been moved before.
After only a few moments I had a lump in my throat,
and after a few minutes of unbelieving amazement
I simply let go of my feelings
and cried unrestrainedly.
This had never happened to me before…
maybe in life, sometimes in the cinema,
but not when watching a rehearsed production,
let alone choreography.
This was not theatre, nor pantomime,
nor ballet and not at all opera.
Pina is, as you know,
the creator of a new art.
Dance theatre.
I loved seeing the dances, dancers, costumes, settings. This film inspires me. I want colorful, flowing, sexy evening gowns to dance in. I want to play with movement, to experiment, to have fun.
I can trust my friends. These people force me to examine, encourage me to grow. ~ Cher
Peggy is a dancer and choreographer and a dear friend of mine for years. Having just seen the film and danced our way out of the theater, we walked around Town Lake incorporating playful movements — stepping stylishly between two trees, walking on benches, doing asana on bridges, mimicking the arm gestures we saw in the film, striking poses, waving arms, adding twirls and hops into our walk.
We made our walk into a dance, and you know I’m such a sucker for dancing in unlikely places. The hike and bike trail is as good a place as any, maybe better than most.
It was a beautiful cloudy cool winter afternoon, and people were out enjoying themselves on the trail, walking, running, biking. Our play gave them a little extra enjoyment. People can be so serious, it’s like an illness. We put smiles on their faces.
As we played, we talked about creating dances. We shared some hilarious, outrageous, fun, engaging ideas for dances.
I love it when science deepens our understanding of something people know from experience to be true. The latest such finding to catch my eye is in my own field, massage therapy. People love massage and not all that much is actually known about how it affects the body’s systems or its long-term benefits.
In short, massage applied to muscles after vigorous exercise reduces inflammation and promotes growth of energy-producing units (mitochondria) in muscle cells.
“The potential benefits of massage could be useful to a broad spectrum of individuals including the elderly, those suffering from musculoskeletal injuries and patients with chronic inflammatory disease,” said Tarnopolsky. “This study provides evidence that manipulative therapies, such as massage, may be justifiable in medical practice.”
The researchers also busted the myth that massage reduces lactic acid, which builds up in cells during exercise and has been thought to contribute to muscle pain. Massage had no effect on lactic acid build-up.
Here’s something to look forward to:
One future research direction will be to examine the long-term effect of massage after a workout.
I was working in the student clinic, doing another intern massage. The client assigned to me was someone I had worked on previously. She works at a desk job.
The first time, she had complained of neck pain, and she had said she didn’t want to be poked with fingers or knuckles. So I rubbed and kneaded her neck quite a bit and didn’t do any of the deep massage strokes that I felt could have been so helpful had she not had this aversion because many involve “poking”.
On the client evaluation, she said I didn’t spend enough time on her neck!
So when I got her again, I was determined to get a better result. I brought her back to the bay and asked her if her neck was still bothering her. She said yes.
I asked her to show me where her neck was hurting and gave a little demo by putting my hand on the back of my neck and asking, “Is it about here?”
She said, “No, more like here,” and she ran her hands across the tops of her shoulders.
Whoa.
Just to clarify, I said, “So you’re not feeling any pain or tightness here?” again with my hand on the back of my neck.
She said no.
And of course, I was professional, but meanwhile I was thinking,
Girlfriend, that’s totally your upper trapezius — the top of your shoulder — and not your neck.
Many people’s knowledge of their own anatomy has big blank areas.
I asked if there was anywhere else she desired special attention. She said her lower back was bothering her. She also said not to work on her abs or her hands.
So I went to work. I spent a lot of time on her back, with focus on her tight upper traps and her sacrum/lumbar area. When I thought I had probably done enough, I leaned down and asked her if that was enough or if she wanted me to work some more on her back.
She said to do what I needed to do. I guessed from that that she assumed that the students in the massage clinic have to follow a routine, and that if she wanted more back work, it was out of the question. Not so.
I told her I could work on her back some more if she liked. I told her I could spend most of our hour together on her back if she liked.
She said she’d love some more back work.
So I worked on her back for about 40-45 minutes of our hour together. I palpated and explored. I repeated strokes, did them slowly, and emulated deep massage with my palms to avoid the poking of knuckles and fingertips.
I pulled her scapula in and up to shorten her tight upper trap and asked her if that gave her some relief. She said it did.
I wrung, lifted and rolled, and kneaded. I rocked her torso. I came at areas from many directions. I even gave her tapotement (like drumming) after asking if she’d like it, which I think is the first time I’ve done it as an intern.
When I finished her back, I redraped it with sheet and blanket and just pressed her glutes and backs of legs and feet. I rocked her body from the heels and had her turn over, asking how she was doing. “Fine,” she said, with a look of bliss on her face.
I like that look.
I pressed the fronts of her legs and tops of feet and rolled her legs, just to loosen up the hips and make the legs feel included as parts of the whole body.
I skipped her abs as requested and just worked on her pecs, giving pressure to her arms so they felt included, avoiding her hands as requested.
Then I did some more upper back work from underneath, rubbed and kneaded her neck, and stretched her neck.
I ended with massaging her scalp and a fulcrum/stretch of the back of her head.
(So okay, I know some of this is massage geek talk, but I’m sure you get the big picture. If not, come get a student massage and see for yourself. $35, no tipping.)
That massage was so off the books from the routines I’ve learned and yet so rewarding because I used my resources to clarify what she really wanted, and then I got to be creative, continuing to ask for feedback and giving her more of what she wanted.
She was very, very happy with it. She gave me a fabulous evaluation, especially for taking the time to really find out what she needed.
The upshot is that questions are very, very powerful tools. If you know what you want but aren’t getting the results you want, ask questions. It’s all in the communication, baby.
There is great personal power to be had literally just for the asking, especially if you ask the right questions, to get the results you want, to get another person to open up to you, to get insight into someone else’s map of reality, to create something that’s satisfying.
It’s so simple, yet almost like a secret. Have you asked anyone a real good question today?
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?
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.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 