Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on

Posted on February 4, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

And trembling, quivering, rocking, shivering, rolling, flapping…

Just got down for day two of my every-even-numbered-day-in-February practice of the trauma releasing exercises.

If you’ve done these exercises, I’d love to hear from you.

Several people have expressed an interest in learning how to do these, and I’m checking into teaching a class. I’d like to find a health-oriented office or clinic to sponsor and help publicize a class. Not everyone has access to (or learns best) from a book or video.

Anyone else interested?

I’ve realized several things:

Before this challenge started, the trembling didn’t start for me until I got to Exercise 7. Upon closer reading, the trembling is supposed to start in Exercise 6! Now, after reading that, that’s when it starts for me. That shows how suggestible my mind is to another person’s authority!
I realized that I had been suppressing my own body’s trauma/stress release response! That’s something to definitely get more aware of. How often do we disrespect our bodies and make them do what our minds will have them do? Often it’s for the sake of convenience or decorum! This is pretty huge.

What might the world be like if people recognized the effects of stress on their bodies felt compelled to release it so that it never built up and resulted in illness and discord?

World peace through the trauma releasing exercises!

Today my legs began to quiver about 35 seconds into Exercise 6. I noticed that sometimes I pressed my sacrum into the wall, and sometimes my thoracic vertebrae were pressing into the wall. The back of my head is constantly into the wall.

Also, it’s important in Exercise 6, Step 1, that your feet are further away from the wall than your knees. This makes sense to me as a yoga instructor. Protect your knees.

Note: In Exercise 6, Step 2, when you do a forward bend, you do not need to touch the floor with your hands, as shown in the illustration on page 184. This is impossible for many people. If you can’t do it, don’t be discouraged. You can rest your hands on yoga blocks, a coffee table, a chair seat.

At first in Exercise 7, I had a lot of leg shaking. A lot. Then hands and forearms — and my right arm is shaking almost as much as my left, after months of nothing happening there.

I did some circular movements with my hands.

(It’s weird saying “I did…” because this is really involuntary movement. It was more like this: “At times my hands made movements that I recognized as circular.”)

And then my body went into gentle, rhythmic pelvic rocking. It felt soothing and comforting. Experiencing my body as this out of control is disconcerting, but I am getting more comfortable with it because of the relaxed emptiness that follows.

Then the leg quivering would return for a while. I cycled between these two patterns for a long time. I even stopped moving completely for a few seconds several times, and then my legs began trembling again.

Finally, I just knew I was finished for today. From the start to the end of Exercise 7 took about 12 minutes.

Right now I feel pleasantly relaxed and empty and slightly fatigued. Since it’s a snow holiday, I think I’ll take a little nap.

Measuring your stress level

Posted on February 3, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

I want to have a baseline measure of my stress level at the start of this two-month Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge.

My immune system is functioning well. I haven’t suffered from allergies or colds since last May.
I’ve never had high blood pressure. It’s usually about 100/70.
I usually sleep well. I take melatonin and Rescue Remedy Sleep when I don’t, and they work.
If negative emotions start to run away with me in the form of anxiety, fear, anger, or guilt, I do EFT and t-a-p them away.

Still, in the last six months, since August 3rd:

I completed yoga teacher training.
I left a job that was stressful to me.
I started doing new types of work (NLP coaching, teaching yoga), moving toward a new livelihood.
I downsized my stuff and put my house on the market.
My house was burglarized and my laptop and some other stuff stolen.
I had a collision that left my car in the shop for over a month, without rental coverage.
I started a three-month technical writing contract at a large corporation with a long but scenic commute.

All of this is stressful, according to the WebMD Life Change Stress Test. You’ve probably read before now that major life events, both negative and positive, are stressful. Now you can measure your stress level online.

Stress can interrupt sleep and make you cranky. Chronic stress can raise your blood pressure, weaken your immune system, and affect physical and mental health. Wikipedia has a long list of the symptoms of chronic stress.

I took the test, and the results showed I have moderate stress. How are you doing on stress?

I believe that doing the trauma releasing exercises for the next two months will help keep me healthy. I just need to keep doing more of what I’m already doing (meditation, yoga, EFT). In addition, I’d like to get more aerobic and weight-bearing exercise.

And I will! I’m getting a kettlebell!

Please share this post about the Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery challenge!

Posted on February 2, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

In an effort to reach as many people as possible who can benefit from the Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge, may I ask that you please share this post — by emailing it to friend who could benefit and/or by sharing on Facebook, retweeting on Twitter, sharing on Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit — using whatever social media programs you like?

There’s even a little +SHARE icon below the post that you can use. I’m trying to get some momentum going here!

The all-time daily high for people viewing this blog was 89 views on Feb. 3, 2010 — a year ago tomorrow. Right now I’m at 15 views for today — would love to beat that record!!!

I’m including the links to all my posts about this challenge below to make it easier to catch up on the info.

In order from oldest to newest, please read these three posts:

Announcing the Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge
An open invitation to join an experiment in well-being
Welcome to the Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge! (includes links to videos showing what the process looks like and interviews with the developer)

These posts will get anyone caught up with the challenge, which starts today. You don’t have to do it like I do it, but please try them at least once.

Doing these exercises can help anyone release stress and trauma. If enough people do them, we could co-create a world with more peace and love, and less violence, substance abuse, and suffering. Would you like that?

If you don’t think you can benefit, I ask you to try them just once. If you do these exercises and don’t tremble, I’ll kiss your feet and tell the world!

If you’re in Austin, Texas, I’ll be glad to teach you how and do them with you, at my home, your home, or maybe a more public place.

Thank you for sharing this.

Welcome to the Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge!

Posted on February 2, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

Good morning! It’s a lovely 18 degrees F. here in Austin, TX, with rolling blackouts occurring around the state as I write this due to the extreme demand for electricity. My old house is chill, and I’m lucky to be bi-powered, with gas and electricity.

If you don’t have the book, The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process: Transcend Your Toughest Times, or the video, or if you’re completely lost about this work,check out these videos on YouTube:

Trauma & Tension Releasing Exercises, 1:37. This silent video first shows a captured polar bear trembling to release shock and stress from its body, and then it shows several people doing the same in a deliberately induced process (because we humans have mostly forgotten how to do this). You can get a sense from seeing the variety of ways that people tremble, shake, and rock that there’s not a “right way” to do it. Your body finds its own way to release stress and trauma, and that can look a bit different from person to person. If your body does something else, just surrender (but please keep yourself safe.)
Trauma Releasing Exercises, 3:58. This video shows a group of women at a workshop testifying about their experience, as well as some bits showing them doing the exercises. If you haven’t done them before, check out what the trembling can look like. Really clears out energy blocks in the lower chakras!
There are also a series of six videos, interviews with David Berceli, author of the book above, who developed these exercises. I haven’t seen them all yet.

I’m getting out my book and turning to page 144. Here goes!

Ahh. I stopped after 30 minutes so I could finish this post before my chiropractor appointment. Had a sense I could have gone for 5 more minutes.

Noticings:

I have been holding off on doing these, noticing stress in my body and wanting to really be ready to do these exercises for this challenge!
The floor was cold, even on a yoga mat, so I spread yoga blankets on it.
I do Version B of Exercises 2 and 3. What do you do?
I have to do Exercise 2 longer to feel stress in my calf. But then I can squat with flat feet, so my calves are pretty stretched out. Do you find that you need to do more of any exercise to feel the stress in your muscles?
I believe that Exercise 6 is really the tough core of the process. Today the trembling started just before I went into the third minute. I hung in there for five minutes! (I wonder if you were in a hurry and just did this one exercise, would your legs begin trembling? I will probably check that out at some point!)
Exercise 7 is the release! Whee! Today, mostly my legs trembled, but my hands shook at times as well, and when the trembling stopped, my body began to rock. I alternated, trembling and rocking, for 15 minutes.
My cat Mango curled up next to my side while I was on the floor trembling. Cats are very sensitive to good energy! Thank you, Mango!

All in all, today was a good start.

If anyone reading this in Austin, TX, is interested in doing these with me, please get in touch. I’d love to teach you or do these with you. If enough people are interested, I will look for a place to teach these for free or very low cost.

Meanwhile, until Feb. 26, there’s my house!

Since I’m doing these on even-numbered days in February, until Friday! (It may be an everything-closed-because-of-snow-and-ice day here in Austin, Texas!)

Day 14: Being a mad scientist, having a wise realtor, leaving home

Posted on January 25, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

We’re two-thirds of the way through the 21-day gratitude challenge!

I’m grateful for the “mad scientist” aspect of my personality.

I’m happily dreaming up and promoting the next challenge, a two-month experiment in doing the trauma releasing exercises.

I’m an Aquarius, born Feb. 7. That sign suits me. (If the “new astrology” is real, I’d be a Capricorn, which doesn’t suit me.) I like experimenting and learning!

I have no idea if anyone will follow me, but I’m willing to be the “lone nut”. (Most Aquarians are.)

That lone nut reference is to a video about leadership lessons from dancing, which you can view here. Are you willing to be a first follower?

I’m grateful for the wise advice of my realtor, who told me not to meet with the buyer of my house until closing. Yesterday I did meet him, but we didn’t converse. His realtor, his inspector, a foundation repairman, and he all came by yesterday to move ahead with his plans for buying and remodeling the house.

I wondered about that advice, and then I realized how emotional it is to sell my home in which I’ve lived 10 years of my life.

It’s the end of an era, not just of the house, but in my life.

The buyer and I will close and I hope we’ll spend some time hanging out. I can tell him about the plants and what I would have done if I had remodeled.

I’m grateful for the 10 years in which this house has provided me a home. So much has happened in those 10 years: The jobs I’ve had that paid the mortgage and bills, the times I’ve been unemployed, the people who have lived or stayed here with me at various times, the work I’ve done and have had others do, the heartbreaks and disappointments, the fun, the moments of joy, the moments of incredible stillness and peace and bliss…

The me of 10 years ago didn’t know herself (or like herself) nearly as much as I do now.

This house is where I recovered from my major childhood trauma, and where I got present in my life and truly acknowledged from the depths of my being how lucky I am to have a community of friends and family.

The guests I’ve had!!!

The yoga I’ve done!!!

The meals I’ve cooked!!!

I’ll be blogging more about my gratitude for this house and the past 10 years over the next week.

An open invitation to join an experiment in well-being

Posted on January 25, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

A reader, Martie in South Africa, commented on an older post, Holotropic breathwork compared to trauma releasing exercises, and said:

I first heard about TRE last year Sept. Since then I have bought the book “The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process: Transcend Your Toughest Times” by David Berceli; spend hours and weeks on the internet reading up as much as I can (actually the info is few and far between and quite hard to find!). I have met up with other people who have done the course, and we have swapped some stories and experiences. I would like to learn as much as I can about this process . Sadly I think the course prices are way over priced (for my budget anyway), so I am going the DIY route.

I invited Martie to participate in the Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge that starts Feb. 2, which I announced yesterday on this blog.

And now I’m inviting you. Here are the criteria for participating:

you want to enhance your well-being
you’ve been under prolonged stress at some point in your life
you’ve experienced trauma at some point in your life
you like discovering what really works
you’d like to contribute to the body of knowledge about a technique designed to help people recover from trauma by releasing it from their bodies
you’re interested in finding out if this technique works for releasing chronic stress

If any of those criteria inspire you, please consider participating for any or all of this challenge. You can’t do it wrong! I’m doing it a certain way, but anyone who does these exercises even once is welcome to participate and comment on your experience.

I’m trying to build a body of knowledge here, because as Martie and many others and I have found, there’s not a lot of anecdotal information available in one place about using this technique to release trauma and stress and improve well-being. It holds great promise, if you can imagine a world where no one is overly or chronically stressed or traumatized.

All it costs is the price of the book or video, you doing the exercises at least once (but hopefully several times or even as often as I do) in February and March, and reporting on your experience in the comments on this blog.

When it’s over, I’ll compile all our experiences into one long, organized blog post (or maybe a page) that anyone can find when they google “trauma releasing exercises”.

Announcing the Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge

Posted on January 24, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

On February 2, after completing the 21-day gratitude challenge, I am starting a new challenge, the Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge.

One topic that consistently draws people to this blog is David Berceli’s trauma releasing exercises, as described in his book, The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process: Transcend Your Toughest Times, and seen in his video, Trauma Releasing Exercises Step by Step Video Instruction and Demonstration.

I’ve posted about them several times and done them at least a dozen times.They aren’t hard to learn or do — you just have to be able-bodied.

Although I have experienced trauma in my distant past, my take on these exercises is that they are very helpful for releasing chronic stress, which is much more common than trauma in today’s world.

It’s been estimated that as many as 90 percent of doctor’s visits are for problems related to stress. So let’s do something to decrease stress!

Besides, I need to do these exercises consistently, and I want to make it fun and useful for others, so I’m inviting you to join me in creating an online resource of anecdotal reports about the effects of doing these exercises. I would love to have your input!

Ever had a job you disliked or got burned out on and couldn’t just leave because of your mortgage/insurance/retirement? That’s chronic stress.
Ever had a difficult colleague/customer/boss/partner who seemingly loved to make your life miserable, whom you couldn’t just tell off because you’d get fired/dumped? That’s chronic stress.
Ever tried to work and take care of your spouse, kids, and aging parents, putting yourself last? And throw in a difficult commute or special-needs family member? That’s chronic stress.
Ever been consumed with worry, so that your health suffered? That’s chronic stress.

Ask yourself this:

How relaxed am I?

Is relaxation a distant memory?

Is relaxation something I only experience with alcohol or an expensive vacation or pharmaceuticals?

What can I do to release tension from my body in a healthy way?

Do I do this often enough to experience life for most of every day in a relaxed state?

If any of these questions hit home, please consider participating in this challenge. Your participation doesn’t have to exactly match mine. Do what you can, and I’d love to hear about your experience.

Trauma recovery experimenters are welcome to take part and report too. That is what this process is designed for.

Here’s how the challenge works (and if I am the only one, I will happily be the lone nut curious enough to do this and learn something useful to share):

If you don’t have the book or video, order them now. The links above will take you to Amazon.com.
On February 2, do the exercises. They take 20-30 minutes. I’ll be doing them and reporting here, and you can share your experience in the comments.
For the rest of February, do the exercises on even-numbered days. Report as needed.
In March, do them twice a week on your own schedule. Report significant changes in the comments.
At the end of March, notice what has changed in your body, attitude, sense of well-being, emotions, vices, and other aspects of your life that may be attributable to doing these exercises and letting go of stress. Share in the comments!
Learn to recognize what your unstressed body feels like and what the signals are that you need to do the exercises. This is a skill.

That’s it! This is qualitative research, health and well-being improvement, and community service, folks. I’d love to receive and share your contributions. Maybe we can make the world a better place while benefitting ourselves!

Any questions before we start? Feel free to email me at mareynolds27 at gmail dot com.

NLPing, challenges and choices, my toolbox of resources — and a proposition for a new challenge

Posted on January 18, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

I’ve got to be out of my house in an hour for a realtor to show it to a prospective client, so here goes!

I feel very gratified about a phone NLP session I had last night with someone I’ve never played in this way with before. I’m not going to betray any confidences, but the process worked! She made several shifts, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

I believe that the thing she was stuck on has opened up in a beautiful and remarkable way. Excellent work — you know who you are! It was such a pleasure for me. I hope it was for you too.

I also got an email from a friend whom I did a session with about three weeks ago — the session that inspired me to offer free sessions for a week. She’s sailing on the project she was stuck on — fulfilling her creative vision and finding collaborators who rock deeply. She wrote:

Your NLP with me was such a help. I may need more soon.

I still need to schedule three more free sessions with people who claimed their spot before January 12. I’m looking forward to it — and I will be offering sessions on a sliding scale or donation basis very soon! Stay tuned!

I feel grateful for life’s challenges. I didn’t sleep well last night — issues with getting my car repaired, selling my house, my present and future work, and of course, my identity, all came to a head, leaving me restless, in my head, and full of what ifs.

Once I considered all the choices I have, I felt better. Got some good quality sleep for an hour or two and woke up ready to face the day. I did Dene Ballantine’s Tap Away Pain (TAP) version of the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) just to really get it at a bodily level that I have many choices about how I face what life presents.

I also feel grateful for my considerable toolbox of resources. Yoga, TAP/EFT, pranayama, sitting, Reiki, NLP — all of them come in handy for getting me centered and helping me operate from my center even more deeply.

I add to that list of resources the trauma releasing exercises, which I haven’t done for awhile.

Last night I was inspired to get that book down off the shelf and find out how often you can do them, because I had a brainstorm.

What if after I/we finish our 21 days of gratitude (we’re one-third of the way through today), I offer an opportunity to join me in doing the revolutionary trauma releasing exercises every other day for a month and twice a week for the next month?

By that point, we will be so unstressed and relaxed that it will be easy to recognize when we need to do them, and it will feel so good to be unstressed and relaxed that we will be motivated to do them when we need to!

Sometimes stress can be such a part of your life that you don’t even know who you are any more. I’ve been there.

This is a way to recover your true relaxed self — without having to go on an expensive island vacation or get frequent massages! (More power to you if you can do that!)

We can share our experiences here. Think of it as a public service: a lot of people find this blog searching for information about the trauma releasing exercises because I’ve written about them before, and there’s not a lot of first-hand reports out there yet.

Look in the tag cloud on the blog and click “trauma releasing exercises” to read those posts if you’re curious.

I decided to mention it now so you’ll have time to order the book and/or video if you want to participate.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Gratitude for my daughter, women friends, and skilled intuitive healers

Posted on January 13, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

About gratitude journals

From googling “gratitude journal,” the practice apparently began in 1996 when Sarah Ban Breathnach created The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude as a companion to her popular book Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy.

Here’s a blurb about the book:

“Gratitude is the most passionate transformative force in the cosmos,” promises author Sarah Ban Breathnach (Simple Abundance) in her introduction.

I believe it, Sister Sarah!

Sarah asked journalers (journalists?) to write five things every day that they felt grateful for and said they would feel their lives shift within a couple of months.

In 1998, Oprah Winfrey had Sarah as a guest on her show, and as we all know, Oprah just knows goodness. The gratitude journal took off.

I missed out on this back then. It was in the early days of the world wide web (remember that?). I was working at a computer all day, and in my free time, the last thing I wanted to do was be on a computer. (My, how Facebook and blogging have changed that!)

I was raising an adolescent girl going through her most difficult period, in an often-strained relationship.

Actually, looking back, keeping gratitude journals would probably have been a fantastically wonderful practice for us to share back then, if she had deigned to share anything with me.

Hmmm. She’s changed, and so have I.

What I feel grateful for today

Today I feel grateful for my whole experience of motherhood. From pregnancy (easy), through childbirth (difficult), to the moment I held my new baby in my arms for the first time and she wrapped her tiny fingers around my little finger (instant love), I have been blessed to have had a child, a daughter, and specifically my daughter, Lela Rose, who is 29 years old now.

Lela at her Dec 2010 graduation from nursing school, with her women friends.

I watched and helped her grow up, even as I grew up more myself, and she has turned out to be a mensch, a true human being. I see her in her young adult years now, a mother herself, starting her nursing career just this week, moving through struggle to accomplishment. I see her self-esteem, her worthiness, her competency, her intelligence, her endearing goofiness, her wisdom, her discipline, her caring, her limits too.

What I am most grateful for about being a mother is the personal growth that raising her brought to my life — the growing up that I had to do, the inner work of exploring my values, learning when to be flexible and when to stand firm, the changes that being her mother brought to my life.

Today I feel grateful for my women friends, in particular Clarita and Linaka, whom I spent time with last night. We go way back to 1995 when we began ecstatically dancing together. That is 16 years of knowing each other, talking, coming together and moving away, seeing each other through difficulties and joys and sharing them, traveling together, cooking and eating together, always laughing together, and lately doing NLP with each other.

I feel blessed to have so many women friends, new and old, near and far. There is something about the friendship of women that is so nurturing. I think we let our hair down when it’s just us, in a way that we don’t or can’t with men, because we share the lifelong experience of being women in this culture. And when we have common interests and affection for each other, the connecting is abundant.

Today I feel grateful for those people I’ve encountered so far in my life who are skilled intuitive healers. I’ve mentioned Patrice, my acupuncturist, and Chandler Collins, my chiropractor, on this blog before.

Yesterday I had a heart-centering bodymind session with Bo Boatwright, who is a chiropractor but who has learned and developed a method that one could do with just a massage license.

Having experienced one session with Bo, I’d say his work with me on the table was a combination of massage, chiropractic, myofascial release, rebirthing, and visualization. He rolled me and moved me to find the stuck places, and he dug into the stuck places, having me breathe all the while, until my body spontaneously began to release stress/tension/stuckness in the manner of rebirthing and trauma releasing exercises.

After my body quieted down, I felt sadness arise in my heart chakra. I cried, and Bo asked me about my relationship with my parents, who died in 1984 and 1997 (but of course one’s relationship with parents doesn’t end with death). I opened my heart to them, forgave them, embraced them, kissed them…

A couple of hours later, in a moment of quiet stillness, I noticed a new space in my heart center, an openness that wasn’t there before.

Thanks, Bo. I’m grateful for you. And heads up, you are teaching me.

Read these books!

Posted on January 2, 2011 by MaryAnn Reynolds

I read a lot.

Let me clarify that. I don’t read as much as a few other people read, or as much as I read in the past, but I am a reader. I’ve been an avid reader from a young age, at times indiscriminate but now much more discerning.

It’s that Buddhist saying: “Don’t waste time.” If a book doesn’t hook me early on, I set it aside and try later. It doesn’t mean it’s not good. It just means it’s not relevant enough to what I need to learn in that moment to make the effort feel alive. Energy flows where attention goes. If there’s no energy there, why bother?

The following is a list of books I read in 2010, plan to read in 2011 (plan, not commit), read before 2010 (and mentioned on this blog) that have shaped my world, and reference books that I dip into but will probably not read cover to cover. Links are included to the books’ pages on Amazon.com; if you buy a book from clicking a link here, I’ll get a very small financial reward — which I appreciate, because blogging takes time.

I’ve mentioned a few of the 2010 books prominently, namely, The Open-Focus Brain, A Symphony in the Brain, Buddha’s Brain, The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process, and What Really Matters. You can do a search for those posts and read what I wrote if you want.

Books read in 2010

Buddha, by Karen Armstrong

Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, by Rick Hanson

The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice, by T.K.V. Desikachar

Krishnamacharya: His Life and Teachings, by A.G. Mohan with Ganesh Mohan

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body, by Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins

Relax and Renew: Restful Yoga for Stressful Times, by Judith Lasater, Ph.D., P.T.

The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process: Transcend Your Toughest Times, by David Bercelli

Strengths Finder 2.0, by Tom Rath

A Symphony in the Brain, by Jim Robbins

The Web That Has No Weaver, by Ted J. Kaptchuk

What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America, by Tony Schwartz