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Why We Get Fat: Diet Trends and Food Policy
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preach
Did St Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats. Rebecca West
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What’s in a song
From the NPR series, What’s in a song:
Group Sing-alongs help a friend
For the past several years, a group of friends has gathered every week in the living room of a suburban home in Logan, Utah, to sing long-forgotten songs. It’s a fun way to spend the evening, but it’s also therapy for a dear friend.
Until several years ago, Barre Toelken was a folklorist at Utah State University. He’d spent much of his life preserving sea shanties and other antique songs, but then he had a stroke and was forced to retire.
“I used to know 800 songs,” Toelken says. “I had this stroke, and I had none of these songs left in my head. None of them were left.”
But, Toelken says, he soon discovered that, with a little positive reinforcement, he could remember some of the forgotten music after all.
“A little bit at a time, I realized I still had the songs in my head,” he says. “So now I meet with this group of friends once a week a week, and we sing.
“This group doesn’t use any musical instruments, because I can’t play the guitar since the stroke hit me,” Toelken says. “And they did that as a sign of respect, I think. But they’ve all said how much they’ve learned about the songs since they quit using the guitar because instead of concentrating on their hand moving, they have to concentrate on the words.”
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truest expression
The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie. ~Agnes de Mille
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Self-care is Setting Boundaries
“Some of us have so many voices in our heads, we could hold group therapy by ourselves,” said Rokelle Lerner, a popular speaker and trainer on relationships, women’s issues, and addicted family systems.
This internal chorus is often composed of voices from our family of origin, voices of critical teachers or bosses, voices from past relationships or current situations. Often these voices are drowned out by our own voice nagging, reprimanding, berating, but rarely praising us.
“In times of stress or chaos, the voices grow louder and it’s easy to go numb,” Lerner once told the audience at a Hazelden Women Healing Conference. “We become estranged from our purpose and our passion. Our response is fear, and our reaction is an attempt at control.” We frequently become children again during times of stress — reverting to old and unhealthy patterns that were present in dysfunctional families or relationships. Our boss becomes our mother, the vindictive coworker becomes the childhood bully. Although we are adults, we feel like vulnerable children, and this vulnerability puts us at risk for depression, substance abuse, or other addictive behaviors.
“We need to ‘grow ourselves up’ when we feel little,” said Lerner. Growing up is about setting appropriate boundaries and limits and turning from reactivity to creativity. “Without boundaries, we all react to the past and retreat to family patterns,” said Lerner. Boundaries communicate “what I value I will protect, but what you value I will respect.”
Lerner said that growing up is about maintaining dignity and integrity, and being “authentic” with ourselves — a skill that takes practice and preparation. It’s about learning how or whether you want to “show up” in a situation, how you want to communicate what you need or want to say, and then taking the consequences for what you say and do. It’s also about listening attentively and with respect. When people communicate clearly, directly, honestly, and sensitively, they are learning to speak from the best part of themselves to the best part of others, said Lerner.
“Healthy adults learn how to make appropriate requests, how to set limits, and how to take action,” said Lerner. She gave an example of a skateboarder who taunted a woman by skating too close to her, knocking the newspaper she held out of her hands. The woman at first reacted explosively by yelling and calling the adolescent every derogatory name she could think of. He just laughed and walked away. Overcoming that first raw reaction, she called him back, this time explaining in a much calmer voice, “What I meant to say is that you scared me. I thought you were going to hurt me.”
“If you can’t identify your emotions right away, at least you can control your behavior,” said Lerner. This “fake it ’til you make it” approach is one of the first things people recovering from addiction learn. It often requires counting to 10, breathing deeply, or excusing yourself until you feel more in control. Reacting reflectively rather than reflexively opens the door for honest interaction.
Boundaries differ for each individual and for each situation, but run along a continuum from “too intrusive” on one end to “too distant” on the other. The trick is to pay close attention to your instincts and feelings so you can strike a healthy balance in relationships that will honor your own boundaries. If an interaction feels inappropriate or uncomfortable, the chances are a personal boundary is being tested or crossed or a need is not getting met.
The more we practice sifting through all the voices in our heads, tuning into and trusting the one clear voice within that guides and protects us, the better we will get at identifying and respecting our own personal boundaries. We will also get better at developing strategies to take the best possible care of ourselves when we feel our boundaries are being violated. We discover how outlets like mutual-help groups, hot baths, long walks, and prayer or meditation feed our soul better than drugs or alcohol. We discover how good it feels to be a grown-up.
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creativity is courage
Another word for creativity is courage. George Prince
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How Does Art Therapy Heal
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Canada Goose Coloring Page
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Meditation can relieve pain
Meditation can relieve pain, and it does so by activating multiple brain areas, according to an April 2011 study in the Journal of Neuroscience. Fadel Zeidan of Wake Forest University and his colleagues scanned people’s brains as they received uncomfortably hot touches to the leg. When subjects practiced a mindful meditation technique that encourages detachment from experience while focusing on breathing, they reported less pain than when they simply paid attention to their breathing. Likewise, different patterns of brain activity emerged under the two conditions, with mindful meditating resulting in more activity not only in executive centers that evaluate experiences and regulate emotions but also in lower regions that control the signals coming from the body.
The volunteers learned the meditation technique in only four 20-minute sessions, which means this pill-free analgesia could be a feasible way to help real patients suffering from pain. “People can reap some of the benefits of meditation without extensive training,” Zeidan says.
When I work with patients using mindfulness I start by asking who has experience with any type of meditation, breathing techniques and/or relaxation exercises. We than have a brief explanation and question and answer period and I focus on removing any doubt, fear, or skepticism. I usually than do a 10 to 12 minute body scan moving right into a mindful meditation that focuses on the breath.
With the co-occurring patients I work with this process seems to work the best. The chat in the beginning warms people up, the body scan relaxes which helps the meditators enter into a more meditative state.
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Bombay Cat Coloring Page
CreativeTherapyTools 