Mindfulness Practice, Emotions & Recovery from Trauma

     "... while the biological flight or fight response is natural and instinctual, when this response is blocked—as happens in trauma—the organism constricts. ... if the constriction from the trauma continues, rage, terror, and helplessness can build up, 'triggering immobility and inward collapse' and 'emotional numbing, and other forms of psychological disassociation'. ... mindfulness practices are well-suited to the process of mind–body healing, especially in relation to trauma.      

     The human cortex comprises six layers:

          Layers 1–3, referred to as 'top-down', are responsible for the matching of current experience with prior learning. 

          Layers 6–4, termed 'bottom-up', are responsible for the awareness of sensory input from our experiences. 

     Mindfulness practice attempts to dissolve the top-down constraints (layers 1–3) and strengthen the input from the bottom layers (layers 6–4), allowing awareness to be shaped by the flow of information merged from the two layers. 
     '... when this bottom-up input is strengthened, it has the capacity to stand up to prior learning that so often constrains us. We are not imprisoned by our prior judgments and come to experience the world with fresh eyes.' "

       Belinda Siew Luan Khong. "Mindfulness: A Way of Cultivating Deep Respect for Emotions." Mindfulness 2011; 2: 27–32.

Marc Chagall

 

Inspiration

     Can we become wise, so that we may consistently inspire & nurture ourselves and others? http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/03/suffering-mindfulness-wisdom-equanimity.html

     How many times have we been told by others, and ourselves, that we'd never be able to do, have, or be something?
     Similarly, the thought of intentionally cultivating wisdom is not even considered by most us. Instead, we stumble through life, learning what’s foolish / self-defeating / antisocial / horrible, by trying it out. If by chance we should come across the deep meaning of "wisdom", most of us doubt that we ourselves could possibly cultivate it. Deep down, many of us lack the self-confidence, discipline and drive to achieve meaningful goals.

     Henry Ford was spot on when he said, "Whether you think you can, or think you can't, you're right!" Watch this video

Self-Care Strategies

The New York Times     May 17, 2014

          "Many economists believe that health care costs will continue to rise. Even more distressing, the Affordable Care Act will likely reinforce current practice, which dictates surgical and pharmacological interventions that can be expensive, inappropriate, burdened by side effects and, often, ineffective.

          Forty years ago, as a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, I began to study inexpensive self-care strategies — then called “alternative therapies” — that might address the underlying biological and psychological imbalances that contribute to chronic conditions. These included nutrition, exercise and “mind-body” techniques like meditation, guided mental imagery and biofeedback.

          Since then, research has demonstrated that mind-body approaches reduce stress and improve mood and immunity. They decrease blood pressure in hypertensives, blood sugar in diabetics and pain. Dietary modification can play a major role in preventing breast, prostate and colon cancer, as well as in diabetes and heart disease. And exercise, which can help prevent all of these, can also alleviate depression.

          We spend about twice as much as many other industrialized nations on health care, often with inferior outcomes. Three-quarters of that spending is on chronic conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, depression and chronic pain — exactly the ones for which self-care is best suited. Comprehensive programs that offer self-care in a supportive group are even more promising, for both treatment and prevention. This approach is also proving effective for psychological trauma.

          What was unexamined and alternative 40 years ago is now well researched. It should be fundamental. If we are going to reduce our ruinous costs and improve our declining national health, we must make self-care and group support central to all care."

JAMES S. GORDON
Washington, May 12, 2014

The writer, a psychiatrist, directs the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and was chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy appointed by President Bill Clinton. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/opinion/sunday/self-care-strategies.html?_r=2

Ian Forsyth   nationalgeographic.com

Integrating Knowledge & Behaviour - Teaching the Talk AND the Walk

     Mindfulness practice cultivates "‘... a quality of self-focused attention characterized by openness & acceptance of experience that is not articulated in the descriptions of ... other constructs involving self-observation’. This quality of attention could potentially assist learning in social work education. 

     ... in order to equally value the sensory & bodily experience with conceptual knowledge, greater emphasis needs to be given to the phenomenology of experience, and to ‘... the reunion of our mind with our body, emotions, & spirit in teaching & learning’. ... (considered) essential to integrating ‘what one learns & knows with how one acts’."

       Lynn R. Mindfulness in social work education. Social Work Education 2010; 29(3): 289–304.

Yochi23   www.dpreview.com

Physical Symptoms from Unprocessed, Dysregulated Emotions

     "advances in research suggest that many medical symptoms without identified pathology may actually be caused by problems in psychophysiologic or brain-body pathways, such as abnormalities in smooth-muscle tone in the gastrointestinal tract during stress in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Recent research also suggests that links between perturbations in brain physiology and physical symptoms are bidirectional. Changes in brain physiology secondary to stressful life events cause functional abnormalities in the body (such as abnormalities in smooth-muscle tone in the gut), and these functional abnormalities in the body are also associated with changes in brain physiology."
     Katon W, Sullivan M, Walker E. Medical symptoms without identified pathology: relationship to psychiatric disorders, childhood and adult trauma, and personality traits. Ann Intern Med 2001; 134(9 Pt 2): 917-25.
 
     "Somatization ... the translation of emotions into the development or worsening of somatic problems or complaints, is a massive burden on patients, physicians, the healthcare system & society in general, accounting for a major proportion of family physician & specialty medical visits, as well as excessive tests, medications & hospital use. Furthermore, it is a major cause of disability, corporate financial loss and probably contributes to early mortality.
     (In one study) 19% of ... sufferers of recurrent headaches were felt to be manifestations of somatization. ... alexithymia, or problems identifying and feeling emotions, was strongly associated with recurrent headache. ... many headache sufferers are psychologically distressed ... poor insight into emotional processes or alexithymia prevented the detection & treatment of these factors. ... there is a need for the development of specific assessment methods to detect relevant emotional and psychological factors in headache sufferers.  
     Specifically, headache sufferers have been shown to have difficulty regulating anger. Many headache patients tend to turn anger inward towards themselves. This effect was experimentally illustrated when migraine patients and controls were subjected to an anger-provoking situation. The migraine patients exhibited significantly less overt anger behaviour & experienced a significantly greater rise in pulse pressure than controls in the anger-provoking situation. ... anger turned inward was the most predictive of headache. Almost half of their sample of headache sufferers scored highly on anger-in, compared with only one-sixth of the matched no-headache control group. The internalization of anger and/ or trouble identifying anger has been found in high rates in patients with conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), depression and hypertension, which are often comorbid with headache." 
       Abbass A, Lovas D, Purdy A. Direct diagnosis and management of emotional factors in chronic headache patients. Cephalalgia 2008; 28(12): 1305-14.

Psychic1   www.dpreview.com