Researchers at the University of Birmingham and King’s College London have found that staying active keeps the body young and healthy.
The researchers set out to assess the health of older adults who had exercised most of their adult lives to see if this could slow down ageing.
The study recruited 125 amateur cyclists aged 55 to 79, 84 of which were male and 41 were female. The men had to be able to cycle 100 km in under 6.5 hours, while the women had to be able to cycle 60 km in 5.5 hours. Smokers, heavy drinkers and those with high blood pressure or other health conditions were excluded from the study.
The participants underwent a series of tests in the laboratory and were compared to a group of adults who do not partake in regular physical activity. This group consisted of 75 healthy people aged 57 to 80 and 55 healthy young adults aged 20 to 36.
The study showed that loss of muscle mass and strength did not occur in those who exercise regularly. The cyclists also did not increase their body fat or cholesterol levels with age and the men’s testosterone levels also remained high, suggesting that they may have avoided most of the male menopause.
More surprisingly, the study also revealed that the benefits of exercise extend beyond muscle as the cyclists also had an immune system that did not seem to have aged either.
An organ called the thymus, which makes immune cells called T cells, starts to shrink from the age of 20 and makes less T cells. In this study, however, the cyclists’ thymuses were making as many T cells as those of a young person.
The findings come as figures show that less than half of over 65s do enough exercise to stay healthy and more than half of those aged over 65 suffer from at least two diseases.* Professor Janet Lord, Director of the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham, said: “Hippocrates in 400 BC said that exercise is man’s best medicine, but his message has been lost over time and we are an increasingly sedentary society.
“However, importantly, our findings debunk the assumption that ageing automatically makes us more frail.
“Our research means we now have strong evidence that encouraging people to commit to regular exercise throughout their lives is a viable solution to the problem that we are living longer but not healthier.”
Dr Niharika Arora Duggal, also of the University of Birmingham, said: “We hope these findings prevent the danger that, as a society, we accept that old age and disease are normal bedfellows and that the third age of man is something to be endured and not enjoyed.”
Professor Stephen Harridge, Director of the Centre of Human & Aerospace Physiological Sciences at King’s College London, said: “The findings emphasise the fact that the cyclists do not exercise because they are healthy, but that they are healthy because they have been exercising for such a large proportion of their lives.
“Their bodies have been allowed to age optimally, free from the problems usually caused by inactivity. Remove the activity and their health would likely deteriorate.”
Norman Lazarus, Emeritus Professor at King’s College London and also a master cyclist and Dr Ross Pollock, who undertook the muscle study, both agreed that: “Most of us who exercise have nowhere near the physiological capacities of elite athletes.
“We exercise mainly to enjoy ourselves. Nearly everybody can partake in an exercise that is in keeping with their own physiological capabilities.
“Find an exercise that you enjoy in whatever environment that suits you and make a habit of physical activity. You will reap the rewards in later life by enjoying an independent and productive old age.”
The research findings are detailed in two papers published today in Aging Cell and are the result of an ongoing joint study by the two universities, funded by the BUPA foundation.
The researchers hope to continue to assess the cyclists to see if they continue to cycle and stay young.
Grounded in the belief we are all unique beings, we begin each new client with a meticulous bio-mechanical evaluation, assessing each joint in its relationship to the movement of the body as a whole. Our therapists are skilled at reading the unique story your body tells, and treating everything from the bottom of your foot to the top of your head.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
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I’m quick to regret the label of chronic pain. I believe in the power of words and thoughts, so the idea of labeling a consistent pain as “chronic” feels like a resignation of control and possibility. For about two and a half years now, I’ve experienced persistent little nudges and discomfort in various parts of my bodies—mostly symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, joint pain, and the general discomfort that comes along with a desk job. Yes, I visited doctors and specialists to no avail and eventually turned to alternative healing modalities—like acupuncture, exercise, hot and cold therapy, physical therapy—searching for answers in the form of relief, management, and prevention. And while these methods worked, only temporarily so. Plus, I never feel that these practices address the root of the pain circulating throughout my body, which is sharp and rarely dormant these days.
Recently, my symptoms have fluctuated in and out of remission, except for, I noticed, during the periods of heightened stress and anxiousness, which seemed to exacerbate the symptoms. On my quest to further investigate the mind-body connection in relation to pain and body trauma, I stumbled across Pyeng Threadgill’s work with mindful movement.
“It’s about guiding people on how to be more integrated into all areas of your life. It’s a practice, not an overnight thing.”
Threadgill came across the Alexander Technique years ago as a vocalist and performer looking for tools to help strengthen her voice and body instruments. “I learned a lot about how we’re using our whole system. There’s an opportunity for openness. Time feels less rushed,” she told mbg during a session at her studio in Brooklyn. Today, she’s a certified instructor who’s reframed the technique as mindfulness and movement re-education to help everyday people focus on their movement habits and the stresses that can trigger chronic injuries and pain. “It’s about guiding people on how to be more integrated into all areas of your life. It’s a practice, not an overnight thing.”
During our session, Threadgill led me through a series of exercises steeped in awareness and conversation. Different from other bodywork treatments like massage, both Pyeng and I guided the treatment, with Pyeng adjusting the moves depending on how I responded to a particular feeling, a gentle pull on my arm there, a guided neck stretch here. After all, one of the primary principles of the technique is cultivating awareness. She explained that the moves were to help retrain the nervous system. “A lot of what we’re connecting to is connective tissue—loosening the grip of connective tissue to allow the muscles underneath to move more freely.”
I walked away from my session with Pyeng lighter and with remarkably less tension and tightness. If we all learned to think about our full alignment and our daily habits, could we shift the conversation on chronic pain from coping to healing? Pyeng’s take: “It’s about the liberation from identifying with your energies. If we can recognize our body and habits, we can change the course of our movement and, ultimately, our outlook on pain.”
Below, Pyeng offers up four tips for incorporating mindful movement into your own life.
1. Bring your smartphone to eye level.
Pyeng notes smartphone usage as a major factor in body alignment issues. “Since so many people are using smartphones nowadays, it is important to raise your smartphone more often when texting, typing, or reading. This takes practice, but it will reveal how often you are closing off the front of the throat and therefore, part of your body’s lengthening and widening potential.” She says a question to ask is, “How can I allow my body to lengthen with ease?”
2. Notice your breath.
A key element of Mindful Movement is to practice noticing your body and habits while engaging with the world. Part of this engagement, Pyeng says, starts with our breath and “how it feels to pay attention to your breath with your eyes opened.” In what ways can you use less force or holding when breathing while fully present in a task, chore, or activity.
3. Walk with intention.
Try to look out at eye height when walking. Oftentimes, so many people look down when they walk, and as a result, they reinforce the shortening of their spines and entire torso by forgetting that we, like any other animal, lead our movement with our eyes and head, followed by our bodies.
4. Slow down and sense your breath and body.
Most of us get so wrapped up in any given task that we forget to sense ourselves. It’s as if we are TOO focused on the bull’s-eye to remember our feet being on the ground and heads being light above. Set a timer once an hour for a five-minute pause to take inventory of your body. Instead ask yourself what you notice in your body while sitting in a chair, your car, or even standing in line.
Grounded in the belief we are all unique beings, we begin each new client with a meticulous bio-mechanical evaluation, assessing each joint in its relationship to the movement of the body as a whole. Our therapists are skilled at reading the unique story your body tells, and treating everything from the bottom of your foot to the top of your head.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
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Reach for the hand of a loved one in pain and not only will your breathing and heart rate synchronize with theirs, your brain wave patterns will couple up too, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The study, by researchers with the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Haifa, also found that the more empathy a comforting partner feels for a partner in pain, the more their brainwaves fall into sync. And the more those brain waves sync, the more the pain goes away.
“We have developed a lot of ways to communicate in the modern world and we have fewer physical interactions,” said lead author Pavel Goldstein, a postdoctoral pain researcher in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at CU Boulder. “This paper illustrates the power and importance of human touch.”
The study is the latest in a growing body of research exploring a phenomenon known as “interpersonal synchronization,” in which people physiologically mirror the people they are with. It is the first to look at brain wave synchronization in the context of pain, and offers new insight into the role brain-to-brain coupling may play in touch-induced analgesia, or healing touch.
Goldstein came up with the experiment after, during the delivery of his daughter, he discovered that when he held his wife’s hand, it eased her pain.
“I wanted to test it out in the lab: Can one really decrease pain with touch, and if so, how?”
He and his colleagues at University of Haifa recruited 22 heterosexual couples, age 23 to 32 who had been together for at least one year and put them through several two-minute scenarios as electroencephalography (EEG) caps measured their brainwave activity. The scenarios included sitting together not touching; sitting together holding hands; and sitting in separate rooms. Then they repeated the scenarios as the woman was subjected to mild heat pain on her arm.
Merely being in each other’s presence, with or without touch, was associated with some brain wave synchronicity in the alpha mu band, a wavelength associated with focused attention. If they held hands while she was in pain, the coupling increased the most.
Researchers also found that when she was in pain and he couldn’t touch her, the coupling of their brain waves diminished. This matched the findings from a previously published paper from the same experiment which found that heart rate and respiratory synchronization disappeared when the male study participant couldn’t hold her hand to ease her pain.
“It appears that pain totally interrupts this interpersonal synchronization between couples and touch brings it back,” says Goldstein.
Subsequent tests of the male partner’s level of empathy revealed that the more empathetic he was to her pain the more their brain activity synced. The more synchronized their brains, the more her pain subsided.
How exactly could coupling of brain activity with an empathetic partner kill pain?
More studies are needed to find out, stressed Goldstein. But he and his co-authors offer a few possible explanations. Empathetic touch can make a person feel understood, which in turn — according to previous studies — could activate pain-killing reward mechanisms in the brain.
“Interpersonal touch may blur the borders between self and other,” the researchers wrote.
The study did not explore whether the same effect would occur with same-sex couples, or what happens in other kinds of relationships. The takeaway for now, Pavel said: Don’t underestimate the power of a hand-hold.
“You may express empathy for a partner’s pain, but without touch it may not be fully communicated,” he said.
Grounded in the belief we are all unique beings, we begin each new client with a meticulous bio-mechanical evaluation, assessing each joint in its relationship to the movement of the body as a whole. Our therapists are skilled at reading the unique story your body tells, and treating everything from the bottom of your foot to the top of your head.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
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You might have heard people mention the benefits of TRE for the healing of trauma and for reducing stress. TRE stands for Trauma Release Exercise. The words ‘traumatic’ and ‘traumatized’ are used casually now in everyday speech, e.g. ‘There were no dark chocolate biscuits in the meeting room today, it was fairly traumatic’.
But what is trauma?
According to the DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), people can experience psychological trauma by any event they perceive (consciously or unconsciously) to be life-threatening, as likely to cause death or injury. The perceived threat can be to our own physical wellbeing, witnessing a violent event, or even learning about highly distressful events. Typical causes of trauma range from exposure to extreme events such as war, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters to long-term exposure to abusive relationships, codependency, bullying, or extreme poverty.
Age, life experience, and constitution are of course all factors in this. Thunder or shouting, for instance, are rarely life-threatening, but when it comes to trauma, the critical factor is the perception of threat and the incapacity to deal with it. As a result, even an imaginary event can be interpreted as life-threatening. Memories associated with trauma can be implicit and hard to recall verbally but still manifest physically.
PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is recognized as a mental disorder that can develop after a person is exposed to a traumatic event and experiences distressing symptoms such as nightmares, mental or physical distress, and an increase in the fight-or-flight response, more than a month after the traumatic event. You don’t need to be diagnosed with PTSD to suffer from trauma-related symptoms. Symptoms of trauma vary from more immediate manifestations such as amnesia or panic attacks to seemingly unrelated ailments like chronic pain and asthma that may develop over time.
The likelihood is that the majority of us have suffered some sort of trauma. Whether it be related to addiction, burnout, a relationship, or something else entirely, people react to situations differently. What might be traumatic for one person may be processed differently by another. Car accidents, death in the family, sexual harassment and misconduct – we have all had distressing events in our lives that affect us.
Many different types of treatments have been studied over the years to try and treat trauma, from exposure therapy, EMDR, CBT, and somatic experiencing. TRE is one way to heal this trauma.
What is TRE?
TRE stands for Tension or Trauma Releasing Exercises. These exercises help individuals to release stress or tension as a result of difficult life circumstances, immediate or prolonged stressful situations, or traumatic life experiences. Consisting of six simple exercises, TRE evokes a muscular shaking process in the body.
The exercises elicit this shaking, or neurogenic tremors, in a controlled and sustained manner. When evoked in this way, this shaking begins to release deep chronic muscular tension held within the body. They come from the center of gravity of the body (S3), which is protected by the psoas muscles. When shaking is evoked at this powerful center of the body, it reverberates throughout the entire body, traveling along the spine, releasing deep chronic tension from the sacrum to the cranium. When tension is released anywhere in the body, the brain registers a reduction in pain signals and produces new hormones for relaxation and comfort. Often, this release of tension is much like receiving an internal massage.
TRE was developed by David Bercelli, a trained social worker who spent years in high conflict areas. Whilst in a bomb shelter, he noticed that people would make the same involuntary movements when they would hear a bomb strike, covering their head with their hands and curling up into the fetal position. He was interested in the fact that after the bomb strikes, children would tremble and shake, while adults did not.
This shaking and tremoring response to trauma is not unique to humans but is found across the animal kingdom. David Bercelli teamed up with Peter Levine, who spent years studying trauma and somatic experiencing, to explore how humans suppression of this natural tendency leads to us “storing” trauma in our body, and how to help release it by working with the body.
After learning how to elicit this shaking response in our bodies- and how to regulate that response and what it invokes in us – we can safely practice TRE on our own. TRE is safe and meant for anyone regardless of gender, sex, age or culture.
TRE at New Life
At New Life Foundation, we currently have two qualified TRE practitioners: Our Intake Therapist Madelaine and Core Energetics Therapist Fernando. Madelaine holds TRE group classes twice a week.
While she was a volunteer at New Life in June and July, Carolina, also a qualified TRE practitioner, assisted with Madelaine’s classes. Carolina’s TRE journey began in 2009 when she was enrolled in body psychotherapy training in Core Energetics in her hometown of Brasilia, Brazil. Someone mentioned to her that David Berceli, the founder of TRE, was doing a weekend training course in town, and so Carolina signed up.
‘It made sense straight away, the whole theory behind it, the need to balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system’, recalls Carolina. There are two states that our bodies need to function: fight or flight (sympathetic), and rest and digest (parasympathetic). We tend to experience life in one state or another, but as we allow the shaking to happen in TRE, we’re able to balance these two functions’.
What Are The Benefits of TRE?
Speaking of the TRE benefits that she felt, Carolina continues, ‘Personally, TRE has helped me to feel more grounded and to be less reactive in everyday life. Other people who took the training with me saw an improvement in their chronic muscle pain and even with panic attacks, but it’s really important when practising TRE that you let the practitioner know if you have any special conditions (such as anxiety disorders, PTSD, physical limitations etc.), as the way that you self-regulate while doing the exercises may have to be slightly different to the rest of the group’.
Some other benefits you might experience from doing TRE are improved sleep quality, improved body and mind awareness, and increased flexibility.
Grounded in the belief we are all unique beings, we begin each new client with a meticulous bio-mechanical evaluation, assessing each joint in it’s relationship to the movement of the body as a whole. Our therapists are skilled at reading the unique story your body tells, and treating everything from the bottom of your foot to the top of your head.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Women’s Health and Lymphedema.
Physical Therapy Portland Oregon
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They say you never forget how to ride a bike, so maybe it’s time to climb aboard a two- or three-wheeler and enjoy the health benefits of cycling. “It’s socially oriented, it’s fun, and it gets you outside and exercising,” says Dr. Clare Safran-Norton, a physical therapist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Read more
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There’s nothing wrong with being a little weird. Because we think of psychological disorders on a continuum, we may worry when our own ways of thinking and behaving don’t match up with our idealized notion of health. But some variability can be healthy and even adaptive, say researchers in a review published February 20th in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, even though it can also complicate attempts to identify standardized markers of pathology.
“I would argue that there is no fixed normal,” says clinical psychologist and senior author Avram Holmes of Yale University. “There’s a level of variability in every one of our behaviors.” Healthy variation is the raw material that natural selection feeds on, but there are plenty of reasons why evolution might not arrive at one isolated perfect version of a trait or behavior. “Any behavior is neither solely negative or solely positive. There are potential benefits for both, depending on the context you’re placed in,” he says.
For instance, impulsive sensation seeking, a willingness to take risks in order to have new and exciting experiences that has its roots in our evolutionary history as foragers, is often thought of negatively. Increased sensation seeking is associated with things like substance abuse, criminality, risky sexual behavior, and physical injury. “But if you flip it on its head and look at potential positive outcomes, those same individuals may also thrive in complex and bustling environments where it’s appropriate for them to take risks and seek thrills,” he says. They often have more social support, are more outgoing, and exercise more.
The same is true for anxiety. “You might be more inhibited in social situations and you may find it harder to build friendships,” Holmes says. “However, that same anxiety, if you think of it in a workplace setting, is what motivates you to prepare for a big presentation. If you’re in school, that’s the same anxiety that motivates you to study for an exam.” He also notes that we have more control over the contexts we’re in than we tend to think we do, which means that it’s very possible to end up in an environment that favors the way our brains work.
But if variation in any given trait is normal, that does raise questions about what makes for disordered behavior, which he stresses is very much a real phenomenon. “It may be the case that if you focus on a single phenotype, there isn’t a specific line that separates health from disease, and that we must consider multiple phenotypes simultaneously,” he says.
This makes it much more complicated to try to find biomarkers for psychological illness, something that Holmes has worked on throughout his career. The usual approach is to break down a disorder into its component pieces, find a specific associated genetic marker or biological process for a certain piece, and then look for that marker or process in the general population to see if it can predict the disorder. The problem, he says, is that “one single phenotype in isolation is never going to be necessary nor sufficient to cause an illness.”
“What we want to try to do is build multivariate approaches that consider multiple domains of human behavior simultaneously, to see if we can boost our power in predicting eventual outcomes for folks,” he says. Large, open-source datasets have been collected in recent years that can be used in these efforts, but Holmes notes that the work will almost certainly require collaboration between different labs and institutions — some of which is already underway.
What this does mean, though, is that it really isn’t appropriate to think of ourselves in terms of a single trait that’s either good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. “This is a broader issue with our society,” he says, “but we’re all striving towards some artificial, archetypal ideal, whether it’s physical appearance or youthfulness or intelligence or personality. But we need to recognize the importance of variability, both in ourselves and in the people around us. Because it does serve an adaptive purpose in our lives.”
This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.
Grounded in the belief we are all unique beings, we begin each new client with a meticulous bio-mechanical evaluation, assessing each joint in its relationship to the movement of the body as a whole. Our therapists are skilled at reading the unique story your body tells, and treating everything from the bottom of your foot to the top of your head.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
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In this whiteboard session for Harvard Business Review, Davidson and Goleman talk about one of the most important discoveries: repeated practice helps us untether from emotional cues that keep us mired in distraction — specifically, rumination.
More emotional control
Research suggests mindfulness practice can strengthen the connections between the brain that direct our decision-making and impulses, so that when we encounter a strong emotional trigger, we’re not pulled to immediately react.
“[Mindfulness] strengthens the prefrontal (cortex’s) ability to say no to emotional impulse,” says Goleman. This increases resilience because it helps us hold things more lightly — like that snarky email — and not devote all of our attention to emotional cues. Davidson explains:
The “recover more quickly” is really an important attribute of what we think of as resilience. Resilience is, in many ways, the ability to recover more quickly from adversity. So instead of ruminating about the email that ticked you off for several weeks after, you can come back down and recover.
Goleman cautions that the science of mindfulness — what we know, what we don’t — is still in the early stages of study. There are benefits, but there is a lot of hype as well. Since the early 2000s, research on mindfulness has been expanding rapidly. For more, here’s a look at 10 leaders in the field, what their research has shown us, and the future directions their studies are taking.
Grounded in the belief we are all unique beings, we begin each new client with a meticulous bio-mechanical evaluation, assessing each joint in its relationship to the movement of the body as a whole. Our therapists are skilled at reading the unique story your body tells, and treating everything from the bottom of your foot to the top of your head.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
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Deep breathing is an essential part of Pilates exercise. And not just a big inhale, but also when you make a conscious effort to exhale fully, getting rid of every bit of stale air and allowing fresh, invigorating air to rush in. Joseph Pilates was adamant about deep breathing. Consider this quote from his book Return to Life Through Contrology: “Lazy breathing converts the lungs, literally and figuratively speaking, into a cemetery for the deposition of diseased, dying and dead germs as well as supplying an ideal haven for the multiplication of other harmful germs.” Is that not scary? Read more
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We’re all carrying a load, including tasks, challenges, worries, inner criticism, mistreatment from others, physical and emotional pain, loss and illness now or later, and everyday stresses and frustrations.
Take a moment to get a sense of your own load. It’s very real, isn’t it? Recognizing it is just honesty and self-compassion, not exaggeration or self-pity.
There’s a fundamental model in the health sciences that how you feel and function is based on just three factors: your load, the personal vulnerabilities it wears upon – such as health problems, a sensitive temperament, or a history of trauma – and the resources you have. As a law of nature, if your load or vulnerabilities increase – over a day, a year, or a lifetime – so must your resources. Otherwise, inevitably, you will get strained, depleted, and ground down. I’ve had times like this myself, and I’ve seen it in loved ones.
Outer resources are things like friends, health insurance, and a well-stocked refrigerator; inner resources include fortitude, positive emotions, and a kind heart. Do what you can to increase your outer resources, though many people have sadly few options there, such as the million or so children in America who are homeless every year. Meanwhile, you can grow your inner resources by taking in the good to build up inner strengths – including the felt sense of support.
The more you feel supported by the people that care about you, by the natural world, and by your own capabilities, the better you’ll feel. Plus your load won’t seem so heavy, and you’ll be more able to carry it. There’s also the matter of justice: if the support is real and is there for you, it is only fair for you to feel it. And the more supported you feel, the more supportive you’ll be toward others.
How?
In the practices that follow just below, you are not overlooking the ways that you are not actually supported. You are just focusing on that part of the whole truth that is the support that truly does exist for you. In particular, you are trying to help this recognition become an experience, a feeling of being supported, which might be subtle, but could still have a sense of ease, relief, calming, or happiness in it.
Try to make feeling supported a regular part of your day. For example, yesterday I went out for a walk and took a few seconds here and there to feel supported by my legs, the air I was breathing, the rock and roll mix in my earbuds, the technology that brought me this music, and the chance to watch some baseball with our son when I got back home.
Start with something that is literally solid and concrete. Sitting, standing, or walking, become aware of how your bones are holding you up. Shift your posture until there is a clear sense of being firmly supported. There could also be a sense of uprightness, dignity, or strength. Really register this whole experience of very physical support.
Also be aware of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. Pick a sense and notice how it keeps working for you, probably without any effort on your part.
Know what it is like to support someone in your life: things don’t have to be perfect between you, but you still wish this person well and are basically on his or her side. Then bring to mind someone who you know cares about you. Also touch on others who wish you well, like you, or are rooting for you in some way. Soften and open to get a sense of this support; just like it would be OK for another person to feel your support, it is alright for you to feel the support of others.
Problem-solving or worrying – like thinking about how to pay the bills or nudge a relationship back to a better place – is necessary for coping, but it puts a natural focus on what’s not supportive. So stop problem-solving for at least a while every day. Even consider a whole day of rest! If your mind goes back to chewing on the worry bone, that’s natural. Just notice it and then guide your mind to where you do feel supported, even in the simple pleasure of a glass of water or a cookie.
When you are doing problem-solving or worrying, try to be aware of what is supportive, such as your own capabilities or the caring of others. For example, if you are grappling with a health problem, you could keep bringing to mind the sense of vitality in other parts of your body, or your determination to do whatever you can to deal with this issue, or the concern and kindness from your friends and family.
Try to feel the support that is coming to you . . . from yourself. You can know deep down that you are on your own side, that your benevolence and advocacy extend to yourself as well as to other beings.
Explore other sources of support, such as the sense of being nourished by the natural world, held by the earth, at peace in awareness itself, and if it’s meaningful to you, cradled in something spiritual.
This practice is down-to-earth and always available to you in one way or another.
And it can become something quite profound. Imagine going through much of your day with an ongoing feeling of being supported. Whew. What a relief!
Grounded in the belief we are all unique beings, we begin each new client with a meticulous bio-mechanical evaluation, assessing each joint in its relationship to the movement of the body as a whole. Our therapists are skilled at reading the unique story your body tells, and treating everything from the bottom of your foot to the top of your head.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
https://www.becomebodywise.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/bodywise_physical_therapy_portland_oregon.jpg251735bodywisehttp://www.becomebodywise.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/bodywise-physical-therapy-portland-oregon-logo-icon-sm.pngbodywise2018-02-22 00:15:242018-02-22 00:15:24What Helps You Carry Your Load?
People who have good emotional health are aware of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They have learned healthy ways to cope with the stress and problems that are a normal part of life. They feel good about themselves and have healthy relationships. Read more
https://www.becomebodywise.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/pilates_physical_therapy_pearl_district.jpg250735bodywisehttp://www.becomebodywise.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/bodywise-physical-therapy-portland-oregon-logo-icon-sm.pngbodywise2018-02-16 23:10:182018-02-16 23:10:18Mind/Body Connection: How Your Emotions Affect Your Health
A Lifetime of Regular Exercise Slows Down Aging, Study Finds
/in fitness, health, the brain /by bodywiseArticle Found on ScienceDaily
Researchers at the University of Birmingham and King’s College London have found that staying active keeps the body young and healthy.
The researchers set out to assess the health of older adults who had exercised most of their adult lives to see if this could slow down ageing.
The study recruited 125 amateur cyclists aged 55 to 79, 84 of which were male and 41 were female. The men had to be able to cycle 100 km in under 6.5 hours, while the women had to be able to cycle 60 km in 5.5 hours. Smokers, heavy drinkers and those with high blood pressure or other health conditions were excluded from the study.
The participants underwent a series of tests in the laboratory and were compared to a group of adults who do not partake in regular physical activity. This group consisted of 75 healthy people aged 57 to 80 and 55 healthy young adults aged 20 to 36.
The study showed that loss of muscle mass and strength did not occur in those who exercise regularly. The cyclists also did not increase their body fat or cholesterol levels with age and the men’s testosterone levels also remained high, suggesting that they may have avoided most of the male menopause.
More surprisingly, the study also revealed that the benefits of exercise extend beyond muscle as the cyclists also had an immune system that did not seem to have aged either.
An organ called the thymus, which makes immune cells called T cells, starts to shrink from the age of 20 and makes less T cells. In this study, however, the cyclists’ thymuses were making as many T cells as those of a young person.
The findings come as figures show that less than half of over 65s do enough exercise to stay healthy and more than half of those aged over 65 suffer from at least two diseases.* Professor Janet Lord, Director of the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham, said: “Hippocrates in 400 BC said that exercise is man’s best medicine, but his message has been lost over time and we are an increasingly sedentary society.
“However, importantly, our findings debunk the assumption that ageing automatically makes us more frail.
“Our research means we now have strong evidence that encouraging people to commit to regular exercise throughout their lives is a viable solution to the problem that we are living longer but not healthier.”
Dr Niharika Arora Duggal, also of the University of Birmingham, said: “We hope these findings prevent the danger that, as a society, we accept that old age and disease are normal bedfellows and that the third age of man is something to be endured and not enjoyed.”
Professor Stephen Harridge, Director of the Centre of Human & Aerospace Physiological Sciences at King’s College London, said: “The findings emphasise the fact that the cyclists do not exercise because they are healthy, but that they are healthy because they have been exercising for such a large proportion of their lives.
“Their bodies have been allowed to age optimally, free from the problems usually caused by inactivity. Remove the activity and their health would likely deteriorate.”
Norman Lazarus, Emeritus Professor at King’s College London and also a master cyclist and Dr Ross Pollock, who undertook the muscle study, both agreed that: “Most of us who exercise have nowhere near the physiological capacities of elite athletes.
“We exercise mainly to enjoy ourselves. Nearly everybody can partake in an exercise that is in keeping with their own physiological capabilities.
“Find an exercise that you enjoy in whatever environment that suits you and make a habit of physical activity. You will reap the rewards in later life by enjoying an independent and productive old age.”
The research findings are detailed in two papers published today in Aging Cell and are the result of an ongoing joint study by the two universities, funded by the BUPA foundation.
The researchers hope to continue to assess the cyclists to see if they continue to cycle and stay young.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
Chronic Pain? This Mindfulness Technique Might Change That
/in chronic pain, mindfulness /by bodywiseArticle by Kristen Peck | Found on MindBodyGreen
I’m quick to regret the label of chronic pain. I believe in the power of words and thoughts, so the idea of labeling a consistent pain as “chronic” feels like a resignation of control and possibility. For about two and a half years now, I’ve experienced persistent little nudges and discomfort in various parts of my bodies—mostly symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, joint pain, and the general discomfort that comes along with a desk job. Yes, I visited doctors and specialists to no avail and eventually turned to alternative healing modalities—like acupuncture, exercise, hot and cold therapy, physical therapy—searching for answers in the form of relief, management, and prevention. And while these methods worked, only temporarily so. Plus, I never feel that these practices address the root of the pain circulating throughout my body, which is sharp and rarely dormant these days.
Recently, my symptoms have fluctuated in and out of remission, except for, I noticed, during the periods of heightened stress and anxiousness, which seemed to exacerbate the symptoms. On my quest to further investigate the mind-body connection in relation to pain and body trauma, I stumbled across Pyeng Threadgill’s work with mindful movement.
“It’s about guiding people on how to be more integrated into all areas of your life. It’s a practice, not an overnight thing.”
Threadgill came across the Alexander Technique years ago as a vocalist and performer looking for tools to help strengthen her voice and body instruments. “I learned a lot about how we’re using our whole system. There’s an opportunity for openness. Time feels less rushed,” she told mbg during a session at her studio in Brooklyn. Today, she’s a certified instructor who’s reframed the technique as mindfulness and movement re-education to help everyday people focus on their movement habits and the stresses that can trigger chronic injuries and pain. “It’s about guiding people on how to be more integrated into all areas of your life. It’s a practice, not an overnight thing.”
During our session, Threadgill led me through a series of exercises steeped in awareness and conversation. Different from other bodywork treatments like massage, both Pyeng and I guided the treatment, with Pyeng adjusting the moves depending on how I responded to a particular feeling, a gentle pull on my arm there, a guided neck stretch here. After all, one of the primary principles of the technique is cultivating awareness. She explained that the moves were to help retrain the nervous system. “A lot of what we’re connecting to is connective tissue—loosening the grip of connective tissue to allow the muscles underneath to move more freely.”
I walked away from my session with Pyeng lighter and with remarkably less tension and tightness. If we all learned to think about our full alignment and our daily habits, could we shift the conversation on chronic pain from coping to healing? Pyeng’s take: “It’s about the liberation from identifying with your energies. If we can recognize our body and habits, we can change the course of our movement and, ultimately, our outlook on pain.”
Below, Pyeng offers up four tips for incorporating mindful movement into your own life.
1. Bring your smartphone to eye level.
Pyeng notes smartphone usage as a major factor in body alignment issues. “Since so many people are using smartphones nowadays, it is important to raise your smartphone more often when texting, typing, or reading. This takes practice, but it will reveal how often you are closing off the front of the throat and therefore, part of your body’s lengthening and widening potential.” She says a question to ask is, “How can I allow my body to lengthen with ease?”
2. Notice your breath.
A key element of Mindful Movement is to practice noticing your body and habits while engaging with the world. Part of this engagement, Pyeng says, starts with our breath and “how it feels to pay attention to your breath with your eyes opened.” In what ways can you use less force or holding when breathing while fully present in a task, chore, or activity.
3. Walk with intention.
Try to look out at eye height when walking. Oftentimes, so many people look down when they walk, and as a result, they reinforce the shortening of their spines and entire torso by forgetting that we, like any other animal, lead our movement with our eyes and head, followed by our bodies.
4. Slow down and sense your breath and body.
Most of us get so wrapped up in any given task that we forget to sense ourselves. It’s as if we are TOO focused on the bull’s-eye to remember our feet being on the ground and heads being light above. Set a timer once an hour for a five-minute pause to take inventory of your body. Instead ask yourself what you notice in your body while sitting in a chair, your car, or even standing in line.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
Holding Hands Can Sync Brainwaves, Ease Pain, Study Shows
/in Pain Management, psychology /by bodywiseArticle Found on ScienceDaily
Reach for the hand of a loved one in pain and not only will your breathing and heart rate synchronize with theirs, your brain wave patterns will couple up too, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The study, by researchers with the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Haifa, also found that the more empathy a comforting partner feels for a partner in pain, the more their brainwaves fall into sync. And the more those brain waves sync, the more the pain goes away.
“We have developed a lot of ways to communicate in the modern world and we have fewer physical interactions,” said lead author Pavel Goldstein, a postdoctoral pain researcher in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at CU Boulder. “This paper illustrates the power and importance of human touch.”
The study is the latest in a growing body of research exploring a phenomenon known as “interpersonal synchronization,” in which people physiologically mirror the people they are with. It is the first to look at brain wave synchronization in the context of pain, and offers new insight into the role brain-to-brain coupling may play in touch-induced analgesia, or healing touch.
Goldstein came up with the experiment after, during the delivery of his daughter, he discovered that when he held his wife’s hand, it eased her pain.
“I wanted to test it out in the lab: Can one really decrease pain with touch, and if so, how?”
He and his colleagues at University of Haifa recruited 22 heterosexual couples, age 23 to 32 who had been together for at least one year and put them through several two-minute scenarios as electroencephalography (EEG) caps measured their brainwave activity. The scenarios included sitting together not touching; sitting together holding hands; and sitting in separate rooms. Then they repeated the scenarios as the woman was subjected to mild heat pain on her arm.
Merely being in each other’s presence, with or without touch, was associated with some brain wave synchronicity in the alpha mu band, a wavelength associated with focused attention. If they held hands while she was in pain, the coupling increased the most.
Researchers also found that when she was in pain and he couldn’t touch her, the coupling of their brain waves diminished. This matched the findings from a previously published paper from the same experiment which found that heart rate and respiratory synchronization disappeared when the male study participant couldn’t hold her hand to ease her pain.
“It appears that pain totally interrupts this interpersonal synchronization between couples and touch brings it back,” says Goldstein.
Subsequent tests of the male partner’s level of empathy revealed that the more empathetic he was to her pain the more their brain activity synced. The more synchronized their brains, the more her pain subsided.
How exactly could coupling of brain activity with an empathetic partner kill pain?
More studies are needed to find out, stressed Goldstein. But he and his co-authors offer a few possible explanations. Empathetic touch can make a person feel understood, which in turn — according to previous studies — could activate pain-killing reward mechanisms in the brain.
“Interpersonal touch may blur the borders between self and other,” the researchers wrote.
The study did not explore whether the same effect would occur with same-sex couples, or what happens in other kinds of relationships. The takeaway for now, Pavel said: Don’t underestimate the power of a hand-hold.
“You may express empathy for a partner’s pain, but without touch it may not be fully communicated,” he said.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
The Benefits of TRE – Trauma Release Exercises
/in trauma, trauma release exercise /by bodywiseArticle Featured on New Life Thai Foundation
You might have heard people mention the benefits of TRE for the healing of trauma and for reducing stress. TRE stands for Trauma Release Exercise. The words ‘traumatic’ and ‘traumatized’ are used casually now in everyday speech, e.g. ‘There were no dark chocolate biscuits in the meeting room today, it was fairly traumatic’.
But what is trauma?
According to the DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), people can experience psychological trauma by any event they perceive (consciously or unconsciously) to be life-threatening, as likely to cause death or injury. The perceived threat can be to our own physical wellbeing, witnessing a violent event, or even learning about highly distressful events. Typical causes of trauma range from exposure to extreme events such as war, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters to long-term exposure to abusive relationships, codependency, bullying, or extreme poverty.
Age, life experience, and constitution are of course all factors in this. Thunder or shouting, for instance, are rarely life-threatening, but when it comes to trauma, the critical factor is the perception of threat and the incapacity to deal with it. As a result, even an imaginary event can be interpreted as life-threatening. Memories associated with trauma can be implicit and hard to recall verbally but still manifest physically.
PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is recognized as a mental disorder that can develop after a person is exposed to a traumatic event and experiences distressing symptoms such as nightmares, mental or physical distress, and an increase in the fight-or-flight response, more than a month after the traumatic event. You don’t need to be diagnosed with PTSD to suffer from trauma-related symptoms. Symptoms of trauma vary from more immediate manifestations such as amnesia or panic attacks to seemingly unrelated ailments like chronic pain and asthma that may develop over time.
The likelihood is that the majority of us have suffered some sort of trauma. Whether it be related to addiction, burnout, a relationship, or something else entirely, people react to situations differently. What might be traumatic for one person may be processed differently by another. Car accidents, death in the family, sexual harassment and misconduct – we have all had distressing events in our lives that affect us.
Many different types of treatments have been studied over the years to try and treat trauma, from exposure therapy, EMDR, CBT, and somatic experiencing. TRE is one way to heal this trauma.
What is TRE?
TRE stands for Tension or Trauma Releasing Exercises. These exercises help individuals to release stress or tension as a result of difficult life circumstances, immediate or prolonged stressful situations, or traumatic life experiences. Consisting of six simple exercises, TRE evokes a muscular shaking process in the body.
The exercises elicit this shaking, or neurogenic tremors, in a controlled and sustained manner. When evoked in this way, this shaking begins to release deep chronic muscular tension held within the body. They come from the center of gravity of the body (S3), which is protected by the psoas muscles. When shaking is evoked at this powerful center of the body, it reverberates throughout the entire body, traveling along the spine, releasing deep chronic tension from the sacrum to the cranium. When tension is released anywhere in the body, the brain registers a reduction in pain signals and produces new hormones for relaxation and comfort. Often, this release of tension is much like receiving an internal massage.
TRE was developed by David Bercelli, a trained social worker who spent years in high conflict areas. Whilst in a bomb shelter, he noticed that people would make the same involuntary movements when they would hear a bomb strike, covering their head with their hands and curling up into the fetal position. He was interested in the fact that after the bomb strikes, children would tremble and shake, while adults did not.
This shaking and tremoring response to trauma is not unique to humans but is found across the animal kingdom. David Bercelli teamed up with Peter Levine, who spent years studying trauma and somatic experiencing, to explore how humans suppression of this natural tendency leads to us “storing” trauma in our body, and how to help release it by working with the body.
After learning how to elicit this shaking response in our bodies- and how to regulate that response and what it invokes in us – we can safely practice TRE on our own. TRE is safe and meant for anyone regardless of gender, sex, age or culture.
TRE at New Life
At New Life Foundation, we currently have two qualified TRE practitioners: Our Intake Therapist Madelaine and Core Energetics Therapist Fernando. Madelaine holds TRE group classes twice a week.
While she was a volunteer at New Life in June and July, Carolina, also a qualified TRE practitioner, assisted with Madelaine’s classes. Carolina’s TRE journey began in 2009 when she was enrolled in body psychotherapy training in Core Energetics in her hometown of Brasilia, Brazil. Someone mentioned to her that David Berceli, the founder of TRE, was doing a weekend training course in town, and so Carolina signed up.
‘It made sense straight away, the whole theory behind it, the need to balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system’, recalls Carolina. There are two states that our bodies need to function: fight or flight (sympathetic), and rest and digest (parasympathetic). We tend to experience life in one state or another, but as we allow the shaking to happen in TRE, we’re able to balance these two functions’.
What Are The Benefits of TRE?
Speaking of the TRE benefits that she felt, Carolina continues, ‘Personally, TRE has helped me to feel more grounded and to be less reactive in everyday life. Other people who took the training with me saw an improvement in their chronic muscle pain and even with panic attacks, but it’s really important when practising TRE that you let the practitioner know if you have any special conditions (such as anxiety disorders, PTSD, physical limitations etc.), as the way that you self-regulate while doing the exercises may have to be slightly different to the rest of the group’.
Some other benefits you might experience from doing TRE are improved sleep quality, improved body and mind awareness, and increased flexibility.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Women’s Health and Lymphedema.
Physical Therapy Portland Oregon
The Top 5 Benefits of Cycling
/in fitness /by bodywiseArticle Found on Harvard.edu
They say you never forget how to ride a bike, so maybe it’s time to climb aboard a two- or three-wheeler and enjoy the health benefits of cycling. “It’s socially oriented, it’s fun, and it gets you outside and exercising,” says Dr. Clare Safran-Norton, a physical therapist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Read more
When it Comes to Our Brains, There’s No Such Thing as Normal
/in neuroscience, psychology, the brain /by bodywiseArticle Found on ScienceDaily
There’s nothing wrong with being a little weird. Because we think of psychological disorders on a continuum, we may worry when our own ways of thinking and behaving don’t match up with our idealized notion of health. But some variability can be healthy and even adaptive, say researchers in a review published February 20th in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, even though it can also complicate attempts to identify standardized markers of pathology.
“I would argue that there is no fixed normal,” says clinical psychologist and senior author Avram Holmes of Yale University. “There’s a level of variability in every one of our behaviors.” Healthy variation is the raw material that natural selection feeds on, but there are plenty of reasons why evolution might not arrive at one isolated perfect version of a trait or behavior. “Any behavior is neither solely negative or solely positive. There are potential benefits for both, depending on the context you’re placed in,” he says.
For instance, impulsive sensation seeking, a willingness to take risks in order to have new and exciting experiences that has its roots in our evolutionary history as foragers, is often thought of negatively. Increased sensation seeking is associated with things like substance abuse, criminality, risky sexual behavior, and physical injury. “But if you flip it on its head and look at potential positive outcomes, those same individuals may also thrive in complex and bustling environments where it’s appropriate for them to take risks and seek thrills,” he says. They often have more social support, are more outgoing, and exercise more.
The same is true for anxiety. “You might be more inhibited in social situations and you may find it harder to build friendships,” Holmes says. “However, that same anxiety, if you think of it in a workplace setting, is what motivates you to prepare for a big presentation. If you’re in school, that’s the same anxiety that motivates you to study for an exam.” He also notes that we have more control over the contexts we’re in than we tend to think we do, which means that it’s very possible to end up in an environment that favors the way our brains work.
But if variation in any given trait is normal, that does raise questions about what makes for disordered behavior, which he stresses is very much a real phenomenon. “It may be the case that if you focus on a single phenotype, there isn’t a specific line that separates health from disease, and that we must consider multiple phenotypes simultaneously,” he says.
This makes it much more complicated to try to find biomarkers for psychological illness, something that Holmes has worked on throughout his career. The usual approach is to break down a disorder into its component pieces, find a specific associated genetic marker or biological process for a certain piece, and then look for that marker or process in the general population to see if it can predict the disorder. The problem, he says, is that “one single phenotype in isolation is never going to be necessary nor sufficient to cause an illness.”
“What we want to try to do is build multivariate approaches that consider multiple domains of human behavior simultaneously, to see if we can boost our power in predicting eventual outcomes for folks,” he says. Large, open-source datasets have been collected in recent years that can be used in these efforts, but Holmes notes that the work will almost certainly require collaboration between different labs and institutions — some of which is already underway.
What this does mean, though, is that it really isn’t appropriate to think of ourselves in terms of a single trait that’s either good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. “This is a broader issue with our society,” he says, “but we’re all striving towards some artificial, archetypal ideal, whether it’s physical appearance or youthfulness or intelligence or personality. But we need to recognize the importance of variability, both in ourselves and in the people around us. Because it does serve an adaptive purpose in our lives.”
This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
How Mindfulness Helps You Get Unstuck
/in mindfulness, neuroscience /by bodywiseArticle Found on Mindful.org
Has someone ever sent you an angry email, and then you found yourself, weeks later, thinking about it while you’re wide awake at 2am?
Emotions can be a major source of distraction, according to researchers Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman, who have chronicled what we know thus far about the meditator’s mind in a new book, Altered Traits, Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body.
In this whiteboard session for Harvard Business Review, Davidson and Goleman talk about one of the most important discoveries: repeated practice helps us untether from emotional cues that keep us mired in distraction — specifically, rumination.
More emotional control
Research suggests mindfulness practice can strengthen the connections between the brain that direct our decision-making and impulses, so that when we encounter a strong emotional trigger, we’re not pulled to immediately react.
“[Mindfulness] strengthens the prefrontal (cortex’s) ability to say no to emotional impulse,” says Goleman. This increases resilience because it helps us hold things more lightly — like that snarky email — and not devote all of our attention to emotional cues. Davidson explains:
The “recover more quickly” is really an important attribute of what we think of as resilience. Resilience is, in many ways, the ability to recover more quickly from adversity. So instead of ruminating about the email that ticked you off for several weeks after, you can come back down and recover.
Goleman cautions that the science of mindfulness — what we know, what we don’t — is still in the early stages of study. There are benefits, but there is a lot of hype as well. Since the early 2000s, research on mindfulness has been expanding rapidly. For more, here’s a look at 10 leaders in the field, what their research has shown us, and the future directions their studies are taking.
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
The Benefits of Deep Breathing in Pilates Exercise
/in pilates /by bodywiseArticle by Marguerite Ogle | Found on VeryWell
Deep breathing is an essential part of Pilates exercise. And not just a big inhale, but also when you make a conscious effort to exhale fully, getting rid of every bit of stale air and allowing fresh, invigorating air to rush in. Joseph Pilates was adamant about deep breathing. Consider this quote from his book Return to Life Through Contrology: “Lazy breathing converts the lungs, literally and figuratively speaking, into a cemetery for the deposition of diseased, dying and dead germs as well as supplying an ideal haven for the multiplication of other harmful germs.” Is that not scary? Read more
What Helps You Carry Your Load?
/in health, wholistic health /by bodywiseArticle by Rick Hanson
The Practice:
Feel The Support.
We’re all carrying a load, including tasks, challenges, worries, inner criticism, mistreatment from others, physical and emotional pain, loss and illness now or later, and everyday stresses and frustrations.
Take a moment to get a sense of your own load. It’s very real, isn’t it? Recognizing it is just honesty and self-compassion, not exaggeration or self-pity.
There’s a fundamental model in the health sciences that how you feel and function is based on just three factors: your load, the personal vulnerabilities it wears upon – such as health problems, a sensitive temperament, or a history of trauma – and the resources you have. As a law of nature, if your load or vulnerabilities increase – over a day, a year, or a lifetime – so must your resources. Otherwise, inevitably, you will get strained, depleted, and ground down. I’ve had times like this myself, and I’ve seen it in loved ones.
Outer resources are things like friends, health insurance, and a well-stocked refrigerator; inner resources include fortitude, positive emotions, and a kind heart. Do what you can to increase your outer resources, though many people have sadly few options there, such as the million or so children in America who are homeless every year. Meanwhile, you can grow your inner resources by taking in the good to build up inner strengths – including the felt sense of support.
The more you feel supported by the people that care about you, by the natural world, and by your own capabilities, the better you’ll feel. Plus your load won’t seem so heavy, and you’ll be more able to carry it. There’s also the matter of justice: if the support is real and is there for you, it is only fair for you to feel it. And the more supported you feel, the more supportive you’ll be toward others.
How?
In the practices that follow just below, you are not overlooking the ways that you are not actually supported. You are just focusing on that part of the whole truth that is the support that truly does exist for you. In particular, you are trying to help this recognition become an experience, a feeling of being supported, which might be subtle, but could still have a sense of ease, relief, calming, or happiness in it.
Try to make feeling supported a regular part of your day. For example, yesterday I went out for a walk and took a few seconds here and there to feel supported by my legs, the air I was breathing, the rock and roll mix in my earbuds, the technology that brought me this music, and the chance to watch some baseball with our son when I got back home.
Start with something that is literally solid and concrete. Sitting, standing, or walking, become aware of how your bones are holding you up. Shift your posture until there is a clear sense of being firmly supported. There could also be a sense of uprightness, dignity, or strength. Really register this whole experience of very physical support.
Also be aware of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. Pick a sense and notice how it keeps working for you, probably without any effort on your part.
Know what it is like to support someone in your life: things don’t have to be perfect between you, but you still wish this person well and are basically on his or her side. Then bring to mind someone who you know cares about you. Also touch on others who wish you well, like you, or are rooting for you in some way. Soften and open to get a sense of this support; just like it would be OK for another person to feel your support, it is alright for you to feel the support of others.
Problem-solving or worrying – like thinking about how to pay the bills or nudge a relationship back to a better place – is necessary for coping, but it puts a natural focus on what’s not supportive. So stop problem-solving for at least a while every day. Even consider a whole day of rest! If your mind goes back to chewing on the worry bone, that’s natural. Just notice it and then guide your mind to where you do feel supported, even in the simple pleasure of a glass of water or a cookie.
When you are doing problem-solving or worrying, try to be aware of what is supportive, such as your own capabilities or the caring of others. For example, if you are grappling with a health problem, you could keep bringing to mind the sense of vitality in other parts of your body, or your determination to do whatever you can to deal with this issue, or the concern and kindness from your friends and family.
Try to feel the support that is coming to you . . . from yourself. You can know deep down that you are on your own side, that your benevolence and advocacy extend to yourself as well as to other beings.
Explore other sources of support, such as the sense of being nourished by the natural world, held by the earth, at peace in awareness itself, and if it’s meaningful to you, cradled in something spiritual.
This practice is down-to-earth and always available to you in one way or another.
And it can become something quite profound. Imagine going through much of your day with an ongoing feeling of being supported. Whew. What a relief!
Bodywise Physical Therapy is located in Portland, Oregon. The Bodywise approach is wholistic, individualized, and can benefit people of all fitness levels. While Bodywise has always specialized in general orthopedics, spine rehabilitation, and sports medicine, they have evolved into a truly wholistic practice integrating Hands-on treatments with Mindfulness, Pilates, Trauma Release Exercise, Womens Health and Lymphedema.
Mind/Body Connection: How Your Emotions Affect Your Health
/in anxiety, depression, the brain /by bodywiseArticle Found on FamilyDoctor.org
People who have good emotional health are aware of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They have learned healthy ways to cope with the stress and problems that are a normal part of life. They feel good about themselves and have healthy relationships. Read more