Category Archives: Addiction

The Why & How of Belly Breathing

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One of the best things you can do for yourself is to learn how to breathe through your belly. It’s a simple way of calming your nervous system and cultivating a deep sense of relaxation and inner peace.

Your breath is always there with you. There’s nothing to buy, no place to get it from, no special clothes to put on. You can tap into it at any moment. It’s better than a chemical substance or acting out compulsively to shift how you feel inside, and without any negative side effects to boot. All that breathing through your belly will cost you is your time, your attention, and your patience. And if you don’t think you have much of the latter, it’ll help you to cultivate it, with each rhythmic breath that is breathed in the practice.

Belly breathing is done when you allow your breath to move in and out of your belly with a soft, focused attention. It can be done lying down on the floor or sitting up in a chair. It’s a popular practice with those who want to enhance their connection to their breath, to detoxify at a cellular level, to learn to relax and to deepen their connection to the Stillness within.

It’s also a practice that is particularly important for those who have experienced psychological trauma or who are recovering from addiction. It’s deeply relaxing, and helps to create a feeling of psychological safety inside. And besides, breathing through the belly in a slow and rhythmic way simply feels good to the bodymind. This is reason enough to practice.

You’d need nothing in particular to get started. No special outfit or fashionable water bottle (not that there’s anything wrong with either). Just the willingness to travel inward and be present to your breath in your body.

Would you like to give it a go and see what it’s like to belly breathe? If you do, then here’s what you can do. If you have a Yoga mat, consider lying it down in a favorite spot where you can be alone with yourself without distraction. If you don’t have a mat, then laying down a blanket on the floor would work just fine. You can gather up a foam block or a pillow and put it beneath your head, that would be okay too. You might even want to cover yourself with a blanket. Once you’ve got everything together, then click on the link below. It’ll take you to a special (unedited) audio recording, close to 15 minutes in length, that’ll guide you through a belly breathing practice. So, if you’re up for it, do what you need to do to get ready, and I’ll meet you on your mat. Note: This is a slow moving practice. Please give it your undivided attention -and stay safe.

Belly Breathing1

At the end of your practice, consider taking a moment to reflect on what the experience was like for you. How did it feel to be breathing through your belly? Where did your mind go? How did you feel after the practice was over? I welcome any thoughts you may have about belly breathing in general, or the audio practice in particular. Reflecting on how a practice makes you feel is as important a part of a Yoga practice as is the practice itself.

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If you love your body, it’ll love you back with good health. If you love your breath, it’ll love you back with inner peace.  If you love your breath as it moves in, and through and out of your body, and do so with the same devotion you’d give to a beloved friend, you’ll have started a love affair that’ll only deepen over time.

In healing,

Gloria

Moving Out of Familiar Pain

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Do you think it’s possible to move out of the conditions of mind called addict and trauma survivor? While each carry the burden of feeling trapped in a world of unending pain and suffering, each also holds the potential for relief and transformative change. The question is how willing are you to do what you can for yourself to grow out from where you are now and into a new way of thinking about yourself?  It’s a big question.  And for some, one that stimulates a genuine fear of the unknown.

What would happen if you were to do an experiment?   An experiment that would explore what it might be like to step out of an identity you’ve been tending for a long time (without knowing it) and into a new one?  In fact how about doing the experiment right now?  If you’re okay with it allow yourself to close your eyes, pause, exhale deeply, and take a moment to imagine what it might look like if you were to no longer be living with the pain you’re living with now?  How would you feel?  What would you be doing with your time?  Who would you be hanging out with? What would matter in your life now?  Who could you become?  It’s all worth imagining, as doing so could be the beginning of a whole new life and a whole new you.

For many of us however, the thought of change can feel oh so frightening.  It can keep us trapped where we are, even when we know we don’t want to be here anymore.   I’m going to let you in on a little secret:   To change is safe.  It’s built into the design of our being to move forward in life.  Some would say it’s why we’re here on this planet to begin with, to learn how to flow with the energy of life that is within us and all around us all the time.  It’s not change itself, but the resistance to change, that can prove to be so threatening to our health and well-being.  It stimulates suffering and stress in a way that can compromise our health overtime, not to mention prevent us from being present to life in the here and now.

So, where are you at with the thought of moving out of familiar pain?  Do you resist it?  If so, why might that be?  Big questions.  I welcome your thoughts below.

In healing,

Gloria

Proven Way to Facilitate Healing

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This past August, I had the pleasure of attending a week long training at the Providence Renewal Centre in Edmonton, Alberta that offered a proven way of facilitating deep healing.  Yoga Nidra is an ancient meditative practice that takes the practitioner into forgotten places within, for the purposes of deep rest, renewal and healing.  Traditionally Yoga Nidra has been offered by Yoga teachers as part of a Yoga class or as a stand alone practice.  But things have changed.  Over the course of this week long training, I was in the presence of 40 Yoga teachers, Yoga therapists, counsellors and psychotherapists.  The training, led by Master Yoga Teacher and Clinical Psychologist, Richard Miller, Ph.D, was nothing short of superb.  Richard has taken a beautiful healing practice, Yoga Nidra, and made it even better.  iRest is both comprehensive in design and broad in application.  It can work with an individual’s beliefs or emotional experience in the moment for example, and help to dissolve any blockage that may be in the way of experiencing the peace and harmony within.   This enhanced Yoga Nidra practice is being used successfully in the treatment of a number of conditions, from chronic pain to homelessness.  I’m particularly excited about its promise in the treatment of addiction and psychological trauma.  In fact, iRest, or Integrative Restoration, is actively being researched by the US Military with service men and women returning from combat.  The research has been looking at the role of iRest in the treatment of psychological trauma.  So far the research indicates iRest has a noticeable and lasting effect on quelling the symptoms of post traumatic stress in this traumatized population.  Just think what this practice could do for you and me?  As for addiction, Richard shared he has used iRest successfully with his clients in an inpatient setting so far.

Overall, this was an excellent training experience.  It deepened and broadened the Yoga and psychotherapy work that I do.  Now I have an additional and proven way that is rooted in the Yoga tradition and researched by modern science of meeting people in the moment who are struggling with the effects of psychological trauma, and of paving the psychological way for their return to the Harmony within.

Unmet Needs and the Birth of Addiction

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It is human to have needs.  To eat, to be kept warm and dry, to grow and develop at a pace that is suited to our own natural rhythm, to be touched by loving hands, to find stimulation from our environment, just to name a few.  In fact, these are some of the basic needs of the infant.  And they’re normal.  When our needs go unfulfilled, they become more important than any other activity until they are met.  According to psychologist Arthur Janov in ’Why You Get Sick and How You Get Well’ , for the growing child “When needs are met, the child can feel.  They can experience their body and their environment.  When needs are not met, the child experiences only tension, which is a feeling of being disconnected from consciousness.”  In the absence of that sense of connection to consciousness, the child does not feel.  When the child does not feel, it is a sign the process of shutting down from feeling has begun.  Each  suppression of need, each denial of need, turns the child off from feeling.  Until the day comes when there is a critical shift within them, to where they are primarily turned off to feeling.  From that point forward, a two part self is born:  The authentic self, which has to do with the genuine needs and feelings of the child, and the inauthentic self, which is a cover for those genuine needs and feelings.  The inauthentic self becomes the mask the child shows to the parent to have the parent’s needs fulfilled, at the expense of their own.

For example, take the parents’s need for respect, where the child learns not to say anything negative to the parent or assert their person and talk back to them, in order for their parent’s need for respect to be fulfilled.   Or when the parent needs the child to grow up too fast, and become adult like long before they are developmentally ready to do so.  This, so the parent can have their need to be cared for fulfilled.  In these ways the child begins to act in ways that are not authentic to themself, but rather in ways they sense on some level are expected by the parent.  They realize being loved for who they are just isn’t going to happen.  That in fact, according to Janov, “it is hopeless”.  As a result, the child turns to repeating back their words to the parent and acting in ways that are not authentic to themself, and therefore not aligned with the reality of their own needs and desires.  In time, not being aligned with their own needs and desires becomes the child’s normal way of being.

If love existed in the life of the child, they would be able to be themself, as love is about letting someone be who they are.  It’s the hopelessness of never being loved for who they are that causes the psychological split in the child, between the authentic and inauthentic selves.   The child denies the realization that his own needs will never be filled by being who they are, no matter what they do.  Substitute needs develop as a result.  These substitute needs turn up as symptoms like nervousness, worries, fears, issues with self-confidence, self-sabotaging thinking patterns, obsessions and compulsions.  All outward signs of burried pain.  As the pain accumulates within, repression builds in its own quiet way.   When the child is thoroughly repressed, they lose touch with who they are.  Humans, being the adaptive creatures that we are, find ways to adapt to the pain inside, and go on.  But the pain is still there, and it doesn’t go away as we grow up.  Do you see where this is heading?  The repressed pain that results from not being loved in a way that meets our needs growing up stays with us as an imprint that gets stored in the cells of the body.   In time, depending on circumstance, the child, or youth, or adult  find their own way(s) of coping with the pain, which can include one or more of the addictive behaviours.  In too many cases, making the choice to resolve an immediate condition like pain in the short-term, can lead to the development of a full blown illness in the long-term.  Over time, unmet needs and the pain inside that follows, can mark the birth of addiction.

Please note this post is not about blaming our parents for not giving us what we needed growing up.   Parenting philosophies and practices of their day were no doubt in the way of doing so, not to mention how well our grand parents raised our parents.   This post is more about continuing to cultivate an understanding of our psychological travels through life.  This, so we may recover and heal, and also, so love  may blossom in our hearts for ourselves, as well as for those we care about today.

A Way Out

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“The best way out is always through.”  Robert Frost

Ever wondered if there is anything you can do to grow out of the psychological conditions labelled ‘addict’ and ‘trauma survivor’?  Well, there are.  Eventhough each carry the burden of feeling trapped in a world of unending pain and suffering, each also hold the potential for relief and transformational change.  The question is how ready and how willing are you to do what you can do for yourself, right now, to move out from where you are and into a new condition of mind and body?  It’s a big question.  And for some one that rouses a genuine fear of the unknown.

What would happen if you stepped out of the warm emotional nest of an old identity, one you’ve been tending for a very long time, even if it’s been a painful one, and into an identity you’ve never experienced before?  What would happen to the comfort of the familiar pain?  Where would it go?  More importantly, how would you feel without it?  Exposed?  Frightened?  Relieved?  How would you identify yourself when the words ‘addict’ or ‘trauma survivor’ no longer apply?  Then what?  Who would you be then?

The good news is the movement out of a comfortable emotional nest of an old identity and into a new one is a natural process.  It can be a process that unfolds at a pace that is comfortable for you, where you can do what you need to do to take care of yourself, in the now, while you grow steadily into a new you.

What would this process look like?

  • Creating safety and preventing relaspe, and getting clean time under your belt.  This lays the foundation for the emotional work you may know you need to do.
  • Learning to regulate your emotional experience in order to be in control of it once again.  This will help you to feel safe through the healing process, and to prepare yourself for future emotional work.
  • Creating a container for your felt experience through your body to learn to be in the present moment as it is, unfettered by wishful thinking about the past or future.  The present moment is your point of power for healing and forward movement.
  • Enlisting the support of compassionate others who are both walking the same path as you, and who have walked this path before and  know the way through.

Together, this approach will meet  you where you’re at to enhance your power to change by working with, and not against, your natural healing instincts.  It will help you to grow into the person you already know you are deep inside.  Stay tuned for details about an innovative new program being designed to support you through this life enhancing process.

Awareness in Action

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We are designed to separate things into dualities:  this and that, black and white, up and down, good and bad, pain and pleasure, etc.  This is the dualistic mind’s way of seeing.  It sees in opposites as it gazes within to the interior relm, and as it gazes outward to the physical world around us.  This is the perceptual place from which most of us are coming, with the exception of our fully realized friends around the globe who have evolved to a place outside of duality, where they can see the harmony and perfection in all things, all the time.  Duality is also a place from which we can live our lives unaware of our conditioned responses to the world within and the world without.  And as a result, we suffer, and endure what feels like endless psychological pain.

How does this translate into the ‘real world’?  Well, take drinking for example:  What if you’ve been conditioned to want a drink whenever you feel stressed?  And what if there was a moment when you’re desiring the drink when you could allow the desire for the drink to be okay?  To see desire for what it is . . .  just another desire . . . and to feel desire in the body . . . to name what it feels like in the body . . . and then within the privacy of your own mind, lean back from desire and simply be there with the perception of it, without taking any action (yet).  What would happen then?  Well, it would give you the ability to . . . pause . . . to consider the ways in which you could respond to desire, before you actually did anything about it.  Rather than being pulled back into a tour of duty with the addictive behaviour.

How can you let desire for something be okay?  You do it by learning to hear the Witness.

In Steven Cope’s masterful work ‘Yoga and the Quest for the True Self’ he talks about how the Yogis discovered that if we can work with our awareness in a way where we acknowledge sensations as they arise in the body, experience these sensations fully, and perhaps most importantly, bear them, we can find freedom and no longer be bound to the world of duality.  We would no longer have to feel compelled to react to sensations as they arise.  In bearing them, we let them be.   In letting them be, we can see them for what they are.   In Yogic practice this is called the Witness conciousness.  It holds the power to free us from our own conditioned responses and to the play of opposites in the world of duality.  In learning to work skillfully with the Witness, psychological healing can flower.  This is awareness in action.

Negative Habits & Yoga – Part II

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In the first part of this two part series on Negative Habits & Yoga we looked at the work of Yoga Master BKS Iyengar and how he understands the structure of the mind to perpetuate a negative habit.  Either through an external challenge (like a disappointment) that causes a primary ripple on the surface of the mind, or from an internal secondary wave, that rises from what Iyengar refers to as a ‘mound’ at the bottom of the ‘lake of consciousness’, which is formed from repeated ripples over time at the mind’s surface.  Are we destined to be indentured slaves to the secondary wave activity in the depths of our minds?  Fortunately, Yoga says we’re not.  Through awareness, and with time, we can free ourselves from these ingrained patterns that have been built up over many years, or over the course of our entire lives.  How can we free ourselves from these ingrained patterns you might ask?  Here’s what Iyengar has to say:

“If you want to intercept the secondary waves rising, you need speed and clarity of perception, an acute self-awareness.  If your lake is muddy and impure, if there are lots of toxins in your system clouding your vision, clarity of vision is impossible. . .  Someone who is clouded, toxic, sluggish, discontented (blaming others is a prime cause of discontent), and restive in mind is never going to catch a secondary wave coming to the surface.  It will have expressed itself in action before they even notice it.  It is through the acute awareness and speed of action that we cultivate in asana (postures) and pranayama (breathing practices) that we can reform ourselves.  In addition, by breathing before acting, we are able to slow down our responses, inhale divinity, and surrender ego in our exhalation.  This momentary pause allows us the time for cognitive reflection, corrective reaction, and reappraisal.  It is the momentary pause in the process of cause and effect that allows us to begin the process of freedom.

The endless process is breath, cognitive reflection, corrective reaction, reappraisal, and action.  Eventually this process blends into the present moment, no past, no future, but action and right perception soldered together in a peerless moment, and then another moment and another.  Eventually, we are no longer caught up in the movement of time as a sequence or current sweeping us along, but we experience it as a series of discrete and present moments.  No rising thought wave can escape the sharpness of such vision.  It is what we call presence of mind.”

How present are you to the activity going on in your own mind?

Negative Habits & Yoga – Part I

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B.K.S. Iyengar has been called ‘The Michelangelo of yoga’ by the BBC. Today he’s in his 90′s, and has been practicing, teaching, and developing his unique style of Yoga for over 70 years. Iyengar was one of the very first yogis from India to bring Yoga technology to Europe and America about a half century ago. It is this style of Yoga that grounds the writer’s approach to her yoga classes and yoga therapy sessions. In his latest book ‘Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom’, Iyengar, with the wisdom of a Master, clearly discusses how you can free yourself from unwanted habits in what he refers to as the imperceptible ‘mounds’ in the mind. Here’s an exerpt from this first class offering.

“If consciousness is like a lake, there are primary waves or fluctuations of consciousness on the surface of the lake. These are easily discernible. An example is that if you are invited to dinner by dear friends and, at the last minute, they ring to cancel, then you’re very disappointed, you’re unhappy, you feel let down, and you deal with that on the surface. You have to calm yourself down, get over your disappointment. This is a challenge, an external challenge as it were, that causes a ripple on the surface.”

“The secondary fluctuations or waves are different. Those are the ones that rise up from the bottom of the lake. The bottom of a lake is covered in sand and so, if in life you experience a sufficient number of disappointments, the ripple on the surface creates a wave that goes down to the bottom, and imperceptibly that ripple creates a little bank in the sand, so there is a little mound of disapointment. As a result you will find yourself frequently disappointed or sad at this mound at the bottom sends off secondary fluctuations or waves.”

“Let us look at another common example. If you constantly find yourself being irritable, annoyed by something – your wife, your children, your parents, or anything at all – a sufficient number of irritable reactions will create, imperceptibly, not in one time only, a little mound of irritability at the bottom of the lake of consciosness, and that will eventually make you what we call an irritable person, an angry person. If you have smoked since you were sixteen, every time you pick up a cigarette in the day you are also brainwashing yourself. “In this situation I pick up a cigarette” mound. That’s why cigarettes are more difficult than almost anything else to give up. Aside from their physical cravings, we create mental cravings because the habit is very repetitive. The habit of smoking puts itself into every situation. The triggers to that situation are so many that many smokers still sometimes want to smoke even years afer they have stopped because the mound is still there . . .”

“The practice of yoga is about reducing the size of the subliminal mounds and setting us free from these and other fluctuations or waves in our consciousness. Everybody aspires to be free. No one wants to be manipulated by unseen forces, but effectively, the banks of samskara* in the dark depths of the unconscious do just that. As stimuli from the conscious surface travel rapidly down through the levels of the lake, the encounter uncharted banks of sediment that cause secondary waves of thought. These in turn stimulate, in a way that is beyond our comprehension or control, behavior that is both reactive an inappropriate. Our reactions are preconditioned and therefore unfree. We cannot break out of the old pattern of behavior, however much we long to. In the end, we may accept the situation and just say, “It’s the way I am,” “Life always lets me down,” “Things just make me so angry,” or “I have an addictive personality.” But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way out.

In the next post, we’ll look at the nature of Yoga and how it can help us to effectively overcome our negative habits.

* subliminal mound; mental impression