Posts Tagged ‘mindbody medicine’
PTSD: 1 No, it’s not all in your head

Self-care: Affirmations, positive emotions and flower essences

Affirmations alone won’t enact change within yourself, but are a wonderful addition to insight psychotherapy to aid in your transformative process. Adding strong positive emotion to the words will help enlist the cooperation of your wary limbic system. And adding a subtle flower essence works supports you on an energetic level.
Read the rest of this entry »Self-Care: Essential Oils for Emotional Support
Self-Care: Essential Oils for Emotional Support
Safety note: Please realize that self-treatment has its limitations. You must seek professional help for any chronic, lingering or severe emotional or psychological symptoms you are experiencing. The use of essential oils for emotional support is discussed here as just one piece of the pie in your healing, as complementary care only. In addition, this website promotes the safe use of essential oils by these methods only: inhalation, intermittent diffusing and safe levels of dilution in a carrier oil for use on the skin. This website does NOT promote the ingestion of essential oils.
Can essential oils be used for emotional support? Is there evidence to back these claims? There is a small, but growing, body of research indicating that essential oils have a positive effect on mood. And research has also focused on the psychophysiological effects of essential oils at the molecular level as well. The studies indicate that there are positive effects and better designed and additional studies are needed.
Veterans Yoga Project®: Interview with Dr. Dan Libby
Veterans Yoga Project Yoga for Emotional Healing PTSD

Photo courtesy of VYP, used with permission
Veterans Yoga Project (VYP) is a nonprofit organization that specializes in helping veterans gain access to the healing benefits of yoga with a program called Mindful Resilience. Thanks to the efforts of VYP, the Mindful Resilience yoga program is being used to help veterans and active-duty military personnel heal from the emotional, physical and psychological aspects of war trauma in mental health and addiction treatment programs in the United States and Canada.
5 Mindbody Ways to take care of mental health during pregnancy
5 MindBody Ways to Care for Mental Health During Pregnancy
Be mindful of your mental health during pregnancy. For many women, pregnancy is the most joyous times of their lives, but for some women it can be a time of increased anxiety and depression. If you have certain risk factors, such as a personal or family history of trauma, depression, anxiety or bipolar disease, you have an increased chance of becoming depressed, anxious or having a manic episode in your perinatal time.
Stress during and after pregnancy increases the likelihood of depression or anxiety. Mindfully taking care of yourself is just as important as your doctor visits and decorating the nursery!
What are the Seven Chakras
What are the chakras? The word chakra literally means wheel or vortex (Eden, 1998). According to yogic tradition, the chakras are the energy centers in the body which and interconnect the body and spirit and the external world. The chakras are associated energetically with physical organ systems, the endocrine system and emotional states. The chakras pull in energy from the environment like a vortex and also release energy outward to encompass outer energies and draw them in (Eden, 1998).
We can balance our chakra energy in different ways. The practice of yoga opens or clears the chakras which, in turn, facilitates self-growth and spiritual enlightenment. The practice of Reiki also clears and opens the chakras. Collette Baron-Reid has a beautiful, calming meditation called Journey Through the Chakras filled with imagery and color that clears and opens the chakras. I often fall asleep listening to it. Plus, color and sound frequencies influence the chakras. Each of the seven chakras has its own color vibration, and in addition, the seven notes of the C scale correspond to the seven chakras (Eden, 1998).
After Trauma, Four Skills to Come Home to Your Body
Sarah was the witness of an accident where a car struck and instantly killed two pedestrians. She had seen the car hit the girls and had seen the bodies fly and hit the ground. She thought that she had handled the situation as best as she could. She went to a therapist to talk about the incident and she also talked about it with close friends. But, as time went on, Sarah’s emotional and physical state was deteriorating. She felt sick often and was generally experiencing a lack of well-being. Two years later, she was having intrusive thoughts about the scene and was feeling physically nauseated often and also anxious and depressed, and sometimes panicky for no apparent reason.
What is Reiki?

Reiki practitioner channels energy (Photo: istock/renphoto)
Reiki literally means universal energy. Reiki is a system of healing using the human energy field. Reiki is being studied more extensively now. Some studies show that Reiki invokes the relaxation response, so this provides an opportunity for respite from anxiety and emotional distress. There are Reiki programs in many hospitals in the United States now. Reiki is used in hospital programs to improve the quality of life for patients with chronic disease.
Improve Your Mental Health with MindBody Changes!
I believe cultivating the habits of thought and action that nurtures mental health is an ongoing, life-long, learning process. I love being a licensed counselor. I believe in professional therapy. I have studied the research and personally seen the positive results of professional counseling for over 17 years. And there are lots of things you can do yourself outside the therapy room and outside the mental health profession to have a positive impact on your mental health.
Craniosacral is Your Body Talking
People ask me to explain craniosacral to them all the time.
Craniosacral is your body talking to you
Touch modalities synthesize feelings of physical pain and emotional distress. Massage has been shown in numerous studies from researchers such as Tiffany Field, Ph.D. of the Touch Institute to elevate mood, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression and promote the relaxation response.