Author: Singing Dragon

Developing habits to restore calmness: Qigong healing sounds for children and adults alike

Singing Dragon 3 Comments

By Lisa Spillane, author and illustrator of Six Healing Sounds with Lisa and Ted: Qigong for Children.

The Six Healing Sounds teach children the calming benefit of pausing and using the breath to connect to the present. Observing the sensations of the body without thinking about the past or the future strengthens our awareness of the peace we have at the core of our being. In Qigong, negative emotions are not considered ‘bad’. Holding onto, cultivating and acting on negative emotions is when the ‘bad’ comes into things. Because negative emotions are part of the ego and have a role to play (mainly related to survival) it’s good to learn how to acknowledge them, listen to anything useful they are trying to communicate and then release the excess of them. Central to this practice is an acceptance that trying to resist, ignore or smother your feelings will only, in the end, make them grow stronger. Rather than letting negative emotions have the driving seat over your brain and body you can teach yourself how to regain calm.

The exercise that generates the most feedback from my book,
Six Healing Sounds with Lisa and Ted: Qigong for Children, is the one that helps children to stop worrying. Basically, worry happens when we meditate on fear, and being fearful gets in the way of clear thinking. When faced with a threat, the mind instinctively becomes more focussed on the urgent actions needed for survival and less inclined towards higher levels of thinking. This ‘fight or flight’ response far exceeds the requirements of our contemporary daily stressors. For children, things like spelling tests and unfamiliar situations and ideas can be interpreted as a ‘threat’, stimulating their adrenal glands and provoking biochemical changes in the brain that incline them to freeze, fight, hide or run. Over-stimulation of the adrenal glands takes its toll on the body, so it’s especially important to develop habits to restore calmness. Through a combination of smiling, deep breathing, visualization, positive thinking, gentle movements and sound-making Qigong breathing techniques help to reverse the body’s stress response and instead support its physical and mental well-being.

These exercises might seem strange when you first encounter them but there is a growing body of scientific research to support them. In my book, Ted overcomes his worries by doing the healing sound exercise for the stomach. The stomach together with the oesophagus, small intestine and the colon, make up what we refer to as the gut. We all know what it’s like to have ‘butterflies in the stomach’ and ‘gut feelings’, but it is a lesser known fact that there are about the same amount of neurotransmitters (one hundred million) in the gut as in the brain. These nerve cells communicate with each other via chemical and electric signalling, processing information and learning from past patterns. The healing sound exercise for the stomach helps children to establish healthy patterns for when they encounter worry. Instead of supporting an anxiety-driven chain reaction, they learn to pause, close their eyes, smile and breathe in the feeling of trust and openness into the belly. They think about their stomach smiling and filling up with a warm yellow light. Then, with eyes open, they exhale worry with a ‘whooooooo’ sound, imagining it leaving them as dark cloudy smoke. Doing this helps the brain and the stomach to calm each other down. Smiling produces serotonin and nearly all of that ‘feel-good’ chemical goes to the gut to help it with digestion. It also reduces cortisol, adrenalin and noradrenaline and it helps you to relax by getting the brain to release chemicals that not only make you feel happier, but support your immune system too. And, breathing deeply gives the brain a chance to see the broader picture, it’s calming and detoxifying and helps you to feel more positive.

Click to hear what the Six Healing Sounds should sound like!

Worry and anxiety is what keeps most of us awake at night. I know from personal experience and from the response of many of my readers that this practice works as well for adults as it does for children. I actually get a lot of adults telling me they’ve bought my book for themselves!

When you are doing this exercise, yourself or with a child, gently rub your stomach in a clockwise direction. Cast your mind on beautiful images of late summer (in Qigong, each organ is associated with a season) and as you smile, picture your stomach smiling too. Practising gratitude is medicine for the body and the soul so as you do this exercise, say ‘thank you’ to your stomach for all the hard work it does.

A little bit of time spent doing the Six Healing Sounds helps to promote relaxation both physically and mentally. It is also a great way to introduce children to the benefits of Qigong from a young age, and crucially, gives them tools to help themselves to deal with life’s challenges.

Join the Six Healing Sounds with Lisa and Ted: Qigong for Children community on Facebook!

Copyright © Singing Dragon 2012.

Teaching Yoga to Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders? A Piece of Cake!

Singing Dragon 1 Comment

By Michael Chissick, qualified yoga instructor, primary school teacher and specialist in teaching yoga to children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, and author of Frog’s Breathtaking Speech.

Exciting New Training Project

An exciting new initiative which delivers the benefits of yoga to hundreds of children with autism will be the cherry on the cake. The project will be in action at a Special Needs Academy in Lincolnshire, UK, after Easter with more to follow.

Over the past thirteen years I have developed a model of how to teach yoga to children with autism. The model can be used by class teachers and teaching assistants with no previous experience of yoga. The structures, activities and postures are easy to learn and are safe to teach. The model is suitable for children across all key stages.

Special schools that have a high proportion of children on the autistic spectrum will use the model. The advantages are that teaching and training are geared to the specific needs of their pupils, and staff can be trained economically without time away from school; and the icing on the cake is that staff can use the model immediately.

How did we reach this point?

I have been teaching Yoga to KS1, 2 & 3 pupils as part of the integrated day at Special Needs School for thirteen years. Many of the children I teach have autism and sensory processing disorders. During each thirty minute session I work with the whole class, class teacher and teaching assistants. Time restraints make it impossible for me to teach all classes in my schools, so I tend to alternate classes every half term.

I had noticed that when I returned to a class to continue after a 5/6 week break there was a need to start over again, which can be frustrating. For many years I simply regarded it as part of the job of teaching pupils with ASD.

However over the last couple of years I have noticed that some classes had retained what I had taught them and were as enthusiastic as ever for their yoga. So what distinguishes the ‘ready-for-more-class’ from the ‘let’s-start-again-class? The answer is that the class teachers and teaching assistants have been teaching their pupils yoga without me… and doing a brilliant job at it too!

Why does it work?

The answer also lies in the fundamentals of my highly structured approach. For example, the children are seated on chairs in a circle. I use a visual timetable and posture cards to keep my verbal input to the minimum. Within the structure I target several layers or elements simultaneously; it’s like a multi-tiered cake. These layers are easily recognised by colleagues who are already experts at working with children with ASD and are using similar models in other curriculum areas.

 

The Layers

  1. Engagement tactics are, for example, encouraging children to choose from posture cards hanging from an umbrella; or children throwing tiny bean bags into the holes on a colourful board as a means of choosing a posture.
  2. Fun is key! Children eagerly get out of their chairs and into the posture because it’s fun; if it continues to be fun then they will want to stay in the posture.
  3. Repetition of postures over the weeks is a crucial; as children become more at ease with the posture leading to improved skills and greater confidence.
  4. Every child Achieves in the lesson.
  5. Social Skills like waiting, listening, speaking, helping each other, taking turns and following rules are targeted.
  6. Fitness Flexibility and improved co-ordination are the layers that tend to hit the news.
  7. Sensory is the sweetest layer. The vestibular system ‘tells us if we are moving or still, while our proprioceptive system is the unconscious awareness of our body position’ (Yack et al 2002). A combination of both systems gives us vital information about movement and where we are in relation to, for example, the floor. I teach many children whose vestibular and proprioceptive systems are dysfunctional. Using yoga postures I help to regulate those dysfunctions.

Feedback

Feedback from the Academy in Lincolnshire was wonderfully positive describing the day as excellent and staff commented that the model:

‘…does away with many pre-conceptions and prejudices – it helps make different types of movement accessible to all.’

It is early days in Lincolnshire, but soon the children and staff will be enjoying their yoga while I’ll be teaching 175 miles away. Seems like I’ll be having my cake and eating it.

Copyright © Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2012.

VIDEO: The foundation form as the most advanced: On true learning in Qigong – Master Zhongxian Wu and Damo Mitchell in conversation

Singing Dragon 1 Comment

Master Zhongxian Wu is the lineage holder of four different schools of Qigong and martial arts. While in China, he served as Director of the Shaanxi Province Association for Somatic Science and the Shaanxi Association for the Research of Daoist Nourishing Life Practices. He has now been living and teaching in the West for just over ten years.

Damo Mitchell has studied the martial, medical and spiritual arts of Asia since the age of four. His studies have taken him across the planet in search of authentic masters. He is the technical director of the Lotus Nei Gong School of Daoist Arts, teaches Nei Gong in the UK and Sweden.

In this, the first of three videos, the two authors provide key insights and advice for the Qigong practitioner on the steps necessary to move forward in practice, and on the gradual nature of learning and the importance of taking pleasure in repetition.

Copyright © Singing Dragon 2012.

Novels as journeys deep into the human heart: Marte Brengle remembers her grandmother, the novelist Evelyn Eaton

Singing Dragon 0 Comments

Marte Brengle is the novelist Evelyn Eaton‘s eldest grandchild and only granddaughter. She is also a writer, and manages the family publishing company, Logan Books. Here, she shares some personal memories of her remarkable grandmother and reflects on the personal significance of Eaton’s books, Go Ask the River and I Send a Voice.

Photo: “Four generations of women – Gran, my daughter Meghan, me and Mom – taken just a few months before Gran died. I think it represents all that was happy about our relationships.” (Courtesy of Marte Brengle)

Your grandmother, the novelist Evelyn Eaton, lived an enormously rich and varied life. How much did all this come through when you were growing up? Or are you still finding out about her?

I didn’t know a lot about Gran’s life until I read her autobiography in 1974. She told us some stories about her life, but there was a lot she didn’t talk about. My third novel is based on her life, my mother’s, and my own, and in re-reading Gran’s autobiographical books I have had to extrapolate and fill in the blanks a lot. I wish I had thought to ask her to annotate a copy of her autobiography, because as I’ve re-read it this past year I can see she put in some very subtle hints about the parts of the story she left out. In many ways, Go Ask the River is Gran’s story just as much as it is Hung Tu’s. The paralells are quite striking. I named my son after her father, since my son was born 60 years almost to the day after his namesake was killed at the battle of Vimy Ridge.

Evelyn’s books ranged across wide territory. The two in the Singing Dragon list cover very different worlds – the life of the Chinese Tang dynasty poet Hung Tu, and initiation into Native American Sweat Lodge ceremonies. Do you think that for her there was a connection between the two?

My grandmother was always interested in the supernatural world, and the ways in which spiritual beliefs shape people’s lives. She could see the supernatural quite clearly. I think she believed she was the reincarnation of Hung Tu, and also the descendant of Native Canadians, so she herself provided the connection between the two. She always said: “There are many paths to the center, and all of them are true.”

Her book about ancient China brings to life a completely different world, and as Chungliang Al Huang’s Foreword recounts, was based on a strange and intense experience she had while a war correspondent in China. And of course as a Native American Medicine Woman, she must have carried much information she could not talk about. Was this obvious in meeting her? What was she like as a grandmother?

Gran always seemed to understand me, and what was in my mind, far better than my mother did. Even though we weren’t together much (separated by geography), I always felt I could tell her anything and ask her anything and she’d understand what I meant even if I didn’t express it properly. She understood my brothers in the same way. To me it was obvious that she was deeply connected to the supernatural world, and it was clear to some other people as well. I don’t know how she was perceived by the world at large, but clearly she was a remarkable person and would have gotten anyone’s attention.

I remember in the spring of 1975, my husband and I took the train from our home in Kansas to visit Gran in California. Gran could tell the future with a pack of ordinary playing cards and she was very good at it, although it wasn’t something she liked to do because of the possibility of seeing something bad. I asked her to read the cards for me. At the end of the process, the person whose future is being told is asked to pick three cards while thinking of a question that can be answered yes or no (without asking it out loud). My silent question was “Will I have a child within two years?” Gran looked over the cards and immediately said “The answer is yes, and if you’re asking about a child, it will be a boy.” When I was expecting my first child, my doctor – who didn’t to ultrasounds, amniocentesis or any of those things – told me she thought I was expecting a girl, so I went through the whole pregnancy thinking I’d have a daughter. But, as Gran predicted, the child was a boy, born almost exactly two years after the prediction.

Did she continue to be interested in China and the Oriental arts throughout her life?

I think she did. She always had Chinese artifacts in her homes, and she burned Chinese incense in her writing room before she began burning sage. I inherited some of the embroidered silk panels she brought back from her trip as a war correspondent. They’re faded now, but I keep them on the wall as a reminder of Gran.

Do you know what took her to the immersion in the Arapaho healing traditions that occupied the last years of her life?

If you read her autobiography, The Trees and Fields Went the Other Way, you can see how she encountered Native spirit guides very early in life. She always connected with people, and I think when she moved to California it was only natural for the Paiutes to come to trust and accept her. It wasn’t an easy path, because they were quite rightly wary of revealing too much to outsiders (and indeed, the Sweat Lodge to which she once belonged has been closed to outsiders for many years now, as Eagle Man’s descendants think differently about the inclusion of non-Indians).

I Send a Voice is such a powerful account of the process of change and becoming. Did her relationship with the family change also during that time?

We were separated by great distances while this was happening – my family in the midwest and Gran in California. She didn’t talk about it much in the beginning, so we weren’t affected by her new understanding of the universe. After my mother and two younger brothers moved to California, they got involved in the Sweat Lodge and it was clear that it had a great personal connection for them as well. I attended one Sweat Lodge ceremony and was so overwhelmed by it that I turned down later invitations to join in.

What happened to her pipe after her death?

My mother inherited Gran’s pipe. She talked about giving it to other people several times over the years, but my brothers and I always maintained that it should stay in the family. My mother left no instructions about Gran’s pipe when she died, so it remains with my second brother, who bought the house Mom lived in and took care of her during her last days. My brothers and I have talked a bit about what should happen to it but we have never really decided one way or the other.

You are also a writer – how did you grandmother and her books inspire your own writing?

Although I had done a lot of technical writing and had written magazine articles, reviews and the like, when I first tried my hand at writing a novel it took me more than twenty years to complete it! The good thing about that is that I was a much better writer by the time I finally got it done. My two published novels are stories about people trying to make peace with their pasts. No high drama and flashy action, just human stories and human nature. My third novel is based on my grandmother’s life, my mother’s and my own. It will be a very long book, covering the time span from 1902 to about 1980.

Gran’s stories were also about human problems and human nature. With Go Ask the River, especially, she went deeply into the human heart. I did not start out thinking I was going to be a writer. I tried a lot of other things before going back to the novel I’d half-heartedly started. I realized there was a better story to be told than what I’d written, and I drew on some of the advice Gran gave me when I went back to work on it. She said you have to know your characters almost as well as you know yourself. I didn’t quite manage that, because my characters kept suprising me by saying and doing things that I didn’t consciously have in mind, but I did try to keep them, and what they said and did, as realistic and true to life as I possibly could.

Evelyn Eaton (1902-1983) was born in Montreux, Switzerland to Anglophile Canadian parents, and educated in England and France. She began writing while still in her teens; her first collection of poems was published in England in 1923 (the same year that she was presented at court) and her first novel in 1925. She became an American citizen at the age of 42, and was a war correspondent in China, Burma and India in 1945, then a lecturer at Columbia University from 1949 to 1951. Partly Native American (related to the Algonquians of New Brunswick, Canada) her later years became increasingly focused on Native American culture and mysticism. She wrote thirteen novels, five volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, and seven other books. For many years she was a contributor to The New Yorker and other journals.

Copyright © Singing Dragon 2012.

Arch Support, or Arch Enemy? Noah Karrasch on the importance of good foot awareness

Singing Dragon 3 Comments

By Noah Karrasch, CORE bodyworker and author of Meet Your Body and Freeing Emotions and Energy Through Myofascial Release.

I’ve long believed that crutches are a useful thing; I also believe that when on crutches, the goal should be to get rid of them and return to using one’s own body. This has got me thinking about feet and arch ‘supports’.

Many of us assume we can only feel comfortable while we have arch supports, either embedded into our shoes or through special orthotics developed specifically for our personal disorganized foot bed. After lots of thought, I disagree.

Granted, orthotics and other supports will take pressure off of aspects of the foot that hurt. But they’re not challenging the body to return to life. A personal disappointment: the physio/physical therapy model too often seems to suggest that a weakened muscle need not be identified and strengthened as much as it should be subdued and subordinated to muscles trained to strengthen themselves around it. This seems to me to be exactly what arch supports do.

On a recent vacation I walked attentively about four miles up the beach, then back, daily…barefoot and in sand. I really paid attention to tracking my feet straight ahead (my right loves to turn out), and remembering to land less heavily in my heels and push off more strongly through my toes and metatarsals. I found the walk to be effortless and my body to be extremely grateful for the overall workout/massage it was getting from the toe hinge action. As I’ve returned to the ‘real’ world, I’ve lost some but not all of that newly found awareness and ease.

This got me thinking about strengthening/conditioning the metatarsal hinges. So, I stood on a step, facing downstairs, with my toes all curled over the edge of the stair. As I pushed my toes into the step (vertical and back towards myself while their tips tugged down towards the floor), I immediately found unknown muscles in my foot. When I further tried to lift my metatarsal joint on one or the other big toe while maintaining the above directional pressures, my left foot complained dramatically. Any wonder the left side is also my ‘bad’ leg: the one that was most damaged in [a plane crash in] 1987. I’ve continued to work to reclaim that leg over the years, and believe that this simple discovery of the metatarsal joint’s weakness is moving me through a whole new layer of awareness, and allowing me to learn to operate that toe hinge in a way I long ago lost—if I ever had it!

For several years I’ve been thinking that many of us are dying physically from the feet up. If we don’t have juice in our legs, all of which is pumped by muscle action precipitated by use of the toe hinge, we’re not pumping old toxic blood up and out of our system. If we don’t use the muscles in our legs (and we don’t if we walk and stand heavily in our heels), we’re slowing down the energy throughout the body. Can we change that? I think so.

So, I’m not saying “Throw away those orthotics and arch supports!” I am saying, “Let’s think about whether reconditioning ankle, toe and arch hinges might make us stand, walk, and live more fully in happy feet.”

Singing Dragon author Noah KarraschNoah Karrasch lives in Springfield, Missouri, USA, where he has developed and still practices CORE Fascial Release Bodywork. He teaches intermittently in the US and Europe. In addition to certification by the Rolf Institute (1986) and advanced certification by the Guild for Structural Integration (1991), he has been certified as a provider of continuing education by the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork (NCBTMB) since 2000.

 
Reprinted with permission from Noah Karrasch’s Spring e-Newsletter, March 2012.

VIDEO: Yijing, Shamanic Oracle of China – An introduction by Richard Bertschinger

Singing Dragon 0 Comments

Richard Bertschinger studied for ten years with the Taoist sage and Master, Gia-fu Feng. He is a practising acupuncturist, teacher of Chinese healing arts, and translator of ancient Chinese texts. He has just published a new translation of the Book of Change, Yijing, Shamanic Oracle of China: A New Book of Change, which he has been working on for the past thirty years.

In this video, Richard talks about the essence of change as explored through the Yijing, and on the elemental energies represented through the book’s trigrams.

[youtube]g0ygZ_Nea-g[/youtube]

 

Read a Preview of Yijing, Shamanic Oracle of China »

Copyright © Singing Dragon 2012.

 

Can Yoga Improve a Child’s Behaviour? A case study by Michael Chissick for World Yoga Day

Singing Dragon 0 Comments

Michael Chissick has been teaching yoga to children in primary mainstream and special needs schools as part of the integrated school day since 1999. He is a primary school teacher as well as a qualified yoga instructor. He is also a specialist in teaching yoga to children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Michael trains and mentors students who want to teach yoga to children.

While the main focus of World Yoga Day is on Human Rights, I thought I would give myself poetic licence to focus also on Children’s Rights – specifically the rights of those children whose behaviour is often labelled ‘disruptive’, because, frankly, it is.

In the following case study from my personal experience as a yoga teacher, you can read how *Sinclair’s behaviour improved significantly because of his success in the yoga lessons over two terms. The plan, to teach challenging postures with aspects of social and emotional learning at the core of the programme, helped change Sinclair’s attitude and behaviour.

*Not his real name.

Is this scenario familiar?

Sinclair was a Year 4 pupil child in a primary school where I was asked to deliver yoga for a year. His class teacher described him as having a low self-image; often being moody, with a short attention span; and often disrupting the class with silly noises or swearing. Sinclair was aggressive to other children and found group work difficult. On the positive side, Sinclair enjoyed Physical Education, loved football, was sharp and incredibly flexible.

My main focus

Whilst I am a specialist children’s yoga teacher, the main focus of my work with children centres on the social and emotional aspects of learning. I teach the whole class and everyone is included. The foremost aim in every lesson is to enhance children’s self-esteem. Other benefits like improved flexibility, fitness, better concentration and calmness, for example, are natural when you practice yoga, yet combined with the emphasis on the aspects of social and emotional learning contribute to a powerful increase in the child’s sense self-worth.

Photo: Michael Chissick’s yoga class students in Tiger Posture (courtesy of Michael Chissick).

Individual Aims for Sinclair

Working with his Class Teacher we decided on the following specific aims:

  • Improving Sinclair’s self-esteem
  • Encouraging Sinclair to be a role model 
  • Improving Sinclair’s group communication skills

Our Approach

Our approach was to cultivate and build on the following three positive aspects:

  1. Sinclair the demonstrator
  2. Sinclair the ‘helpful teacher’
  3. Sinclair the ‘star’ at school and at home

Sinclair the demonstrator

Sinclair was a natural yogi and we quickly realised that he was excelling at the posture work. We decided to use Sinclair as much as fairly possible to demonstrate new postures and reinforce old ones to the whole class. Before the lesson, the class teacher would remind Sinclair that he was being given the responsibility of showing the other children postures and it meant that he had to show responsible behaviour too.

Sinclair the ‘helpful teacher’

Group work was an essential ingredient of the lesson in achieving our aims. The children worked in groups of six. Each group was to work as a team to find a way to perform a specific posture in an interesting way that also supported and connected with each other.

We made it clear that we were looking to reward group skills which included listening and making decisions. Above all there was an emphasis on group members helping each other in a kind and encouraging way. In other words, children were given the responsibility of looking out for each other.

Sinclair’s expertise at the postures set him up as a natural leader and his attention to detail meant that he could spot ways to help children in his group.

We had given him some input on how to get his classmates to change an aspect of the posture in an encouraging way, and Sinclair learnt and applied these skills with ease and a gentleness that his teacher had not seen before. Sinclair was also very keen to be the group spokesperson, yet gradually, over time, he more readily agreed to let someone else have a turn.

Sinclair the ‘Star’ at school and at home

Sinclair performed the most challenging postures to the whole school at two achievement assemblies, where he was encouraged to explain how yoga had helped him to be calmer and more focused. We also discovered that his family eagerly awaited his return from school on yoga day when he would teach them new postures and play yoga games with his two brothers.

Certificates and stickers

Sinclair worked hard to get the special certificates that were awarded to children who could show:

  • Good listening skills to teachers and children
  • How to help other children in group work
  • Improved behaviour

He also earned his fair share of stickers for good listening, learning to be still in calming postures and games and relaxation, as well as increasing concentration and being well-mannered.

Summary

The combination of our behavioural approach and the yoga improved Sinclair’s self-esteem and consequently improved his behaviour because:

  • he experienced a great sense of success in the yoga.
  • the calming and relaxation aspects of the lesson gave him experiences that helped him feel in control.
  • he was perceived as an expert by his class and earned their respect
  • he tried hard to overcome his disruptive behaviours in order to win the special certificates and stickers that were an incentive for him to change.
  • Sinclair’s parents were able to celebrate his success at home and give lots of genuine praise.
  • the combined effect of rewards and praise from me, the class teacher, peers and parents had a very powerful and positive effect on Sinclair’s self-esteem.

Conclusion

This case study is yet another example that supports the case for yoga to be taught in schools as part of the integrated school day on an ongoing basis. Clearly, it also shows the importance of placing the social and emotional aspects of learning at the core of the yoga lesson.

If there is one message I hope teachers and parents take away on World Yoga Day, it’s that yoga can help children foster a sense of achievement regardless of stature, academic ability, upbringing and other differences.

Read a Preview of Frog’s Breathtaking Speech »

This post was adapted with permission from Yoga at School. Visit www.yogaatschool.org.uk for more info.

VIDEO: An Interview with Master Herbalist Philip Weeks – author of Make Yourself Better

Singing Dragon 0 Comments

Philip Weeks is a leading expert on natural medicine and nutrition and is a master herbalist and acupuncturist. He is well versed in Ayurvedic, Arabic, Chinese and Greek medicine and utilises these systems by making them relevant to today. Philip is known for his pioneering, passionate and positive approach to helping people achieve their optimum health.

In this video interview, Philip discusses the principles behind his new book, Make Yourself Better: A Practical Guide to Restoring Your Body’s Wellbeing through Ancient Medicine.

 

[youtube]

pWetjelO_3I

[/youtube]

 

Watch the official book trailer!

[youtube]

UD7xfxTh7J0

[/youtube]

 

Read a Preview of Make Yourself Better »

Copyright © Singing Dragon 2012.

“Although fatigue may persist, it can go away” – An interview with Lucie Montpetit

Singing Dragon 3 Comments
Photo: Singing Dragon author Lucie Montpetit

Photo: Singing Dragon author Lucie Montpetit (Credit: Jackie Fritz)

Lucie Montpetit is an occupational therapist with over 25 years’ experience working in a variety of hospital settings. She runs workshops on managing fatigue, stress and pain using the approach she has developed incorporating a number of different techniques. She has personally suffered from debilitating fatigue and restored her health through the methods she now teaches others.

She is the author of Breaking Free from Persistent Fatigue – coming soon from Singing Dragon.

In this interview, Lucie recounts her personal experience with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and how overcoming this condition through a combination of occupational therapy techniques and Eastern health modalities inspired her to help others to do the same.

Can you please tell us a bit about you and your personal and professional interest in improving the lives of people with persistent fatigue?

First, I’d like to explain that I chose the expression “persistent fatigue” because although fatigue may persist, it can go away. A frame of mind open to hope is important in healing.

When I started working as an occupational therapist, I was interested in understanding the drops in energy of my patients. Despite people’s motivation to get better, a lack of energy became apparent in rehabilitation. I encountered different types of lack of energy, whether patients were suffering from major depression in an acute psychiatric setting; war veterans suffering from late onset diabetes leading to leg amputation; or young mothers who just encountered their first major energy drop from multiple sclerosis or a rheumatoid arthritic attack. Personally, I went to see a neurologist at the age of 29 because of sudden energy drops and my GP thought I had multiple sclerosis, but nothing was found and it went away within two weeks. Then, after my second child was born, I had multisystemic symptoms that my GP did not understand. He said I must be stressed. But I did not feel I was more stressed than my co-workers and friends who had to conjugate career and family life.

Book cover: Breaking Free from Persistent FatigueEventually, despite my relatively healthy lifestyle, I had to find another doctor who put me on sick leave with the diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis. It took me about two years to recover from the persistent debilitating fatigue. After that I started to do workshops for patients suffering from similar daily challenges. My book reflects in part my own findings to regain my health as well as the work I have done as an occupational therapist with patients suffering from debilitating fatigue associated with different diagnoses. So it is not a book about disease but about finding solutions according to different ways of gaining back one’s physical, emotional and psychological energy balance. For many, it is also a path towards empowerment and finding a new meaning in daily activities.

Can you paint us a picture of what the person with fatigue goes through on a daily basis?

Once the imbalance is severe, here is what I observed in my patients: Sudden energy drops at fixed time during the day or after physical exercise; poor sleep of different kinds (inability to fall asleep, waking up many times during the night with an urge to urinate and/or unable to feel refreshed even after a good night’s sleep); food and environmental intolerances; exacerbation of known allergies or new allergy appearances; dizziness; mood swings; foggy thinking; no buffer to deal with stress; having a hard time doing little things around the house, such as washing dishes, due to lack of energy and reduced capacity to organise and plan; having projects in mind and interests to pursue but the inability to do so due to lack of energy; not being able to lift grocery bags without shaking like a leaf and needing to go to bed right after; preferring to be alone but not necessary being depressed – essentially just needing to use as little energy as possible to “survive another day”.

What causes this debilitating condition?

One thing for sure is that long standing exposure to stress is a cause of this debilitating condition, but not only psychosocial stressors like your work environment, a conjugal separation or the death of a close relative. These can also include viral infections, postural stressors that leads to jaw misalignment and lack of sleep, nutritional deficiencies that prevent the production of energy at the cellular level, candidiasis, and long term exposure to moulds, endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, allergens, electromagnetic smog and other environmental pollutants.

The accumulation of stressors leads to the imbalance of your psycho-neuro-immuno-endocrine (PNI) super system, known by researchers as allostatic overload.

What makes it worse, and what makes it better?

Continuous exposure to stressors of any kind – insomnia, not respecting one’s limitations and forcing oneself to do more – makes things worse. To make things better, get rid of the stressors when possible; eat energising foods rather than energy draining processed foods; modify daily habits to optimize the natural chronobiological hormonal cycles of one’s body; learn to change one’s mode of reacting into a more energising way of responding to daily life challenges; and make informed choices while honouring one’s strength and limitations. Choosing the right physical intensity of exercise to regain one’s capacities is crucial, while choosing key nutrients to optimise cellular energy production is also important in the process. Learning how to breathe efficiently through the nose in order to optimise the oxygen input is also very important.

What is the book about, and what motivated you to write it?

For many years, I have been dissatisfied with medical answers that purport to address the debilitating fatigue suffered by my patients with auto-immune diseases. Lack of resources and understanding, finding quick fix medications such as antidepressants for patients clearly suffering from musculoskeletal symptoms such as fibromyalgia, and having difficulty finding answers with the variety of health professionals I personally consulted inspired me to write the book. I needed to find answers firstly for myself, and then got the urge to share my findings and what I had learned with others facing similar prejudices among some health care practitioners. So the book is about finding personal solutions, different for each reader because of their own type of debilitating fatigue and personal way of over-spending their energy. People will learn how to make an energy balance sheet like one would do financially when consolidating debts. From their findings, they will figure out how to save energy in their daily lives and regain their inner mind-body balance towards health.

Can you talk about how your work and approach is influenced by Chinese medicine and other practices?

As an occupational therapist I was trained to view my patients from a holistic perspective, which is in accordance with my personal understanding. People require a meaning in the activity they are doing in therapy; they need goals of their own to reach in addition to those of my rehabilitation treatment plan for them. From my perspective as a martial artist of many decades, I am also influenced by the efficiency of energy expenditure, the need for the energy to circulate through the meridians and the influence of the breath during outer and inner Qi Gong and martial practice.

For me, the autonomous nervous system (ANS) follows the yin/yang principles. Patients I treat, for different reasons, have lost the balance of their PNI super system. This has direct repercussions on the ANS as it reverts to a constant “fight or flight” reaction mode as a result of too many stressors that leads to a narrow, skewed perception of daily life. In these circumstances, the ANS becomes too much yang.

I teach patients to reconnect with their bodies through their senses, the awareness of their body and posture in space and their breathing pattern. Then I use different Qi Gong exercises according to the level of energy of my clients or Chan Ssu Chin Tai Chi exercises (known as Silk Reeling Cocoon exercises) to reconnect further with their breath and body and the body’s ability to heal itself. Sometimes I use Neurofunctional reorganisation – Padovan’s Method® (NFR) with the patients to regain the balance of their autonomic nervous system and sleep rhythm: it is a powerful tool that follows brain plasticity principles. I had used NFR mainly with patients suffering from neurological conditions that follows brain plasticity principles in the past. Many of the NRF exercises help my clients suffering from debilitating fatigue as well because it helps reorganise posture, breathing, and ANS functions and rhythms.

Once the body starts to regain its natural rhythms, I encourage my patients to implement what they found useful in therapy into their lifestyle. I teach them about chronobiological rhythms so they can choose for themselves the minor changes in their daily habits that can help foster the natural flow of hormones and chi. Finally, when the patient starts to get out of the constant “fight or flight” mode and is ready to respond in a new way, I make use of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) principles to help make changes to the energy draining perception of daily life to energising life habits that are better suited for the recovery process. All of those life changes follow the yin/yang principle to break free from persistent fatigue while restoring the inner balance called homeostasis in Western medicine.

How does the book reflect your general philosophy about health?

For me, health is a dynamic equilibrium within oneself. Equilibrium takes place in the physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual dimensions of our lives in relation to our environment. If a person is disconnected from one aspect of his or her self, the imbalance will eventually be reflected in the other dimensions of his or her life. I believe that every person who comes to consult me is in part responsible for restoring and then maintaining his or her PNI super system dynamic balance that we refer to as health. People are amazing at finding ways to change their lives in ways that make sense to them. Once they realise from a new point of view how they were living, they have no interest of returning to their previous lifestyle.

Our environment has never had such a strong negative impact on our health. Depleted soils and foods, pollution of all senses, the intrusion of technology in every aspect of our daily lives and having to deal with the compound effects of so many hundreds of chemicals even before we are born are also major stressors that health professionals too often neglect. These are also consequences of living in a world that is too “yang”. There is an implicit false belief that we have to be busy and multitasking most of the time. We can be proactive in maintaining or restoring our health once we gain knowledge of those relatively new phenomena. Knowledge is power. Feeling empowered rather than feeling a victim of a disease changes your outlook on your condition. This frees your body-mind and it starts to heal itself faster. Allowing a few minutes per day to be rather than to do is sometimes sufficient to maintain one’s inner balance.

Finally, how should this book be used by the reader?

The book is to be read and applied according to your level of energy. As a start, people who have low energy would benefit from knowing how to nourish their bodies to optimise energy production. Then they should go to the chapter that appeals to them. Usually, a gut feeling leads people to what they need. If a reader is too exhausted to concentrate on reading, I recommend bringing the book to a true friend or the health professional he or she is working with to do some of the exercises with the assistance of the health professional.

Copyright © Singing Dragon 2012.

London Event: Free Talk by Master Herbalist, TCM practitioner and author Philip Weeks – Nutri Centre Bookshop, 29th Feb

Singing Dragon 0 Comments

On Wednesday, 29th February, Singing Dragon author Philip Weeks will be giving a free talk at The Nutri Centre Bookshop in London, UK.

Make Yourself Better
Restoring Your Body’s Wellbeing through Ancient Medicine

with Philip Weeks, Master Herbalist & TCM Practitioner

Applying his deep understanding of holistic medical traditions from both East and West, Philip Weeks guides the reader through the process of restoring the body’s wellbeing using a simple combination of natural techniques, diet and herbal medicines. He explores five key interconnected areas through which wellbeing can be attained – nourishment; detoxification; lifestyle; activation; and mind, emotions and spirit – based on his analogy of the wheel of health.

Philip’s new book Make Yourself Better: A Practical Guide to Restoring Your Body’s Wellbeing through Ancient Medicine will be available to purchase at the event.

More About the Book

Philip Weeks is a leading expert on natural medicine and nutrition and is a master herbalist and acupuncturist. He is an engaging, informative presenter and is renowned for his deep understanding and knowledge of ancient medicine. He is well versed in Ayurvedic, Arabic, Chinese and Greek medicine and utilises these systems by making them relevant to today. Philip is known for his pioneering, passionate and positive approach to helping people achieve their optimum health. He is a frequent lecturer on herbal medicine and holistic health.

Event Details

Place:     The Nutri Centre Bookshop, 7 Park Crescent, London W1B 1PF
Date:      Wednesday, 29th February 2012
Time:     7pm to 8.30 pm (approx).
RSVP:     No need to book! Just bring yourself – and a friend – along!

Download the flyer

X