The Power of Poetry

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Kimmi

There lies infinite healing powers inside a pen and paper. This art form provides a medium for the restless, dancing words inside the mind, wishing only to become liberated. They are happier dancing on pages of a book and the ears of others.

—
In a word Storm,

Poetry is that expression that turns life’s trepidation into instances of pure intellectual elation.

Has everything we see, hear, or feel, been perverted by the awareness of by our own inadequacies?

Or paralyzed by the fears that encroach like the foggy mists that invade the Irish hills early in the morning?

Poetic expression for me is much more than a way to see Wisdom’s influence on the spaces between the words I write.

The paper is the battlefield my pen marches onto to pay homage to the mastery of thought that reigns over all reality.

Yes, that’s right, I do think, I do contemplate, I do meditate, the Why that is a prevalent question verbalized by the Silence.

There is no other way to escape the penance of a life sentence of imprisonment in and to one’s own mind.

If you finally choose to satisfy the nagging voices of Intention and hear reality’s voice of reason, then a positive outlook can find the meaning of your life’s purpose.

Do you hear me, I mean really? Finally the house-guest who has spent 14 years Marionetting my life like a Master Puppeteer, has found the Emergency exit. This exit is through my mouth; In Spoken Word my ideas find the freedom to get born into existence.

My mouth, like the barrel of a gun spits the projectiles that add the thunder to the rain. The rain that is currently soaking society; why should we seek cover? Why not go dancing in the rain?

Every so often the lightning strikes, and then all we are left to do is count,
to find out, how far away is the eye of the storm.

Surprise, we are in the eye of the storm, and safe here,
but here, have an umbrella just in case….

Poetry has been that one outlet that is always accepting of my mental confusion. Surviving catastrophic brain injury in 1999, for me poetry has been instrumental to my recovery; socially, motivationally, and too therapeutically; even romantically. Sometimes it is true that the paper is the only one who will listen to my pen. Such a mental exchange brings light to the darkness that sometimes shadows my world.

Thank you poetry, you’ve saved me!
—
~ Michael Gardner (2013)

Chill Out with an Essential Oil Steam

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Kimmi

Chill out with an aromatherapy session using essential oils! Many essential oils work on altering your neurochemistry to provide sedative, analgesic, and/ or anti-depressive effects. A few of these include eucalyptus, peppermint, jasmine, lavender, and lemongrass.

A simple and accessible way to use essential oils is through the steam method:

1. Boil a quart of water and pour it into a bowl.
2. Add a few drops of the essential oil of your choice.
3. Right away you may begin inhaling the steam. A typical session lasts around 15 minutes.

Using essential oils is very effective because you are actually forced to focus only on your breathing. Breathing exercises with the essential oils steam multiplies the mood boosting, calming, de-stressing effects of the scents themselves, further activating parasympathetic nerves, decreasing stress hormones, and increasing GABA (the ultimate anti-anxiety neurotransmitter). Therefore, this method is very handy if you need a major pick-me-up on the go!

The Medicinal Properties of Pranayama (Breath Control)

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Kimmi

Pranayama (breathing exercises) exude vast brain and body benefits through stimulating parasympathetic nervous activity and increasing vagal tone.

Our body’s Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) helps us to regulate stress and threat responses, and branches off into two main categories: the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS). The SNS responds to threatening environments by increasing metabolic activities and facilitating energy mobilization (“fight or flight”), while the PNS responds to social engagement & safe environments (“rest and digest”).

Prolonged and consistent activation of the SNS is associated with a plethora of mental illnesses such as major depression, epilepsy, and post-traumatic stress disorder – while its opposition, the PNS, helps to maintain optimal homeostasis.

The PNS is composed of five sets of vagus nerves projecting information to and from different areas of the body (ie. abdominal viscera, pharynx, larynx, lungs, heart, trachea, external sensory receptors, etc) and the Central Nervous System (CNS; brain and spinal cord). Therefore, there lies a bidirectional influence between emotional states/ cognitive thought processes and their somatic/ bodily expressions with vagus nerves bridging the comunication. In other words, the body listens to the brain, but the brain listens to the body as well.

So where does yoga come into play?

In one word: breath.

“The fact that breathing is the only autonomic function that can easily be voluntarily controlled provides a portal through which specific selected breathing patterns can be used to send messages to through PNS, SNS, and interoceptive systems to affect how the brain perceives, interprets, and responds to stress or threat.

Because breathing is vital to survival, information from the respiratory system must be noticed and attended to immediately.” ~ Streeter, Gerbarg, Saper, Ciraulo, & Brown (2012)

This not only means that breathing exercises can tell the brain that it can chill out and veer into a more safe allostatic state, but that this communication is extremely rapid.

Different types of breathing exercises have been shown to increase PNS activity. For example, ujjayi breath (resistance breathing involving laryngeal contracture and partial closure of the glottis) increases intrathroracic pressure, baroreceptor stimulation, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, and heart rate variability, while using breath holds with ujjayi multiplies PNS effects. In addition, chanting om (resistance breathing while contracting the vocal cords) increases vagal tone and physiological relaxation.

Therefore yogic breathing can be a powerful tool in preventing and combating a number of chronic illnesses involving hyperactive SNS activity by defeating allostatic load. And furthermore, it’s simple, accessible, and effective!

Thank you!

Streeter, C., Gerbarg, F., Saper, R., Ciraulo, D., Brown, R. (2012). Effects of yoga on the autonomic nervous system, gamma-aminobutryic-acid, and allostasis in epilepsy, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Medical hypotheses, 78 (5), 571-579.

Yoga as a Treatment for Eating Disorders

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Kimmi

Recent studies are beginning to reveal the promise of yoga as a supplementary prevention and treatment aid for eating disorders (ED) anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), and binge eating disorder (BED); six of the seven recently emerged studies reveal positive findings.

Yoga may be effective for the prevention and treatment of EDs due to it’s abilities to treat common co-morbid symptoms such as hyperactive stress, chronic anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsion as well as ED related neurological deficiencies such as impaired interoception (internal sensory signalling), proprioception (perception of body in space), and visual association (ie. inaccurate perception of body shape and size leads to body dysmorphia).

Read Flow’s full review: Yoga as a Treatment for Eating Disorders [PDF].

1:2 Breathing Sings Lullabies to Sympathetic Nerves

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Kimmi

1:2 breathing is the practice of patterning your breath as to make your exhales twice as long as your inhales. Bo Forbes, psychiatrist and yoga therapist shines light on the power of this breath control practice for alleviating anxiety in her exceptionally handy book, “Yoga for Emotional Balance: simple practices to help relieve anxiety and depression.”

1:2 breathing, like every other pranayama (breath control) technique, takes a bit of foundational work and practice; acknowledge this and let go of nailing it to perfection at the first try now, otherwise the meditative practice may grow to agitate you and as a consequence become counterproductive. These foundations include familiarizing yourself with general nostril breathing and ujjayi breath, which you may learn how to do here; once you have a fair grasp on those foundations, 1:2 breath will come much easier.

You may begin 1:2 breathing by assuming a comfortable position, whether seated or supine. If seated, ensure that your spine is aligned, with a slight lumbar curve, shoulders rolled back and down from your ears, and crown of the head reaching tall. If lying supine, just be sure to fully relax your hips and shoulders, surrendering them to gravity. Start with four counts for your inhales, and five counts for your exhales. Become comfortable with this ratio before moving onto four counts for inhales to six counts for exhales. Gradually, you will make it to four count inhales and eight count exhales. Be sure to resist increasing the ratio until you are fully comfortable with the current one – this may take over the course of many separate sessions.

A few things to note: you can (and should) take a few normal breaths in between bouts of breath control at any time you feel that you need to. I also suggest taking little to none throat constriction for the inhale, while constricting the throat more for the exhale, as so air can slowly pass through your airway (this is where ujjaiyi breathing comes in handy). If you do find the four to eight ratio easy, you may work to increase the overall counts as well.

Engaging in this breath practice for as little as five minutes can dramatically slow down a fast paced sympathetic nervous system – it creates a state where being physiologically anxious is nearly impossible. Try a little 1:2 breathing to evaporate your anxiety and sing your insomnia away for a good night’s sleep.

Reference:

Forbes, B. (2011). Yoga for Emotional Balance: Simple Practices to Help Relieve Anxiety and Depression. Boston, MA: Shambhala.

How to Catch and Kill Samskara-Dukha (Negative Thought Patterns)

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Kimmi

Thought patterns are habits of thinking in a particular way and are a product of implicit neural processing. Thought patterns become stronger after each time they are activated ie. each time you think the thought. They may be rational and positive, but they however may also be distorted and negative. These ”samskara-dukha” are debilitating to mental health as they perpetuate anxiety, stress, and depression. So how do we work to dewire these chains of destruction?

The first step is to accustom yourself with the common negative and distorted thinking patterns:

All-Or-Nothing Thinking: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative defeat and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.

Disqualifying the positive: You dismiss positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.A. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out.B. The fortune teller error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”

Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.

Should Statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

Labeling and Mislabeling: This is an extreme form of over generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

~ Burns, D. (1980), Feeling good: The new mood therapy

After you have familiarized yourself with these patterns, begin a daily mind-watching meditation practice. Everyday in the morning or before bed, set a timer for 3 to 5 minutes, and sit in a comfortable seated position. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and then begin to observe your thoughts; do not attempt to control them – simply sit and watch where your brain takes you. After the timer goes off, write down every thought you can recall in a journal. After a few weeks, you may now begin to notice any thoughts that seem to recur over and over again as you review your journal entries. Analyze whether these thoughts are possibly distorted and/ or negative, then highlight them. For every negative thought pattern, write down a “counter”: a more rational and positive thought.

From here on, every time you become of this thought, initiate the counter immediately. Yoga, meditation, and any other contemplative practices are great times to habituate these thoughts: make this counter thought your intention for attentional focus. These counters act like antibodies for distorted and negative thought patterns. When you think the counter, they will now activate different circuitry which will begin to rewire your brain to now be accustomed to the new and better way of thinking, inhibiting the old. The more repetitively this is done, the easier it will become, as the old thought pattern will gets weaker and weaker. So take initiative to rewire your distorted and negative thoughts to create for yourself a more rational and positive world!

Thank you:

Burns, D. (1980), Feeling good: The new mood therapy. New York, NY: New American Library.

& Renee Rodoja, a beautiful yoga teacher and friend.

Contagious Health: The Power of Strong Interpersonal Relationships

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Kimmi

Persons who enjoy support from a variety of caring and loving interpersonal relationships engage in more “safety” processing in the brain and healthier states of well-being, while persons who frequently experience threats to social connection engage in a heightened and prolonged “alarm” response, which leads to debilitating health consequences.

Since social disconnection is an innate threat to our survival, the experience of real social disconnection (ex. rejection, exclusion, and infrequent exposure to cues that signal social support) or anticipated social disconnection (ex. threats to self-worth, social-evaluative stress) activates physiological alarm systems. The amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and periaqueductal gray matter of the brain are all involved in this “alarm,” stimulating the sympathetic nervous system (release of adrenaline and noradrenaline), H.P.A.-axis (release of stress hormones), and pain-related circuitry. A prolonged alarm response creates a toxic environment in your body, promoting cardiovascular disease, increased blood pressure, gastroinestinal ulcers, type II diabetes, tumor metastasis, decreased immune functioning, muscle wasting, and brain damage.

On the brighter side, strong social ties activate reward related circuitry which does two jobs: 1) facilitates mood stability and 2) inhibits threat circuitry described above. “Safety” circuits include neuronal networks in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, which are activated during real social connection (ex. in the presence of supportive figures), and in memory or reminder of social connection (ex. viewing an image of a loved one, reading past e-mails of endearment from a good friend). They are also involved in the process of “fear extinction,” when a previously negative learned outcome now predicts safety. Furthermore, care-giving related behaviors, ie. being the one providing the support, activates the ventral striatum and septal area, which similarly inhibits alarm responses and thus once again protects from chronic illness. Overall, social bonding releases endogenous opiods (natural “happy” neuropeptides) and oxytocin, which have mood lifting, stress reducing and immune boosting properties.

Therefore, taking the time to invest in intimate, trusting, and nurturing interpersonal relationships may be just as useful to your health as regular exercise; so build them strong, and strong to last!

Thank you:

Eisenberger, N., Cole, S. (2012). Social neuroscience and health: neurophysiological mechanisms linking social ties with physical health. Nature Neuroscience, 15, 1-5.

& my awesome supervisor, Professor P. A. Hall for sending me along the above review article; it’s truly spot on for highlighting the importance of the “social” aspect of the biopsychosocial model for health!

the flow channel: Psychology, Neuroscience, Health, Yoga.