Coming Home to Self: A 50 Year Quest

“Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo, y más la piedra dura porque esa ya no siente, pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo, ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.” These words of Ruben Dario, the iconic Nicaraguan poet who revolutionized literature in Latin America and died an alcoholic, capture the essence of my discontent in being born into this sentient life. I was born September 4, 1961, the dawn of a new era of rebellion and discord, attempts at transformation through the destruction of traditional structures and constructs. It is the year the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional came into existence, and a group of idealists began to plot the bloody overthrow of a decades-long dictatorship in the country of my birth. The Nicaraguan civil war will rage as I enter my equally forlorn adolescence, as will the war within my family, and the endless battle for the right to take up space, to breathe my own air. War, external and internal, will rip apart everything that held me together in one piece, giving me a sense of permanence, solidity and identity. I will be grasping for years at some sense of meaning and belonging in the midst of global cultural and political upheaval, old concepts falling away while a collective birthing process of new ideas rocks the world with labor pains. The Russian missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion (with Nicaragua as a launching pad), JFK’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, the Vietnam War, protest marches and the anti-war movement, the sexual revolution, the birth of feminism, the death of racist structures, transcendental meditation, LSD and psilocybin psychedelic explorations into altered states of consciousness, peace, love, rock & roll and flights to the moon.
This is the world I was born into, the daughter of a Nicaraguan-born German whose parents escaped war-torn Germany in the 1920s and lost their German citizenship because they refused to recognize Hitler, and a Nicaraguan mother from a family of 11 children whose father died when she was nine (of an alcohol-related highway accident or a politically-motivated assassination, no one knows for sure). My father wore pleated pants and pencil-thin ties in black, brown or navy with a starchy white shirt. My mother was a hippie-wanna-be painter who grew marijuana in the back yard. Fifty years later, they are ultra-conservative, right-wing, born-again and still married. I have come full circle from my socially conscious upbringing by the Teresiana nuns. After searching for a true identity through various cultures and cities, I have come home to myself - or should I say, my Self. I have embraced my existence and love this journey called the human experience. I even love this body that I used to condemn and despise, for it is the vehicle for a Pure Consciousness that is sweet and enduring. I know who I am, why I am here, and how to serve. In the words of Andrew Cohen, I have embraced "the mysterious compulsion to become more conscious." A far cry from Dario's words that the conscious life is the most painful thing to endure.

Full Recovery is Possible, Costin Writes

Carolyn Costin, founder of The Monte Nido Treatment Center in Malibu, CA, believes full and total recovery from an eating disorder is possible,having recovered from one herself. This is how Costin (who treated Portia de Rossi and Jenni Schaefer, who have authored memoirs of their own recovery process) describes recovery: "Being recovered is when a person can accept his or her natural body size and shape and no longer has a self-destructive relationship with food or exercise. When you are recovered, food and weight take a proper perspective in your life, and what you weigh is not more important than who you are; in fact, actual numbers are of little or no importance at all. When recovered, you will not compromise your health or betray your soul to look a certain way, wear a certain size, or reach a certain number on a scale. When you are recovered you do not use eating disorder behaviors to deal with, distract from, or cope with other problems." In her new book, 8 Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder

She lists the keys as: 1) Motivation, patience and hope; 2) Nurturing the healthy self to heal the eating disorder self; 3) Feel your feelings; 4) Change your thoughts; 5) Change your behaviors; 6) Reach out to people rather than an eating disorder; 7) Find meaning and purpose; and last but not least, 8) It is not about the food, but it is about the food (nutritional restoration is critical to support recovery but is not the source of the eating disorder nor the sole focus of treatment).

Is the Much-Maligned, Oft-Abused Body the Key to Happiness and Bliss?

I am reading this book for Unity on the Bay's Adventure in Faith program and the very first chapter is about listening to the body! As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, I could not agree more. Awareness of body sensation discharges negative emotions and opens us up to access the bliss centers of the brain. One simple suggestion in the book is to keep your attention on distracting sensations in the body (such as pain, or tension) until they disappear. Instead of reacting to the sensation, paying attention extinguishes the stimulus-response process and stops the reaction from "fueling itself." Once the sensation passes, the body recognizes its innate, harmonious self-regulation capacity. Deepak Chopra takes it one radical step forward, stating: “Your physical body is a fiction,” Dr. Chopra states. "Every cell is made up of two invisible ingredients: awareness and energy." In his view, relaxed awareness (resulting from a coherent nervous system) is our natural state. Body awareness changes the pattern of distracting in unhealthy ways when stressed or overwhelmed.

Nourishing Secure Attachment

Last month I attended Diane Poole Heller's Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Experience workshop on Creating Adult Relationships and learned skills to help people heal from early attachment wounds that disrupt their adult relationships. Continually evolving knowledge about neurobiology now confirms that we are designed to heal and that maladaptive attachment dynamics can be reconditioned to our natural, innate healthy, secure attachment design. Diane's understanding of somatic relational practices to effect lasting change on attachment patterns is a great contribution to human healing and the evolution of our authentic selves. Her work is informed by the work of Stan Tatkin, author of Love and War in Intimate Relationships and Wired for Love.

CANCER: Creating A New Consciousness Essential to Recovery

The other day I posted on my Facebook page some suggestions for staying cancer free:
1. Eat green, cruciferous and other colorful, nourishing vegetables.
2. Eat a variety of fruits -- 3+ a day.
3. Eat only healthy, plant-based fats and proteins.
4. Exercise at least 30 minutes a day, on most days of the week.
5. Avoid processed foods, alcohol, caffeine, cigarette smoke and excess sugar.

Then I realized that I was forgetting the most critical ingredients:
1. Practice stress relief every day -- breathwork, meditation, yoga asanas.
2. Forgive everyone everything.
3. Be grateful for at least one thing for every complaint you have.
4. Give of yourself -- even if it is a smile, a flower, a kind thought or word.
5. Create something -- a poem, a meal, a photograph or drawing.

This is my recipe for creating a new consciousness essential to recovery from cancer.

What is Evolutionary Enlightenment?

This interactive teaching module gives you an easy to understand overview of Andrew Cohen's teachings on Evolutionary Enlightenment to support the conscious evolution of humanity. It's all about moving beyond the Ego into the Authentic Self that seeks to live, consciously, with clarity of intention, for the sake of the Whole. Cohen outlines six principles and five tenets leading to true freedom. He defines hell as the world of the ego (or false self) that remains mired in victimhoom, faces nothing and avoids everything, and seeks to live only for its own sake.

Stop Complaining and Start Creating

Complaining is a bad habit, and like any bad habit, it can be changed with discipline and perseverance. Complaining is the activity of people who feel powerless. Notice I say "feel" NOT "are." Have you ever considered doing something to change the situation you are complaining about? Action removes the sense of powerlessness. And action usually involves changing something in ourselves. It requires insight into our perceptions, our fears that block us from changing. Complaining is an ANGRY energy. It is passive-aggressive. What if you were to tune in to that energy as pure sensation, without judgment, and use it to mobilize the action necessary to create the change? After all, all emotion is just that "e-motion" = energy in motion. Move the energy instead of being stuck in the quicksand of complaining. That will only create misery, instead of the opposite of what you are complaining about. How about when your complaining is about other people's behaviors? You cannot change other people. It is an impossibility. You can only change yourself. So what then? You still have options: 1) change your perception of the person; 2) accept the person exactly as they are; 3) do not have a relationship with the person ... and so on and so forth.

Mindfulness in Psychotherapy

Mindfulness is finding its way more and more into the field of psychotherapy, and with positive effects on those who practice it. It is helpful in reducing everything from anxiety, to impulsivity, to stress and chronic pain. Could radical acceptance and compassionate awareness be the key to ease suffering and promote change? Acceptance and Commitment Therapy; Dialectical Behavior Therapy; and Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction are some of the approaches that incorporate mindfulness at their core. Check out this May 2008 New York Times article by Benedict Carey.

CriticalThinkRx -- A Prescription for Critical Thinking About Psychotropic Medications

Critical Think Rx

CriticalThinkRx, a FREE web-based resource on psychotropic medications, is now available to the world. The project, which is research-based and publicly funded, grew out of public concerns about the increasing use of psychiatric medications (that have serious adverse health effects) in children and adolescents, the escalating costs to taxpayers (through public health insurance) to pay for these prescriptions, and the undue influence of the pharmaceutical industry on drug information (as well as increasingly exposed deceptive and often illegal marketing practices). Key conclusion: There is little or no research evidence supporting safety and efficacy of these drugs in children, and ample evidence of the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions to treat childhood problems. Let's challenge the pharmaceutical industry--health insurance cartel and advocate for the use of psychosocial interventions. Let drugs be an intervention of last, not first, resort.

The curriculum was developed over the last 18 months after systematic research literature searches of databases in medicine, pharmacology, psychology and social work. More than 1,000 abstracts and articles were reviewed for relevance and accuracy, and 600 articles were further summarized and synthesized into the first draft of the web-based modules. These were further reviewed and edited by independent consultants in counseling, law, psychology and social work. The information was produced as an 8-module, web-based course with Flash videos, PDF courses materials, learning guides with questions for practice, supervision and administration, and additional supporting materials such as medication adverse effect monitoring checklist, guidelines for Court affidavits, and more. Take advantage of CriticalThinkRx for your free professional development and training purposes. CEUs will be offered soon for counselors, psychologists adn social workers, and possibly select health professionals. Check out the website at www.CriticalThinkRx.org and let me know what you think. Enjoy the fruit of my labor!

Reported this week: 1 in 50 infants in the U.S. suffer abuse

The Centers for Disease Control reported this week that 1 in 50 infants suffer non-fatal abuse and neglect, 30% of them before they are a week old. That means 2% of all babies have the cards stacked against them at the starting gate. The researchers counted more than 91,000 infant victims of abuse and neglect from October 1, 2005 to September 30, 2006. And these were verified cases. Clearly many more may not have been reported. Federal officials define neglect as a failure to meet a child’s basic needs including housing, clothing, feeding and access to medical care. Studies show that poverty (lack of access to basic needs) and early neglect or abuse are a high predictor for later problems in life, both in physical and mental health. New understandings in neuroscience explain how brain development is adversely affected by lack of nurturing by a caring, protective adult. These children grow up to have trouble modulating their em0tions, concentrating and paying attention, and forming lasting bonds with others. We must raise awareness to end social disparities and the abuse of children if we are to call ourselves "human".