Yoga and Recovery: A Gateway to Compassionate Self-Care

Yoga encourages us to engage with loving kindness, listening interoceptively, recognizing and honoring our boundaries, and knowing it is safe to gently and progressively challenge our edges. We learn to see ourselves as deserving of compassion when facing challenges and difficulties—as human beings facing tender human experiences. We learn we can experience life without feeling powerless, needing to distract, engage in maladaptive coping to not feel our experiences. Continue Reading

Yoga and Recovery: The Brain and Mental Health

Yoga is like weightlifting for our brain, our brain cells develop new connections, and changes occur in brain struc­ture as well as function, resulting in improved cog­nitive skills, such as learning and memory. Yoga strengthens parts of the brain that play a crucial role in memory, attention, awareness, thought, and language. Continue Reading

Yoga and Recovery: Client-Centered Care

We MUST feel safe to explore our somatic experience and trauma, learn coping skills, face the highs and lows, and ultimately recover. So, we need people on our team who are always focused on what is best for us. Practitioners who can adapt their approach for our benefit sit with us in our resistance and hold space for working through it without attachment to the result. We need caring professionals on our court, working with us and focused on helping us reach our recovery goals. Who responsibly helps us explore our experiences as we learn to cope and self-regulate. Who understand the emotional cycles and rollercoasters of shame, pride, resistance, acceptance, love, and loathing. And sits with us when this darkness comes with compassion and helps us find our way to safety. Continue Reading

Yoga and Recovery: Defining the Journey

The truth is recovery is messy, challenging, and filled with highs and lows. I’ve learned to live in the moment while playing the long game. In other words, living in the present moment and embodying my life while giving myself time to do the work in treatment and grace when I stumble. Time to curiously explore and discover healthy coping techniques and when they help me. Which has helped me feel more confident and less overwhelmed when symptoms and challenges occur. Continue Reading

Is productivity costing us everything?

Does our focus on productivity lead to burnout? I never even questioned it. Isn’t that the goal to use our time wisely, achieve, and be productive?  If you had asked me this question six months ago, my answer would have been yes. But then, it all changed.  A few of my closest friends and family started to share their concerns, but the praise and feeling of success quickly drowned them out. Then, like a wave that I never saw coming, I was drowning.  The signs have been there for so long; exhaustion, achy body, foggy mind, eye fatigue, difficulty with digestion, feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, and easily agitated. Honestly, they were badges of honour. The suffering is completely overlooked in a society that praises accomplishment and culture of “do more with less.” Continue Reading

Turning Emotions into Emotional Regulation with “RAIN”

Our thoughts often skip over acknowledging the emotion and lump it together as one experience. By focusing solely on the thought, we are disconnecting from our experience of the thought. We may be experiencing sadness or fear and feeling disappointment or regret without recognizing that we can easily miss what we actually need. However, if we learn to identify thoughts, feelings, and emotions individually, we can develop emotional intelligence. Learning to understand what makes us feel and respond the way we do allows us the ability to regulate our experience. Continue Reading

Finding some silence between all the noise

I am finding more and more in my own life and the lives of my clients a sense of profound exhaustion. I’ve been spending a lot of time on this reflection lately, wondering what the consistent link was.  I always find it funny when what I found isn’t new knowledge; or even something I haven’t reflected on before. More so, I find myself acknowledging what my wisdom already knew. And, what I have been resisting—there is so much that it is easy to get distracted from. Literally. Have you ever noticed how little silence we have in our lives? We are inundated with Continue Reading

Why I’m glad I got sick

Throughout my life, I have had hundreds of conversations with people who, like me, have gotten sick or faced something traumatic that changed their lives forever. I have listened as they intimately shared their suffering and their victories. There is a common thread in those stories; we struggled with the questions. So today, I thought I would share the question people often asked me during this time, the impact this question had, and the answers. Continue Reading