Wednesday, July 22, 2015

The Healing Circle Book Chapter Blog Chapter 15 - Why Meditate?

The Healing Circle Book Chapter Blog Chapter 15 - Why Meditate?

Read Chapter Fifteen:  Why Meditate
Watch the Video:  This webpage contains several guided meditations. Try “Creating Space for Healing” to which combines “Present Focus” attention and Healing Visualization.


  
RobRutledgeBlog by Dr. Rob Rutledge

Strengthening your Brain’s ‘Present Focus’ Pathway

“Start by thinking about your feet.
How your feet have carried you a fair distance today.  Where they’ve taken you, walking, driving, sitting.
Comparing one foot to the other, notice any judgements or evaluations…
See whether you like one foot or the other foot.
See if you have any worries about your feet – anything that is medically oriented or unknown sensations.
See whether there are any future-oriented things related to your feet. Maybe you have a pedicure that is scheduled, or you have to redo your toenail polish.
Continuing to think about your feet and let whatever comes up in your mind be there. Just think about your feet.
Now stop and redirect your attention back to your feet but this time…
Just become aware of whatever sensations are present in this part of the body. Maybe feeling the way the feet are pressing down against the floor through soles of the shoes.
Perhaps feeling the points of contact of the big toe, the little toe, the heel, the ball of the foot.
Noticing any sensations between the toes, any moisture, any  heat, any energy…
Bring your attention to the foot itself encased in the shoe, any sense of tightness, pressure, throbbing.
Just allow any sensations to come up as you’re experiencing your feet in this way.”

From Dr. Zindel Segal’s Ted Talk “The Mindful Way through Depression”. 
Dr. Segal, a world-renowned psychiatrist at the University Toronto, later explains how the two ways of contemplating your feet map to two different neural pathways in your brain. In the first half of the exercise, when we intellectualize the concept of our feet (worrying, comparing, thinking about the future or past) we are using some of the higher executive functions in the frontal lobe of the brain.  In the second half of the exercise, when we directly experience our feet, it lights up the “present focus pathway” of the brain.  He explains that practicing mindfulness allows us to process information from both of these pathways at the same time. We can be mindful of our thoughts about something, and we can simply experience the sights, sounds, sensations of life without adding extra thoughts. 
Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual teacher who wrote the international bestseller The Power of Now, also discusses these two aspects of our experience.  He recognized that most people get caught up in and identified with their thinking mind (the first pathway), and have lost touch with sacredness of the present moment.  His teachings focus on bringing people back to the now which he also calls stillness. Interestingly, I heard him acknowledge recently that we need both thinking pathways in our lives. He calls himself an outlier because he claims to spend more than 80% of his life living in the now with only a small portion of his time thinking conceptually (eg. planning for the future). He also said that Oprah exemplifies a healthy balance – being both incredibly effective in the outer world and able to stay connected with the timeless, formless spiritual realm of her life.
 Most of us spend too much of our time caught up in thinking about future and past and so need to build up the ‘present focus’ pathways in our brains so we can get closer to the balance that Oprah appears to possess. Practicing meditation and learning to bring our minds back to the now (without adding mental commentary) also has profound health benefits, such as higher energy, improved mood, and fewer stress hormones in our body which can cause inflammation and damage to our bodies. Strengthening our connection with the present moment also allows us to access the depth of our spiritual life – and reconnect with the essence of our being. 

Dr. Rob Rutledge is a Radiation Oncologist in Halifax, Nova Scotia, specializing in breast, prostate and pediatric cancers. He is also an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University.
In 1999, Rob co-created the ‘Skills for Healing’ Cancer Weekend Retreats. These weekend support groups teach a powerful and integrated approach to the cancer diagnosis and ways to heal at levels of body, mind and spirit. To date, more than 1,600 people have attended the retreats in over 20 cities across Canada and abroad. 
Rob also leads the Healing and Cancer Foundation, a Registered Charity, that freely offers educational videos, documentaries, and webcasting seminars – and he is co-author of a book called The Healing Circle, which captures the teachings and inspirational stories from the weekend retreats.
In 2010, Rob received Cancer Care Nova Scotia’s Award for Excellence in Patient Care and, in 2006 Doctors Nova Scotia presented him with the Health Promotion Award in recognition of his contribution to physician health and health promotion in cancer patients.

Monday, July 13, 2015

The Healing Circle Book Chapter Blog Chapter 14: Cathy – Learning to Listen to Myself

The Healing Circle Book Chapter Blog Chapter 14: Cathy – Learning to Listen to Myself


Read Chapter Fourteen:  Cathy – Learning to Listen to Myself
Watch the Video:  Healing Meditation – scroll down to bottom of the page to the audio meditation Alchemy of the Heart


  
TimothyWalker.jpgBlog by Dr. Timothy Walker
Cathy:  Learning to Listen to Myself

I am contemplating chapter 14 Cathy – Learning to Listen to Myself while on a break at a professional retreat in the country.  The retreat is about “Somatic Experiencing”, a therapeutic system designed to facilitate the body’s natural ability to heal itself, especially from the after effects of trauma. Contemplating her story in this context I am struck with the lessons that Cathy ascribes to her journey with cancer and the other health issues that have spun off from it. She says, “I’ve learned so much by listening to my body and listening to how I really feel – it has been an awakening.”

The body has a natural intelligence that moves us toward a wholesome state of balance, homeostasis and healing. Sometimes our notion of who we think we should be, moves our life energy out of balance. As we attempt to live up to our often unreasonable mental image of who we’d like to be, we tend to override the subtle – and then not so subtle – messages that the body sends us through our nervous system.  Training ourselves in paying close attention to the shifting states of body and mind awakens a new language of healing. Just as babies learn language by listening and paying attention to their caregivers, so when we listen to the body, we learn this unique vocabulary and grammar of the body. With practice this language of inner healing begins to become part of our conscious awareness as our mind and body communicate with each other, helping us to return to health and wholeness on every level.

Peter Levine who wrote a book called Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, refers to this language of connecting body and mind as “self-regulation.” A cancer diagnosis is its own kind of trauma that can trigger a stress reaction as we sense or learn about a threat to our very life. Also this kind of threat is hard to understand, hard to locate in a normal way, and we can feel helpless in knowing how to run away from it, or fight it, in order to preserve our life. Levine explains:  “Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the event itself. They arise when residual energy from the experience is not discharged from the body. This energy remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and minds.” Levine and others have studied how animals in the wild de-activate this kind of residual energy in the nervous system after experiencing a life-threatening event. Meanwhile most of us as human beings have lost conscious contact with this innate capacity to deactivate our nervous systems.

When we learn to slow down, pay attention to the present moment deliberately and listen to our own nervous system as it connects with our motor faculties, we gradually reclaim this ability. As we do, we gain more capacity and more inner resources through which to work. Learning this inner approach to working through anxiety and emotional tension in the body is complimented by learning to marshal our outer resources for support in the form of our family and friends. Learning to humbly ask for help and receive it fully with gentle gratitude is the other lesson so many people learn from living with cancer. Likewise, being assertive, taking a stand, and speaking one’s truth is a lesson many learn.  As Cathy says, “In the darkness of the hospital room, I had a breakthrough realization: I felt that nobody had listened to me for most of my life. Things had to change and I had to learn to speak up.” As I contemplate Cathy and her journey of healing I am impressed at how her openness and determination seem like a textbook case of re-framing her cancer diagnosis and her other health problems into opportunities to heal her life on every level.


Timothy Walker Ph.D. is a mindfulness teacher and psychotherapist  living in Halifax Nova Scotia with over 30 years experience integrating mindfulness into counselling, education and healthcare. He is co-author of the The Healing Circle: integrating science, wisdom and compassion in reclaiming wholeness on the cancer journey and co-founded with Dr Rob Rutledge the Healing and Cancer Foundation. He designed and has taught with Dr. Rutledge the Skills for Healing Weekend Retreats for people living with cancer and their family members 42 times since 1999 in 20 cities across North America touching the lives of more than 1600 people. He has taught at Dalhousie University, Acadia University, and Mount St. Vincent University as well as hundreds of workshops, seminars and retreats Internationally. In his private practice, The Healing Circle, Timothy sees individuals, couples and families and welcomes distant consultations.


Monday, July 6, 2015

The Healing Circle Book Chapter Blog, Chapter 13 - Coming Home to Your Body, Mindful Breath and Body Scan

Chapter 13 - Coming Home to Your Body, Mindful Breath and Body Scan.


Watch the Video:  Try following this Body Scan relaxation exercise (get down onto the floor if you can). 



RobRutledgeBlog by Dr. Rob Rutledge

Resetting the Stress-o-Meter

Resetting your stress-o-meter by practicing a relaxation technique everyday can profoundly affect your life in many ways.
 First, you’ll be able to settle down faster and more effectively when you’re feeling stressed. For example, let’s say you’re going into your doctor’s office to get the results of a recent scan.  (As an oncologist, I’ve noticed people seem to be more anxious about the “unknown” than they are when they’re coping with the difficulties of any “known” situation.  And even when they’re living through a really tough situation it’s their fear of the future, rather than the suffering of the moment, that affects them most.  The fact is people have incredible resilience when they live in the moment, which can be of great surprise to themselves and to their loved ones. Typically, people’s fear of the future is far overblown, and their innate capacity to cope and love in the midst of adversity is far underplayed). Back to the doctor’s office. If you notice that you’re feeling anxious, you can settle yourself down by tapping into the relaxation response. The critical step is to notice your unique reaction to a stressful event. The stress reaction might manifest as physical sensations (eg. feeling breathless, heart pounding, headache, butterflies in the stomach), emotional states (eg. irritability, feeling like you’re going to cry) and even a change in the way you think (trouble concentrating, swearing in your mind, labelling people or situations). 
If you’re able to notice any of these stress reaction cues then you can press the ‘pause’ button, take four slow deep breaths into your lower abdomen, while bringing your attention to the sensations in your body.  Then use the wise and compassionate part of your mind to reassure yourself.  For example, once you prime the relaxation response you might think to yourself along these lines:  “I may be feeling stressed now but I can handle this. I’ll just take one step at a time. I’ve been through tough situations before and I’ll get through this no matter what the scans show.”  Or you might take a more spiritual perspective:  “Here’s an opportunity to bring my love and peace into the world.  I’ll be loving to everyone I meet on this journey no matter what happens.” 
When you settle down an acute stress reaction like this, you’ve switched the brain activity from the stress pathways to the relaxation pathways.  The key point to this is that when you reset the stress-o-meter by practicing a relaxation technique on a daily basis outside of when you’re feeling stressed you’ll change your brain. The circuits in the relaxation pathway get stronger and stronger so it gets easier for your brain to switch from the state of “upset / can’t concentrate” to the state where you feel more peaceful and are able to think clearly. Practicing relaxation daily for 10-30 minutes is like creating a big well of calming energy on which you can draw when you need it most. 
As a physician I know the profound health benefits of stress reduction (having more energy, better brain/memory function, fewer health problems in every organ system in the body) but it is my personal experience of lowering the setting on my stress-o-meter that has convinced me of the benefits of practicing relaxation techniques. On the days that I meditate in the morning, I feel more calm and at peace with the world. My energy seems to permeate my body down to my feet, and I feel more connected with the earth. My mind seems to rest more easily on what’s happening in front of me, and not flitter about thinking about everything else. Being in this more relaxed state doesn’t mean that the challenges of life disappear; the world will serve up the same external conditions.  But you’ll be in a different space to receive them, and your ability to choose how you want to respond will improve. 
Instead of being spaced out when I’m relaxed, I’m actually more efficient, doing one thing at a time by putting my entire focus on it. Being calm also allows me to see the reality of the situation for what it is. I’m not fighting with the truth and wasting my energy wishing it to be different. Practicing meditation doesn’t mean that I turn off having to make judgements of others either. I can still see people for who they are, and I still use my rational mind to try to make good decisions. Moreover, my natural love and compassion seem to extend out from my heart more easily when I’m relaxed. 
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, resetting the stress-o-meter provides a window to the sacred.  When we’re able to relax into the world, we become aware of the beauty of life, and we can put our precious life force energy into what’s most important. 

Dr. Rob Rutledge is a Radiation Oncologist in Halifax, Nova Scotia, specializing in breast, prostate and pediatric cancers. He is also an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University.
In 1999, Rob co-created the ‘Skills for Healing’ Cancer Weekend Retreats. These weekend support groups teach a powerful and integrated approach to the cancer diagnosis and ways to heal at levels of body, mind and spirit. To date, more than 1,600 people have attended the retreats in over 20 cities across Canada and abroad. 
Rob also leads the Healing and Cancer Foundation, a Registered Charity, that freely offers educational videos, documentaries, and webcasting seminars – and he is co-author of a book called The Healing Circle, which captures the teachings and inspirational stories from the weekend retreats.
In 2010, Rob received Cancer Care Nova Scotia’s Award for Excellence in Patient Care and, in 2006 Doctors Nova Scotia presented him with the Health Promotion Award in recognition of his contribution to physician health and health promotion in cancer patients.