If you choose to turn to a yoga practice on your healing journey, there are a couple of elements that can contribute to a soothing, grounding, healing experience and prevent you from experiencing triggers during your practice. They are all part of what is called trauma-sensitive yoga.
Read MoreNature is a potent healer. Turning to nature for healing is a free way to pour into yourself daily. As humans, we need to be in nature to be balanced. And when you’re recovering from trauma, being out in nature during the day is even more important.
What’s behind the healing benefits of being outdoors in nature for your trauma recovery? It’s the circadian rhythm.
Read MoreCoffee is a modern-day socially accepted drug. That is, it’s an herbal medicinal drug. As an herbal stimulant, coffee has a direct stimulating action on the central nervous system resulting in mental alertness. It potentiates the effect of pain medication like aspirin and, since it can also increase the transmission of dopamine and serotonin, coffee can enhance your mood while increasing both mental and physical performance. - It’s for these exact reasons that many of us rely on coffee to get through the day.
But, if you heal from trauma, the nervous system stimulation caused by coffee can be very triggering. What does this mean for a body recovering from trauma? It can lead to either anxiety and panic attacks or worsen depressive episodes. Let’s explore!
Read MoreWe live in a time that triggers deep childhood wounds and trauma on a daily basis. Every day is bathed in uncertainty and you are challenged to ground yourself within.
Not only do you need to find ways to self-regulate and step out of fear to think clearly, sleep well, or connect with others. Finding ways to calm the nervous system down is probably the best thing you can do for your own health today, because fear weakens the immune system.
Read MoreFrom the time you grow in your mother’s womb, you develop a physical synchrony with other human beings; your mother’s rhythmical heartbeat becoming the first rhythm you are in sync with. You are wired for connection. One of the lasting effects of trauma is disruption, because trauma breaks this synchrony down. This loss of trust makes it incredibly difficult to allow intimate relationships and let anyone in. But healing requires human connection. Healing requires reconnecting to ourselves and reconnecting to another.
Read MoreAs 2021 is coming to a close with policy makers worldwide urging for the individual to take responsibility for the health of others as a sign of solidarity, the question that echoes is: Is health a personal responsibility or can we expect others to endeavor healing for us and make us healthy?
Let me be so bold: The healing journey is a personal endeavor. Health is a personal responsibility. Here’s why.
The world can be a triggering place and for the past two years our collective is going through a potentially deeply traumatizing time. One organ that is involved in navigating your response to the world is the polyvagal nerve (or vagus nerve). While your polyvagal nerve influences your nervous system response and in turn, your body’s response to what is happening to or around you, there is way to integrate your body in your healing work and work the opposite way around: Various bodywork techniques allow you to stimulate and influence your vagus nerve and consequently can help you calm down whenever you are triggered or experiencing episodes of anxiety and panic attacks. A brilliant, free and accessible way to do this is humming.
Read MoreAnxiety is a common symptom many experience as a result of unhealed trauma. When considering a holistic approach to recovery, healing might be facilitated by supporting your body with a focus on specific nutrients. Mindfully incorporating foods high in these nutrients or supplementation can make sense to provide your body with the nutrients it needs to manage the effects of traumatic stress. Magnesium is one of these nourishing and soothing nutrients that can support your body in being able to calm down, and in managing your blood sugar.
Read MoreSleep is essential for healing and wellbeing. During your sleep your body gets to regenerate, heal, detox, recover from the day. Cell regeneration, promoted by the so-called “growth hormone” mostly happens during the REM phase of your sleep, which is the deepest sleep and the time you are dreaming. Under normal circumstances, your brain processes your day and everything that happened during your sleep. It makes new connections and transforms negative thoughts and sensations into lessons learned during the deep sleep phase (called REM). But why is sleep an issue when you’ve made traumatic experiences? And what is the role of sleep in trauma recovery?
Read MoreFood is an often overlooked link in the realm of mental health, especially when it comes to trauma and recovering from trauma. But what you eat during recovery can make a difference: Research that goes back as far as 1982 shows that the sympathetic nervous system responds to changes in caloric intake. Certain foods can trigger your nervous system acitivity and along with it your trauma response.
Read MoreIn this day and age, we have become fond of the term “mental health”. There’s a mental health awareness month and celebrities engage in openly sharing their mental health struggles online. The bravery to share is applauded, but the focus on mental health as a disease is still incredibly narrow.
So, what exactly does mental health mean? How do you “have” it? How come someone does not? How can you really heal?
Read MoreTrauma still has a reputation of being something haunting, dark, an almost abstract thing that we humans only go through when faced with extreme situations. What do you immediately associate trauma with, if someone was to ask you what it was about?
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