Exercise, Wellness topic, Yoga

Personal Practice Challenge – Self Judgment

The third sections of Judith Hanson Lasater’s book “Living Your Yoga” focuses on Self-Judgment.  She reminds at the beginning of the section of the yoga sutra that says the posture should be “steady and comfortable”.    She then goes into describing how we set certain expectations on ourselves and have certain thoughts in regards to our practice that gets in the way of our personal practice.  She discusses how we are a culture of “No pain, no gain” and how this is not necessarily the focus in yoga.

Her suggestions for this month is 1)Write down your internal dialogue right after your personal practice.  Keep notes brief and do not try to interpret. Keep track and note how the dialogue changes over time. 2) If you find yourself forcing in asana or other parts of your live ask, “is this in the spirit of yoga?” 3)If you notice that someone else is judging you, don’t be quick to agree or to internalize the judgment.  Think about what happened and agree only if his assessment aligns with yours. 4) If you are going into a situation about which you feel anxious, tense, or afraid say to yourself, “I am perfect just as I am” 5) Rather than approaching your yoga practice from an attitude of no pain, no gain, how about no pain, no pain? and 6) Do not criticize yourself, anyone else, or anything for one hour.  If this feels like too much, commit to doing it for the next 5 minutes.

These suggestions or homework feels quite freeing to me.  We spend so much of our time worrying about not meeting expectations that we forget the only real expectations are to grow and learn.  This should be interesting  lesson in letting go.

depression, Treatment, Wellness topic

Weekly Wellness Post – Burn Out

Burn out, I think on some level we all have experienced.  I am studying for my CCS (Certified Clinical Supervisor) and one of the areas I’m reviewing includes the identified stages of burn out by Edelwich and Brodsky.  What I have found interesting about these stages every time I have read about them in the past is that the first stage involves “Enthusiasm“.  This is described as a tendency to be overly available and to give a lot of oneself due to the motivation and excitement.  I think many people forget when they are burned out that at one time they probably had an excitement for what is burning them out currently.  A lot of time we start our work with a certain idealism or a vision of “how things could be”.

The next stages include “Stagnation“.  This is described  by stating “expectations shrink to normal proportions and person discontentment begins to surface”.  Basically this happens when we have a desire to make something happen or to do our work a certain way and we get thwarted.  Frustrations start to mount up as we realize we can’t do what we had set out to as easily as expected and we see no movement toward our goal or vision.  This can happen when a company also doesn’t encourage collaboration and has a very dictatorship culture.  Or this can happen when a person does not have a full understanding of the field they are going into and only see a small window of the bigger picture until they are actually doing the work.  Other ways this could happen is that environmental factors such as  unexpected reduction of supplies  or resources occur that could be related to a natural disaster or unusual fluctuation in the economy.

The third stage is Frustration.  This is described as “difficulties seem to multiply and the helper becomes bored, less tolerant, less sympathetic, and she or he copes by avoiding and withdrawing.”  So what happens in stage 2 worsens.  No relief or help is available or received and the goal/vision gets further and further away.  At this point feelings of hopeless sink in and people start to give up or not care as much.  This leads to the fourth stage.

Apathy.  Apathy is characterized as “depression and listlessness”.  At this point a person may have forgotten why they entered their line of work in the first place.  They may seek help or quit job.  Some may move on to a more severe form of depression/anger and become harmful to themselves or others.

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I think the main point to take away from these identified stages is that the main culprit is a feeling of lack of control. There is much different companies can do to help a person prevent burn out.  Some things include more collaborative style of decision making and planning in which you not only elicit feedback from your staff but they see you use it.    Other things include having resources like EAP for staff to use to help them personally figure out how to take back control of their lives.  Helping folks have more work/life/family balance like incorporating family events or exercise initiatives into the regular work day.  Some people feel burnout b/c they feel they lost control in another area of their life so if they feel like work is taken over and the vision they had for the family or health is not coming to fruition they can feel burn out and project it onto the work place.  Helping employees work on balancing work and home can be extremely helpful.

Individuals can also retake their lives back by indentifying their roles and what parts of their roles are not meeting their own vision and expectations.  Next step would be examining this vision and expectations to see if they are realistic.  If they are not then taking some time to develop more realistic expectations might be in order.  If they are realistic then breaking the steps toward reaching these goals into manageable and measurable pieces would be helpful.  Once we know what the next step is, how we are going to do it,  and when we are going to do it then we are back in control.  The feelings related to burnout will start to diminish as we make progress.

 

research, Treatment, Wellness topic

Dyslexia and Visual Talents

I have looked into this topic a great deal due to the fact that my oldest son has had much difficulty knowing left from right and letter reversal issues, for example his 4’s and 9’s look like Ps… A book that made a lot of sense to me although I had questioned how the scientific community held it as factual is the book called ‘The gift of Dyslexia” by   Ronald D. Davis  .  This book describes individuals with Dyslexia to have many talents that those of us who do not have dyslexia are not capable of having.  These talents involve the ability of seeing an object like a cube and being able to turn it around in their mind as if they are seeing it from many different view points instead of the view point of just staring down at it on the table.  The can actually pick it up in thought and turn it around to see accurately the different sides and angles of the cube.  The problem comes in when they are asked to read something on paper that to understand it you have to be looking at it from the same viewpoint as any other person reading it.  Training the brain to look at it from the same view point is the trick.

Well I just stumbled on to an article in Scientific American:Mind, Jan/Feb 2015, on “The Advantages of Dyslexia” which found scientific studies that back this theory up.  So that this ability to see everything 3 dimensional and to be able to  manipulate an object in one’s head without picking it up is quite an asset it areas where one might need to see things in this manner.  In the engineering and sciences this is an extremely helpful talent.

There are many kids that get labeled with a learning disability because of dyslexia.  I believe occupational therapy really helped my son understand how to interpret the perspectives and dimensions of what he is seeing in comparison to what he is expected to see by us 2 dimensional folk.  Also with him he also had difficulty crossing the mid line of his body and I wonder how that all fits in with the dyslexia and his visual/mental ability.  Occupational therapy also fixed that.  He spent a large amount of his occupational therapy time on a “scoot” with his hands moving him in a crawling fashion all around their offices.  He had a blast and it made him do a lot of mid line work.

I’m fascinated by how our brain, visual ability, and physical movement are so interconnected.   We all know this and are taught this but the part our past teachers emphasized was our brain controlling the movement  and not the other way around, our movement controlling/affecting the brain.  Funny how most therapies address the movement aspect last and not first, being that you only get it addressed if sent to a specialist.  It seems like it should just be common knowledge to have our kids do mid line activities and tests that measure “ability” in this spacial/visual talent and less on just sitting in a desk with a sheet of paper and measuring the disability.  It really is a paradigm shift though and that takes time.  The science is there however.