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We continue to see truly exciting results from Dr. Jennifer Strauss’ research, investigating the impact of self-regulation & guided imagery downloads on returning soldiers suffering from posttraumatic stress.  She’s on her fourth investigation (all of which are summarized in this week’s Hot Research) and it just keeps getting better and better, the more she refines and tweaks the imagery protocol, based on feedback from the earlier studies.  So far, she’s found similar results with Vietnam vets, women suffering military sexual trauma and returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan with combat stress.
 

Hey, Folks,

Don’t forget ACEP’s 11th Annual Conference in Energy Psychology convening in Orlando from May 28 through June 1.  The theme is Intention, Transformation & Change for this year’s terrific, cutting edge professional gathering, which highlights all the new energy psych interventions – everything from EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) to TFT (thought field therapy) to EFT (emotional freedom technique) to SE (somatic experiencing) to TAT (Tapas acupressure technique)… you get the picture.  If you’ve been curious about these new methods and want to have one venue in which to be introduced to the full range and heft of them, or if you just want to expand your knowledge base and get a more intensive feel for one or two of them, this is the place to do it. 

It’s time to start our Annual Random Shoutout list – kudos that we arbitrarily bestow on anything that tickles our fancy - no axes to grind, no sales to be made and no kickbacks in sight.  Just stuff we applaud.  Here goes:

Wendy McClure’s hilarious book of old Weight Watcher recipes, The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan: Classic Diet Recipe Cards from the 1970s has some of the most appalling recipes and horrifying food photos you’ve ever seen.  But it’s Wendy’s side commentary that will have you doubled over with laughter.  I kid you not.  Every time I read these cards, I wind up laughing so hard I’m crying, snorting, spraying and gasping for breath. Thank heavens I have a spectacular bladder, is all I can say. So either my sense of humor is all twisted and wrong, or this is a new form of inexpensive, belly-laughter therapy.  Before you preview these cards here, I should warn you that Ms. Wendy is a tad raunchy and uses salty language. 

Thanks very much for all the comments, suggestions and critiques from people about their experiences with cancer treatment. There was a real consistency to them that, sadly, reflect we have a long ways to go still.  If oncology professionals have anything to add, please don’t hold back!  I’ll make good use of the feedback at the meeting I’ll be attending next week.

And speaking of oncology, do take a look at this week’s Hot Research.  It’s pretty exciting.  I don’t remember ever seeing this impressive a panel of bloodwork measures to test immune function after using relaxation and guided imagery – and the results are pretty terrific!  Pretty soon even the naysayers will be sitting up and taking notice.

The original article requesting cancer care feedback (as well as the reader comments that ensued) can be found here.

I’m writing this update on Monday, January 19th – Martin Luther King Day and the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama.  I have to say I’m profoundly happy to see this improbable turn of political events, given the difficult years we’ve all experienced.  I usually don’t write about anything political.  It’s not the point of this website, and can distract from what we’re about.  But this is worthy of an exception. 

 I'm sixty-six years old.  I saw my first Pete Seeger concert at the age of 20 in 1963, when I was home for the summer and a totally cool, new boyfriend took me to see him at a small folk concert at Brandeis University.  I lived as a student and young adult in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago for 9 years, some of them around the block from the house our new president so reluctantly had to leave. 

Hello again.
It was a nice surprise to see a recent mention of our fabulous little holistic health software widget, DesktopSpa on a very cool midlife web page, headlined “Take a Time Out to Visit a Virtual Spa”.  This our web-based, mind-body jukebox, which plays scores of brief, guided, audio and video mini-treatments – imagery, yoga, breathwork, qigong, etc… that you can use at your computer screen, any time, day or night.

I love this writer and her praise of The Widget (especially since it was created by one of my kids, for crying out loud) – I assume this is either Kathleen Daniel or Jennifer Montgomery, the creators of a terrific site called Ahead of the Curve at Midlife: Resources for Midlifers about What Matters Most at the Second Half of Life. She writes:

In the meantime, all of you who’ve recently had dealings in cancer care, for yourselves or a relative, I have a request:

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I now know dozens of people – as I’m sure you do - who’ve been hammered by this frayed economy.  Last week I had breakfast in New York with an old friend, a successful editor and publisher, who was heartbroken because she’d just had to lay off several prized members of her staff – people who’d worked for her for years and whom she considered good friends as well as valued colleagues.  As I watched her over our cooling eggs, I thought, “I bet she feels even worse than the people she had to pink-slip.”  Aside from feeling horrible for them, she also knew she’d be holding her demoralized shop together with a lick and a promise, and the constant anxiety that she and everything she’d built over the years could be next.

My dear fellow slacker, procrastinator holiday shoppers!!  Even if you’ve blown your deadline for holiday shopping and feel like an utter, unredeemable slug, here’s the good news: thanks to the wonders of cybertechnology, you can still  come off as the timely, responsible, thoughtful person we all know you really are, with an instantaneous, digital gift!!  How about that?  We all get to have our cakes and eat them too!  I love it when this is possible. 

Hello again.

Just to state the obvious, we think one of the absolute, best, most important gifts you could possibly give a soldier or his/her family is some good old stress-reducing, resilience-promoting, health-generating guided imagery…. CDs if you want something wrapped up and pretty that they can hold in their hands; but at this late date, it makes more sense to send the digital gift of a download that they can put directly into an iPod or MP3 player.  

What could be better than some potent but non-pharmaceutical assistance with self-regulation skills, sleep, anxiety, depression, panic episodes and even posttraumatic stress?