Hello again.

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?

Hey, so look, Good People - we know that you’ve got a lot on your plate this time of year. So each year Cindy and her wily team of ace customer service mavins, loaded up to their eyebrows with empathy and mind-body wisdom, manage to put together gift ideas that give something wonderful to the recipient, while at the same time, cost the giver a minimum of work, time and money.

After you pick your gift kit, we assemble it. package it, and enclose a gift note with it.  (And if you’re at a loss - totally tapped out on inspired messages - we’ll even help you write something fabulous and memorable!)  We are a complete, one-stop, worry free operation, and we care about getting it right!

Kudos to our team in Akron for putting together and discounting some terrific holiday gift goodies, designed to save you stress in the giving; and to save the recipient stress, too, in the getting.  Order one of these and we’ll do all the arranging, combining, wrapping, fluffing and mailing, and we’ll include a personal note for you, too.

For instance, we’ve got a gorgeous Slip into Sleep Gift Pack of multi-sensory snooze-inducers for your favorite insomniac, consisting of our perennially popular and wondrously effective Healthful Sleep guided imagery CD, a classy, molded and contoured sleep mask, and lavender, valerian and hops-scented aromatherapy beads in a gorgeous gift bag.  

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!  Let the tryptophan roll!!

And speaking of Thanksgiving, I want to express my gratitude to Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente, Oxford Health Plan and United Health Care for pushing the envelope and making guided imagery available to their members.  Blue Shield pioneered a program of sending guided imagery recordings to HMO members when they got pre-approval for surgery.  Much to the company’s surprise, this yielded a cost savings among hysterectomy patients of $2003.07 per procedure, not to mention the “customer satisfaction” response – they got multo kudos from all sorts of surgery patients, and none of the expected concerns or objections from their docs.  It was a retrospective study, so they had to work backwards to figure it out, but they think the savings was from reduced need for pain medication and fewer complications and doctor visits post-surgery.

I’m here at the annual ISTSS conference (International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies) to scan the field for new findings and techniques in treating traumatic stress.  This field is exploding so rapidly, it’s hard to stay current – which is a wonderful thing.  So I’m going to be soaking up new info like a sponge.

And more importantly, the clever and bodacious Dr. Jennifer Strauss, principal investigator from Duke and the Durham V.A., will at last be presenting some of her findings from the guided imagery for trauma study (GIFT is the acronym) with women suffering from military sexual trauma from the Vietnam War.  Very exciting!

This year it’s in Chicago, and this city is so proud of itself for launching Barack Obama’s political career, it’s simply beside itself.  It’s fun to see the local news going crazy, and the cameras trained on my old neighborhood of Hyde Park, where I lived for a decade myself.  I love Chicago – such a vital, gritty, alive, juicy city!  Everything Carl Sandburg said was true!!  

I’m looking forward to seeing some of you in Salt Lake City on Nov 22-3 for my weekend workshop with ConferenceWorks: Reversing Panic Attacks, Acute Stress and PTSD: Powerful New Solutions to Formerly Intractable Problems.  I’ll be including the latest, research-based techniques and clinical successes from using imagery and other mind-body methods for healing panic episodes, acute stress and posttraumatic stress.  It’s for professionals and health consumers too (the health & mental health professionals get 9 continuing education credit hours).  So come and get some practical, life-changing tools to take away and put to work immediately, on yourself or your clients.  For more information, call 800-395-8445, email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , or check out the online brochure.

This account of a woman’s heart attack has been making the digital rounds for some time now, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s really worth reading. And, according to one cardiologist, if you send it on to at least 10 others, there’s a good chance you’ll be saving at least one life. Check it out:

I am an ER nurse and this is the best description of this event that I have ever heard.  Please read, pay attention, and send it on!  Did you know that women rarely have the same dramatic symptoms that men have when experiencing heart attack? .. you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor that we see in the movies.  Here is the story of one woman's experience with a heart attack.

Well, just about everyone I know is somewhat demented over our national financial vulnerability, and fears abound about retirement, mortgages, business loans and savings.  Sad to say, it looks like the situation isn’t going to get better any time soon.  As I wander around the U.S., I’m continually being asked what can be done for the inordinate level of financial stress people are feeling.  Here are a few suggestions: