Hello again.

Lately I seem to be having a lot of conversations with friends about clearing out clutter. This is probably part of a post-child rearing, de-nesting phase.  Most of the people I talk to want to do it.  They feel oppressed by the stuff surrounding them. I think it actually creates a subtext of constant, subtle stress.  But they also feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the job.  After years of inadvertent accumulation, let me tell you, it can be a pretty daunting prospect.

When I was getting ready to sell my big, old, Charles Addams-esque house in Cleveland Heights (designed for relentless entertaining from when my husband was a grad school dean), I was taken firmly in hand by my real estate agent and told that clean surfaces, open spaces and orderly closets would be the sine qua non of unloading that sucker.

I’m not someone who’s big on routine.  I don’t need a fixed, daily structure to get a lot of work done - I’m pretty internally driven - and, because I can only write and think so much on any given day, I prefer to let my impulse to work drive me. That’s also true of my impulse to get away from work.

That means that on some days I’ll work 14 hours, and on others barely at all. Sometimes, in the middle of writing a piece, I know I have to get away from it in order to wrap my mind around it in a better way, and so playing hookey is part of getting the job done - or so I tell myself.  (A lot of writers will relate to this, I suspect.)

Hello again.

Thanks to everyone for the honest, thoughtful, intelligent, nuanced debate about active troops using guided imagery downrange on last week’s update page.  I felt privileged and grateful to be part of it.

In the meantime, there’s a very compelling piece in Veterans Today by Bruce Levine about the Army’s training its soldiers in Positive Psychology. I wrote something similar for Huffington Post, but he says it better.  It’s here.

Hello again.

We’ve had some terrific but insufficient debate over the morality of using guided imagery for active troops.  (Better killing through mind-body methods?) Some of you were horrified at my update on this last week.   I welcome all comments, because this is something many have been pondering for a long time, myself included, and it deserves more than our first knee-jerk responses.  Here is what I wrote in response to the dismay some of you expressed.

My main goal for making these audio programs has always been the same, since 1989, when Steve Kohn (composer/musician) and I created some guided imagery to accompany chemotherapy: to alleviate a little suffering. Not terribly ambitious and definitely achievable, this simple intention. I'm still there.

Another effect is that sometimes - maybe often, even - the imagery helps make people more competent, more confident, more capable at whatever it is they do.

Hello again.

Last week I was in San Antonio, helping out with some resilience training with the Army PRT’s (professional resilience trainers) who are assigned to various Army hospitals, tasked with keeping health care staff from burning out from the stress of dealing with severe injuries and profound emotional distress. Hats off to them, the providers they serve and of course, most of all, to the patients.

I was there to demonstrate the how’s and why’s of guided imagery, and hopefully I made a decent case for its use.  It was a very impressive and mixed group - some had backgrounds in health or mental health; others were more from the warrior mold - former special ops, rangers, snipers, bomb dismantlers - and some were from both worlds.  They came from as far away as Korea and Germany; and from Fort Hood, Ft. Stewart, Ft. Bliss, Ft. Sam Houston, Ft. Bragg… I can’t remember all of them.

Well, the squeezers and their parents have all left and I’ll miss them horribly in about a minute, but right now I’m surrounded by blissful silence and I’m just soaking it all in. The quiet is spacious and nourishing, and my inner BR is rolling around in it like a puppy in clover!

It’s funny how much our relationship to time and solitude changes as we move into different phases of our lives.

When I was an adolescent, I went through a period when I had to have people around me.  I felt slightly anxious being by myself. I even think there was a time in college when I actually studied better if I knew one of my roommates was in the apartment too.

It’s 5 a.m. here on Martha’s Vineyard, and the fog horns are going nonstop because of - well, the fog.  It will always be a sound I love, a deep, low, repeating signal of safety and coziness. (And hopefully it’s keeping ships away from the rocks too, more than just yummy background noise for the folks out on boats, looking to avoid danger, which, I guess, is the whole point….)  I know there are relaxation audios of waves and birds and whales… but I’d really go for one with just a fog horn.

I’m very happy to report that we’re starting to get a lot more orders for our CDs from the military…. Playaways, too.  We just sent 500 guided imagery CDs for pain to Landstuhl Military Hospital in Germany, where so many injured troops from Iraq and Afghanistan wind up. This is very important, to be giving our injured soldiers something they can implement themselves, if and when they feel like using it, for pain relief.  Sometimes patients just don’t want to get all gorked out on a pain pill (especially if they have visitors or some other reason to stay alert), but still they need to have something.

Well, after years of getting requests for imagery for interstitial cystitis, pelvic pain and vulvodynia, I’m happy to say we’ve now got some research-vetted imagery in the warehouse, by Beaumont Hospital’s nurse practitioner Donna Carrico and narrated by hypnotherapist, Gail Elliott Evo.

The imagery is simple but solid and targeted, focusing mainly on healing the bladder, relaxing the pelvic-floor muscles, and quieting the nerves specifically involved in IC and other kinds of pelvic difficulties. The narrator has a nice, trustworthy voice and the music works well too.

Hello all.

We got a really interesting note from a therapist, offering his personal feedback on using EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) first, then guided imagery, to help him with weight loss.

Here is what he wrote:

Hi, everyone.

Hey, I want to urge those of you who’ve been obsessing, procrastinating or gnashing your teeth over creating your own blog, to check out a really helpful and reassuring resource, with lots of specific, practical suggestions to get you started.  Dr. Ruth Buczynski, the psychologist who founded NICABM and who’s gone viral all over the internet and all over the world, has put together a series of videos on how to start your own blog.  It’s geared for clinicians, but, really, the ideas she presents work for just about anyone writing about anything.