When my father was dying of kidney cancer back in 1959 (probably from copper dust contamination acquired while making bullets at the Watertown Arsenal during World War II) our family was told not to tell him he was dying, lest he deteriorate even faster.  As a result, my mother was denied the comfort of sharing her feelings with her best friend – her husband - about the single most impactful and horrible event in her 47-year-old life.  

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of sitting with dying friends. Two families really touched and impressed me with the way they’ve been handling this tough journey.  It struck me that our norms are really changing at last - we’ve gotten much better at dying than we used to be.

Hey, everyone.

I love Sara Altshul – I met her when she was writing for Prevention Magazine – and her recent article:  What Happens when a Natural Remedies Guru Comes Down with Swine Flu seemed to me to strike just the right notes.  Rather than botch it up in translation, I’m going to paste it in here.  This comes from her terrific weekly column for Health.com, which you can find here.

When I wrote about ways to prevent the H1N1 flu virus last month, I never suspected I might actually catch the bug myself. I’m healthy, and I’m committed to my three-times-a-week gym workouts; plus, I eat well, and I take vitamins. So when, a few days ago, I started feeling flu-ish, I was pretty surprised.

We’ve been getting more and more valuable feedback on how our troops are using guided imagery to improve their emotional resilience and reduce symptoms of acute stress and PTSD. And at long last, the word is starting to spread from base to base, vet center to vet center, hospital to hospital, without our having to go sell the idea anew to each place. This has been a long time coming, people!

The Duke/Durham V.A. studies continue apace, some nearing completion, and the exciting results continue to hold steady and even improve as we tweak the imagery intervention.  The summary of three clinical trials, plus a survey, can be found here. We’ll have more to report when the final blood work and MRI studies are in, so stay tuned.  That’s when the journal articles will appear, too.

Greetings, everyone.

Dr. Ruth Buczynski of NICABM has been distributing a free report: Guided Imagery: From Accrued Wisdom to State of the Art Practice – it’s an excerpt from Chapter 10 of my book, Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma & How They Heal.  She writes,

In this report, psychotherapist, author, and innovator, Belleruth Naparstek, LISW reaches beyond the basics of guided imagery to show how it can strengthen and support trauma-survivor recovery.  From scripted to self-generated, from one-on-one to recorded, you'll discover how guided imagery can release your patients from trauma's devastating grip.

Hello, everyone.

There’s a lot to tell you about…. for starters, Cindy tells me the three new CDs I recorded this Spring - for Caregiver Stress, Healthy Immune System, and Allergies - are in the warehouse, so those of you who back-ordered, your guided imagery is on the way or already there.

Our big news, is that the new version of the commercial side of our HealthJourneys site has launched, in a design to parallel the blog.  Please play around with it and let us know how you find it.  I confess, I’m dazzled by its looks, but also deeply in love with its organization and substance (not just a pretty face).

Some of you may have already noticed that several months back, we launched this separate (but connected) blog, under the URL belleruthnaparstek.com, to house all our archived content and separate it from the commercial pages. We knew that while some people just wanted to just get on the site, buy something, and get the heck out, others preferred to loll about in the content and explore our miles and miles o' research abstracts, Q & A's, programs, practitioners and inspiring stories. (The weekly e-news that subscribers get features the current week's batch of new articles. If you want to sign up and haven't yet, just click here.)

Hello, everyone.  We’re very happy the new catalog is getting such an enthusiastic response. We’re very pumped over the new choices ourselves. – this is probably the best collection we’ve ever pulled together.  If you haven’t seen it yet, or if, in your greenness, (which we applaud) you don’t get a print copy, you can check it out online by clicking here.

There are also some really wonderful new books out that don’t qualify for our catalog – we pretty much stick to our experiential media niche – but very much deserve a shout-out here.

Hey, folks,

The three new Health Journeys CDs I recorded last month are being duplicated even as we speak.  There’s been an especially strong back-order run on Help with Caregiver Stress and A Guided Meditation to Support a Healthy Immune System, with Help with Allergies bringing up the rear.  They should be ready in a couple of weeks.

I also want to mention some training opportunities for practitioners interested in mind-body courses:

Imagery International, along with Beyond Ordinary Nursing is hosting its popular annual conference this year on July 17-19 at Vallombrosa Center in Menlo Park, CA.  This is the ideal place for practitioners of the art to hone skills, network and have a terrific time.

Hello again.

Yikes, pesky digital gremlins were out in full force last week!  Our blog got hacked and had to be cleaned up, reconstituted and surrounded by triple threat protective devices.  We had to divert visitors back to the old site while we mopped up – so those of you who found yourselves on the older, non-bloggy pages, that was why.  

In addition, Bruce the engineer’s mixing equipment wasn’t working so well with his new recording software, and so there too, the older stuff had to be taken down off the shelf and brought back to life.  

I had a terrific, informative chat with Adriana Tarazon, OEF/OIF Psychologist at the Phoenix V.A.  She’s a great proponent of guided imagery (and other mind-body methods), having used hundreds of our CDs with the men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.  As a result, she’s a mind-blowing encyclopedia of practical information about what works for returning troops and what doesn’t.