Thursday, September 23, 2010

Finding Safe-be consistent.

Ultimately, safe is what we are all craving, and what we all strive to find. In the classroom, if a teacher is safe, it means she's consistent, and that she is predictable. If a parent is safe, it means they are the same.

It does NOT mean that the adult is indulgent. Indulgent does not make the child feel safe. In fact, it often feels the opposite. Sometimes indulgence codes in as indifference.

What makes us feels unsafe is changing rules in mid-stream, or inconsistent rules. Something that is a rule one day and not the next for instance, only makes us feel unsure, and unsure means unsafe.

One of my son's teachers would yell at the children if anyone dared to speak during prayers. She would be furious and would rail about being disrespectful. (Catholic school) Then later in the same week, she laughed because she forgot the words.

Consistency means the adults operate out of the same rule book. If you don't want the bedroom door locked when they are teens, then don't lock them out when they are little. They will model what you do and not what you say.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Everything We Need Is Around Us-if we can recognize it as a gift

There was an old Star Trek (I'm talkin' the ORIGINAL Star Trek tv series) that put Kirk on a planet with an alien and they had to battle to the death to save their crew (or was it their planet?) The crew could watch on the monitors. Anyway they had everything they needed to win. It was all around them, IF they could recognize it,

Kirk made gunpowder using a bamboo sleeve and hemp for a fuse and filling it with chunks of sulfur and coal and junk. Ok ok-the details aren't important here-my POINT is the premise that they were given everything they needed to win and that it was all around them-IF they could recognize it.

I've always thought that that's what God has done with us, here on planet earth, and that we would find the cure for cancer in a weed, and probably the weed that is the most in our face and annoying. Here we are trying hard to eradicate it, and God has made it abundant so we can survive and we are too dense and rigidly in our limited thinking brain to recognize it.

Cats eat grass for instance, when they have an upset stomach.

Cudos to British researchers at the University of Nottingham's school of Veterinary Medicine for thinking outside the box-they've discovered that COCKROACHES have molecules in their brains and CNS tissue that kill bacteria like Ecoli and Staph.

NOW that is creative research! Why aren't WE doing that?
Exactly-how come cockroaches can survive anything and everything including radiation? Way to go!

For the Full AOL news article click here.

For the Full LA Times news article click here

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Birth Trauma Memories


Someone recently told me that she had heard that all children remember being born until they are about two and a half. So she had asked her grandchild if he remembered. And he said he did.

She asked him if he remembered being born and he nodded with assurance.
She asked him what it was like being inside his mommy's tummy and he made the noises of her breathing, and he made the sounds of her heartbeat, with big actions and puffed out cheeks like a bellows, which was exactly what it would have sounded like inside I imagine, not like our breathing on the outside.
She asked him what it was like being born and he touched the top of his head and made a squished up face and said "ow" in a long sound.
She asked him how he got out and this was the only time he said anything in words, "there was a door!" For a two year old I take that to mean that there was a something that he went through. A door is a place that you recognize will take you somewhere else.

He primarily acted it all out in sensory kinesthetics, in feeling language, which is just too perfect to even  be anything but in awe of! How perfect! That is exactly what it was like. It was before words, it was all sensory. Can you doubt it?

Now imagine asking every little one what their experience was like, and really listening to it, with your whole body. Feeling it the way they felt it. I work with lots of kids that were preemies and had issues at birth. And often they have issues with separation anxiety, high startle reactions, and issues with change and transitioning.

It struck me that if the sound of her heartbeat is what that little boy remembered, why don't we play the sound of their mother's heartbeat, recorded off of all those ultrasounds, to them when in the ICU? I've heard of vets putting  ticking clocks under the blankets to comfort puppies and kittens that lose their mothers.

I remember going through a rebirthing regression experience myself years ago, and after my birth I was searching for the sound that I was missing. I remember a profound aloneness that grew with intensity inside, causing me waves of increasing panic. Where where where was the sound I knew? I couldn't see, I couldn't tell where I was. (I had gone through a door into a new world).

Yes, it was the sound of my mother's heartbeat and it wasn't until I found it again that I relaxed with my whole body. My only grounding and centering channel was on search-auditory, and it was an auditory/kinesthetic search, meaning that sound fed every skin cell of my body because it surrounded me in the womb. My skin was on search for the sound, and when I found it, my skin relaxed, my central nervous system relaxed.

Without finding it, I wonder? We go through stages of stress, which cycle from shock, to countershock to exhaustion. I wonder if we asked a two year old preemie what they remembered of their birth, if they would be able to recall, or if, like someone having survived a trauma, they would start the 

Omega 3 oils and the Brain

When doing a raw diet, or raw transition diet, please make sure you are getting enough oils. Societies that have a high vegetable often have very oily dishes and I think that this may be why. Olive oil is added to many many dishes, and from the outside it might seem excessive but now, I understand! If we aren't getting our fats from animal protein, we must get it somehow, and not just for our skin, but for our BRAIN function. Without sufficient omega 3 oils, we just don't think or process as well.

On one of my other blogs, Shamans In The Raw, we've been posting recipes and nutritional information, as well as our own 'raw-ish' journals, for four years now and there is a lot of information on it. Here are links to 3 articles I wrote on nutrition and the brain that you might find interesting.

Omega 3 oils and the Brain

Benefits of Fish Oil and the Brain

B6, Zinc and B12