Sleep - it's a Ritual

There are two times of day when we are procedural-meaning we do things based on a routine. Routine is doing the same thing the same way. Another word for routine could be ritual. We have our waking rituals and our sleeping rituals.

When we are in our procedural brain, we are not thinking, we are on automatic pilot. We have established a protocol and we simply go through it. 

If you are having trouble sleeping, and it's a new issue,

1. take a look at your night time ritual and see if you have inadvertently changed something in your routine. If the answer is yes, change back. We need our routines to establish safety. 

If the sleep issue has been an issue for awhile now,

2. look at what the routine was when you were sleeping well.

3. When did you used to sleep well, and what was the routine then?

4. Have you dropped any part of the night time routine that you might require at an unconscious level to give your brain/body the message that now it is time to go to sleep.

We have an internal circadian rhythm that is a twenty four hour cycle that affects the physiological process of all living beings, including plants, animals, fungi and cyanobacteria. We have an internal biological rhythm and it can be thrown off kilter by any number of things including changes in light, temperature, barometric pressure, electromagnetic shifts, geopathic stress, emotional tension, travel, and more.

If you are very sensitive, changes in weather patterns can affect your sleep.

If you have never slept well, look at what the night time ritual was when you were a child, for a clue to what could be out of balance. This works whether it is your internal child that can't sleep, or your own child that has a sleep issue.

There are several things you can shift and some of it is you.

1. make going to sleep a routine/establish a clear ritual. "Now we get ready for bed." "Now we do this, then this then this." When you have clear procedure, with clear expectations, it establishes safety in the mind and body. You know what is coming next. And listen to your internal dialog as you are doing this-if your background voice is saying "I'm never going to be able to get to sleep" while you are trying to talk yourself into it-who's voice is that one in the background?

2. make it safe to go to bed, and not a punishment. Forget about the old "go to bed without supper" punishment. If you link punishment with bed, or bedtime, you are going to establish a troubling confusion later.

3. make the bed for sleep only. Don't watch tv from bed, don't eat in bed, and don't work in bed. Bed is for sleep. And remember: your children will do what you do and not what you say, so if you do any of these things-break yourself of the habit. Eat at the table. Work in the office. Sleep in the bed.

4. Keep the bedroom sacred. Don't send them to their room as punishment. We used to use the laundry room which in our home was just off the kitchen. It was someplace that wasn't fun and wasn't so far removed that it was considered Siberia. By the same token, a time out was 2-5 minutes and it was so we could both catch our breaths! It wasn't for hours on end. Keep it short, and bring them back to love.

5. Blow your nose before sleep. Add this to your/their bedtime ritual because if your nasal passages aren't clear, your oxygen levels will be off and this will interrupt your sleep.

6. Cuddle. Safe touch raises oxytocin levels, and relaxes us. Cuddling, stroking and holding all relax the body unless there are other factors. Petting animals too, will do it. So, cuddle with the cat and the dog to relax. Pet, don't go play frisbee at 9pm.

7. Allow for more winding down time. Don't plan activities right up to the brink of bedtime. We need time to do nothing. Read, watch some tv, do a puzzle, journal about the day, take a slow walk around the block before bed. If you are over scheduled with activities, it's much harder to shift gears to bedtime.

8. Notice when they are sleepy naturally. Are they signaling sleepy before you are ready to put them down? Establishing bedtime at a reasonable time helps. Children need an earlier time to bed than adults, but many many adults are not going to bed early enough. We have over-scheduled our days, and we are teaching our children to do the same thing.

If we pass our natural sleep, we can have a harder time making ourselves go to sleep. My youngest son would come up to us and say "I'm ready for bed" when he was little. It would always be 9pm and he would already have his pjs on. While this is unusual (he's a Virgo) all children are actually saying it in some way. This son has never had a sleep issue. He knows when he is tired, and he heads for bed. But his bedtime was often earlier than 9pm and we would miss it for one reason or another.

He also wasn't just saying "I'm tired" he was saying he was ready for his bedtime ritual. We would go up, brush teeth, then lay together on his bed and cuddle. We would pick 3 beanie babies from my basket and they would tell us both how their day had been. Then they would read a book with us. He would put them on his shelf above his bed for the night, we would send blessings to everyone that popped into his head, turn out the night-light

 (I would always be saying 'are you sure you don't want a light on which was MY issue, and he would patiently say 'no mom, no light)

and he would turn over, close his eyes and be asleep before the door closed.

Our beanie baby ritual established a diffusing of the day's stress and separated 'this is what happened in the daytime' from night time.

As an adult, you might try journal writing.(But do it with a pen and paper-journaling on the computer can throw you off for up to two hours from the light affecting your eyes-true.)

On the other hand, part of our morning ritual was and still is, sharing our dreams, and by doing this, if there had been a rough night we were saying it was ok to talk about that too. Messages from the unconscious come up during sleep and dialoging about dreams is a great way to begin to decode the dream-time symbols. And saying it out loud helps you to understand.

Getting Dirty Keeps Us Happy

Science Daily (April 10, 2007) - Bacteria found in soil activated a group of neurons that produce the brain chemical serotonin.

Well well well! According to Dr. Chris Lowry, who wrote a paper for Bristol University, getting dirty produces more serotonin in the brain! Now, see that makes sense to ME because we always feel better when we get our hands in the dirt and work in the garden. Good old fashion playing in the mud made us happy. 

He says "These studies help us understand now the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune system is important for maintaining health. They also leave us wondering if we shouldn't all be spending more time playing in the dirt."

Yes we should! Get into the garden, play in the mud, go plant a tree, get dirty!

Read the Full Article

And if you read the last post about phthalates, then you know getting too clean (certain products that contain this chemical compound) is also not good for the brain... goes to show if you let the little ones lead they will take us back to rebelling against showers and playing in the mud, and now 'science' is saying maybe that's not such a bad thing afterall. :)

Phthalates and ADHD

Phthalates and ADHD - the chemical in personal care products

Excerpt from: Personal care ingredient linked to ADHD

Source: Natural Food Merchandiser

A new study has linked phthalates, a substance used in some shampoos, lotions, air fresheners and children’s toys, with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although research on the health effects of phthalates (pronounced “thalates”) has been somewhat inconsistent, the latest study, published in Biological Psychiatry, adds to troubling findings about the chemical.

“These data represent the first documented association between phthalate exposure and ADHD symptoms in school-aged children,” Yun-Chul Hong, MD, PhD, senior author of the study, said in a statement. He and his colleagues came to their conclusions after measuring urine phthalate concentrations and evaluating ADHD symptoms in 261 Korean children, age 8 to 11 years. They found that the higher the concentration of phthalate metabolites in the urine, the worse the ADHD symptoms.

Some studies to date on phthalates have linked the chemical to hormone disruptions, birth defects, asthma and reproductive problems. Other studies have found no significant association between phthalate exposure and health risks. 

Published: Monday, November 30, 2009

Go to LOHAS to read the complete article.

What Does it Mean to Be a Child?

Back in the Victorian Era children were dressed up like miniature adults. Little boys had powder wigs, and little girls had bustles. We look at the archival images and say "oh can you imagine?"

But are we any different today? We are still dressing children up as if they are little adults with young girls in makeup and wearing clothing that is much too old for them. Just because they can doesn't mean they should. We have gotten away from rites of passage in our country - rituals that say we have reached a new pinnacle. It's amazing how we seem to rush the aging process and not honor where we are and not honor passages, but that's for another time.

What does it mean to be a child?

We want them to be responsible and self-governing at younger and younger ages, but we don't seem to think that this is something that needs to be learned. We expect them to behave (sit quietly, respect their adults, be able to keep their emotions under control), but we don't think that this is something that is learned behavior-rather it is supposed to be just known and able to be done.

We don't think that they should make mistakes. But if we never make a mistake, how do we learn? I loved the NLP premise as soon as I heard it, and adopted it to heart: "There is no failure, only feedback." DO it again! Figure out another way.

Keep this as a guiding principle and you will quickly find that you are open to exploration when otherwise you might be closed. When you believe that there is only a right way and a wrong way, and that you will do it wrong, you immediately lock yourself into non-movement. You've check-mated yourself!

We make mistakes. We are supposed to. It's coded into our DNA-all the ways not to do it, again. Don't touch the snake. Don't jump off the cliff. Don't look someone in the eye. Don't go down into the dark basement. Don't talk back to the nuns (even if you aren't Catholic). I call it instinctive behavior modification, and it's in our DNA just the same as antibodies are in our immune system-we learn from our experiences, and from trying out metal.

Exploration leads to discoveries. Breaking the rules leads to finding another way. Being able to hear between the lines means allowing your brain to work out new answers. Without this ability, we would not have ever had a United States of America. Without this, Columbus wouldn't have journeyed, and later our forefathers wouldn't have had the audacity to dream of breaking away from English rule.

Don't rule out mistakes. Mistakes are what solutions are built on. Do it again isn't a punishment-it's the ultimate reward!

Feathers

I've always collected feathers and thought of them as messengers. I find them on walks, they show up in odd places, and always they seem to be timely.

Yesterday a client and I were standing and talking after her session. We were talking about her mother, who had died when she was five. We stood for about twenty minutes, in the hallway, just leaning against the walls and chatting at the end of the day, talking about connecting to the other side and stories of messages from beyond, both my stories and hers.

She turned and walked to the front door, and as she did, a small white downy feather came floating down behind her. I couldn't tell if it came off her, or from her, or if it was something else? Pure white, it floated slowly down, calling attention to itself in it's solitary path.

She had nothing feathery on, nor did I.
She had not been laying on a feather pillow.

Was it from her mother? From someone else? Or just a splendid coincidence?

Working with Children and Trauma

As adults we forget what could be traumatic for a child. We think we are looking for big events, but really it's anything that was overwhelming. What sticks in the memory are events that engaged all of our senses at the moment of overwhelm. In that instant, it codes into the instinctive memory with deep indelible roots.

Trauma is sensory overwhelm, and sensory overwhelm is violating in impact. It smacks into us. It hits with a high resonant volume. Often, it's things we don't understand.

What was overwhelming and traumatic for one, might be nothing to another. It also depends on what you have already experienced, and how good your sensory system is at sorting and categorizing. If you have a lot of file folders already, then your system knows what it is.

I had a mother tell me that she decided to invite people to 'pet' her stomach when she was pregnant. She invited people in to the space, and felt that the baby was experiencing, in a safe way, lots of different sorts of people's energy. Her child is now a one year old girl, and she likes people. Will this change? It will be interesting to watch. This mother is also a nurse.

She said she didn't try this with her son, who is three, and he has always had more caution around people. Is this a personality thing? AND if so, does the personality start to form in the womb? Why not? If we are experiencing emotion via our mother, why then couldn't we be learning our primitive instinctive survival from her experiences? And why then, couldn't she also be teaching us?

Since the emotional in-utero experience codes into us, why can't we teach the growing fetus, in a conscious way? I love this idea.

On the same note, I have another mother who has recently given birth to twins, and she has completely kept them isolated from the public even now and they are 8 weeks old. For two months they have been exposed to only the immediate family and caregivers she has carefully screened.

Inception-the seed of an idea of who we are

In the movie "Inception", just out now, the characters go into someone's dream to plant a seed so that the dreamer wakes with a new idea that he thinks is his own. Once accepted the seed will bloom and the mind will grow it.

He has to be the one to think it first or he won't accept it. That's the movie, but that's not necessarily true for us. We often accept someone else's idea of who we are, as our own. In the movie for instance, the son has accepted for most of his life, the belief that his father is disappointed in him. In accepting that limitation of himself, it clouded everything he did and felt. He had internalized his father's version of himself.

We do it all the time if the person is an expert or an authority of some sort like a teacher, or our parents. We accept their version of us as ours. We accept the limitations others put on us, and even if we hate it, we have their voice tone in our subconscious, carrying out their version of us.

Years ago I had a woman come to me in hysterics for an 'emergency' session. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, but it turned out she was less upset about him than she was about it making her mother right. She said her mother had always said that no one would ever stay with her because she was so horrible. This man had been abusive and violent, and she was glad he was gone, but also devastated that her mother was right. Was her mother right?

She said "even this horse's ass of a man won't stay with me"!

"But did you want him?" I asked her.

"No, but he wouldn't stay anyway because she said so, my mother said it, and it's been true my whole life." she sobbed.

Try arguing with that. You can't. Our version of our reality is all that counts, and so it must be us that changes our mind.

With the S.E.A. work, we are riding that wave of emotion back to the original moment what was a spike of overwhelm.  That overwhelm caused the internal survival system to create a survival strategy, and along with that survival strategy are limiting beliefs about who we are and how we respond to the world.

We go into the past to find the seed that began the 'idea' of who we accepted that we were, so that it can be changed and we can become more! Those 'seeds' are I AM statements. "I'm shy." "I'm fat." "I'm lonely." "I'm typhoid mary" "I'm terrified of driving on the freeway, because I will kill someone" but in that original moment it was an incident that carried intense feeling that drove in deeply the limitation and how we respond to the world.

The future is created in our mind, and fueled by the remembered energy of the past. When our past is riddled with repressed fear and tension still in our autonomic nervous system, it becomes our referencing field. Clear the field, calm the sea inside, and we create a more benevolent future.

And deeper still is the seed of the original blueprint of who we are, and who we are here to become. When we clear the debris of our misunderstandings, we are free to find our way back to our passion and our joy! (no pun intended...really) and become our true selves.