Exercises / Practices

By Joy Reichart, New Ventures West, guest contributor 

“If you want to improve the world, start by helping people feel safer.” —Stephen Porges

____

Can you recall a moment in your life when you felt truly supported? Perhaps it was a session with a therapist, bodyworker, coach, or teacher. Maybe it was a good conversation with a trusted friend. Or maybe someone came to your aid following a disturbing event.

What was that person’s bearing, and what sort of effect did it have on you? 

Regardle…

By Steven M. Cohen, guest contributor 

Thanksgiving has been a special holiday, a day where both sides of our family and some friends gathered together for a feast.  The more the merrier, and without the entanglement of religious significance. In 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 changes everything. What once brought only joy now brings fear, particularly with respect to our elderly parents. Likely, it will be too cold to gather and eat outside, and likely too dangerous to bring everyone together to eat …

By Marc Brackett, guest contributor 

When we are overly stressed and worried, like many of us have felt lately with threats like the coronavirus, it becomes even more difficult to regulate our emotions with effective strategies.

But what exactly is effective emotion regulation?

Emotion regulation is how we deal with the feelings we experience from moment to moment to have wellbeing, build positive relationships, and achieve desired goals. When we’re feeling disappointed or joyful or anxious o…

By Joy Reichart, New Ventures West, guest contributor

Guidance is a concept that is easy to forget about, or dismiss altogether. It can be brushed aside as an ethereal, “woo-woo” concept that has no place in our contemporary western world, where will and self-determination are what lead to success. Actually, guidance is more readily available and far less mysterious than we might think. 

What might happen if we made room in our lives to more easily receive guidance? Mindfulness, of course, is …

By Larissa Hall Carlson, guest contributor 

If you’ve been seeking out mindful ways to reduce stress overload, but are still feeling tapped, it may be time to create space to just… do… nothing.  Oh yes!  There’s a stealthy workday power tool that resuscitates and revitalizes with no effort at all: meet Constructive Rest Pose.  

Constructive Rest Pose is a restorative yoga posture that works like a reviving balm when time is tight and tensions are running high. Restorative yoga is known for usi…

By Cara Bradley, guest contributor 

Do you ever feel like you’re like a brain on a stick—you know that sensation of being stuck in your head, disconnected to what is happening below the neck, aka your body? Let’s just say, it’s not a comfortable (or productive) place to live—and, yet, it’s all too common.  

Somehow, moving through the world like that brain on a stick is acceptable in our culture. In some ways, we revere those supposedly productive minds that are always thinking.  The result of…

By Joy Reichart, New Ventures West, guest contributor 

“Along with all the growth and healing, remember to give yourself time for integration, which is a fancy word for ‘allowing sh*t to settle.’ It looks like doing nothing. This nothing is necessary.”

- Emily McDowell

Has it ever happened to you? You’ve been meditating, or doing the art, or practicing the breathing technique, and finally, suddenly, something breaks open and you feel completely and irreversibly new? Or maybe you find your…

By Joy Reichart, New Ventures West, guest contributor 

“Sorry, remind me how to pronounce your name?” I asked. 

I knew about her alcoholic mother, about her cancer scare. I knew how many children she had, their ages, and what they were up to. I knew that she hoped to help teens and young adults with her coaching, inspired by her own difficulties as a youth and the kinds of situations she’s been privy to as an adjunct college professor. I knew that a pervasive fear of scarcity ruled many of the…

By Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P, guest contributor 

During these times of great uncertainty and anxiety, I believe we need to begin a serious conversation about resilience. Resilience is simply no longer a luxury. It's becoming essential and even critical to our very survival… in much the same way that His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a global voice for peace and nonviolence, has said that compassion is not a luxury, that it's actually critical to our very survival in the highly complex, interdependent …

By Joy Reichert, New Ventures West, guest contributor 

Do this, if you would: Google “René Magritte, Clairvoyance.” Bring up an image of the painting.* Sit with it for 30 seconds, one minute, two minutes. Five. 

Receive it through your heart. Notice its effects on your body. Analyze it with your mind (you probably started doing that the second you saw it. We can’t help it, we humans! However, if that’s where you automatically went, perhaps try amping up the focus in your heart, your gut).

How…