Breath of Life Conference and Three Workshops

Description

One superb Conference and three great workshops:
The Breath of Life Conference London 2017
Plus: Rollin McCraty, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and Stephen Porges.

The international Breath of Life Conference 2017 brings together pioneering practitioners and scientists involved in ground breaking research and the application of body-mind therapeutic approaches. It explores key factors that organise how we function, beyond just the physical form, providing a forum and meeting place for exchanging ideas at the cutting edge of holistic health. Each speaker gives an individual presentation and a panel discussion with all the speakers concludes the set.

1 – ‘Heart-Brain Dynamics And The Impact Of Self-Regulation On Health’
by Dr. Rollin McCraty
2 – ‘Finding The Health’
by Robert Lever
3 – ‘The Biology of Loss: What Happens When Attachments Are Impaired and How To Foster Resilience’
by Dr. Gabor Maté
4 – ‘Small Women, Big Ideas’
by Katherine Ukleja & Cherionna Menzam-Sills
5 – ‘The Fourth Phase Of Water: A Central Role In Health’
by Dr. Gerald Pollack
6 – ‘The Multidimensional Wholeness Of Babies’
by Dr. Wendy Anne McCarty
7 – ‘Synchrony, Attunement And Self-Regulation: The Neurobiology Of Childhood Abuse And Neglect’
by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
8 – Panel discussion with all the speakers
facilitated by Michael Kern

The Breath of Life Conference was organised by Michael Kern and Jane Shaw

Duration 12 hrs approx.

Mp4 Files or 8 x Universally formatted DVDs (play in USA/Canada as well as Europe).
Nb: Some slides and video’s shown by Dr. van der Kolk, Dr McCarty have been omitted from this recording for copyright reasons.

Bio’s of Speakers:

1) Heart-Brain Dynamics and the Impact of Self-Regulation on Health by Dr. Rollin McCraty – director of research at the HeartMath Institute, fellow of the American Institute of Stress, co-author of Heart Intelligence and author of The Coherent Heart as well as numerous published research papers about the subtle physiology of the heart and emotion.

2) Finding the Health by Robert Lever – osteopath with over 40 years’ experience, former lecturer at the European School of Osteopathy, recipient of Medal of Honour for services to osteopathic education, and author of At The Still Point of the Turning World and Finding The Health.

3) The Biology of Loss: What Happens When Attachments Are Impaired and How To Foster Resilience by Dr. Gabor Maté – renowned speaker, teacher and clinician on addiction, stress and childhood development, and author of In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts, When The Body Says No and Scattered Minds – The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.

4) Small Women, Big Ideas by Katherine Ukleja & Cherionna Menzam-Sills – Therapists and international educators of Craniosacral Biodynamics, and ‘grandes dames’ in this field. Cherionna also has a background in pre-natal psychology and Continuum Movement, and Katherine originally trained in osteopathy. With more than half a century of joint experience they bring a profundity of understanding to the continual enquiry into the nature of Primary Respiration.

5) The Fourth Phase of Water: A Central Role in Health by Dr. Gerald Pollack – professor at the University of Washington, founder of the Pollack Laboratory, pioneering researcher into the properties of biological water and author of The Fourth Phase of Water, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life and Muscles, Water and the Cell.

6) The Multidimensional Wholeness of Babies by Dr. Wendy Anne McCarty – former chair of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology programmes at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute and author of Welcoming Consciousness: Supporting Babies’ Wholeness from the Beginning of Life – An Integrated Model of Early Development and 30+ publications.

7) Synchrony, attunement and self-regulation: the neurobiology of childhood abuse and neglect by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk – clinician, researcher and teacher in the area of post traumatic stress, Medical Director of ‘The Trauma Center’ in Boston, and author of Psychological Trauma, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, and the best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Treatment of Trauma.

Workshops

1) HEART RHYTHM COHERENCE: PRACTICAL TECHNIQUES FOR IMPROVED SELF-REGULATION, HEALTH AND COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING
WITH DR. ROLLIN McCRATY

During this workshop Dr. McCraty provides an overview of innovative research findings with important implications for our clients. You will learn practical self-regulation techniques designed to reduce stress, fatigue and overwhelm. The recording includes an in-depth discussion of the types of intuition and how heart coherence increases access to non-local intuitive processes. In addition, Dr. McCraty explores how the heart’s magnetic field carries emotional information that can be detected by the nervous systems of animals and other people, and new data will show that we are more synchronized to the Earth’s magnetic field than previously understood.
Duration 5 and 1/2 hrs Approx (4 x DVDs) Universal DVD Format (playable in US/Canada) 

Topics explored include:

• Learning practical skills for increasing self-regulatory capacity and building resilience in challenging times
• Heart rate variability technology for assessing patients’ health risks, and supporting skills for self-regulation
• An understanding of the physiology of optimal cognitive and physical functioning, including surprising findings from recent research.
• Benefits of coherence training on health outcomes
• The hidden impact of relational energetics
• Human-earth synchronization.

Tutor:

Dr. Rollin McCraty, Ph.D. is director of research at the HeartMath Institute, and a professor at Florida Atlantic University. He is a psycho-physiologist whose interests include the physiology of emotion. One of his primary areas of focus is the mechanisms by which emotions influence cognitive processes, behaviour, health and the global interconnectivity between people and Earth’s energetic systems. He has been with the HeartMath Institute since its founding in 1991 by Doc Childre. He has worked closely with Childre to develop HMI’s research goals and has been instrumental in researching and developing the HeartMath System of tools and technology. McCraty has worked in joint partnership with research groups at Stanford University, Claremont Graduate University, Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Prince Sultan Cardiac Center in Saudi Arabia and the University of Lithuania among many others. He has been interviewed for many published articles and has been interviewed for numerous television programmes. He has been featured in many documentary films, including ‘I Am’, ‘The Truth’, ‘The Joy of Sox’, ‘The Power of the Heart’, ‘Solar Revolution’ and ‘The Living Matrix’. McCraty’s critical research on heart rate variability and heart-rhythm coherence has gained international attention in the scientific community and is helping to change long-held perceptions about the heart’s role in health, behaviour, performance and quality of life.

2) HEALING TRAUMATIC STRESS: HELPING MIND, BRAIN AND BODY TO LET GO OF THE PAST
WITH DR. BESSEL VAN DER KOLK

Duration: 11 hrs Approx (8 x DVDs)
Universal DVD Format (playable in US/Canada)
NB: Video’s used by Dr. van der Kolk are excluded from this recording for copyright reasons.

Bessel van der Kolk brings us a unique gift: he is a masterful therapist as well as being a uniquely enquiring scientist.

Description: After having been traumatized, the brain is re-set to respond to ordinary challenges as existential threats, and the body continues to pump out stress hormones that make people feel frazzled, agitated, or shut down. In response, traumatized individuals tend to organize much of their energy on not feeling and sensing their inner experience. The sad side effect of this is that they pay with their capacity to fully engage in activities and relationships. After the brain has been rewired to over-focus on danger it has trouble paying attention to subtle changes in one’s universe. Research over the last thirty years has elucidated the nature of these processes, which have profound implications for clinical treatment and effective intervention.

The last twenty years has provided us with a great deal of information about the impact of trauma on the brain, and on its interference with the capacity to pay attention, concentrate and filter out irrelevant information. In this workshop we will review these discoveries, and demonstrate how bottom up processes, that involve, touch, movement and breathing, as well as top-down processes that utilize mindfulness and interoception, can help traumatized children and adults to regulate their arousal and regain mastery over their own ships. In this workshop, you will learn how traumatic imprints can be integrated using techniques drawn from somatic therapies, yoga, theater and neuro-feedback.

Duration 11 hrs Approx (8 x DVDs)
Universal DVD Format (playable in US/Canada)
Nb: Some slides and video’s shown by Dr. van der Kolk have been omitted from this recording for copyright reasons.

Viewers will learn:

• Breathing, posture, facial synchrony and vocal exercises to energize your therapeutic presence and enhance being in synchrony with patients’ posture and expressions.
• Skills for bringing parts of the brain on-line that are knocked out by hyper and hypo-arousal.
• Tracking physiological arousal in body language and movements.

How the only way to achieve self-leadership is through activation of the areas of the brain involved in interoception and mindfulness.

Tutor:

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has been the Medical Director of The Trauma Center in Boston for the past 30 years. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School and serves as the Director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress Complex Trauma Network. He is past President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Though he identifies himself primarily as a clinician, he has published well over 100 peer reviewed scientific articles on various aspects of trauma. He participated in the first neuroimaging study of PTSD, in the first study to link Borderline Personality Disorder with childhood trauma, was co-principal investigator of field trial for PTSD and is chair of a workgroup on Developmental Trauma Disorder. He has written extensively about using neuroscience research to identify appropriate treatments for PTSD and completed the first NIMH-funded study of EMDR. He has taught at universities and hospitals around the world. Dr. van der Kolk’s latest book is ‘The New York Times’ bestseller The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

3. For contractual reasons, Gabor Maté’s presentation has been removed from this set.

4) THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF FEELING SAFE: A MASTER CLASS ON THE POLYVAGAL THEORY
WITH DR. STEPHEN PORGES

Safety is critical in enabling humans to optimise their potential. The neurophysiological processes associated with feeling safe are a prerequisite not only for social behaviour but also for accessing both the higher brain structures that enable us to be creative and generative and the lower brain structures involved in regulating health, growth, and restoration. The Polyvagal Theory explains how social behaviour turns off defences and promotes opportunities to feel safe. It provides an innovative model to understand bodily responses to trauma and stress and the importance of the client’s physiological state in mediating the effectiveness of clinical treatments. From a Polyvagal perspective, interventions that target the capacity to feel safe and use social behaviour to regulate physiological state can be effective in treating disorders that are dependent on defence systems. This workshop includes new and updated material that is very significant for those working in the therapy, medical and caring professions.
NB: Some slides and Youtube video’s are excluded from this recording for copyright reasons.

Tutor:

Dr. Stephen Porges is ‘Distinguished University Scientist’ at Indiana University Bloomington where he directs the Traumatic Stress Research Center in the Kinsey Institute. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he directed the Brain-Body Center in the Department of Psychiatry, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, where he chaired the Department of Human Development and directed the Institute for Child Study. He is a former president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and also of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He is a former recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development Award. He has published more than 200 peer reviewed scientific papers across several disciplines including anesthesiology, critical care medicine, ergonomics, exercise physiology, gerontology, neurology, obstetrics, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, space medicine, and substance abuse. In 1994 he proposed the Polyvagal Theory, a ground-breaking theory that links the evolution of the vertebrate autonomic nervous system to the emergence of social behavior. The theory provides insights into the mechanisms mediating symptoms observed in several behavioral, psychiatric, and physical disorders. The theory provides a theoretical perspective to study and to treat stress and trauma and has stimulated research and treatments that emphasize the importance of physiological state and behavioral regulation in the expression of several psychiatric disorders. He is the author of The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication and Self-regulation and is currently writing Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe.