Breath of Life: Workshops 2017

Description

Four great workshops: Dr. Rollin McCraty, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. Stephen Porges.

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 Memory stick only

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)
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 Memory stick only
Nb: Some slides and all 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) TRAUMA & HEALING: AN EXPLORATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS, ADDICTION AND DISEASE
WITH DR. GABOR MATÉ

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens inside us. Based on Gabor Maté’s bestselling books, this two-day workshop explores the traumatic basis of physical disease, mental illness, addiction and childhood developmental problems. It illuminates all of these conditions not as separate diagnostic entities, but as bio-psychosocial phenomena, manifestations of the unity of mind and body, physiology and psychology, and of the individual with the social environment. Treatment approaches must flow from such a holistic understanding.

Viewers will:

• Develop an understanding of mind/body unity as illuminated by modern science in the field of psychoneuroimmunology.
• Learn how the early rearing environment shapes us psychologically and physiologically, and may create a life-long template for stress-generating behaviours and emotional functioning. These, in turn, can trigger the onset of disease.
• Recognize the stress-driven and therefore disease-prone personality, and how to reverse the unconscious dynamics that lead to stress.
• Learn about how early experiences influence brain development, the conditions necessary for healthy development and those that impair it.
• Understand the nature of addiction neither as a choice or genetically-determined brain disease, but as a complex psychological and physiological response to trauma.
• Understand the brain circuits implicated in addiction and the dynamics that need to be addressed in the healing of addiction.
• Appreciate the social basis of addiction in economic and cultural dislocation and insecurity, and in historical trauma.
• Develop a sophisticated understanding of the nature of compassionate and science-based approaches to the healing of addictive tendencies.

Tutor:

Dr. Gabor Maté is a renowned speaker, bestselling author and highly sought after speaker and teacher for his expertise on a range of topics including stress, addiction and childhood development. Rather than offering quick-fix solutions to these complex issues, Dr. Maté weaves together scientific research, case histories, and his own insights and experience to present a broad perspective that enlightens and empowers people to promote their own healing and that of those around them. For twelve years Dr. Maté worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness and HIV, and he has over 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience. Dr. Maté has extensive knowledge of the latest findings of leading-edge research and he regularly addresses health professionals, educators and lay audiences throughout North America. As an author, Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress and Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, and co-authored Hold on to Your Kids. His works have been published internationally in twenty languages. He is the co-founder of the non-profit organization Compassion for Addiction and is an advisor of Drugs over Dinner. Dr. Maté has received the Hubert Evans Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, an Honorary Degree from the University of Northern British Columbia, an Outstanding Alumnus Award from Simon Fraser University, and the 2012 Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award from Mothers Against Teen Violence. He is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Criminology at Simon Fraser University.

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 video’s shown by Dr. Porges have been omitted 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.

Product total duration (approx): 39hrs. Memory stick only