Trauma Training Tip On February 12th, the Lunar New Year arrived! It signals the movement from Winter to Spring – and marks the beginning of the movement of the sap in the trees. In our East-meets West model, the energy of the Wood Element and the Mobilize A Response phase of the Self-Protective Response are rising. The Wood supports our capacity to “protect and defend” ourselves and those we perceive to be vulnerable. It governs our capacity to mobilize a “fight/flight/feign” response to a perceived threat. 2020 (and into 2021) has been a highly challenging year for our nation’s and …

Trauma Training Tip I want to talk about shame and traumatic stress. We all hate to feel shame – it’s not a popular subject! However, shame is a necessary part of our biology and socialization. Healthy shame helps parents teach their children to inhibit anti-social impulses and learn the norms of behavior for the “tribe” they were born into. This type of shame focuses on the behavior and not the person, it has a repair built into it. “We don’t throw sand into our friends face – this would be a good time for you to apologize to your good …

Trauma Training Tips We are experiencing traumatic contagion in our communities and on our streets. It’s just plain tragically painful to witness. Our primal ancestors survived by virtue of the members of their tribe who could hear a saber-toothed tiger in the bush. Evolution selected for people who had the capacity to experience resonant connection with this special member’s message of fear and alarm and appropriately respond to such threats. We have inherited a proclivity for traumatic contagion. Like everything, there are two aspects to this phenomenon. Such contagion can help communities come together and survive threats. However, when the fear is …

Trauma Training Tip We can’t go through the Winter/Water season without exploring Acupuncture and Asian medicine’s beautiful and unique concept of Jing.  Jing is a substance that we receive from our parents at conception – it is something like our genetic code – or our essential essence. We receive a finite amount of it at conception, spend it through our life and when it is gone, it is our time to become an ancestor. This special substance is stored in our Kidneys – the organ associated with our Water element, and the season of Winter. We can protect our Jing with a healthy lifestyle, good …

Trauma Training Tip So much division. So many opinions. So much anger. So little listening. The ears are the sense organ associated with the Water Element and the Winter-time. Our Water gives us the capacity to hear even what we are afraid to hear. In an archetypal way, Winter is a very silent time of year. We are called to listen deeply and contemplatively. We may hear the crack in the ice – is that the natural popping sound that ice makes as it freezes and thaws? Is it an indication that the ice is giving way under our feet? …

Trauma Training Tip Our nation is a trauma survivor. We are witnessing increasing arousal and dysregulation in our national discourse. The thawing of generations of thwarted urges to protect and defend that we have witnessed in the arousal on our streets this summer has created significantly more space in our national trauma body. Removing the Confederate Flag from flying freely, changing the names of schools and military bases, and taking down statues glorifying treasonous generals from the Civil War are all great examples of more space, more life, more vitality in our nation. The reverse is unfortunately also true. The …

Trauma Training Tip September came in with the breath of Fall here in the U.S. mid-Atlantic. Open the windows, turn the air conditioning off, breathe that crisp, cool air. Oh my goodness, what a delight after the hazy, hot and humid weight of Late Summer. Fall is the season of the Metal Element in Asian medicine, the time of the Lung and the Colon. The growing season is rapidly closing. The air actually feels thinner now. We, and all of nature, are preparing to rapidly fall into the quiet, dark, yin time of year.   Classical Asian medical texts refer to the …

Trauma Training Tip August. The air feels thick and heavy. It’s Late Summer, the Earth season in the world of Asian medicine. It’s 2020. We’re coping with an out-of-control CoVid 19 pandemic, the highest unemployment numbers since the 1930’s, and long sought-after and slow-coming transformation of our social contract on race. Many of us are feeling a chronic rumble of uncertainty in the Earth below our feet – and for some of us, genuine “quakes.” The Earth Element governs our guts and our capacity to “Digest the Gristle.” When we feel threatened, our Sympathetic nervous system needs all our energy …

Trauma Training Tip When our biological urge to protect and defend is thwarted and left incomplete, that urge remains in our tissues. Healing requires us to access those places where a collapse or freeze state has been hidden away and helping it thaw, mobilize, and find clear voice. Our qi or “energy” and our blood are then better able to nourish, vitalize, restore, renew, find power, and enhance life. We will likely feel more spacious on the inside when we are not braced against an historically held freeze response. We are witnessing this phenomenon in our nation’s body. The release …

Trauma Training Tip I confess when CoVid first came, I experienced a lot of fear and desire to isolate… that grew into despair as I witnessed the burden it was placing on people challenged to quarantine – elders in nursing homes and those living on the streets and in prisons, the disproportionate deaths in Black, Brown and Indigenous people, and the many migrants who, without access to paltry support from the federal government, were forced to choose between dying of CoVid and dying of starvation or exposure. Then George Floyd was murdered. African Americans who were dying of CoVid at …