A seated Tai Chi practice can have both physical and emotional health benefits.
Interview with Ralph Somack, PhD — Tai Chi Instructor
Tai Chi instructor, Ralph Somack, has taught tai chi to seniors, people with dementia, stroke survivors, people using wheelchairs and this week begins to teach a seated tai class to people who are blind or visually impaired. Somack, an octogenarian, continues to take on new challenges of modifying tai practices such as qigong, bagua, and Xing Yi for those who want to alleviate stress. In addition, Somack has seen his students benefit from increased self-esteem, ambidexterity, an Increased awareness of themselves as well as others, and a sense of where they are in time and space. To register for Somack’s online classes sponsored by BORP, visit this webpage for the Tuesday 10 am Pacific Seated Tai Chi class or here for the new Tai Chi class for Blind and Visually Impaired Participants on Wednesdaya at 10:30 am Pacific. You can watch videos of Somack’s classes. Here is an earlier Glass Half Full podcast episode about qigong and a short video about qigong.
The Pandemic has brought many changes; for me, it’s ushered in the next chapter of my life. Perhaps the final chapter? With mobility challenges, it was one of two choices: home modifications or move to a new house. I chose the latter. The transition could be bittersweet but I think I’ve gained more than I’ve lost. I am closer to Nature and getting more than my usual Vitamin N dose.
Shortly after I moved from the East Coast to California in 1989, I had the opportunity to visit Mendocino when I was producing a documentary about women rabbis. Ever since that experience I’ve visited this beautiful coastal town.
This past May was filled with online accessible movement classes for the May Movement Challenge. Once the month of activity ended, all I did was organize, pack, organize, and pack. The move occured in mid-August and here I am…ready to continue podcasting.
This is part 2 of a conversation with Dalia Kinsey, RD, LD, SNS. We talk about becoming our authentic selves, how trauma impacts our physical and emotional health, and the need for inclusivity and intersectionality in public health messages.
This is the most stressful year of our lives. We’ve got the pandemic going. We already knew about police brutality, but never have we been to a point where every time you turn on the television, every time you open Facebook, every time you look anywhere, you’re seeing another black or brown body being abused. The trauma is massive and I don’t see anyone really addressing it. And I feel like racism is what I know, that racism and all kinds of systemic abuse, these are public health crises.
~ Dalia Kinsey
The first part of our conversation can be found here. To learn more about Black Joy, check out this article or video series.
Are you feeling stressed out? With all that’s going on in the world — pandemic, civil unrest, job loss, hurricanes, wild fires — it’s difficult to avoid stress.
Laughter therapy, or laughter yoga, might help alleviate some of the stress. It’s free. It offers numerous mental and physical health benefits. And it’s fun.
In the field of psychoneuroimmunology, laughter has been studied and found to lower blood pressure, strengthen cardiovascular function, improve circulation, boost immune function, trigger the release of endorphins, and produce a sense of well-being.
You’ll meet Annie Goglia, a certified Laughter Yoga Leader, who shares her story how laughter transformed her life. You can even join her, virtually, at her Laughter Club.
The University of San Francisco Osher Center for Integrative Medicine offers classes in Laughter Yoga as well as the Founder of Laughter Yoga, Dr. Madan Kataria.
welcome to glass half full with leslie krongold she shares her stories experiences and knowledge of living and coping with a chronic health condition learn about tools and resources and hear inspirational interviews that help you to live a life filled with quality and dignity with two decades of support group leadership leslie’s ready to help you make lemonade out of life’s lemons are you ready are you ready we can all use a little more laughter are you agreeing i mean this is a tough time and that’s coming from a normally optimistic person me most of you listening likely have some type of chronic health condition that presents challenges for you with every day living now if you are more vulnerable like me with respiratory issues or maybe a compromised immune system you’re on high alert during this pandemic even quote unquote healthy people are at risk and maybe you’ve also lost your job or your work hours have been cut or like me your spouse has suffered a job loss which impacts your household and then we’ve got a lot of civil unrest and maybe you’re in the path of a hurricane or the air quality is super unhealthy because you live near wildfires like myself jesus episode is about laughter what am i doing going on and on like this the fact of the matter is we are all stressed out and if you’re not stressed out what in the world is wrong with you okay so we’re in agreement right you’ve gotten stress i’ve got stress people across this whole world are all stressed granted some have a bit more stress than others i can’t even imagine what it’s like to have to evacuate my home because of fires on its trail it’s a totally different enough to crack and i don’t think laughter therapy is the best antidote not yet ironically and here’s how i bring us back to the topic two years ago i was scheduled to interview a nurse about laughter yoga she teaches laughter yoga and meditation at the university of san francisco’s school of medicine
the day before our scheduled interview she sent me an email message that she needed to cancel because her cabin in lake county california was under evacuation orders for the fires the good news is that she’s fine i went to one of her laughter yoga sessions earlier this year pre-coded my intention was to return to her class again and reschedule the interview but that didn’t happen but i do have a guest and she’s in fact the very first person i experienced laughter yoga with
there’s a field of research about after therapy this type of research lies within psych neuro immunology which is the study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems of the human body i don’t know when this term psych neuro immunology was coined but the scientific research has found laughter to be really good medicine some of the health benefits include lowering blood pressure strengthening cardiovascular functions reducing stress hormones and improving circulation increasing muscle flexion oxygenating the body by boosting the respiratory system immune function by raising levels of infection fighting t cells disease fighting proteins called gamma interferon and b cells which produce disease-destroying antibodies triggering the release of endorphins the body’s natural painkillers and producing a general sense of well-being pretty convincing results don’t you think so with all of this stress upon us maybe we should try working in a little healthy so what is laughter yoga it’s a fairly recent phenomenon an indian physician madame kettarian developed an exercise routine he calls laughter yoga it’s a combination of laughter and yoga breathing laughter yoga practitioners do not use asana or yoga poses as part of the routine so if you can’t do a great down dog don’t worry dr catorius started the first laughter club in 1995 and today there are more than 20 000 free social laughter clubs throughout 110 countries
my introduction on laughter yoga was several years ago i probably had read about laughter yoga and then i did a little research to find a local practitioner and that’s how i found annie golia my guest for this podcast episode i was facilitating a monthly support group for adults with neuromuscular disease we would meet at the kaiser permanente hospital in oakland california and annie happened to live nearby in oakland and she graciously joined us one sunday and led us through several laughter exercises it was not until many years later when i attended my next laughter yoga class at ucsf and during coven so far i’ve attended a couple of virtual laughter yoga sessions so anyhow here’s annie my first question and you know i don’t even know if i asked you this years ago when you came to the support group but how and when did you discover laughter yoga ah well i think it was 2005 or 2004 and i was living in the boston area and i i was very i was pretty shy when i was younger and as i got older i realized humor and laughter were things that helped me connect with people and get over that shyness and i i became quite the laugher and people with friends would tell me you should become a professional laugher or i knew you were in the room because i could hear you from from across the room so when so i thought well that’s funny professional laughter there’s no such thing and then i found out about laughter yoga some friend told me like there’s this thing that adults do and they get together and laugh together and i’m like that sounds spectacular to me so i joined a group and near where i live near boston and i loved it and then i moved here about a year later and i found a training and that’s and then i took a training with dr qatar it was the founder of laughter yoga and now i and then i also started to train other people to lead after yoga so that was almost 14 years ago is he in india or is he located in the united states he is in india he was then and originally he was in mumbai but now i believe he’s in the kind of silicon valley area of india and do you actually travel to india to city with him no no uh he does do trainings there but i at that time he would travel to the u.s to do trainings so it was near la and sierra madre oh okay and so previous to this when you said you were shy have you you know in high school or college done any kind of acting or improv or any of that not so much then uh i did i i think it was later on i got interested in when i was in my 30s i started to do storytelling and that’s before and after yoga yeah yeah and that really got me out of my shell a lot and then i started to take some improvisational classes too movement and storytelling improv so yeah it all kind of comes together in life together it’s very improvisational and playful and creative and brings all my fun stuff together so may ask what did you study in in college i was an english major
not literature did you teach did you go and teach after that or i eventually i got a master’s in arts and teaching and i taught for less than a year and that was the end of that oh my god did you hate it it was very very challenging and it was really hard to find a decent job in teaching at that particular time especially in english and so yeah it just did i wasn’t suited to it so then i ended up doing a lot of human service jobs for many years once you started uh you know working on laughter on your own and then discovering laughter yoga how did it change your life i think it’s it’s it’s kind of sneaky it kind of sneaks up on you you practice it the more you laugh the more you laugh we like to say and there’s a lot of things in left yoga that are intentionally meant to help you bring laughter into your everyday life we call them values-based exercises so for instance there’s something called argument for argument and forgiveness laughter so we argue with laughter and then we forgive with laughter and that’s a great way to just remember when you’re having a disagreement with somebody in your life like is it more important for me to be right or is it more important to have a nice relationship with this person i think things like that and then also just just remembering that laughter is a possibility when things are stressful especially minor things for instance uh one time i was carrying a plate of spaghetti with sauce on it down to the dining rooms in the kitchen and i tripped and of course i was in a hurry i tripped and i ended up all over this bookcase bigness and and i was really bummed out because i thought oh my god this is going to take so long to clean up and like first i was really pissed and then i’m like but i could laugh and it was much more fun and so i did and it made cleaning it up much more enjoyable and then one of my housemates was there and that person also started to laugh when he saw what was going on and it just like made both of our days more fun because of laughter yeah and and other things like like one time i was taking my bike out of the garage and i was going backwards with my bike and i started to fall on my back and before i hit the ground i started to laugh and because of that i i really didn’t hurt myself i think it just relaxed me and wow yeah so it’s really useful that’s this laughter thing yeah i mean over the years i have read you know different articles and i know there’s even you know peer reviewed scientific research about the health benefits of laughter yoga or laughter therapy which i’m thinking is kind of synonymous isn’t it laughter therapy laughter yoga pretty much yeah i mean it can be just like kind of entertaining and fun but there is a therapeutic aspect of it absolutely when when did you become a practitioner how many years have you been you know leading people i started leading into in january of 2007. okay mars you’ve been doing it a number of years and have you met people with different types of health conditions where they were seeking it out as a therapeutic you know modality yes um well certainly people have come who’ve been feeling i don’t know about depressed but down you know feeling down and needing needing something to cheer them up i mean i think people come to laughter yoga because they feel like they need more laughter in their lives and so and some of those people may have some mental health issues and they’re also you know people just want to be healthier they want some mode a way of becoming healthier and relieving stress i think really mean stress is a big reason people come to laughter yoga and certainly there’s plenty of stress to go around right now and stress causes inflammation in the body it causes the body a lot of wear and tear and it can cause heart disease cancer dementia so all of those things you know it’s a great preventative and if you have those things it’s certainly useful to help heal so i’ve done it a lot for elders who have all kinds of health issues i’ve done it for people who are on dialysis there was a study that we did i was part of a study that actually went in and did laughter yoga for people while they were on dialysis to see if that would help them and actually you could see their blood pressure on the machine and you could sometimes see it like going down wow interesting now so they were hooked up to the machine yeah and experiencing a class a section of laughter yoga yeah yeah that’s amazing
so you also do it in corporate settings right i have a little bit yeah and so is that are you brought into like hr and is it like some section of the staff and often it’s a manager who’s like i want to bring some stress relief or fun for the staff a way for them to cope with the stress of the job and so i try to always customize it for people so i find out what are these people’s stressors or challenges and also what do these people need to celebrate because life yoga is just about relieving stress it’s all also about learning to celebrate what we need you know and not just the big things in life but so important i think what one of the things i’ve learned from left yoga is celebrating the little things in life so we can say yay very good very good yay over like you know i i got up and took a shower this morning i mean i’m like it doesn’t have to be i’m still breathing it’s all relative though you know it is especially now in the pandemic exactly so so are there are there in your experience are there certain types of people that you find are more receptive i think there’s some people who’ve just decided for themselves i’m too serious i need more laughter in my life or i’ve got some issue and i think laughter would be good for me so there’s those people and then there’s the people sort of more like me who are like oh my god i want a place that i could just laugh like crazy and people don’t think i’m crazy you know um so i think those are the two biggest groups i think that come to us but and then there’s other people too but i think those are probably and is there any kind of generalization you can make about people that just don’t uh you know it’s just not they’re not their thing well i mean truth be told i i’m so i think you were the first experience of laughter yoga for me and then over the years i attended a couple of other sessions at ucsf yeah in person and then since the pandemic i’ve done a couple online classes and i don’t know how much you know about me but i embrace all modes of non-invasive healing modalities and for some reason it’s i’m i have not it just it doesn’t i mean i don’t have an adverse reaction yeah but i’m just not fluid with it yeah i think it depends totally on somebody’s openness and also on their personality i think some people just have a really hard time letting go and getting silly because i think silliness is really and feeling safe enough in the group is really really really important so i think that some people just you know i think it’s as as when we’re growing up we’re told when we’re told to grow up when we’re little what does that mean it means get serious get responsible it doesn’t mean have fun have a good life you know it means so we learn that being an adult means means getting serious and being responsible and those are not bad things to be but it kind of leaves out a whole other part of life so i think laughter local calls on us to have a more childlike approach and to see that to open up that side of ourselves to be silly to be playful and for some people that’s really hard i’m not saying you are like that but for a lot of people that is very challenging and they’re just like kind of frees up and they they’re like oh this is too silly for me or uh it’s too embarrassing um or it feels fake that’s the other thing i hear sometimes yeah i mean i’m you know i’m i’m open to still you know because every once in a while i come back and i’ve often wanted to do a podcast on it you know what works for me isn’t going to work for someone else and vice versa i mean they’re just um many different paths to hopefully the same goal of just leading a better life yeah but i tell people if they feel like that kind of sense of embarrassment or or inhibition to think about it as an exercise i’m doing an exercise for my health and hopefully elevating my mood as well because we still get that we still get the benefit out of it even if it’s intentional laughter even if we’re not laughing spontaneously so a lot of times i don’t feel like exercising i have to push myself to exercise and so this is a form of exercise and so i encourage people to take that bring that kind of experimental or decision of deciding to laugh because i know it’s good for my health and then often almost always people end up spontaneously laughing in the group there’s this sense of safety and sense of connection and and they say that actually most people laugh not because of humor not because of jokes but because they’re with a group of people they feel safe with and they’re just they’re just really kind of laughing just because they’re together that’s interesting so in the in the laughter clubs that you’ve been affiliated with is there a sense of community that’s fostered yes i i mean i i can’t speak for all laughter groups but i i do feel like the woman who ran the group that i went to in boston really worked on that and had regular people and and really tried to get people to share and connect with each other and i really tried to nurture that in my group so there’s regulars and then there’s new people we try to welcome the new people and that’s fine and but i do try to make sure people feel like they get to connect in a real way even if it’s um even if they’re there for the first time that they get to have this connection with a group that’s safe and enjoyable that might be the key for me you know is that in you know it did feel a bit like artifice but had there been more time where i actually got to know the people um and and the idea of like building that safety i mean because it is you know one it isn’t opening up to laugh freely and you know kind of that whole full-body jewelry experience is certainly yeah kind of intimate yeah it is oh absolutely it is and i tell people like to try to channel their their their childlike self that because when we’re kids we generally most kids don’t say oh i have to talk to this person to get to know them first before i want to play with them
i have to know what work they do or where they live or whatever they just like let’s play let’s play and so i try to like encourage that like getting to know people on a different level than the intellectual one or the the verbal one it’s getting to know people on a very human level that’s that’s just like we’re two human beings together we can play together without really knowing each other on that verbal level so are you are you able to achieve that online now have you been doing that it’s more challenging somewhat more challenging but i’m amazed that we’re able to it does work for a lot of people and it we’re still able to do it yeah so i’m very grateful for that for everybody some people in my group don’t come to the zoom and then some people never come before and hop down and and love it on zoom so you know i can’t say you know it obviously is not for everybody but i’d say it works for a lot of people i mean everybody should try it you know no harm done no no no i don’t know anybody who’s died from laughing
that’s a good testimonial
and most people come out of it saying they feel both more relaxed and more energized yeah nice combination yeah no i definitely did feel more energized i mean because you are really exercising your lungs and the one i did online we were moving around a little you know so yeah it is uh oh yeah a lot of movement moving clapping um breathing a lot of yogic breathing and of course laughter and i also do uh when we have a we so we do these playful after exercises we get people to connect and laugh with each other and we also do um some warm-ups before that some physical warm-ups and towards the end we do a time when we just laugh for a minute or two because you really get more benefit out of a more extended lab more health benefit helps with the blood pressure helps with the immune system which we really need right now right yeah
and as a natural pain reliever which is lovely and then uh at the towards the end i do a guided or eliza or i do a guided relaxation because it’s in the evening and we want to leave people in a peaceful place oh yeah that makes sense right you’re unwinding and gonna go to sleep soon so you want to come down a bit
great well thank you so much oh you’re very welcome my pleasure yeah i feel like i haven’t bumped into you somewhere since kaiser yeah i think we did but i don’t remember where that’s another way i use laughter is because it helps my dog my memory when i forget something i laugh and it’s amazing because it kind of it cuts through the brain freeze and i can think better and i almost always remember it what it was i was forgot wow i recommend trying them oh man can you jar that that’d be good wouldn’t it yes you’d get an arp magazine you know you’d make a fortune
hey guess what you too can experience laughter yoga with annie she has a groupon meetup i’ve provided the link in the podcast notes on the glasses website and if you’d enjoyed if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard in this episode i invite you to check out the other links on the glass apple website that are related to laughter therapy there’s an organization called comedy cures foundation that provides therapy therapeutic comedy programs for children and adults living with illness trauma depression and disabilities there’s the association for applied and therapeutic humor which is was founded by a registered nurse in the sev in the 80s 1980s meta organization provides and disseminates information about therapeutic humor and there are also links to the ucsf laughter yoga program and dr kitarya’s website so take care of yourself as best you can and when you’re ready consider exploring how some intentional laughter can help ease your stress thank you for listening to glass half full leslie invites you to leave a rating and review on itunes this helps spread the word to others dealing with chronic health issues for show notes updates and more visit the website glass half full dot online.online
Being diagnosed with a chronic, debilitating disease can certainly bring stress to one’s life. In fact, that stress can be significant enough to be called trauma.
How one handles this stress varies. Some people have amazing coping capacity and are hard-wired for resilience while others have more difficulty. None of it is easy.
Mary Holt, a Registered Nurse with a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology, shares her journey of loss and recovery and the profound impact a mindfulness meditation practice has had on her life and work. She brings this practice to the clinics where she helps patients and their families with neuromuscular and Parkinson’s disease.
welcome to glass half full with leslie krongold she shares her stories experiences and knowledge of living and coping with a chronic health condition learn about tools and resources and hear inspirational interviews that help you to live a life filled with quality and dignity with two decades of support group leadership leslie’s ready to help you make lemonade out of life’s lemons are you ready are you ready
hello listeners we’re nearing the end of february which means it’s almost international rare disease day i have a rare disease do you there are over 6 000 rare diseases i know i’ve met people with a disease so rare that they’ve never met anyone else with it i can’t even imagine what that would be like recently at my monthly support group we had a family joined us who had never met people outside of their family with myotonic dystrophy if you’re diagnosed and you live in or near a heavily populated city you will hopefully not have to wait too long before you meet others with the disease we have a patient advocacy organization that has an annual conference and this conference has given me the opportunity to meet others with the condition who live throughout the us and other parts of the world we’ve had people in the conference come from new zealand south america and of course you know a few european countries so rare disease day celebrated on february 28th is a day of advocacy getting out in the public to let others know about your disease last year a group of us met at senator dianne feinstein’s office in san francisco this year we’re joining others with rare diseases at a local museum and park so check the gospel website for links to learn more about rare disease day maybe there is an event happening in your neck in the wood and i will also include a couple links to podcasts that i did specifically about rare disease day today though is not about rare disease as i mentioned i’m part of a patient advocacy organization which meets in person annually usually in a different location throughout the country and last year we met in philadelphia and one of the sessions i attended was titled mindfulness as a disease management strategy now you can just imagine how that piqued my interest unfortunately the session was less than 45 minutes but i could tell the presenter had more to offer so i introduced myself gave her my podcast calling card it’s actually a postcard um if you want one let me know anyhow she and i recently had a chance to talk mary hope is a busy woman she works at two different philadelphia clinics and has a private practice in addition to her academic work she’s a registered nurse and has a master’s degree in counseling she has a lot of lived experience mary was a caregiver for her husband and experienced his loss at an early age with two young children to raise she’s also been in recovery from alcoholism for a number of years i have always worked in my nursing career uh with chronic pain and chronic illness that kind had always been my path and then there were actually a series of events that had happened personally in my life and i had not been working for a time while i was pregnant with my second child and yeah it was just knew i had to get back into the workforce my husband had become quite ill and i you know of course he was not able to work so i really had to kind of get back into the workforce um you know kind of help provide for us in a sense in my two children so i saw this job posting that was for a nurse coordinator i loved always being able to kind of have that integrative model so i love the coordination piece and it was neurology so it was it was the mda als center of hope um and at that time it was at diversity in philadelphia and that was back 2005 and then i started there as a nurse coordinator full time and i was probably seven years or so and had had a master’s encounter with a specialization in psychological trauma and bereavement so working with people that had you know a focus of course of chronic illness terminal illness that was really one of my passions so when the mental health specialist left that center then i kind of moved into that role in terms of being able to support the patients and the families yeah all throughout the journey really from time of diagnosis or from the time that we you know began with them and then journeying for as long as they stayed with us you know for a number of years the rest of my time my other full-time work i actually do three things so my other full-time work is working with parkinson’s and i’m a nurse educator a clinical educator with that population so i work with people that have parkinson’s and their families and i work with physicians movement disorder specialists and i do educate food i teach the families and the patients how to use a particular medicine medication and injectable medicine for parkinson’s and really how to live well you know as best as they can with their parkinson’s and then outside of that i am also i have a private practice in terms of life coaching speaking mindfulness practice and things like that so i’ve always had a desire to have uh and my you know goal still one of my goals is to be able to do that more to be able to reach people in a way that to have a greater impact in terms of helping people so i when i was working originally with a neurology team and during that time i had had a meditation practice of my own i’ve been sober for a bit over 12 25 years and i’ve had a meditation practice of my own for a number of years and when i was at jefferson i was working with chronic pain patients and they had a center for uh integrative medicine so i went there and i took a mindfulness course a mindfulness meditation it was actually a stress management course and at that time i fully impacted and shifted my whole experience in my own life my professional work my recovery my own personal health in such dramatic ways that i went on for more training and really have been teaching and doing that practice and really focusing a ton of my work professionally around stress stress management and how it relates to our health and also how mindfulness can be a foundational piece of that in terms of helping people live well in the midst of chronic illness and terminal illness so what is psychological trauma when it’s boiled down it is trauma if we look at just trauma in and of itself is something whether it be an experience a situation or an event that overwhelms the system right overwhelm the system physically of course it could overwhelm the system of course which is my my specialization psychologically and mentally emotionally spiritually as well so that can come from a certain particular event it can also come from chronic exposure to certain things whether they be you know external or potentially internal you know somebody is chronically experiencing anything you know negative perceived as negative to the point where it over overwhelms our ability to kind of integrate our experiences on a healthy level for us to be able to function kind of day in and day out in a healthy way yeah because when i hear the term trauma i think of people with ptsd or um some sort of sexual abuse i generally might and i’m not you know a professional in psychological or mental health but i um i think of it as like an incident or series of incidents that are traumatizing but the way you’ve defined it it sounds as if just the diagnosis of a progressive chronic illness can serve as trauma
absolutely yes absolutely i’ve experienced that with people you know when we say in particular when we you know potentially give somebody the diagnosis of als or something um what can happen is that i mean on the flip side of this too i you know i don’t know if we’ll talk about it but is also the amazing resiliency of the human spirit in terms of being able to you know kind of integrate and wrap our brains around certain things and being able to function in the midst of these kind of crises these crises that happen in our lives but you know when somebody is you know faced with a situation that is in many ways i’m going to say potentially but can many ways alter their existence and how they perceive that it can absolutely be traumatic i was actually just this weekend i was working with our team our multidisciplinary team and in terms of the and talking about the effects of you know continually working with the population of you know in neuromuscular conditions and neurodegenerative conditions that you know it is a traumatic environment because we’re continually working with emotions that may arise from time to time such as frustration powerlessness not being able to make an effect potentially loss grief sadness you know and that can be incredibly distressing to the you know our mental capacity and our psychological capacity to be able to manage so how do you define resilience so i would define resilience as the amazing capacity which always seems to surprise me the amazing the amazing capacity of the human being and the human spirit to be able to integrate and rise above
what may be perceived as incredibly negative circumstances and find meaning continue to move forward um serve continue to serve in some way not that all of these are necessary but these are the things that i see in the people that i work with and the families that i really tiny amount like couldn’t even fathom what it’s like yet you are serving the world rising above taking your experience and helping others that is to me incredibly resilient because some people fold i also see a lot of people fold and i don’t believe that there’s a good a right or wrong necessarily we all do with the capacity that we have um but when you ask about resiliency it’s definitely i think you’re a living example of that so the session you read at the conference this year how i met you was titled mindfulness as a disease management strategy so i think we’ve led up to this right you talked about how mindfulness helped you and you your training and i’m assuming you’ve implemented it in all the work you do does a mindfulness training or does it as a strategy help build resilience for me personally you know mindfulness is kind of a buzzword around healthcare around the corporate world somewhat um and it really is a way of it really is a way of relating to the world you know i mean when i so i practice minds when yes there are strategies within mindfulness and from the bigger scheme it really is a way of relating to our life and our life experiences and ourselves and others um so it definitely can build resiliency because what mindfulness gives us is number one it gives us awareness so i’m not a and the other thing i want to say is it’s a practice so it’s something that is certainly cultivated over time i am absolutely not an expert it is something i practice every day um every moment of my life that i can become more aware so it gives us an awareness so we’re not just acting on autopilot so we have some sense of you know when we’re going down the rabbit hole per se so it gives us awareness and then it has this underpinning in terms of non-judgment and compassion so it offers me the opportunity to meet my life and my life experiences to number one become aware of my you know how i’m perceiving something and how i’m relating to it and then it gives me ways of coping with openness and non-judgment and compassion for self for others and for kind of life as a whole which is simple in words yet incredibly in light so yes it can 100 yeah build resiliency how do you do that in the clinic setting i mean i i’ve been to the interdisciplinary clinics in san francisco and at stanford you know for my disease and i imagine they’re kind of similar and you know i went for years i haven’t gone recently but i had a pt who i saw you know uh every year for many years and one of the last times i saw her and unfortunately she had to leave the clinic she moved away but she started talking about mindfulness meditation and i was blown away because it was such a departure from anything she spoke about before so i’m wondering you know is it something that the other clinicians are talking about too or is it just you that’s actually yeah that’s a great question so it is um it just depends on everybody’s level of comfortability uh in our life right now it’s not something that everybody talks about people they are becoming more aware of it and more i would say open to it you know whether that is because of you know kind of what i do you know i talk about there so i would love to see it one day as kind of a standard of care um interesting and really offering people ways to manage you know all of i mean you think i’m just thinking about the physical therapist so if your physical therapist is there talking about mindfulness meditation that shows huge kind of integration to me that says you know there’s a lot of integration there in terms of what can help support you that she’s not just just addressing you linearly right with a solo focus you know acknowledging the fact that you are simply as a being right you have a mind you have a body and you have a heart so how then can we because they don’t none of them operate individually so how is it then that we can take our health care management and also approach people you know i really meet people in the sense that you know that we each really do have the capacity within ourselves to kind of answer all the questions that we have and we do have the resources within us um whether we need to find some more outside but we really do have a that within us so i meet people hopefully with that uh intention that you really do have everything that you need um and my role with you is then just to help you uncover that and get clear what’s your relationship with yourself you know that’s a big thing so when i’m seeing people in clinic a lot of our conversation is around um what’s the you know what is the relationship with the illness you know a lot of people are you know fine you know quite they they’re angry they’re and those emotions sometimes are controlling them in ways that they are not even aware of and impacting choices that they make choices that they don’t make whether they’re going to use their walker or not use their walker whether they’re going to accept a feeding tube or not accept the feeding tube so how to how how help them explore the reasons underneath that why is it that you don’t want to use the walker when you’ve fallen three times right no not in a fault-finding way but just to help them explore that oh you know it means that um you know that much worse in my illness or i’m giving into it or you know what will people think of me i’m weak you know all sorts of things so um yeah so i really try to help them you know to provide a space for that to arise because the body does hold you know there’s a book called the body holds the score or keeps the score and it really i mean you know our bodies just like it needs to you know all these negative emotions they all kind of you know they can i mean whether we’re giving a space for them or not they need to come out some way right so especially people that have physical conditions you know like you all the people that i work with i i stress that it’s even more so important and myself you know i it is more so important if we already have a physical condition or a medical condition that we you know somehow manage the stressors and you know negative emotions in our lives when they arise because our body is already kind of working somewhat double time um you know to manage and you know negative emotions build up or not given space can just impact that in a profound way there’s a lot of research around that as well in terms of the cascade of events with the you know neural chemicals that kind of run through our body so i hope to just meet people you know i hope to just provide a space where people feel that they can uh you know be real and really explore what they need to so then they can make the best decisions that they can you know for themselves whether it’s using the walker or not using the walker having the feeding tube or not having the feeding tube so a lot of my work in the clinic is around life choices all the choices we have to make yeah i invite you to check out mary’s website especially if you live anywhere near philadelphia she teaches a variety of classes i wish i could take thanks for listening i hope you’re able to take away something you heard in today’s podcast and apply it to your life take care of yourself and i i hope to see you online in our facebook group on youtube instagram or on the glass f4 website thank you for listening to glass half full leslie invites you to leave a rating and review on itunes this helps spread the word to others dealing with chronic health issues for show notes updates and more visit the website glass half full dot online
Imagine if your physician not only understood your invisible chronic illness but also had experience healing her own autoimmune illness. That physician could be Cynthia Li.
Dr. Cynthia Li talks about her book, Brave New Medicine, and answers my questions covering everything
from autoimmune illness, functional vs. integrative medicine, the writing
process, to the role intuition played in her healing process and now plays a
role in her medical practice.
Dr. Li mentions the organization, HeartMath Institute, in this episode. To read Dr. Li’s 2014 (pre-Brave New Medicine publication) contribution to the San Francisco Medicine Journal, check page 19.
An echocardiogram technician told me I have a beautiful heart and that got me going. What makes for good heart health? What role do genetics, lifestyle, and environment play?
Dr. Erica Pitsch talks about the Framingham Heart Study, John talks about congestive heart failure and Mended Hearts, and Saurabh shares how yoga and meditation help his stress level and coping with myotonic muscular dystrophy. For additional tips on heart health, check out the Harvard Heart Letter.
Earlier podcast episodes you may find of interest:
Welcome to Glass Half Full with Leslie Krongold she shares her stories experiences and knowledge of living and coping with a chronic health condition learn about tools and resources and hear inspirational interviews that help you to live a life filled with quality and dignity with two decades of support group leadership Leslie’s ready to help you make lemonade out of life’s lemons are you ready are you ready every year there are a few diagnostic tests i need because of my myotonic dystrophy some of these tests are to monitor my heart because many of us with myotonic dystrophy have electrical conduction issues and eventually require a pacemaker a couple of weeks ago i was at my local Kaiser Permanente hospital getting an echocardiogram if you’re unfamiliar with this test it’s not painful it’s just a bit awkward you lay or lie half naked on your side the technician rubs something like Vaseline on your upper body and presses deeply with a probe while looking at a screen displaying your beating heart my session lasted for about 30 minutes
Mary Lou, my echo echocardiogram technician, commented that i had a beautiful heart this was a surprise i didn’t interpret it as a flirtation but a great conversation starter i asked her what other hearts look like what made mine so beautiful she told me about dirty looking hearts from years of smoking she sees a lot of hearts and assured me that there are many differences i envisioned her writing poetry based on the beating heart she looks at for hours and hours each week later that day as i swelled with the news about my beautiful heart i realized valentine’s day was approaching and that’s how this episode came about i suspect the health of our hearts is due to many factors some genetics some lifestyle choices and some environmental factors we have little control over according to the American Heart Association ideal cardiovascular health is a combination of four healthy behaviors and three health measurements the behaviors are not smoking maintaining a healthy weight exercising regularly and eating a healthy diet the measurements include total cholesterol under 200 milligrams per deciliter blood pressure under 120 over 80. and fasting blood sugar under 100
Not adhering to those guidelines can result in all sorts of problems including heart failure stroke diabetes and the list goes on in fact in a recent issue of the university of California Berkeley wellness letter there’s an article about the relationship between heart health and brain health many studies have found that cardiovascular risk factors in middle age are associated with the likelihood of developing dementia later in life back to the behaviors i don’t have anything to say about smoking or healthy weight but diet and exercise are something I can speak to
You can probably find many dietary plans focused on heart health on the internet in producing some of the newsletters i read i found something about nuts this is based on a Swedish study that found people who snack on nuts three or more times each week had a lower risk of atrial fibrillation so add nuts to your diet in an Australian study with nearly 1 000 older women those that ate three or more servings of vegetables each day fared better than those who ate two or fewer servings each day the study also found cruciferous vegetables that would be like broccoli cauliflower those were the most beneficial one of my favorite newsletters is Dr. Andrew Weil self-healing a few years ago in an article titled rethinking dietary fats and heart health he gave a thumbs up to butter and a thumbs down to red meat and processed meats in terms of their impact on cardiovascular health in the tufts university health and nutrition letter i made a minute study with middle-aged men those who ate higher amounts of protein were at a higher risk of heart failure than those who ate less protein and i think we’re really talking about animal protein so maybe just maybe my heart is beautiful because i gave up meat over 30 years ago
Enough about diet let’s turn to physical activity physical therapy professor Erica Pitsch at the UCSF school of medicine had this to say during a recent interview i’ve seen a lot of people that you know it was multiple diagnoses that have a good exercise ethic and they tend to fare better and there was actually a study number of years ago called the Framingham heart study which followed people for decades and people who exercise have less probability of dying of anything and was it in general thousands of people in the city yeah oh no in the us okay yeah great this is yeah it’s called the Framingham oh now i gotta google it now Framingham heart study but yeah no it’s it’s the exercise improves overall survival in general you can find the link to the Framingham study on the glass cellphone website as well as links to two previous podcast episodes with professor Pitsch one is about stroke survival and the other episode is all about balance and falling i admit it’s difficult to glean the best dietary advice from research since one month there’s a study that finds eating eggs to be nutritious and the next month there’s another study advising against eating eggs but with physical exercise it seems fairly conclusive that movement is key whether it’s walking working out at a gym or just remaining active in your home doing chores in 2017 there was the PURE study and PURE is an acronym for prospective urban rural epidemiology study it was written about by the American college of cardiology and the article library found that just 150 minutes of physical activity each week reduces cardiovascular disease and deaths so i mean ultimately you’re still going to die but during the study’s time there was an eminence of prolonged life when compared with a group of people not exercising for at least 150 minutes per week okay so that’s 22 minutes of exercise each day i can do that are you up for that challenge let that be your valentine’s day gift to yourself and your loved ones
As i mentioned we don’t have complete control over all the factors that may result in heart complications my beautiful heart may have benefited from my father’s genetics because i know my mom’s genetics passed on the myotonic dystrophy gene
For this episode i wanted to include a few people i know with heart conditions the first is John, a retired attorney in Oakland, who was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2017. I met John on a patient advisory council and Kaiser Permanente for the previous really year i had been declining in terms of my ability to breathe and my ability to walk in distance at all i used to be a backpacker and I could walk you know five or six miles a day with 50 pounds on my back at altitude and that was that was great it was one of my favorite things to do and gradually i began having less and less ability to walk until it got to the point where i really couldn’t walk more than maybe 100 yards or something without having to stop for breath so any one night i was in bed laying on my back and i felt that i didn’t i couldn’t breathe i mean i had to breathe but i didn’t have enough air so my wife suggested i go in which i should have done a long time ago but it just never occurred to me that i had a heart thing because I’ve always been healthy and right away they figured it out that i had what’s called congestive heart failure which means that the heart is not pumping efficiently so what that meant and why i felt an air hunger was that i had a lot of fluid in my lungs the heart wasn’t pushing the fluid throughout the body and my lungs were filled with fluid and that’s why i couldn’t get enough air to feel like i could properly breathe a lot of heart people with congestive heart failure they have to sleep at a recline or even sitting up for that reason so it’s a life-threatening thing it’s it’s it’s not uncommon and uh and they have a whole great big protocol at Kaiser to to deal with it and they have done that and I’ve been treated quite well and they put in a device which regulates my ventricles the lower chambers of the heart to get them to be synchronous which is one of my problems was they were beating a different time and then if I’m at a higher risk to go down with a with a heart attack so it has a defibrillator built into the device that i carry around in my chest with wires that go down into the heart to pick up the electrical information from the heart and put it into the computer and you know and it does its job and one of our advisory council meetings where we both volunteer at Kaiser John mentioned a group he attends mended hearts so i asked him about it you can go on their website it’s a national organization and it was started in Oakland by a cardiologist at Sutter hospital and i haven’t learned all the things that they do but the things that i have learned are they have a meeting once a month they bring in a speaker of some sort or some sort of a presentation sometimes it has to do with hearts and sometimes it has to do with something else like the last one was about you know life enhancement one of these life coach people and so she put on her talk that’s one piece of it the other piece obviously is that it’s a sort of an affinity group where people who have some kind of a heart issue go to meet other people who have some kind of a heart issue so that was actually the reason that i was interested in it was some peer contacts with people the third thing that they do is is they have a visitation program so you’re trained as a visitor you have to learn different things that they want you to know about like you know HIPPA rules and the things that you do and don’t say to a patient and you don’t comment on their treatment or whether that’s good or bad various things like that and so what happens is you sign up and you go like four hours a week and you just show up the nurses on the floor have already asked different people well there’s somebody from men at hearts coming would you like to talk to him or her and they say yes or no so once that’s happened then you show up and the nurse says the lady in room 13 wants to talk to you and that’s what you do is you go in there and just talk so it’s obviously a support kind of a thing but the idea behind it is that if you’re a person who has some heart condition and you’re in the hospital you’re an inpatient it’s really helpful to have somebody who’s also had some kind of a heart condition come and talk to you up here not one of the medical people i think that’s the biggest thing is the visitation
i asked john how this experience has changed his life and what he now does to remain healthy they did a bunch of expensive things for me they did a catheterization where they run a camera on the end of a wire up into your heart and somehow manipulated around the different arteries to see whether there’s any kind of a blockage there was none i didn’t have any disease in my arteries so that was good because it wasn’t like okay well if you start eating this strictly vegan diet and leave out all of these different things which i really really didn’t want to do then you can you know maybe turn this around and i didn’t i wasn’t in that category they have a heart health nurse at Kaiser and she goes over all of the things that you should be doing and gives you a pretty extensive booklet about it you know like no salt and avoid this and that alcohol is one of the big ones no smoking that sort of thing so i now take about six seven pills every day that are for my heart to help it get work better not get better but work better and then when they put that device in my chest they told me that you know in around six months you’re going to start feeling a lot better and that is true i now I’m able to go to yoga twice a week for an hour and a half and today’s my yoga day and then I’ve started recently a personal training program at the y in an ideal case i’ll be able to go to the y three days a week and then i can use the swimming pool there and swim so i can have a lot of activity and i do have a lot of activity that’s what I’m doing right now and you know i just feel better i have more spring in my step people look at me and say there’s more color in my face my wife says well you’re standing up straighter and you don’t have a furrowed brow all the time and so yeah you look a lot better you know and that’s true i feel a whole lot better i don’t feel normal in terms of you know how i felt 10 years ago or but you know i do feel but for the fact that i that i tire easily i would feel pretty normal i don’t have any other issues during the day well thanks to modern medicine huh you bet yeah you bet and modern medicine has really come a long way i remember when i was growing up in the 70s hearing about so many men who died from heart attacks my own father had a heart attack close to 20 years ago he’s still thriving with the help of stents and drugs i also had uncles on my mother’s side of the family who died from sudden heart failure which was the common way people with myotonic dystrophy died which brings me back to the echocardiogram in kg and halter monitor i wear every year to see how my heart is doing in an earlier podcast episode all about adventure Rob who has myotonic dystrophy and his share of heart issues celebrated his recovery from cardiac surgery by climbing mount Everest now his story admit is a bit extreme but there are others in my patient community that are also thriving in spite of cardiac issues Saurabh who lives in San Francisco and works in the financial industry has a pacemaker he practices yoga and meditation to mitigate stress which exacerbates his heart condition and he also sees an ayurvedic practitioner as well as western doctors his treatment also includes an ayurvedic supplement called arjuna which is from the bark of the arjuna tree by the way ironically storm only lives a few miles from me but the phone connection had interference I’m trying to reduce some of the noise yeah so i was diagnosed with myotonic dystrophy in 2009 they pretty much had told me when i got diagnosed the most people who get this diagnosis tend to have heart issues and on the subsequent followers of cardiologists i had electrical conduction problems and they said they would need to follow up with me uh every six months yeah i was diagnosed with a problem called injured flutter initially which is irregular heartbeat and so i had to go and get a surgery done which corrected that but that led to a another form of irregular heart rate heat which is very common with people 60 years and older when i was 30 in that age as for literal population with atrial fibrillation i had to go on meditation because people with natural population tend to be at the highest stroke and i would follow up every six months around the heartbeat at some point time i started getting shot disease and my cardiologist suggested getting a photo monitor done for about two weeks and those two weeks the device that they put on me if i had a disease file which is supposed to press the button and when the results came out and i pressed the button when i was getting those dizzy spells they figured out that my heart was missing at that point time and because of the missing piece they decided to go in for the basement i don’t do a lot specifically for my heart health but i do things which try and be the healthier life overall this would also help my heart i exercise i do yoga and i also try and get some cardio exercises and uh you know i think the problem is the conduction problem so i definitely take that into account and not take my heart rate up too high when i exercise that you know i also meditate to keep stress away because i realize my regular beats were definitely [ __ ] up a lot around stressful situations so i meditate and that helps me manage my stress i did speak to an ayurvedic practitioner she suggested a medicine called arjuna which is supposed to protect your heart health in general use it as a substitute for anything in normal school um it’s easier to have it as a capsule there’s so much more to explore about the heart for example i wanted to include the role love and intimacy may play with heart health but i just didn’t have the time but i invite you to listen to an earlier podcast episode for valentine’s day with Dr. Danielle the link is on the Glass Half Full website and Dr. Sheypuk who holds the title of sexpert for the disabled community introduces the topic of dateable self-esteem the episode is called sassy in a wheelchair and now my valentine’s day gift to you
thank you for listening to glass half full Leslie invites you to leave a rating and review on iTunes this helps spread the word to others dealing with chronic health issues for show notes updates and more visit the website glass half full dot online
One yoga teacher’s health journey. Katrina LaShea was able to ease her back injury and subsequent ankle injury pain through a yoga practice. What once worked as a treatment, later became her passion. Today Katrina teaches yoga to African-American women and girls at GirlTrek retreats as well as at her Oakland yoga studio.
Beginning this February, the GirlTrek founders will be visiting 50 cities across the country bringing the message of radical self-care and healing at teach-ins and wellness festivals. The Road to Selma culminates this summer in Selma, Alabama.
Sound therapy has become a wonderful tool to access deep relaxation. For many, it is a gateway to meditation. Melissa Felsenstein of Inner Sounds Meditation shares her story of how playing crystal bowls and metal gongs helped her heal from symptoms of anxiety and depression. A self-proclaimed Nervous System Advocate, after several years of exploring these musical instruments, she now shares her process to help others.
Check out a video from this Summer Solstice Sound Bath.
Transcript
welcome to glass half full with leslie krongold she shares her stories experiences and knowledge of living and coping with a chronic health condition learn about tools and resources and hear inspirational interviews that help you to live a life filled with quality and dignity with two decades of support group leadership leslie’s ready to help you make lemonade out of life’s lemons are you ready are you ready welcome to the summer if you listen to the last podcast episode about nature i hope you’re now trying to get a daily dose of it vitamin n that is this past week i was quite fortunate to get this great double dose of vitamin and at the university of california’s botanical gardens in berkeley on wednesday i attended my first forest bathing led by a certified forest guide but the two and a half hour experience ended in a redwood tree grove and on thursday morning i found myself in the same grove i didn’t sleep there overnight and i was not kidnapped and taken there but i returned for a solstice sound math i would assume most of you listening out there have never been to a sound bath but it’s an experience i bet will come your way soon my first sound bath we always remember our first time right was nearly three years ago in july at a yoga studio in oakland california sound practitioner was melissa felsenstein and she is my guest for today’s episode so perhaps you’re wondering just what is a sound bath is it always experienced in nature and how is leslie able to read my mind
often i use wikipedia as my go to web page for a solid definition of something but there is no entry for sound math i’ll have to rely on my experiential knowledge so you know when you’re in a bathtub you’re enveloped in water for me this is a truly relaxing experience well in a sound bath you allow yourself to be enveloped by the sound not any sound like i don’t think any cdc concert would qualify but you know who knows melissa uses crystal balls gongs and chimes to create her sound math i’ve been to several sound experiences with different practitioners sometimes it’s called a sound meditation or sound symphony where other instruments in addition to bowls and gongs are used such as a harp wooden xylophone and even a human voice each sound experience is unique many factors contribute to the overall experience who is the practitioner what is the environment like if it’s indoors what are the acoustics like how close to the practitioner am i seated or am i reclined do i shut my eyes and let myself be carried away or do i remain seated so i can watch and listen on thursday i chose to have my eyes open it was a gorgeous sauce this morning in a redwood tree grove and i wanted to videotape portions of melissa’s performance best to keep my eyes and ears open for that what you’re listening to in the background is from that day in the redwood grove you can hear birds communicating in the background and actually when melissa stopped playing the bulls and gongs the birds really went crazy i think they were beckoning for an encore you can already tell i’m partial to melissa’s sound performances i’m a fan shall i say her journey to this work and you know and now after three years she’s making a living as a sound practitioner or healer anyhow her journey is what this episode is all about you can watch a video of the solstice sound bath on the glass half full youtube channel but it’s a best experience live a link to the inner sounds meditation website is in the podcast notes and that’s melissa’s website so i was introduced to sound as therapy in 2008 and i was traveling india and i was at one of those bazaars there was this big market i walked into one that i had i’d known about the tibetan bowls the metal ones they’re metal bowls that are handmade in tibet and in india this was in rajasthan so it’s the northern part of india and so i i went there i saw i saw this this shelves and shelves of metal bowls and i thought oh that’ll be a really fun thing to have and i started talking with the man the store owner and i kept kind of coming back to it like we were there for a couple of days and i kept just wanting to be around this man and just sort of talking with him and i helped him with his business card and some other things and we were just kind of becoming friends and eventually he told me that he used these bowls he used the sounds to help heal children specifically of different ailments and that’s what he was known for and i remember i had this moment like oh my gosh like i’ve always been interested in music i was a dancer so the idea of sound as a way to help people i was just so blown away and i thought and then he was showing me some techniques and i eventually bought a bowl from him and then i convinced him to give me his mallet you know he didn’t want to give me like his mallet but i really wanted his mouth i felt like he was infused with this like power you know and he was very reluctant but somehow i convinced him um and i uh yeah so i came home and i was so inspired from that trip and i thought i’m gonna become a sound healer and then i got home away from india back in the grind of los angeles and i was like that is a crazy idea like who who would ever want that you know i completely denied the dream like i felt the dream and then i i denied it and i was working a corporate job and i just continued and then it’s interesting how you know you have this little if it’s meant to happen it will happen right so i i said i said no and then of course you know a short time later it came back to me like a boomerang i think i just felt like it was just too wild you know and anyway so needless to say um a few years later uh my father fell mentally ill so he was dealing with bipolarism and he was on lithium but then the lithium was really hurting his kidneys and so he was abruptly taken off the lithium by a really bad doctor i don’t know you know someone is a certain way and then you have no idea what might happen really when they’re taken off their meds you just assume it’ll be fine kind of you’re like well what’s gonna change really well everything changed for him everything changed he became manic and he just never recovered he was manic for eight years until he died so uh in the beginning you know he was on the street and it’s interesting how the system i i’ve said this before but the system doesn’t really care that that person was an mit graduate on a scholarship i mean my father was brilliant he worked for hewlett-packard his entire career starting right when he graduated from mit just this really brilliant man very kind and soft-hearted and always taking in stray animals and just a very introverted introverted quiet genius and but the system doesn’t care it doesn’t care that what you were you’re just like another person you’re another number and so he was lost in the system of just mental hospitals and um all sorts of situations that i i don’t really want to go into too much too much detail because it’s um it’s painful but we’ll just say that it was it was a really bad time and so i was very close to my dad i’d say we both had this kind of wild adventurous self that we both understood and we were both a little bit weird and we liked like kind of things that were a little different from other people and he really encouraged me to be an art major he loved the arts he loved that i loved music he loved that i danced so it was really supportive and just i don’t know fun we were like pen pals during that you know my college years so anyway when he got sick um i was doing yoga i was doing kind of your typical exercise and but my nervous system was becoming so
it was becoming so severely imbalanced because i was so afraid all the time for my dad i was afraid for his health i was afraid for my mom’s safety i was afraid for everyone else’s safety he became kind of a dangerous man he became an angry man so um and his his own safety for himself and uh it just became too much you know there’s a certain amount of stress you can deal with but then when that stress keeps going like whether it’s a chronic illness right you understand that and just dealing with this something that’s relentless it doesn’t it doesn’t ever let you go and you don’t know what’s down the line you don’t know what’s down the line you have to become it’s very uneasy it’s unsettling you can’t ever get kind of grounded and feel confident or sure and i think about that like chronic illness or or cancer treatment and sort of my experience too there’s a lot of commonalities and i think a lot similarly this happens for everyone’s nervous system that’s under chronic intense stress you know basically like everyone else i stopped sleeping i was insomniac um because i just couldn’t rest my mind at night so that and then i stopped sleeping then i wasn’t able to eat and digest you know i could barely eat anything i was losing weight i felt sick all the time and bloated and it just felt awful i had migraines i had tmj i had teeth grinding and eventually it got to the point where i had like a shake as well like like and i was losing my hair i mean it was wow severe anxiety severe severe anxiety and as that started to compound i was also greeted with depression because you start to really feel down when you can’t get yourself healthy and you’re seeing you know i think depression it’s different from sadness i mean i was sad about my dad but depression is this there’s a quality to it that’s um so gray it’s so bleak and i could feel that with just this idea that tomorrow is going to look exactly like today right and when you look into the future and that’s all you see is a broken body and sadness grief you know at the time i didn’t realize i was grieving the loss of my dad right like i had lost my dad he was here but who he was was someone like completely foreign to me occasionally over those seven years i’d see this little spark and i’d remember who he was and he’d do a little joke or something and it gets me like teared up just thinking about god it was such a hard time um but was there also an element of fear that this could be your future oh yeah that’s a really good point yeah like i looked into my own future and i was like oh wow this could be it because i was still going to yoga classes and i remember being so like angry and i was very bitter a lot of the time because i was so um mad that my life was lost and my dad’s life and my family my family you know we were sort of broken up by the situation as any family would it’s very very hard to deal with mental illness i asked melissa about her reintroduction to the sound work how did she recapture that dream she originally had in india so i would go to these yoga classes and yoga had always been my savior it always been my refuge and i would sit in shavasana i would just steam i was just so mad because like i kind of felt like even that was taken from me like no matter what style of yoga i did it didn’t work i was doing acupuncture which i always felt exhausted by like i felt like it took something from me to show up to get there to receive treatment and then afterward i was always super tired reiki same thing i tried talk therapy i tried some western medicine i was basically just doing anything i could and i just i just didn’t have any extra energy for anything i was barely able to kind of just show up in my life and just kind of just get through the hours of every day so a few different people um encouraged me to take some time off and i and i did and one person actually said she was like you know i really she was my my therapist and she said i think you should like go to an ashram so i did i did and it was a brilliant move because they’re so disciplined there’s a lot of chanting and that’s kind of when i opened up to this other side of yoga that wasn’t just asana you know asana is the movement it was the chanting and then the meditation um and you know just kind of broadening out what what this concept of of yoga was and at the same time i was taking some classes around my neighborhood and i walked into this class and little did i know at the very end in shavasana she plays a crystal ball and i just had this moment where i could feel my whole body responding to the sound you know that deep deep relaxation and i could feel even my nervous system kind of calming down and it was really brief you know it was only like a minute or two and i just thought i don’t care why or how i’m just going to i walked up i was like what is this i didn’t even know what it was she’s like this is a crystal ball and i was like what and then i just bought them and i had them delivered and i taught myself how to play i bought i bought three of them from home shop in florida no they don’t make them there no no almost all the bowls are made in china actually but um so uh and they were delivered in like you know eight business days and i just unpacked them and just started to play them because i just at that point i was like i don’t care what it is i don’t care what tool it is because i i think i think the pivotal moment too wasn’t just how i felt when i heard the ball and i think it also was that it created hope for me a hope like that future that i saw before that we were talking about where every day is the same and you almost just want to give up you know it’s like why keep living why do i want to live i don’t want to live like this you know and i think a lot of people are confronted with that um often in our lives uh but so it brought me this tiny bit of hope like maybe it could be different maybe i could just try and use this so the sound came back to me under much more rough circumstances um and you know unlike some sound healers uh sound is taking off right now and there’s a lot of different healers out there but i think the thing that makes it slightly different for me was like it was necessary this wasn’t a choice it wasn’t like i like gongs these sound so pretty they’re fun they are fun they’re outrageously fun to play to feel it in your body as you play it’s amazing and i could see that draw but for me it was necessary like i had to do this every day if i wanted to become well again
i don’t know i just feel like the gongs what what they did for me i felt like you know i started for like a month or two with just the bulls and they really rewired my nervous system but i was missing the jump for my depression like i still couldn’t quite mitigate that and um i think the gongs really help with that because they take you into this ethereal meditative open space so when i got the gong it’s jupiter jupiter was the gong each of each of the gongs have a um they’re a certain note that’s aligned with the orbital properties of each planet and they have they have the base note and then they have two overtone notes as well that’s how they’re different from orchestral gongs which are not tuned at all so when i have eight gongs or something i can set them up to be very harmonious based on notes or feelings or dissonant you know but orchestral gongs you can’t do that they’re all just set they they’re tuned to sound pleasant but that’s about it so these are really special instruments and they’re so high quality they’re all made of an alloy of of metal oh okay so they vary in what they’re made of well depending on the maker yeah every maker has their secret recipe so piste’s got a recipe and meinel has a recipe and um nobody wants to give up their secret recipe because it’s a combination of different metals okay to make the sound and of course you know there’s also there’s gong gongs have been around for thousands of years um so there’s chinese gongs and tai gongs and burmese gongs and how did you know you wanted to go to gongs like yeah that’s that’s a good question i don’t know there was an intuition that just you know i did go to a few sound meditations at the time in l.a and i would go and i would feel this like distinct calling like if if i really really want to feel healthy i’m going to need this and i i think it was so it was intuitive but once i got it i did notice a big difference in my healing experience
it’s very hard to describe this the state of being
i always struggle with it on paper and through voice because it’s like a place that’s beyond time i don’t know it’s a place beyond words it’s a it’s a feeling it takes you into this almost like to the soundless place that’s where the gongs take you it’s like you’re you’ve got to prepare the the mind you got to create the pathway in into the silence and i think the gongs really help with that and when we can find silence in different ways rather than just through meditation which is so hard for most people including me i mean i became a meditator after i used sound as meditation as a meditative tool but um so we all struggle with sitting there you know and in yoga they they have you do pranayama first so that way you can do a little breathing technique and then hopefully get your mind ready well in the same way that’s what the sound is doing the sound is stimulating your mind it’s stimulating your senses it’s stimulating your cells it’s vibrating everything it’s unpredictable the gong i don’t even know how it’s gonna show up you know some days i do a hit that i’ve done a million times and it just looks like crazy um so it’s very unpredictable and so the mind can’t um the mind relaxes in that actually it doesn’t it doesn’t grasp it’s not able to grasp to rhythm you know it sort of has to deal with unpredictability which is good because it makes it more flexible but the the sounds i think or this is what i know the sounds of the gongs
are trying to prepare your mind for the sounds without the gongs to prepare it to kind of clear those everyday thoughts out of the way with sound because it takes over just it’s not going to let you spend a lot of time thinking about your grocery list
melissa explains how her playing of the gongs was a healing process remember she was doing this on her own still the gongs and the crystal balls were tools for her own healing also getting a lot of strength from that space too right resiliency you kind of feel like you can get through these difficult points of our lives and you know my dad’s story you know as as i got better and better and better you know dad got worse so you know right as i was launching my business my dad was dying you know so um and i’m smiling right now which no one can see uh and it’s because you know he brought me the biggest gift like would i have found this if everything had stayed the same probably not or maybe it would come to me in a different way we don’t know um if you’re meant to do it apparently it comes back again again yeah but uh yeah i mean his he’s he’s he’s an inspiration for it and also i really felt like the sound as therapy and for myself really expanded my capacity to just handle more you know and so even though dad was going through so much i felt very robust and i let go of the need for him to be the way he used to be and i accepted who he was and i accepted his own karma if you believe in that his own path like i can’t change that it’s what his soul needs and i can just support him with love and kindness and caring and it really having those kind of realizations helped immensely with the guilt and the pain
and i’d say i really started to feel better about a month into it and then really powerful changes in the nervous system three months later and i’d say the depression was really reigned in and sort of obliterated probably six months into it wow so yeah within a year i was already doing really i was a really different person and over the years people were like wow you’re so less gritty like you’re so much more soft i used to be really kind of intense and kind of feisty so it’s it’s it’s changed my pulse you know it’s changed my own vibration and and um but it was you know i started out with myself and i remember my friends they were like what have you been doing you seem different and i was like well i was kind of embarrassed about it i was like well i kind of do this stuff with sound and they’re like what i’m like they’re like that sounds cool like they’re all into it you know and i was like i don’t know and they’re like we should you should you should play for us and i was like i don’t know about that it really like i was pretty reluctant to share um for many reasons you know i kind of felt like well what kind of person is a sound a sound practitioner i’m even afraid to say healer it just feels too heavy what kind of person is that like who does that you know and i’m like that’s not me i like to eat hot dogs and hamburgers bacon i love bacon god if i could have that every day i would and i love to like drink wine and i i’m very standard in many ways just like i’m just a normal chick like you know who is this and so i was very um embarrassed and even when i first moved here you know that was a three years ago i launched my business full-time after doing a few of those events you know and then kind of growing a little bit in la but but i knew i just knew i needed to come here i need to come back home this is where i’m i’m bored i was born in south bay and now that melissa’s been sharing her healing tools with others for over three years she’s learned a lot about the instruments and how people respond to her performances i asked her to elaborate on this it’s organic and you’re really like for me i’m just listening i’m listening so intensely to wait and sort of find the sound that’s special because every sound meditation has several of them and it’s a it could be a rhythm it could be especially with the gongs the bowls are interesting how they show up every time too a little different but the gongs they definitely have their own
individual way to them for each one and so i’m just searching i’m looking around and just trying to find okay where’s that nice and i hear it and i’m like oh what’s that what’s happening here and i’m like oh that’s exciting you know even after years and years and years and years of playing i have those moments every time or where one gong who normally plays very dark and deep is showing up right what’s this about what happened and i’m sure you could go into all sorts of like um the physicists are always like well it’s the temperature of the room and this and that but really i i think there’s something more to this that’s um less scientific and less rational because i could have the same exact two gongs playing for a private session and the person changes but nothing else does and they show up differently and i think that’s also me as a practitioner because like i said i i’m intimate with these instruments they were a big part of who i am and who i’ve become and i have a great respect for them so i’m really i could there’s many people who just want to you know aggressively go at the gong because it’s so exciting it’s so stimulating and it’s fun as a player it’s fun but as a recipient it can be create a lot of intensity and i’ve heard so many people go to these other experiences and say i hated it you know i will never do it again i found that to be like i was panicked the whole time and it’s because your nervous system you know doesn’t understand these sounds and they sound scary and they it just goes into fight or flight so as a player i’m very aware of that and because i’m a nervous system advocate and i’m trying to re-teach people how to relax i’m trying to calm their nervous system down and to clear their minds that’s my intent it’s like a healing environment i am mitigating the gongs quite a bit you know what i mean i i’m really working with them from that standpoint it’s almost like they know that that’s what they need to do and i know that’s what i need to do so but they will play very very very differently and we’re talking like nothing else in the environment has changed so you have to wonder well what is that about well it depends it depends how scientific you want to be or if you want to be open to you know the potential that there’s some greater forces happening that affect how they show up but it’s this idea that this is what i mean by there could be something more and i think there is i’m saying could because i’m being a coward well do you think the energy of the people yeah okay i think so the energy of the people that i understand right you do but you know the average person i don’t know um but yeah the energy of the people um and i get a lot of intuitive because i’m going into a very meditate meditative state i get a lot of intuitive hits as well about people so about like a stranger i don’t even know them but as i’m playing you know there’s a rhythm and there’s a feeling and i’m like oh
i had a few questions from melissa that were less about her journey and more about the science behind the use of sound as a therapeutic tool i asked her to talk about brain entrainment a term i wasn’t familiar with but is often mentioned in this line of work so entrainment is the ability for our brains as animals as humans um and animals to synchronize and so this is how large fish can swim together as one organism or if you’ve ever seen a huge group of birds and they’re might and they’re they’re turning like a mass and it’s not because they’re talking to each other like let’s make a left no it’s because they’re entrained they’re near each other and they’re synchronized two heart cells placed near each other but not touching synchronize pendulums synchronize together um in a conversation actually there’s entrainment with body language so if i were to sit here and put my my chin on my hand you might eventually do that if i rub my nose you’re gonna rub your nose actually that happens every time because people are worried about like is this the whole mirror neurons yeah it’s mirror neurons yeah and yeah entrainment so um in this case your brain waves are synchronizing with the sound waves and the sound waves have tons of properties that induce deeper states of slower slower brainwave states or deeper states of relaxation some of it’s the tonal qualities they have high tones and low tones going together they have very low frequency tones as well that can help they aren’t pure notes so they’re normally flat or sharp by a random amount as your your brain receives these tones it entrains and naturally starts to slow down and it’s through that process that you can go into these deeper states so you can drop into the beta state you know relax tape and the theta lots of people drop into delta as you know so delta brainwave state is deep deep sleep so it’s the kind of sleep that you get after like massive travel right and you’re so tired and you’re like oh my god i’m exhausted boom and then 12 hours later you wake up so it’s like that but imagine getting that in just a one hour experience and say you get 45 minutes of it and it’s rich sleep
my belief you know there’s been a lot of connection around sound healing and cancer treatment my feeling is you know with some of these conditions fibromyalgia chronic pain conditions where our sleep is affected i really it’s extremely nourishing because it’s that rich rich sleep and they find that people are falling asleep and sleeping eight hours but we wake up and we’re tired and there’s disputes about that right maybe it’s you’re waking up at the wrong time of your cycle of your sleep cycle but there has been some research um of late that says that actually it’s you’re not getting delta because we go to sleep and we’re thinking about all these things and we’re stimulated by the ipad and whatever else that we’re using which i’m guilty of and many others right we’re we’re on the line or we’re reading a book or something and we’re too stimulated and we sort of fall asleep thinking about our to-do list and then we wake up thinking about our to-do list and we’re not rested because we’re not actually getting that sleep but you can train your brain and that’s what the sound does so it’s cumulative so each time people they come to the sound meditations and their brain through neuroplasticity which is so amazing right we used to think that your brain was done growing at like 17. and now we know oh my god brains are changing all the time all the time and so you can get better sleep i mean i’m proof of it right like you can restore your entire nervous system from you know it was [ __ ] before to like robust and healthy and healthy immune system and everything just with sound that’s what i did but it’s not some kind of snake oil it’s through science you know if you can get into these delta brainwave states and your brain also starts to learn about the theta brainwave state which is so hard to describe that was the space i was talking about you know inner space a place that is boundless it’s free every time i walk in i it just gets bigger you know there’s so much space in there and there’s so much beauty and it’s a feeling um but your brain starts to get used to it it starts to unlock and become more comfortable with these states that we’re becoming less and less aware of and our ability to get into them on our own is becoming harder and harder simply because we’re being pulled in so many directions right like technology has been great but now we’re always kind of multitasking and the brain necessarily wasn’t made for that or the nervous system the nervous system hasn’t really improved in the way that technology has right it’s an old system so your nervous system doesn’t realize like oh actually i’m not being chased by a bear i’m just late to a meeting like it could be worse right it can’t differentiate but and the body responds in the same way either way and that’s where we get destructive with stress that’s when stress becomes destructive but there’s ways that are easy have no side effects you know sound has no side effects it has only benefit and you know when i said in the very beginning i was doing these other modalities and i felt like they took away from me and i had a private client say the same thing and he so beautifully said he’s like when i come to sound it always feels like it gives to me it doesn’t take it just gives and i love that about it as a therapeutic tool i hope you enjoyed this episode perhaps you might consider exploring this healing modality by attending a sound bath in your area or even trying to see how you react with different sound tools watch the youtube video segments on glass apple’s channel to learn more and check out melissa’s website thanks for listening thank you for listening to glass half full leslie invites you to leave a rating and review on itunes this helps spread the word to others dealing with chronic health issues for show notes updates and more visit the website glass half full dot online last half full dot online
This week I had an appointment with the neurologist who diagnosed me twenty years ago. (I talk about my diagnosis in the first podcast episode.) It’s really been great having the continuity but three years ago I had to leave my insurance plan. My spouse got a new job and Kaiser wasn’t an option. My 3-year experience with another healthcare system is a long story which I need not go into now. Suffice it to say, I’m thrilled to be back with Kaiser and my neurologist, even though I’m her only DM1 client.
Before she came into the exam room I noticed several new informational posters tacked up to the walls. There were articles and classes promoting different types of exercise and movement for people with Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and stroke survivors. Kaiser even has special support groups for adults with MS. But this poster was the most impressive — all about stress and how it manifests both physically and emotionally. That’s really the basis of my self-care treatment; whatever I can do to mitigate stress in my life so that I feel better. And there are so many stressors in life. Thankfully I continue to add to my tool case of de-stressors.
In the past I’ve always had a long list of questions and issues to discuss with my neurologist during our annual appointment. There have been periods when I saw her more frequently than once each year. But now, I feel like I’ve got a good handle on things and only had a few questions. We talked about many things — travel, my experience with a different healthcare system — and she did her routine exam which seems kind of subjective since she’s manually checking my strength and range of motion. She’s done this every year and takes notes so perhaps it’s less subjective than it seems.
To my surprise, she was surprised. With just about each test she remarked that I’d improved. She even said a few times, “you’re stronger!” I don’t want to get too excited; I won’t be signing up for any marathons or Himalayan treks. What I will do is continue the program I have cultivated — gentle yoga, Pilates, qigong and a multitude of other healthy physical and emotional behaviors.
I walked out of the doctor’s office feeling quite full of myself. I know I have a progressive muscle disease. I know it’s dramatically changed the course of my life. But I’m going to do whatever I can, for as long as I can, to live the fullest life possible.
