This morning I signed on to my telesession with a child, and I was greeted by a giant stuffed tiger.
Then my student poked his head out from behind.
I asked him, "Who is this tiger?" and he said, in all seriousness,
"He is my emotional support animal".
LOL!

It has been so much fun to sign on to sessions and meet these objects of love and comfort, like the distinguished Mr. Tygee.
I have also immensely enjoyed sessions and exercises classes recently where pets have photobombed the screen, sticking their face in the camera, or in the case of the kitty above, decided to take a seat on the keyboard.  ​

One of the questions asked most frequently about brain gym is what to do, how many sessions it takes, and how often you need to do a balancing session for the changes to last.  
As with any kind of work that involves working with individuals of differing skill levels, ages, challenges, innate abilities, and support systems(to mention only a few), there is no one umbrella answer or prescription to cover all possibilities.  
In the case of this high school student who made a pretty significant pencil grip transformation the month previously, there was a one month gap between his last session and the day when I took this video.  Over the course of the month, he had AP exams, school field trips, absences, and final exams which made it so that I could not see him for his regular weekly sessions in his school.  
So approximately one month after I had worked with him, I saw him and we did some brain gym and I had him write again, and his handwriting grip had actually improved without any additional support.  
The basic foundational skills in his hands were improved, therefore when he was using his hands for his daily life tasks such as typing on his computer, dressing himself, eating, playing basketball, the new patterns were getting reinforced and strengthened.  
As you can see in the video below, his hands have increased in ease and his non dominant hand has relaxed and become more supportive without working harder.  

It does not always happen like this in every case, however these kinds of results happen more often than not.  When you break down the activity you're trying to master whether it be pencil grip or learning a new language, down into its component parts and assess and work on the skills that that activity entails, dramatic changes can happen in a short time.  

Much like the buds that are breaking through the surface of the soil to reach for the sun, this is the time of year when I see the culmination of regular, consistent work in many of my clients.  

One of my kindergarten kids made a very clear shift in his baseline brain functioning last week. 

I have been seeing him twice a week for 45 minutes in his school since January. 
When he was an infant he had an illness that severely affected his absorption of nutrients and he was sick and malnourished for many years. The parents and doctors finally figured out what was wrong and was able to help him get better but unfortunately it affected his brain development. 

He is absolutely adorable, but he unsettled and in constant motion and talking all the time in a random, garbled, and disorganized way. 

His mom said that one of the old school teachers from the country where they came from called him "eccentric".
He was totally marching to a different drummer, but that drummer, rather than keeping a constant beat, was always changing it before he could sink into that new rhythm. 
He couldn't write or consistently recognize any letters and didn't really like writing at all. He could not write his name and would  lose his place when counting to 10.  He was clumsy in his movement and couldn't figure out how to cross the middle of his body, and naturally had a lot of difficulty learning to run, ride a bike, throw and catch a ball. 
He also frequently drifted away into his thoughts or imagination, and when you talked to him, you had to repeat it a minimum of 3-4 times with some sort of tactile cue.
I often felt like he was a kite and I was reeling him in back to earth. 

I had been doing tons of brain gym movements, balances, as well as reflex integration with him, and he was definitely changing but still very disorganized and all over the place.
On most days, by the end of the session, the racing thoughts would relax and he would start yawning.  
Yawning is one of the signs that the nervous system is relaxing and this relaxed state is when new and organized learning can happen.

He felt better to me, but sometimes I wondered if I was changing some essential part of him that made him uniquely him.
We had been working on this handwriting program called handwriting without tears, which are many different parts and multisensory ways to learn and write the letters.
I started most sessions with an assisted brain warm up, additional movements, and once he was more organized, set up the handwriting program and go through the different sensory practice pieces in the same consistent order.
In the last few sessions, he had been saying, "I want to do it by myself" and I had been letting him.

The day I noticed the breakthrough was when we were working on the letter V, and he went through almost the whole process of set up and clean up by himself.
I also noticed that when asked him about his week, he gave me an answer that made sense. He was still the excited and curious boy that he has always been, AND his brain felt calm, organized, alert, and happy. 

We went back to his class, I showed his whole kindergarten class how to do some of the exercises and he was right next to me, proudly demonstrating the movements for all his friends.
I often think about my kids in the future. I imagine how some of the behaviors I see would impact real life adult situations if they did not change.
Random thoughts, disorganized thinking and and garbled speaking in a 5 year old is kind of cute and endearing, but on the first day of a college school year, a job interview or a first date it could be a source of ridicule or rejection from peers, bosses, potential life partners and pain for this "one-day-will-be-older -but-right-now-tender-little-being".
I guess there really is no need to worry because my personal experience with brain gym has been that doing it and calming my brain and changing my compensations and survival patterns actually make me feel more like my true self.
I remember years back, sitting in the front row of a class with the founder of brain gym, Paul Dennison, and he said something softly, almost under his breath, which I think only a few of us heard. 
"We are teaching kids to live lives they haven't lived yet."
That thought sticks with me to this day. 
And if I had any part in helping this child to have good relationships, good coping skills, independence, self-reliance stemming from an organized brain, then I am happy.

It's that time of year, where you review what happened and think about what you would like to welcome in the new year.Regardless of who you are, this year was a tumultuous year on many fronts; politically, economically, racially, gender equality-wise.  Even if you were personally not impacted,
I am sure that your family members, friends, and other people in your personal spheres were impacted by these things.  
As human beings possessing a limbic brain(the part of the brain responsible for emotional intelligence and empathy) we are impacted by the emotions and well being of those around us.  
The goal is not to isolate and feel less, but find ways to maintain our emotional center and have a great set of tools in our toolbox to come back to center when life happens.
One of my teachers has a phrase I love,
"Unconditional freedom is freedom in all conditions"---which I take to mean, that freedom is a mindset and  I am in charge of it.  It is up to me to free my emotional state from being impacted by what is going on around me. 
It is not to be numb, but to feel more, but be anchored in who we are in what we believe in.
Taking charge of my nervous system, and having a close network of friends and loved ones helps me to keep coming back to center.
What I wish for you, at the end of the year and moving forward, is freedom from worry, stress, and the power to come back to your center.  Who you are meant to be when you are not just managing or dealing with life.

I wish you all the best holiday season of your making.  
I look forward to being able to share more with you in the new year.

The journey of alleviating or curing chronic pain continued....
I knew a woman in one of my dance classes, who danced beautifully, and woke up one day with debilitating pain in her hips.  She kept coming to class, but after the warm up, would sit out and watch because the pain was so great.  She was in her early 40's and had had no injury or concrete reason for her pain to begin.  She had been to physical therapy and acupuncture treatment to no avail.  She told me in class that she was going to stop dancing until she could figure out what was happening or the pain went away.

I don't usually speak to people in my social circles about work, but I really felt that her pain was not physically based and that my work could help her.  She was such a beautiful dancer and I saw that dancing did so much for her spirit, I didn't want her to be stopped by pain that could possibly be alleviated relatively easily.

I spoke to her and asked her to contact me if she still had pain after all her scheduled acupuncture appointments were done.  
She called me a week or so later and agreed to try three sessions with me.

As we delved into her pain, it was reveals that it was being caused by unprocessed emotional pain and anger.  Over the three sessions, she had complete resolution of all her hip pain.  There was work done between the session such as writing exercises and specific integrating exercises that were found to be effective for her brain/body system. 
Now that her pain is resolved, the writing exercises she did during the treatment time and the movements she learned are now tools in her toolbox if she ever has anger or resentment come up in her life.  But she is happy to report that she has had no recurrence of the pain since.  

This supposition that there is sometimes an emotional component to pain, is not original to me and my thought process.  There are countless books by different MD’s such as Dr. Sarno and his book, “Healing Back Pain” and Dr. Daniel Seigel “Healing Power of Emotion” which talk about the connection between our emotions and our bodies.  It is also mirrored in the many sessions I have done with people over the years to help address their pain, as well as my own exploration of chronic pain.   
My experience with working with people with chronic pain conditions, such as back pain, jaw pain, foot/leg pain, headaches, is that there is some combination of unprocessed emotions along with some form of unintegrated reflexes in the body and miscommunication or poor communication between body systems such as vision and/or vestibular system challenge.

In my training in craniosacral therapy, my teacher had a saying, "The tissues hold the issues".
When another student in class asked how that was possible, she responded, "VHS tapes are pieces of plastic with magnetic particles on them which can hold visual and auditory information. If something as simple as tape and magnetic particles can hold that much information it is not too farfetched that human cells and tissues, which are infinitely more complex than that, can hold much more detailed and complex information.”
Are you suffering with chronic pain that is draining the energy out of your life?  Have you tried many things to help your pain to no avail?  Life is too short to suffer in pain needlessly.  
Contact me today for a free consultation call or to set up an appointment.  
What are your favorite books on emotions, the body, and healing pain?  Please contact me and share them with me!   

Most people associate brain gym with kids and helping overcome learning challenges, however because of my background in Occupational therapy and craniosacral therapy I have also used it extensively to reorganize posture, and coordination to help people be more efficient with their movement. 
Quite often this has the added benefit of decreased pain.  Especially pain that is chronic and has not been helped by other more conventional modalities like physical therapy and acupuncture.

My first experience of healing back pain happened when I experienced relief of my chronic back pain while in a class that was part of the certification for becoming a brain gym teacher.

I used to have chronic tightness on my right lower back which was ever present in my body as a low dull ache.  I used to do yoga, get massage, acupuncture, and craniosacral therapy to address it but after the session it would feel better for about 15-20 minutes, but as soon as I started moving around, walking, sitting, driving, it would come back.  

I had resigned myself to the fact that my body was just going to be like this and that I was just going to have to get massage, acupuncture, craniosacral therapy for the rest of my life to keep these things at bay.

Then when I was in a class called “in-depth” and my teacher noticed the asymmetry in my back. 
He said, “You have the ATNR(asymmetrical tonic neck reflex) active in your body”.
I scoffed and said, “No way!  That reflex goes away when you’re a baby.  It’s not active in me.” 
But he told me that reflexes can be unintegrated in our bodies beyond the designated time that it is supposed to be, and cause imbalances that cause chronic pain types of issues. 

Also, because these reflexes are part of normal development, there will be no test to detect it as a problem because it is something that is inherent in all of us and is supposed to be there.
So I agreed to have him check my body for the presence of this reflex.
He checked my leg length while my head was straight and then also when I turned my head side to side and sure enough, my leg length changed as I moved my head which is one of the indications that this reflex is active in my body. 
Then he lead me through a full balance procedure where he did additional brain gym processes to balance my brain and body system.

He did the checks again and my leg length did not change. 
When I stood up again, I felt like I was standing crooked, leaning way over to the left, but when I looked at my reflection in the mirror, my body was standing straight up.
This mismatch in my feeling sense of my body and my visual sense of my body was shocking.
This meant that on an unconscious level, I was always pulling away from my tight right side in order to walk and stand up straight.  Because my right back was always tight, and I was always pulling the other way to keep myself centered it caused an ache and tiredness in my lower back. 
When that internal pull which was coming from my brain was gone, I was able to stand straight without needing to pull against my tight side.

After that session, the long term, low-grade ache in my back disappeared and has never come back.  In fact, with each successive balance procedure, my body has only continued to become more and more balanced.

This was the first time I witnessed how the brain can have an impact on chronic pain.
Here are some signs that you may have some reflexes or movement imbalances that may be impacting your body and possibly causing chronic pain:

-Chronic Pain that comes back no matter what you do to address it, whether it be tight neck, shoulders, back, knees, ankles, etc.
-A difference in the tightness of your muscles between the left and right sides of your body
-A feeling like your body does what it wants to do regardless of how you consciously want to move(this shows up particularly in sports or dancing)
-Certain sensations seemingly affect you more than it affects other people, such as loud noise, bright lights, smells, other people touching you, routines being disrupted, fear of heights, etc.
-It is easier to balance on one leg more than the other
-your shoes wear unevenly
 
If you recognize any of these signs and are experiencing chronic pain, you may be able to gain relief from these.  
Call today for a free consultation or to set up an appointment.  
301-523-3477

I have a second grade student attending a private school who I began seeing for Occupational Therapy last October.  He was adorable but very unfocused, and wiggly in his seat.  He also was not able to read and write.  
I asked him how to spell "the", and he said, "D.......a.....I don't know. This isn't fun.  I don't want to do it".  
It was difficult for me to make out his letters and he fatigued easily when working on writing.  He had difficulty staying on the line and spacing between his words.  
His teacher, who is a 30 year veteran of teaching, said "He needs to be held back.  He needs a neuropsychological evaluation and most likely move to another setting that is less demanding".
Looking at his handwriting, it was difficult not to agree, however because all of this was going to take time, I decided to continue to work with him and do my best to help him.
After all the environmental accommodations such as seat cushions and slant boards, we began working on his posture, hand strength, visual perceptual and visual motor skills.

I see him two times a week for 45 minutes.  There are a lot of days when I feel like all I am doing is redirecting him back to focus.  But in between all of the visual training, strengthening, handwriting practice and some games(FUN is a necessary component for learning!), I was watching him write a cursive letter p and realized that he had made amazing progress.  
I had noticed that his curiosity for learning had shifted, and where it was difficult for him to even attend to a book in October, he was starting to read the titles of books around him in the library where we worked.  
But when I was watching him write that cursive p, I was thinking that his formation and focus was so good.  I became curious and I decided to look in my folder and see how his handwriting had been progressing.  
This is what I found and it was shocking, even to myself who sees this kind of transition rather regularly.

He currently is still performing slower than his peers, however because he was at least a year behind at the beginning of the year, the fact that he is reading as much and as well as he is, and also that he can write (and has the motivation to learn more cursive) is an amazing shift for him.

Where neuroplasticity and technology meet, magic happens.