All of our lives are touched by health challenges.  How we respond to those challenges defines us as people.

Everyday Health is a show that weekly features someone facing a challenge to their own health or overcoming the loss of someone important in their lives. This week’s episode -  Saturday, October 29  on ABC stations features Ellese, a young woman who lost her Mom to breast cancer.  She turns her grief into action by organizing a “Pink Out” event to reaise money for the Young Women’s Breast Cancer Awareness Foundation.  Her determination and action inspire a whole community.

You can follow the link below for a preview of this moving story:

Episode 9: Think Pink!

Ethan and Jenna help Ellese stage a “Pink Out” at her old high school to honor her mom, and to raise money and awareness for breast cancer.

http://www.everydayhealth.com/tv/episode-guide/episode-9.aspx

Guest column by Donna Daniell, psychotherapist with Balance your Life

Are you healing from grief, stress and emotional burdens? If you keep going on and on and don’t stop to heal, don’t stop to rejuvenate, don’t stop to rest,  you will hit BURNOUT.  Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.defines burnout in her new book, FRIED as “our frenzied, speed-oriented, exhausted state of mind.”  And BURNOUT can be defined as “losing your most loving, creative self and all you have left is your most negative version of yourself.”(p xi-xii)

Luckily BURNOUT has not made it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  If it had, we’ve have a drug for it by now.

And can you imagine what a drug might do to this state of being?  How can a drug bring us back from our most diminished sense of self which has at least three dimensions:

1)        Emotional exhaustion: deep fatique and feelings of being emotionally drained and overwhelmed

2)        Depersonalization:  a loss of self and cynical regard for the people you live with

3)        Diminished personal accomplishment:  a progressive loss of confidence and competence (pg. xxvi Fried )

I think we all have our own version of “burnout” based on our own personal experience. The real issue is here, how to we keep ourselves balanced and resilient enough to avoid this burnout state. I have experienced burnout when I get stressed and it continues over a long period of time because I can’t seem to avoid the stressors or I allow myself to focus on them until they break down my spiritual integrity or my sense of my wholeness.

This experience leaves me in a diminished state, in which I can’t seem to get the rest of me back. I’m stuck in negativity. This year, I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of it – perhaps because there’s so much in our environment that is negative and it is impacting our ability to stay open and flowing – our resilience is constantly being tested by our “Fried” world. Read more…

Would you like to find balance in your life and work on healing from the past?  Donna Daniell has a practice in Boulder CO that helps you do both.  I love Donna’s focus on women’s wellness.  Donna is incredibly insightful and supportive.    Here is a description of one of her workshops:

Balance Your Life Women’s Groups are  designed to provide support and skills for women specifically.  If you are going through a major transition in your life, my Level I group: Moving Mindfully Through Change is the perfect opportunity to turn that transition into a new beginning for you.  In this community of women you will learn the valuable tools of mindfulness meditation,  non-judgmental awareness & inquiry, visioning, exploration of your emotional blocks, and more.

More about Donna:

I am a specialist in mindfulness-based psychotherapy and coaching. My life’s work has brought me to teaching families, adults, couples and teens how to be present and balanced in themselves and in their relationships with others. My expertise is working with women and families through transitions and the life cycle as well as with difficult parenting challenges. I am a certified IFS therapist and trainer and use this model for inner healing, for trauma & attachment issues individually, with couples, and groups.

I’ve been in private practice as a family therapist and generalist in the Boulder/Longmont area for 21 years. I received my Masters Degree in social work in 1989 from Denver University. My training was in clinical work with systems such as families and relationships. As a child and family therapist, I have worked with a variety of different clients, from families of extreme trauma (neglect and abuse) in residential treatment settings and mental health and day treatment settings, to middle class families in EAP programs in hospitals, schools and in private practice. I have experience with families experiencing grief, trauma, divorce, giftedness and sensory integration issues, spirited children and teens, and step-families.

To find out if you can benefit from working with Donna, either in person or via Skype, take a look at her website http://www.findbalanceinyourlife.com/.

Welcome to Donna and Balance Your Life – the newest swagger partners!

Grief and dating

Why are you online looking for friends? Probably because you lost someone, one way or another. Have you dealt with your grief? Have you faced it and let it unravel within your body? Did you sit with your feelings long enough to give the chemistry/adrenaline the time to exit the body? This is a spiritual activity: you check in with your body, feel what it is feeling and how it is related to what you’re thinking. Am I looking to be saved? Do I want to have another in my life so I am distracted from my more painful, uncomfortable or shadowy feelings? Am I looking for an escape from my grief?

Detachment

When I feel the energy and spirit in my body, I am not lonely. But when I am thinking, I cannot tell what my body is feeling anymore and I can’t feel Spirit energy within. So the practice is to keep coming back, keep coming back to the body sensations, the breath, and move out of thinking, move away from expectation, from analyzing or judging or rejecting or accepting. None of these activities is real or productive. It is usually the ego holding on to a fantasy/thought. In general any holding on activity is ego-related. What is real is detaching, staying open and in the moment and not knowing, not knowing why we are alone, or fantasizing about not being alone but staying in the balance of the present. Letting all thoughts come and go. It is just like regular life no matter how many pictures or profiles of people keep coming at you. Maybe online dating requires more practice than everyday life, to stay balanced and aware of spirit within. Just keep letting thoughts (or photos or profiles) come in, and go out. Come back to the body. Breathe. Read more…

The avoidance of legitimate suffering is the root of all neurotic behavior.

                          Carl Jung

Facing grief? It is a simple idea yet it sounds awful. We were taught to get over grief, not dwell on it. We are supposed to go through stages so we can be done with it. But use it to our advantage? Don’t hear much about that.

What is grief? Loss? Abuse? Trauma?Abandonment? All of the above?

 The basic premise for us physically is that the body is charged with stress chemicals that allow us to survive traumatic events. This has been called fight or flight (mobilize) or disassociation (immobilize). We need these responses to survive. Animals need these responses. However animals, once they have reached safety, will tremble and the stress chemicals can exit their bodies. Humans don’t have this automatic mechanism that expels the chemicals once the trauma is over. Our cells will hold chemicals and ‘memories’ of the trauma in our bodies. Subsequent events can trigger these chemicals and memories so that we feel the trauma all over again, as though it was in the past. This looks and feels like a flashback. We react with energy or anger or fury that seems inappropriate to the present event. Read more…