by jimmycrow | Jan 1, 2023 | LAND BLOG
Catskill Mountain
Yoga Festival
Plattekill Mountain, in Roxbury, NY
July 22nd (rain date July 23)
My offerings for the festival
Building Resilience Workshop 9:30am
Based on the newly released book, The Essential Guide to Trauma Sensitive Yoga. In this workshop, we explore quick simple yoga and other somatic-based practices for increasing the capacity to deal with our increasingly busy lives. Learn how to manage and decrease stress, and build your capacity to thrive under any circumstances. Discover which poses and techniques work best for you and how to incorporate them into your daily life for optimization.
Infinite love & Healing Yoga Class 1pm
Opening the space around the heart supports us in becoming more emotionally receptive, compassionate, and loving in our lives. In this class, we explore a number of back-bending and heart-opening postures suitable for all levels. These shapes counter the strain our bodies feel these days from hovering over our technologies and reawaken us to feelings of love, potential, and healing around us. Join me as we access our deepest breath potential, clearing out old grudges and promoting our best health, both emotional and physical.
Check out full festival offerings HERE.
Use my special links for $5 your festival tickets
by Lara Land | Dec 26, 2022 | BOOKS, COACHING, COMMUNITY, LAND BLOG, LARA LAND, Self Improvement, SELF-IMPROVEMENT
It’s taken a few decades, but psychedelics are finally back in the public conversation, and in the discussions around healing trauma.
Their active component psilocybin for many works to release years of trauma that remained in the body even after other therapies.
Folks like Michael Pollen, Gabor Maté, Tim Ferriss, and many others have propelled this topic to the mainstream and their readers and listeners are taking note and trying what many call magic mushrooms for healing trauma.
My latest guest on the Beyond Trauma podcast, Rachel Aiden, is a trauma and psilocybin specialist and is currently the CEO of Synthesis Institute, an organization committed to developing evidence-based practices for training practitioners to safely, ethically and effectively support people on a journey for healing using truffles containing psilocybin. They have a proven track record for leading safe, legal, medically supervised psychedelic retreats for more than 1000 individuals and Rachel maintains that is because of their very specific method.
She wants folks interested in psychedelic healing to know a few things. The first is that there is no magic pill for trauma healing. Plant medicine works in conjunction with set and setting. The right preparation, environment, dosage and support systems before, during and after the experience are deeply important to its power to heal. It is critical that folks, especially those who are trauma survivors, do their research and take their time with this process to make sure they have proper screening for counter-indications.
When it is a fit though, magic mushrooms can work like magic to unlock and release years of stress, provide a deep clarity and connection, and open one’s heart to boundless, universal love. As Rachel puts it, you realize you don’t have to carry the weight of your trauma anymore.
Rachel is at the forefront of the research around psychedelics and trauma healing. Take a listen to our conversation on the Beyond Trauma Podcast and consider whether plant medicine may be the answer for healing your trauma.
by Lara Land | Dec 19, 2022 | BOOKS, COACHING, COMMUNITY, LAND BLOG, LARA LAND, Self Improvement, SELF-IMPROVEMENT
Holiday time can be particularly triggering for trauma survivors. It can bring up feelings of abandonment, loss, and what if’s. For some, traveling back home or to relatives’ homes is not a positive feeling. It can bring up bad memories, feel phony, or even take us out of control and out of our comfort zones.
All of this is normal and understandable.
To avoid these feelings, you may want to start a new family or friend-based holiday tradition at your home where you are more in control. If you can’t or prefer to still go see your relatives, here are some things you can do to make that experience less triggering.
Know your boundaries and make a plan in advance. Decide before you arrive how long you will stay. Make it clear if there are topics or people who are off-limits and make sure everyone agrees to your terms.
Minimize drinking. Though it may feel comforting for trauma survivors to numb out with drugs or alcohol, this can backfire when important boundaries are disturbed through these substances. Choose calming drinks instead like warm milk (even in some hot chocolate) and tea.
Check-in. Make a plan to check in with your nervous system. Take note of your heart rate and breath. Know and recognize any signs you are dysregulated and plan in advance for what you will do if they arise.
Resource Yourself. Come rested and have tools at hand that bring you comfort and increase your capacity to handle triggering family members. This could be a mantra, a squeezy ball, a breathing technique, or anything you know works for you.
The overall lesson for trauma survivors trying to reduce trauma triggers on the holidays and have happy holiday traditions is to plan in advance what you will say and do if triggered and let the family know ahead of time what your boundaries are and agree to them.
Wishing you all a safe and healthy holiday time!
by Lara Land | Dec 12, 2022 | LAND BLOG
Chris Willson had a normal life and a nurturing family, but things changed quickly when his neighborhood became dangerous. He found himself traumatized by the sound of violence outside his window, a sound he became hypervigilant for and which prevented him from enjoying his childhood and studies like a little boy should.
Chris’s life got more challenged when his mom got trapped in an abusive relationship with a cop who stalked her when she tried to call things off. One night the cop’s friends came around harassing Chris and he ended up shooting and killing one landing him a life sentence.
In prison, Chris experienced even more trauma when put in solitary confinement, something he says no one should have to go through, especially not a kid. It dulled his senses and made him jumpy, but he recovered and decided to make a change.
He may not get out of prison, but he wouldn’t live life as imprisoned. He would make the best of his life, learn, grow and accept and make amends for his part in what got him there.
He did just that, and after 16 ½ years, when the laws changed and the judge agreed, he was released.
Chris’s mission now is to make a difference in the world, giving back and giving his life meaning. He does that through his foundation and through his art.
Discover how trauma leads to trauma, the harm of incarceration, the power of setting intention, accountability, and surprisingly vision boarding in my latest episode of the Beyond trauma podcast with Chris Wilson.
by Lara Land | Dec 5, 2022 | BOOKS, COACHING, COMMUNITY, LAND BLOG, LARA LAND, Self Improvement, SELF-IMPROVEMENT
As we head into the holiday season, many of us are thinking about our families, where we come from, and maybe even where we are headed. This can bring up a lot of feelings, some of which may be hard to name. Perhaps even the image of sitting together at a table with some relatives brings up conflicting sensations. All of this is normal.
All families carry their histories and no member of a family is separate from that, which is why when folks ask me about connecting to their ancestors, my first response is that they already are connected. Many of us feel disconnected because of ancestral traumas that we haven’t wanted to face. However, hiding from the pain of ancestors inflicted or suffered keeps us also from being able to access their joy, warmth, and resilience and cuts us off from parts of ourselves.
When we do the work of reconnecting to our ancestors and our ancestral trauma, we learn about ourselves, why we are the way we are, and have the patterns and reactions we do. We are also able to heal, and in that healing, shift our patterns so that ancestral trauma isn’t carried on through our bodies to others and the next generation, cycling, as it so often does. This is the work of repairing the world and the kind of work all yogis should be invested in.
How can I reconnect with my ancestors?
- Collect some photos or personal items from the family members you wish to connect to. (If you don’t have these you can substitute a symbolic item that stands in for it.)
- Sit quietly with the item(s) in your cupped hands.
- Notice any feelings or sensations, images, memories, or energies arising.
- For a few minutes, simply take note of what they are.
- Choose one and breathe into it, inquire about anything it might want to reveal to you. Register any connections you make and continue to ask if you’re getting it right, before moving on.
- When you feel complete, give thanks to your ancestors as well as your body for sharing and supporting this connection.
- Write down anything that came to you and anything you want to revisit.
Let me know in the comments how your practice is going and reach out for coaching when you are ready to go even deeper. Healing ancestral trauma is a process. Go slowly and move with self-compassion as things arise.
This blog was especially inspired by Michelle Casandra Johnson. You can learn about her work here and listen to her on the Beyond Trauma Podcast episode 15.
by Lara Land | Nov 28, 2022 | BOOKS, COACHING, COMMUNITY, LAND BLOG, LARA LAND, Self Improvement, SELF-IMPROVEMENT
Many of you have likely heard about trauma sensitive yoga by now. You may even have read books on it such as The Body Keeps the Score, Waking the Tiger, and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Perhaps you’ve pre-ordered my book, The Essential Guide to Trauma Sensitive Yoga. I hope you have. Yoga for trauma studies are getting more and more popular and more information is getting out there during this time when more folks than ever are identifying as having survived trauma or traumatic stress.
This is a change from the earliest studies we had which were largely from veterans. Most of the earliest trauma sensitive yoga programs were for veterans diagnosed with PTSD. Those programs proved again and again the power of trauma sensitive yoga to reverse the impacts of trauma, restore the nervous system and give folks a chance to change their response to traumatic stress.
No one knows that better than the next guest of the Beyond Trauma Podcast. Pamela Stokes Eggleston has been sharing yoga years with Veterans suffering from PTSD or traumatic stress and their families. She was inspired to focus on this demographic after her own husband returned injured from service and she needed to learn how to live with that. The vicarious trauma she experienced from living with someone with PTSD also had to be addressed. Pam was able to address it with yoga and yoga related practices and one thing she was especially able to treat is sleep. This is deeply important because sleep is always disturbed with trauma and sleep disturbance makes the impacts of trauma more severe.
Take a listen to Pam on the Beyond Trauma Podcast to learn more about yoga for veterans and how she is improving their sleep and hers with some special practices.
If this resonates with you, you may want to consider a trauma sensitive yoga training. I’m offering both an online trauma sensitive yoga training (this weekend) and in many person trainings in the coming year including the weekend of June 30th at Kripalu in Massachusetts (which will be listed next week) and the weekend of August 18th at Miami Life Center, in Florida. More to be listed soon!
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