by Lara Land | Aug 22, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND
Are you overscheduled and under rewarded? Do you feel like you are always doing and at the same time nothing is getting done? Do you fantasize about completing dream projects but see them always falling to the bottom of your list?
You are not alone!
The business epidemic and culture of busyness that has infected the United States is a trauma response. It involves a certain learned hypervigilance that is not natural to human rhythms and it is harmful to our health. We are overscheduled, but why do we do it?
We overschedule ourselves for a number of reasons including not believing in ourselves, not wanting to face ourselves, fear of limited resources and lack of self love. We think we deserve punishment or that our personal value is caught up in our ability to be or even seem productive.
It isn’t!
Trauma responses always involve a hijacking of our nervous system that doesn’t allow us to see options and to view our life with creativity. When you notice this happening, aka when you are really busy, the best thing you can do is slow down.
by Lara Land | Aug 16, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND
In case you haven’t noticed, the last few years have seen a real shift in the way folks are viewing, talking about, and experiencing yoga and the whole wellness industry. Gone are the days of gurus, clear lineages, and cookie cutter definitions of what wellness is.
Those who like categorizing and those who need homogenous interpretations to feel like they know something will feel stretched these days wading through the various information out there on health and wellness… And that’s a good thing?
As Kerri Kelly details in her recent release, American Detox, The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal, the wellness industry has long been corrupted, offering us many ways to buy our health, while always leaving us needing more. This unending and careless approach convinces us we need money and products to be well and leaves many feeling confused and lonely when they haven’t reached the positive sumit they were promised.
It also leaves out one or two important facts about wellness… the biggest being that we can not reach it alone.
Wellness includes things like access to clean air and water, health care, time and space, education and compensation, systems we achieve through each other when we live in healthy and well societies. When the places we occupy lack in these areas all of us suffer, some, by design, more than others.
This is systemic trauma and it is a side of trauma that has not been studied or talked about nearly enough. Kerri Kelly is trying to change that.
She is also one of the strongest voices advocating for a personal definition of wellness. This type of agency is the empowerment trauma survivors need and deserve. The ability to define what is wellness for me, what I need for my mind/body/spirit system to thrive is integral to the wellness I wish to create.
For those of us in the trauma informed yoga or yoga service space like Kerri Kelly and I have been in for so many years, learning not just to bring in trauma informed yoga but to listen to what the trauma survivors we are serving are really asking for, has been crucial to our evolution.
I know it’s what we are doing at Three and a Half Aces Yoga.
Take a listen to Kerri’s work and actions on my latest Beyond Trauma podcast on iTunes or Spotify as we talk about systemic trauma and the harm it is doing to all of us, no matter how close we sit to privilege.
by Lara Land | Aug 8, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND
One of the greatest and often unspoken about causes of trauma is medical trauma.
Medical trauma can occur when a child is subjected to a procedure that they don’t understand or to folks of any age when tests are being done which aren’t explained. Medical trauma can also become present when a patient isn’t listened to or doesn’t have their wishes respected. Sometimes something as “small” as lack of eye contact, touch and affirming words can cause trauma in a medical atmosphere.
I recently had the experience of having to go to a hospital in Spain. My doctor who spoke English rushed me through my assessment missing the vital information I was giving her about the over two weeks of symptoms I had just experienced. Many of the clues to my diagnosis were there inside my story, but Instead of listening, and even after showing no pain during her brief exam of stretches, she decided that I had sciatica. When I insisted I didn’t, she sent me through the machine of hospital operations from pain medication injection (which didn’t work to X-ray which I didn’t need or want and eventually refused.
In between, a variety of folks who I assume were nurses and who didn’t speak English took blood and urine. I tried to ask questions but there was a lot of running around and it was impossible to find someone to speak with me. All I could see was that everyone from the nauseous guy next to me to the guy with gout on the other side was getting the same treatment. It was finally when they were wheeling me to X-ray and I saw my husband who hadn’t been allowed in with me that I had the supportive energy that allowed me the confidence to say no to the X-ray and ask for an English speaking representative. I was made to sign documents that I was refusing treatment and was sent away with a prescription for pain meds. It was not until I was about to leave the hospital that the doctor came and found me having realized my true diagnosis which required antibiotics and could have soon become dangerously serious.
I’m still waking up thinking about it all.
This is not the first time I’ve experienced medical trauma. Birth trauma is another experience that sticks with me. Birth trauma had such an impact, that I’m feeling activated / triggered now as I begin to write this. After months of preparing with a doula and birth classes for a “natural“ birth, I was rushed to be induced when it was determined the baby inside me had no fluid around her. This came after some other stressful and frankly traumatic encounters in pregnancy including having the only hospital adjacent both center in my area shut down,I was actually excited to be induced and start moving forward finally as a mom.
Induction however in a hospital setting starts a whole chain of practices and procedures that severely limit birth choice. I had to be constantly hooked up to machines with chords so short that whenever I changed position even in the slightest it set off alarms to the nurses who dutifully entered and reset the attachments. This was brutal medical trauma as I was really committed to laboring in squatting and other non reclining positions. My only choice was to lay or stand. I stood a lot next to the machine. It wasn’t fun or productive for labor and towards the end when no doctors or nurses were there and it was just myself, my husband, and my dula I ended up in squat and cat/cow positions on my bed moving my way until the final birthing team arrived. Things got even more dramatic then but I’ll spare you the details.
I do still wake up some days and I’m brought to tears wondering how birthing my daughter could have been different.
Those days I work with trauma sensitive embodiment tools to process the birth trauma I still feel in my body.
If you’ve experienced medical trauma or birthing trauma it may take some time to trust folks in the medical field. Having an advocate with you, can help a lot. In both cases it was my husband who was able to give me the loving care and the permission to use my voice in the way I needed to feel safer.
Have you dealt with medical or birthing trauma? Let me know in the comments below.
by Lara Land | Aug 1, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND
I’ve probably mentioned this already, but my husband always says that a person’s opinion is the least interesting thing about them. I think that’s about the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.
In a social media driven world overrun with opinions, I’m left constantly wondering if any of the folks I encounter spouting their strong AF views ever give any consideration to the positionality and life-experience they are coming to those from. Or do some actually believe they are neutral, blank canvases? I know the Supreme Court would have us think they are though it is so obviously not true.
In fact, the United States great lie is that there is this fair neutral view which is why so many of us are going great lengths to call it out as biased and blind and supportive of white, male, able-bodied needs and desires.
It’s not only our views, but our way of thinking which we are addicted to.
By the time we are adults, the way we process information, weigh priorities and outcomes and come to conclusions is all habitual, feels good and right and we are addicted to it.
We are affirmed in our addiction by our peers and circles and followers who tend to think as we do, creating what is commonly called the echo chamber.
New ways of thinking are harder to come by in later years when we are less exposed to the new frameworks and paradigms we get at school. We have to seek out more fringe ideas, philosophies and teachers and listen to folks who think differently, trying on their thinking and working through thought exercises and giving our brains a good stretch.
This is something I have enjoyed doing via podcasts I listen to which in the past years have led me down many different styles of thinking but most notably, metamodernist thought projects and system change queries. I am so grateful.
Nikki Myers, the latest speaker on the Beyond Trauma podcast, is known for her work combining the twelve step program with yoga to help folks with addiction. However, her knowledge and practices are actually so much more than that. The way she explains and curtails addiction goes all the way to the way we think.
Take a listen on iTunes or Spotify and leave me a review to let me know what you think!
by Lara Land | Jul 25, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
– Marianne Williamson
As many of you who have followed my life-coaching writing and posting up through now undoubtedly know, one of the teachings I repeat again and again in my life-coaching work is that there is always a pay off one is receives from any habitual feeling or action that continues to cling long after it has surpassed its helpfulness.
It is an illusion that one goes from growth to growth.
Understanding the reward we are addicted to and accepting its loss, is necessary to gain the next level of personal growth.
This is true of all long term emotional states including insecurity.
Insecurity may come from a variety of roots including parental figures whose psychologies craved the neediness and dependance of a child even as the child matured. Or it could stem from teachers and other influential adults who also gained in power through nurturing doubt in their subordinates. In more recent years insecurity has been produced and nurtured through social media where the illusion of others’ success creates impossible goals and expectations.
Regardless of the root cause, insecurity continues through adulthood, like all other undesirable habits, by choice, when we are unable to face the fear of how others may react to us if we hold our power…
…or because of false notions that if we stand in our self security we can’t also make and own mistakes.
…or because there is a reward we receive for playing small and insecure that we are afraid to give up.
That reward is the reassurance of others that we are good, smart, strong, pretty, etc etc.
If you are someone who deals with regular, long-term insecurity, ask yourself what reward you would have to let go of to let the insecurity go. Is it the ability to escape scrutiny? The avoidance of risk? Reassurance? Excused immobility?
Once you understand the pay off for any hard to break habit, you can decide consciously if you are ready to go there and let both the habit and the reward go.
Let me know how this worked for you!
Helping my life-coaching clients to understand and break patterns for the long-term is one of my greatest joys. If you think you can benefit from life-coaching, consider joining me for my Women’s Realignment Retreat this October 7th-9th where you will receive both group and individual coaching or message me to discuss ongoing private coaching openings for fall.
I can’t wait to help you grow!
by Lara Land | Jul 18, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND
When we think of trauma our minds usually go to a single traumatic event like a crash or natural disaster, but traumatic stress actually goes way beyond this limited definition. There are medical traumas, trauma produced when we witness a violence and can’t act, and there is the trauma of lack when needs are not met, especially in childhood.
In some ways, we are more likely to get the care we require after a single traumatic event than when an ongoing disempowerment is taking place. Ongoing traumas are often hidden or when they are exposed, minimalized in deeply unhelpful ways.
A traumatic response in our systems may occur anytime we are unable to act, get away, or metabolize the traumatic event and instead must hold in the tension of the flight or fight we desire to enact so deeply as our evolutionary response. This happens regularly to folks who experience racial trauma and it stresses the body to levels which often produce negative health outcomes.
Many of us will have experienced traumatic stress from covid and our inability to flee or be together in ways that we are so drawn to when fighting a common enemy. Even if we weren’t in the worst of situations when covid hit, it’s important not to minimize the impact that delayed response has had on our bodies.
Making sure to check in with yourself and if possible with your patterns to get to know what might be lurking below the surface “I’m fine” is essential for making sure your trauma isn’t passed on to others. In some ways our self work is our basic responsibility and it’s the work my next Beyond Trauma podcast guest, Dr. Liz Cohen is so familiar with and good at.
She explains so clearly why what we may be calling little t trauma is actually where some of our biggest challenges lurk and why we shouldn’t shrug off what we’ve all just been through with covid even if we feel as if it is over.
Take a listen on itunes or spotify and as always, please subscribe, rate, and review and comment here with your thoughts!
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