NEW FILM - The Connection: Minding Your Body

Heya, Caninesense, welcome to our forum!!

This movie looks terrific! The expert list is quite impressive, full of scientists with very impressive credentials. We need something like this!

Here's the trailer for anyone who's interested. It's definitely also worth clicking on caninesense's link to check out the expert list, if you like that type of thing.

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Thanks for sharing!!!

 

"...if you like that type of thing"

Huh?

 

LOL, Forest

I am very interested in seeing this, it's the kind of thing that can really help spread the word.

 

That's so true, Walt. I found a fascinating clip from the producers about a little town called Roseto:

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It very much touches upon your point - both in terms of how things have changed (you would know!) and in terms of how important community is.

 

I signed up for emails from the website, which are enjoyable - today's email links to a February blog post from Shannon Harvey (she's the director of the movie). It contains great information from Dr. Howard Benson of the Relaxation Response:

This was a break through moment in my own healing journey. Doctors had told me that my autoimmune disease was genetic in nature, that I just had bad genes and there wasn’t much to be done. But here was a professor of medicine from Harvard telling me that even the expression of the genes causing my illness could be changed. The next question I had was how could I ensure that I was evoking the relaxation response when I meditated and the answer was remarkably simple.

When we meditate we’re encouraged to focus our attention on just one thing such as our breath, or sensations in the body, or the sounds around us. When other thoughts rise up, we’re encouraged to let them go and return to our focused awareness. According to Dr. Benson’s research, this is central to evoking the relaxation response in the body. “The two basic features of evoking the relaxation response are a repetition and the disregard of other thoughts when they come to mind. And what those two things do is break the train of everyday thinking,” says Benson.

Dr. Benson explains that it’s often the train of everyday thinking that is causing stress in our lives. We’re worried about things that have happened in our past or may happen in our future and those thoughts are causing stress chemicals and hormones to be released in our body.

When Dr. Benson returned to the literature of the world to see whether these two steps that are breaking the train of everyday thinking had been described before, he was astonished to find that every single culture of human kind had these two steps. “There’s a commonality. So if a person argues my technique or my religion is better for bringing this forth than another, it’s foolish because it’s a bodily response. Just as there are scores of techniques that are stressful – same fight or flight response – so there are scores of approaches that evoke the relaxation response,” he says.

 

Thanks for sharing that, Jan. I just signed up for their email list as well. It sounds really interesting.

Herbert Benson runs a mind-body institute in Boston at the Mass General Hospital. They have a two day conference every year that is really stunningly good. (Last year Jon Kabat-Zinn, the pioneer of scientifically demonstrating the positive effects of mindfulness meditation, was the the keynote, but there were many other excellent speakers as well.) They also have a structured educational program of their own that I hope to attend. It can be paid for by insurance and because they've been doing it for so long, they have some amazing institutional knowledge in the people (primarily women) who run the institute. It is a terrific mixture of Harvard/MGH-level science and an open-minded approach that is willing to try different things and see if they work.

 

I found another excellent video from the movie. Apparently there is evidence to suggest that mind-body approaches to calm the stress response, including the autonomic nervous system can double the chances of successful infertility treatment.

Here's the short version:

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And the extended version: (also good)

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One thing I liked in this video and the Roseto video above was the emphasis on social support. It's completely free and connection with other people makes a world of difference.

On the other hand, it makes you a little angry that these ideas aren't more widely known. Could the problem be that mind body treatments are too cheap? Our nonprofit shows that a huge amount of services can be offered for free, but that also means that people will have a hard time making money providing mindbody services. If there are no revenues in mindbody, then all of the marketing money and attention goes to things that are more profitable. Right?

 

Absolutely right, Forest. And I wish there was an alternative to "Liking" a post - I totally agree with your post, but I don't like it! (Well, I'm sure the video is good - haven't watched it yet ) This issue makes me very frustrated and angry as well.

~Jan

 

Those are really terrific points, Ellen. I love the way that you challenge me to refine my thinking. Dialogue like this is, I think, the high point of what a forum can be, and as our forum matures, (it's still a toddler, only 2 years old!) I think we'll be seeing more and more of it, as we attract more and more people who have thought deeply about these subjects.

My dream has always been to build this organization up to be the AA of mindbody/psychosomatic medicine. Early in the process of incorporating, Alan Gordon suggested that I look up other nonprofits to benchmark ourselves against. AA was a clear first candidate. Two others are the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) and Recovery International, two other tremendously inspiring nonprofits.

Because it is the most evidence based, I think the DBSA is the best model for us, going forward. It is an incredibly inspiring organization. They have more than 700 peer-led chapters worldwide:
http://www.dbsalliance.org/site/PageServer?pagename=peer_what_they_do
The Boston chapter has events every week at the famous Maclean and Mass General hospitals, serving about 150 people a week in about 13 breakout groups, with no cost of admission. For their facilitators, they have therapist-led trainings twice a year and mentoring after that. I attended one of their trainings and have been very impressed by their evidence-based approach.