Blog

Help for Kids with PTSD

Recently John Christoffersen wrote in the Huffington Post that mothers are still struggling to calm their children after the Sandy Hook disaster. Even though the children have been moved to a different school and have received the best counseling available, the children and teachers are still spooked by loud noises, which make them think another intruder has entered their school. Nightmares and trouble concentrating are other problems that linger.

Between 8 to 15 percent of those who experience traumas such as mass shootings develop PTSD, said Russell Jones, a psychology professor at Virginia Tech who counseled survivors of a mass shooting at his school. Fortunately, about half of them no longer have the symptoms after three months, he said.

Wellness in Children Takes More than Wishful Thinking

When you look at health statistics for children, there is a heartbreaking trend toward more disease during the past two decades. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control tell us that 9.5% of children currently have asthma, 8.4% have been diagnosed with ADHD, and a shocking 18% are not just overweight, but clinically obese.

In a recent Huffington Post piece, “The Last Well Child,” pediatrician Lawrence Rosen, M.D., remarks that he recently saw a healthy child in his office, which was such an unusual event that it got him thinking. He wonders if our health care system isn’t actually a disease-treatment system in disguise—and with so much emphasis on labeling, classifying and treating disease, we are doing our children (and ourselves) a great disservice.

Nothing Depressing About That

It turns out I have a job that puts me at risk for depression. Writers, artists and other creatives are on a list of the top ten jobs linked to depression posted on Health.com in 2012. Understandably, caregivers, health-care workers and teachers are in the top ten, but writers? The article cites irregular paychecks, uncertain hours, and isolation as stressful elements of the job. Creative people may also have higher rates of mood disorders, with 9 percent reporting an episode of major depression in the previous year.

From another perspective, just being a woman puts me at risk for depression. Nearly twice as many women suffer from depression than men, research shows, most likely because the female brain is wired in a way that makes women more susceptible to stress. Women are affected by lower levels of stress than men, produce more stress hormones than men and recover from stress less quickly.

Fear of Change and the Field of Changelessness

Right around the time I learned how to meditate, I read a haiku from the sixth century AD:

He creeps along the log in fear and trembling,
He does not know that the bridge is flowing and the water is not.

For some reason, this haiku rang bells for me. Somehow I had always intuited the truth of this haiku in my own life—that what we experience from day to day and year to year in our lives is ever changing and impermanent. However what lies within us and at the basis of the ever-changing universe is non-changing eternity. Fear of falling off the log is based on a false image of what is real and what isn’t.

Birds of a feather flock together!

Sometimes women love to spend time with women, men with men, just as sometimes children with children, teenagers with teenagers. It’s natural. Can we use that time of getting together with other women to enhance our spiritual lives and to improve the world on a deeper level?

Today women comprise more than half of the workforce in America, and many of those women are also the main caregivers for their family. Coming home at the end of a workday and attending to children, household chores and preparing a meal can be overwhelming. As women, we often put other’s needs before our own, yet taking some time to nourish our self is often the best way to both nourish our family and be most efficient in our responsibilities.

Balancing Family and Work—Can Women Have It All?

Last year “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” was one of the most popular articles on The Atlantic’s website (www.theatlantic.com)—and nearly a year later it’s still getting a lot of attention. Clearly, it hit

American Heart Association Advises Doctors to Prescribe TM for Hypertension

I’ll never forget Maggie, one of the first women I taught to practice the Transcendental Meditation technique. As a young TM teacher in the 1970s, I was feeling less stressed and happier with daily meditation,

Transcendence and the Third Metric

This article was featured on the Huffington Post’s Less Stress, More Living page.

Stuck inside during a rainy weekend in the mountains of North Carolina, I was happy to discover Huffington Post’s webcast entitled, “The Third Metric: Redefining Success Beyond Money and Power.”

Is the Mediterranean Diet the Only Way to Lower Heart Disease Without Drugs?

Heart disease used to be considered a men’s ailment. With women balancing more pressures at work and at home, cardiovascular disease now affects more women than men, and is responsible for 40 percent of all deaths in American women.

Clearly, preventing and lowering heart disease is something every woman needs to think about, for her own health and her family’s. A recent research study showing that the Mediterranean diet lowers heart disease is a huge breakthrough in natural solutions to heart disease. The five-year study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that people age 55 to 80 who ate a Mediterranean diet—including vegetables, fruits, nuts and olive oil—had 30 percent fewer heart attacks and stroke than control groups that ate a tlow-fat diet or a typical red-meat and junk food American diet.

Stilling the Mental Chatter

A writer friend recently asked me if the TM technique would still the mental chatter that never shuts off in her brain. I said “yes,” because quieting the mind is a direct result of transcending. And it’s definitely been my own experience.

Most self-help books will advise you to control negative thoughts—or any incessant brain noise such as obsessing about what other people say or do or what they think about us. Yet as we all know, it’s not easy to control thoughts. They pop up whether we want them to or not. Whether we’re obsessing on something embarrassing we just said or did, or worse, about something sad or tragic that has happened to us, negative thoughts seem to get louder the more we try to turn them off.