I am testing this to see if I can make this my comment page.

Evaluation Tables

 

Notes on Podcast of Dr. Dan Siegal March 28, 2012

The theme of the talk was how we could encourage better brain health and integration in children.  He first described narrative integration, which is important to use after a stressful event.  As a child puts into words a stressful event, the autobiographical sequence allows the child to tap into the visceral sensations in the right brain, and put that into words, which involves the left brain.  He calls this name it to tame it.  The left brain thus become integrated with the right brain.

He emphasizes left and right brain integration as well as  “upstairs” vs.” downstairs” brain integration.  The downstairs brain is the older reactive parts of the brain………the limbic brain, the viscera, etc.  The upstairs brain is the cortex.  The downstairs brain is so influenced by the body and the autonomic nervous system that he includes the autonomic nervous system in his definition of the downstairs brain.  The downstairs brain is responsible for “fight or flight” reactions. 

He calls his discipline interpersonal neural biology, and he draws on many different fields, including psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, physics, and anthropology to draw conclusions about the brain and, relates that to the way the synapses work.

Brain health is based on integration.  He considers the following characteristics to be indicative of brain health: adabtable, flexible, coherent, energizing, stable.  These all come from brain integration.  The healthy brain honors differences and communicates in a kind and compassionate way.

Attention, coordination, and balance are all related to brain health and integration.

The brain that is not integrated well is chaotic and/or rigid.   Toxins, genes and experience can all cause these issues.

Every single DSM (mental health) definition is related to chaos and/or rigidity.

Experience can change the brain.  Mindfulness meditation grows linking fibers between the amygdala and the downstairs brain. 

Mental life is a function of the whole body—the brain includes the distributed nervous system.  That gets some researchers angry, but there is no definition of the mind, which also exists outside the brain.  In fact, the mind is outside the body as well, because the mind can be defined as emergent processes in energy and information flow among people.  This movement is not restricted to the skin.  This movement happens in families and societies, which is why he embraces the disciplines of anthropology and sociology as well as more traditional scientific disciplines.

Relationships inspire kids to focus their intention.  Relationships shape the mind.  There is a deep scientific foundation that relationships have to do with the mind as much as biochemistry in the brain.  The mind is relational and embodied.  Relationships affect the biology.

Here are some strategies that he outlined to help a child integrate their brain:

Connect and Redirect—Rather than correcting a child when the child is upset,  affirm their feelings and redirect their attention to a strategy to deal with situations

Name it to tame it –That was the first example given, of parents talking to a child and getting them to verbalize a stressful event, which helps them integrate the experience and be able to deal with it.

Engage, don’t enrage—Parenting has to do with reaching stability between the parent and child, not becoming enraged with behavior.

Use it or lose it- Study attachment, and be awake to who you are, and how your own experiences shaped you.  That will better inform your decisions on parenting.

Move the body and let go of energy—Children need to move. That is  important for well being and neuroplasticity. 

Using imagery to change the brain— There is a wheel of awareness at his website.  Some kids feel passive at whatever happens in their lives, but using imagery keeps kids away from being on automatic pilot.  If they are sad, they can move one spoke over on the wheel so that they can engage different emotions.  This is empowerment, because they have control over their feelings.  The wheel of awareness helps them visualize this switch.  

Remember to remember--we all have experience what we know from memory integration, if we use focused attention, that activates hippocampus, puzzle piece of assembly of memory.  Ask child to articulate memory of an event , which allows pieces of memory to be integrated together. Memory talk with kids makes kids remember better, drawing on all parts of brain to remember!!

Clouds of emotion—Use this metaphor when talking to kids about their emotions.  Clouds come and go, and so do their emotional states.  They will understand it when the metaphor is used because it anchors the mental life to the physical world.   There is better emotional intelligence when emotion is discussed with a child.

Family Fun Factor—It is important for kids to experience joy through family experiences.  

It is important when parenting to identify triggers.  He did not know how to deal with his son as an infant because crying brought back to him all the vulnerabilities of children that caused him a lot of stress in his internship as a pediatrician.  It is important to recognize triggers like this.

Still, a few people seem to have missed out on the slideshow because either they have a Mac and didn't want to download a VLC player, or because the time limit on the file storage site ran out before they downloaded it, or they saw the post too late. 

For those of you who would like to use the demo version of the slideshow, please first read all the posts here about it, and how to use it, and then email me at meditationslideshow@comcast.net .

I will send you a password protected place where you can view the slideshow online without downloading it.  I hope this works for everyone.

Pauline

Now that I realize that some people are using the demo for issues with various foods, I thought I would go into a bit more detail with some suggestions that might be helpful..   Keep in mind that the slideshow is a demonstration and this should not be taken as any type of protocol.  Therefore I really need feedback on how this works. 

Address only one food issue at a time.

Begin a food at night before you go to bed, with the headphones on.

Hold the actual food in your hand while you play the slideshow, if possible.  If not, look at a picture of the food.

The slideshow should be played during the day the next day, but without the sound, or with the sound very low, so you don’t get sleepy during the daytime. 

If you like, you can add an EFT type affirmation, “Even though I react negatively to this food item, and it currently weakens my energy fields, I am able to access various resources that I have within, and process the information from this food in a reasonable manner, and I am able to love myself completely while I am in the presence with this food.” (insert the name of the food and hold the food).

Most likely the last time you will need to play the slideshow is the following night, with the headphones on.  Note that generally the process ends just a little longer than twenty four hours.

Skip at least one day before going on to the next food item.

If you use a pendulum, or can do self muscle testing, it is extremely helpful to check what foods cause your energetic fields to weaken.  After watching the slideshow in the above protocol, the muscle testing results/pendulum results should change.  

If you come in contact with the food in any way during the period in which you are playing the slideshows for the food, you must be sure to play the slideshow within about fifteen minutes.

Keep in mind that some foods can be broken down into various parts, and it might be helpful for you to break them down into various components.

As an example, sugar is quite complex.  People think of sucrose, but what about fructose, lactose, glucose, etc.?  Those might need to be treated separately.  Those that use pendulums or muscle testing will be able to tell if they can process all sugar molecules at once, or address them separately.  Those that don’t may need to treat all the sugar molecules, one at a time.   Rather than looking at a photo of the food item, it is helpful to focus on the actual chemical formula.  You can find these with Google image searches.  You can use such terms as “sucrose chemical formula”.  Websites like this come up.  http://www.1279honey.com/articles/a_honeyanalysis.asp    Look at the chemical formula for the particular sugar that you would like to treat as you are clearing it. 

There are various protocols for “allergy elimination” that use similar techniques, but they require practitioners, appointments and money.  Furthermore they are mislabeled, because though they do address energy reactions, and that may in turn influence allergies, allergies have a particular physical meaning.   These are not physical treatments, but energetic balancing.

You may be able to obtain information about these protocols by looking for the particular orders in which they treat foods, for example, or ordering workbooks.  The whole idea behind all protocols like this is to change a negative muscle test response for a food to a positive one.   In doing this, the conditioned "cringing" that we have subconsciously learned while in contact with that item subsides.  I would say going through a protocol could be a bit difficult without being able to get yes/no answers in some way, but you could just do a little overkill, treating an item for two days instead of one, for instance, and breaking up things like sugars into the component parts.   In any case I would love to know how it goes.

Thanks everyone!  Filemail and I (from my personal email account) just sent those who emailed me a new link for the location of the  MeditationSlideshow file "Remove Personal Energetic Blockages".  It is only available at this site for three days, so please download it soon, and let me know if you have any difficulties.  This promotion is over.    I would love for you to contact me with your impressions or suggestions regarding this demonstration slideshow. 

Pauline

Since only one day is gone and all 15 copies are gone are also, I'll extend this free offer through Monday.   I will probably be using a new file sharing service, though,and I may have to send the links through email.  If you missed out on the first fifteen, just contact me by private message, or you can email me at meditationslideshow@comcast.net   and send me your email address.  Either Tuesday or Wednesday I will upload it and email you with the link. 

 I am editing this to reiterate that, should you decide to email me for a free demo copy, please ONLY use the email linked above.  I just tested it and it worked for me.  Someone said they emailed me, and I did not receive it.  I don't know what email account they used or where they found it.
Thanks everyone.  I tried to make this post as short as possible to limit the number of typos and grammatical mistakes I invariably make as a non-blogger.

Your non-blogger,

Pauline