Healing Combat Trauma

"Yoga for the Nervous System: Healing Anxiety, Insomnia and PTSD"

The above title -- promising, no?! let's hope it also delivers -- is the name of a "weekend intensive" class being given in mid-November at the famous Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the Berkshires (Western Massachusetts, close to the New York border.)  Information about the class is linked here.

(For more links to blog posts where we've talked about yoga and PTSD, click here. For more about the larger topic of mind-body medicine, which includes yoga, click here. For more on a yet still more comprehensive topic, PTSD and Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which includes mind-body medicine, click here.)

According to the Kripalu Center's brochure:

"Unlock the power of your mind-body network to relax your physical body, calm your mind, and quiet your nervous system.  Conditions such as anxiety, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) involve hyperarousal of the nervous system along with the mental, emotional and physical [aspects of our] bodies.  If this activation becomes chronic, the neuro-emotional patterns that result can compromise your physical health, emotional well-being, and creative potential.

Fortunately, the neural pathways to relaxation and calm exist in each one of us.  Those pathways simply need to be discovered and activated repeatedly to alter the state of the nervous system.

This transformative weekend intensive will include:

• Elemental Yoga, a transformative, therapeutic, alignment-based, slow vinyasa practice;
• Meditation;
• Restorative yoga; and
• Pranayama (breathing) exercises designed to balance the nervous system and emotional [aspects of the] body;

Psychologist and yoga therapist Bo Forbes will draw from her extensive experience in clinical psychology and mind-body therapeutics to help you learn to activate the neural pathway[s] to relaxation and catalyze the emergence of your extraordinary inner potential.

About Bo Forbes:
Bo Forbes, PsyD, E-RYT500, is a leading clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, and yoga therapist in the Boston area.  She is the founder of Elemental Yoga, director of the Center for Integrative Yoga Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a contributing writer for Yoga Journal and Body & Soul magazines. 

(There's also an interesting interview with Bo Forbes on the topic of "Narrowing the Gap between Insight and Change: Yoga, Psychotherapy and the Body," linked here.

NOTE: The class says it is for those with "some yoga experience" as a pre-requisite.

Editor's note: For general yoga instructional videos, or yoga for stress videos, see thefollowing, mentioned in the sidebar (column to the left): Gaiam: Yoga For Beginners; Gaiam: Yoga for Stress Relief (With The Dalai Lama); Gaiam: AM/PM Yoga For Beginners (with The Dalai Lama & 10 Routines); and Yoga Journal: Yoga Journal's Yoga for Stress With Dr. Baxter Bell.

Heroes at Home: Emory University Research Project on PTSD

[Editor's note: If this post is a little bit mystifying, it's only because the specifics of this project are a little unclear.]

The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life ("MARIAL") near Atlanta, Georgia, has a research project underway called Heroes at Home?: Experiences of Combat Trauma among Returning Veterans and Their Families

According to the website,

This research uses a combination of ethnographic and epidemiological methods to consider lived experiences of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American male veterans of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. F ieldwork in San Antonio, Texas will explore how PTSD-diagnosed male veterans and their families understand and respond to trauma-related mental illness, as well as how PTSD illness experiences are shaped by individual and family members’ met and unmet expectations of veterans’ military service and performance of adult male roles within the family, particularly as related to work and economic providership. Interviews and participant observation conducted in clinical, family, and community settings will consider how veterans and their families situate lived experiences of PTSD, combat trauma, and personal and family well-being in the context of lay and clinical ethnopsychiatries around PTSD, expectations and experiences of military service in the “War on Terror,” and cultural norms for successfully functioning as an adult male. Findings will provide insight into individual- and family-level negotiations around illness, work, and gender roles; the negotiation of explanatory models of illness within pluralist cultural settings; and the ways in which cultural representations of war and PTSD are adopted, resisted, and lived out by a multiethnic group of participants.

By examining how patterns of work and socioeconomic status shape the experience of individuals and families dealing with combat-related PTSD, this research contributes to research on working families already ongoing at the MARIAL Center. The planned study will elaborate a multifaceted and diachronic view of how work is done and made sense of within families whose expectations and practices have been shaped by past military work, who have suffered the disruptions of long-term deployment, and whose well-being remains enduringly altered as a result.

Erin Finley, from the Department of Anthropology at Emory University, seems to be conducting the  research study.  Her contact information is available on the website, linked here.

Blogged Reports from Brown Conference

For those of you who like me are crying salty tears about missing what sounds like it was a stupendous conference at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island over the weekend, here are a couple of first-person reports from the same blogger about what the conference was like to attend. It really sounds fantastic.  I still wish I'd been able to go.  (Sigh.)  (The conference was on first person narratives coming back from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, featuring many of the authors who wrote them, as well as interested others.)

First person report about the events of the first day; first person report about the events of the second day.  (Referencing those blog posts here does not imply an endorsement of the rest of the blog's contents -- I'm particularly interested in, as I hope you would be, the impressions from going to that conference itself.)

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If you've never seen "The War Tapes," by Deborah Scranton, one of the featured speakers at the conference, now might be a good time to try to find it on DVD.  Scranton is a filmmaker who put video cameras in the hands of various New Hampshire National Guard members, as the war in Iraq was beginning, and asked them to record what they saw, with the permission of their superiors.  What came back was some interesting footage, which she put together into a documentary that covers how three "regular guys" go to Iraq and get changed by the experience.  I saw the film at one of its first screenings on Cape Cod last year, met one of the featured participants, Sgt. Steve Pink, and really was impressed.  Apparently Scranton was a live wire at the conference, and one of it's most interesting participants.  (Here's a link to Scranton's blog, which includes a link to buying the DVD.) (The movie has since gone on to win a number of awards, including "Best Documentary," Tribeca Film Festival, and "Best International Documentary," BritDoc Festival.)