Resilience: Taking the Strain and Coming Back Stronger

Presented by Tom Myers

No one lives a stress-free life.  The question is: how to handle it in a health enhancing manner, rather than having it slowly break down your resilience.  Resilience is a state of the body that reflects into your state of mind.  New understandings of how our whole systems act and interact, gives us new methods of self-regulation and energy management.

This course is designed to build your own resilience, and help you recognize the signs of distress and growing resilience in your students, patients, or clients.

Where is your shoe nailed to the floor?  Deep grief, trauma, long illness, a constant frustration – all of these can sap your resilience.  Structural, physiological, and psychological health are all related – and all work through elasticity and plasticity – in the nervous system, the chemical system, and the myofascial system.

Using the breath, stretching, awareness meditation, and focused attention, we will explore the limits of the neural, biochemical, and fascial ‘whole-body’ systems:  how to make stress work for you, what to do to lessen distress, increase balance, and have the most resilient system you can have.  

We’ve heard of IQ, and most of us have heard of EQ – Emotional Intelligence – but what about KQ – Physical Intelligence?  Understand plasticity in the body on a global level to make the best use of our organismic responses to life situations.

Objectives:

We will explore the questions and learn:

• What is the job of the nervous system?  Neurological development, coordination, and alarm responses
• What are stress, distress, and ‘eustress’, and how can we use them?
• What are our biochemical limits?  Slow poisoning and recognizing its chronic effects
• What happens in injury and recovery? The fascial system and various forms of remodeling tissue
• What happens in trauma? Breaking sensori-motor amnesia and reaching resolution
• How can we build resilience through movement, nutrition, and simple meditative practice?

Come away with a sense of bodily resilience, how to assess it in your clients, and put it to work in a bodywork or movement practice.

Get in touch if you have questions about this course.