Trauma and using mind-body healing to treat it has long been of interest to me. So I was especially pleased to come across an interview with Bessel Van der Kolk, a leading expert on trauma and mind-body healing with Krista Tippet on her program On Being. He was speaking about the treatment of trauma and what was necessary for treatment and healing to be successful.He feels that it is absolutely essential to have methods that address the mind-body connection in order for healing to be effective and return wholeness to a person living with the profound effects of trauma. Yoga is one of the methods that Dr. Van der Kolk is especially helpful to integrate in a successful approach to healing. Nowhere is this more profoundly demonstrated than in the story of Mathew Sanford.
The excerpt below is from an interview with Matthew Sanford, a yoga teacher paralyzed from the chest down since he was 13 years old. If anyone can speak from personal experience about the power of the mind-body connection and what happens to it with trauma it is this man.There is something to be learned here re: the mind body connection and energy, but perhaps even more there is deep wisdom and counsel about embracing self acceptance and compassion no matter what wounds we may be recovering from.
Mr. Sanford: (reading) In principle, my experience is not so different from yours, it is only more extreme. My mind-body relationship changed in an instant the time it took for my back to break. But the changing relationship between mind and body is a feature of everyone’s life. We are all leaving our bodies this is the inevitable arc of living. Death cannot be avoided; neither can the inward silence that comes with the aging process.
I now experience a different, more subtle connection between mind and body. It does not require that I flex muscles. It does not dissipate in the presence of increasing inward silence.
It does require, however, that I seek more profoundly within my own experience and do so with an open mind. It means that I must reach intuitively into what may feel like darkness.
Read the entire interview here: http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=5027
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