Another year is almost over
and what an exciting year it has been! Over the last
three months, since our official launch in September,
Hove StressBusters have attracted a number of
practitioners who are eager to share their ideas and
skills with the community, offering us different tools
to combat stress.
At this month's session
(7th December 2011),
Jo
Sawyers, a registered cranio-sacral
therapist, presented the theory behind this effective
healing system. Based on whacky experiments conducted at
the beginning of the 20th century by an osteopath, Dr
Sutherland,
which revealed that our cranial (skull) bones move all
the time, as well as on the serendipitous finding by Dr
Upledger in the 1970s that cerebrospinal fluid (the fluid
which surrounds our brain and spinal cord) has its’ own
regular pulse,
cranio-sacral
therapy has evolved into a very complex art of
healing. Like with many such empirically-based
techniques, it is as yet not clear what the true
mechanism of its’ effectiveness is, but many
client
reports as well as a few clinical outcome studies which
have been conducted until now confirm its’ benefits (go
to
www.craniosacral.co.uk for an overview of
research studies). In addition to explaining the origins
of cranio-sacral therapy and its’ relevance to
stress-reduction, Jo also demonstrated a simple
manipulation for releasing tension in the neck and head.
We all had a go at performing this move on each other
and the relaxation was immediate.
After the break, Nikola Goranovic, an NLP Master Practitioner, wingwave® Trainer and Coach and the Co-Founder of INNERNATION Coaching & Development, taught us a simple Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) technique for reducing the volume of our ‘inner critic’, the internal voice which puts us down and reduces our self-confidence and thus the ability to achieve our goals (keep rolling that chocolate bead!). He then guided the group into a hypnotic trance state which helped us to identify a word that we can always think of whenever we want to regain our self-composure in stressful situations. As promised, Nikola has given us the script for this self-hypnotic routine so that we can all learn to use it in daily situations whenever we need to reduce our level of stress and negative thinking (click the link on your right to open and print the script). Finally, we all had the opportunity to witness a mini NLP Life Coaching session with a volunteer in order to familiarize ourselves with the concept of coaching and how a coach may use a client’s own metaphors in order to facilitate their ability to focus and identify steps towards achieving a goal.
We look forward to many more interesting talks and demos, including day-long stress-busting workshops, in 2012.
Wishing you all a
merry Christmas and a wonderful and stress-free New
Year!