Slow breathing is the most direct and dependable strategy for calming your mind that comes to mind. When in doubt about what to do to create more clarity, calm, or focus, I'll remind myself, hopefully sooner than later, to breathe more slowly. I say that it's 'almost'...

There's very encouraging news for individuals who are willing to devote some time to self-care with an inner, self-regulation practice. Not only does the inner practice produce more emotional balance and ease, but it also creates measurable biological changes. A...

Do you have a belief that love, compassion, and cooperation are viable avenues, possibly the only way forward, for healing our social and political division? If that's true for you, do you often feel at odds with a larger cultural bias towards opposition and division?...

Whether you're highly sensitive or not, everyone gets triggered emotionally. The sensitive folks just have a lower threshold. Once we're triggered we tend to react in predictable ways. From an autonomic nervous system perspective, we tend to react by running,...

It's a scientific fact (backed by decades of neuroscience research) that you can change your brain to positively influence how you think, feel, and behave. Regardless of what's happened to you (and to your brain) in the past, today is the day you can begin to update...

Life has always been more challenging for highly sensitive people. We feel more of everything and that means more emotional pain as well. And who wants more of that?  And that’s the problem. Nobody wants emotional pain, especially the highly sensitive person (HSP). We...

A wise doctor said, "If the patient believes they can heal they're absolutely correct, and on the other hand, if the patient believes they cannot heal .... they're absolutely correct". I'm not sure about the absoluteness of that statement, but in general it's a good...

I was introduced to Tapping in 1983 by my friend and chiropractor Dr. Craig Williams. In those early days of Tapping it was called Thought Field Therapy, or TFT. I found the process to be very helpful with phobias, addictive behaviors, anxiety, and especially for...

Have you noticed that some experiences in your life, often the less pleasant ones, have a habit of repeating? Have you ever asked yourself, why is this happening again? This post will offer insight on how to make sense of these repeating patterns or themes and more...

Speaking of natural healing, Focusing is the most natural and essential healing process I've discovered in my lifelong pursuit of healing and wholeness. Hands down. So, just what is Focusing? For me, it's not really a technique. Although Focusing was discovered at the...

Your body is your subconscious mind and is just waiting for you to connect with it. I'll say more about learning how to listen to your body's healing language a bit later. Your body partitions off and stores intense or traumatic emotional energy as a form of...

I remember a patient from many years ago who was experiencing back pain years after, actually a decade after, she had been injured in an auto accident.  I was treating her with acupuncture and a variety of manual therapies but I was only able to provide her with...

Over the last fifty years I've observed a gradual shift towards including the body in the pursuit of mental, emotional, or spiritual healing. I'm not speaking of the body as an object to be treated but rather as a source of wisdom when we turn our attention to the...

If you've read much about highly sensitive people you’ve seen articles or books suggesting that your sensitivity is a gift.  If it is a gift, the wrapping isn’t very inviting at first glance. And where the heck is the user manual? I’ve spent the better part of my...

The highly sensitive person’s body can be a reliable source of intuition, guidance, and insight if they only knew how to access this information. Complicating this issue is the fact that many HSPs learned early on to mute or ignore bodily felt sensations and feelings...

A challenge for the individual with a more highly sensitive nervous system is learning to live comfortably in the midst of emotional experience. This is important because our response to emotions either enhances or imbalances the functioning of our nervous system and...

Tension is a doorway to the Self for the highly sensitive person, while at the same time tension can be a preamble to pain or other chronic health complaints. The less conscious we are of tension, say in our low back, belly, neck, jaw, or temples, the more likely it...

Before you take that ‘deep therapeutic breath’ you might want to consider a few things about therapeutic breathwork when you're a highly sensitive person. First of all, breathwork can be very therapeutic, especially for HSPs. A gentler, slower, fuller, more rhythmical...

Pain is almost always met with resistance. We tend to fear pain and do our best to create distance between ourselves and the painful experience. When it comes to chronic pain, pain that's lingered for three months or more, this reflexive need to resist pain is...