Peace of mind and a relaxed body is key to healing. Worry, anxiety, fear, and depression interfere with the normal functioning of the heart, lungs, stomach, and intestines. When you feel physically and mentally disturbed, the best thing you can do is to practice techniques to relax, and calm your thought processes.

Progressive Relaxation: Relaxation is an antidote to the taxing effects of unrelieved stress, a significant factor in most modern illnesses. This procedure will familiarize you with the muscles in your body that are most commonly tense. Learning to relax is fundamental to self-healing and allows your body to channel its energy into repair and restoration and provides respite from habitual patterns of tension. Through repetitive practice you quickly learn to recognize and distinguish the associated feelings of a tensed muscle and a completely relaxed muscle. With this simple knowledge, you can then induce physical muscular relaxation at the first signs of tension to keep yourself in a calm state of being.

The Relaxation Response: In the late 1960s, Harvard Medical School's Mind/Body Medical Institute President, Herbert Benson, M.D. found that there was a counterbalancing mechanism to the fight-or-flight response. The Relaxation Response is a physical state of deep rest that changes the physical and emotional responses to stress (e.g., decrease in heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension). If practiced regularly, it can have lasting effects when encountering stress throughout the day and can improve health. Learning the Relaxation Response can work more directly on the damaging hormonal effects of stress while also providing clients with a sense of control over their lives and thoughts.

Breathing Exercises: When we are in a constant state of tension our sympathetic nervous systems (fight-or-flight nervous system) takes over. Chronic over-stimulation by the sympathetic nervous system can cause a multitude of diseases from cardiac arrhythmias and hypertension to imbalances of the immunity, and gastrointestinal ailments, and is associated with anxiety. When the parasympathetic nervous system is dominant (a person is relaxed physically and mentally) the heart rate slows, blood pressure falls, circulation is balanced throughout, digestive organs work smoothly and metabolism and immunity are optimal. Breathing techniques become a very powerful means of eliciting the Relaxation Response that gets more effective over time.

Self-hypnosis or Self-relaxation: Self-hypnosis/relaxation is a wonderful way to start creating helpful changes in your life. Learning self-hypnosis lets you deeply relax anytime, anywhere.

Imagery: The brain does not distinguish between what is real and what is imagined - imagery can be used to empower outcomes. Imagery is said to be the language of the brain. In order to effectively deliver messages to the brain we must use the language that our brain understands the best. Long before language was invented, human beings used images, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes to form their abstract thoughts. These modes of thinking are known as our 'representational systems' and help us to send strong messages to the subconscious mind which are far more powerful than words.

Additional Tools: We have some remarkable new techniques that can bring down stress, reduce fear, and transform powerlessness much more quickly than we could in the past. Remember, every individual is different and it is the client’s choice which tools to pick up and practice.

Therapeutic Touch - Quantum Touch - Energy Work: Two decades ago, Delores Kreiger introduced Therapeutic Touch which is being widely used by nurses in hospitals today. Life-force energy is considered the blueprint, the communication, the invisible foundation for the health of your body. This life-force has been acknowledged and utilized by numerous cultures around the world for thousands of years. With energy work it is believed that your body is made of energy pathways and energy centers that are in an active relationship with your cells, organs, moods, and thoughts. These energies include electromagnetic impulses, such as those that can be recorded by an MRI or EEG. When you shift these energies, you can influence your health.

Spirituality: A good deal of research shows that a strong spiritual belief system has many advantages for health and Well Being. The imagination can be divided into mental processes (thoughts, memories, ideas, learning) and spiritual processes (intuition, gut feelings, answers to prayers, messages received during times of contemplation). I will always work with anyone’s particular spiritual beliefs to enhance their healing.

Movement: Various physical poses, stretches, and exercises help in a variety of ways to heal and relax the body.