Here are descriptions of the seven new courses in the PNI series. These will be repeated again next year.
PsychoNeuroImmunology 1 — How Ailments Serve – Optimistic Interviewing
Cost/Credit: 5 CE hours, $100.00 includes handouts.
Course Description:
In 1975 experiments proved that the immune system stops working when the person expects it to stop. Health is affected by what happens in her head. You’ve probably already had the experience of hearing a person’s story, and being able to see how her interpretations, expectations, entitlements, beliefs, attitudes or judgments affect her health. When PNI is explained, many interpret the effect as self-sabotage or psychosomatic illness. However, if the person’s head can deplete her health, it can also boost it or intend greater gifts. How do you help her to have a more positive outlook? You model it. When you believe her ailments serve, she will come to believe it.
During the intake and exit interviews, you are expected to ask about the person’s ailments. The way you ask demonstrates your positive outlook. During the massage, the person may ask you your interpretation of her ailments. To her, her ailments seem malicious. There is an art to empowering her with your interpretations.
Along with group discussion, you will practice modeling the intake and exit interviews with a partner. You will practice giving positive interpretations about dire symptoms. You will practice asking the kind of questions that inspire.
PNI 2: Who Is Guarding The Muscles And Why?
(formerly called, The PsychoNeurology of Muscle Tension)
5 CE Hours-$100.00 includes handouts.
This group discussion workshop is designed to help you understand why the brain guards the muscles. You don’t need to know why, to be a great muscle therapist. But you’re curious. And people keep asking you, why are my muscles tight? The simplest answer is this: the brain has good reasons for deciding to guard each muscle. Each ounce of tension is accounted for. When tension is seen as the enemy, you turn therapy into a battle. You wear yourself out trying to persuade, even force the muscles to relent. Once you understand the brain’s simple needs, and trust its intelligence, muscle therapy becomes a simple, low-stress career. Once you understand the brain’s guarding process, you have better answers when they ask, Why?
Old Course Description:
PNI is the study of how health is influenced by what happens in the person’s mind. Muscles are the most direct reflection of a person’s inner state. Muscles contract during a) current stresses, b) recent stresses not yet resolved, c) unresolved stresses long ago, and d) in aticipation of future stresses. Even tiny stresses below awareness are enough to increase muscle tension. Tension-causing stresses include pain, discomfort, emotions, anxieties, avoidance, boundaries, and more.
Once we know how stress leads to muscle tension, what can a therapist do? 1) Massage is a way muscles may learn to embrace stress, both letting it go today and not tensing up tomorrow. 2) Suggesting movement, isometric contraction, exercise and dance as ways muscles can “burn off” stress. 3) Understanding the causes of muscle tension always helps. 4) Embracing the source of stress is something that a massage therapist can assist with. While we are not counselors, we may ask the person questions about their muscle tension and offer different perspectives.
This class is group discussion with partner communication exercises. You will practice asking your partner about her muscle tension and reframing in terms of the PsychoNeurology of muscle tension.
PNI 3: How Challenge Boosts Vitality
$100.00 / provides 5 CE hours / handouts provided
Course Description:
Eyeglasses weaken people’s eye muscles. Cushy running shoes make the legs weaker and the stride sloppy. What can a therapist learn from this? Too much support makes people weak and dependent. But too much challenge overwhelms them.
In this group discussion workshop, you will learn how to challenge in ways that assist a person to be more relaxed, resilient, vital, and healthy.
Optional further reading, Take Off Your Glasses And See, and Born To Run.
PNI 4: Treating Two People In One
Cost/Credit: $100.00 / provides 5 CE hours
Course Description:
Your client is really two people, the conscious person who wants "more pressure," and the subconscious intelligence that wants the muscles to relax. Most massage therapists are trained to treat only what the conscious person dictates. Seasoned therapists often focus only on what the body "tells" them.
This is a group discussion workshop. You will learn how to give therapy and healing that balances the two people into one whole. If you like, we have time for you to describe people in your practice and receive suggestions.
We will do one exercise where you will chat with a partner.
Extra Credit: what do craniosacral therapy and ouiji board have in common? ..In both, action is created when the subconscious fires weak muscle signals. The movement is directed by intelligence that the conscious people are unaware of, and so seems mysterious. This movement can spell out messages for the conscious person.
PNI 5: Fight or Flight
Cost/Credit: $100.00 / provides 5 CE hours, includes handouts.
Course Description:
We will discuss how to train ourselves and our clients how to live a more natural lifestyle, finding meaning and progress while remaining relaxed.
The fight-or-flight system is a natural reaction to true danger. If you are truly about to be attacked by a bear, you will happily shut down all other systems to have more energy for fighting or fleeing. The FOF system is designed to be active for five minutes, and then to remain in the “off” position until the next survival event.
However, competition and drama activate the FOF system even when there is no danger. If the FOF system remains active for more than five minutes, the body begins to eat its own tissues, normal growths are no longer pruned, and ordinary infections are not fought. The heart races at unsustainable speed, hair, skin, and nails lose their youthful quality.
With all these health risks, why would people choose to be “adrenaline junkies” and “drama queens?” Answer a) Because FOF provides a false sense of meaning and progress. Answer b) the adrenaline and endorphins are addictive.
The FOF system is switched on during any kind of competition, thrill, drama or danger, even if the opponent is imaginary, such as rooting for your football team, or other thrilling TV shows.
People who remain in FOF mode for more than five minutes lose the natural energy support of their immune, digestive, skin, hair and other systems. Prolonged adrenaline has adverse affects including blood pressure and heart trouble.
Massage restores a person to natural settings.
In this group discussion workshop, you will learn: • the allure of FOF • the enervation and hormones of FOF • caffeine good or bad? • pleasure, pain, and inflammation • how sleep is different than rest • massage techniques that restore natural settings • how a massage therapist demonstrates a non-competitive patient lifestyle • how, if and when to recommend lifestyle changes. We will do at least one partner exercise, clothed.
PNI 6: If I Were You… Mirror Neurons and Feeling the Client’s Tension
Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. (one hour break for lunch)
$100/includes handouts by Patrick Moore/provides 5CE hours for AZ LMTs/NCBTMB
(people who do not need certificates may attend for half price)
register through http://arichexperience.com/classes.cfm
late registration after Saturday Sep 28 by calling Patrick 334-8950
Massage Therapists often report resonating with the client, as if they were one with the muscles, hearing and responding to their every need. Therapists often say they try to feel what the other person is feeling. Is it really possible for a therapist to know what another person feels? Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and other Scientists have identified neurons in the brain they call mirror neurons. Your mirror neurons provide you an accurate model of what it is like to be the other person. No other animal has mirror neurons, only humans have them. Mirror neurons account for the ability of healers to truly feel what it is like to be the person on the table.
Once this ability is allowed and recognized, it becomes an important part of improving the therapeutic experience. If you can tune in to how the other person feels, you can adjust for the correct pressure, and find exactly the spot that needs help. You’ll know exactly when that spot is finished and you’ll be guided where to go next. The recipient has mirror neurons too, which allow her to imagine what it is like to be you massaging her, your hands are hers, doing exactly to her what she would direct. When she perceives you as herself, she can then let down her guard. When you give your hands to her brain’s direction, they provide exactly what she needs.
This group-discussion workshop explores your experiences and supports your having more experiences of mirroring and oneness with others.
PNI 7: Pain, Gate Theory, and Signs of Progress
Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.,
$100.00, includes handouts, provides 5 CE hours for AZ LMT/NCBTMB
people who do not need certificates may attend for half price)
register through http://arichexperience.com/classes.cfm
late registration after Saturday November 26 by calling Patrick 334-8950
Course Description
# 7 in the PsychoNeuroImmunology Series
At the brain stem, sensation is filtered. The body is capable of sending, say, hundreds of watts of pain signals up the nerve paths. But the gate allows only ten watts at a time, or less, to pass through. This explains why people reporting their pain on a scale of one to ten, think they are not making progress. It’s still a ten, she says. Why? The one-to-ten scale only reports the amount of pain signal that the gate allowed through. If her body was making 100 watts of pain, she senses this as 10. Over nine weeks you help her reduce her pain to 90, 80, 70, but each time she still feels her pain is at a 10. Only when her body’s sensations send 9 watts or less, will her pain reporting be accurate. The gate is a safety precaution, to keep the person sane. More than a ten would overwhelm her.
With this in mind, we need other ways to monitor her progress. One way that is more accurate is ADLs—asking which activities of daily living she is not able to do. Whenever she loses faith, we remind her of how much of her ADLs she has regained. When she has accurate markers of her progress, she will see what a great job you’ve been doing for her.
This group discussion class allows time for peer feedback and supervision about clients you’ve been working with, time for your questions and perspectives.
Prerequisites: None.
About Your Instructor: Patrick Moore LMT BA was a math teacher and journeyman carpenter before training in massage therapy in 1992-94. Patrick specializes in Osteopathic Techniques. In his free time he searches libraries for rare books and reads. Students say they enjoy Patrick’s warm approach with personal attention. More about Patrick at www.meltingmuscles.com
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