Getting Ready for the Holidays: Relaxing

Feel Good for the Holidays:

Tips from Alternative Medicine—

  Healing Touch, Yoga, Massage, Reike, Acupuncture, and Sound Therapies

This time of year there are all kinds of tips to help us get through the holidays with less stress and more joy.  For many of us, there is so much to do that stress seems much inevitable.  With shopping lists and meals to plan, with work and relatives and traveling, we may want to give up before we even begin.  Wait--before you surrender, consider these tips from the vast world of alternative therapies including practices related to reike and healing touch, yoga and massage, and many others, to help you uncover your joys and dodge the strains and stresses.  If you can take the time and spend a little money ($60-$80 and up), I would recommend a full-body massage for detoxing the body and total relaxation.  Even a quickie shoulder massage at the shopping center can feel great.  Other treatments like reike, acupuncture, or reflexology may involve finding someone to fit your wants and needs, so you may want to explore them in the New Year.  For many people, getting a mani and a pedi can be enough of a break.  

Alternative Medicine: Vibrations, Energy Fields, and More--   The insights of alternative medicine have had mixed reviews in healthcare circles.  Although main stream Western medicine does not accept much of the formal evidence involving energy fields, healing/therapeutic touch, Ayurvedic nutrition, and related approaches, many medical centers are beginning to include alternative practitioners among their offerings.  For most of us, evidence is not as important as our own experiences and how we feel afterward.  In our hospice team, we have tried out some relaxation techniques from the traditions of energy medicine, visualization, and yoga.

Simple and easy is the key.  Ten Deep Breaths: Sitting comfortably, upright in a chair, take ten slow breaths in and out, eyes about half-open or completely closed, to restore your energy and send you back into your day with more hop in your step.  Take ten more and then sit for five minutes to listen to your heart beat.      

When relaxing, if something hurts, don’t do it.  Remember the goal is to let go and release tension and not to tighten up.  Soften your muscles; ease your mind. 

Listen to Your Own Vibrations.  Another of my favorite exercises is best done standing up.  You can bring energy to the body by using gently closed hands to pound lightly starting with the collar bones and moving slowly down the front and sides to your knees or feet.  If bending over is difficult, then pause at your waist or knees and go back up to the top.  You can also use your finger tips to press the tender spots on your face and head, chest, around the waist, and down over the hips.  Make a humming sound to hear your own vibration, or sing a silly song like Happy Birthday or Three Blind Mice to yourself or out loud.  Your own healing touch and movement will renew you.  Remember at busy times, take time to relax so you can enjoy the best of the holidays—the hugs and kisses of family and friends.   Nothing replaces the best of love and caring. 

 

 

 

Perspectives on Bereavement: Marti Smith and the Hospice Team

Here are a few excerpts from a recent article for one of our newsletters.  Along with pictures of some of us in the hospice team, there will be an article about hospice services and our director, Gretchen White-Streuli.  Enjoy.

 

What goes on in spiritual and bereavement services?

Hospice is a team effort, and Marti’s role focuses on the emotional and spiritual needs of patients and families from admission to years after the death of the loved one. Hospice traditions from its beginnings and today Medicare regulations require attention to the whole person and family, not just the physical problems. Official requirements also include support for professional team members’ emotional and spiritual wellbeing. As a society with deep fears of illness and death, all of us are vulnerable, and experience teaches that preparation is the key to helping others and ourselves navigate the challenges of sickness, dying, death, and grieving.

Every situation brings its own challenges.

In her duties in spiritual and bereavement services, Marti listens to team members to assess each family’s situation to customize appropriate services. Every case is different, from the great, great grandmother with congestive heart failure to the young father with brain cancer. In each case, individuals are coping with unfamiliar demands and feelings, and each person’s experience is different. With hospice medical social workers, Marti helps families connect to their support systems, to friends, faith traditions, community agencies. In the Reading area, often a mom or dad has moved away from a home church, so, as needed, Marti arranges for local pastors to provide ministerial support. Fortunately, in Berks and Pottstown, there is wonderful community cooperation from a wide variety of faiths. Our families, often multi-generational, may have a mix of affiliations and religious preferences. Marti helps families to find common ground to guide them before and after the loved one’s death. She is available to assist with planning memorial services or funerals in accordance with the wishes of the family and conducts services when requested.

Care Long After Your Loved One Dies

Personalized attention to mourning families continues with a set of services that Marti coordinates. She started as a hospice volunteer and now enjoys a large team of volunteers who make calls, send regular letters and uplifting reading, and keep all of the records for an operation that most years serves around 400 bereaved. Twice a year, Marti participates in the agency-wide memorials with the Tree of Remembrance and the Butterfly Release. She says that she especially enjoys sharing the volunteer created knitted shawls, hats, booties, gowns, and other special items. On being a member of the hospice team, Marti says she is blessed to share times when the earthly and the spiritual seem to come together around a patient’s bedside or in the weekly moments when those who have passed are honored.

Personal Details

Marti has been an ordained minister since 1971, in the United Church of Christ since 1983. She was born and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida and went to Duke University, Duke Divinity School, and received graduate degrees from both Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She worked in colleges and universities both teaching and in libraries. An early tech enthusiast, she taught online at several places, first starting a blog while at Drexel in the School of Information in 2005. She now has a blog Compassion Comes Home linked to the VNA website (http://compassioncomeshome.blogspot.com ). She is a member of Immanuel United Church of Christ, Shillington, PA, and enjoys guest preaching and speaking in local churches and civic organizations. While teaching world religions early in her career, Marti came to appreciate the importance of spiritual expression to people in both life and death. She is grateful to work as part of a healthcare organization devoted to respecting all perspectives as patients and families face difficult challenges.

When the Sun Sets Earlier: Do You Need a Happy Light?

When the Sun Sets Earlier:

Do You Need a Happy Light?

A full- spectrum light may help some people with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), but if something is making you feel sad, make sure you find some way to find help in understanding your feelings. Many people suffer needlessly and may even feel suicidal in the wintertime when the weather is colder and the sun shines less and less.   

 

In Winter and always, take good care of yourself. 

 

When I was growing up in Florida, it never occurred to me that I might live in a place without sunshine.  Even when it was raining, I always knew the sun was not far away.  In the summertime, the sun would be shining when the rain was pouring down.  At the lake, the rain would stream across slowly enough for us to jump into the water and swim around before the rain would hit our dock.  All the while the sun would keep shining.

When I moved to Northern Indiana, the sun seemed to have stayed in Florida.  The summers were short and the winters were very, very long.  From October to almost June, there was snow on the ground, and it never went away.  I always thought snow melted.  But I had never encountered temperatures so low.  My groceries froze in the car.  My sodas were solid.   

 

Snow, snow, snow--how could there be that much snow?  Even in North Carolina where I had lived for decades, there was sunshine most of the year.  My first winter in Northern Indiana, not far from Chicago, I began to sink into a funk early in November and was very depressed by January.  I knew what I felt was nothing normal.  I could barely get out of bed.  Food tasted strange, and my energy was gone.  A kind doctor suggested a temporary medication and a full-spectrum light.  What a difference both made.  Now I wouldn't do without my light.  While I've had different models over the years, they have all helped to fight off what I learned was Seasonal Affected Disorder or SAD.  Maybe I was more prone to SAD because I came from the South where I had lived for over forty years by the time I loved to the Midwest.  I don't know, but I am so glad that I found something that helped me so much. 

Now that I live in Pennsylvania I enjoy more sun year round than I did in Indiana.  But I still depend upon my happy light to keep my mood up in the fall and winter.  I get it out around the end of September and turn it on as I wake up.  Experts suggest ten to thirty minutes each morning.  No need to look at it directly.  I turn it on before I get out of bed and it makes the morning brighter.  Sometimes I turn it on for a little longer in the late afternoon as the sun begins to set earlier.  Might a full-spectrum light help you if you are feeling sad this time of year? Whatever you need to help you cope with the winter or with a time of loss or grief or with a hard time, seek out help.  Take good care of yourself.  You are worth it.