Dr. Peter J. Weiss

More New Ideas at This Week’s Gary Null Health Sup­port Group

A lit­tle over 20 of us met for our sec­ond health sup­port group ses­sion in Mel­bourne, Florida this week.  There were some new faces — sev­eral peo­ple brought friends as Gary had sug­gested at the end of our last meet­ing.

Shortly after call­ing the group to order, Shan­non Bur­nett reached Gary Null by phone for a wel­come and a brief encour­ag­ing con­ver­sa­tion.  It was a great way to kick off the ses­sion.  Who among us could not use more encour­age­ment and less crit­i­cism?  That doesn’t seem to come nat­u­rally in our cul­ture, but Shan­non is cre­at­ing a sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment in our group.

I won’t review every­thing we cov­ered in the three-hour ses­sion, but this “power in a group” is one of the things I want to stress.  In fact, one of the par­tic­i­pants remarked on the way that shar­ing and learn­ing in the ses­sion with other peo­ple had a notice­able greater impact on him than self-study.  This is so true.  But too often we just won’t ask for help or open our­selves to oth­ers.  As you make pos­i­tive changes in your life, build a team to sup­port you and lend your sup­port to oth­ers.

Rapa­port

One of my other take away lessons came from our guest speaker, Al Rapa­port, Direc­tor of Open Mind Zen in Mel­bourne, who spoke briefly on stress reduc­tion and med­i­ta­tion.   With Al as our guide, we also did a 10-minute group med­i­ta­tion.

Now I’ve tried med­i­tat­ing before but found that I couldn’t always promptly relax.  Al explained that the prob­lem isn’t that med­i­ta­tion is all that hard, but rather it’s that peo­ple think it’s sup­posed to be easy — so if they don’t get it right from the start, they con­clude that they’re not good at it and give up.  He com­pared it with learn­ing a new sport or learn­ing to play a musi­cal instru­ment — it’s not that hard, but it does take prac­tice, and coach­ing or lessons can help.  Same with med­i­ta­tion, he said.

As we went through our ses­sion, he explained that breath­ing with your abdomen pro­motes relax­ation in a way that using your chest does not.  I real­ized that I nat­u­rally breathe through chest expan­sion and that in my pre­vi­ous med­i­ta­tion expe­ri­ence I had been con­tin­u­ing that pat­tern.

As I switched breath­ing meth­ods dur­ing the exer­cise, I could imme­di­ately feel the dif­fer­ence and I achieved a remark­able state of relax­ation in about five min­utes.

Per­haps you’re think­ing, “Dr. Pete, you didn’t know about abdom­i­nal breath­ing?  Every­one knows that.”  Not true.  “Every­one” doesn’t know all they need to know, includ­ing me.  I’m happy to admit it because, truly, we all have a lot to learn.  The trick is keep­ing an open mind — so far so good.

Stay tuned, and I’ll con­tinue to keep you updated on our bi-weekly sup­port group meet­ings.