Newsletter – April and May 2010

May Local Community Events and Classes with Carmela

Janice Gates invites you to her yoga studio’s community celebration
Saturday, May 8th
T H E   Y O G A   G A R D E N’s  Open Studio 412  Red Hill Ave. #12. San Anselmo, CA 94960  www.yogagardenstudio.com

8:30-9:30 Strong Flow with Margaret Kuffel
9:45-10:45 Gentle Yoga with Catherine Henry
11:00-12:00 Mindful Flow with Ford Peck
12:15-1:15 Qigong & Dharma with Teja Bell
1:15-1:45 Connecting, Q & A, food and drink
1:45-2:45 Laughter Yoga with Carmela Carlyle
3:00-4:00 Therapeutic Yoga with Lynn Weinberger
4:15-5:15  iRest Yoga Nidra with Catherine Henry

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TGIF: Friday Night Laughter Yoga Club.
May  21.   7 – 8 p.m.

Third Friday of Every Month. $10.  Happy Hour with warm-ups  and music  while rolling on the mat and joyful laughter exercises moving around the studio. Solo Laughter Meditation with crystal bowl relaxation is the cherry on top. Amp up your Spring Mojo with this rockin’ yoga class. Bodyworks Yoga. 490 Second Street at “G” Street. Petaluma. CA  94952.

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FREE: Arm Chair and Wheel Chair Laughter Yoga 10 – 11  a.m.      May 4 and 18th. First and Third Tuesdays of Every Month hosted by  Merrill Gardens  Retirement Living in Rohnert Park.  Open to adults of all ages. Safe, joyful exercise  with lots of medical benefits, done seated for folks with health challenges. Great way to get back into your exercise groove to restore your  joy this season. Snyder Lane two miles north of Expressway in Rohnert Park.

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New Class with Carmela: Community  Yin  Yoga

4:00 – 5:15  p.m.  May 24. 4th  Monday  of  Every Month. Join us for this deeply nurturing and meditative practice done seated on the mat. Poses are held for three minutes to allow your connective tissue  —  and your mind, to let go, release and relax.  I play my crystal bowls and allow for lots of  quiet time. Bolsters, blankets, mats and pillows provided to support you.  Donations gratefully accepted for Bodyworks Community Yoga Projects. Bodyworks Yoga. 490 Second Street at “G” Street. Petaluma. CA  94952.

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Interested in a small  “Yin Within Yoga Therapy Group” ?
I am setting up a customized group, limited to four women, for a four session series of  yin yoga classes at my Petaluma Office.

The sessions will be deeply devoted to self-nurturance and slowing down to explore the yin within.  I have found Yin Yoga to be a  juicy enticement to meditate, deeply calming  and   emotionally  balancing and wish to share it with you.  Each session will feature a  healing theme with crystal bowls,  inspirational  readings,  and aromatherapy ~   and peacefully grounding poses held for a few minutes each to allow your connective tissue and your mind to release and relax. Time  to be determined by women in attendance.   Call with your preferences.  707.765.9035.

The symbolism of the lotus flower is extremely important in yoga. The lotus flower is a gorgeous blossom with a circle of petals that floats on the water’s surface. The lotus’s roots, however, are extremely long and deep in the mud. The sludge and the mud provide the nutrients to help the lotus grow and achieve its beauty. To yogis and yoginis, the lotus represents human life.

My focus this season is floating our community lotus with some joyful Laughter Yoga to lift us from the muck of  the serious on-the-job risk for clinicians known as Vicarious Trauma.  Repeatedly listening to the traumatic stories and doing hands-on work with those who have experienced  life-threatening traumatic events causes clinicians to internalize these traumas that can alter the way we perceive ourselves and affect our worldview. This goes beyond “burnout”  folks. Secondary trauma affects our core being. And it is a focus of my work with Laughter Yoga in Medical Settings  right now. If you wish to learn more about this stress-syndrome you will find my article and attached research literature on my website’s LY in Medical Settings page.

As a trained  Psychotherapist and Critical Incident Stress Debriefer, with a background in working with hospice, elders, community mental health agencies, rape crisis centers, abused women’s shelters, dementia and private clients for many years, I know first-hand the effects of  secondary trauma and the need for effective healing interventions in healthcare workers’ lives.

My next step to support health care workers, including yours truly, will be taking the iRest Training with Richard Miller Ph.D, modern day Yoga Master and Teacher. I lunched with Richard a few weeks ago and learned  more about his organization’s community outreach model of creating professional teams of  iRest Practitioners to focus on serving groups who can benefit from the deep healing of practicing Yoga Nidra.  He is of course, very well-known for his pioneering work with iRest for PTSD with Veterans and the Homeless, but he and his  iRest practitioners are also interested in training elders, hospice workers and other healthcare professionals, which is my calling too.

Both Yoga (Sleep) Nidra and Hasya  (Laughter) Yoga  elicit powerful changes in our neurochemistry. Both practices invite us to experience the  joy that  is already within us. As part of  his training segment on joy, Richard invites students to join him in laughter for fifteen minutes. Wow!  Pure form dude.

We only needed to a  little bit of  laughter warm-ups at my recent “Vicarious Trauma: Laughter Yoga as a Fun Tool for Coping”  presentation for a group of more than a  hundred nurses at the  March 26th  Nurses’ Alliance Training Day “Nurses Modeling Healthy Lifestyles” in San Francisco. We warmed up with “Cell Phone Laughter Exercise”,  ”No Road Rage Laughter” and my personal favorite, “Naughty, Naughty Nurse Laughter.” I shared the basic symptoms of Vicarious Trauma (not an amusing list, but important to understand before practicing healing laughter) and then the nurses enjoyed genuine laughter in community.

Susan Priano and Lorraine Thiebaud, both Registered Nurses, with years of experience, teaching, training and organizing behind them, and also newly Certified Laughter Yoga Leaders, invited me to present at this nurturing day. I love working with nurses and am encouraged that as more registered nurses train with me to become Certified Laughter Yoga Leaders, they are experiencing the benefits and bringing it to their colleagues in medical workplace settings.

Speaking of nursing colleagues in medical settings, my training partner, the fabulous Teresa Corrigan, R.N., M.A. and Certified Laughter Yoga Leader leads a Free Laughter Yoga Club at UCSF’s Osher Center,1701 Divisadero at Sutter, on  two Wednesday evenings a month at       5:30 -6:30 p.m. Check out her fun group on April 7 and 21 and May 5 and 19.  415.353.7718.

I will be doing another “Vicarious Trauma: Laughter Yoga as a Tool for Coping” presentation for  the The Nurses’ Alliance Conference on May 4th in Sacramento for those of you in that area.

And, I am honored to be offering a keynote  lecture on VT  followed by experiential Laughter Yoga for The Reproductive Health Institute’s Conference on April 9th. Hundreds of  hard-working  Planned Parenthood Nurses from all of our Midwestern States will be in attendance at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Denver.

The first thing I intend to make clear to my Midwest audience is that Laughter Yoga was created by a medical doctor and that it is practiced in 68 countries around the world —- not  just in  California. I might need some creative laughter yoga exercises for gynocological medical settings.  Anyone have any ideas to share for customized Laughter Exercises for this group?   HO HO HAHAHA.   contact@carmelacarlyle.com

Experience the amazing benefits of laughter by practicing Laughter Yoga Solo! No jokes needed. No one else need be involved for you to laugh alone and feel your blood pressure go down as your endorphin level soars. Remember, with Laughter Yoga, you laugh for no reason and you feel better automatically. So why care what your neighbors think? Or those folks stuck in traffic with you? Practice extended laughter, for at least a minute, and reduce your stress while enhancing your joy. Need a little help getting into it? Visit this site every month for a tip on how to integrate Laughter Yoga into your daily life.

Spring is in the air!  The season of  fresh beginnings, exuberant growth and the frisky activity of the birds and the bees is alive and buzzing. But for many folks, with the pollen levels topping  the charts, it means seasonal allergy reactions.

I am getting some help from the bees this season by taking a few teaspoons a day of Hector’s Honey Bee Pollen and using  local honey daily in my tea for natural innoculation. I also am practicing lots of Bumble Bee Meditation as an energetic spring cleaning for inside my head. It is a favorite of my Laughter Yoga students who appreciate the buzz of a deliciously cleansed mind after one minute of practice.

First, put a smile on your face and begin by being seated upright with your hips firmly planted in your chair. Feet flat on floor. Lean forward from your waist and then gently move  your whole upper body in a circle, using your abdomen to rotate around in a circle with your head painting a big circle in the air as you move slowly around and around.
Next make a buzzing bumble bee sound inhaling as you need to, but keeping the  “zzzzzzzzzzz” going.

Finally, put your hands over your ears and close your eyes. Keeping the smile and the buzz going, moving in calming circles, visualize the buzzing sound cleansing and clearing your the spaces inside your head, opening your sinuses and leaving your mind springtime fresh!After one minute of this effective spring-cleansing meditation sit still and feel the buzz.

To complete your session, do three Sneezing Laughters:  AAAAAHHHHH AAAAAHHHHH  AAAAHHH  HA HA HA CHOOOO!