In the May issue of my e-newsletter, you will find information about upcoming training events, including the May 21st teleseminar with Dr. Marty Rossman on How Guided Imagery Opens New Healing Pathways for People with Chronic Pain, and my June 7-8 workshop in Toronto on The Body as the Ultimate Healer of Trauma and Pain.

You will also find some of the highlights from my March teleseminar with Peter Levine. If you missed this event, you will have an opportunity to explore some of this vital information.

Be well,

I am writing this in Kathmandu at the end of my Asia trip. One of the more memorable parts of my time here was the lecture I gave at one of the well-known hospitals in Nepal on chronic pain. The idea that trauma often is a root cause of chronic pain, and that techniques like breathing can be used to make permanent changes, was a new idea for most of the medical staff that attended. More information on this topic is included from the seminar with Peter Levine, summarized below.

I also greatly enjoyed the teaching I did in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur on treating pain and trauma and the Somatic Experiencing® Beginning Level I course I taught in Hong Kong. All were wonderfully successful, and highly enjoyable for me! In Shanghai, I introduced Somatic Experiencing®, and there is sufficient interest that the organizer and I will be working toward launching a certification program there. In 2009, I will be presenting a five-day course to bring together a group that we hope will form a core group for SE certification.

My next event is the Teleseminar on Wednesday, May 21st, from 8 am - 9:30 am Pacific Time with Dr. Marty Rossman on How Guided Imagery Opens New Healing Pathways for People with Chronic Pain. I am very excited to be presenting with Marty, who is the co-director of The Academy for Guided Imagery, is an MD and an acupuncturist, and has written several books and recorded many popular CD programs. He has developed numerous imagery protocols for working with various types of pain and I will join him with a few of my own. For those of you interested in specific methods to use with specific types of pain in different parts of the body, this seminar is for you.
To register, please go to www.maggiephillipsphd.com/courses_teleseminars.html.
We would like you to submit questions in advance so that we can organize our presentations to best meet your needs. If you are a pain professional, go to www.maggiephillipsphd.com/courses_interactive2.html and if you are a person with pain or a support person for a pain patient, please go to www.maggiephillipsphd.com/courses_interactive.html.
Watch for our next email with more content details. If you have questions about the organization of the teleseminar or about registration, also visit our Teleseminar FAQs at www.maggiephillipsphd.com/teleseminar_faqs.html.
(If clicking on the links above does not work for you, copy and paste the URLs directly into your web browser).

I will then be teaching 7-8 June in Toronto, Canada for the Canadian Society of Clinical Hypnosis/Ontario Division. This workshop on The Body as Ultimate Healer of Trauma and Pain will explore the latest advances in the treatment of trauma, while the second day will review the dynamics of emotional and physical pain and specific techniques to reverse the effects of pain conditions through self-regulation of the nervous system. Please contact Dr. A. Lorenz at alorenz@cogeco.ca or Sid Freedman at sidfreedman@gmail.com if you are interested. I'd love to have some of you join me in the wonderful city of Toronto!

Finally, I want to give a "heads up" to special training events in ego-state therapy that will take place in the fall of 2008. Dr. Claire Frederick, Dr. Woltemade Hartman, and I will be presenting fundamentals and intermediate workshops during the European Society of Hypnosis in Vienna from 18-21 September and a special post-conference course on Advanced Topics in Ego-State Therapy which will include presentations by the 3 of us on therapeutic alliance issues and how to form a positive counter-transference trance, ego-state therapy with children, and ego-state therapy and mind-body healing. It's a beautiful time of year to be in Europe so bring your family and colleagues to this wonderful event. For information and registration, go to www.esh-hypnosis.org. Hope to meet you there!

Following the Congress, Dr. Woltemade Hartman and I will be presenting a full week intensive in Ego-State Therapy at the MEG Institute in Rottweil, Germany. Wally will present the Fundamentals course on Monday and Tuesday, 29-30 September; we will both conduct a case consultation session on Wednesday, 1st October, and I will teach Advanced Topics in Ego-State Therapy: Treating Complex Stress Disorders on 2-3 October. For more information, visit www.meg-rottweil.de.

In our March teleseminar on Solving the Puzzle of Pain, Peter Levine discussed some of the bracing patterns activated by the autonomic nervous system in reaction to threat and how they impact on pain. One type of bracing is the global flexion or contraction response that involves contracting around the abdomen and other places in the body. Our muscles are used to defend ourselves from being hit, in falling, or when being attacked. Another common response we have is that when we are overwhelmed by threat that we cannot escape, our muscles and other areas of the body lose their resilience and collapse. When these reactions become chronic in response to triggering events, this can result in a vicious cycle, which creates more fear, and fear causing further bracing which causes more fear, which triggers more bracing, and so on. That vicious cycle can lead to chronic pain syndromes as well as to panic, anxiety and fear.

Peter also emphasized how important it is to help the person in pain feel the sensations underlying the pain, rather than being stuck in identification with the pain or being consumed by the pain. Once we can help people feel these sensations that lead to the various bracing and freezing patterns that occur with threat, we can begin to separate the muscle responses from those patterns so that the person can disconnect from trauma that maintains the pain.

I had several experiences on this trip of working with people with these results. The most recent one was in Nepal where I worked with a woman who had chronic constriction, dissociation, and freezing. The patterns of constriction were longstanding and painful, ranging from her eye, through the side of her face, through her ear, to behind her ear and neck, and finally to her lower back. When we explored the underlying sensations, which appeared to be connected to fears when being attacked and raped as a young woman, as well as to her early childhood responses to family conflicts, illness, abandonment, and loss, we were able to release several of these painful constrictions in one session, resulting in a full body experience of expansion and relief.

This is a very common effect of Somatic Experiencing® (SE) work, and so valuable for people in chronic pain who are not responding to common treatments, including medication and other procedures. For more information, consult my book, Reversing Chronic Pain (click here to order), and the website for SE, www.traumahealing.com.

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