In this August issue, you will learn about several upcoming events, including the Wednesday, September 10, teleseminar with Dr. Judith Orloff, and the workshops I will be teaching in Vienna, France, and Germany. We close with inspiring news from the China Earthquake project and from HeartMath to help us understand how emotions are generated by interactions between the brain, heart, and other areas of the body.

Be well,

In early September, please join us for a dynamic teleseminar on Intuitive Healing led by Judith Orloff MD: How to Listen to the Body for Pain Relief and Well-Being. This workshop will be held on Wednesday, September 10 from 10 am - 11:30 am Pacific time. Judith is a world renowned authority on intuition (please visit www.drjudithorloff.com to find out why you should not miss this event!). We will be exploring Judith's extraordinary gifts of intuitive resonance with the body's healing resources and, best of all, she will be teaching you how to discover and use your own intuitive process to resolve pain and achieve well-being. Please watch your email for opportunities to register and for more information.

Here are some additional events that also might be of interest:

· We are still accepting reservations for the Advanced Topics in Ego-State Therapy workshop in Vienna on Monday, September 22, just immediately following the European Hypnosis Congress in the beautiful city of Vienna. I will be joining faculty members Dr. Claire Frederick and Dr. Wally Hartman in what promises to be a stimulating learning experience. We are launching our new ego-state certification program at the conference. You can earn 8 hours of credit toward certification if you have already completed some training in the ego-state approach to therapy. If you enroll in the beginning and intermediate ego-state therapy workshops during the congress itself, and follow with the post-conference workshop, you'll earn a total of 16 certificate hours. To learn more about the post-conference workshop, visit www.maggiephillipsphd.com/courses_egostate.html. To enroll in the European Society of Hypnosis Congress, held from September 17-21 and one of my favorite conferences, please visit www.vienna.hypnos.de or contact mariannemartin-isorec@aon.at. The music in Vienna is an exquisite side benefit, as the summer music festival continues into the fall with a broad menu of events.

· If the Vienna event is not the right timing for you, you might enjoy visiting Paris instead! I will be teaching a new workshop, Treating Complex Stress Disorders with Mindfulness and Mind-Body Healing in Paris, France on September 27-28. To explore the course syllabus, please visit http://ietsp.free.fr/pdf/september-2008_English_Brochure.pdf and to enroll, click on http://ietsp.free.fr/pdf/Inscription_Seminaire.pdf.

· After Paris, I'll be teaching (along with Dr. Woltemade Hartman of South Africa) a weeklong intensive program in ego-state therapy from September 29 - October 3 in Rottweil, Germany. I will be available for private therapy or consultation sessions in Rottweil on September 29-30. Then, on Wednesday, October 1, I will be co-leading a group clinical consultation session with Dr. Hartman, and at the end of the week will teach a two-day workshop, Advanced Topics in Ego-State Therapy: Treating Complex Stress Disorders, on Thursday and Friday, October 2-3. The advanced workshop will explore how internal conflicts and fragmentation can be repaired to impact both common and atypical stress-related conditions. All of the events of this weeklong intensive count toward the new certification program in Ego-State Therapy. Please visit www.meg-rottweil.de to learn more, and contact me directly about private sessions at mphillips@lmi.net.

· On Saturday and Sunday, October 4-5, I will lead a workshop on Multi-Modal Approaches to Healing Post-Traumatic Pain in Heidelberg, Germany. This workshop will include methods drawn from mindfulness, breathing and meditation, Somatic Experiencing®, ego-state therapy, formal hypnosis, interactive guided imagery, Energy Psychology and EMDR. Our focus will be on how to build individualized, highly effective protocols that address both emotional and physical pain as well as the trauma components that often block healing. For more information and registration, visit www.meihei.de, or contact Dr. Gunther Schmidt at office@meihei.de.

At all of these European events, I will be available for private consultation on clinical cases or for personal therapy sessions. Please reserve a space in advance by emailing me at mphillips@lmi.net.

· I'm happy to announce that my online course in Energy Psychology begins again in late September. This is an 8-week course that teaches a wide spectrum of techniques in this exciting new field. Newcomers and veterans alike have given us positive feedback on the value of the course in exposing them to new techniques, increasing self-confidence, and expanding their range of energy applications within their practice of medicine, counseling, nursing, teaching, and psychology. To register and learn more, visit www.nicabm.com (website of the National Institute for Clinical Applications of Behavioral Medicine) and click on "Online Professional Development." Remember that you will be earning CEU's while saving money on this training since you can work on the course whenever convenient for you, and do not need to pay for transportation or accommodations, or take time away from your job or practice. Another benefit is that you have ample opportunities to practice and integrate the techniques during the 8 week term, a feature that is not true of usual weekend courses.

· In the US, there is a workshop on Ego-State Therapy planned in the San Francisco area the weekend of October 25 & 26. Please watch for further email and newsletter announcements about this and other training events.

· Finally (for now), if you enjoyed the report on mind/body health included in my July newsletter, you will want to take a look at the annual conference on mindbody health sponsored by NICABM (the National Institute for Clinical Applications of Behavioral Medicine) and held December 3 - 7 in the beautiful beach resort of Hilton Head, South Carolina. You will find an amazing array of presenters, topic areas, and stimulating events. If you decide to register, let me know that you'll be there and perhaps we can meet in person. And if you do enroll, let NICABM know that I sent you. I will be presenting a post-conference workshop on Healing the Trauma-Pain Connection as well as a breakout event. I will also be presenting a related free teleseminar on healing pain on September 8. Go to www.nicabm.com for more information about these events.

I'm happy to report that our relief project is well underway now with a clinical team training professionals and volunteers for the next two weeks who work with traumatized children in the earthquake region. This project is co-sponsored by The Foundation for Human Enrichment (FHE), the organizational platform for Somatic Experiencing®, and by United Family Hospitals and Clinics in China.

Here is one of the most recent email bulletins from Dr. Rob Blinn, our "point man" on the ground and Director of Family Services at United Family Hospitals in Beijing:

On Tuesday we made our first trip here to Jiangyou. Before we reached the training site, we stopped at the local psychiatric hospital as they are supplying some of the trainees from their staff. We were told that the training would not be held at the hospital here as it had been partially destroyed by the earthquake. The Director of the Mianyang Psychiatric Hospital pointed out where the destruction was, and also stated that some of the work here is being done in tents and that the tents are also used as hospital rooms for the patients. This disaster has permeated through every level of society here. Medical personnel are not excluded, and as I stated last week, 50% of all medical personnel in Beichuan perished in the earthquake. Many medical personnel feel burdened by both primary and secondary traumatic stress. This statistic really hit home with our group when we went to the ridge overlooking the city of Beichuan and viewed the destruction of the city.

Despite being only about 40 kilometers from Mianyang, the destruction is much greater here and tents line every street. In addition to the survivors from Jiangyou, many survivors from other areas were re-located here. As it is estimated that there are approximately 5 million people homeless because of the earthquake, there are tents everywhere and in every city in the earthquake zone. There is only limited running water and people see at night using candlelight.

Interest has built in the program and we could have trained 2-3 times the number of trainees that we have reached in this phase of the program. Once trainees see demonstrations of how powerful somatic work can be, they are eager to learn and use the methods themselves. The three volunteers (graduate students in psychology) who are working with children in the Beichuan relocation camps that we mentioned last week saw the value of the work we are doing and were able to join the second training. There are a lot of volunteers we have met who are hungry to learn. We have continually heard that although there have been many trainings; the other trainings really lack the hands-on training and mentoring that our program is offering.

It is gratifying to see the trainees gradually understand the concepts and techniques we are teaching and then begin to apply them in work with patients. Working with the body doesn't exclude other trauma techniques but is rather the center of any good treatment for trauma; we are confident that professionals and volunteers here will be more ready to intervene with victims of the earthquake.

The ways that the trainees are learning to help children are somewhat revolutionary and related to play therapy. If you think about it, you can't really sit down and discuss the earthquake with a 6 year-old and in fact, it might make their symptoms worse by going over them again and again. Ale Duarte, one of our trainers who is originally from Brazil, has developed many interactive therapeutic games. Such games are used to help children discharge energy that was locked-up because of the earthquake and to help children regain a bodily sense of safety. One such game is "The Wolf Comes at Midnight."

The game which Ale had trainees participate in, starts with the facilitator telling the participants that a wolf is coming at midnight, that he is the wolf, that there are certain zones where everyone will be safe from the wolf. This game in children brings up activation that is similar to that brought up in the earthquake. Children report that their hearts are beating quickly, and they look exited and slightly fearful. The facilitators and trainees working with the participants help them identify bodily sensations associated with this activation. This will help them discharge the activation and feel more "grounded." The game also works by having the participants identify how it feels in their bodies to reach a sense of safety. The game is done in stages and children thus have time to make a safety plan and anticipate what they might do when the wolf comes. This is something they were unable to do before the earthquake and helps them feel that they have resources that were unavailable when the earthquake happened. Ale states that when a traumatic event happens, the child's lack of time reduces his or her choice options and the skills that may be needed to make a successful escape. These therapeutic games help the child regain a sense in his or her body that he or she can cope and not get "stuck" or "frozen" in the trauma. Last week we saw these principles in action in the Beichuan relocation camps, as children were led through various activities and were able to discharge some of the traumatic activation related to the earthquake.

If you are moved by this effort, please consider making a financial contribution. To do so, go to www.traumahealing.com, and click on the "donate now" button. I can assure you that your money will be well used and deeply appreciated.

As part of my approach to reversing the course of pain conditions, I have learned again and again the importance of identifying and treating the emotional and stress components of physical pain. Frequently, when clients with chronic pain conditions are given sound treatment but are not healing, it may be because related emotional pain issues are blocking their healing process. HeartMath research gives us a window into understanding "matters of the heart" and suggests innovative ways of intervening in the heart system. A number of studies sponsored by this organization have provided new insight into the links between heart activity and emotions, health, and vitality.

HeartMath studies show how the heart and brain organs are in a constant two-way process with each other. Our emotions change the signals the brain sends to the heart and ones that the heart transmits to the brain. Findings also explain how the heart responds to emotional and mental reactions and why some emotions stress the heart and drain our energy. When we experience certain feelings like frustration, worry, anxiety, and confusion, our heart rhythms become more erratic. These erratic heart rhythms are transmitted to the limbic emotional centers in the brain, which label them as stressful. Such signals create the emotions we feel and also block our ability to think clearly. Stressful emotions therefore create a chain reaction in the body -- an increase in stress hormones, constriction in blood vessels, a rise in blood pressure, and a weakening of the immune system. Over time, these changes can contribute to significant health problems.

On the other hand, HeartMath research demonstrates that positive emotions such as joy, compassion, hope, and gratitude produce harmonious heart rhythms, which reflect cardiovascular efficiency and balance in the nervous system. Learning how to shift out of stressful, toxic emotions can result in profound positive effects on the heart system and on overall health. HeartMath offers a variety of methods to shift the heart into a more efficient state by monitoring its rhythms in ways similar to biofeedback and neurofeedback.

HeartMath researchers have found that feelings of appreciation are one of the easiest emotions to generate and sustain over relatively long periods of time. Just by recalling a time when you felt genuine warm feelings of appreciation, and reliving those feelings, you can increase heart rhythm coherence, improve health, and decrease emotional distress. Eventually, you can learn to self-generate feelings of appreciation in the current moment and will not need a past memory reference. One important factor is that it is not the image of a positive memory, but the positive emotions connected with it, that create heart coherence.

HeartMath offers specific techniques that help create more focus on positive emotions. Information about this approach can be found by visiting www.heartmath.org. Studies have shown that HeartMath's positive emotional methods reduce anxiety and stress, which also can lower blood pressure and increase heart function in heart failure patients. These benefits also hold true for patients in current good health, and may help prevent future heart problems. In addition, another important internet resource is www.gratefulness.org, which offers various helpful ideas for generating emotions of gratitude in everyday life.

Thanks for reading.

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