Jim has a collection of informative articles to get you started on this revolutionary brain-body therapy.

The articles cover a variety of topics and are written by leading researchers and experts in the field.

You can view the complete alphabetical list or select to view by the various topics.

“The mind has forgotten but the body has not – thankfully.”
~ Sigmund Freud

Alphabetical List of All Articles

10 Life-Changing Facts About Attachment

Just for a moment, imagine being free of attachments. Things come and go, but you are stable and unmoving in the midst of it all. It doesn’t mean you don’t care. In fact, in the lack of clinging, you are free to care deeply. The most intimate state of being Read More

A Process, Not An End Point

At one time, I thought that if I just worked on particular issue A, B and C, that I would be fully healed from baggage of my past.  It seemed like, all I had to do was go to counseling, work on it, become aware of it and that’s it. Read More

A Secret Weapon for Handling Change

Change is uncomfortable and scary for all of us.  And it’s especially hard to release “the old” when we haven’t met “the new” yet.  But let go we must if we want a life that’s aligned with the integrity of who we are as we grow. Life is about growth, Read More

ADHA Experts Re-evaluate Zeal for Drugs

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) now impacts 1 in 10 American children—a 22 percent increase from 2003.  About two-thirds of these children are on some form of prescription medication, which has become the go-to treatment for this increasingly common condition. ADHD makes it hard for children to pay attention and Read More

ADHD Linked to Prenatal Antidepressant Use

More than one in 10 Americans take an antidepressant, and that number jumps to one in four among women aged 50 to 64.1 They’re the most commonly prescribed class of medication other than antibiotics,2 but despite their overwhelming popularity there’s an important question that needs to be answered: do they Read More

Advances in Understanding of Depression Offers New Hope

Depression is thought to affect about one in 10 Americans.1 In 2010, antidepressants were the second most commonly prescribed type of medication in the US,2 hinting at the severity of the problem. Contrary to popular belief, depression is not likely caused by unbalanced brain chemicals; however, there are a number Read More

Allostatic Load

The Cumulative Effects of an Unbalanced System Unfortunately, our nervous systems have not yet adapted to the type of ongoing stress we face today.  As you can imagine, there is a huge difference between the constant stress of 21st century life and our ancestor’s sudden need to flee from danger. Read More

Anxiety Drug Overdoses Hit Record Levels

Prescription drug overdoses have become alarmingly common in the U.S., with opioid painkillers, such as Vicodin and Oxycontin, among the drugs most frequently making headlines. 2:57 minutes New research shows another class of drugs — benzodiazepines or “benzos” — is rising in the ranks of overdose deaths, however. Prescriptions for Read More

Can Resolving Emotional Trauma Ease Chronic Pain?

Human beings have long sought to understand the basis of pain.  Until the late 17th century, pain and disease were considered a byproduct of sin, or something a person endured to test their faith.  But after philosopher René Descartes first theorized that pain was a physical sensation interpreted by the Read More

Childhood Trauma and Adult Disease

What’s the Real Diagnosis? “Traumatic events of the earliest years of infancy and childhood are not lost but, like a child’s footprints in wet cement, are often preserved life-long. Time does not heal the wounds that occur in those earliest years; time conceals them. They are not lost; they are Read More

Chronic Pain and The Brain

Pain and the brain are inexorably linked. Our brain is the hub of our nervous system, made up of 100 billion nerve cells. We count on it to process what we’re experiencing and help us react. For example, touching something hot activates an immediate withdrawal reflex, thanks to the brain. Read More

Connection Between Stress and Autoimmune Disease

Affirmed by Massive 30-Year Study As you may already know, autoimmunity is a form of immune dysregulation. This occurs as a result of different factors and that includes emotional factors. Your emotional health is directly linked to your immune function, via the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis, which means that you can Read More

Consciousness & Healing – Dr Canali

Dr Paul Canali has been working for over two decades with the idea that consciousness, somatic awareness and the Autonomic Nervous System can be activated in such a way as to create what he calls a “super conscious state.”  The super conscious state is a state of awareness induced in Read More

Conversion Disorder

Conversion disorder is a neurological disorder in which physical symptoms are unconsciously caused by a stressful or traumatic event and is one of a group of psychological disorders called somatoform disorders. Somatoform disorders are psychological disorders which are characterized by physical symptoms that have no apparent physical cause. While potentially Read More

Degenerative Disc & Spine Changes

Did you know that current scientific research is that degenerative disc and spine changes are not the real source of pain? That is, most people have one or more disc protrusion, herniation and degeneration of the spine without pain! Recent discoveries show that the disc is loaded with sensory fibers Read More

Do We Change or Do We Hunker Down?

Many of us from the species called humans come up against big obstacles in our life and in our day.  We all know what these things are if we have not completely become numb to them.  I’m sure each one of us could think of a zillion obstacles or at Read More

Enteric Brain Technique™ – Dr Canali

Buried around your gut, or digestive system, is a second brain.  The gut brain, also called the Enteric Brain, has a mind of its own.  Functioning much like the brain in your head, this system is able to sense and receive impulses.  It records and remembers experiences, and responses to Read More

Evidence on Prescription Medication?

Kirsch’s analysis of the effectiveness of antidepressants was an outgrowth of his interest in the placebo effect. His first meta-analysis was aimed at assessing the size of the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. The results not only showed a sizeable placebo effect, but also indicated that the drug Read More

Fearlessness

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy. We fear that this moment will end, that we won’t get what we need, that we will lose what we Read More

Five Things That Sabotage Your Health

Why Most People Don’t Have Optimum Health What are the Top 5 reasons we shortchange our health? There are lots of posts about everything you should be doing…. But do you know why it can be so hard to succeed with your health goals?  Here are the TOP 5 reasons Read More

Freedom From Pain

It is so easy it seems to resist things in life.  While resistance sounds difficult, it is by far something we do frequently as humans. This may be through our thoughts, our bodies and even in our spiritual growth and overall learning in our lives. We do this without notice Read More

Have Patience…

Have Patience… Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms, or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able Read More

Heal Trauma – Dr Canali

Heal Trauma Save The World Project™ is about ending the cyclical nature of trauma. Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) is most destructive when passed down from person to person, and through families and institutions.  Like a virus, the unconscious carriers can be you and me.  Repeating patterns of PTS behavior can represent Read More

Healing Progress And Then I Slipped Back

A common question I’ve seen come through applies to many that I’ve seen go through the healing process.  I’m sharing this tonight in hopes that it will help further the understanding of what the healing process is.  These are questions that we need to keep open in discussion so that Read More

High Tolerance to Pain or Numbing Out

At one time in my life, I could endure a lot of pain.  It had to get to the level that was so high before I would really pay attention to it.  Usually in those situations, the situation was so dire that it would require going to the emergency room Read More

How Stress Makes You Sick

Stress often starts in your head with a worry or a fear, but those feelings of anxiety, and perhaps even panic, don’t stay there.  When you feel stressed, your body ramps up production of the stress hormones cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine. This triggers the start of the stress response, and, Read More

Human Memory: Why Bad Memories Stick

“I’m incredibly stressed out, and this Arizona thing has really put me over the top,” complained my patient, just this week, a woman in her mid fifties. “I just can’t seem to let it go.  It’s like I’m always on edge,” she lamented.  Looking at her intake paperwork, I noted Read More

I’m Healed – I’m Over It!

So often people who have been through so much in life, tend to hide from it and almost act as if nothing happened.  More times than I can remember, I’ve basically heard from others “I’m healed and I’m over it!”  In the voice and words of the church lady, one Read More

Illness as an Opportunity to Awaken Consciousness

Transforming illness into a self-healing journey, the next paradigm shift in medicine. When we are sick and in pain, we try to return to health as quickly as possible. It is a natural response to seek treatments to ‘fix’ or get rid of pain and symptoms so we can return Read More

Letting Go

Letting Go To “let go” does not mean to stop caring, …it means I cannot do it for someone else. To “let go” is not to cut myself off, …It is the realization I can’t control another. To “let go” is not to enable, …but to allow learning from natural Read More

Living in Presence With Your Emotional Pain Body

There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose.  It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.  It comes together with other energy forms from other Read More

Masking The Healing

We all have times when we come up against physical situations that challenge us to the core of our being.  It may be anything from hip pain, back pain to a rash, headache, allergies or any condition you can name.  Sometimes these conditions are debilitating and leave us screaming beside Read More

Meditation and Freedom

Meditation only becomes real, powerful, authentic, and liberating when it is a practice of letting everything go. Otherwise it is reduced to little more than a psycho-spiritual relaxation technique. It may make you feel better, but it won’t set you free. Feeling better and being free don’t necessarily mean the Read More

Mental Illness – It’s Not in Your Genes

Even before the Human Genome Project wrapped up in April 2003, scientists have worked overtime to find the gene or genes responsible for autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, alcoholism, depression, and other ailments “known” to have major genetic components. The problem is, many neuropsychiatric ailments that are assumed to have a Read More

Nervous System and Trauma

Nervous systems are becoming so overloaded and overworked that few people are actually engaged in life and reality.  When we overload and overwork our nervous systems without release, we cannot expect to function at 100 percent as humans.  We become less than human.  We give up who we actually are Read More

Releasing Judgment…of Yourself

I’m sure you’ve heard the spiritual trope – let go of what no longer serves you. But does that actually mean anything to you? Do you really have any idea what it would feel like to loosen that toxic grip? Let alone what is involved in such a letting go? Read More

Social Anxiety Disorder

Social Anxiety Disorder Linked to High Serotonin Levels Throwing Treatment with SSRIs into Serious Question Depression and other mental health problems are at epidemic levels judging by the number of antidepressants prescribed each year. According to CDC data, one in 20 Americans over the age of 12 report some form Read More

Somatization Disorder

Definition Somatization disorder is a psychiatric condition marked by multiple medically unexplained physical, or somatic, symptoms. In order to qualify for the diagnosis of somatization disorder, somatic complaints must be serious enough to interfere significantly with a person’s ability to perform important activities, such as work, school or family and Read More

Stress: A Badge of Honor or A Code Word for Fear?

According to the Center for Disease Control, 80% of visits to the doctor are believed to be stress-related. Yet what is “stress” if not fear, anxiety, and worry dressed up in more socially acceptable clothing? While we tend to view worry, anxiety, and fear as signs of weakness, most of Read More

Stuck In The Mud

Staying In Pain Pain comes and it goes.  It is just one component to the grand cycle of life.  And when experienced as such, pain can serve as an important teacher.  It is when we get stuck in our pain that it becomes detrimental to our well-being and development.  If Read More

Survival Mode – Dr Canali

When we experience a stressful or traumatic event, whether it is emotional or physical, our nervous system automatically goes into a response.  The most recognized reactions are fight or flight.  In the fight or flight response the body prepares itself for what it believes to be a life-threatening event by Read More

Take My Pain Away

I know I have written on this subject in the past, but time and time again, I see people focusing on taking the pain away.  I get the flyers and information constantly for healing bodywork methods of all kinds that guarantees to take the pain away.  However, from what I Read More

The 5 Healing Questions

THE 5 HEALING QUESTIONS What do you MOST want to heal which is deep down inside you and are you READY to heal it? Are you willing to do WHATEVER it takes to heal this, including complete lifestyle changes and changes in your belief system? What are you covering up Read More

The Autonomic Nervous System and Survival Mode

Unresolved stressors and trauma can cause dysregulation and affect these bodily systems, causing not only pain, discomfort, sleep difficulties and such, but may even create disease. There is much research and scientific literature on the benefits of meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, herbal remedies, and the like. All these may help, but Read More

The Cure

The Cure We think we get over things. We don’t get over things. Or say, we get over the measles but not a broken heart. We need to make that distinction. The things that become part of our experience never become less a part of our experience. How can I Read More

The Healing and Strengthening Power of Touch

The power of touch is displayed perhaps no more poignantly than during the first few months of life. Babies who are not hugged and held during these first months will not thrive and grow like their cuddled peers.  In fact, a study by Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found Read More

The Neuroscience of Traumatic Memory

Sometimes people can remember what seem like the smallest, most insignificant details of their lives – their 8th grade locker combination, a story they heard at a party years ago, or all the lines from their favorite movie. These memories – full of facts, words, and events – are explicit Read More

The Unification Project™ – Dr Canali

The Unification Project™ is about gathering health professionals across many disciplines together to share evidence-based, reproducible truths in disease and human suffering with the goal of forming a common approach to diagnosis and treatment.  Current research indicates that the perceived positive results of decades of medical and alternative therapies may Read More

Toxic Stress – The Facts

The future of any society depends on its ability to foster the healthy development of the next generation. Extensive research on the biology of stress now shows that healthy development can be derailed by excessive or prolonged activation of stress response systems in the body (especially the brain), with damaging Read More

Traumatic Stress and Its Relationship to the Body

Do you sometimes seem stuck in vicious cycles of physical pain, trauma, anxiety or depression?  Have you ever wondered why your symptoms resist traditional treatment approaches? Traumatic stress is the number one source of chronic pain, creating anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, musculoskeletal pain, and other illnesses. Understanding how Read More

Unified Therapy™ – Dr Canali

The healing arts and sciences in medicine and alternative practice are filled with numerous diagnoses, treatments and theories.  When subjected to closer inspection it becomes shockingly clear that the diagnoses, treatments and perceived results of these practices are often based on the doctor’s and therapist’s individual and collective beliefs, and Read More

Waking Up The Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System – Parasympathetic and Sympathetic In helping to understand healing principles within the body, we need to understand the two basic states of the autonomic nervous system.  These states are survival mode or a time of rest and repair.  Survival mode is often referred to as the fight or Read More

What is Suffering? – Dr Canali

Specific life experiences can trigger significant loss of health, happiness, and sense of purpose.  After studying thousands of individual cases, I have found that people are often changed – physically, mentally, and spiritually – by a particularly hurtful, traumatic or stressful experience or event. These events or experiences, such as Read More

What Resets Our Nervous System After Trauma?

Dr. Levine: When I first started developing my approach to trauma – and this was in the sixties and seventies, so it was way before the definition of trauma as PTSD – I noticed how many different kinds of sometimes even seemingly ordinary events could cause people to develop symptoms Read More

What Suffering Does

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bunch of conversations in which the unspoken assumption was that the main goal of life is to maximize happiness.  That’s normal.  When people plan for the future, they often talk about all the good times and good experiences they hope Read More

What Your Child Remembers

New discoveries about early memory – and how it affects us. Most of us have been told at one time or another that children aren’t supposed to remember anything that happens to them before – roughly – the age of two. Emotionally painful experiences during infancy will therefore have no Read More

When Life Is Too Busy

I can’t keep track of how many times I have heard people say, “I’m so busy, I just can’t find the time to get everything done”.  Their days are filled from early morning until late at night where they try to cram in some time to gulp down food, say Read More

When Self-Care Turns Into Sabotage

It’s safe to say that self-care is having a moment.  More and more, it seems like everyone is espousing the importance of sleep, saying no, and “treating yo’self” as much as possible. As a social worker and coach, I talk all the time about the importance of self-care.  Many people Read More

When the Body Says No – The Cost of Hidden Stress

When the Body Says No is an accessible and groundbreaking book — filled with the moving stories of real people — medical doctor and bestselling author of Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté, shows that emotion and psychological stress play a powerful role in the onset of chronic illness. Western medicine achieves Read More

Your Autonomic Nervous System and Your Health – Dr Canali

Your Autonomic Nervous System can tell your doctor many things about how healthy you really are and what needs to be done to restore and improve your health. For centuries, doctors both traditional and alternative have asked the question: “is there a universal or shared understanding of the nature of Read More

Zone of Regulation

Are you in the Zone?  Unresolved stressors and trauma can cause dysregulation and affect all bodily systems, causing not only pain, discomfort, sleep difficulties and such, but may even create a variety of pain disorders, anxiety, depression and even disease.     The Zone of Regulation, also called the Window Read More


Articles By Topic of Interest

You can view articles by Topic of Interest (category) below. Articles may be listed under more than one Topic.

Unified Therapy™

Unified Therapy™ – Dr Canali

The healing arts and sciences in medicine and alternative practice are filled with numerous diagnoses, treatments and theories.  When subjected to closer inspection it becomes shockingly clear that the diagnoses, treatments and perceived results of these practices are often based on the doctor’s and therapist’s individual and collective beliefs, and Read More

ACE Study & Early Childhood

Childhood Trauma and Adult Disease

What’s the Real Diagnosis? “Traumatic events of the earliest years of infancy and childhood are not lost but, like a child’s footprints in wet cement, are often preserved life-long. Time does not heal the wounds that occur in those earliest years; time conceals them. They are not lost; they are Read More

Toxic Stress – The Facts

The future of any society depends on its ability to foster the healthy development of the next generation. Extensive research on the biology of stress now shows that healthy development can be derailed by excessive or prolonged activation of stress response systems in the body (especially the brain), with damaging Read More

Allostatic Load

Allostatic Load

The Cumulative Effects of an Unbalanced System Unfortunately, our nervous systems have not yet adapted to the type of ongoing stress we face today.  As you can imagine, there is a huge difference between the constant stress of 21st century life and our ancestor’s sudden need to flee from danger. Read More

Nervous System Resiliency

One of the things that I am learning firsthand is how our nervous system is in the course of our day.  Many of the things that I write about here are ones that I have been introduced to and then I learn about them by living through experiences that become Read More

The Neuroscience of Traumatic Memory

Sometimes people can remember what seem like the smallest, most insignificant details of their lives – their 8th grade locker combination, a story they heard at a party years ago, or all the lines from their favorite movie. These memories – full of facts, words, and events – are explicit Read More

What Resets Our Nervous System After Trauma?

Dr. Levine: When I first started developing my approach to trauma – and this was in the sixties and seventies, so it was way before the definition of trauma as PTSD – I noticed how many different kinds of sometimes even seemingly ordinary events could cause people to develop symptoms Read More

Zone of Regulation

Are you in the Zone?  Unresolved stressors and trauma can cause dysregulation and affect all bodily systems, causing not only pain, discomfort, sleep difficulties and such, but may even create a variety of pain disorders, anxiety, depression and even disease.     The Zone of Regulation, also called the Window Read More

Autonomic Nervous System

Allostatic Load

The Cumulative Effects of an Unbalanced System Unfortunately, our nervous systems have not yet adapted to the type of ongoing stress we face today.  As you can imagine, there is a huge difference between the constant stress of 21st century life and our ancestor’s sudden need to flee from danger. Read More

Connection Between Stress and Autoimmune Disease

Affirmed by Massive 30-Year Study As you may already know, autoimmunity is a form of immune dysregulation. This occurs as a result of different factors and that includes emotional factors. Your emotional health is directly linked to your immune function, via the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis, which means that you can Read More

Enteric Brain Technique™ – Dr Canali

Buried around your gut, or digestive system, is a second brain.  The gut brain, also called the Enteric Brain, has a mind of its own.  Functioning much like the brain in your head, this system is able to sense and receive impulses.  It records and remembers experiences, and responses to Read More

Heal Trauma – Dr Canali

Heal Trauma Save The World Project™ is about ending the cyclical nature of trauma. Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) is most destructive when passed down from person to person, and through families and institutions.  Like a virus, the unconscious carriers can be you and me.  Repeating patterns of PTS behavior can represent Read More

Nervous System and Trauma

Nervous systems are becoming so overloaded and overworked that few people are actually engaged in life and reality.  When we overload and overwork our nervous systems without release, we cannot expect to function at 100 percent as humans.  We become less than human.  We give up who we actually are Read More

Nervous System Resiliency

One of the things that I am learning firsthand is how our nervous system is in the course of our day.  Many of the things that I write about here are ones that I have been introduced to and then I learn about them by living through experiences that become Read More

Survival Mode – Dr Canali

When we experience a stressful or traumatic event, whether it is emotional or physical, our nervous system automatically goes into a response.  The most recognized reactions are fight or flight.  In the fight or flight response the body prepares itself for what it believes to be a life-threatening event by Read More

The Autonomic Nervous System and Survival Mode

Unresolved stressors and trauma can cause dysregulation and affect these bodily systems, causing not only pain, discomfort, sleep difficulties and such, but may even create disease. There is much research and scientific literature on the benefits of meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, herbal remedies, and the like. All these may help, but Read More

The Unification Project™ – Dr Canali

The Unification Project™ is about gathering health professionals across many disciplines together to share evidence-based, reproducible truths in disease and human suffering with the goal of forming a common approach to diagnosis and treatment.  Current research indicates that the perceived positive results of decades of medical and alternative therapies may Read More

Traumatic Stress and Its Relationship to the Body

Do you sometimes seem stuck in vicious cycles of physical pain, trauma, anxiety or depression?  Have you ever wondered why your symptoms resist traditional treatment approaches? Traumatic stress is the number one source of chronic pain, creating anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, musculoskeletal pain, and other illnesses. Understanding how Read More

Unified Therapy™ – Dr Canali

The healing arts and sciences in medicine and alternative practice are filled with numerous diagnoses, treatments and theories.  When subjected to closer inspection it becomes shockingly clear that the diagnoses, treatments and perceived results of these practices are often based on the doctor’s and therapist’s individual and collective beliefs, and Read More

Waking Up The Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System – Parasympathetic and Sympathetic In helping to understand healing principles within the body, we need to understand the two basic states of the autonomic nervous system.  These states are survival mode or a time of rest and repair.  Survival mode is often referred to as the fight or Read More

What Resets Our Nervous System After Trauma?

Dr. Levine: When I first started developing my approach to trauma – and this was in the sixties and seventies, so it was way before the definition of trauma as PTSD – I noticed how many different kinds of sometimes even seemingly ordinary events could cause people to develop symptoms Read More

Your Autonomic Nervous System and Your Health – Dr Canali

Your Autonomic Nervous System can tell your doctor many things about how healthy you really are and what needs to be done to restore and improve your health. For centuries, doctors both traditional and alternative have asked the question: “is there a universal or shared understanding of the nature of Read More

Zone of Regulation

Are you in the Zone?  Unresolved stressors and trauma can cause dysregulation and affect all bodily systems, causing not only pain, discomfort, sleep difficulties and such, but may even create a variety of pain disorders, anxiety, depression and even disease.     The Zone of Regulation, also called the Window Read More

Consciousness & Healing

Consciousness & Healing – Dr Canali

Dr Paul Canali has been working for over two decades with the idea that consciousness, somatic awareness and the Autonomic Nervous System can be activated in such a way as to create what he calls a “super conscious state.”  The super conscious state is a state of awareness induced in Read More

Enteric Brain Technique™ – Dr Canali

Buried around your gut, or digestive system, is a second brain.  The gut brain, also called the Enteric Brain, has a mind of its own.  Functioning much like the brain in your head, this system is able to sense and receive impulses.  It records and remembers experiences, and responses to Read More

Five Things That Sabotage Your Health

Why Most People Don’t Have Optimum Health What are the Top 5 reasons we shortchange our health? There are lots of posts about everything you should be doing…. But do you know why it can be so hard to succeed with your health goals?  Here are the TOP 5 reasons Read More

Illness as an Opportunity to Awaken Consciousness

Transforming illness into a self-healing journey, the next paradigm shift in medicine. When we are sick and in pain, we try to return to health as quickly as possible. It is a natural response to seek treatments to ‘fix’ or get rid of pain and symptoms so we can return Read More

Living in Presence With Your Emotional Pain Body

There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose.  It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.  It comes together with other energy forms from other Read More

Survival Mode – Dr Canali

When we experience a stressful or traumatic event, whether it is emotional or physical, our nervous system automatically goes into a response.  The most recognized reactions are fight or flight.  In the fight or flight response the body prepares itself for what it believes to be a life-threatening event by Read More

The Unification Project™ – Dr Canali

The Unification Project™ is about gathering health professionals across many disciplines together to share evidence-based, reproducible truths in disease and human suffering with the goal of forming a common approach to diagnosis and treatment.  Current research indicates that the perceived positive results of decades of medical and alternative therapies may Read More

Disorders

ADHA Experts Re-evaluate Zeal for Drugs

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) now impacts 1 in 10 American children—a 22 percent increase from 2003.  About two-thirds of these children are on some form of prescription medication, which has become the go-to treatment for this increasingly common condition. ADHD makes it hard for children to pay attention and Read More

ADHD Linked to Prenatal Antidepressant Use

More than one in 10 Americans take an antidepressant, and that number jumps to one in four among women aged 50 to 64.1 They’re the most commonly prescribed class of medication other than antibiotics,2 but despite their overwhelming popularity there’s an important question that needs to be answered: do they Read More

Advances in Understanding of Depression Offers New Hope

Depression is thought to affect about one in 10 Americans.1 In 2010, antidepressants were the second most commonly prescribed type of medication in the US,2 hinting at the severity of the problem. Contrary to popular belief, depression is not likely caused by unbalanced brain chemicals; however, there are a number Read More

Conversion Disorder

Conversion disorder is a neurological disorder in which physical symptoms are unconsciously caused by a stressful or traumatic event and is one of a group of psychological disorders called somatoform disorders. Somatoform disorders are psychological disorders which are characterized by physical symptoms that have no apparent physical cause. While potentially Read More

Mental Illness – It’s Not in Your Genes

Even before the Human Genome Project wrapped up in April 2003, scientists have worked overtime to find the gene or genes responsible for autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, alcoholism, depression, and other ailments “known” to have major genetic components. The problem is, many neuropsychiatric ailments that are assumed to have a Read More

Social Anxiety Disorder

Social Anxiety Disorder Linked to High Serotonin Levels Throwing Treatment with SSRIs into Serious Question Depression and other mental health problems are at epidemic levels judging by the number of antidepressants prescribed each year. According to CDC data, one in 20 Americans over the age of 12 report some form Read More

Somatization Disorder

Definition Somatization disorder is a psychiatric condition marked by multiple medically unexplained physical, or somatic, symptoms. In order to qualify for the diagnosis of somatization disorder, somatic complaints must be serious enough to interfere significantly with a person’s ability to perform important activities, such as work, school or family and Read More

Drugs and Prescriptions

ADHA Experts Re-evaluate Zeal for Drugs

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) now impacts 1 in 10 American children—a 22 percent increase from 2003.  About two-thirds of these children are on some form of prescription medication, which has become the go-to treatment for this increasingly common condition. ADHD makes it hard for children to pay attention and Read More

ADHD Linked to Prenatal Antidepressant Use

More than one in 10 Americans take an antidepressant, and that number jumps to one in four among women aged 50 to 64.1 They’re the most commonly prescribed class of medication other than antibiotics,2 but despite their overwhelming popularity there’s an important question that needs to be answered: do they Read More

Anxiety Drug Overdoses Hit Record Levels

Prescription drug overdoses have become alarmingly common in the U.S., with opioid painkillers, such as Vicodin and Oxycontin, among the drugs most frequently making headlines. 2:57 minutes New research shows another class of drugs — benzodiazepines or “benzos” — is rising in the ranks of overdose deaths, however. Prescriptions for Read More

Evidence on Prescription Medication?

Kirsch’s analysis of the effectiveness of antidepressants was an outgrowth of his interest in the placebo effect. His first meta-analysis was aimed at assessing the size of the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. The results not only showed a sizeable placebo effect, but also indicated that the drug Read More

The Healing Process

A Process, Not An End Point

At one time, I thought that if I just worked on particular issue A, B and C, that I would be fully healed from baggage of my past.  It seemed like, all I had to do was go to counseling, work on it, become aware of it and that’s it. Read More

A Secret Weapon for Handling Change

Change is uncomfortable and scary for all of us.  And it’s especially hard to release “the old” when we haven’t met “the new” yet.  But let go we must if we want a life that’s aligned with the integrity of who we are as we grow. Life is about growth, Read More

Do We Change or Do We Hunker Down?

Many of us from the species called humans come up against big obstacles in our life and in our day.  We all know what these things are if we have not completely become numb to them.  I’m sure each one of us could think of a zillion obstacles or at Read More

Enteric Brain Technique™ – Dr Canali

Buried around your gut, or digestive system, is a second brain.  The gut brain, also called the Enteric Brain, has a mind of its own.  Functioning much like the brain in your head, this system is able to sense and receive impulses.  It records and remembers experiences, and responses to Read More

Healing Progress And Then I Slipped Back

A common question I’ve seen come through applies to many that I’ve seen go through the healing process.  I’m sharing this tonight in hopes that it will help further the understanding of what the healing process is.  These are questions that we need to keep open in discussion so that Read More

I’m Healed – I’m Over It!

So often people who have been through so much in life, tend to hide from it and almost act as if nothing happened.  More times than I can remember, I’ve basically heard from others “I’m healed and I’m over it!”  In the voice and words of the church lady, one Read More

Illness as an Opportunity to Awaken Consciousness

Transforming illness into a self-healing journey, the next paradigm shift in medicine. When we are sick and in pain, we try to return to health as quickly as possible. It is a natural response to seek treatments to ‘fix’ or get rid of pain and symptoms so we can return Read More

Masking The Healing

We all have times when we come up against physical situations that challenge us to the core of our being.  It may be anything from hip pain, back pain to a rash, headache, allergies or any condition you can name.  Sometimes these conditions are debilitating and leave us screaming beside Read More

The 5 Healing Questions

THE 5 HEALING QUESTIONS What do you MOST want to heal which is deep down inside you and are you READY to heal it? Are you willing to do WHATEVER it takes to heal this, including complete lifestyle changes and changes in your belief system? What are you covering up Read More

Unified Therapy™ – Dr Canali

The healing arts and sciences in medicine and alternative practice are filled with numerous diagnoses, treatments and theories.  When subjected to closer inspection it becomes shockingly clear that the diagnoses, treatments and perceived results of these practices are often based on the doctor’s and therapist’s individual and collective beliefs, and Read More

Pain & Suffering

Can Resolving Emotional Trauma Ease Chronic Pain?

Human beings have long sought to understand the basis of pain.  Until the late 17th century, pain and disease were considered a byproduct of sin, or something a person endured to test their faith.  But after philosopher René Descartes first theorized that pain was a physical sensation interpreted by the Read More

Chronic Pain and The Brain

Pain and the brain are inexorably linked. Our brain is the hub of our nervous system, made up of 100 billion nerve cells. We count on it to process what we’re experiencing and help us react. For example, touching something hot activates an immediate withdrawal reflex, thanks to the brain. Read More

Degenerative Disc & Spine Changes

Did you know that current scientific research is that degenerative disc and spine changes are not the real source of pain? That is, most people have one or more disc protrusion, herniation and degeneration of the spine without pain! Recent discoveries show that the disc is loaded with sensory fibers Read More

Fearlessness

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy. We fear that this moment will end, that we won’t get what we need, that we will lose what we Read More

Freedom From Pain

It is so easy it seems to resist things in life.  While resistance sounds difficult, it is by far something we do frequently as humans. This may be through our thoughts, our bodies and even in our spiritual growth and overall learning in our lives. We do this without notice Read More

High Tolerance to Pain or Numbing Out

At one time in my life, I could endure a lot of pain.  It had to get to the level that was so high before I would really pay attention to it.  Usually in those situations, the situation was so dire that it would require going to the emergency room Read More

Living in Presence With Your Emotional Pain Body

There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose.  It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.  It comes together with other energy forms from other Read More

Stuck In The Mud

Staying In Pain Pain comes and it goes.  It is just one component to the grand cycle of life.  And when experienced as such, pain can serve as an important teacher.  It is when we get stuck in our pain that it becomes detrimental to our well-being and development.  If Read More

Take My Pain Away

I know I have written on this subject in the past, but time and time again, I see people focusing on taking the pain away.  I get the flyers and information constantly for healing bodywork methods of all kinds that guarantees to take the pain away.  However, from what I Read More

What is Suffering? – Dr Canali

Specific life experiences can trigger significant loss of health, happiness, and sense of purpose.  After studying thousands of individual cases, I have found that people are often changed – physically, mentally, and spiritually – by a particularly hurtful, traumatic or stressful experience or event. These events or experiences, such as Read More

What Suffering Does

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bunch of conversations in which the unspoken assumption was that the main goal of life is to maximize happiness.  That’s normal.  When people plan for the future, they often talk about all the good times and good experiences they hope Read More

Resiliency

A Secret Weapon for Handling Change

Change is uncomfortable and scary for all of us.  And it’s especially hard to release “the old” when we haven’t met “the new” yet.  But let go we must if we want a life that’s aligned with the integrity of who we are as we grow. Life is about growth, Read More

Nervous System Resiliency

One of the things that I am learning firsthand is how our nervous system is in the course of our day.  Many of the things that I write about here are ones that I have been introduced to and then I learn about them by living through experiences that become Read More

Symptoms of Inner Peace

Be on the lookout for symptoms of inner peace.  The hearts of a great many have already been exposed to inner peace and it is possible that people everywhere could come down with it in epidemic proportions.  This could pose a serious threat to what has, up to now, been Read More

What Resets Our Nervous System After Trauma?

Dr. Levine: When I first started developing my approach to trauma – and this was in the sixties and seventies, so it was way before the definition of trauma as PTSD – I noticed how many different kinds of sometimes even seemingly ordinary events could cause people to develop symptoms Read More

Self-Care

10 Life-Changing Facts About Attachment

Just for a moment, imagine being free of attachments. Things come and go, but you are stable and unmoving in the midst of it all. It doesn’t mean you don’t care. In fact, in the lack of clinging, you are free to care deeply. The most intimate state of being Read More

A Secret Weapon for Handling Change

Change is uncomfortable and scary for all of us.  And it’s especially hard to release “the old” when we haven’t met “the new” yet.  But let go we must if we want a life that’s aligned with the integrity of who we are as we grow. Life is about growth, Read More

Five Things That Sabotage Your Health

Why Most People Don’t Have Optimum Health What are the Top 5 reasons we shortchange our health? There are lots of posts about everything you should be doing…. But do you know why it can be so hard to succeed with your health goals?  Here are the TOP 5 reasons Read More

Have Patience…

Have Patience… Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms, or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able Read More

Letting Go

Letting Go To “let go” does not mean to stop caring, …it means I cannot do it for someone else. To “let go” is not to cut myself off, …It is the realization I can’t control another. To “let go” is not to enable, …but to allow learning from natural Read More

Meditation and Freedom

Meditation only becomes real, powerful, authentic, and liberating when it is a practice of letting everything go. Otherwise it is reduced to little more than a psycho-spiritual relaxation technique. It may make you feel better, but it won’t set you free. Feeling better and being free don’t necessarily mean the Read More

Releasing Judgment…of Yourself

I’m sure you’ve heard the spiritual trope – let go of what no longer serves you. But does that actually mean anything to you? Do you really have any idea what it would feel like to loosen that toxic grip? Let alone what is involved in such a letting go? Read More

Symptoms of Inner Peace

Be on the lookout for symptoms of inner peace.  The hearts of a great many have already been exposed to inner peace and it is possible that people everywhere could come down with it in epidemic proportions.  This could pose a serious threat to what has, up to now, been Read More

The Cure

The Cure We think we get over things. We don’t get over things. Or say, we get over the measles but not a broken heart. We need to make that distinction. The things that become part of our experience never become less a part of our experience. How can I Read More

The Healing and Strengthening Power of Touch

The power of touch is displayed perhaps no more poignantly than during the first few months of life. Babies who are not hugged and held during these first months will not thrive and grow like their cuddled peers.  In fact, a study by Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found Read More

When Life Is Too Busy

I can’t keep track of how many times I have heard people say, “I’m so busy, I just can’t find the time to get everything done”.  Their days are filled from early morning until late at night where they try to cram in some time to gulp down food, say Read More

When Self-Care Turns Into Sabotage

It’s safe to say that self-care is having a moment.  More and more, it seems like everyone is espousing the importance of sleep, saying no, and “treating yo’self” as much as possible. As a social worker and coach, I talk all the time about the importance of self-care.  Many people Read More

Toxic Stress

Connection Between Stress and Autoimmune Disease

Affirmed by Massive 30-Year Study As you may already know, autoimmunity is a form of immune dysregulation. This occurs as a result of different factors and that includes emotional factors. Your emotional health is directly linked to your immune function, via the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis, which means that you can Read More

How Stress Makes You Sick

Stress often starts in your head with a worry or a fear, but those feelings of anxiety, and perhaps even panic, don’t stay there.  When you feel stressed, your body ramps up production of the stress hormones cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine. This triggers the start of the stress response, and, Read More

Human Memory: Why Bad Memories Stick

“I’m incredibly stressed out, and this Arizona thing has really put me over the top,” complained my patient, just this week, a woman in her mid fifties. “I just can’t seem to let it go.  It’s like I’m always on edge,” she lamented.  Looking at her intake paperwork, I noted Read More

Stress: A Badge of Honor or A Code Word for Fear?

According to the Center for Disease Control, 80% of visits to the doctor are believed to be stress-related. Yet what is “stress” if not fear, anxiety, and worry dressed up in more socially acceptable clothing? While we tend to view worry, anxiety, and fear as signs of weakness, most of Read More

The Autonomic Nervous System and Survival Mode

Unresolved stressors and trauma can cause dysregulation and affect these bodily systems, causing not only pain, discomfort, sleep difficulties and such, but may even create disease. There is much research and scientific literature on the benefits of meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, herbal remedies, and the like. All these may help, but Read More

The Unification Project™ – Dr Canali

The Unification Project™ is about gathering health professionals across many disciplines together to share evidence-based, reproducible truths in disease and human suffering with the goal of forming a common approach to diagnosis and treatment.  Current research indicates that the perceived positive results of decades of medical and alternative therapies may Read More

Toxic Stress – The Facts

The future of any society depends on its ability to foster the healthy development of the next generation. Extensive research on the biology of stress now shows that healthy development can be derailed by excessive or prolonged activation of stress response systems in the body (especially the brain), with damaging Read More

Traumatic Stress and Its Relationship to the Body

Do you sometimes seem stuck in vicious cycles of physical pain, trauma, anxiety or depression?  Have you ever wondered why your symptoms resist traditional treatment approaches? Traumatic stress is the number one source of chronic pain, creating anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, musculoskeletal pain, and other illnesses. Understanding how Read More

When the Body Says No – The Cost of Hidden Stress

When the Body Says No is an accessible and groundbreaking book — filled with the moving stories of real people — medical doctor and bestselling author of Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté, shows that emotion and psychological stress play a powerful role in the onset of chronic illness. Western medicine achieves Read More

Trauma

Can Resolving Emotional Trauma Ease Chronic Pain?

Human beings have long sought to understand the basis of pain.  Until the late 17th century, pain and disease were considered a byproduct of sin, or something a person endured to test their faith.  But after philosopher René Descartes first theorized that pain was a physical sensation interpreted by the Read More

Childhood Trauma and Adult Disease

What’s the Real Diagnosis? “Traumatic events of the earliest years of infancy and childhood are not lost but, like a child’s footprints in wet cement, are often preserved life-long. Time does not heal the wounds that occur in those earliest years; time conceals them. They are not lost; they are Read More

Heal Trauma – Dr Canali

Heal Trauma Save The World Project™ is about ending the cyclical nature of trauma. Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) is most destructive when passed down from person to person, and through families and institutions.  Like a virus, the unconscious carriers can be you and me.  Repeating patterns of PTS behavior can represent Read More

Nervous System and Trauma

Nervous systems are becoming so overloaded and overworked that few people are actually engaged in life and reality.  When we overload and overwork our nervous systems without release, we cannot expect to function at 100 percent as humans.  We become less than human.  We give up who we actually are Read More

The Autonomic Nervous System and Survival Mode

Unresolved stressors and trauma can cause dysregulation and affect these bodily systems, causing not only pain, discomfort, sleep difficulties and such, but may even create disease. There is much research and scientific literature on the benefits of meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, herbal remedies, and the like. All these may help, but Read More

The Neuroscience of Traumatic Memory

Sometimes people can remember what seem like the smallest, most insignificant details of their lives – their 8th grade locker combination, a story they heard at a party years ago, or all the lines from their favorite movie. These memories – full of facts, words, and events – are explicit Read More

Traumatic Stress and Its Relationship to the Body

Do you sometimes seem stuck in vicious cycles of physical pain, trauma, anxiety or depression?  Have you ever wondered why your symptoms resist traditional treatment approaches? Traumatic stress is the number one source of chronic pain, creating anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, musculoskeletal pain, and other illnesses. Understanding how Read More

Unified Therapy™ – Dr Canali

The healing arts and sciences in medicine and alternative practice are filled with numerous diagnoses, treatments and theories.  When subjected to closer inspection it becomes shockingly clear that the diagnoses, treatments and perceived results of these practices are often based on the doctor’s and therapist’s individual and collective beliefs, and Read More

What Resets Our Nervous System After Trauma?

Dr. Levine: When I first started developing my approach to trauma – and this was in the sixties and seventies, so it was way before the definition of trauma as PTSD – I noticed how many different kinds of sometimes even seemingly ordinary events could cause people to develop symptoms Read More

What Your Child Remembers

New discoveries about early memory – and how it affects us. Most of us have been told at one time or another that children aren’t supposed to remember anything that happens to them before – roughly – the age of two. Emotionally painful experiences during infancy will therefore have no Read More