Slowing Down & Thinking with Your Heart
As a child growing up in a home suffused with trauma, life always felt uneasy - like something bad was about to happen. Always. This ever-present fear often got expressed through impatience, rushing, and urgency. It was a defense against instability and readiness to...
Caring for Others by Caring for Ourselves
Having worked in and with the educational world for many decades now, I know just how tirelessly committed to their students teachers are - and how much stress they take on. After our Summer Intensives, more than a few would comment on how much they needed the...
15 Ideas to Help Your Family Thrive This Holiday Season
Survival is more than just avoiding bad outcomes. It’s also doing what you can to thrive amidst adversity. Sometimes that can require some extra creativity - something this pandemic year has asked of us all. So we’ve brainstormed a list of “survival” activities for...
Tools You Can Use to Address Pandemic – & Other – Stress & Trauma
Even though Thanksgiving has passed, the importance of gratitude goes on. One thing we can be thankful for this holiday season is a COVID vaccine on the near horizon. While it won’t bring an instant return to normalcy - Dr. Fauci has said it may be mid-2021 at least...
Giving Thanks Connects Us, Even When Distanced
Whether you observe Thanksgiving or not, it’s instructive to note that the modern national holiday was born in a time even more divisive, contentious, and uncertain than our own - and that it came to be in no small part thanks to the efforts of a woman named Sarah...
Healing Around the World
Some things seem meant to be. What happened had to happen and couldn’t have happened any other way. When RJ Swanson, founder of New Hope for Children, contacted Lynea about sharing the practice of TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises) with children in Africa,...
New Study Shows the Positive Impact of Yoga Calm in the Classroom
When we were first designing Yoga Calm, there wasn’t a lot of research supporting what we were seeing work so well with kids in the rural Oregon elementary school where Lynea was a counselor. Over 20 years later, there’s a significant body of literature showing that...
Presence & Intent in a Virtual World
One thing that saddened me during my years as a school counselor was how many students carried around negative stories about the world. They believed the world was full of bad guys; that people were out to get them. They also felt bad about themselves. Often, they...
How & Why to Keep Mindful Movement in the Virtual School Day
Not long after I’d begun work as a counselor in a high poverty, high trauma school, I played a social/emotional game with a group of students in which I’d ask questions to get them thinking. “What would you do if you found $10,000?” I asked the children. Having come...
Re-imagining Education in a COVID World
The 6th grade students at the Outdoor School were looking at the results of water samples they had just taken when a great blue heron landed in a tree above our heads. All the children turned to gaze at it, their eyes huge with excitement. What is that? they wanted to...
Time in Nature Is Important – Especially Now
If you followed the news at all over the 4th of July weekend, you likely saw beaches filled with an unsettling number of people, many ignoring the mask and social distancing guidelines for controlling the spread of COVID-19. Though plenty of folks were concerned about...
We Can Make a Better Post-Pandemic World, Part 3
Read Part 1 Read Part 2 Originally, our last post marked the end of this series, but the ongoing fight for justice that the death of George Floyd inspired has kept us thinking about what more we can do to create a healthier world for us all. Certainly, there’s a lot...