Sakura’s Call to Mindfulness, Mindfulness’ Call to Gratitude
While cycling through downtown Portland a few days ago, I was amazed to see so many people out along the waterfront admiring the cherry trees and their eruption of soft pink blossoms. The tree limbs were like arms, welcoming us to step out into the spring, with its...
Yogic Breathing May Help Covid Long Haulers
We’re finding out now that long COVID is extremely common. Roughly one-third of those infected will have some lingering symptoms, most often fatigue and loss of smell or taste. We’re also finding just how mysterious it is, affecting more women than men, for instance,...
Missing Body…Investigation Underway
Just yesterday, my granddaughter Anna came to me and said, “Let’s go for a bike ride.” While this is an activity that she always enjoys for its own sake, I could see that the suggestion was coming from a place of stress. Some bullying had been happening in her...
“Hope Is Nature Talking to Us”: 6 Tips for Nurturing Hope
Some people seem to think of hope as kind of a feeling that comes and goes. Others understand it more as part of a person’s very constitution - you’re either an optimist or a pessimist, and once the thought pattern is set, that’s that. But in fact, hope is something...
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...