TRE with Tim

04/12/2021

🎅🤠🎅

Discover the best books on to heal trauma with yoga and meditation. Deirdre Fay and other experts share the best books on every topic you can imagine.

15/08/2021

Happiness is visceral 💗

There’s growing evidence that signals sent from our internal organs to the brain play a major role in regulating emotions and fending off anxiety and depression

04/03/2021

Here is a conversation that I had with psychotherapist Martin Fisher recently on the subject of Stress, Trauma and Resilience. We talk about neuroscience, attachment, trauma, resilience and post traumatic growth. Hope you find it useful. 🙏

View from The Hill present: Stress, Trauma and ResilienceA conversation between Martin Fisher (psychotherapist) and Tim Kirkpatrick (craniosacral therapist)C...

16/12/2020

The world has wised up to how our past affects our present. But I know that labelling ourselves as ‘traumatised’ holds us back, says writer James Greig

06/12/2020

Polyvagal Institute is a not-for-profit dedicated to creating a new paradigm for health and wellness. We provide training, support community and facilitate research centered around a revolutionary understanding of the body and mind, as presented in the work of Stephen Porges and Polyvagal Theory.

11/09/2020

Trauma can last a lifetime. Here is is explained in 10 minutes.

14/08/2020

A full day of talks exploring mind, body and brain approaches to healing from trauma.

27/06/2020

"Trauma is what happens inside of you as a result of traumatic events. It is a loss of connection to oneself and to the present moment.
Healing is the reconnection to our authentic self."
— Dr. Gabor Maté

For many of us, the global crisis has reactivated old fears, depression, dissociation, feelings of isolation and numbness. We live in times of uncertainty that awaken old traumas and reactions in us. When we are under stress and feel challenged, we resort to old patterns of survival. 

27/05/2020

‘If in doubt, shake’. These are tense times. Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®) is a great tool for relieving stress and anxiety.

TRE is actually you, healing you. It's very easy to learn and easy to practice. The goal of TRE is to set up a natural shaking mechanism in the body. When you're tremoring, the body begins to free itself from old stories.

When we've been overwhelmed, our bodies tend to go into defensive patterns. We contract or disappear from our body.
The goal of TRE is to wake up our sense of our body again, using shaking a as way of generating new feelings and releasing tension patterns.

Many people report feeling more connected and present after letting natural tremors release tension in the body.

Although we can't meet for TRE courses and trainings in lockdown, I have resources and article to inspire you here: www.trecollege.com

27/05/2020

This is useful to view if you're shaking has not moved beyond the pelvis.

Dominic used different body positions to help the tremors move past his pelvis into his torso. This video demonstrates that private on-lineTRE sessions can b...

22/02/2020

“The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated that one in five adults aged 18 to 74 years experienced at least one form of child abuse, whether emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or witnessing domestic violence or abuse, before the age of 16 years (8.5 million people).”
😢😤😠

Child abuse in England and Wales, bringing together a range of different data sources from across government and the voluntary sector.

06/01/2020

Really happy about the recent feature in the Metro about one of my TRE intro days:

“A few weeks ago, I went to to meet and to try a therapy known as Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercise or TRE. It’s basically a way of connecting mind and body to try to help de-stress you. It sounds quite woo-woo but because I’m convinced that body can influence brain, and not just the other way round, I was interested to hear more.

It was an amusing and enlightening experience and you can read all about it in today’s .

Like all these things I’m not convinced you can make judgements based on a one off session, but I like the idea that it’s a skill you can learn and then practise on your own - particularly if you’re not a big fan of yoga or mindfulness but want to do something that gets you out of your overthinking head and into your body and the moment.”

28/11/2019

The official TRE video now available!

24/11/2019

My last TRE @ WLBC class until April 2020, as I am off on a four month travel break. Would be great to see you there 😄

The class continues in my absence under the watchful eye and provagal presence of Marzena Hauton. Thanks Marzena 🙏

Trauma and Tension Release Exercises class TRE at West London Buddhist Centre Studio led by Vilasamani every Wednesday evening 8-10 pm from 11 November 2015

05/11/2019

This piece is true for beings of all genders. And none. 🙏

Polyvagal Theory sheds light on trauma and trauma responses.  We learn best and connect through story. I’m sharing with you a personal excerpt of trauma. Please read with caution. I was three. My parents were out of town for the weekend. I had a babysitter and her son wa

02/11/2019

Healing is our responsibility because we have this one life, this single shot to do something important.

05/10/2019

If you only read one article about trauma and the difficulty of being here, make it this one.

“To feel and know your body safely is an essential ingredient of healing.”

"Neuroscience research has shown that the only way you can change your survival orientation in your brain is by accessing your interoceptive world—the part of your brain that allows you to observe yourself. You have to go inside and be still by yourself... But when trauma lives inside of you, getting to know yourself can be the scariest thing to do. It takes an enormous amount of courage to visit and befriend yourself and to feel what that uptightness is about."

Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusettsis professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School, and director of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. His newest book, The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the He...

27/09/2019

Trauma Release Exercise classes in London
with Tim Vilasamani Kirkpatrick

What happens? An introduction is followed by 6 exercises designed to fatigue the big muscles of the legs until they start shaking, and then plenty of time to explore how this tremoring can release tension and rebalance the nervous system. Classes are 120 minutes.

Current classes :

Wednesdays 8 - 10 pm : West London Buddhist Centre W2 5DP.
£20/15. Book here : https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trauma-and-tension-release-exercises-tre-class-tickets-24647096128

David Berceli’s Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) are a wonderful tool to assist the body in letting go of chronic stress and deeply ingrained patterns through involuntary shaking. It is a self directed healing mechanism through which overwhelming experiences can be cleared or integrated. The exercises are simple to learn and the process easy to self regulate.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

This is an easy explanation of TRE. It is a method of stress reduction that is simple and easy to apply because it naturally follows the physiology of the hu...

22/09/2019

You probably know Veronique Mead if you follow the Vagus Study Group on Facebook (recommended as a great source of research and discussion). Here is a piece of hers on the links between trauma and chronic illness.

7. "Understanding trauma can empower you."

11/09/2019

Interoception is the perception of one’s inner environment, particularly as it relates to bodily sensations. It is our capacity to bear witness to the feelin...

09/09/2019

TRE in the Park promotes TRE as a method that encourages health care in the form of self-care and collective care. It teaches TRE as a stress reduction and t...

02/09/2019

Helping people with anxiety has traditionally been seen as the territory of mental health professionals. Anxiety is most commonly framed as a psychological problem. My clinical experience for over 20 years has been that by safely connecting to the body, people become less anxious. My book, 'Anxiety Is Really Strange 'is an attempt to summarise my understanding of why embodiment is a key tool to slow down feelings of anxiety and panic.

Another trigger for the book was reading the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) on how emotions are made. Her ‘constructed emotion’ model, rooted in decades of research, pulls together lots of great neuroscience and philosophy. Reading Barrett gave me renewed confidence that the business of feeling, however tricky, is central to health.

Many people assume feeling our body is natural and easy. Its not. It takes a lot of practice and skill to connect to our body. We can easily slip into habits and fantasies when we perceive the inner world of sensations. Buddhist scholar Reggie Ray (2016) goes so far as to say: ‘In modern culture, all of us live in a state of disembodied abstraction’.

There is now lots of great science on the value of exploring feelings (Barrett 2017). The inability to consistently map the internal state of the body is linked to persistent pain, anxiety states and being stuck in trauma responses.

It is useful differentiate basic body phenomena – physiological shifts in chemicals, nervous system reflexes, muscular tension patterns, and, behaviours – from the complex processes of consciousness. Emotions, memories and thought all co-emerge, created by our flexible brains, as we extract meaning from body events. ‘There is physiology and then complexity’ Haines 2018.

In response to a stimulus our body gears up for action, often defaulting to simple protective reflexes such as fight-or-flight or freeze. Our brain attempts to quickly and efficiently predict what is happening. Feelings are a bridge between physical body properties and complex emotions. We use our past experiences to continually create memories, emotions and meaning from our internal feelings.

To successfully work with anxiety it is useful to become skilful at managing events in the body. For sure, we need to do simple things to ensure our resources are not overwhelmed – try to eat well, socialise, sleep and de-stress. But, we can also learn to reframe our responses to the protective reflexes that can hijack our functioning. This is best summed up by Viktor Frankl 1946:

‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’

Feelings are important and are the foundation of knowing and perception. By learning how to feel we can self-regulate seemingly out of control processes in the body. Somethings feels right or, too often, feels way wrong. But, ultimately, it is only a feeling and we can choose our response. We can learn to not get lost and stuck in protective reflexes and generate a window of opportunity to come out of anxiety.

You can find out more about the book here: https://bodycollege.net/anxiety/

24/08/2019

08/08/2019

Infographic...and some impacts are probably not listed, but it’s pretty comprehensive.

07/08/2019

The human body and mind, medicine, psychology, spirituality and the paranormal have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. I spent many nights sitting up in pe**te meetings during my late adolescence while living among the Kiowa tribe in Southwestern Oklahoma and went on to apprentice with Hor...

06/08/2019

When practising TRE it’s important to understand 3 aspects of the trauma response: freezing, flooding & dissociation to ensure the healing process is safe.

05/08/2019

TRE class - Summer dates update

Primrose Hill (Mondays 4 - 5.30pm) : there will be classes on through August except for 26/8 (Bank Holiday). Drop in.

WLBC (Wednesdays 8 - 10pm) on 21/8 and 28/8 are cancelled, but other dates continue with myself or Marzena Hauton. Book here : http://westlondonbuddhistcentre.com/tre/

Trauma and Tension Release Exercises class TRE at West London Buddhist Centre Studio led by Vilasamani every Wednesday evening 8-10 pm from 11 November 2015

01/08/2019

Here are some intriguing questions:

How should you engage with ‘parts’?
How can you avoid ‘retraumatising’ the client?
How do you work with the client who can’t properly remember the trauma?
What do you do with the client who cannot stay present during a session?
How do you deal with dependency?
Is integration the goal?
How do you pace sessions?
What do you do if you can’t get the adult ‘back’ at the end of a session?
How do you deal with stuckness?
How do you avoid traumatic reenactments within the therapy room and the therapy relationship?
What pitfalls are there in this work?
How do you look after yourself whilst working with such demanding and at times overwhelming content and trauma?
How do you deal effectively and empathically with self-harm and suicidality?
How do you process traumatic memories?
Do you allow the client to ‘switch’ or do you keep the ‘adult’ present?

https://www.carolynspring.com/shop/wwddicp-online-training/?utm_source=sib&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sib-email-040819&utm_term=wwddicp

This online course provides a solid grounding in how to work with clients in particular with dissociative identity disorder - how do you relate to 'parts of the personality', what is the treatment roadmap, what are the principles and pitfalls of this work? Currently available for £30 using coupon c...