Today I had the honor of attending Houston Compassion Week’s kickoff luncheon.
Compassion week is a week-long celebration to highlight Houston’s compassionate culture with workshops, service projects, and creative ideas for cultivating compassion.  The luncheon was full of individuals and groups focused on having compassion and caring for others…so it was fitting that the keynote speaker, Kristin Neff, PhD, has devoted her life to researching and teaching self-compassion.
 
Dr. Neff's talk highlighted the benefits of self-compassion such as decreased caregiver burnout and ability to sustain empathy.  She reminded everyone in the room of the importance of putting one's own proverbial oxygen mask on first before assisting others.  She gave an example of a difficult time when her son was throwing a tantrum on an international flight and as she began to flood herself with self-compassion, not only did it shift from being a terrible experience to a positive one, but her son calmed down as well.  Research on self-compassion shows that it improves health behaviors, increases psychoemotional resiliency, improves interpersonal relationships, and more.  Self-compassionate people also report more happiness, optimism, life satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation, as well as greater levels of emotional intelligence, coping skills, and wisdom than those who harshly judge themselves.  Dr. Neff said she's no longer concerned with proving the benefits of self-compassion but rather learning more about how it can be taught and proliferated throughout systems and communities.

Dr. Neff shared a tool of taking a "self-compassion break" during situations in life that are difficult and cause stress.  She also recommends practicing this tool before the stuff hits the fan so it is more easily called to mind when you need it most.  A self-compassion break involves 3 steps:

1. "This is a moment of suffering." - Mindful awareness that this hurts, this is stress, etc.
2. "Suffering is a part of life." - That's common humanity.  Recognizing that life isn't perfect, we're not alone and that other people struggle or feel this way from time to time.
3. "May I be kind to myself." - This is kindness.  You might also ask yourself, "what do I need to hear right now?" or a phrase specific to your situation such as:

P.S. If you're reading this post in real-time, check out the schedule of workshops and service projects all around Houston metro going on this week!  http://compassionatehouston.org/schedule

I had the opportunity to spend the weekend with one of my absolute favorite gurus in the physical therapy realm: Shirley Sahrmann, PT, PhD, FAPTA.  I was lucky to be able to chat with her at lunch about big career things ahead!  As she said, "I've been running this aging experiment for a while now, and it's not for sissies!"  She has a ton of energy, probably due to the regular exercise she gets despite her "senile sarcopenia" (her jocular moniker for her aging muscles).  She's seen the ups and downs and fads in the movement sciences, and although she's technically retired (yea right!), she's still quite busy lecturing and writing a new edition of her first book.  Although this is not my first rodeo engaging with her material, or taking class from her, every time I come away with tons of new tidbits to digest and wonderful words of wisdom.  She is still learning, and not afraid to speak of how she's "seen the light" in regard to things she used to teach but no longer agrees with.  Shirley speaks of how to move our profession forward rather than recite a litany of her great many accomplishments and hot shot friends.  She believes physical therapists have an identity as movement diagnostic and prescriptive experts and belong as birth to death practitioners - just like the dentist - doing annual neuromusculoskeletal screens to catch things before they become big problems.  She is also hilarious, a joy to be around, and believes in the power of smart women.  In case you can't tell, I think she's fantastic and I hope to have an ounce of her wisdom and spunk when I myself have run the aging experiment a good while longer.

My pen never stopped moving all weekend, so it'd be impossible to share all the great takeaways, but I wanted to share a few more general ones:

• "Muscles don't take kinesiology.  They violate the rules because they don't know the rules."
• "Neuromuscular control and performance is more important than muscle strength."
• "Just because you're wearing a muscle doesn't mean you're using it."

• "Find the muscle and use it.  If you can't use it under controlled circumstances, using it functionally requires a lot of luck."
  
• "Doing things easily uses the little guys.  Doing things big will use the big guys." (speaking of intrinsic vs large multi-joint muscles)
• "You get what you train."
• "There's no magic in an exercise unless you see what you want to happen happening."
• On mindful movement: "When a patient asks 'when can I stop doing these exercises?' I tell them when you stop taking a bath and brushing your teeth because you obviously don't care anymore."
• "If the patient doesn't take responsibility, we part company - there's no point."
• "I can't emphasize enough the importance of alignment with gravity."
• "What I had attributed many years to shortness, I don't believe any more is shortness.  It's a relative stiffness problem - not fixed by stretching, but fixed by stiffening what's relatively flexible."
  
• "I firmly believe there are signs before symptoms."  Followed by examples such as you don't wait 'till you have a stroke to get your blood pressure checked.
• "Identifying a pathoanatomic problem doesn't do anything to help you solve the problem."
• "If they taught med students like we teach PTs today, they'd say 'today we're covering cardiology. We've got beta blockers, transplants and antibiotics.  Now you figure out who to use them on.  We wouldn't want to tell you what we learned when we were old 'cause we don't want to stifle you're creativity'." with a hint of sarcasm ;-)
• "Evidence changes.  We need to understand the underlying mechanisms."
• "I don't care how far you go, I just care how you get there."

I just got home last week from Professional Yoga Therapy Studies with Ginger Garner.  It is both humbling and inspiring to be welcomed into the fold of depth and breadth of experience offered by Ginger and my classmates.  Ginger does an excellent job perusing and presenting us with research to support medical therapeutic yoga.  It's so great to know that so much of what we can offer in the merging of yoga and medicine is evidence-based...and there is so much more research to be done!  

We covered so much great info throughout the week, but if I had to sum up my entire week in one word, it would be "breathe."  We discussed so many layers of life and body systems with literal anatomic connections to the breath, specifically the respiratory diaphragm.  This article helped connect a lot of dots for me!  Stay tuned...we'll talk more about it!

Below, a great quote on improving health through yoga from Geeta Iyengar, daughter of BKS Iyengar, who herself has been teaching yoga since about age 13:

Currently reading Peter Levine's In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness and found this great quote.  It is paired with one of my favorite photographs I took traveling in Cambodia at Bayon Temple.  I was lucky enough to get this picture from a room of the temple before the rain started coming in so strongly I had to put away my camera.