Excerpt from The Spiritual Journey of Family Caregiving:
I co-lead a support group for patients in the early stage of Alzheimer's Disease and their caregivers for the Alzheimer's Association in conjunction with Del Mar Caregiver Resource Center. One of the caregivers in the group had emergency surgery several weeks ago and almost died. When she returned she looked radiant. I had never seen her look so healthy and relaxed.
"I learned something wonderful!" she joyfully reported. She had been sick for a long time without realizing it. But now that she was healthy, rested and relaxed after a long enforced break from caregiving, her husband (the Alzheimer's patient) had improved! He wasn't cured by any means, but because he felt less nervous around her he was able to remember things more easily.
Her husband piped in at this point."It's important to feel confident around the person who takes care of you." He agreed that it made a big difference.
So, caregivers, take care of yourself! And don't be afraid to take a break when you need it.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The "Relaxation Response"
Why is it that people in the medical profession need to create new jargon for perfectly acceptable techniques? I'm talking about Dr. Herbert Benson and what he calls "The Relaxation Response
." Benson conducted a study showing that teaching his patients this technique resulted in decreased metabolism, rate of breathing, blood pressure, muscle tension and heart rate. It was effective in the treatment of a wide variety of disorders including hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, chronic pain, insomnia, mild to moderate depression, infertility, PMS, migraine and cluster headaches, even dealing with symptoms associated with cancer and AIDS.
What is this miraculous technique? Meditation. Mantra-based meditation to be specific. Benson teaches his patients to repeat any word, sound or phrase that has meaning for them. "Peace", "Om" or something longer like "The Lord is my shepherd." He tells them to passively disregard any intrusive thoughts that come to mind and return to the mantra instead.
That's it. Meditation. I remember when he announced this amazing new "Relaxation Response" technique. I was at a seminar on Spirituality and Health put on by Harvard University several years ago and he did a highly-touted presentation on his findings at that event. I remember wanting to shout from my seat "Where were all you people in the 60's and 70's when Transcendental Meditation was shown to have the exact same effect? Why the hell did it take a doctor giving it a socially-acceptable name to make it alright to come out of the closet and say 'yes' to something millions of people have trusted and used effectively for hundreds of years?"
I better go practice my "relaxation response." The inanity of this situation makes me want to gnash my teeth.
Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum...
Ah.... much better.
." Benson conducted a study showing that teaching his patients this technique resulted in decreased metabolism, rate of breathing, blood pressure, muscle tension and heart rate. It was effective in the treatment of a wide variety of disorders including hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, chronic pain, insomnia, mild to moderate depression, infertility, PMS, migraine and cluster headaches, even dealing with symptoms associated with cancer and AIDS.What is this miraculous technique? Meditation. Mantra-based meditation to be specific. Benson teaches his patients to repeat any word, sound or phrase that has meaning for them. "Peace", "Om" or something longer like "The Lord is my shepherd." He tells them to passively disregard any intrusive thoughts that come to mind and return to the mantra instead.
That's it. Meditation. I remember when he announced this amazing new "Relaxation Response" technique. I was at a seminar on Spirituality and Health put on by Harvard University several years ago and he did a highly-touted presentation on his findings at that event. I remember wanting to shout from my seat "Where were all you people in the 60's and 70's when Transcendental Meditation was shown to have the exact same effect? Why the hell did it take a doctor giving it a socially-acceptable name to make it alright to come out of the closet and say 'yes' to something millions of people have trusted and used effectively for hundreds of years?"
I better go practice my "relaxation response." The inanity of this situation makes me want to gnash my teeth.
Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum...
Ah.... much better.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Give Yourself to Love
"Give yourself to love
If love is what you're after.
Open up your hearts to
The tears and laughter.
Give yourself to love,
Give yourself to love."
--Kate Wolf
My clients have been teaching me some important life lessons. While I consider my job to be about helping people learn to set limits and boundaries so they can take care of themselves better, I've recently had a spate of caregivers tell me the importance of risking it all for a cause you believe in. When the universe sends me the same message over and over I sit up and take notice, so when three caregivers in a row told me about how important it was for them to have made family caregiving the center of their lives despite the toll it took I decided it was time to write about that.
I sometimes have clients who are literally killing themselves to keep loved ones at home. I beg and plead with them to get some rest, to take time off, to let more people help and they refuse. One person explained it to me like this: "I made a commitment to my husband to see him through this time in his life and, by God, I'm going to be there!" Another recounted the story of how her concerned children actually slipped her a sleeping pill without her knowledge to make her get some rest while they watched her husband. Something happened when she was asleep that she wasn't able to be there for and she has resented the interference ever since. She wanted to be there. It didn't matter that other people were there to take care of things for her -- this is what she wanted to do with this time of her life, period!
Many clients have told me how precious they consider the time they spent with their ailing loved ones to be. It's hard, almost unbelievably challenging, and yet something they would not have missed for the world. The studies that worry me about family caregiving show that elderly caregivers over the age of 65 taking care of someone with dementia have a 60% higher mortality rate than elderly people who are not caregiving. However, the latest studies show that family caregivers in general (all ages, all kinds of illnesses) score higher on tests of physical and emotional well-being after their caregiving days are over than those people who have not done family caregiving. The emotional satisfaction and self-esteem that come from having seen a loved one through a difficult time of crisis and transition appear to far outweigh the negatives (if you survive).
What this information has meant for me as a caregiving consultant is that I am far more reluctant to tell a client that she "can't" do what she is trying to do. I still want my clients to take breaks, get other people involved and make taking care of themselves their highest priority because I want them to survive their caregiving experience and actually succeed at doing the best job as caregivers that they possibly can. But I also have to respect that sometimes love demands a person to make sacrifices that seem over the top to those of us who are not in similar situations. Caregivers put in superhuman efforts to keep their loved ones at home, parents stay up round the clock with sick children, lovers leave promising careers, family and friends to be with their beloveds. I, myself, still grieve the loss of having left my native New England to be with my husband, now ex-husband, in Santa Cruz. I grieve my losses but I don't regret the decision because when loving someone means so much you do what needs to be done and, no matter how it ends up, the loving was not in vain.
The previous blog was an excerpt from The Spiritual Journey of Family Caregiving.
If love is what you're after.
Open up your hearts to
The tears and laughter.
Give yourself to love,
Give yourself to love."
--Kate Wolf
My clients have been teaching me some important life lessons. While I consider my job to be about helping people learn to set limits and boundaries so they can take care of themselves better, I've recently had a spate of caregivers tell me the importance of risking it all for a cause you believe in. When the universe sends me the same message over and over I sit up and take notice, so when three caregivers in a row told me about how important it was for them to have made family caregiving the center of their lives despite the toll it took I decided it was time to write about that.
I sometimes have clients who are literally killing themselves to keep loved ones at home. I beg and plead with them to get some rest, to take time off, to let more people help and they refuse. One person explained it to me like this: "I made a commitment to my husband to see him through this time in his life and, by God, I'm going to be there!" Another recounted the story of how her concerned children actually slipped her a sleeping pill without her knowledge to make her get some rest while they watched her husband. Something happened when she was asleep that she wasn't able to be there for and she has resented the interference ever since. She wanted to be there. It didn't matter that other people were there to take care of things for her -- this is what she wanted to do with this time of her life, period!
Many clients have told me how precious they consider the time they spent with their ailing loved ones to be. It's hard, almost unbelievably challenging, and yet something they would not have missed for the world. The studies that worry me about family caregiving show that elderly caregivers over the age of 65 taking care of someone with dementia have a 60% higher mortality rate than elderly people who are not caregiving. However, the latest studies show that family caregivers in general (all ages, all kinds of illnesses) score higher on tests of physical and emotional well-being after their caregiving days are over than those people who have not done family caregiving. The emotional satisfaction and self-esteem that come from having seen a loved one through a difficult time of crisis and transition appear to far outweigh the negatives (if you survive).
What this information has meant for me as a caregiving consultant is that I am far more reluctant to tell a client that she "can't" do what she is trying to do. I still want my clients to take breaks, get other people involved and make taking care of themselves their highest priority because I want them to survive their caregiving experience and actually succeed at doing the best job as caregivers that they possibly can. But I also have to respect that sometimes love demands a person to make sacrifices that seem over the top to those of us who are not in similar situations. Caregivers put in superhuman efforts to keep their loved ones at home, parents stay up round the clock with sick children, lovers leave promising careers, family and friends to be with their beloveds. I, myself, still grieve the loss of having left my native New England to be with my husband, now ex-husband, in Santa Cruz. I grieve my losses but I don't regret the decision because when loving someone means so much you do what needs to be done and, no matter how it ends up, the loving was not in vain.
The previous blog was an excerpt from The Spiritual Journey of Family Caregiving.
Buddhist Philosophy and Family Caregiving
A caregiver said something very profound to me one day which I decided to tape to my wall. She said that as a young woman in her forties she couldn't stand the Buddhist philosophy of acceptance of what is. She always was a crusader for social change and "making things right." But now that she's 84 years old, as her body is failing her and her short term memory is leaving, she clings to the following Buddhist philosophy as a lifeline. Her words:
That it is possible and ultimately desirable to accept life's limitations while enjoying the mental and emotional freedom that comes from noticing the beauty inherent in every present moment. That no matter how bad things get there is always something in the present moment that makes life worth living and that it is my task to learn to spend more time noticing those things than I do lamenting the losses of the past and the worries of the future.
Today, as I sit writing this, I have the windows of my house closed up tight to keep the smoke in the air from billowing in. There's a huge fire burning across the bay in Big Sur and the wind is blowing the smoke directly this way. The heavy Santa Cruz fog keeps the smoke trapped in the air. We haven't seen the sun in two days.
Two friends were evacuated and narrowly missed losing their homes in a fire just a few miles away and now business associates are in danger of losing almost everything (home and livelihood) in Big Sur. The fires are literally just across the street from their homes. When I think about the challenges friends have been facing lately I have to be thankful for what I have in my life right now.
It frequently takes a crisis to remember what matters most. My Buddhist caregiver friend reminded me to take time to do that every day.
That it is possible and ultimately desirable to accept life's limitations while enjoying the mental and emotional freedom that comes from noticing the beauty inherent in every present moment. That no matter how bad things get there is always something in the present moment that makes life worth living and that it is my task to learn to spend more time noticing those things than I do lamenting the losses of the past and the worries of the future.
Today, as I sit writing this, I have the windows of my house closed up tight to keep the smoke in the air from billowing in. There's a huge fire burning across the bay in Big Sur and the wind is blowing the smoke directly this way. The heavy Santa Cruz fog keeps the smoke trapped in the air. We haven't seen the sun in two days.
Two friends were evacuated and narrowly missed losing their homes in a fire just a few miles away and now business associates are in danger of losing almost everything (home and livelihood) in Big Sur. The fires are literally just across the street from their homes. When I think about the challenges friends have been facing lately I have to be thankful for what I have in my life right now.
It frequently takes a crisis to remember what matters most. My Buddhist caregiver friend reminded me to take time to do that every day.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Rosemary is For Remembrance
"There's rosemary; that's for remembrance.
Pray, love, remember."
~Shakespeare, Hamlet
Paul's mom sent us a nice article about aromatherapy that she clipped from Prevention Magazine. In it was reported that a study with college students at the University of Northumbria showed a significant increase in memory and feelings of alertness for those who used rosemary essential oil as compared to a control group. Oddly, the Prevention Magazine article did not report that the study also showed that rosemary slowed memory recall for the same test subjects. In other words, the students outperformed other students in two different kinds of memory tests (and felt more awake doing it) but took a little longer to come up with the results. Hmmm. Could it be that if we stay awake and slow down our brains function better?
I took a quick look around the internet to see if I could find more about this. According to research done by the Burnham Institute for Medical Research there are ingredients in the rosemary herb that protect the brain from the injurious effects of free radical production. Free radicals are thought to contribute to a wide variety of neurological conditions such as stroke and Alzheimer’s in addition to what is considered "normal" age-related memory loss. You can read more about free radicals in another blog I wrote here. In that post I was talking about antioxidants such as those found in blueberries that have a useful effect in counteracting free radical reproduction in the human body. It turns out that the carnosol and carnosic acid found in rosemary are powerful antioxidants. In addition to having a significant effect on memory loss they have been shown to have a protective effect against cancer.
Scientists are hard at work trying to use these findings to create powerful drugs which could be used for the same purpose. Meanwhile it couldn't hurt to add a little rosemary into your life. I like it in my garden--I can't seem to resist picking a little bit and rubbing the leaves between my fingers whenever I can. The smell is irresistible. I use it in my Mama Love for Focussed Attention perfume.
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