COPYWRITING - SHORT ARTICLES
We talked last week about positive Rites of Passage, using life events to encourage our children to be engaged, positive, and active. Rites of passage help ground a child, a family, and a community in their collective life chronology. We gave a great example of this through our Brain Harmony Founder, Carol Garner-Houston, and her daughter Grace, their involvement in her school's soccer team, and the community's rally around her and the team! We highlighted the way they are creating special and everlasting memories.
However, some Rites of Passage are much harder than others. For example, the inevitability of death within our family or community. In the last two years, when someone has passed away and we are forced to mourn through virtual events, or we’ve had to reschedule events for a later time due to inability to travel, has made a traumatic event even more difficult. However, as hard as these passages are, we can look at them from different points of view. What once was called a “funeral” is often now called a “celebration of life,” whereby we share stories about that person we’ve lost, come together and remember them for all they brought to our lives, how they inspired us, and how we will always remember them. Now with the advance of technology, we can play back videos of them or listen to them sing. We can still hear their voices and see their smiles.
We also know that in these more difficult Rites of Passage, such as caring for someone who is sick, we must also take care of ourselves. We recommend our blog “Caring for the Caregiver," as we know that rest, meditation, vagal regulation and sleep are crucial to avoid anxiety, depression, and many other conditions that sometimes accompany these events.
We also need to make sure our Nervous Systems feel safe, not only for ourselves but for our families in a time of high-stress or sadness. One of the most profound and heartwarming things that we see at Brain Harmony when using our protocols with families, is the shift in family dynamics when people's nervous systems feel safe together.
If you or a loved one are currently experiencing or have experienced Rites of Passage that have been very difficult for you, let us know. We are here to help you walk through them and the brain fog, anxiety and depression that may accompany them.
Since we started our program, and when things changed dramatically in schools and at home in 2020, people have often reached out to us to recommend "504 accommodations" for their children who need extra help at school and at home to achieve optimal performance. Despite our feeling that children should cut back on screens as much as possible, we've made many neurologically-sound suggestions for their children/students, even sometimes justifying working on screens due to poor Ocular Motor and visual perceptual issues.
However, nowadays we also need to remember the digital aspect - and the research that shows improvement in test scores at schools when all cell phones or other personal digital screens are removed from students. Dependence upon technology in education makes it impossible to remove all screen distractions, and because we know they can become a pervasive problem, we must weigh both pros and cons of both digital and analog assistance for children.
But the question prevails - do these and other accommodations truly solve the problem? And should we be relying on the educators to enforce these changes for each individual child? What about all accommodations we've recommended for our special needs friends, but when it comes to mask mandates, it's either difficult or impossible due to the mask hiding emotions and expressions?
The bottom line that encapsulates all of the above is that these needs for accommodation are all rooted in your child's disorganized brain and nervous system. And our true belief is that, rather than placing band-aids on the issues, we want to make the fix at the root by using our unique home program to rewire the brain. By working directly with the Vagus Nerve, neurological organization, reflex integration, and more, we can then simply gently lean on, rather than rely upon, accommodations, arrangements, and communities.
We work with adults and children on over 40+ conditions through our cognitive and behavioral therapy protocol. Take our quiz to see how we might help you and your child address those conditions first from the roots first, and then to the branches.