@Ginny Branden @Michael Williams @Pat Sullivan @Grace Carter @Donna Becker @Katie Colormaiden @Jackie Johansen @Tracy James @Jessica Jennings, MS  @Susan Tutt 

Hey Friends - here's my final letter after incorporating your edits. Thanks so much - it was super helpful and now I'm feeling way better about sending this to people. Until I had the opportunity to read it aloud with you all to witness, I didn't realize how uncomfortable it felt because my marketing person's voice was too in it vs. my own. So many thanks - off I go to "cold email" my peeps :) 

Subject: Sharp End Podcast – thank you, XXX!

Hi XXXX,

I follow The Sharp End podcast and just heard the episode where you were interviewed. Holy cow – I’m glad you’re all ok! Thank you for sharing your story - it’s a brave thing to share and it will benefit many people. 

I’m also into adventuring and had my fair share of close calls, which impacted me with stress injury and adventure trauma. After a near-death ski fall in the backcountry and a few scary whitewater swims, I lost interest in ski mountaineering and boating – my two adventure staples. I lost confidence in my body and felt betrayed by it. I felt depressed and exhausted, and if I tried to force myself to go do one of those activities to be with my friends, I experienced intense anxiety. It was an invisible injury – it didn’t show up on an x-ray – and I wondered what was wrong with me, but I was certainly injured. A stress injury.   

While healing, I spent a lot of time finding credible resources to move beyond my stress injuries. Adventuring is at the core of who I am (I bet you can relate!), so I was thrilled when my symptoms went away and suddenly I was leading through whitewater rapids again and going skiing. Eventually, this whole experience led me to hone my expertise into a coaching/counseling practice to help other adventurers heal from this sort of thing. 

I’m writing to you primarily because I want to share hope and resources on your journey if you feel like you are impacted by stress injury, or know others who have. What I’ve learned was hard to find, and has helped me thrive again. After trailblazing and figuring it out, I want to show everyone this off-the-beaten-path until it’s on every adventurer’s radar like the CDT because I truly want to be of service to our adventure community – it’s at the heart of why I run my genuinely service-based coaching practice. 

No matter what you’ve tried before, know you don’t need to live with the symptoms of adventure trauma. I do offer 1-1 coaching, and would be honored to support your journey, but even if not, I want to leave you with info that has helped me; beta from one adventurer to another. So, if you can relate to my experience, if you’re holding back in any way, or have lost that spark of enthusiasm, read on for the beta. Otherwise, I’ll bid you farewell for now and invite you to share this missive with anyone in your network who might be suffering from adventure-trauma stress injury.

Symptoms:

Not everyone gets a stress injury from a traumatic event, and here are some of the signs we need extra support. Symptoms are wide and varied - I won’t list them all here. The ones I hear about most commonly in the adventure community are: 

·       We lose interest in the activity or avoid anything that reminds us of the incident

·       We feel anxiety or even have panic attacks planning or prepping to do the activity

·       We are easily startled by things we weren’t previously startled by

·       We feel more on-guard or hypervigilant than before

·       Nightmares, and other sleep issues

·       We lack energy and motivation; we feel exhausted

Why Talk Therapy Doesn’t Work:

Many of us who’ve had these experiences go to traditional therapy and are frustrated with the results we see - or worse, we feel like a failure since it didn’t work for us; like, “there must be something wrong with me.” In reality, talk therapy often fails its adventure clients. When a highly stressful incident occurs, it is overwhelming to the nervous system, and our nervous system literally suffers an injury - much like my bicep would get a strain if I tried to curl 100 pounds. The perceived “mental” injury actually happens in the body and if treatment does not include the body, then we don’t heal fully. And this is why typical talk therapy often doesn’t work - you can’t talk your way out of a stress injury any more than you can talk a broken leg into being unfractured. Positive self-talk might help a little, but it won’t get us over the ridgeline and to the other side. 

What DOES Work?

Over the past several decades, new, EFFECTIVE modalities of treatment are available for adventurers. In all of my research, training, and experience, an approach called Somatic Experiencing (SE) is the most effective technique for this sort of thing. SE Practitioners are trained to gently work with the body via reading signals from your nervous system. We help incomplete stress cycles held in the body to resolve themselves, which in turn resolves our symptoms. For decades, conventional science has poo-pooed the mind-body connection. But today, there are mountains of evidence to support that this and similar techniques are REALLY effective in treating symptoms (and don’t require medications, exposure therapy, etc.). 

The Path Forward:

So if you feel as though there might be some lingering symptoms after your incident, I encourage you to check out SE. You can do that via their website, or you’re welcome to learn more about it in a 1-1 beta chat with me. I offer 30 minutes, free of charge (and no strings attached - I promise not to try to sell you anything 🙂). My goal with these sessions is to learn about what obstacles you are facing, and letting you know if SE in general, or with me, might be a good fit for you. From there, for folks who resonate with my work, I am honored to be their guide on the healing journey and get started with sessions. For everyone else, I am simply ecstatic that another person in the world knows about SE - that there IS an effective solution to adventure trauma. I will even happily refer them elsewhere. 

If you want to learn more, here is my website. If you know you’d like to connect, you can book a free 30-minute Exploratory Session here. If not, the 2nd link in this email, to Somatic Experiencing International, is where you should start.

I really hope you find this beta helpful - I’ll check back in a few days to see how all this lands with you. 

Warmly, 

Julia Yanker

Somatic Experiencing Practitioner & Coach

Please see the latest version of the post at the top of our Writer's Circle Forum -- thank you!

**

Original post:

Hello Soul Gym Friends,

Why would you join something like this?

• a supportive group for collaboration with peers in the Soul Gym community
• constructive feedback from peers (and a writing coach) who share similar interests and values for connection
• more eyes on your writing before you post it

• enhance your writing skills through exposure to different writing styles, techniques, and perspectives
• Try out different writing styles/format/post-types
• Opportunity to build a hat manual around content creation/ posting???

• Seeing others' work, hearing new ideas, and engaging in creative discussions can spark new ideas and help overcome writer's block (yay!)
• Decrease the amount of time spent working in isolation

• stay motivated, meet deadlines, and maintain consistency in your writing/sharing

The details:

• AU / Asia members: sorry that this time probably won’t work for you. As Soul Gym grows we will do our best to create a Writer’s Circle for you as well!

How it will work (at least for the first meeting on July 7):

• If you plan to attend, tag me under this post by Tuesday (July 5), or send me an email (susanmtutt@gmail.com) so I can get an idea of how many people are interested
• If you want to share a piece of writing with the group for feedback, send it to me on a Google doc (also by Tuesday, July 5) 
• I’ll make sure to share it with the others who will be attending by Wednesday the 8th, so we can think about our feedback before the meeting
• Depending on how many people want to attend, we may have break-out rooms, to keep the feedback flowing and make sure everyone gets a chance to share their work

It’s easy to compartmentalize aspects of ourselves. To separate out mind from body from spirit and attempt to address challenges we face from our parts instead of our wholeness. My guest, Allison Pelot helps us explore a more integral approach to health and wellbeing. As the author of Finally Thriving and host of the Integrate Yourself podcast, Allison has inspired thousands of people to take ownership of their wellbeing by integrating the diverse aspects of their nature, honoring their values and making space for what brings them joy. Join us as we explore a range of topics from recovery after injury to the role creativity and spontaneity can play in wellbeing. 

https://podcast.livingelemental.com/s3e6

@TeAroha Haunui

As you go through the Digital Detox process, I encourage you to see yourself as a being of energy. Your energy can be nourished and restored and it can be depleted.

If you’re not being nourished, you’re depleting. Just breathing takes energy. We are aware that healthy foods nourish us, but what about things in our environment?

Think about the experience of someone making an angry comment on one of your social media posts or how you feel after you watch a cable news show? It’s helpful to be mindful of the effect certain activities have on your energy.

What is draining and what is supporting the flow of energy in your life? How much effort or focus does it take to respond in a way that isn’t reactive and what does it take to process the impact of that out of your body?

You don’t always know you’re being drained because in the moment, a lack of nourishment doesn’t always occur to us as something depleting. Like a reservoir in these times of drought, when you aren’t refilling your tank consistently, your resources are there until they aren’t anymore.

How do you cultivate healthy reserves of energy? How can you open up the flow?

Think about what nourishes you. What lights you up and makes you feel alive? How might you add more of those ways of being and doing to your daily life as you move forward?

I’d love to hear your ideas and what the process of implementing them is like for you.

@TeAroha Haunui

How are you sleeping? 

Do you have a hard time falling asleep OR do you sleep easily until the middle of the night when you lie awake for hours trying every sleep technique the internet has to offer? 

Did you know that even if you sleep through the night, your sleep may still be affected by screen use?

The National Institute of Health found that electronic devices, particularly when used within an hour before bed, cause “an alteration in sleep architecture”.  

They found that there were delays in the ability to fall asleep, disruptions in the length of time sleeping, circadian rhythm and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. 

So, even if you’re sleeping through the night, but use devices before bed, you might not be accessing that REM stage of your sleep cycle. 

REM affects the ability to learn and remember. Been forgetful lately? This might be why.

REM affects emotional processing and mood. Have you ever gone to bed upset and woke up feeling better? That’s an example of REM sleep at work.

In addition, researchers at Rutgers University found that REM sleep has a protective effect on the brain and supports greater resiliency to trauma and less vulnerability to PTSD. I was blown away when I saw that study.

Taking a break from devices at least an hour before bed can really set you up to sleep better and support your emotional, mental and physical wellbeing. Bedtime is a great place to explore Digital Detoxing. 

Keep an eye out for my next Digital Detox installment with night-time routines that can support you in getting better quality zzz’s. 

@TeAroha Haunui