Yoga and Mindfulness: Mind-Brain Change for Anxiety, Moods, Trauma and Substance Abuse

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Faculty

Debra Alvis, Ph.D. Related seminars and products

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Debra Alvis, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and private practitioner with over twenty-five years of clinical experience. She specializes in an integrative approach bringing together polyvagal, neuroscientific, and somatic principles to treat trauma and co-morbid disorders.

Debra discovered that the polyvagal approach facilitates a mindful awareness of the biological reactions influencing the therapist/client relationship and the client's sense of safety in the world. Integrating physiological, brain-based, body-focused approaches with traditional psychotherapeutic orientations helped clients to recover more easefully and quickly from trauma. In addition, with an increased sense of safety and connectedness, clients more frequently practiced the strategies required through her work in private practice and as a clinical supervisor, educator, and consultant.

Dr. Alvis developed and led the Mind/Body Program at the University of Georgia where she now teaches health psychology graduate students to apply polyvagal, neuroscientific, and somatic approaches, serves as project director for federal grant focusing on integrative healthcare, and develops mindfulness-based research studies. A thirty-year personal contemplative practice and over a thousand hours training as a mindfulness and yoga teacher further enrich her presentations.

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Debra Alvis is in private practice. Dr. Alvis receives a speaking honorarium from PESI, Inc.
Non-financial: Debra Alvis has no relevant non-financial relationship to disclose.

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Objectives

1. Incorporate simple yoga and mindfulness practices that can be used as clinical skills.
2. Incorporate breathing interventions/practices to help reduce anxiety and depression.
3. Practice body awareness techniques to help stabilize your client with trauma, anxiety, depression and substance abuse.
4. Teach clients how to practice self-compassion using mindfulness techniques.
5. Develop a four-step meditation to aid in affirming positive thoughts and decreasing negative ruminations.
6. Analyze the neuroscience of anxiety, trauma and depression and how it impacts your clinical work.

Outline

Neuroscience of the Mind-Body Unity

• Your responsive nervous system: Neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, and how to activate the brain for change
• Mind-body link: How the mind changes the body and the body changes the mind to transform
• Networks of interaction and influence: Mirror neurons and attachment
• How yoga breathing, mindfulness, and meditation bring balance and wellbeing to dysregulated nervous system and a troubled mind

Mindfulness and Yoga as an Evidenced- Based Clinical Intervention: Multicultural Approaches

• Multicultural guidelines
• Culturally sensitive applications

A Holistic, Mind/Body Approach

• Unifying by intention: One with your true being in mind, body, and spirit
• Top-down: Harness the healing power of thought
• Bottom-up: Use the body and the breath to activate the vagus nerve for calm and balance
• Horizontal: Cross modalities and hemispheres to work around defenses and elicit new potentials

Find Courage from Anxiety, Fear, and Panic

• Turn from fearful anticipation of the future to the mindful present
• Quickly reduce heightened anxiety with moving meditations
• Breathing to reverse the fight, flight, freeze stress response
• Reset the nervous system to find a calm, confident balance

Posttraumatic Growth: A Journey to Transform Trauma

• Convert implicit memories from the source of pain to a resource for strength
• Create an internal safe sanctuary
• Meditative breathing to develop self-regulation and inner control
• Resonate with inner strength: Mantra and posture practice
• Elicit the brain's natural capacity to heal through the mind-body link
• Nurture compassion for self and others

The Path from Depression

• Reconnect the disconnect between frontal and limbic areas in depression to stop unproductive ruminations
• Four-Step method to observe and detach from negative thoughts that elicit depression
• Develop non-judgmental awareness
• Breathing and body meditations to balance energy
• Leave the past by living in the present moment
• Mindful attuning to your radiant deeper nature
• Gratitude meditations to nurture a positive life

Rewire the Compromised Reward Pathway in Addiction

• Detach from drugs
• Go beyond pleasure and pain
• Soothe with comfort practices
• Mindful acceptance
• Develop a healthy and wise inner compass
• Find joy from life itself in the present moment

Target Audience

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