Four-second breathing, gentle stretching and guided meditation.
Such calming exercises are often found in yoga studios and fitness centers. Less common, however, is finding them at the Kenosha County Detention Center or at the ELCA Outreach Center.
Since last summer, the Rev. Dr. Monica Cummings has been folding yoga, breathing and meditation into group therapy programs on substance abuse and recovery in several Kenosha venues.
A recovery coach for the Hope Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs, Cummings introduces participants to relaxation techniques said to enhance the potential for success in recovery from substance use and trauma.
“We want to give people another tool in their toolbox; it helps them to know they have power,” Cummings said.
Cummings began folding yoga and meditation into recovery programs at the KCDC, the ECLA and the YMCA shortly after being hired as a recovery and education coach by the Hope Council last June.
The core of Women in Recovery, a 12-week recovery program offered at KCDC, is an education curriculum. When Cummings took on the program, she looked for ways to enhance it with yoga, breathing and a bit of nutrition education.
“I wanted to add yoga and chair meditation as a way to help with healing,” she said.
She also regularly adds breathing and meditation to the KCDC’s Women’s Awakening group, which focuses on women’s issues ranging from the psychological to the physical.
At a session for Women in Recovery last December, Cummings led 10 participants in a brief breathing and relaxation exercise. She told them to begin by placing their left hand over their hearts and their right hand on their bellies.
She next told them to inhale and exhale in four-second intervals.
“You can do this anywhere, anytime you feel stressed,” she told them.
Reversing the order of things which are normally done (i.e., right hand over the heart) causes the brain to think differently, Cummings said in an interview later. “Doing familiar things in a novel way makes you think.”
“The goal is to get out of the fight/flight/freeze mode and into the rest and digest mode,” she said. “We are not designed to live (in fight/flight) — we need to go into rest and digest mode.”
For those who are incarcerated, the exercises are particularly helpful, noted Cummings. “A vast majority of women who are incarcerated have had vast amounts of trauma in their lives.”
“The women really enjoy it,” said Jevon Claussen, KCDC programs manager. “They like the new techniques to calm down, especially because incarceration can be an extremely stressful environment.” (MORE)
Source: Kenosha News
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