By Nicole Marcia

I’m often asked why I chose to specialize in working with trauma survivors. My answer is, “because yoga transformed my life.”

In the summer of 1994, at the age of 21, I was sexually assaulted and severely beaten by a neighbor. The day I was released from the hospital, I knew that my life would never be as it had once been. What had seemed certain, predictable and true, no longer was.

Afterward, I stayed with friends. I paced their courtyard, replaying the details of the assault in my head. I avoided venturing outside lest I come into contact with any reminders of the attack. I stayed out of the sunlight and kept to the cool shadows, where no one would see my badly beaten face, my stitches, my broken teeth. What if someone voiced what was occupying much of my thoughts in those early days: “You deserved it”? My sense of self was so depleted, I might just have agreed with them.

As time passed, I grew to see myself as a vulnerable person in a dangerous and unpredictable world. Few others saw me in this light, and I was, for the most part, moving ahead in my life, but internally I lacked any sense of what the deeper meaning might be other than just surviving.

By 1998, I weighed almost 200 pounds; food had become a way to experience nurturing and safety. I smoked up to 1.5 packs of cigarettes a day to calm my anxiety and give me an excuse to escape social interactions when they grew too intimate. I engaged in risky sexual behavior to feel seen and valued. I binged on alcohol and drugs as a way to transcend the contempt I had for myself.

In 2002, I saw Madonna on TV speaking about her practice of Ashtanga yoga. I thought, “Yoga is easy. I could do that and maybe lose some weight.” But there was something just below the surface of that thought that was more vulnerable, and it said, “Maybe this will fix me.” In those early days of practice, a transformation began to take place. I was taught to focus on breath, be conscious of the sensations that arose in my body, accept myself where I was and ride the ebb and flow of my emotions as a curious and compassionate observer.

Although I wasn’t entirely aware of it at the time, I was growing into someone I would never have imagined myself to be.

Without conscious effort, the unhealthy coping strategies I had used to manage my trauma-related symptoms began to fall away. For the first time in years, I felt hope. I felt liberated and empowered. As I grew to know myself as a person who was committed, disciplined, strong, compassionate, flexible and adventurous on the mat, I also became that person out in the world. What trauma had taken away, yoga restored. The rumination, anxiety and desire to escape myself disappeared. Within this practice, I discovered healthy coping strategies.

I could breathe through anxiety instead of smoking. I could go more deeply into and accept the sensations in my body that changed with my emotions rather than try to numb them with drugs and alcohol. I could stay present and become an observer of emotions and thoughts as they arose, shifted and fell away. I could choose what was happening at every step along the way. I was in control of my body, from a place of compassion not punishment.

In 2003, I took my first yoga teachers training. I was reluctant to even consider that I might teach yoga to others, but my terror at the prospect told me that I was probably going in the right direction.

I know now that, ultimately, I am at the source of my life. I get to create it anew every morning when I step onto the mat, and that is what I want to share with my students.

I want my students to know that there is a sanctuary inside of them, and my goal is to create a safe space for them to experience and cultivate that sanctuary so that they can safely explore the landscape of their own stories. To come out of the shadows and into the sunlight.

I envision a day when all trauma survivors can easily access compassionate yoga-based care that takes into consideration both body and mind. The work I do is my contribution to that vision, and this story is my motivation.

Nicole Marcia

For information about Nicole’s upcoming trainings, classes and workshops please visit http://www.finebalanceyoga.ca/.

By Dr. Trevor Hancock

If, as I have argued in my previous column, unsustainable development is bad for health, then is the converse true? There is a strong case that in order to be healthy, communities need to be ecologically sustainable. Many of the actions that could be taken to make communities and societies more sustainable have what we call health co-benefits.

These health co-benefits are not limited to minimising the harm from global ecological change. There are large health costs to our current way of life, and thus large potential health benefits resulting from a shift to a more sustainable society. Here I will explore several examples that we identified in the Canadian Public Health Association’s Discussion Document on the ecological determinants of health; energy, agriculture and food, and urban design and transportation.

In a 2012 Global Energy Assessment, the direct global health impacts of energy systems (especially but not exclusively those that are fossil fuel-based) were likened in scale to “tobacco, alcohol, and high blood pressure, and exceeded only by malnutrition”. In fact, the authors estimated that they “directly cause as many as five million premature deaths annually and more than 5% of all ill health when measured as lost healthy life years”.

These health impacts arise largely from air pollution due to the combustion of fossil fuels, but there are also occupational health impacts (especially from coal mining), water and soil pollution, population displacement from dams, large numbers of deaths and injuries resulting from the use of energy in transportation and, of course, the health impacts resulting from climate change.

On the other hand, numerous studies have found that renewables (mainly wind and solar) and conservation have much smaller health and environmental impacts. Clearly, there are significant health benefits to be gained from a move away from fossil fuel-based energy, especially coal, with conservation and renewable energy systems offering a much healthier future.

This is not pie in the sky: A recent report by a group of independent Canadian scholars states that “Because renewable energy resources are plentiful, we believe that Canada could reach 100% reliance on low carbon electricity by 2035. This makes it possible, in turn, to adopt a long-term target of at least 80% reduction in emissions by the middle of the century”. The health benefits would be significant.

When it comes to food and agriculture, our current intensive system is an environmentally harmful approach that provides a highly processed diet low in fiber and high in animal protein. If we are to dramatically increase global food production to meet growing populations and demands, and simultaneously reduce environmental harm, we need a very different agricultural system and a very different diet.

In fact, one of the key strategies proposed by Jonathan Foley in a 2011 paper in Scientific American is a shift to a low-meat diet. Many more people could be fed on less land, thus reducing intensity. There are important health benefits to such an approach. Land, soil, water and biodiversity would be conserved and greenhouse gas emissions would drop. A reduction in portion size would reduce the pressure on the environment, not to mention our waistlines, while a shift to a low-meat or vegetarian diet would have a number of direct health benefits, including reduced rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.

Moreover, recent research in the UK has shown that a low-meat or vegetarian diet would markedly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For high meat-eaters (more than 100 grams per day) those emissions are more than 7 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents per day, while for low-meat–eaters (less than than 50 grams per day) it is less than 5 kg per day, and less than 4 kgs per day for fish-eaters and vegetarians.

Finally, not only is urban sprawl a very energy-inefficient urban form, often requiring use of a car for many of the daily activities of life, it is also unhealthy. Conversely, the health benefits of ‘Smart Growth’ (one of the key urban development solutions to urban sprawl, which encourages active transport and public transit), has been likened to a ‘medical miracle’. It reduces deaths and illness from pollution, physical inactivity and traffic crashes, while promoting mental health and social capital.

In short, a more environmentally sustainable way of life brings with it many health benefits, including mental and social health benefits that are often overlooked. What’s not to like about that?

© Trevor Hancock, 2015

Originally published in Times Colonist 5 August, 2015

By Dr. Trevor Hancock

Richard Horton is the Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals. In January 2013 he was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to participate in a conference in Beijing on ‘Innovation for the next 100 years’ as part of the Centennial celebrations of the Foundation.

At that event he proposed the concept of ‘planetary health’ as a challenging issue for the 21^st century, suggesting that “the planet’s potential to sustain our species is slowly declining” and that we need to adopt “a planetary view of human health”. In particular he noted that this was not just about the state of the Earth’s ecosystems but about “the quality of human socio-political and economic institutions that shape human responses to the dangers”.

In 2014, he and several others published a brief Manifesto for Planetary Health in The Lancet. They called for public health and the wider society to address the threats we face to human health and wellbeing, to the sustainability of our civilization, and to the natural and human-made systems that support us.

At the same time, the Rockefeller Foundation funded and supported the creation of the Lancet Commission on Planetary Health. The Commission’s report – for which I was an expert reviewer – was released this week. It makes for somber reading.

The Commission examines not only climate change but also ocean acidification, land degradation, water scarcity, overexploitation of fisheries and biodiversity loss, all of which “pose serious challenges to the global health gains of the past several decades and are likely to become increasingly dominant during the second half of this century and beyond”.

The members of the Commission – leading scientists and practitioners from the health, environmental and social sciences – report they are “deeply concerned that . . . we have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realize economic and development gains in the present”. In other words, we are pursuing short-term gain at the expense of long-term pain, leaving it to our children and grandchildren to cope with the mess we are creating.

The drivers of these alarming trends, they note, are “highly inequitable, inefficient, and unsustainable patterns of resource consumption and technological development, together with population growth.” And they suggest that “the way we organize society’s actions in the face of threats is more important than the threats themselves”.

The Commission identifies three major challenges we need to address. The first, are conceptual and empathy failures, including our use of GDP as a measure of human progress, the failure to factor in the harm we do in the future due to our decisions today, and the unfair impact of the harm we do to disadvantaged communities, especially in the global South.

The second set of challenges, which they call knowledge failures, includes our failure to fully recognize the health impacts of broad environmental and social conditions. We also fail to work holistically and across disciplines, and we are poor at coping with uncertainty in our decision-making.

Thirdly, there are implementation failures, or governance challenges. We delay response, especially in the face of uncertainty, and we fail to account for the lag-time inherent in both ecological and social change. We also, I would add, fail to allow for the potential for sudden, rapid and dramatic change that is inherent in the complex adaptive systems that are our ecosystems and social systems.

The Commission’s report is a serious warning to which people and governments should pay heed. There are some, undoubtedly, who will try to wish away this report, as they have so many other reports, so many times before. But we can only bury our heads in the sand and ignore our responsibility towards future generations for so long. There is growing evidence of accelerating global ecological change, and this will have profound impacts on the health and wellbeing of many alive today.

The sign of true leadership is to recognize the global ecological, social and human crisis we face and take action now, not punt it down the road 50 or a 100 years, as the G-7 leaders recently did on the fossil-free energy file. The challenges are mounting, and the time we have left to take decisive action is narrowing. The time for action is now.

© Trevor Hancock, 2015

Published in Times Colonist 20 July, 2015

On Tuesday June 2^nd, 2015, I had a chance to watch the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s summary report and recommendations with my 10 year old son who was taught at school that residential schools was something that had happened ‘in the past’. Despite this educational error, I was glad he was able to learn what was never available to me when I first arrived in Canada as an immigrant child. However, as a parent I realize there is still so much work to be done to educate this new generation about the legacy of colonialism. So, I started another conversation with him, one that will continue….

I hope that schools, workplaces and communities all across this country are having these important conversations so that we do not forget history and to take action as citizens. Part of this taking action is demanding accountability at all levels of government for the impacts of colonial policies that affect Aboriginal Peoples on a daily basis. Without having a national dialogue about this, it will be hard for our children to understand why residential schools have an impact today, and how we all have a role to play. Reconciliation is a process and it has only begun in Canada. Evidence of this is very apparent if we look at the proportion of Aboriginal children in care, or Aboriginal people in jail. Social innovation efforts will require us to not only question our assumptions and beliefs about Aboriginal people, but also to disrupt existing power structures and unjust resource systems. When Aboriginal people are supported in their own communities, in their own lands, we may have a chance of achieving equity, health and wellbeing for the future generations.

Today, on National Aboriginal Day, I was celebrating with friends and family at Trout Lake, unceded lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. I was happy to see so many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal families, of all ages, celebrating together.

Yet, I was also deeply saddened as I reflected how in my home country of Chile, people are shamed if they admit having Indigenous heritage. My own Indigenous ancestry was hidden to me, to all my family for many generations because of this shame. It was only when my mother had a rare genetic disease during her pregnancy with my brother did she discover that her grandmother Esther was Mapuche. The Mapuche people as other First Nations communities have the worst education, socio-economic, and health status statistics compared to the larger population. Yet, they are also resilient and have managed to restore their teachings and language. Today, many Mapuche communities are engaged in the Mapuche conflict over land and Indigenous rights in both Chile and Argentina.

Today, I was also sad to realize that colonization has also separated the north and south Indigenous Peoples, which share so much in terms of values, teachings, roots in language, culture, struggles and strengths. Yet, today’s songs and dance made me hopeful that one day the Mapuche people will be able look to Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, in quite the same way as we now look at how strong and proud the Maori People stand today. Perhaps the day will come when Indigenous Peoples across the north and south of this continent will celebrate new laws, new policies and true reconciliation that brings all of us together, as one Peoples.

By Paola Ardiles

By Trevor Hancock

Many years ago, the American Health Foundation had one of my all-time favourite slogans: ”The secret of life is to die young . . . but as late as possible!” I am privileged to dance with a group who live that approach.

The Hollytree Morris dancers were part of the great folk revival of the 1970s, being formed in 1973. Morris dancing is a centuries-old English traditional folk dance, with sides all over England and around the world.

One way to understand it is as a form of non-violent rugby: A group of people who get together to do something energetic in a team, then go to the pub to drink beer and sing songs.

Some members of Hollytree have been doing this together since 1973, and many are in their 70’s and a few in their 80s. In fact, at 66, I am one of the youngest members of the side! What distinguishes them is their physical and spiritual energy, their ability to play and have fun and be young.

This coming weekend, we are celebrating the oldest of our number, Fred. He turns 90 this week, and still practices every week and comes out to dance in public when we do that. In fact, we think Fred is probably the oldest active Morris dancer in the world! So Morris sides from all over the Pacific Northwest will be in town to help us celebrate.

But I am not writing this simply to extol Fred or the other members of our side, nor to advertise our dance-out. Rather, I want to make a larger point about the health benefits of participation in the arts in general, and dance in particular.

When I give presentations to recreation and parks organizations and public health audiences about the health benefits of recreation, I always use a picture of us dancing. And I say: ‘Look what is happening here’. First, we are dancing, being physically active and using our strength, agility, flexibility and balance – all the things the exercise advisors tell us we should do.

Second, we are being creative, engaged in the arts and learning together. One of the beauties of Morris and other dance forms is that there are always new dances to learn, or old dances to modify. Dancing keeps our minds active and flexible and agile too!

Third, we are outdoors, often dancing in and connecting with nature. And we are also dancing in public; a little public appreciation and applause helps you feel good!

Finally, dancing together like this is a social experience. We are working together, forming life-long friendships and social support networks. Going to the pub is not really about drinking beer, but about socialising.

Put all this together and you have a recipe for fun and a healthy old age. But while the benefits may seem obvious to those of us engaged in dance, there has been surprisingly little research on the topic. As recently as 2009, a group of New Zealand-based researchers could state that “no reviews on the physical benefits of dancing for healthy older adults have been published in the scientific literature”.

In their review they found a few studies that had some reasonable evidence that through dancing older adults could increase their aerobic power, muscle endurance, strength and flexibility in their lower body, as well as their balance, agility, and gait. Of course, this was not news to the Hollytree dancers!

A more recent review from the UK of recreational dance in young people found, not surprisingly, that it improved fitness and bone health and could help reduce obesity, and found some evidence it could improve body image and reduce anxiety.

A 2006 brochure from Arts Council England noted many benefits of dance, which it noted was second in popularity only to football in English schools. The Ministers of Public Health and of Culture wrote: “Dance can have a powerful effect on people’s lives and we want to see the physical, emotional, mental and social benefits of dance extended to as many people as possible”.

By the way, we really do hope to see you at 3.30 on Saturday June 13^th in front of the Legislature. Come and see us demonstrate the health benefits of dance and while you are at it, wish Fred well. Better yet, come and dance with us – we think it is part of the secret to a healthy old age!

© Trevor Hancock, 2015

Originally published in Times Colonist June 8, 2015.

By Sydney Nilan

Runa Foundation is beginning a groundbreaking new initiative in the Peruvian Amazon. As an organization looking to create new value for tropical forests and their inhabitants, we are always looking for ways to share the bounty of the Amazon with the world.

Teaming with Peruvian NGO Rios Nete, our newest project focuses on health and well-being. We are asking the question: What if tomorrow’s innovations in modern medicine have their roots in the Amazon’s ancient past?

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon inhabit the world’s single largest incubator of biological diversity, and over centuries they have discovered the properties and medicinal uses of the vast array of plants that surrounds them.

However, over the last hundred years this knowledge has been under attack, as modern healthcare has pushed traditional medicine underground and out of sight. Today, there are very few people left who hold the knowledge of these plant medicines, and we are in a race against time to preserve their millennia old tradition.

Right now, we are launching an initiative to build the first ever Amazonian research facility bringing together western medical research methods and traditional Amazonian medicine. We are hoping to unlock the healing power of the Amazon, and show the world that people everywhere can benefit from the Amazon without destroying it.

Many modern pharmaceuticals are derived from forests and natural plant sources, and yet less than 5% of Amazonian plants have been scientifically evaluated for their medicinal properties. What makes this even more astounding is that the rainforest abounds with seemingly miraculous stories about cures for illnesses for which modern medicine has no answer.

In collaboration with indigenous healers, Runa Foundation and Rios Nete will research the efficacy of these plant-based remedies in addressing today’s chronic illnesses. We see Amazonian plant medicine as a ‘disruptive technology’ that could benefit communities across the world, starting with the people who live there.

Patients across the globe are looking for more effective, natural, and economical treatments for modern illnesses that are non-invasive and non-toxic. The Amazon not only holds the potential to provide people with a more integrated and holistic approach to health, but also showing the world the potential of Amazonian Medicine can provide the impetus to halt its destruction and save the lungs of the planet.

At Runa Foundation, we have seen the benefits of bringing together indigenous knowledge and modern enterprise models, and now we want to expand this idea into health and wellness. If you’d like to help, please visit us at www.plantmed.org

For more information:

Aliana H Piñeiro, Director of Evaluation and Development, Runa Foundation