INDIANAPOLIS — Everyone is surviving a difficult chapter. The pandemic brought widespread stress and uncertainty to every community.
Eskenazi Health’s Hoosier Heartland Healing Collaborative focuses on helping any Hoosier deal with trauma or secondary trauma. This free resource trains groups of people using the Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s model.
“Definitely breathing and meditation is the foundation,” Megan Hider, Mind-Body Program Supervisor at Eskenazi Health, said. “Genograms which is looking at your family tree, so to speak. It’s a really intensive four-to-five-day training. Besides the small groups, there’s also large group lectures so you’re learning all the science and the background and the evidence for this mind-body connection, and the ways we can empower ourselves and those that we serve, to really change our physiology to help us with self-healing.”
The collaborative works in two parts: the first focuses on the self and the second involves working with a facilitator to teach others, and hopefully help them deal with trauma and stress.
“Noticing what’s going on in your body, your thoughts, your feelings,” Hider said. “Noticing how those are affecting your body and your behavior.”
Christy Gauss, Owner of SCP Consultants, LLC, is working through the training for others now. Through her business, she works with schools and their partners across Indiana to help support students’ emotional, social and mental health needs.
“This is really about bring wellness to the educators themselves,” Gauss said. “This translates to the students, but I think the missing piece that I’ve even had in my work, is how we address the wellness and the self-regulation abilities, and the healing of the adults who are taking care of our children. They need it now more than they’ve ever needed it, and this model does it in a more beautiful way than I’ve ever experienced it in my career. I believe in it more than I can say.”
Hider said this training can help anyone, and anyone can sign up for the virtual training.
“We want this to be accessible to all neighborhoods,” Hider said. “To people of all levels of socioeconomic status.”
For more information on the Hoosier Heartland Healing Collaborative, visit skenazihealth.edu. For more information about the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, visit https://cmbm.org/.
Read More: Eskenazi Health program offers free mental health resource for Hoosiers