Author: jonkeyes

Folk Counseling

Our modern forms of helping people in emotional distress (talk therapy and medications) have largely supplanted more traditional forms of healing. In some cases this is a continuation of oppression and colonization that has gone on for hundreds of years. -- Indigenous healing practices are denigrated and seen as unscientific, based on superstitions, or as an adjunct to the proper, modern way of helping people in distress. In this way, we have ignored and suppressed folk methods of healing that are often highly effective. … [click on title for the rest of the post]

In Praise of Pleasure

By Jon Keyes - Pleasure is underrated these days. People ask, “What do you do for a living? What are you working on?” I can’t lately remember someone asking me “what do you do for pleasure?” “How do you feel joy?” Perhaps as our lives fade, those are the things we will remember the most, not what we built, but how well we slowed down and connected, tasted and touched, savored with delight and pleasure. … [click on title for the rest of the post]

Herbal medicine, Extreme States and Transformation

cartoon herbs Herbal medicine, Extreme States and Transformation

By Jon Keyes - Herbal medicine, Extreme States and Transformation. The idea that extreme states are something that requires medical intervention is a relatively new one.  Generally indigenous and folk cultures throughout the world have employed a wide variety of interventions that include spiritual, shamanic, herbal and dietary techniques for working with people in crisis and spiritual emergence.  

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Dissociation- On finding the way home

By Jon Keyes - Finding peace with the body can be a long journey. Those that are working on finding a way home often explore changing their diet and working with modalities such as yoga, tai chi, acupuncture, herbs, EMDR and EFT. These are ways of building strength and resiliency, of rebuilding the foundation from the ground up, of integrating and processing the deepest levels of sorrow but also transcending these places of fear and shame to come out again, to breathe and shine, to remember their underlying wholeness and holiness that underlies all nature, that can never be breached, that can never be taken away. Sometimes we must go away to protect ourselves. But when the time is right, the path home is available to us all. … [click on title for the rest of the post]

Modern Mental Health/ The Problem with Evidence Based Treatment

By Jon Keyes: Often when I work with someone who comes to see me I am at a loss of where to begin. Emotional distress such as depression, insomnia and anxiety often have so many tangled roots that it is hard to know where to begin. Distress often has its roots in multiple origins such as trauma, ongoing stress as well as poor lifestyle and dietary habits. On a deeper level, distress can be thought of as a singular expression of a larger pattern of disharmony that spans the globe due to underlying systemic problems of racism, poverty, colonialism and ecological devastation. If we think of the planet as one living organism, then emotional distress is a signal of systemic suffering. … [click on title for the rest of the post]

Restoring Balance with the Plant World

a garden for restoring balance in the plant world

Restoring Balance with the Plant World: By Jon Keyes ~~ As an herbalist, I think of how humans interact and relate to plants everyday.  Mainly we interact with plants through our diet.  Our morning cereal, a sandwich, tea, beans, rice and salad all come from plants.  Even meat comes from animals that ate plants.  In essence, our very survival comes from plant life.  Though plants represent the source of our sustenance, we have become deeply out of balance in our relationship with them.  We have shifted from a diverse and varied plant diet to one that includes just a few highly processed plants.  This is leading not only to a  breakdown in our physical and mental health, it is leading us to ecological catastrophe as well. In the U.S., 25 billion dollars a year is spent to subsidize the production of just a few commodity crops with an overwhelming emphasis on wheat, corn and soy.

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Somatic Wisdom Technique 2, by John Keys

a space age looking design

In this second part of using the Somatic Wisdom Technique, I’ll ask you to return to that place of discomfort to find out how to transform that area of distress.  Start with picking an area of the body that you found to be the most “charged” or in need of greater attention and care.  Then begin by sitting comfortable in an upright posture.  For some that may mean sitting in a meditative posture with legs crossed.  For others that may mean simply sitting in a comfortable chair. 

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Somatic Wisdom Technique Part 1 By Jon Keyes

The Somatic Wisdom Technique (SWT) is a way of accessing our body’s innate wisdom, to become aware of any deep set negative emotional state and then to develop the tools to loosen and release that emotional state.

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The Nourishment Model of Counseling

Though most counselors do not use these early Freudian psychoanalytic theories in their practice, they still use much of the same structure for helping people to heal. Conversations are limited to specific periods of time, are usually done in an office setting and generally focus on examining personal experience and looking towards restructuring thoughts and beliefs and making personal changes to improve life.

Though counseling in this way can often be deeply helpful, I think we have become excessively focused on the cognitive approach to healing people in emotional distress. Instead of a cognitive based approach, I think we should place much more focus on somatic “body-based” counseling. Often times I hear people complain that people would rather go to a doctor for psychiatric medication than go to a therapist. Part of this has to do with the idea that it is easier to simply take a medication than engage in therapy, but part of the reason is because medication actually causes immediate physiological changes and affects how one feels and thinks by affecting the nervous system. People who are in distress are often looking for a way to alleviate that distress and talking about it does not generally produce that alleviation they are looking for. … [click on title for the rest of the post]

Folk Healing, Industrial Agriculture and the Rise of Psychiatry

The idea of food and local herbs as medicine mostly dried up after world war II. Processed foods, microwave dinners, industrialized agriculture and shopping markets filled with food from far away started to dominate the Western landscape. Food became veryimages bland and tasteless. The notion that food was the essential medicine was overwhelmed by the idea that medicine was found in a drug.
The psychiatric revolution really began in earnest in the 50’s at the same time that industrial farming took off. The first antipsychotic known as thorazine was synthesized in 1950 and was given to people who were deemed psychotic or labeled with schizophrenia. Interestingly, this first widely prescribed psychiatric drug was first developed as a pesticide to kill parasites in pigs. … [click on title to read and view more]

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