White Eagle Counselling and Therapy

Hacking your nervous system with breath standard

You come home from work, pour yourself a drink and tune into Netflix. It’s 5pm. What’s wrong with that? Life is full, work is challenging, you are overstimulated, and you just need to relax. Well, nothing is wrong with this – if it happens on occasion. But if this is your consistent coping mechanism, perhaps you are lacking resources to manage the stress of your life. Many of us feel like victims to the overstimulation of the world. Our nervous systems are dysregulated. Our patience is fried. Our phones are buzzing at us and we are fed up. The news is horrific, the political state unstable, and we can’t deal with one more issue. So we flop. We zone out. ...

Gratitude standard

Gratitude You’ve heard it before – practicing gratitude is good for you. It can make you happier, increase your patience, increase success in relationships, ease depression, reduce overeating, improve self-esteem, reduce aggression, enhance empathy, improve physical health and even give you a better night’s sleep. The word gratitude is derived from the Latin word gratia, which means grace, graciousness, or gratefulness. It is the simple act of noticing what you have and expressing thanks for it. But gratitude offers us even more in terms of rewards. It trains us at mindfulness, putting us into the ‘here and now’ and allows us to regulate and attune our awareness. In a world where we are encouraged to be disembodied through technology, busyness ...

He is Reasonable Doubt standard

He is Reasonable Doubt Light blue jeans, greasy blonde hair to his shoulders, hands that know manual work. This is him, taking the stand now, as I sit beside my counselling client who no longer can talk, can barely breath. If it wasn’t here, before this Judge who looks like we are all a bad smell, in this courtroom in Victoria, I would suggest it was high school, a drama class, a bad play. But it is none of these things, it is the Queen’s Bench of Canada and my client, raped in her own bed, watches as a man looks the Judge in the eye and says, “My friend didn’t touch her.” He is Reasonable Doubt. ...