Research has shown that childhood abuse can damage the brain and reduce it up to 10 percent in size. This in turn can then create functional abnormalities of one’s mood and thinking process. Western science used to believe that by young adulthood the brain had lost its capacity for radical change, which meant that brain damage caused in childhood was no longer curable in adults. This viewpoint left little hope of recovery for individuals who where abused as children.
More recent research has revealed that the brain has the capacity to change at any age, and one of the best ways of doing that is though mindfulness practice. Since childhood adversity is an experience that many people have had, I feel it is important to make easy and effective tools available to as many people as possible to help reduce stress, move out of reactivity, restore balance, and learn to create a healthier life.
The I Create What I Believe! (ICWIB) program grew out of a need that I saw, and from my own personal experience. I experienced an excessive amount of trauma both in the womb and in the first five years of my life. This subsequently had a negative impact on my developing brain. Since I grew-up in a time where there was little awareness of how trauma and/or abuse could impact brain development, I had to find a way out myself.
Some of the ICWIB activities stem from activities I developed for myself as a child to help restore balance, while other activities are based on movement practices and drawing activities I discovered later in life and used for my own healing. Each of the twelve activities focuses on helping the brain resolve a different kind of imbalance.
The ICWIB program activities helped me let go of the difficult experience and see it with new eyes. This in turn helped me move forward into life in a more peaceful, integrated and joyous way. This is the reason I am so passionate about getting the ICWIB program into the hands of parents, teachers, and anyone working with at risk individuals—especially at-risk children.
With this in mind, I invite you to explore some of the ICWIB! art activities and videos for FREE! If you are interested, I recommend you begin with the first activity—Just Scribble. This activity incorporates deep abdominal breathing with movement—two important components for restoring balance and healing in the body and mind. It also introduces the art of self-reflection, which is a very important component of mindfulness training.