Barn Life Blog
Weekly Theme: Family and Accountability
The Value of Family Family – a word that can carry such pain and yearning yet also warmth and purpose. Barn Life practices the value of “family.” Our actions are guided by this value often. “Accept everyone!” is our beautiful marching tune. We want everyone who walks...
Weekly Theme: What is Self-Love?
Self-Love is a Basic Human Necessity What are basic human necessities? Some include food, water, air, and shelter. These things we quite literally cannot live without. What if we told you self-love was a basic human necessity? Shocking, right? What is shocking about...
Weekly Theme: Forgiveness and Resentment
Letting Go of Resentments, Pain, and Anger Forgiveness is not giving up nor is it admitting defeat. Forgiveness is about taking power back. Making a conscious decision to let go of resentments, pain, and anger. Some people are not ready to forgive and rightly so. What...
Weekly Theme: Inner Child Healing
A Guided Meditation Get comfortable and let’s try this guided meditation together: Take a deep breath in through your nose, hold it, then blow out through your mouth. Do that four more times. Next, I want you to think of a time when you were younger and you felt like...
Weekly Theme: Crisis is Choice
The Turning Point Within Have you ever been in a situation faced with an important challenge that felt insurmountable by your usual methods of coping and problem-solving? Into every life flows crisis. Every breath rides on the brink of upheaval. Every human beat of a...
Weekly Theme: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Can Happen to Anyone Continuing with the idea that we are not our diagnoses, we want to discuss post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) this week. PTSD has gone by many names: shell shock, soldier’s heart, combat fatigue, and war neurosis,...
Weekly Theme: Psychosis and Schizophrenia
What is Psychosis? Psychosis is sensory perceptions and abnormal thinking experienced by an individual struggling with a schizophrenia spectrum or other psychotic-based disorder. Reminder! We are not here to judge you or label you. We are here to help you manage these...
Weekly Theme: Depression and Negative Belief Systems
A New Way of Thinking For some, "depression" is a scary word that carries a connotation of weakness and shame. For others, it’s a warm blanket to withdraw into over and over again despite knowing the suffocating ramifications. We may be fearful of it, comfortable with...
Weekly Theme: Anxiety is a Teacher
Don’t Shoot the Messenger!! Extreme and constant emotional states (i.e. mania, anger, fear, sorrow, grief, and worry) lead to serious mental health disorders (i.e. anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc). Anxiety, for example, is a normal reaction to stress and certain life...
Weekly Theme: You Are Not Your Diagnosis
Navigating the Sea of Modern Mental Health Diagnosis Our themes from this week forward are going to be a general overview of mental health diagnosis. However, we want to do it in a systematic order week by week. We will start with the root and move outward towards the...
Weekly Theme: Transformation
Manifesting Real Transformation Have you ever thought, I would like to be a little less crazy? Or, I would like to be a little more tolerant of ignorance, or I would like to stop drinking so much. Or, I would like to begin learning Aikido. Get into better physical and...
A Holistic Approach to Mental Health Treatment
The Relationship Between the Parts People misuse the word, "holistic". This week, we are going to bring it all back home. Bring it back down to the grassroots, to its intended meaning and purpose. Note, we can also write "holistic" as "wholistic," even though your...
Weekly Theme: Poseidon
The Unpredictable Waters Within In my years as a clinical therapist and program director, I have encountered many Poseidon problems. Clients express that they feel over-possessed by the unpredictable waters within them, overcome by the surfacing and powerful waves of...
Weekly Theme: Intro to Parent Models
Images of Healthy Parent Models Today we begin a new series on images of healthy parent models. It’s no real stretch to suggest that how we were parented influences who we become. From Freud to now, psychology has been dominated in large part by the reconciliation of...
Weekly Theme: the Third Eye Chakra
I stood upon a high place And saw, below, many devils Running, leaping, And carousing in sin. One looked up, grinning, And said: “Comrade! Brother!” -Stephen Crane The Center of Consciousness Undoubtedly you have heard of the third eye chakra. In large part, we might...
Weekly Theme: the Heart Chakra
Song of a man who has come through Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time. If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me! [...] If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by...
Weekly Theme: the Solar Plexus Chakra
Curiosity, Respect, Compassion, and Trust Early in our work with the psyche and soma connection, we introduced the concept that the interrelationship between the body and mind is a primary factor in the individuation of one's personality. For example, we approach a...
Weekly Theme: the Sacral Chakra
“Ultimately, to acknowledge the life of the body, and to affirm our solidarity with this physical form, is to acknowledge our existence as one of the earth's animals” – David Abram Vegetal, Instinctual, and Rational Aristotle once wrote that the human soul is a...