Nexus Seminars

Energized, Relaxed & Fully Present

2007-06-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

Work in Fulfillment

This one-day seminar is the direct awakening of who you really are. It teaches you to use what you already possess for success and natural stress-free communication. You can be empowered by gifts and practices embedded in the nature of your own body!

Let every step you take upon the earth bring peace, both for you and for those who walk beside you. You can rediscover creative energy in your daily work, and be the difference you want to make in the world.

Stress-Release & Positive Communication

There is a profound link between personal stress and poor communication. The Nexus Seminar is unique because it addresses both sides of the Stress-Communication Cycle. Personal stress undermines communication, while poor communication causes more stress. These two factors compound each other, creating a feed-back loop that prevents success in business and relationships.

Some workshops teach stress management. Others teach communication skills. But Nexus works on both ends of the cycle, relieving stress to strengthen communication, enhancing communication to relieve stress.

Unique Exercises for Speaking & Listening

You will learn to communicate with clarity, enthusiasm, and fearlessness through dynamic interactive exercises. Drop the inner judgments that undermine your relationships. Free your mind from negative patterns of the past and tap the creativity of the present moment.

You will learn how to discriminate between what actually is and the old story your mind tells about it. Free from old self-defeating stories, you are empowered to turn your daily conversations into pathways of success. Discover your authentic words of power to express your most cherished goals. Then act on them.

The Nexus Seminar also expands your power of listening, unfolding deeper listening skills than most people have ever imagined. For many busy employees, listening can be frustrating or intimidating. But these empowering practices will make listening an opportunity for compassion, team-building, and peace of mind.

Use Your Senses to Energize, Focus, Relax

Nexus awakens the grace and power of the ordinary. Even in our daily work place, the present moment can be a deep wellspring of energy. Our eyes, ears, and senses - which are often on auto-pilot throughout the work day - can be fountains of refreshment. We just need to rediscover the treasures that are already ours. You may find a blessing in the eyes of the person right in front of you, in the taste of a single grape, or the whisper of the breeze in a moment of silence. Such moments of self-awareness bring creativity, intuition, and mental clarity. These qualities make us better problem-solvers.

What We Do In The Seminars

Dynamic interpersonal communication exercises are combined with training in deep relaxation and enlivened sensory awareness. Nexus Seminars explore:

* Fearless positive communication;

* Replace gossip with leadership;

* Take 100% responsibility right Now;

* Generate peace in the midst of conflict;

* Tap the creative energy of the present moment;

* Be a compassionate listener;

* Energize and relax your bodies stress points;

* Express power from your core-silence;

* Create your World from your Word;

* Use your senses for clarity & refreshment.

The seminar is available for businesses, faculties, service organizations, churches, and soldiers who deal with post-traumatic stress. Contact us by email:
fredlamotte@gmail.com

Sample Syllabus

2007-06-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

A Seminar for Success

This is the syllabus for a business or faculty in-training day. The term Nexus captures the essence of what we do to make you successful. It means: "a connection linking two or more people; a focal point; or a membrane linking cells to enable them to communicate.

The day is enjoyable and inter-active. You don't just sit an listen. You experience. The exercises empower you to communicate in the creative nexus of the present moment - free of stress, fear, and negative patterns from the past. This unique combination of stress-release and communication skill creates positive energy in the workplace. This training roots out gossip about the past and negative thinking about the future. Participants learn to take 100% responsibility for the present moment, with joy and vision. This moment is the seed of future success.

The following syllabus can be condensed into a four-hour seminar. But it is intended to be a full day. The workshop can also be extended into a weekend for maximum fulfillment of the goals.

An asterisk* indicates an experiential exercise rather than a talk. The workshop is primarily experiential, with minimal lecture material.

I. Morning session: Clearing Mind & Body

1. Introduction: The feedback loop between communication and stress. Stress causes poor communication and poor communication causes stress. What makes this workshop unique is that we work from both ends of this loop.

2. * The Voice: Recognizing our interior monologue that undermines relationships, causing gossip and negative communication.

3. The Listener: Who we are right now.

5. * The Bell (A Mindfulness Exercise)

6. * Paris In The Spring (How Mental Habits Undermine Us)

7. * Eye On The Ball (Stress Release through Sensory Awareness)

8. * What Does It Feel Like to Be Heard? (Exercise in Pairs)

9. Time Management: Ending the Stress of the Past through the Power of Presence

10. * Body Awareness (Joint Rotation for Muscle Stimulation & Relaxation)

11. * One Breath Meditation: Discharging Stress & Grounding Our Bodies
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Lunch Break (* With Mindfulness Practice)
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II. Taking Responsibility

1. * Smiling Yoga & Laughter: A Mindfulness Exercise

2. * Complain! Observing our own gossip and negative thinking.

3. * Two Circles: What-Really-Happened vs. Our-Story-About-It

4. Discussion: How can we turn this wisdom into work?

5. Taking 100% Responsibility for Our Story

6. * Transforming Conflict Into Communication (An Exercise in the Breath of Compassion)

Break

III. Creating Our Vision

1. * Role Play: Simulation, Discussion & Positive Replay of A Work Place Encounter

2. What Is The Empowering Conversation?

3. * Choosing Your Word of Power (Journal Exercise)

4. * Sharing Your Word of Power (Exercise in Pairs).

5. * Living Your Word of Power (Hypnotherapy & Visualization)

IV. Conclusion: Creating Our World

The future we want only comes from the freedom we can enjoy in the present moment.

Stress Management 101

2007-06-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

Working With Stress

Stress is not your situation. It is your response to the situation. You can allow your body to be your teacher, transforming tension into flow, dis-ease into creative energy. The first three sections below give you knowledge about stress. The last section gives you a practice, which we use in our seminars, called Stress Points and Anchor Points. You can practice with a partner or alone. It will teach you to recognize your own Stress Position before it arises and replace it with a more positive Relaxation Position.

The Stress Response

Known technically as the Fight Or Flight Response, the physiology of stress was mapped by Dr. Hans Selye (1907-1982). We evolved this stress response as primitive hunters to deal with danger. Physiology rapidly mobilizes to fight or flee. But in modern situations, we can do neither. On the way to the airport, we can’t flee from the traffic jam or attack the guy in the next car. We just stew in our road-rage. At work, we can’t punch the boss, or run out of the office. We just sit there and smile. Yet in our body, heart rate and blood pressure elevate; breath grows shallow and rapid; muscles contract in the belly, shoulders and neck; our palms sweat; capillaries contract in the skin, diverting blood to the big internal organs. And our blood chemistry goes a little crazy: adrenal glands release cortisol and epinephrine, the liver elevates blood sugar for energy, our tense muscles release lactic acid.

This reaction may delay until some inappropriate time in the future, when we call it a panic attack. In the extreme, it is post traumatic stress disorder. More often, we develop a constant low-level stress response to modern living, a response we may not even notice consciously. When our nervous, limbic, and endocrine systems get stuck in this response, stress becomes a more or less permanent physiological state, which has devastating long-term effects: migraines, heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety. Chronic stress may even be a contributing factor in cancer. Remember: stress is not the situation. It is your response to the situation.

In the stress response:

Heart and breath rates increase;

Capillaries contract to redirect blood flow to internal organs;

Muscles tense, constricting and shortening breath: lactic acid is produced by the muscles;

Cortisol is secreted shutting down the immune cells' ability to respond to infection;

All these reactions are set in motion by the hypothalamus in the brain cavity, when the hypothalamus responds to a perceived stress.

This last point is critical, because it means that the stress reaction may be triggered by a memory pattern, super-imposed over the actual situation. Thus we may be stressed by the story our mind is telling us about the situation, and not by the situation itself!

The stress reaction may delay until some inappropriate time in the future, when we call it a panic attack. In the extreme, it is post traumatic stress disorder. More often, we develop a constant low-level stress response to modern living, a response we may not even notice consciously. When our nervous, limbic, and endocrine systems get stuck in this response, stress becomes a more or less permanent physiological state, which has devastating long-term effects: migraines, heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety. Chronic stress may even be a contributing factor in cancer. Remember: stress is not the situation. It is your response to the situation.

The Relaxation Response

The first medical studies on meditation were connected to the study of stress. Researchers wanted to know if there might be a relaxation response to counter-act the stress response. In 1972, Dr. Keith Wallace published an article in Scientific American, "A Hypo-Metabolic State," showing that Transcendental Meditation reverses the physiology of stress. If you want to understand the physiology of meditation, just look at the parameters of the stress response described above and reverse them. Then add strong Alpha and Theta wave patterns in the cortex, with a remarkable degree of brainwave coherence to integrate various segments of the brain. That is the relaxation response.

Breath In World Traditions

Stress can be transformed into vitality when we learn how to recognize and re-program our own body language. Let your body teach you the psycho-physical points where you accumulate tension, bottling up fear or aggression during stressful situations. These are the flash points between mind and body where your thoughts can literally dis-ease you. You can consciously breath in and through these blocked regions, bathing them with oxygen and sending chemical messages of healing into every cell. This practice will actually generate the neuro-peptide molecules of health and well-being that form the information-technology of your body. To deal with stress, you don’t have to burden your intellect with the complexities of self-analysis or doctrinal belief: you can immediately activate the self-healing wisdom of cellular intelligence. This happens when you combine relaxing movement, breath and attention, integrating body, energy, and soul.

Joining awareness and breath generates vital energy. This energy is called prana in Sanskrit, chi in Chinese. The Bible uses the word ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek to make a running pun: these words can be translated either as spirit or breath. Uniting awareness and breath is essential to both Yoga and Chinese medicine: it will undoubtedly become part of Western medical practice. It is a fundamental practice of meditation in every religious tradition, including the Christian "prayer of the heart."

Breath without awareness is just an autonomic biological response. But when awareness permeates the flow of breath, something that is both physical and spiritual is generated in the subtle zone between body and mind. In this zone, consciousness touches the material world through endorphine and other protein messenger molecules. These messengers attune harmonically with receptor sites on the cells of our immune system. They produce not only a feeling of wellness, but real healing. Therefor we can say that the power of our breath is (1) energy for the body, (2) peace for the emotions, and (3) clarity for the mind. Our vitality, well-being, and mental health are three aspects of one phenomenon.

Stress Points and Anchor Points

The Nexus Seminar brings all this down to a practical level: this breath now! We turn our stress points into transformers where tension dissolves and vitality flows, enabling us to meet the challenges of daily work with energy, calm, and grace. We learn to recognize signals that trigger our body’s stress reaction. When unconscious of our stress reaction, we become locked in our personal stress position. But with conscious breathing, we can unlock our stress points even before they tense up. Then we can shift our attention to healing anchors. These are the areas in our body that ground and calm us in the midst of stressful encounters.

An anchor is a calming trigger: the moment we place our awareness there, a relaxation response begins to counter the stress response. Each of us must find our own stress points and our own anchor points, unique to each body. They exist in each of us, but we go through life unconscious of them. Then our stress points become sites of chronic illness, and we never discover our self-healing power. The process of unfolding this knowledge begins in the Nexus Seminar and continues in an exciting journey of self-awareness. The beauty of the process is that our own body is our teacher.

The workshop utilizes individual psycho-motor exercises, communication in pairs, and group discussion.