Karen Wheeler RN-BC, director and primary facilitator of BEwell*PLAYwell, offers numerous individual trainings and services to support you in forming and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. She utilizes motivational interviewing, an evidence-based approach to overcoming the ambivalence that keeps many people from making desired changes in their lives. Motivation is nurtured by addressing three components: readiness, willingness, and ability. See About Us for Karen's biography.

Karen's intention is to provide you with choices, an individual tailoring of mind-body interventions, a true holistic approach. This integrative medical approach provides you with the unique opportunity to choose from a variety of medically mainstreamed techniques and complementary medicine modalities for which there is high-quality scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness. In the individual sessions Karen helps clients with:

• Strategies for each stage of change
• Education based in scientific research
• Support to focus on what you can control
• Encouragement to work towards balance
• Choices that can enhance all aspects of your life
• Techniques to create your zone of optimal functioning
• Empathy, warmth, respect, and understanding at all times

Any of the technique trainings described on this page can be presented as a group class. Multiple individual offerings can form programs to meet the needs of a target group. Contact BEwell*PLAYwell to discuss customized classes and programs.

• Has life become a frantic balancing act?
• How often do you find yourself distracted, hurried, or anxious?
• Does your mind jump all over the place or fixate on a particular issue?
• Do you have a stress-related illness or condition?
• Has your health care professional recommended stress management?

The relaxation response is a physical state of deep rest that changes the physical and emotional responses to stress. For example, the heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension decrease while in this state. In addition to the healthy physiological changes, practicing the relaxation response facilitates clear thinking and smart choices. When you quiet the mind it is easier to reframe the limiting thinking and beliefs that contribute to negative behaviors. Relaxation response techniques can improve health, sports performance, work success, the capacity to learn, relationships, and balance in all life dimensions.

Techniques that elicit the relaxation response have two basic components. The first is the repetition of a word, phrase, prayer, image, or physical activity. The second is the passive disregard of everyday thoughts when they occur during relaxation. Your holistic experience at BEwell*PLAYwell includes at least one of the following techniques that are proven to elicit the relaxation response:

• Body scan meditation
• Breath awareness and control
• Coherence
• Imagery
• Mindfulness meditation
• Progressive muscle relaxation
• Repetitive exercise
• Yoga

Breath awareness and control are the most crucial and simplest skills needed to enhance the quality of life. Breathing techniques can have a positive impact on performance, strengthen the immune system, and improve your energy levels, mood control, and focus. Breathing with awareness and control are key factors in almost all techniques known to elicit the relaxation response.

Because of the thorough and minute focus on the body, this is a particularly effective technique for developing both concentration and flexibility of attention simultaneously. The idea is to feel each focused region, pausing to be with the details of the sensations. You breathe into and out from each region a few times and then let go of it as your attention moves onto the next region. As you let go to any sensations, thoughts, and inner images, the muscles in that region relax, lengthen, and release.

Breathing and walking are two of the most natural things we do. Breathwalk® integrates breathing, walking, and meditation into specific exercise patterns that create vitality. In addition to every benefit of aerobic exercise, you will notice more choice over your energy level, mental state, and mood. Breathwalk® is easy to learn, sophisticated in its design and powerful in its impact. Experience Breathwalk® and revitalize your body, mind, and spirit.

The Breathwalk® Program was designed by Gurucharan Singh Khalsa, Ph.D. and Yogi Bhajan, Ph.D. Breathwalk® is a registered service mark of Khalsa Consultants, Inc.

The Freeze-Framer® Interactive Learning System with Patented Heart Rhythm Monitor is an easy-to-use interactive software program that displays your heart rhythms and shows how stress may be affecting you. Much more than a heart monitor, this revolutionary technology helps you to transform a stress response into vibrant energy for personal and professional effectiveness.

Watch in real time how thoughts and emotions affect your heart and autonomic nervous system. Freeze-Framer® objectively monitors your heart rhythms and confirms when you are achieving autonomic nervous system balance—“getting in sync.” When you intentionally shift to a positive emotion such as appreciation, care, or compassion, your heart rhythms immediately change. This shift in heart rhythms creates a favorable cascade of neural, hormonal, and biochemical events that benefit the entire body.

Freeze-Framer® for Golfers focuses the general session techniques to help golfers improve their game. This training includes the booklet Managing Emotions—Golf's Next Frontier.

Quick Coherence® is an easy-to-learn, self-regulatory technique used to promote a desired state or autonomic nervous system coherence. It was designed by the Heart Math Institute to improve performance on the Freeze-Framer® Interactive Learning System. It also provides a tool you can use daily, outside of the sessions, to reduce the negative effects of stress.

In some important ways, achieving a state of psycho-physiological coherence is different than merely “relaxing.” For example, one might describe that we feel relaxed when we listen to music or watch television or walk in nature. Our subjective experience of relaxation may or may not translate to objective, desirable mind-body changes.

Mindfulness is the intentional cultivation of nonjudgmental moment-to-moment awareness. It involves a combination of slowing yourself down, doing one activity at a time, and bringing full awareness to whatever you are experiencing. One can practice formal or informal meditation. Formal meditation practice refers to establishing a particular time, on a regular basis, to devote solely to the cultivation of mindfulness. Informal mindfulness practice refers to conscious efforts to bring moment-to-moment awareness into all aspects of one's daily life.

Consider some thoughts on choosing change:

Working on your automatic thoughts to a perceived stressor is an essential ingredient in improving the quality of your life in all dimensions of wellness. Cognitive distortions are inaccurate perceptions of reality and usually make us feel anxious, depressed, or angry as well as provoke us to act unwisely. Interrupting the cycle of cognitive distortions and self-limiting thoughts requires education, practice, and re-enforcement. But the results are beneficial: a more rational and productive outlook, improved communication, wiser decision-making, and enhanced performance. BEwell*PLAYwell offers choices to approach this critical issue of restructuring thought processes.

An affirmation is a strong positive statement which expresses your intention for a characteristic, habit, or skill, as already existing in the present. When affirmations are combined with visualization, a powerful manifestation process for change is created. The visual picture can be literal or metaphoric and is basically an image in your mind that complements the verbal statement.

Certain ingredients are vital in drafting powerful affirmations that lead to clear images. This skill is a basic component of cognitive restructuring and peak performance. When the process is correctly repeated, often a new neuronal chain begins to replace the old negative thought pattern, producing permanent, desirable results. Contact BEwell*PLAYwell for examples of powerful affirmations in many categories:

• High self-esteem
• Sense of purpose
• Acceptance of self and others
• Peak experiences
• Integrity
• Democratic personality
• Creativity and sense of humor
• Commitment to excellence
• Freedom from negative addiction
• High fitness level

Self-hypnosis can be used to heighten your self-reliance and self-esteem. Autogenic training, using simple phrases to cue the body to relax, is an example of self-hypnosis. The benefits to creating and actualizing your own goals with self-hypnosis are:

• Increased practice time which can strengthen your intentions
• Health-enhancing reinforcement or changes
• Choice in the process of programming your subconscious
• Positive change suggestions

The mind is directed to imagining for the purpose of relaxation and to affect thought processes which influence performance. Creative use of visualization is an outgrowth of meditation and another powerful way to help unlock our optimal levels of well-being and athletic performance. As opposed to meditation which trains the capacities of self-observation and letting go, imagery as a technique is goal directed.

We normally use our imaginations and create mental pictures. Unfortunately, we often visualize through disempowering and energy-depleting mental habits like worrying. Due to our uniqueness, our experiences with creative imagery vary widely. Imagery may or may not involve images; if you're more kinesthetic or auditory, for example, you may hear or feel “images,” rather than see them.

Many different styles of massage have evolved from a core set of techniques. Each style can have varying degrees of benefits on the musculoskeletal, circulatory-lymphatic, nervous, and other systems of the body. While techniques are an important part of a massage treatment, for a great massage there should be at least an equal emphasis on the giver coming from a place of maximum concentration and empathy.

Massage has many specific medical uses and is often recommended by doctors and nurses in stress management programs. Besides the many physical benefits which influence the overall health of the client, all styles of bodywork are known for their motivating impact on the psyche and contribution to profound states of well-being.

Karen Wheeler has a long massage lineage. Her skills are partly based on her Swedish, athletic, and nursing backgrounds. Furthermore, Karen trained with “Aunty Margaret,” renowned master and only person state-certified to teach Lomi Lomi in Hawaii; Dr. Trager, founder of Trager Psychophysical Integration; and Howard Rontal for Myofascial Release 1 and 2.

In addition to administering massage at individual sessions, Karen Wheeler teaches massage classes. See Be Well Programs for a description of Massage: The Basics & Beyond.

Hawaiian Lomi Lomi, also know as temple style and loving hands massage, incorporates similar strokes as used in a basic Swedish Massage. The methods and philosophy have been handed down through the master healers of Hawaii for generations. A basic assumption of Huna, a Hawaiian philosophy, is that everything seeks harmony and love. As indicated by these ancient teachings, the holistic purpose to bring alignment back to the individual body, mind, and spirit, is the foundation of healing.

Myofascial Release is based on the point of view that areas are defined by all the fascial tissues which span them. Fascia is like the white fiber under an orange peel. One of the roles of fascia is to serve as a medium of communication among many, if not most, of the different parts of the body. Fascial tissue is a connecting structure within muscles, bones, and organs and is continuous throughout the body. Therefore it is advisable to also work parts of the body that are distant from the problem area.

Sports Massage is used before, during, and after athletic events to help an athlete to achieve optimal performance. However, even someone new to exercise can reap benefits from massage because it helps prevent those niggling injuries that often get in the way of continuing an exercise program. The main purpose of Sports Massage therapy is to help alleviate the stress and tension which builds up in the body's soft tissues during physical activity. Where minor injuries and lesions occur, due to overexertion or overuse, massage can break them down quickly and effectively.

Olympians and professional athletes have long known the benefits of massage:

• Reduced muscle tension
• Increased recovery time
• Removal of lactic acid
• Increased flexibility
• Injury prevention
• Decreased swelling

Swedish Massage was developed in the 1700's by a Swedish doctor and is recognized as the first massage technique to be included in a college curriculum in the early 1800's. Swedish Massage features a broad variety of strokes specifically designed to relax muscles by applying pressure to them against deeper muscles and bones. Long and flowing strokes are used to spread small amounts of lotion or oil to pleasurably knead the soft tissues and to coax relief from tightness and spasm.

The main purpose of Swedish Massage is to increase the oxygen flow in the blood and to release toxins from the muscles. Swedish Massage can also shorten recovery time from muscular strain by flushing the tissues of lactic acid, uric acid, and other metabolic wastes. It can increase circulation without increasing heart load. It can stretch the ligaments and tendons, keeping them supple and pliable.

Designed by Milton Trager M.D., Trager Psychophysical Integration is the innovative approach to movement education. When receiving a treatment, the partially clothed body is rhythmically rocked, cradled, and moved by the therapist to re-educate both body and mind to be light and easy in movement. Mentastics is the exercise program that complements the table work. The exercises are simple, active, self-induced movements which you can do on your own during your daily activities. They have the same intent as the table work in terms of releasing deep-seated patterns. For many people, Mentastics becomes a part of their life in taking care of themselves, and relieving themselves of stress and tension.