Restorative yoga is a good practice. It helps relieve the effects of stress by providing a completely supportive environment where you alternately stimulate and relax the body to move toward balance. This quiets the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides a “recovery phase” for all the activity of the world. Here’s a simple restorative yoga posture that you can try at home.

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. The first Federal child protection legislation was passed in 1974 and growing awareness of child abuse and child welfare continued to develop through the 80s and 90s. My practice includes adults who are survivors of child abuse who grew up during these time periods. While much of Child Abuse Prevention Month is focused on the well-being of today’s families, it’s a good opportunity to share information and resources for adult survivors too.

Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neuroscientist and writer, revealed an important fact about primates under stress during an interview on KQED: one of the most effective ways to diffuse stress is to take it out on someone else. I was struck by how relevant this is for couples. In fact, couples do this to each other all the time, and they often regret it. So how can you change this behavior?

Language is one of the ways to connect our conscious and unconscious worlds. Things we don’t yet realize we know have a chance to rise to the surface. This allows our perceptions to become more deeply felt and understood. Sometimes we forget this amazing function of language in a culture that overflows with data and information.

The holidays can get hectic. But the winter days are also a good time to slow down and have some quiet, contemplative time. It helps to set a few intentions before everything gets busy. I know that “setting intentions” can sound serious and time-consuming, but all it takes is finding an idea you like and saying a simple one-line statement to yourself.

I’ve been reading Cheri Huber’s book, There is Nothing Wrong With You: Going Beyond Self-Hate. She talks a lot about how self-hate works, and how to intervene on your own behalf. She says that spiritual practice is essential because “in order to be free of self-hate, we must find the unconditional.” Not everyone who comes to psychotherapy is interested in spiritual practice, so here are some of her suggestions that are free of spiritual or religious requirements.

I’ve been hearing a lot about orthorexia, a term developed by Steven Bratman, MD, to identify an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy food. Orthorexia is not a recognized mental or medical disorder, but it identifies a phenomenon that Bratman sees in his practice and has experienced personally. The quest for good nutrition and healthy eating seems like a positive goal, but the unhealthy obsessiveness seriously complicates the picture.

Motivational Interviewing is a directive, client-centered counseling style for eliciting behavior change by helping clients explore and resolve ambivalence. It was developed by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick and evolved from the treatment of problem drinking. It’s a useful approach for working with clients around change and can be integrated with other treatment goals.

The health benefits of meditation and mindfulness receive a lot of well-deserved attention in our culture. These practices can help people with everyday suffering, as well as specific health concerns. The image associated with these practices is frequently a calm and peaceful meditator. So the question is, do we have to be calm and peaceful in order to be healthy?

I’m writing an article for the Winter 2011 issue of Bridge on the topic of assertiveness and guilt. Assertiveness is an often-misunderstood communication style, so I begin the article by contrasting it with other styles and then identifying this mysterious link to guilt.