Blog

Please check out the inspiring keynote speakers and embodied resilience workshops we have lined up for Echo's 2018 conference . We will be looking at how trauma and resilience are transmitted across generations and learn how to not only be resilient but also thrive despite trauma histories.

I am reading Nadine Burke Harris’s Book: The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity . I will often come across a passage that resonates so deeply with my own life that I have to put the book down and just breathe. The reason for my pause is not about my own Adverse Childhood Experiences, although I have a few; it is because I recognize the path she is on. I first heard about Adverse Childhood Experiences from another professional in my field of practice, prenatal...

Robert Simmons, on left. _________________________ Robert Simmons had been working with incarcerated men since 1998 and thought he’d seen everything. But in 2010, he met a grandfather, a father and a grandson—all of them inmates at Buncombe County’s Craggy Correctional Center. “I saw how things are passed down from one generation to the next. That was a wake-up call for me,” says Simmons. And it underscored his resolve to help thwart that cycle. For years, Simmons had been volunteering at...

When Highland Park, Michigan, a predominately Black city surrounded by Detroit, had its streetlights repossessed in 2011, because of a $4 million unpaid street lighting bill, Ryter Cooperative Industries L3C stepped in to help install solar-powered streetlights in the city’s neighborhoods. Energy cost inequality is a problem in many areas throughout the country. Low-income households spend 10% of their income on electricity—four times higher than the average household, according to a recent...

AUSTIN - There's a new approach to solving homelessness in Austin. It has to do with a one-of-a-kind apartment community that has onsite mental health services plus drug and alcohol treatment. It's called Housing First Oak Springs. At a press conference at the future site of the apartment community in East Austin on Oak Springs Monday morning, Joyce, a former homeless Austinite, talked about what would have happened if she didn't get help. [For more on this story by Jenni Lee, go to...

Editor’s note: This is a continuation of an ongoing series, Your School , that examines what is holding back teachers, principals, parents and communities from helping students realize their full potential, and aims to hold up promising efforts that other places might learn from. Each of them took a side and lifted. From the back of a minivan, Milbridge Elementary School students Spencer Bickford and CJ Lovejoy carried an armchair into the school’s art room one day in November. They hauled...

Excerpts from article in today's Keene Sentine l by Jessica Ricard.

[This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Tiny Buddha] I’ve always lived with a low hum of anxiety in the background, and lately, it’s been harder to keep a lid on it. There are a lot of things to be anxious about these days. We live in a complex and stressful world and anxiety is very common, affecting upwards of 20 percent of the population. Some experience manageable levels; for others, anxiety and chronic stress can be debilitating and self-destructing. Truth is, we...

Today I interview interview psychiatrist Susana De Leon, MD, who explains how early trauma changes our DNA by damaging telomeres, with potentially serious consequences for our health and longevity. We talk about how she helps people build lives full of love and connection, which can measurably change the health of their cells (and the length of their telomeres) for the better. Click here to watch the video .

With HOPE being the place where healing starts...I penned a song that I will be performing for school children. It OnlyTakes One Each and every one of us is hungry to feel love It’s natural to look for it even from above It’s part of our soul the void we need to fill Your parents are the likely source if they only will It matters if they found love when they were growing up Did they have someone in their life to fill their loving cup? It only takes one person to care that is all you need A...

A new report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the number of teen-aged and young adult women being medicated for ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) has risen by 344%. The CDCP noted that in 2006 about 1% of the female population were medicated for ADHD, but by 2015 the percentage had climbed to 4%. The study focused on women between the ages of 15 and 44 who had private insurance. About 5% of the general population has ADHD. The disorder used to...

In the United States, inequality tends to be framed as an issue of either class, race, or both. Consider, for example, criticism that Republicans’ new tax plan is a weapon of “ class warfare ,” or accusations that the recent U.S. government shutdown was racist . As an India-born novelist and scholar who teaches in the United States, I have come to see America’s stratified society through a different lens: caste . Many Americans would be appalled to think that anything like caste could exist...