After I started speaking again—following two weeks on a bed of ice in a medically induced coma—I was told that some of my first words were in Spanish. For the eight weeks prior to my coma, I had been working at a mission organization outside of Ensenada, Mexico. Upon returning home to the Bay Area…
Tag: traumarecovery
How Hope Might Help Us
Hope was an amazingly brilliant option then, and it might also be an amazingly brilliant option now. While I’m reflecting specifically on my personal trauma recovery, I think many of us are bewildered by the amount of darkness and suffering in our world (personally, locally, nationally, globally). Of course sometimes even if we take the…
Finding A Good Path Forward In the Midst
When my community and world have been on fire, I’ve needed to adjust my expectations, for one, as well as try to honor the needs of myself and my family. One evening in February, when my youngest was asleep by 7pm (which rarely, if ever, has happened), I had a moment of stillness and creativity…
Interview with Hello Darkness
I had the opportunity to be interviewed by the YouTube channel Hello Darkness: Stories that Transform. In the interview, I share: It was such a special experience, and an honor to do. I hope it’s encouraging!! Here’s the interview if you’d like to listen: Warmly,Robyn Feature Image: This was a recent “glimmer moment”! I took…
The Start of My Healing Journey
I haven’t shared this information here, but doctors said I had a 3% chance of surviving the multiple extreme injuries from my rollover car accident in 2011. At the time, I didn’t know this—nor did I know that I’d make a full recovery years later. During the years of recovery— when so much was unfamiliar,…
Available For Joy in the Midst of Pain
I got to speak at Westmont College earlier this month! I shared my trauma story as well as two of the things that helped me be available for joy in the midst of pain. It’s been through the deeper pain that I’ve been able to experience greater joy. The two things that I shared are:…
How Lengthening Movements Helped Me Heal
Bessel Van Der Kolk says that for healing to happen after trauma, we need to feel ways and do things that “directly contradict the helplessness, rage and collapse that are part of trauma, and thereby regaining self-mastery” (The Body Keeps the Score, page 4). Even though my body underwent huge trauma after being collapsed in…
Evaluate Doing “More” This Holiday Season
I was flipping through one of my past journals and noticed an entry reflecting on my accident and all the ways I’d been changed because of it: I was journalling that before my traumatic brain injury etc, I could do a lot more than I could do now [the date that I wrote this entry]….
Find Our Unique Basket of “10% Solutions”
When I worked on the Perinatal Wellness team at Providence St. John Hospital, I met a woman who is a certified laughter yoga instructor. Have you heard the phrase that laughter is medicine? Well, turns out there is a ton of research behind this. There’s even a science of laughter, it’s called gelotology. And get…