Editorial
Front Page - Friday, August 20, 2010
HeartMath and Ortho-Bionomy soothe stress, pain
Erica Tuggle
Diane Richardson was a body worker for 30 years before returning to school for her master’s in education degree in counseling to aid her work with HeartMath and Ortho-Bionomy procedures. She is now working on a proposal for her services to enter into Hamilton County Schools to help students improve math and reading scores.
- Erica Tuggle
Walking into Diane Richardson’s lamp lit office in the Business Development Center instantly puts one in a non-threatening atmosphere, and begins step one of helping your health.
Richardson is the founder of Relational Energetics, a company that wants to make you feel better. While the process in accomplishing this may seem like a difficult thing to envision, Richardson says the idea behind it is not. She works to provide people, in a gentle non-threatening way, relief from physical, emotional, mental and spiritual pain, and she does this through the tools of Ortho-Bionomy and HeartMath.
The first of these tools, Ortho-Bionomy, looks for pain patterns, and to see what is the origin of the pain being caused in an individual. Ortho-Bionomy works with muscle and skeletal structure to examine the structure that is causing the pattern of pain and then changes it and neurologically resets it.
“It is taking the body more into this position that is painful and then out of this so the brain can say, ‘I have a way to change,’” she says.
The second procedure she uses is HeartMath, a researched based program out of California that concentrates on stress. HeartMath is currently being used in cardiology, enhancing sports performance, business and is good for mediation, Richardson says. The process of HeartMath basically teaches an individual how to get their thinking and feelings connected to their heart.
“Neuroscience is now finding that the heart is more powerful than the brain, and emotions through the heart controls all things throughout your body,” she says. “For instance, one little negative situation will shoot stress chemicals into your body for six hours unless you change it, and that is what HeartMath does.”
By connecting her clients to a computer by an earlobe attachment, the rate in which their heart can deal with stress is displayed. The importance of relieving stress from a heart is backed up by some scary research she says, such as the fact that constant negative thinking actually affects DNA in stretching it out and shutting down those parts of the body. Luckily, HeartMath can reverse this, Richardson says.
Richardson started out in California as a bodyworker 30 years ago with a degree in psychology. She says she found out that massage was not only her gift but also her passion, and from there she began to teach for the next 25 years, 14 of which would be in Chattanooga at the Institute of Healing Arts.
Things were cruising along nicely, she says, until five years ago when she had an accident that broke her finger, fractured a vertebra and caused a disk problem. This allowed her to be reintroduced to Ortho-Bionomy in her treatment, and since then she has done nothing but Ortho-Bionomy, in terms of bodywork.
She also went for her master’s degree in counseling when she moved here, because she says she realized a lot of chronic pain problems have an emotional base to them.
When she started Relational Energetics two years ago she realized the spectrum of those who can benefit from Ortho-Bionomy and HeartMath is so wide that she would have to find an area to focus on for her services. She decided that working with adults and children who have ADHD, test anxiety and problems in school would be her primary focus.
Richardson began with a group of eight children at the Northside Neighborhood House. The children began hunched over and in a state of high stress with the space in front of their heart shut off. With permission, Richardson asked each child if it was all right to touch their back in order to open up this area. Using this combination of Ortho-Bionomy and HeartMath the children of the group were reported weeks later as being much better behaved and making better decisions.
Now, Richardson is putting together a proposal to enter Hamilton County Schools with her work. She says HeartMath’s national study shows that the process significantly raises math and reading scores. The work she does is also relatively inexpensive when compared to a lot of other areas, because she trains the teachers, she says.
“With this procedure, work stress, anxiety disorders and sleep disorders went way down and performance work went up. It’s a difference in working in a classroom where it is a coherent ambiance and not the disciplinary chaos that so many teachers talk about,” Richardson says.
In teaching the teachers and with all the clients she works with, Richardson says she tries to create an ambiance when people meet her in her office. The relational ties between everyone in every situation is half of the name of her business, while the other half deals with the process itself. Even though her work is still called an alternative therapy, it is a $35 billion a year industry, and all of this comes from people paying out of pocket for these services.
She says, “People are looking for what works and are tired of taking drugs.”
While primarily focusing on getting HeartMath into the public school system, she says she is also speaking with GPS and Cleveland and Bradley county schools that have expressed interest in her work. Starting small with an in-service for teachers to view the programs is her next step.
The work with Ortho-Bionomy for physical pain and HeartMath on a daily basis for making someone feel better emotionally is something she wants every community and family to have, she says.
She stays busy volunteering with the Jordon Thomas Foundation, the choir of Unity Church, reading and with her five pets. She’s been asked when she will retire, but says she can’t see why she would want to when she loves what she does and is always looking for the next thing to get into.
“When you can help people feel good, not have surgeries, not freak out over taking tests… how much more rewarding could it be?” she asks.
For more information contact Richardson at 423-667-0118. ?
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