Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being [Paperback]

Thom Hartmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 2006

A new approach to using walking to heal emotional trauma and bring forth optimal mental functioning

• Explores why and how we carry emotional wounds, and how they can be healed and resolved

• Shows how walking stimulates both sides of the brain to promote and restore mental health

• Provides simple, yet potent, mental exercises to use while walking

Our bodies usually heal rapidly from an illness, injury, or wound. Yet our minds and hearts often suffer for years with debilitating symptoms of distress or upset. Why is it so hard for our minds and hearts to heal? The key to healing them is simple and can be just a short walk away.

Walking--a bilateral therapy that has been a part of human life throughout history--allows people to heal emotionally as quickly as they do physically. Bilateral therapies engage both sides of the brain and unlock natural states of optimal function and creativity. Thom Hartmann examines how memory works and why emotional shock can resist normal healing. He found that the simple act of walking is effective in treating emotional disturbances ranging from temporary upsets and problems to chronic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

Case studies have shown dramatic results. Walking consciously, while holding a distress or desire in mind, can rapidly dissolve the rigidity of a traumatic memory or negative mind state, dispersing its unpleasant associations in as little as a half hour’s time. While walking has always been a natural part of life, its importance in promoting and maintaining mental health is only recently being rediscovered. Hartmann’s simple yet potent exercises allow us to create our own walking journeys to restore our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being as well as rejuvenate our body’s health.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This book is a prescription for mental wellness that has no bad side effects. Walking, like drawing, is a human activity that calms the brain and induces insight. . . . Buy several copies--you’ll be handing this book out to friends.”
(Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain )

“In presenting respectable research and scholarship on how the mundane-seeming, everyday activity of walking balances the brain’s laterality, Thom Hartmann brings a scholar’s concentration to his subject, a storyteller’s sense of enchantment, and a humanitarian’s concern with the issues that matter.”
(Stephen Larsen, author of The Healing Power of Neurofeedback )

“Thom Hartmann’s work with bilateral movement is a fascinating and important contribution to holistic healing modalities and a timely tool for healing many crises of our modern times.”
(James Endredy, author of Ecoshamanism and Earthwalks for Body and Spirit )

From the Back Cover

HEALTH / HEALING

“This book is a prescription for mental wellness that has no bad side effects. Walking, like drawing, is a human activity that calms the brain and induces insight. . . . Buy several copies--you’ll be handing this book out to friends.”
--Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Our bodies usually heal rapidly from an illness, injury, or wound. Yet our minds and hearts often suffer for years with debilitating symptoms of distress or upset. Why is it so hard for our minds and hearts to heal? One simple key to healing them can be just a short walk away.

Walking--a bilateral therapy that has been a part of human life throughout history--allows people to heal emotionally as quickly as they do physically. Normally the brain converts our daily experiences into long-term memories. However, a traumatic experience can become “stuck” in the brain, unable to be stored as “memory” and persisting in the brain as if it were still a present-time event. Thom Hartmann explains that when we walk, which engages both sides of the body, we simultaneously activate both the left and right sides of the brain. This allows the brain’s two hemispheres to join forces to break up brain patterning and allow the sufferer to release these distresses--from extreme but brief upsets to chronic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

To achieve these results, Hartmann shows how we must learn to walk consciously, holding an awareness of the distress (or desire we hope to attain) in mind as we move. Using a variety of case studies, he demonstrates that it is possible to dissolve the rigidity of a traumatic memory or negative mind state in as little as a half hour’s time. His techniques have proven successful in helping to alleviate rage resulting from a domestic dispute as well as the chronic traumas soldiers experience during war that are often locked away for decades. While the physical benefits of walking have long been recognized, its importance in promoting and maintaining mental health has only recently been rediscovered. Hartmann’s deceptively simple, yet potent exercises allow us to create our own walking journeys to restore our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being as well as rejuvenate our body’s health.

THOM HARTMANN is the award-winning, bestselling author of over a dozen books, including The Edison Gene, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, and Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception. His groundbreaking work in ADD/ADHD and psychotherapy has been featured in TIME magazine, the New York Times, and in media around the world. He lives in Oregon.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Park Street Press (October 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594771448
• ISBN-13: 978-1594771446
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #289,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #50 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Exercise & Fitness > Walking

More About the Author

Thom Hartmann, who started in radio in 1968, is also an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The co-founder (with his wife, Louise) of The New England Salem Children's Village (1978) and The Hunter School (1997), he has led national innovations in the areas of residential treatment for abused children and private/public education for learning-disabled children. Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of nineteen books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. He is the former executive director of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed and abused children, and has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States through the German-based Salem International program. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of The Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler (who wrote the foreword to one of Thom's books), he was the originator of the revolutionary "Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis" to understand the psychiatric condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). A guest faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, he also synthesized the "Younger/Older Culture model" for describing the underpinnings - and possible solutions - to the world's ecological and socio-political crises, suggesting that many of our problems are grounded in cultural "stories" which go back thousands of years. His most recent books are "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class," "The Edison Gene," "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call to Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?"

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

106 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Simple--But Fascinating--Theory, November 14, 2006

By 

Janet Boyer "Author, Blogger, Radio Host" (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being (Paperback)

"Just as a person with a severe hemispheric imbalance can be badly disconnected from emotions such as empathy, and thus sanction or even encourage actions such as mass murder that is war, so too can an entire society. In the opinion of some researchers, societies that are hemispherically unbalanced are more likely to be patriarchal, hierarchal, and violent, whereas societies that are hemispherically balanced are more likely to be egalitarian and democratic, and employ violence only in self-defense." - From the book

Remember the caricatures of stage hypnotists brandishing a swinging pocket watch while intoning "Look into my eyes..." ? Well, according to author Thom Hartmann, this type of hypnosis was actually a bona fide psychiatric therapy in the late 1700's and early 1800's. In fact, Franz Anton Mesmer ("mesmerize") was the first person to develop a system of bilateral cross-hemispheric stimulation by waving his fingers side to side while a patient followed with their eyes. Mesmer discovered that his system was quite effective in resolving non-organic physical and psychological problems. That is, psychosomatic conditions or issues rooted in emotional trauma.

In the late 1800's, Sigmund Freud--a protégé of Josef Breuer--discovered the power of bilateral therapy in the form of alternatively stroking both sides of the body, a technique that Mesmer first developed. In fact, in the 1880's and early 1890's, Freud's preferred method of treatment wasn't talk therapy (which is what he became famous for) but a bilateral technique known as hypnosis.

In Walking Your Blues Away, author Thom Hartmann traces Freud's sudden discontinuance of hypnosis to the popularity of the book Trilby, authored by George Du Maurier in 1894. Playing on the new wave of anti-Semitism that swept Europe at the end of the 19th century, Du Maurier's novel Tribly chronicled the seductive story of Svengali a "sinister, Jewish" hypnotist who exploited susceptible women both sexually and financially.

Hartmann suggests that the public reaction to Jewish physicians employing hypnosis was so intense, that Freud had no choice but to abandon this successful form of therapy.

Walking Your Blues Away offers theories as to why bilateral therapies such as hypnosis, side-to-side stimulation, NLP, EFT, etc. are so successful at reframing emotional trauma--and the author applies this mode of therapy to walking.

The hippocampus is the part of the brain that functions as a "dumping ground" of memories, so to speak. Whatever we go through or experience in a day is processed by the hippocampus while sleeping (REM being another form of bilateral stimulation). However, some emotional trauma--such as what is experienced with PTSD--is so severe that the hippocampus can't process it all. This trauma then becomes "stuck" in the brain, unable to be processed as a mere memory. These frozen experiences can debilitate and depress unless they become resolved.

Interestingly, talk therapy can often cause a "re-wounding", asserts Hartmann, which actually makes matters worse. Drawing on his experience with NLP, he realized that emotionally charged memories are "seen" front and center of a person--in full color--while non-traumatic memories are "seen" far away, off to the side, "flat", or in black and white.

Combining the most natural form of bilateral therapy extant--walking--with NLP, Hartmann realized that holding a painful memory in central awareness while walking can resolve a traumatic issue in less than 30 minutes.

Amazing, no?

Yet, according to Walk Your Blues Away, Hartmann's technique has proven successful for alleviating both short term and long-term symptoms in people--ranging from angry domestic disputes to war trauma. This is because walking uses both hemispheres of the brain, and "holding" the traumatic issue in one's mind while walking can literally vaporize disturbing events. In addition to providing compelling evidence in the form of case studies, he also shares fascinating cultural and historical anecdotes as to why "brain balance" can heal. For example, Hartmann refers to the legacy of left-brain dominance caused by literacy as put forth in the book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain, as well as Darwin and the "noble savage" and how "walking" tribes were much less violent than "civilized" horse-riding people.

Most of us realize the many benefits of walking, but Walking Your Blues Away describes a deceptively simple process to resolving stuck emotions and symptoms stemming from traumatic experiences. At only 102-pages, this is a short book, but the case histories and theories Hartmann presents is compelling--and his methodology is so easy that even a child could use it.

In fact, walking as bilateral therapy can also be used to generate creativity, solve problems, and create motivational states.

My one criticism of this book is that the author doesn't mention if this type of therapy can be used with treadmills. I happen to live in a region that experiences some cold winters and while I'll go to the park as long as I can stand it, it's difficult to do so when the wind chill sinks to 0 degrees!

Bilateral therapy through walking is a fascinating, sensible idea--so if this form of healing sounds appealing to you, it's an easy way to (hopefully) treat chronic emotional distress or resolve "stuck" emotions.

Janet Boyer, author of The Back in Time Tarot Book: Picture the Past, Experience the Cards, Understand the Present (coming Fall 2008 from Hampton Roads Publishing)

57 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Breakthrough Book, January 16, 2007

By 

Dave Smith "Author of 'To Be Of Use'" (Mendocino County, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being (Paperback)

Don't let the lightweight title, cover, and page-count fool you. This is a breakthrough book, and not just another self-help, happy-talk rip-off. This book can stand proudly next to the most academic psychological tome, and replace much of the pop psychology pap moldering on our bookshelves.

To be open to something so important, one first has to know who the author is, what he stands for, and why he can be trusted. I've read several of Thom Hartmann's books, and listened to his daily progressive radio program numerous times. I can only state emphatically: This is a gifted man we can trust. He is the real deal. (See my earlier post on him for more info.)

The basics of the book are these:

1. Our bodies are self-healing if we feed it the right food and exercise it properly under the right conditions. Shouldn't our minds and emotions also be self-healing?

2. Rhythmic, bilateral movement is the way we've healed ourselves from traumatic, psychological wounds for hundreds of thousands of years. But until now, we didn't know how it worked.

3. "Bilaterality is the ability to have the right and left hemispheres of the brain fully functional and communicating with each other."

4. Freud's early, very successful work was based on Bilaterality techniques, but after some unfortunate, sensationalistic historical events, he was forced to abandon it for mostly unsuccessful "talk-therapy" methods. Freud tried, but failed, for years to find an equally-successful technique. This history is crucial to our understanding of why psychotherapy evolved the way it did.

5. Devastating events can haunt our every waking moment for years. Some suffer war-caused "post traumatic stress disorders" for years or allow a loved-one's untimely death to ruin their lives, while others are able to move on. Just as we learned to transform our physical health by eating organic food, exercising, and drinking pure water, now we know how to consiously bring ourselves back to a healthy mental state.

6. This discovery comes from Hartmann's own training, observations and experiments, with dramatic results illustrated by case studies and testamonials.

7. Hartmann details a simple, five step technique.

8. Bilaterality has also been used by humans for less-traumatic problem solving, creativity, and motivation. Now we can train ourselves to use it consciously.

This book deserves a wide readership and word-of-mouth recommendations. I urge you to read it and pass it on, especially to those whose lives have been darkened by tragedy.

45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It works, November 25, 2007

By 

Bill (Pittsburgh, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being (Paperback)

When a self-improvement book is reviewed I always look for actual experience from people who have tried the methods in the book - not just those read it and agree with it. Well now I am reviewing 'Walk Your Blue's Away' and I can say unequivocally IT WORKS, at least for me. All of my adult life I have been prone to depressive episodes from rejection and loss - even if the loss is very small. Recently a loving and satisfying relationship of 5 years was broken off by my partner. I knew from experience I was poised to nosedive into depression. This was despite many years of zealous embrace of cognitive behavior therapy in which the two sides of the brain battle. An adverse event triggers dejection, anger, depression. With cognitive therapy you have to identify the irrational thought that supposedly triggers your negative emotions, dispute the thought, and find a rational and sensible substitute thought. The problem was the negative emotions would take sometimes years to dissipate and I was constantly ruminating and flashing back to previous events. What Thom's book does is address healing. When you heal from emotional trauma with this method, the two sides of the brain actually are successful in integrating reason and emotion. With cognitive therapy reason and emotion seemed to constantly battle one another without resolution. You might win a battle but the next day another begins. I contend that after 5 daily walks following the simple guidelines of the book, the crushing sadness of rejection has lifted. The memories that previously would trigger bouts of depression are still there but now in the distance. They no longer dominate my mood allowing me to concentrate and get on with my life. At the end of each session my thinking was especially sharp - the corrective rational thoughts that I tried for years to marshal with cognitive therapy were at last automatic. Everyone suffers loss, rejection and emotional trauma. The key, as Thom says is, to facilitate your ability to heal naturally.