Introduction:
Overall, the Mind Branch highlights the mental health aspect of bodymindspirit integration. There is an understanding that mental health practitioners naturally conceptualize and work with the mind aspects of the bodymindspirit as part of their training, supervision, and clinical practice. This provides incredible strengths and some predictable biases that can be counterproductive to complete bodymindspirit integration. The purpose of the Mind branch is to highlight those dialogues, discussions, and practices that build, train, and enhance mental health acumen within a responsible bodymindspirit practice.
Jason Benton is a psychotherapist, advocate, psychiatric nurse practitioner, homeopath, and CranioSacral therapist. He has worked in a variety of healthcare settings since the early-2000's and is the perfectly qualified individual to craft and oversee the vision for the Mind Branch at AMBST.
-Eric Moya, Executive Director ABMST
Vision:
Early in my healthcare career, I began to seek a more integrative and holistic way to address my clients' problems. I observed how one's whole-person health moved and changed as a whole, rather than in segments. Not only that, but I noticed how an individual's health moved with or reacted to movements within their world as well. For example, as what we call "schizophrenia" progresses, so do a variety of endocrine, immune, metabolic, mental, emotional, and spiritual facets of the whole person. Sometimes, grief or heartbreak can lead to cardiovascular disease, systemic inflammation, addictions, and major depression - but alleviating the depression doesn't always cure the heart, and vice versa. Further, often, we see in mental health care settings the emergence of whole groups of unrelated people reporting very similar internal patterns and problems all at once. How do we access the underlying forces that govern the whole (perhaps collective as well as individual) rather than address specific parts of the isolated human being piecemeal? Specializing in every specialty is, of course, impossible, but various holistic methods can provide ways toward whole-bodymindspirit therapy.
After incorporating bodywork into my mental health practice, I witnessed profound healing changes occur that I had not experienced previously. A whole bodymindspirit movement in concert emerged. And it is super fun and creative! Over the last several years, I've worked with other psychotherapists, bodyworkers, and alternative medicine practitioners to explore how manual therapy can address psycho-somatic-spiritual processes in a gentle, trauma-informed, and focused manner. Also, it was possible to promote outcomes with things like cognitive impairment in dementia, specific organ dysfunction like cholecystitis, hypertension, diabetes, chronic pain and arthritis, traumatic brain injury, severe depression, PTSD, relationship dysfunction, spiritual and identity crises, and much else. From these experiences, I truly believe that mental health care approaches, especially psychotherapy, should pull the body out of the collective shadow of mental health care and into the light of clinical practice. To be clear, when I advocate spotlighting the body, I mean beyond our chemicals alone and am referring to the skilled touch possible by training in therapeutic physical touch and manual therapy. Lately, I find that the deeper my knowledge grows into the physical substance-energy of the body, the more profound my ability to access not just one's physical condition but one's emotions, mind, and developing spirit. Excluding such knowledge and skills from mental health care, I believe, prevents our ability to provide fully humane or complete care.
I hope that the Mind branch can address potential obstacles and challenges with such work, as well as promote the future development of mind-to-bodymindspirit therapies and therapists in practice. I look forward to the journey together.
-Jason Benton, Head of the Mind Branch @ ABMST