Pondering Life Adventures

Check this bonus episode out! Maurie was interviewed by Emma Stein. Here is how she describes this episode: "In the second interview of this podcast, Emma welcomes a seasoned leader in the field of adventure therapy to the show, Maurie Lung. Maurie discusses her work at Life Adventures Counseling and Life Adventures For All and shares how she integrates her work into her own life and her life experience into her work. She gives valuable advice to anyone new to the field of mental healthcare." Emma's podcast, Graduate to Guide: On the Other Side of Therapy, can be found at https://graduatetoguideontheothersideoftherapy.buzzsprout.com if you are interested in more stories like this one.

Listen in on our conversation with Dr. Tina Bhargava, an Associate Professor at Kent State University. She has been studying how bandwidth (a term she uses for our brain resources) relates to human behavior for the last 10 years and has discovered that truly understanding it can provide a life-changing perspective on why people do what they do—AND what we can do about it. Check out her website at www.everydaybandwidth.com!

Grab that cup of coffee and listen in as we wander about in our fog, directly experiencing the influence of the vagus nerve that is overseeing our parasympathetic nervous system and its vast range of crucial functions, such as communicating motor and sensory impulses to every organ in our body. From the common cold to sleep deprivation, we unpack what happens when we get overwhelmed with our world and we share a few strategies that will help to mitigate this stress that we are all experiencing in some form or another. (Visit our Facebook page, Pondering Life Adventures, to see the slide we are referring to in this episode!)

Listen in on our chat as we navigate our stressful world while still trying to hold onto some of the routines that help our families thrive. We somehow link current events, with Halloween, gun sales, and the Olympic Biathlon. Finally settling on discussing regulating, family rules, the difference between tattling and telling, and the most important rule of all...to have fun. Don't miss the mindful moment at the end, as we are certainly in need of those these days!

Listen in on the interview as Maurie was a guest on the podcast "Stories from the Field: Demystifying Wilderness Therapy."

Stories from the field is dedicated to demystifying wilderness therapy and is hosted by Dr. Will White. In this podcast Will interviews various wilderness therapy researchers, program founders, writers, executive directors, guide staff, clinicians, critics and more. He educates the listener to the long history of the field and different trends related to this evolving treatment option.

Will has worked in the wilderness therapy field for over 30 years and co-founded Summit Achievement (a wilderness therapy program) located in Maine in the 1990's. He wrote the book, "Stories from the Field: A History of Wilderness Therapy" and his doctoral dissertation traced the history of the field and is titled, “Stories from the Elders: Chronicles and Narratives from the Early Years of Wilderness Therapy”.

Grab that coffee and sit back to listen in on our conversation about our experiences during the pandemic, such as our observations about mask wearing, our children interrupting our working from home, and how we are trying to find solid sleep and helpful mindfulness. Savoring seems to be the key. Enjoy!

Grab your coffee and sit back for a stroll down memory lane as we chat about our career paths into adventure therapy, camping with our families, and how our personal bandwidth is feeling a bit restricted these days. All of which is being mitigated with some good doses of playfulness and mindfulness.

We typically access our surge capacity, our collection of our mental and physical adaptive systems, for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations. However, when we try to access it for long-term survival, it can become depleted, causing our bandwidth to become pinched and our compartmentalizing to leak. With the end of the pandemic not yet in sight, listen in as we share our struggles and our ideas of how we resource ourselves through connecting with people and sharing the gifts of laughter.

Grab your cup of coffee, relax, and listen in on our conversation about parenting, some of our struggles, some of our successes, and just what we think about when we try to answer the question of who we are as a parent. One thing became clear, that throughout our parenting journey, we both aim to focus on our values, while juggling our responsibilities to our family, our work, our friends – all while trying not to lose ourselves in the process.

Grab your cup of coffee and listen in as we chat about some very real life situations we are navigating, sprinkled in with some research about resiliency, tips to mitigate the impacts of the stress, and a tiny bit of mindfulness to reorient your day. This episode dives into how the stress of the pandemic is impacting our families and ourselves during what seemed to be more mundane moments.