Deepak Chopra visits Paradise Valley Wellness Centre in Squamish

Posted on February 16, 2011 by admin

New York Times Best Selling Author & Physician gives an exclusive discussion on healing and transformation from addictions

Squamish, BC, February 2, 2011 – Paradise Valley Wellness Centre (PVWC), the first addiction treatment organization in North America to be affiliated with The Chopra Center, is proud to host Deepak Chopra on Thursday, February 17, 2011 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. for an exclusive discussion on healing and transformation from addictions and to introduce the work of PVWC and its Foundation; The Foundation will provide financial support to individuals seeking treatment who cannot afford it. Part of the monies will be used for research.

PVWC features The Chopra Center’s Freedom from Addiction Method, which is unique and provides an alternative perspective on traditional twelve-step programs. It promotes long-term balance and personal growth through the use of timeless tools and healing principles to aid guests in nurturing their own health, restore balance, and create greater fulfillment in their lives.

“The field of addiction and mental health carries so many stigmas and it is indeed an honour to have Dr. Deepak Chopra at Paradise Valley Wellness Centre to talk about compassion, caring, and community building to bring attention to those who suffer,” says Nirmala Raniga, Founder and Director of PVWC. “What many people don’t know or understand is addiction comes in many forms, and can affect anyone, from professional executives to teenagers. Be it gambling, internet use, overeating, alcohol, drug, or prescription drug use, we are committed to empowering patients to move beyond destructive patterns and conditioned beliefs.”

Chopra met Raniga a few years ago in Whistler when Raniga was working on a project at that time to open a centre specializing in addiction treatment with a holistic approach in Squamish. Chopra was keen in the intention and supported her vision by having The Chopra Centre for Well being become a partner. Raniga has been a pioneer in addiction recovery in the Lower Mainland for more than 20 years – running five outpatient addiction clinics in Metro Vancouver. “Nirmala is a true leader in aiding people with addictions, and I am glad to lend my support to the PVWC,” says Deepak Chopra, Co-founder of the Chopra Center for Well being. “We believe that when people identify and release stored emotional pain, a definite transformation and healing can occur with addicted patients. It is about making healthy and conscious choice.”

For more information, please visit www.paradisevalleywellnesscentre.com

About Paradise Valley Wellness Centre
Situated along the banks of the Cheakamus River in Squamish BC, Paradise Valley Wellness Centre provides a sanctuary for people looking to overcome their addictions.
Programs offered include group and individual therapy, consultation with an addictionologist and psychiatrists, meditation and mindfulness to promote balance and peace in daily life, therapeutic body work including yoga, massage and acupuncture, a fully equipped gym, a vegetarian-only menu and 10 acres of private access to the river, trees and trails. www.paradisevalleywellnesscentre.com.

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No Numbers: Identity Beyond Measure

Posted on February 10, 2011 by admin

For those living around the Vancouver British Columbia area, we would like to announce that there will be a screening of the film: “No Numbers: Identity Beyond Measure” on Wednesday February the 16th, 2011, at the Rio Theatre; Doors open at 6:30 p.m.  The critically acclaimed documentary deals with eating disorders , such as anorexia and bulimia, and takes viewers on an informative journey to highlight that there is hope for those who suffer from these conditions. The film also aims to empower individuals by encouraging viewers to not determine beauty by things such as physical measurements, and promotes acceptance and compassion.

Details

Wednesday, February 16th @ the Rio Theatre
doors open 6:30 p.m.
1660 E. Broadway, Vancouver
Live Performances by Canadian Idol’s Laurell, plus songwriting contest winners & finalists.
Special Guests:
Patrick Gallagher (GLEE)
Ryan Robbins (SANCTUARY).
Tickets $15 @ door.  Great draw prizes. Cash bar/ concession.
Proceeds Benefit the Looking Glass Foundation

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Radio Interview

Posted on February 2, 2011 by admin

This past Monday, Nirmala Raniga, the founder of Paradise Valley Wellness Centre, gave an in depth interview to Drishti Point Radio (102.7 fm) where she answered questions about our treatment centre, its history, and its approach to helping heal those who suffer from addiction.

Nirmala also provided details about her own history and what motivations lead her to devote her life to helping others, which began with an early campaign she had started in 80′s and 90′s, demanding that users of methadone clinics be shown humanity instead of being shunned and ridiculed.

Click the “nirmalaradiomp3″ file below to hear the interview in full and learn more about Paradise Valley Wellness Centre.

nirmalaradio.mp3

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Vancouver Premier of Journey Into Healing

Posted on January 20, 2011 by admin

Paradise Valley Wellness Center is proud to announce that Deepak Chopra and David Simon will be visiting Vancouver, British Columbia to host their Journey into Healing seminar at the Fairmont Hotel in Downtown Vancouver.

Also joining them will be the renowned dog behavior expert, Cesar Millan, host of the hit show Dog Whisperer who will discuss his views about living in balance and finding happiness.

The seminar will be a four day event that will run from February 16-20, 2011 and will include talks by Deepak Chopra and David Simon as they demonstrate their approach to healing that involves the traditional Indian system of Ayurveda. Follow the link below for more details.

http://www.chopra.com/journey/vancouver2011

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Stressed out? Try mindfulness meditation

Posted on January 10, 2011 by admin

DAVE McGINN

From Monday’s Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Jan. 09, 2011 4:00PM EST
Last updated Monday, Jan. 10, 2011 11:40AM EST

Zindel Segal was in a Toronto bookstore a few weeks ago, when a title caught his eye. The book, The Mindful Investor, caused him a moment of shock and panic.

“I turned to someone and said, ‘This is the beginning of the end,’ ” recalls Dr. Segal, who heads the cognitive behaviour therapy clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

The book, which purports to explain how a calm mind can help a person achieve financial security, is a sign that the concept of mindfulness is making a leap into mass popularity. But that doesn’t mean people actually understand it, he says.

Mindfulness is a technique for slowing down and examining one’s thought processes, and learning to be in the moment. Based on Buddhist principles, it became popular in the United States in the 1970s, and was taken up by celebs such as Meg Ryan and Goldie Hawn. Today, researchers are studying its benefits for everything from depression to stress.

In a multi-year study, whose results were published last month in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Segal and a group of colleagues found that mindfulness meditation – the term they use is “mindfulness-based cognitive therapy” – was just as effective as antidepressants when it came to preventing depression relapse.

Dr. Segal, who was one of the developers of the therapy, teaches it at CAMH in group treatment sessions with patients who have recovered from depression and are “trying to stay well.”

“We’re seeing a demand as people feel that it’s more and more legitimate,” Dr. Segal says. He defines mindfulness meditation as “a way of training yourself to pay attention in the present moment without judgment [as] to what your experience is.”

Thanks to a similar U.K. study, which found the technique reduces the risk of depression relapse by 50 per cent, Britain’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence recommends mindfulness meditation in cases of chronic depression. The Mental Health Foundation, a U.K.-based charity, has recentlylaunched a campaign called Be Mindful, and offers an online program intended to make mindfulness more widely available.

“It’s growing exponentially almost, in terms of there now being an evidence base,” says Ed Halliwell, a British mindfulness teacher and co-author of The Mindfulness Manifesto: How Doing Less and Noticing More Can help Us Thrive in a Stressed-out World. While the field is still relatively new, some 300 to 400 studies are published each year, Mr. Halliwell estimates.

The studies show benefits for many conditions, including anxiety and stress. A study published last year in the journal Neurology found that mindfulness could be used to help people with multiple sclerosis.

And just as it is becoming more popular among researchers, it is also increasingly being sought out by busy professionals.

“Life these days is these days so full of stress … so I think this offers some way of simplifying our life,” says Marian Smith, founder of Mindful Living, a Vancouver-based clinic. Many clients, says Ms. Smith, are dealing with “the challenge of juggling full-time work, having a family, trying to make life meaningful to themselves and to be grounded.”

Doug MacLean, a mindfulness meditation instructor and owner of Practical Wellbeing in Calgary, says there has been an “explosion” in interest, in large part because of the research being published on the topic.

But some experts worry that some people may think all they need to do to solve their problems is close their eyes and pay attention to what’s going on in their heads.

“That can be a real danger, because people can go, ‘All I need to do is be mindful.’ And then perhaps they try meditation and discover it’s not easy – it’s simple, but it’s not easy – and then that can create another level of beating yourself up,” Mr. Halliwell says.

Dr. Segal says that people need to understand that mindfulness is much different than the popular idea of meditation.

“You think of the Beatles, you think of TM [transcendental meditation], you think of people achieving some kind of bliss state. And it’s really different from what people who are going through mindfulness-based cognitive therapy get,” he says. “If anything, what the meditation does is provide them with a way of staying grounded in the midst of very difficult emotions.”

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The Gift of Physical Health

Posted on December 27, 2010 by admin
December 24, 2010

Meagan Robertson
mrobertson@squamishchief.com

Paradise Valley facility embraces the theory that you can’t heal the mind and leave the body behind

A generous donation ensures Paradise Valley patients, recovering from all types of addictions, will have the opportunity to reclaim physical health while undergoing treatment.

The Paradise Valley Wellness Centre’s exercise room is now fully equipped with new top-of-the-line exercise equipment thanks to the generosity of North Vancouver resident Richard Savage and his firm Macquarie Private Wealth.

The company matched the $7,500 donated from Savage — a donation he gave because he believes that “you can’t heal the mind and leave the body behind.”

“It’s very satisfying to see it completed,” Savage said. “It’s an inspiring place and I think people come here to heal and you can’t separate the mind and body with healing – it’s really all one.

“To support a place where people can get physically fit again, get their bodies in shape and come and try and get their issues resolved is wonderful.”

Last month, Savage presented the $15,000 cheque to Paradise Valley Wellness Centre founder and director Nirmala Raniga and several other centre supporters, including Lois Wynne, Sea to Sky Community Services (SSCS) executive director.

The Paradise Valley Wellness Centre, which opened in March 2010, partners with Sea to Sky Community Services, the Squamish Nation and Vancouver Coastal Health to provide 52 weeks per year at the centre for no charge to allow those who can’t afford treatment the opportunity to heal.

Since its opening, SSCS has used 13 weeks for community members free of charge and Raniga has also donated seven weeks free of charge for patients from her outpatient clinics in the Greater Vancouver area.

Local resident Peter Gordon helped the wellness centre get up and running by dealing with various approvals. He said the number of free weeks represents Raniga’s devotion to providing treatment for everyone, not only those who can afford it.

“Out of 80 weeks they’ve been open, 20 has gone to no-charge treatment,” he said.

“We’ve needed a residential treatment facility here in Squamish for so many years and Nirmala had the knowledge and passion to make it happen.”

Wynne said having several different support levels for people recovering from addictions is a powerful tool for success.

“We are developing a link between our support recovery house and this place,” she said. The support recovery house is normally the final step for transitioning people to return to their homes, families and normal life.

“It’s a good example of some opportunities between different types of organizations and this has worked out really well.”

Wynne said SSCS has supported Nirmala and the project since the beginning. Receiving 52 weeks per year is substantial, she said.

“Fifty-two is a lot,” she said. “That can be 10 people receiving service from the community and the community wins when they get a bed.”

She said SSCS plans to review referrals to the centre and decide which ones to send to the residential treatment facility.

“As a community partner with the Paradise Valley Wellness Centre, SSCS welcomes the corporate participation and the benefit it brings Squamish.”

Jeff Thompson, clinical services coordinator at the centre, has worked at three other residential treatment centres and said he feels positive about his current position at centre.

“It’s been really amazing and really rewarding to see people make great shifts in their lives,” he said.

The 16-bed centre is modeled as a home with bedrooms, a common area and a large kitchen. Thompson said the interaction with one another helps stabilize everyone.

“People tend to stabilize one another because of their common ground,” he said. “It all comes down to not really being happy in their relationship with themselves.”

He said it’s rare these days that people only have one destructive compelling behaviour, whether it’s smoking, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, Internet addiction, gambling, video game addiction, workaholism and several others.

Despite trying to help patients make connections with one another, Thompson has another outlet — his therapy dog Skybear.

“Animals help calm people’s pain and anxiety,” Thompson said. “They represent unconditional love, particularly for people who have trouble accepting that from other people. It can be a good starting point.”

He said he was surprised at how much of an impact the dog has had.

Nirmala has designed the centre to make recovery as positive as possible.

“At Paradise, Valley, we are committed to providing a safe, nurturing environment where you can transform the underlying causes of your addition, freeing yourself to discover your deepest passion, purpose and happiness in life.”

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Deepak Chopra wins 2010 Goi Peace Prize

Posted on December 14, 2010 by admin

Paradise Valley Wellness Centre would like to congratulate Deepak Chopra, who has been named the 2010 recipient of the Goi Peace Prize. First awarded in 2000, the Goi Peace Prize is awarded to those who are working to promote peace, harmony and sustainability in the world.  The organization has been working diligently to spread a message of peace and goodwill through various public outreach programs and also by recognizing those who have committed themselves to building a better world. Deepak Chopra has been given the award for his continued call for humanity to embrace a new form of thought that promotes peace, health and sustainability; and rejects violence. The official ceremony to bestow the award took place on November 7th 2010 in Tokyo Japan.

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Deepak Chopra article: "Who Owns Yoga"?

Posted on December 3, 2010 by admin

Newspapers used to keep morgues of old clippings (I suppose the Web has largely replaced them), and I had the feeling of being dusted off, if not revived from the dead, when my name appeared in a New York Times  article about the current kerfuffle over Yoga. The Hindu American Foundation is as mad about the “brand” running out as they were a year or two ago, and their claim is just as unfounded. There was bread and wine before the Last Supper, flies and frogs before the curses that Jehovah visited on Egypt and Yoga before Hinduism.

The text usually cited as the definitive source for Yoga is Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, but the familiar poses that are part of Hatha Yoga are generally traced to Shiva cults, the god Shiva being its founder. The problem that is being swept aside is that exact dates cannot be assigned to any of these texts. Nevertheless, what is certain is that ancient Vedic culture, which lays claim to being the first written spiritual tradition in the world, is much older than the loosely formed religion, Hinduism, that sprang from it. The spiritual practice of Yoga was part of Vedic culture long before Hinduism. In the interests of generosity, maybe we should refer to a famous Sanskrit aphorism, Vasudev Kutumbukam: “the world is my family.” Yoga is India’s gift to the world, and it would be a shame to bring back the phrase Indian giver, now banished from polite conversation, with a new meaning.

I don’t know to what extent the “Take Back Yoga” campaign is an innocent attempt by the Indian diaspora to get some respect. I sympathize with them taking offense at the “caste, cows and curry” stereotype. Polish Americans want us to know that they are a group with dignity who are offended by Polish jokes; Italian Americans hate the Mafia stereotype. I suppose the price of a pluralistic society like America’s is that it’s an equal-opportunity offender. Indians would do well to lighten up. With a burgeoning economy at home and a return to importance on the world stage, Indian pride is getting more than its share of strokes.

Having written about spirituality for many years, I’d like to point out that the whole point of Yoga is to achieve enlightenment, and that the most revered practitioners, whether known as yogis, swamis or mahatmas, transcend religion. In fact, even if Yoga were granted a patent or copyright by the U.S. Patent Office, there is no denying that enlightenment has always been outside the bounds of religion. That’s where the spiritual path leads, not into the arms of priests or Yoga instructors. Before Hindu Americans complain about Hatha Yoga being deracinated, they might want to promote the ideas that are the very essence of Indian spirituality, which preceded Shiva, Krishna, cows and castes. The nobility of Indian spirituality elevates Hinduism to a unique place in the world, something that religious partisans forget all too quickly.

Deepak Chopra is the author of “Muhammad: A Story of the Last Prophet” and more than 50 books translated into over 35 languages, including other numerous New York Times bestsellers in both the fiction and nonfiction categories.

Chopra’s “Wellness Radio” airs weekly on Sirius/XM Stars, Channel 102 and 55, focusing on the areas of success, love, sexuality and relationships, well-being, and spirituality. He is founder of The Chopra Foundation.

Time magazine heralds Deepak Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.” Learn more at www.deepakchopra.com.

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Loving, Understanding and Respect: 5 helpful tips

Posted on November 4, 2010 by admin

“If you do not love yourself … you cannot love another … though you be loved.
If you cannot understand yourself … you will never fully understand another … though you be understood.
If you cannot accept yourself … then you cannot fully accept another … though you be accepted.
To love, to understand and to accept – this is pure innocence and goodness .”
-Ancient Tibetan Wisdom

Love, understanding and acceptance are essential building blocks of vital, loving relationships.
Yet before we can enjoy loving, understanding and accepting relationships with others it’s important to learn to love, understand and accept oneself.
This can be difficult for those in addiction recovery, working on smoking cessation, depression treatment or alcoholism rehab. At Paradise Valley Wellness Centre we help our residential treatment facility guests understand how symptoms in their relationships with others often reflect inner issues.
This understanding helps people accept themselves and move from stagnant “blaming” patterns toward new, responsive behaviours that manifest acceptance and love. To move towards this understanding guests participate in individual and group counseling sessions at our wellness centre. Here “outer” relationships with friends and family, and “inner” relationships are explored.
Small steps can make a big difference! Paradise Valley Wellness Centre Therapist Michael Talbot Kelly has 5 simple, useful tips that can help us to better understand, accept and love others by learning to accept ourselves:
1.    Accept the present circumstances as fully as possible and assume that you are exactly where you need to be. Breathe that acceptance in with 3 deep breaths, increasing your acceptance with each breath.

2.    Despite knowing the facts of what is so “wrong” about this situation, ask yourself: what is “right” about this situation.  Write down 3 things that are right about this situation.

3.    Write down 3 of the accurate qualities or attributes in your partner that drive you crazy.

4.    Assume that these “crazy-making” qualities in your partner are hidden in you somewhere – but may be reflected in a different way than they are in your partner. For example, “he is such a slob!” [Reflection in the bedroom at home]. Now find where are you a “slob” in your life [inner problem: you are a “slob” with your finances]

5.    Now give yourself permission to accept this “slobbiness” in your life. Then watch how, with a little more understanding, love and acceptance begins to show itself naturally.

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Paradise Valley sponsors Dr. Wayne Dyer, caters VIP Dinner.

Posted on October 27, 2010 by admin

Paradise Valley sponsors Dr. Wayne Dyer, caters VIP Dinner

Dr. Wayne Dyer, best-selling author and speaker sometimes referred to as “the father of motivation,” is coming to Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theater on Tuesday, November 23, 2010 for “Making The Shift from Ambition to Meaning,” an inspiring, all-new lecture.

Paradise Valley Wellness Centre is proud to join with the wonderful Seed Productions Foundation in bringing Dr. Dyer back to Vancouver. And VIP Reception guests are in for a “Taste of Paradise Valley” as two of our wonderful chefs (Enrick Gagnon and Darin Joseph) will cater the reception with healthy vegetarian cuisine featuring fresh, all-natural and organic ingredients from local producers, including Rakesh Raniga and Indianlife Foods.

Friends of Paradise Valley, seniors and students can save 20% on ticket prices by mentioning the promo code “SOUL.” To learn more about Dr. Dyer’s new program and the November 23 event visit Seed Productions Foundation (www.seedproductions.info), or www.drwaynedyer.com.

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