New Class Announced – Understanding & Healing Pain

Understanding & Healing Pain
It’s not the WHAT that hurts. It’s the WHY it hurts.

When we think about pain, most of us think “I don’t like it , I try to avoid it , and I don’t want to be in it .” Yet, pain actually serves many valuable purposes. To begin, it’s the body’s natural protective response when it gets hurt, and it’s a primitive part of our ability to survive. It’s our internal cop that tells us what we shouldn’t be doing, it tells us we’ve overdone it, it teaches us to avoid danger, and it tells us when we need to hunker down to give the body the time it needs to heal. Pain is also an integral part of the body/mind connection and serves as a highly-developed communication process that instantaneously alerts the brain when there’s a problem in the body. It not only identifies where the problem is, it reveals how severe the problem is, and depending on the degree of pain, it instructs the brain on how it should respond, meaning if it needs to seek immediate medical attention or if it’s something that can take a wait-and-see approach. Pain is also a barometer of our mental and emotional state. It lets us know when we’re stressed and how we’re coping with the challenges of life.

However, even understanding that pain serves a valuable purpose provides no consolation when we’re in the throes of it. When we’re in pain, all we know is that we hurt and that we want to the hurt to go away, and go away now. So, if that’s what we desire and it’s what we’re telling the brain to do, then why doesn’t the brain turn the pain messages off immediately?

The answer lies within the pain messages themselves. If the messages are acute, meaning they’re triggered by an injury or by a surgery, they’re actually easier to shutdown. On the other hand, if the messages are chronic, meaning that pain has gone rogue, then turning those messages off is much more difficult. Pain going rogue refers to it bombarding the brain with false alarms. These false alarms, over the course of time, cause the brain to shift it’s perception of pain from being situational to being continual, which causes the brain to adapt to the pain and accept it as being normal. Now, rather than pain saving our lives, it wrecks havoc with them, and rather than it helping us get well and staying safe, pain becomes an illness in itself — an illness that affects more than 76 million American who live with chronic pain every day.

In the Understanding & Healing Pain class, we’ll be exploring pain and learning how it’s not the What that hurts, but it’s the Why it hurts and how the Whys keep us in an unhealthy pain cycle that just won’t seem to quit. We’ll be redefining pain, discovering its neurological roots, looking at how it maps itself in the brain, and uncovering why the brain is so quick to adapt to and accept pain as the norm.

You’ll learn:

• How to shift your perception of pain, thus changing your brain’s response to it
• Techniques that use the brain’s flexibility to retrain how it reads pain messages, making it possible to control pain without the use of medications
• How to use the healing powers of your personality and your mental state and emotional state to heal the psychological contributors behind pain
• Methods that can help you address pain so it won’t become persistent and self-perpetuating or become physically destructive
• How to deal with pain beyond drugs by using alternative treatments that effectively help ease pain

Class Topics include:

• Understanding pain
• How pain affects the sensory, emotional, motivational, cognitive brain pathways
• Resculpting how the brain reads pain
• Settling down overactive immune cells
• Subsiding the impact of inflammation
• Pain as an emotional defense mechanism
• The neurological healing qualities of personality
• Easing pain and its associated fatigue
• The neurological benefits peace and calm
• How to live with pain
• Creating a new vision of yourself

This class is a combination of lecture, experiential activities, and quiet introspections offered through the Psychoillumagery™ process, all of which are designed to assist you in learning how to deal with and manage pain. Please wear comfortable clothes and bring a floor pad or a blanket, and a pillow.

Bonus Gift: For attending this class, you will receive a 25 page pdf on chronic pain written by Carol.

This class qualifies for 6 CEUs for RNs, MFTs and LCSWs

Please register early as this class will fill up quickly.

When:	Saturday, June 23, 2012
Time:	9:30 am – 5:00 pm
Where:	Holiday Inn Express4360 Town Center Blvd.El Dorado Hills, CA 95762(530) 358-3100 Room rates under the name of Ritberger Media Group Sleeping room rates are $109.00 if you book by June 8, 2012 Hotel directions and particulars are available on www.hiexpress.com/eldoradohills Note: If you are coming from out of town, fly into Sacramento International Airport
Cost:	$95.00 Includes class materials. Cost does not include travel, meals, and lodging.

Finding Your Passion in a Burnout Paced World

Announcing a new class by Carol Ritberger!

Event	Finding Your Passion in a Burnout Paced World
Date	Saturday, February 18, 2012
Time	9:30 am – 5:00 pm PST
Where	Holiday Inn Express El Dorado Hills, CA

Finding Your Passion in a Burnout Paced World

The quest to find passion is interesting in the sense that many people spend their lives seeking it, only a few live it, and even fewer are able to sustain it once they’ve found it. The pursuit of passion is like chasing a hat in the wind. We feverishly run after it and just when we think we have it, we grab for it, only to have it blow right out of our hands again. So why is passion so hard to get hold of? Why is it something that once we experience it we can’t seem to sustain it? Why are we able to have it in one part of our lives and not in other parts of our lives? Could it be that we’re looking for it in the wrong places? Could it be that we’ve become so emotionally correct in our behavior that we’ve forgotten that it’s okay to do something we really feel passionate about? Could it be that our daily lives are driven by obligatory tasks and doing what others think we should be doing rather than doing what we desire? Or could it be that our burnout paced world is reprogramming our brain to the point that it’s negating the need for passion?

The reason that passion is so hard to find is because we are looking for it in the wrong places. We won’t find it in doing things we don’t like to do or want to do. We won’t find it playing it safe and sticking with what’s tried and true. Nor will we find it by just thinking about it. Passion isn’t found externally. It’s found internally and it’s found by doing what feels right in our heart rather than doing what our head considers to be right. To find passion, we have to create the opportunities for it to surface; we have to take the steps everyday to cultivate it, and we have to see ourselves living passionately. We have to remember that passion is sustained by the hope of the future and diminished by the fears of the past. We have to realize that passion is purpose and purpose is passion, and that both are required if we are to discover our life’s purpose that will add true meaning to our lives.

Join me for this fascinating journey into the mystical and magical world of passion where we’ll explore:

• The anatomy of passion and it’s ten intrinsic qualities
• The connection between passion and personality
• The tools that can help you identify your strength-based talents and define your top five passions
• The Law of Attraction and the role passion plays in it
• The power of the mind to create or to destroy passion
• How burnout neurochemically alters the brain’s ability to experience passion
• How to use mindfulness to sustain passion and incentives to keep up the manifestation momentum
• How to create your personal passion avatar

The Finding Your Passion in Burnout Paced World workshop is not a hype filled motivational workshop. It’s a hands-on roll up the sleeves workshop rich with experiential activities that will provide the tools and techniques needed so you can create, cultivate, and sustain the passion filled life you desire. What have you got to lose? What have you got to gain? How you answer those two questions is the first step to creating a passionate life.

Announcing an Evening of Readings with Carol Ritberger

Enjoy an Evening of Readings with Carol Ritberger, Ph.D. Date October 14th Time 7PM – 9PM PDT Location Holiday Inn ExpressEl Dorado Hills, CA Cost $25 per person Date October 21st Time 7PM – 9PM CDT Location Crowne Plaza Minneapolis Airport HotelEagan, MN Cost $25 per person

The evening of readings is a gathering where the environment is relaxed and charged with inspiration and understanding. It’s the opportunity for Carol to share her humor and her medical intuitive skills by answering your questions, and for you to spend time with her in a close and personal setting. The evening will begin with a brief energy update and a discussion of the significant energy attunement that will be taking place October 25, 2011. Carol will be explaining how this attunement will affect your body and your ability to make decisions, and how it will shift both your energy and thinking from scarcity to abundance in preparation for 2012 – The Year of Abundance. Then following the discussion, she’ll be answering as many individual questions as time allows. Carol can respond to health, relationship, career, and spiritual questions. Interestingly, the information she shares through the answering of questions is frequently of significant value to others in attendance. She will do her best to cover as many questions as possible. However please note that attending the event doesn’t guarantee each person will get a reading. If you’ve wanted to spend in-person time with Carol, this is your opportunity as she will be offering the evening of readings gathering in just two locations this year. Cost for the event is $25 per person.

Rewire Your Brain for Abundance – A New Class by Carol Ritberger

2012 is the Year of Abundance. So in preparation for this abundant flow of energy and manifestation, we’re individually and collectively being asked to make some significant neurological, biological, and psychological changes – changes, while appearing on the surface to be no different than what we’ve been doing, are vastly different. They’re different because they’ll change the focus our brain to what we want rather than what we don’t want, and will stop rewarding its fear-based, threat-based habits and patterns of thinking. Essentially, the energy of 2012 is asking us to create new neurological pathways that realign with our inherent mental processing, and that will bypass the mental limitations impeding our ability to create the abundance of health, happiness, prosperity, peace, and success, and self-love we desire.

If this is the case, why then doesn’t the brain manifest this abundance? Why does it, instead, manifest the abundance of scarcity, fear, insecurity, unhealthy thoughts, self-destructive behavior, and self-defeating habits? Why does it choose repetition over change and suffering over joy? It does so because that’s how it’s been programmed to function. It’s been programmed to be chemically rewarded for staying with what’s tried-and-true and for feeding threat-based behavior even when both are negatively impacting the health and well-being of the body and the quality of life.Webster’s Dictionary defines abundance as an ample quantity, profusion, and a relative degree of plentifulness, and when we read this definition, our brain momentarily creates the positive manifestations of abundance and experiences the feel good emotions associated with the positive qualities of abundance. It becomes receptive to new experiences, expands its way of perceiving, and heightens its awareness so it can sense the abundance feelings and recognize abundance behavior. In addition, it biochemically changes the state of well-being in the physical body by increasing the flow of hormones, neurotransmitters, and endorphins that support abundance, and it electrochemically changes the interaction between the mind, the body, and the soul, so all can attract abundance energy.

Join Carol for this fascinating journey into the neurobioscience and metaphysics of abundance and get a jumpstart in preparing yourself for the abundant energy coming your way. Learn how to stop meeting your limitations head on, and how to stop trying to conquer your fears as if you’re at war with them. Learn how to stop talking your limitations and insecurities to death hoping they’ll just go away, and how to stop creating unnatural behavior that compromises who you really are. Learn how ruminating about the past and how the past has damaged you and your life is a significant contributor to chronic illness and how it destroys your quality of life. Learn why willpower isn’t enough when it comes to changing patterns, and learn how you can integrate the wisdom of metaphysics with the knowledge of bioscience to attract the healthy abundance you desire.

Class topics include:

• The abundance-perception connection
• How neurology affects your ability to attract abundance
• The Metaphysics of abundance
• The NeuroBiology of abundance
• What to do when willpower isn’t enough
• Threat-based mental saboteurs
• How to overcome threat-based mental habits
• How to create reward-centered abundant habits
• How to maintain healthy abundant habits

This class is a combination of lecture, experiential activities, and quiet introspections offered through the Psychoillumagery™ process, and all are designed to assist you in your ability to create a deeply satisfying abundant life.

This class will be offered in two locations:
Sacramento, CA
Date:	October 15, 2011
Time:	9:30 am – 5:00 pm
Where:	Holiday Inn Express4360 Town Center Blvd. El Dorado Hills, CA 95762 530.358.3100
Room rates under the name of Ritberger Media GroupSleeping room rates are $109.95 if you book by October 1, 2011 Hotel directions and particulars are available on www.hiexpress.com/eldoradohills Cost: $95.00 Includes class materials. Cost does not include travel, meals, and lodging. Note: If you are coming from out of town, fly into Sacramento International Airport
Eagan, Minnesota
Date:	October 22, 2011
Time:	9:30 am – 5:00 pm
Where:	Crowne Plaza Minneapolis Airport/Eagan2700 Pilot Knob Road Eagan, Minnesota 551221 651.454.3434
Call for sleeping room rates. Room rates under the name of Ritberger Media GroupHotel directions and particulars are available on www.vipstay.com. The hotel offers a shuttle from the airport. Cost: $95.00 Includes class materials. Cost does not include travel, meals, and lodging. Note: If you are coming from out of town, fly into Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport