Recently, Dr. Erik Peper traveled to Israel to present a series of workshops on biofeedback. The event was organized by the Israeli Biofeedback-Neurofeedback Association (IBNA). As one of the sponsors of the event, we had the pleasure of working with the members of the IBNA to help promote the workshops. Yuval Oded, a member of the IBNA commented, "Erik is a wonderful human being and an outstanding teacher. As a real master in integrative approaches to healing, his workshops here not only greatly expanded our knowledge in biofeedback but also affected many of us in our general attitude towards therapy by emphasizing
the role emotional memories and patterns, and interactions of body, mind, social and physical environment for achieving long term results in optimizing performance and health. Erik generously shared his clinical wisdom with us, teaching many practical techniques for increasing self awareness, fostering control and self mastery skills, taking charge and actively participating in ones own healing process. The workshops were not only theoretical. Erik gave us many impressive demonstrations using biofeedback on how to promote health."
Day 1 - Wednesday, January 11th
Making the Invisible Visible with Biofeedback as a Diagnostic and Self Mastery Tool
The workshop focused on integrating biofeedback with cognitive, somatic and imagery techniques. The biofeedback includes analysis of dysponetic muscle patterns, dysfunctional respiratory patterns in clients and training strategies to optimize performance and health. The biofeedback treatment strategies can be used in numerous disorders such as panic and anxiety, recurrent abdominal pain, asthma, muscle dysfunction, hypertension, autonomic disregulation disorders, PTSD and pain.
Day 2 - Thursday, January 12th
Integrated Biofeedback to Manage Stress and to Optimize Health
Dr. Peper discussed the use of respiration biofeedback and other modalities (temp, SEMG, SCL, HRV) for stress management and for reducing pain, panic, anxiety and increasing performance.
Day 3 - Friday, January 13th
From Technostress to Technohealth
This course focused on teaching practitioners how to prevent computer-related disorders and presented a comprehensive approach covering workstation ergonomics, corporate culture work environment, individual work style, work/rest patterns and psychophysiological predisposition. An emphasis is placed on utilizing surface EMG to take the guesswork out of assessment, monitoring, and training.
The workshops were co-sponsored and in collaboration with:
Medtechnica (
www.medtechnica.co.il)
Comments on the workshop...
“Dr. Pepers' contribution to the field of applied psychophysiology and Biofeedback over the past 40 years is huge. What I have learned from him as a student in many of his BFE workshops, has first of all, changed the way I cope with stress."
--Yuval Oded
"The ability to teach in a way that the participants not only learned new tools for their practice but also for the clinicians themselves, is one of the major strengths of Erik. He made everybody understand and feel hands on that clinicians need to experience Biofeedback themselves in order to be good clinicians."
--Daniela Gräfin von Der Schulenburg-Ortner
The BFE looks forward to working with the IBNA again in the future to promote biofeedback and neurofeedback in Israel.
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Dr. Daniel Hamiel is an Israeli psychologist who has done extensive work in treating children with PTSD. In a past issue of Psychophysiology Today, Dr. Hamiel wrote an article titled "There Are the Best Laid Plans, and Then There is Biofeedback". The article summarizes his work with a group of adolescents who survived a terrorist bomb attack in a discotheque in Tel Aviv. Click here to read the full article.
