Vibrant Lives of Montana was founded in august of 2020, after operating for several years as an LLC and accepting donations rather than requiring payment. Donation based programming and services arose from the deep desire to ensure that all beings have access to modalities and practices designed to enhance health: physical, mental, and spiritual. Vibrant Lives, to it's very core, wishes for all beings to be happy. "Happy" requires skills: an understanding of the human mind and nervous system are essential as are skills to effectively down regulate. When "down regulated," the human nervous system is in a state of parasympathetic nervous system response or "rest & digest." This is a state of calm and relaxed, open and curious, safe and secure. It is the state that we, as animals are wired to exist within most all of the time. In fact, mammals are wired to spend only about 20 minutes at a time in it's opposite: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (otherwise known as sympathetic nervous system response or stress response). In stress response, respiration rate increases, heart rate increases, muscles tense, and stress chemicals are released. Stress response, when endured for amounts of time greater than 20 minutes and frequent in nature, has long term impacts on our physical and mental health. Yet, the vast majority of us, as Americans, live day after day, week after week, and year after year in a state of stress. Our bodies and our minds are evidence of such. We end up in physical and mental anguish.
Vibrant Lives of Montana is a wellness academy committed to enhancing quality of life by honoring the whole person: body, mind, and spirit. We strive to expand awareness, embrace mindfulness, cultivate healthy thought patterns and behaviors, and activate the relaxation response through breath, movement, focused attention, stillness, and human connection.
Human connection is essential to wellness. Whether we believe ourselves to be introverted or extraverted, humans by nature are interdependent. We quite literally need each other. That said, to be happy, we need the relationship that exists between us and another to be healthful and be built upon empathy and compassion. We, as humans, need love to be unconditional.
Healthful relationship with another is possible only when there is healthful relationship with self. Vibrant Lives of Montana offers evidence-based practices, including, but not limited to, professional counseling, yoga, mindfulness, meditation, and creative expression. These are opportunities to acquire a thorough understanding of one's own nervous system and opportunities to witness and observe the ways in which one's own body and mind interact and react to the environment in which one resides. Upon witnessing this exchange, participants of vibrant lives learn a variety of "Skills" for down regulating the human nervous system. With practice, participants successfully build distress management skills and habits of radical self care. Participants develop the ability to choose how they wish to interact with the world around them. Participants experience an increase in life satisfaction, creativity, connectedness, and joy; participants experience a decrease in depressive symptoms, anxiety, suicidality, and substance use and abuse.
There is no such thing as small change. This belief is confirmed by interpersonal neurobiology: humans co-regulate. This means that one's relationship with self directly impacts relationship with another. Vibrant Lives of Montana is also a collective: a merging of self-honoring beings who are committed to supporting each other, and our communities, in the transformation of mind, body, and spirit. Vibrant lives of Montana's collaborators and partners create and share practices and modalities designed to assist in knowing one’s self, deeply caring for and nurturing one’s self, and as a result, healing and transforming oneself and the world. May all beings live vibrant lives.
