Meditation changed Leah Doroch’s life. And now, she’s using meditation to help seniors ease pain and ward off Alzheimer’s disease through her business, The Sweet Retreat.
A certified holistic life coach, Doroch had a life-changing experience when a thoroughbred horse she was riding reared up, and both Doroch and the horse flipped over backwards. The horse landed on top of Doroch. Her heart stopped momentarily, and “she went over to the other side,” she recalled of her near-death experience.
The injuries from that experience, a concussion and a blown-out disk in her back, resulted in Doroch taking medication for the pain. But she continued to ride horses and a subsequent incident with a different thoroughbred horse she was training left her with a broken rib and a collapsed lung. More pain and post-traumatic stress disorder followed.
“After that, I made a lot of changes in my lifestyle. I started reading ‘A Course in Miracles,’ studying alternative therapies such as meditation and reiki,” she said.
In an effort to avoid taking pain medications, she started to meditate and decided to learn more about the practice to help others. After training for 18 months through the Awakenings Institute in California, Doroch started offering meditation classes and speaking about the benefits of medicine at area councils on aging, local hospitals and assisted living facilities.
At Saint Anne’s Hospital, she said she’s worked in the Behavorial Medicine Clinic with people who have recent dimentia diagnoses and also uses meditation to help patients deal with anxiety related to health diagnoses.
Research on meditation done by the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation, she said, shows that it improves cognitive function. Other studies, she said, show that meditating for just 12 minutes a day for eight weeks resulted in changes in the brain in the areas related to learning, language and compassion. “It also shrinks the area that produces cortisol,” she said of the stress hormone that is often connected to weight gain and inflammation.
As part of her work with Alzheimer’s clients, Doroch said she is starting a caregiver support group that will be done through teleconferencing. “There’s an isolation factor with that whole role of caregiver that can be helped with effective ways to destress,” she said.
In addition to visiting COAs and assisted living facilities, Doroch offers meditation sessions for her clients and workshops at The Sweet Retreat, a center she opened on her property at 1460 Main Road in 2010. She said she uses a variety of meditation techniques from mindfulness meditation walks on the trails behind her property that wind through pastures and woods, to guided meditation talks that bring people into an alpha brain state.
Meditation changed Leah Doroch’s life. And now, she’s using meditation to help seniors ease pain and ward off Alzheimer’s disease through her business, The Sweet Retreat.
A certified holistic life coach, Doroch had a life-changing experience when a thoroughbred horse she was riding reared up, and both Doroch and the horse flipped over backwards. The horse landed on top of Doroch. Her heart stopped momentarily, and “she went over to the other side,” she recalled of her near-death experience.
The injuries from that experience, a concussion and a blown-out disk in her back, resulted in Doroch taking medication for the pain. But she continued to ride horses and a subsequent incident with a different thoroughbred horse she was training left her with a broken rib and a collapsed lung. More pain and post-traumatic stress disorder followed.
“After that, I made a lot of changes in my lifestyle. I started reading ‘A Course in Miracles,’ studying alternative therapies such as meditation and reiki,” she said.
In an effort to avoid taking pain medications, she started to meditate and decided to learn more about the practice to help others. After training for 18 months through the Awakenings Institute in California, Doroch started offering meditation classes and speaking about the benefits of medicine at area councils on aging, local hospitals and assisted living facilities.
At Saint Anne’s Hospital, she said she’s worked in the Behavorial Medicine Clinic with people who have recent dimentia diagnoses and also uses meditation to help patients deal with anxiety related to health diagnoses.
Research on meditation done by the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation, she said, shows that it improves cognitive function. Other studies, she said, show that meditating for just 12 minutes a day for eight weeks resulted in changes in the brain in the areas related to learning, language and compassion. “It also shrinks the area that produces cortisol,” she said of the stress hormone that is often connected to weight gain and inflammation.
As part of her work with Alzheimer’s clients, Doroch said she is starting a caregiver support group that will be done through teleconferencing. “There’s an isolation factor with that whole role of caregiver that can be helped with effective ways to destress,” she said.
In addition to visiting COAs and assisted living facilities, Doroch offers meditation sessions for her clients and workshops at The Sweet Retreat, a center she opened on her property at 1460 Main Road in 2010. She said she uses a variety of meditation techniques from mindfulness meditation walks on the trails behind her property that wind through pastures and woods, to guided meditation talks that bring people into an alpha brain state.
She is also working on recording a CD of guided meditations that she expects to be released this fall.
In addition to meditation, Doroch uses reiki and “Emotional Freedom Technique,” also known as “tapping” that she said helps her clients eliminate negative emotions by tapping on acupressure points on the face and body.
This summer, she said she will be offering meditation series for teens. Other offerings at The Sweet Retreat include personal abundance coaching to help change people’s inner thought patterns to be more positive. “It will help people to stop being in survival mode. I think a lot of people have been in survival mode for the past several years,” she said.
On July 27 and 28, Westport resident Rebecca Tripp will offer a Silva Ultramind series at The Sweet Retreat and in August, the two will pair up for a series that will combine the positive thought-provoking Silva Ultramind series, with Doroch’s meditation/personal abundance coaching.
For more information, visit www.thesweetretreat.org[1] .
Email Linda Murphy at
lmurphy@heraldnews.com[2]
References
- ^ www.thesweetretreat.org (www.thesweetretreat.org)
- ^ lmurphy@heraldnews.com (www.heraldnews.com)
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