It starts with teaching people how to breathe

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This article was published 10/11/2017 (2999 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

People need help to breathe.

“I know, I know,” Dr. Gilles Beaudry says with a chuckle, it’s not the most revolutionary of ideas.

And yet, the Winnipeg counselling veteran says it’s been a constant in his practice since he founded the Renaissance Centre nearly 40 years ago.

Slowly inhale through your nose, and then exhale through your mouth. Beaudry recommends putting a hand to your chest so you can feel the steady beat of your heart and the warmth of your own hand pressed close.

“It’s surprising people don’t really know how to breathe properly,” he says, “but helping them to focus on their breathing helps them be grounded and helps them connect with what it is they want.”

Beaudry founded the Centre Renaissance Centre — in recognition of its bilingual services — in 1979 on an simple mission: to offer counselling and related programs that would help the community live well.

Beaudry, then a teacher, says he was growing so frustrated with parents “undoing” his attempts to instil good coping mechanisms in their children that he decided to go back to university and start working with the parents.

“They didn’t have the skills, the parenting skills,” he says, “they didn’t know how they should be communicating with their kids, helping their kids and how to manage kids that were struggling.”

The key, Beaudry says, is to “connect with the hurt.”

“That’s what I try to do with clients is to connect with their hurt, address their hurt,” he says, “then they can deal with it, they can deal with the hurt so they can move on with their lives and not stay stuck.”

That’s one of the chief aims of the centre, an agency partner that benefits from the support of United Way Winnipeg. The centre offers an abundance of specialized services: anger management, coping with abuse and burnout, elderly, parenting and family counselling and grief counselling. There are sessions on mediation and personal growth, how to cope with professional burnout or stress management and workplace issues.

Beaudry, who focuses now primarily on marriage and family therapy, says the issues that bring people to the centre have only become more common now, 38 years since he first opened its doors.

“There’s more stress now. There’s way more fear of what’s going to happen, with what’s going on in the world.”

Most people’s struggles can be condensed, Beaudry says, into a search to find meaningfulness. Too often, he says, people find themselves living in an almost constant state of worry: what will happen to my job, what will happen with my family, will I have enough money to pay my bills, to retire.

“There’s a lot of hopelessness,” he says, but something as simple as forcing a person to pause and breathe can have a dramatic impact in terms of helping people realize that they have options and that they can make different choices.

Still, Beaudry says, laughing a little now over his own repetitiveness, “the most important tool I have is teaching them how to breathe.”

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.ca