Access Consciousness Facilitator, Quetta Sosa, takes Access Bars to the frontline in Mexico and here are the results.

In 2017 I found out about the Bars after seeking recovery from a cancer treatment.

I found silence; I came out of the drama and the fear of dying. My body began to change, deflating, I felt vitality, agility again and I regained the strength that I had lost with the whole process.

Working with my coaching clients, I saw that the Access Bars® created a lot of space for them. The Bars provided relaxation for them; they dissolved stress and allowed these executives to have a greater presence capacity, making their skills more easily displayed.

At the beginning of 2020 a client asked me to make a proposal to try and treat the stress and anxiety that the medical staff that worked in the emergency area (telephone and ambulance) underwent daily.

Inspired by the studies of Dr. Jeffrey Fannin and Dr. Terrie Hope on anxiety and how the brain responds when the Bars® run, I started to look for a protocol that would allow us to measure the effects of stress in the workplace environment.

At the same time in Mexico, NOM-035 STPS, a regulation issued by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, came into force. This implied that companies would implement strategies for the care of psychosomatic factors caused by stress that created health issues.

Depression is the number one disease of occupational disability worldwide and that the Bars are an excellent tool to treat it.

I found a combination that covered both of my objectives: on the one hand, I could understand the risk factors in the health of employees and on the other hand, I could really address the effects of work stress on the integral health of the personnel.

The first thing I did was to attend a course at NOM-035 so I could understand very well its implications. Then I took on the task of reviewing all the psychometric protocols that could give me guidelines to measure the effects of stress in the workplace environment.

Finally, I found one focused on violence at work that gave us the specific guidelines to see the effects of work stress involved in leadership, communication, and work culture that can be reflected in some psychosomatic factors such as: headaches, sleep disorders, digestive disorders, anxiety, muscle tension, loss of sexual appetite, fatigue, among others.

I got together with my colleague and friend, Ernesto Erdmenger, a Bars Facilitator, with whom I exchanged ideas and we designed an initial questionnaire to detect anxiety symptoms, which we applied together with the Violence protocol at the work environment.

Together we interchanged ideas of how to make an executive presentation and we considered the possibility of extending this study to more companies.

Finally, we had our executive presentation that explained the project, the protocol and the steps that we were going to follow, and I also added Dr. Jeffrey Fannin’s video to show the doctors involved what happens to the brain after a Bars® session.

Likewise, I shared Dr. Terrie Hope’s study so that they could see that there are serious clinical studies in the world about anxiety and Bars.

The staff that I was dealing with at the time were emergency physicians who usually have not an open mind to anything that doesn’t sound scientific to them. The initial reaction was skepticism, disbelief, and even some mockery.

They were questioning what we said, they were skeptical and in some cases they looked apathetic, disinterested, incredulous. They thought that the Bars were something esoteric that they had to believe in for them to work.

The company’s intention was that these executive presentations could be an invitation just for the people who really wanted to attend. The initial perspective of the operations’ coordinator was that at most 5 people would choose the Bars due to the scientific profile of the staff.

However I remained open to receive all the possibilities and to be the energy that opens perspectives. We seeked to solve all of their doubts and offer them all the available sources at all times, so they could learn more.

The second phase of the project was to implement the protocol and carry out the evaluation. At this moment, 106 people were interested in participating. This made the company stop and seriously consider and pick out strategically the people who really needed to participate. And so, we started with a budget for 85 people who would receive 4 sessions of Bars® for a month, one per week.

What I found was bigger than I expected.

In the first session, there were people that felt excited, others that were skeptical and others that were resistant. There were even people who said that they were forced in some way to take the session, they said, “I was not at the presentations and I don’t even know what I’m here for.” There were moments of tension in response to these reactions.

We realized how important it is in a project like this, to guarantee the involvement of the staff at all levels so that communication can be effective, but we also learned that the permission to letting everything to be shown as it is and to continuing asking questions can open us to what we cannot even imagine.

They provided us with a room where we set up 10 zero gravity chairs and I formed a team of 10 practitioners and facilitators to help us out with the sessions. Our sessions were scheduled to start on Fridays and end on Saturdays, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., with an average of 8 hours of Bars® sessions on Fridays and 4 hours on Saturdays, so that each weekend we attended 85 people during the first 3 weeks.

As the sessions progressed, the reactions were increasingly joyous and expansive.

There was greater openness and increased willingness to confidently receive the Bars. Many times, they fell asleep and even snored. In some cases, their bodies jumped strongly, showing us all the physical stress that they released in each session.

For some, being able to take off the ambulance equipment was vital to receive the Bars: they took off their boots and vests. It was their special moment!

The last phase was at the end of the 4 sessions of Bars. We implemented the same evaluation protocol, in order to compare the results from the beginning up to this point. This was achieved with the 59 people who completed the 4 sessions.

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Some of the final testimonies were:

👉 “I am surprised. Bars® really work. I feel much more relaxed”

👉 “I have slept much better”

👉 “I feel less nervous, I wouldn’t normally feel like this during a pandemic. I feel more confident and focused on making decisions”

👉 “I notice that the work environment has improved even more, I hear more openness in discussions, and I feel that we are much more collaborative”

👉 “I am surprised by how the sweating on my hands has disappeared, my hands have always sweated and since the last session the sweating stopped”

Comments like these and more were received at the end of the sessions.

For us, it was important to hear out loud what we would confirm after reviewing the final evaluation and comparing data.

Due to the confidentiality of the company and its participants, it is not possible for us to share many details, but I can say that from the results that this study gave us, we can comment on the following:

• Bars are an extraordinary tool to completely eliminate stress in people
• Improve sleep quality
• Decrease in eating disorders
• Decrease in digestive disorders
• Decrease in headaches
• Decrease in muscle aches
• Increased sexual appetite
• Less sadness
• Less anxiety
• Less fear of everyday things in life
• It favored changes in attitude
• Improved interaction and tolerance between people
• Promoted a greater collaboration
• Less irritability and reactivity with anger
• Greater feeling of comfort at work and a perception of a more pleasant, less tense and more collaborative work environment

For many employees, the prospect of companies implementing this type of practice is undoubtedly feasible and necessary. Especially, if we are dealing with jobs that are loaded with tension and stress such as the work that people have to do in medical emergency areas.

How much change can there be in the workplace environments if we allow ourselves to let go of what we no longer need?

Guest Author: Quetta Sosa
Access Consciousness Bars Facilitator