Gary Green:  

Gary Green "Made Life Better" During 29-Year KCKCC Career For 29 years, Gary Green has been living Kansas City Kansas Community College's motto of "Making Life Better." During the last 27 of those years, Green has worked with 21,555 persons through his Biofeedback program as a counselor at KCKCC. That does not include anywhere from 20 to 40 seminars, workshops and lectures a year nor a trip to China in 1997 as a member of an International Stress Management team. Now Green is stepping down. He'll end that 29-year career at KCKCC in late June although he's not retiring from helping people. "I'm going to get ready for my wife's retirement in a couple of more years and work part-time with Dr, Nancy Russell of Combined Health Care Professionals, who I have worked with for the last five years," says Green. "I'll be working with patients and doing workshops. It won't be an 8 to 5 job. I'll decide how much and when, maybe three days a week with short days so I can practice what I preach." What Green has preached since starting the Biofeedback program in 1974 is "Kill stress before it kills you." Green describes biofeedback as an "Educational awareness process of learning to unlearn both conscious and unconscious adaptations to stress." "It's a course in disobedience and you begin the process by learning how to breathe," says Green. "The first response to stress is a change in breathing. Either you hold your breath or your breath is short and shallow in the upper chest. "It's like driving a car with a foot on the brake and the choke pulled out. If you get cold sweaty hands taking a test or giving a speech or doing an interview, the cold hands are the brake, the sweat is the choke. It's not stress that does us in but our adaptation to stress. Stress happens between your ears." The good news, says Green, is that the adaptation to stress can be changed, which leads directly to how a person feels. "All habits are unconscious; you don't think about them, you just do them," contends Green. "Some habits are good habits, some are not very helpful. Biofeedback training brings a conscious awareness and deep breathing becomes a transformer of stress into useable energy. Breathe deep, warm hands. It's the key to channeling headache pain, emotional stress and so on." The fact that he is "Making Life Better" can be documented by countless letters of thanks from people Green has helped, whether it be through a test, divorce, athletic performance or family or job crisis. "They've kept my passion in knowing I'm doing something to help students make their lives better," he says of the letters. Green tells of an older woman who came to his biofeedback lab. After listening to a relaxation tape, she told Green that the part of the tape that had her envision floating in water at a sunny beach had first been stressful because she did not know how to swim but then through the biofeedback tape she was able to see herself floating, relaxed and was fine. "The next week, she started taking swimming lessons at the Y and she was going to see that her grandkids were taught to swim," says Green. "It was just another case of 'Self-imposed fears because of false evidence appearing real.' " At one time, Green worked with several members of the Royals including Steve Braun, Willie Wilson, Clint Hurdle an...Expand for more