Category Archives: articles

Repost from NY Times: Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

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A new field in health research is called “inactivity studies,” and this article reports on its findings.

Here’s one. Two people eat and exercise the same. One gains weight, the other doesn’t. Why?

If you fidget more and move more, but not necessarily work out, you can burn a lot of calories. People who are more sedentary put on more weight.

That seems like a no-brainer, but so much knowledge about this is based on self-reporting, which is simply unreliable. The study used “magic underwear” to track motion.

This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

I’m curious. How much sitting is too much? More than six hours a day, some say; others say more than nine hours a day. Sitting is more lethal than age, sex, education, smoking, hypertension, BMI and other indicators.

And did you know that Steelcase, maker of file cabinets and office furniture, now makes treadmill desks?

That’s the ticket for health at sedentary jobs. That, or fidget and get up and walk around a lot.

“Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”

Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? – NYTimes.com.

Repost from Elephant Journal: Drink Beer, Eat Chocolate, Live to 100

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Drink Beer, Eat Chocolate, Live to 100. ~ Jolee McBreen | elephant journal.

Click to read what researchers now believe the link between longevity and stress is.

Hint: It’s not avoiding stress or minimizing stress.

Thanks, Elephant Journal.

Samadhi and the right brain

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I’m linking to an article published in Elephant Journal that has an interesting discussion about the right brain and mystical states. Jill Bolte Taylor wrote about having her left brain shut down during a cerebral hemorrhage in My Stroke of Insight.

This writer, a yogi and ayurvedist, wonders aloud if samadhi is actually experienced through shutting down big parts of the left brain.

Read on for a worthwhile discussion, and juicy tidbits about a few spiritual eminences.

Thoughts on spring cleansing, the liver, allergies

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I started the colon/parasite cleanse today. It’s spring! Time to clean out the system! I do this twice a year.

I wrote about this last fall. You can click this link to my earlier post, which contains instructions for the colon/parasite cleanse, which is fairly simple, and information about the liver/gallbladder flush, which is more complex but worth doing.

I didn’t provide instructions for the flush because it’s complicated, and in my opinion, if you’ve never done it before, it’s best done under the supervision of an expert, experienced health care practitioner who’s quickly available should you have any questions or problems.

One new bit of information to note: The company that makes Paracidin, which rids the body of parasites in the liver, gallbladder, spleen, and pancreas, has changed the name of that product to Paratosin. The labels, including dosage and ingredients, are identical except for the name.

Another new bit of information that I’ve heard or read from several sources: allergies are related to liver toxicity. I’m not sure about this, but thought I’d put it out there. If you have experience or information on this, please share.

My respiratory allergies have decreased dramatically over time. I had NAET acupuncture treatment in 2000 (when I moved back to Austin, allergy capital of the world), and it made a substantial difference.

Before NAET, Seldane or Claritin every day, year round, plus at least one sinus infection per year requiring antibiotics.

After NAET, I’d take an occasional Claritin, and I’ve had only one sinus infection in the 10 years since, when I walked to and from work on a windy day last spring after a long dry spell — exposing myself to lots of pollen. Acupuncture helped me recover from that.

NAET worked pretty well for me.

I’ve done the liver/gallbladder flush twice a year (two nights in a row each time) for about 3 years. I rarely take medication for allergies any more. I feel unpleasant side effects if I take Claritin, so if I’m having nasal congestion and sneezing, I take a homeopathic remedy, Histaminum hydrochloricum, and that does the trick. I use it maybe once a week at peak pollen times. My body doesn’t respond to allergens like it used to. (Another day I’ll post on the NLP allergy cure, which has probably also made a difference.)

So it’s possible that the flush has improved my liver’s health and reduced my allergies. They haven’t gotten worse. (This does not apply to my gluten sensitivity, just to airborne allergens.)

Here’s a link to an article I found with much more information on the liver/gallbladder cleanse, including what actually happens in those organs.

The instructions are pretty close to what my acupuncturist says. She has me test my pH before doing the flush to make sure my body is clearly alkaline, and she has me do it two nights in a row. She also suggests taking magnesium malate when it’s difficult to make fresh, organic apple juice in quantity.

Badshah Khan, leader of a nonviolent army in Afghanistan

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This is a little bit different from most of my blog posts, but I found this tale compelling and want to share. This little bit of history is new to me, and perhaps to you as well.

My friend Peggy Kelsey, who has a special place in her heart and photography for the women of Iraq and Afghanistan, posted this story on Facebook.

Who would have thought that a master of nonviolence would have come out of modern Afghanistan?

Badshah (a title meaning king) Khan lived to be nearly 100 years old, and he died in 1988.

One of his remarkable achievements is that he raised, uniformed, and disciplined an army of 100,000 Pashtun men, and it was a nonviolent army. That’s right, a  nonviolent army. An oxymoron? Let’s find out.

They faced down the British army, and the British came to fear them more than they feared armed Pashtuns. The Pashtuns had simply found the strongest weapon available: nonviolence.

Khan was a devout Muslim who would always remain a devout Muslim, one who thought his religion required nonviolence.

Did you even know there were devout Muslims who practice in nonviolence? I didn’t. Or maybe I did, but thought of them as Sufis.

Beginning in 1910, Khan opened schools in the mountainous region he grew up in. He opened schools for boys and for girls. He taught agriculture, sanitation, self-sufficiency, and nonviolent resistance to empire. Khan learned of Gandhi in 1915 and joined him in calling for nonviolent opposition to the British in 1919, for which Khan was locked up for 6 months.

Here’s a description of their nonviolent technique.

The British ordered troops to open fire with machine guns on the unarmed crowd, killing an estimated 200-250. The Khudai Khidmatgar [servants of God] members acted in accord with their training in non-violence under Ghaffar Khan, facing bullets as the troops fired on them.

“When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with their breasts bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as 21 bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic.”

This continued for six hours. When an elite military unit called the Garhwal Rifles was ordered to fire on an unarmed crowd, its members refused and were themselves court-martialed and sent to prison.

When Badshah Khan died, the Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan. A ceasefire was declared and honored by both sides so he could be buried.

You can read more about Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan here on Wikipedia.

To relax, to improve health, to change the world, just breathe

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Last night I attended the monthly Austin NLP meetup. Katie Raver, who was raised by an NLP-trained mom and who is a co-founder of Austin NLP and who created Year of the Breath in 2009, presented on the topic Breathing Life into Rapport.

Note: Katie is my temporary roommate. And she loves my cat, Mango. I may be biased.

Katie drew on her experiences in Hawai’i (where ha means breath, thus Hawai’i, aloha, ha‘ole — without breath, ha prayer). When she returned, she noticed how shallow breathing negatively impacted a work-related meeting she was in, and she experimented with pacing and then leading the alpha person at the meeting (not the speaker, but the key decision maker) to breathe more deeply, thus changing the state of the meeting for all 17 people present. Only Katie — or as we call her, the instigator of love — was aware of how that shift occurred.

We had fun doing exercises like matching someone’s breathing while talking to them and matching their breathing while they’re talking to you. Sorry you missed it.

I must say, it’s a lovely experience to have a room full of people breathing in unison. It’s on a par with hearing a room full of people all chanting OM. Deep. Alive. Powerful. 

 Today an email led me to this NPR article dated Dec. 6, 2010, Just Breathe: Body Has a Built-In Stress Reliever.

As it turns out, deep breathing is not only relaxing, it’s been scientifically proven to affect the heart, the brain, digestion, the immune system — and maybe even the expression of genes.

Yogis and meditators know this. Breath is powerful.

But more importantly, [breathing exercises] can be used as a method to train the body’s reaction to stressful situations and dampen the production of harmful stress hormones.

Click the link to read up on the latest scientific findings about using breath to influence health and well-being.

You can also make meetings more satisfying. At least you won’t be bored.

Trauma/stress, sleep, and brainwaves

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I have several friends who have a hard time sleeping. Could be falling asleep or staying asleep. They go through long periods of not sleeping well.

I’ve been through several of those periods myself, although not lately. I empathize with how the lack of a good night’s sleep negatively affects everything the next day — energy, alertness, performance. I feel their pain.

I’ve already mentioned that I take most of the supplements recommended in the appendix of Buddha’s Brain. I feel better than I’ve felt in years.

I honestly don’t know how good I can feel, and I’d like to find out!

When my contract job ends in 6 weeks and I can make this a priority, I intend to get my brainwaves optimized.

Here’s a link to an article, Your Brainwaves On Sleep. The author writes about the particle (chemical) and wave (brainwave) approaches to sleep.

On the particle side of the debate, there is ample experiential evidence and scientific studies that demonstrate that chemical activity in the brain can profoundly alter sleep tendencies. Many foods, medicines and other substances are well known to have promotional or inhibitory influences on sleep. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated the existence of sleep-regulatory substances, which, after accumulating in the cerebrospinal fluid of an organism and then being injected into another one, can induce the state of sleepiness.

Wave approaches to sleep focus on its cyclical aspects. A focus on wave aspects has intrinsic appeal, since sleep itself comes and goes regularly in healthy individuals. On this side of the debate, researchers have shown, for example, that there is an extra dose of sleepiness that comes in the middle of the afternoon. Within and between sleep periods, there are predictable cycles of brainwave activity. The timing of the beginning and end of a sleep period is also intimately connected with the timing of our secretion of hormones, the level of arousal of our cardiovascular system, immune system and metabolic functioning and integration of our cognitive capacities. Without good quality sleep, these systems become poorly modulated and dysfunctional over time.

I disagree that we must understand sleep as one or the other. I believe we must understand sleep — and everything else — as both particles and waves. We are bio-chemical, bio-electrical critters.

Good sleep correlates to brain activation patterns (as measured by EEG) that are reasonably balanced (left-to-right and front-to-back) and harmonized (low and high frequencies in a good proportion to one another throughout the brain). Balance and harmony are required especially in those brain areas that generally function for the purpose of internal processing and reception of external stimuli: the temporal, occipital, parietal and midline (or corpus callosum) areas.

Of course, trauma and chronic stress (or prolonged periods of stress) get the brainwaves off track. Brainwave optimization gets them back in harmony.

I hope that someday, brainwave optimization will be inexpensive, widespread, and routine in our culture. What a world that might be, with everyone’s brains functioning at their best all the time!

Videos of Krishnamacharya doing yoga, 1938, age 50

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I discovered some YouTube videos this week taken of Krishnamacharya and some of his students doing yoga in 1938. These are black and white, originally silent, now with a soundtrack of his son Kausthub chanting the Yoga Sutras.

By the way, Krishnamacharya was 50 when these were filmed. : )

In light of the recent controversy of Indian yogis dissing Shiva Rea’s yoga trance dance as not being yoga (and calling for yoga to be regulated by the government), it’s good to remember that Krishnamacharya borrowed from Indian gymnastics to add to the yoga lexicon.

Part 1, 8:24

Part 2, 9:35

Part 3, 9:44

Part 4, 2:40

Part 5, 9:30

Part 6, 5:48

Enjoy!

 

Why yogis don’t meditate

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Came across something else I wanted to repost tonight, this article from Elephant Journal on why yogis don’t meditate by Philip Goldberg.

Yep, asana is only one of the eight limbs of yoga, which is about quieting and calming the mind, or as some would say distancing from the mind. Patanjali had much to say about the mind, and little about asana.

After all, yoga is a philosophy with beliefs. It’s not just physical fitness.

My formerly daily meditation practice is in a slump right now. I miss it. Having the flu and then moving disrupted my life, although witness awareness has been keen through the many transitions.

I discovered Sunday that my meditation timer, which I was using to time long restorative yoga poses, seems to be broken.

However, I downloaded a timer app for my new iPhone that should serve well.

Now all I need to do is move the yoga blankets off my zafu and zabuton, and I’ll be meditating again.

 

How the dominant paradigm is being subverted, and how you can participate

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I read this article, The New Humanism, in today’s New York Times. It’s an op-ed piece by columnist David Brooks about how our culture’s predominant way of thinking and viewing the world, through the lens of reason, has led to major policy errors, such as invading Iraq, the financial collapse, futile efforts to improve the educational system.

Brooks writes:

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

Of course, we brain geeks know that it’s the glorification of the left brain at the expense of the right.

He continues:

Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view. It is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on.

This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

These points bear repeating:

  • Consciousness is tiny in comparison to the unconscious parts of the mind.
  • Emotions are the basis of reason.
  • We live our entire lives in a web of interdependence with other humans.

Got that? Good. That’s thinking with an integrated brain.

Brooks goes on to write about the difference this makes in what we pay attention to:

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

Then he lists the talents this new paradigm requires and develops:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

Which of these talents have you developed? Which do you want to develop more deeply?

This article is not about Buddhism or NLP or ecstatic dance, by the way, although given my history, I couldn’t help but make those connections.

It’s about how thousands of researchers in multiple displines are coming up with a new view of what it means to be a human being. Brooks concludes:

 It’s beginning to show how the emotional and the rational are intertwined.

I suspect their work will have a giant effect on the culture. It’ll change how we see ourselves. Who knows, it may even someday transform the way our policy makers see the world.

Let’s hope so. Let’s do our parts to make it so.

Okay, people. let’s get to work changing the world! One savasana, one trance, one meditation session, one ecstatic dance, one meta-position, one moment of transcendence at a time.