Category Archives: media

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.

Fall down seven times, get up eight

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I discovered this lovely blog post about the resilience of the Japanese people. Thought it was worth sharing.

They say that in times of crisis people show their true character. Anyone can be cooperative, patient, and understanding when things are going well and life is good. But it is the noble man or woman who can behave with grace and compassion and even kindness when times are very, very bad. For many people in Northern Japan right now, the times could not be worse. And yet, at least to the outside observer, the manner in which the Japanese people conducted themselves in the aftermath of this calamity has been remarkable.

Here’s more:

The best kind of motivation is intrinsic motivation. For the benefit of oneself — and for the benefit of others as well — one must bear down and do their best. Even in good times, behaving uncooperatively or in a rude manner is deeply frowned upon. In a crisis, the idea of complaining or acting selfishly to the detriment of those around you is the absolute worst thing a person can do. There is no sense in complaining about how things are or crying over what might have been. These feelings may be natural to some degree, but they are not productive for yourself or for others.

Click the link to read on.

In the Light of Love: A Tribute to Japan

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If you read my earlier post containing the beautiful letter from Japan written by the American woman Anne who taught school in Sendai, please watch this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGWAZVZG1TA&feature=player_embedded#at=13

Deva Premal and Miten made it in loving tribute to the Japanese people affected by the earthquakes and tsunami. They write:

The earthquake happened while we were working on a remix on this song. Later we put images to the music in an attempt to portray the elevation of the human spirit in times of such overwhelming and inconceivable destruction. It is our tribute to the brave hearts of the Japanese people.
The letter at the end of the clip is a first hand account of a friend of a friend, living in Japan.

With love

Miten and Deva

…ps… we just received this message and thought you’d like to know: “And in case you don’t know — the baby in the pink snuggly being smiled at by the soldier was found in the wreckage 2-3 days after the tsumani and was reunited with her father….one of the biggest miracles to date…”

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!

4-Hour Body exercise induces shaking

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Today I induced trembling unintentionally.

I’m reading The 4-Hour Body. I was feeling achy in my lower back this morning and decided to try some exercises I read about last week. The Egoscue Method is a postural therapy program with 24 clinics worldwide. Tim Ferriss, the author, was skeptical but tried a session, walking out after 90 minutes with no pain in his mid-back for the first time in six months.

He recommends six exercises for desk-dwellers’ postural imbalances.

If you have the book, I’m talking about pages 302-306.

The last exercise of the six is called the “air bench”. It’s like Exercise 6a of the trauma releasing exercises.

  1. Stand with back against a wall, feet and knees hip width apart, feet straight ahead.
  2. Walk your feet out as you slide your back down the wall. Stop when your knees are bent 90 degrees. Ankles should be slightly ahead of knees. Lower back is flat against the wall. Keep the weight in your heels.
  3. Hold for two minutes.

Aargh, it’s hard work! I bring my attention to my breath and breathe slowly, deeply, and smoothly. Otherwise, I’d be moaning.

When I finished, I lay on my yoga mat and did Exercise 6b, on my back, soles pressed together, knees as wide as possible, sacrum elevated two inches.

Then I immediately relaxed and put my soles flat on the floor and trembled, shook, and quivered for 20 minutes! It was a very good session, with lots of releasing. Both shoulders released, separately.

Nothing new to report except that I seem to be experiencing less intense shaking in my legs. I don’t shake as hard.

I wonder if there’s a point when you’ve done these exercises enough that you only shake mildly and for a short time.

That will be the blessed day…

Anyway, I’m going to try doing just Exercises 6a and 6b to find out if they alone can induce shaking. Next time!

The 4-Hour Body, continued: pre-hab and weight loss

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I blogged in January that I was starting to read Tim Ferriss’ new book, The 4-Hour Body. Well, I’m still reading it! It’s a big book chock full of interesting information, and I’m reading it from front to back, which Tim does not recommend.

Well, I’m up to page 332 out of 474 (excluding the 100 pages of appendices, bonus material, and index), reading about something Tim calls “pre-hab”. This chapter is about stabilizing the body to prevent injuries. The man who has worked with world-class athletes to improve their consistent high performance is Gray Cook, and Tim pumped him for information for do-it-yourselfers like me to do at home.

It’s all about gaining strength and stability using basic movement patterns.

Boy, I need this. A strong wind can almost blow me over. I’m 58 and understand how devastating a fall can be in a way I didn’t when I was a lot younger (“Why don’t you just get up?”). Even though I’m probably fitter than average for someone my age, I can always improve.

So apparently you can self-assess by doing some exercises and noticing left-right imbalances and wobbling/shifting. Then there are four corrective exercises to fix the most common imbalances/weaknesses.

These have names like chop and lift, Turkish get-up, two-arm single-leg deadlift, and cross-body one-arm single-leg deadlift.

You might as well be speaking a foreign language, Tim!

I’m going to pursue this, and I wish for someone who speaks this language to magically show up and guide me. Know anyone?

~~~

I do have something else to report from The 4-Hour Body. I followed the Slow Carb diet in February. Subtitle: How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise.

Results: I lost only 4 pounds but lost several inches converting fat to muscle. I don’t have an accurate way of measuring BMI, just a scale, and it showed a loss.

Note: I have been on a gluten-free diet for several years, and I also (usually) avoid potatoes. That’s probably where most people who eat those things lose the 20 pounds.

This diet calls for no rice, no dairy, no fruit/sugar/sweeteners, just eating the same meals of animal protein/legumes/veggies every day. Yep, beans, eggs or fish, and veggies at every meal. Good thing I love refried beans.

The bonus is one day a week you can eat whatever you want. Yes, built-in cheating! I went all out twice and then binged moderately, with a kefir and pomegranate and stevia smoothie and occasionally ice cream.

I learned gratitude for the variety of legumes in this world. Refried beans, fava beans, limas, snap peas, black beans. The beans really help each meal “stick to your ribs” so you don’t get hungry and snack in between meals.

I lost inches around my upper arms, thighs, and waist, and I gained an inch around my hips. That inch is all in my booty, from doing kettlebell swings twice a week. I’m sure it’s building bone density too.

Have you read the book and tried any of his suggestions?

 

Rest and relaxation bootcamp and desk yoga videos

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I just realized a day or two ago that so many of my recent efforts — meditation, reiki, the trauma releasing exercises, learning and teaching restorative yoga — are not only healing, they also relax you.

Hmm. Methinks there’s probably a strong relationship between healing and relaxing.

Judith Lasater in her recent restorative yoga workshop in Austin said that human beings need activity, rest, and sleep.

Rest is the one we usually let go of first in the pressure to “keep up” and “have it all”. Then sleep.

It’s hard to set limits on activities. Let me practice that right now.

No thanks, I have just the right amount on my plate.

Really, do you know anyone who takes resting seriously? Who turns off their computer and phone regularly to do something relaxing? Something playful and not too competitive?

Remember when everything was closed on Sunday and it was truly a day off? Stores and offices and factories closed so employees could have time off with their families. It was the norm.

Now so much is available most or all the time. You can shop online at 3 am! Factories run 24/7. Banks are open on Saturdays. Some stores are open all night.

Pondering all this “need for speed,” I thought up a workshop title: Relaxation Bootcamp. Really. That’s what it might take for some people, the bootcamp approach.

I’d start with the trauma releasing exercises. All that quivering, trembling, and shaking is tension leaving your body!

Then some pranayama to balance the left and right hemispheres.

Then a long restorative yoga session followed by a reiki session followed by meditation. 

I have to ask myself,

Do I know who I am as a relaxed person?

What will it take to find out?

Am I addicted to stress?  

When do I feel relaxed yet aware?

As I ponder these questions, I am in the middle of a 3-month contract job. I usually eat at my desk and don’t take a lunch break. Being productive is my m.o.

Yet sometimes when I feel the tension building from sitting at a computer all day, I do a little desk yoga with Rodney Yee.

4 Minute Neck and Shoulder Stretch

4 Minute Upper and Lower Back Stretch

Puts a little spaciousness and flexibility back into my day.

I have a hunch this is a lifetime issue for me, something I need to learn for myself and master.

How about you? What would you include in your Relaxation Bootcamp?

Graphic: Patanjali’s 8 limbs of yoga

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The marvelous yogini-cum-graphic-artist Alison Hinks, who created the yoga lineages flow chart I linked to earlier, has done it again.

This beautiful graphic shows the eight limbs of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

What’s extra nice is that she’s identified the actions you do and the experiences that happen to you because you have practiced the actions effectively.

Thank you, Alison Hinks, for adding beauty and inspiration to the world.