Category Archives: media

My yoga page on this blog

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Just letting y’all know… If you’re curious about my yoga classes, look under the banner photo, and you’ll see a row of links to pages. Click “Private yoga classes” to go there. Or just click here.

I just noticed yesterday in my blog stats that it had only been clicked three times.

I’ve finished the class part of my yoga teacher training and have a humongous test to do on my own time, as well as lesson plans for my 12-class series, Beginner’s Yoga, Beginner’s Mind, currently getting ready for the 9th week, to turn in.

I’ll post more about the Oak Hill restorative yoga class when it’s all worked out. Right now I’m focusing on the test and lesson plans.

I’ll let you know when I officially finish my training, and we’ll celebrate!

Buddha’s Brain: supplements for brain health

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June 2, 2012: I’ve updated this post with links for the supplements if you want to order online. Some of them are not readily available in stores like Whole Foods.

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When I read the book Buddha’s Brain, I was very impressed by an appendix, Nutritional Neurochemistry, by Jan Hanson. She’s an acupunturist who has specialized in clinical nutrition for many years.

I’ve been following Hanson’s suggestions and taking supplements for about six weeks now. I take the minimum amount suggested. I feel better! My memory is better, I sleep better, and I focus better. My mood may be a little better—I wasn’t depressed before, and I generally feel buoyant already.

I haven’t noticed any changes in my digestion (the other area that neurotransmitters affect), but I take great care with my diet, having been tested for food sensitivities years ago and generally following a Type O Gatherer genotype diet. I eat well, going light on grains, beans, and dairy (mostly limited to yogurt and kefir), eating lots of fruits and veggies including green juices, and buying fresh and organic.

I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist, just someone in pursuit of health and well-being. I’m going to repeat some of what Jan Hanson says here in the hopes that if you’re really interested in this topic, you’ll click the link above, buy the book, and read it yourself. The world needs more people who are working toward functioning at 100 percent of their capabilities!

Base  your decisions either on testing or on self-observation.

  • If you have problems with sleep or digestion, supplement for serotonin.
  • If you have memory issues, build acetylcholine.
  • If your energy is low, build norepinephrine and dopamine.
  • These last two and serotonin help with mood.

Since supplements are expensive, it seems wise to start with your diet, because you gotta eat anyway. In general, eat lots of protein (a serving the size of a pack of cards at each meal) and at least 3 cups of veggies per day. Protein includes nuts, dairy, seeds, eggs, legumes, and grains, as well as meat, poultry, and fish and seafood.

Foods that are particularly good for brain health: berries, egg yolks, beef, liver, and dairy fats. I prefer grass-fed bison to beef and suggest avoiding liver unless it’s from a really clean source. Eggs with orange yolks from free-range chickens rock!

Foods that are not good for brain health: those with refined sugar and/or refined flour. You probably know this already.

If you think your body may disagree with some foods, either get tested for food sensitivities (chiropractors and naturopaths offer this) or eliminate suspects for a week or two and notice if you feel better, think more clearly, digest more easily, and have more energy. Anything your body is sensitive to causes an inflammatory reaction throughout your body, and inflammation is an enemy of your brain.

Supplements for basic brain health

Hanson recommends multivitamins with 10 to 25 times the daily value of all the B vitamins. For adults, that means at least the following amounts:

  • 12 mg of thiamin (B1)
  • 13 mg of riboflavin (B2)
  • 160 mg of niacin (B3); you may need a separate supplement* to get this much, and I recommend the no-flush kind
  • 50 mg of pantothenic acid (B5)
  • 17 mg of pyridoxine (B6)
  • 24 mcg of B12

Check your multivitamin label and if these amounts are not provided, find one that does. I like Source of Life food-based vitamins.

Vitamins B6 and B12 and folic acid play a crucial role in the production of many neurotransmitters:

  • Be sure to get 50 mg of B6 in the form of pyridoxal-5-phosphate (P5P) on an empty stomach in the morning. I have not found this form in a multivitamin, so I take a separate supplement. B vitamins are water soluble; any excess is excreted, so it’s okay if you take too much (at least from what I read now).
  • Take 800 mcg or more of folic acid, which is twice as much as most multis contain, so you’ll need a separate supplement.
  • Get at least 24 mcg of B12, which multis usually have.

Make sure you’re getting 400 IU of Vitamin E, at least half of which is gamma-tocopherol (not the more common alpha-tocopherol, which multivitamins usually contain).

Get 100 percent or more of the daily value of minerals. The Source of Life multi mentioned above includes the minerals below.

Iron plays a big role in brain health. If you think you might be low in iron, get tested, and supplement if you need it.

  • 1000 (men) or 1200 (women) mg of calcium (usually supplements are needed; I like New Chapter Bone Strength Take Care)
  • 20-35 mcg of chromium
  • 900 mcg of copper
  • 8 mg of iron (18 for menstruating women; Source of Life’s multivitamin offers this much iron—see link above)
  • 320-410 mg of magnesium
  • 1.8 to 2.3 mg of manganese
  • 45 mcg of molybdenum
  • 700 mg of phosphorus
  • 4.7 g of potassium
  • 55 mcg of selenium
  • 8 to 11 mg of zinc

Get enough omega-3 fatty acids. The benefits are better growth of neurons, mood elevation, and slowing of dementia. She recommends fish oil containing about 500 mg each of DHA and EPA daily—high quality, molecularly distilled. I like New Chapter Wholemega. It’s from sustainably caught wild Alaskan salmon.

Note: If you want to avoid fish oil, you can take a tablespoon of flax seed oil and 500 mg of DHA from algae daily.

Supplementing for neurotransmitters

Neurotransmitter supplements should be taken carefully. Start with the smallest dosage, try one new one at a time, and discontinue if you have negative side affects. Do not combine neurotransmitter supplements with antidepressants or psychotropic medications.

Hanson recommends building serotonin first. Serotonin supports mood, digestion, and sleep. Take 50-200 mg of 5-HTP in the morning or 500-1,500 mg of tryptophan before bed. If you need help sleeping, tryptophan at night is probably the better choice.

Norepinephrine and dopamine support energy, mood, and attention. Dopamine transforms into norepinephrine, so supplementation is the same for each: take L-phenylalanine or L-tyrosine, and start with 500 mg on an empty stomach, first thing in the morning. The maximum dose is 1,500 mg, which may be too stimulating for some.

Acetylcholine supports memory and attention. Take phosphatidylserine (PS), 100-300 mg per day. Also take acetyl-L-carnitine, 500-1,000 mg first thing on an empty stomach. Take huperzine A, 50-200 mcg per day. Hanson recommends finding which combination works best for you.

*The supplement links are based on the recommended minimum dosages given in Buddha’s Brain. I am a small person, and these dosages work for me. If you are larger or more in need of neurotransmitter supplementation for particular purposes such as sleep, attention, or memory, you can experiment with taking up to the maximum recommended, only making one change at a time and making gradual changes. Many of the supplements may be ordered from Amazon on a subscription basis, saving you money.

About Effortless Wellbeing

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Note: Earlier this post mistakenly called this book Effortless Meditation. The actual name of the book is Effortless Wellbeing.

Elephantjournal.com posted this article a day or two ago. Being someone who appreciates simplicity and elegance, I found it very worth sharing. Read the article here.

A man named Evan Finer has written a little book called Effortless Wellbeing. The author of the post, Bob Weisenberg, writes that in his effort to boil meditation down to its essentials, Finer came up with three key skills:

  1. Relaxing the body.
  2. Learning to breathe smoothly and naturally.
  3. Calming the mind by learning to focus.

Notice you don’t have to be sitting on a zafu with your eyes closed to use these skills!

Weisenberg states,

…there are few things in life which cannot be enhanced by relaxing your body, breathing more naturally, and gently focusing your mind.

Weisenberg goes on to list nine techniques for focusing the mind.

Body awareness is one of them, although it doesn’t mention whole body awareness. I really enjoyed getting perspective about my meditation technique, that it’s one of nine ways to focus the mind. Whole body awareness, preceded by a body scan, is working for me very well.

Comments?

Good news for the brain

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Good news for brain health! Neurofeedback is growing in popularity — an estimated 100,000 Americans have tried it over the past decade.

The National Institute of Mental Health just sponsored its first study, on ADHD, with results to be announced later this month. The study’s director noted improvement in many of the children’s behavior.

Some so-called authorities still think of it as crackpot science.

It seems to me more like physical therapy: you have an injury or an imbalance, and you do exercises targeted to gain functionality.

Neurofeedback practitioners say people have problems when their brain wave frequencies aren’t suited for the task at hand, or when parts of the brain aren’t communicating adequately with other parts. These issues, they say, can be represented on a “brain map,” the initial EEG readings that serve as a guide for treatment. Subsequently, a clinician will help a patient learn to slow down or speed up those brain waves, through a process known as operant conditioning.

The article mentions companies offering it, and the lack of regulation. It advises choosing a practitioner carefully.

I’d love to hear first-hand accounts of people who’ve used neurofeedback to improve brain functioning in Austin, Texas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/health/05neurofeedback.html?src=me&ref=health

Trauma release heavy heart

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Someone found this blog using those search words.

No doubt they found my post on trauma releasing exercises, from David Berceli’s book The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process. That post did not specifically address a heavy heart. I’m not sure if the exercises would help. They are designed more to help you heal from a terrifying fight-flight-or-freeze situation, and from chronic stress and deep patterns of holding tension in the body. But I don’t know.

If you find me again, this is for you. Heartbreak can feel traumatic. I know. I’ve been there several times.

In my experience, heavy hearts take time to heal. Give yourself time and be as kind to yourself as possible. Let trusted others know your heart feels heavy and allow them to be kind to you too.

A heavy heart led me to meditation. I tried to avoid the pain. It didn’t work. What was left was facing it. Because when your heart is really heavy, you want to feel some emotional movement. Heaviness has tremendous gravity. You don’t want to feel stuck with a heavy heart.

I don’t know, but I suspect you will move through this. You are resourceful enough to be looking for help, looking for change.

When I sat with my heavy heart and just faced it — noticed where in my body I felt it, qualities of the feeling, finding words to describe it — I noticed there was more to me than just my heavy heart. That lightened the load, began to put some space around my heavy heart.

Here are some other suggestions:

You can be just a little bit grateful that you are feeling this because it means you have an active, alive heart center. Some people don’t. You are responsive to life, which is sometimes heartbreaking.

You are also not alone. At any given moment, a million people and more in this world have heavy hearts. Even if every single one of them has retreated into their bedroom, you have a lot of company! Connect with them psychically. Be curious about them.

You can google and learn how to do EFT. You can take the homeopathic remedy Ignatia Amara. You can watch sad movies and cry, or just cry — tears are healing.

There is no instant cure. It takes time.

You can make a plan to do one kind thing for another person. Help a single mom have some private time by taking the kids out to a park. Help a homebound senior with groceries or cooking. There are thousands of nonprofits who need volunteers — in prisons, homeless shelters, food banks, children — there is simply no end to it, unfortunately.

And I don’t think it would hurt to do the trauma releasing exercises.

Cleansing the colon, liver, and gallbladder

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I’m in the last week of a 27-day colon/parasite cleanse, which I do spring and fall. My dear acupuncturist tells me that it’s not a question of whether you have parasites, it’s what to do about them.

This cleanse isn’t difficult. Morning and night mix 2 T of psyllium husks and 1/2 t. of bentonite clay into a half cup of water or fruit juice/water mix, stir well, and throw it down the hatch. You must follow with a large glass of water. Do this every day for the entire 27 days.

Mid-morning and mid-afternoon, take 3 capsules of Paratosin from Premier Research Labs (a herbal blend that will have you burping cloves) on an empty stomach.

Do this every day until the whole bottle of Paratosin is gone (10 days). Continue to take the psyllium and bentonite twice daily but take no Paratosin for 7 days.

On day 18, start taking a second bottle of Paratosin as directed above to rid yourself of any parasites that have hatched since the first bottle.

After 27 days, your gastrointestinal system (especially your colon walls) will be cleaned out by the psyllium husks, toxins pulled from the walls by the bentonite clay, and your liver, gallbladder, spleen, and pancreas will be clear of parasites for a while (you can get them from drinking tap water) — and then you repeat in the spring, or the next fall.

I follow this cleanse with a liver/gallbladder flush, which is much more involved. I’ve done the cleanse and the flush back to back in the spring and fall for the past three years, and I believe they play an important role in my vitality and well-being.

I’m not going to include directions here because I don’t know the contraindications — i.e., when someone shouldn’t do this. I’m just a blogger sharing a personal health practice. If you’re interested, please consult your alternative medical practitioner first.

You can also find instructions in Jack Tips’ book, The Healing Triad: Your Liver…Your Lifeline. Tips says this flush has been done since antiquity, with variations. Basically you consume certain foods to cause the liver and gallbladder to empty their contents for elimination. This flush rids both these organs of old, hardened bile pieces. They look like green stones when you pass them but float because they are made of fat.

Compared to the colon/parasite cleanse, this flush involves more prep work (eating more veggies and using pH test strips to be sure you’re alkaline, and consuming apples or apple juice or malic acid to soften the hardened bile). It’s also trickier. There may be some discomfort involved, but it is only temporary. I’ve felt great afterwards.

(By the way, anything fried in cooked vegetable seed oils contributes to the formation of hardened bile. Now, I love chips and salsa and fried okra. It’s my birthright as a Texan! Doing this flush twice a year helps me stay healthy.)

You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Well, to keep your organs healthy! We often have an attitude of denial in this culture about our internal organs until something goes wrong. They have vital functions that contribute to our health. Taking good care of one’s organs translates into better functioning of your body — which of course cannot be isolated from the mind, heart, and spirit.

The large intestine, liver, and gallbladder have associated meridians in traditional Chinese medicine. That means these organs have energies associated with them. The colon is associated with the emotion of grief. The liver and gallbladder are associated with the emotion of anger.

Flushing them can result in a surge of positive energy — more happiness. Can you use some of that? I sure can!

Blogging update, moving into last quarter

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We’re heading into the home stretch of 2010, the last three months of this year of daily sitting and blogging about it. I’m posting my blog stats so that if you’re thinking about starting a blog, you can read a first-hand report.

Plus, I appreciate your support and interest.

My first post was Dec. 30, 2009. And then on February 3, I got 89 views! I’m not sure why. Maybe WordPress featured my blog that day. That’s still the one-day record for views. By Feb. 8, I had had 181 views.

I started out blogging once a day, occasionally twice, almost every day. I kept this up until mid-March, when I started feeling life crowding in on me.

After that, I experimented to find a more natural rhythm for me. That has turned out to be about every 2-3 days. Even better, each post feels more worthwhile to write and contribute, and I hope more worthwhile for you to read.

By April 22, this blog had had 827 views.

In May I skipped a couple of weeks due to no internet access at home. (Tree fell on cable line, yada yada.) May wasn’t a good month for blogging. For January through April, the monthly total for views was roughly 200. In May I had 121 views.

Lesson learned: you have to keep it up to keep your readers!

Halfway through the year, on July 1, I had had 1,233 views and 52 comments. I hit 1,500 views on July 26 and 2,000 views on August 31, a month and a day ago.

As I write this, the view count is up to 2,316. I’ve had over 300 views for each of the past three months. I’ve posted 200 times (201 with this one) and have received 83 comments.

I truly love hearing from you. I get a lot of spam that I delete (which WordPress filters nicely), and genuine comments from people who have actually read a post and have something to say about it are heavenly. I love your input, feedback, additions, stories, and responses. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has commented (and thanks in advance to everyone who will comment but hasn’t yet).

I’ve made this blog easy for people to find, through Twitter, Facebook, NetworkedBlogs, and subscriptions. Most of you come through Facebook. Friend me if that works easier for you. I’m probably the only Mary Ann Reynolds in Austin, TX.

The most popular search term used to find this blog is “trauma releasing exercises.” I’m glad to be spreading David Berceli’s wonderful work — a set of exercises that release trauma (tension, stress) from the body. I do them a couple of times a month and find them valuable.

Most of us aren’t familiar enough with the state of being deeply relaxed yet alert. TRE is well worth including in your pursuit of being a fully alive and awake human being, in my opinion.

Plus, you never know when you might need to tell or teach someone who needs these exercises more than you do. I am very happy to know that through my sharing, this book has spread to an Army captain in Iraq as well as to someone in the Acupuncturists Without Borders organization. It’s going where it’s needed.

My most viewed post is also Trauma releasing exercises.

My next most popular post is Cranio-sacral therapy, brain waves. It has a lot of brain geek information in it.

A more recent post, Pain and pleasure, pleasure and pain — side effects of living, has become increasingly popular, ranking third in number of views, excluding a couple of poems. Boy, that title says it all, doesn’t it? It’s probably my longest title.

I like that one. Instead of the more typical attraction to pleasure, avoidance of pain pattern, which keeps us moving back and forth, there’s another possibility of being more centered and knowing that both pleasure and pain are nervous system experiences! You have a nervous system, you’re alive, and pleasure and pain are part of life, in other words.

What I get from this analysis is that you guys, my readers, are curious about body/mind/emotions/spirit connections. You want to read about discovering/returning to some kind of integrated state of healthiness and wholeness. You’re interested in ways to frame experience, to give it context and perspective. And reading about geeky brain wave states does not put you off!

You know what? I love you guys. You’re my kind of people! Maybe you’re even trying some of the things I’m trying! If that is so, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks for stopping by. Come again soon!

Article: Becoming a yoga teacher

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I really liked this article, from Elephantjournal.com, by a yoga teacher about being a yoga teacher.

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/09/becoming-a-yoga-teacher/

Parking tickets and bad yoga

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YogaDork has a fantastic yoga blog. Check it out at http://www.yogadork.com/.

The post that most recently caught my attention is about how Cambridge, MA, police now give out parking tickets with yoga poses printed on the back! This is not a bad idea, in my opinion. However, the execution could have been better.

Amazingly, YogaDork has managed to get a photo of a ticket with the poses! Go here for a look: http://www.yogadork.com/2010/09/21/parking-tickets-now-with-yoga-instructions/.

The image is blurry, but it appears to show a figure doing sukhasana (easy cross-legged pose), a modification of lunge, and a variation of Warrior 1 with an extremely arched back.

Warning: The last pose shows someone with an extremely flexible spine doing a yoga pose. Please do not try this at home unless you’re an experienced yogi! Otherwise you could hurt your back.

Article: 10 Things I Learned at Yoga Teacher Training

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I’m posting this article by Valerie Reiss, published in the Huffington Post, so I can find it again when I need it!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-reiss/10-things-i-learned-at-yo_b_716619.html?igoogle=1