Hugh Mann | organicMD.org

Health is metabolic efficiency. Sickness is metabolic inefficiency. Nobody is totally healthy or totally sick. Each of us is a unique combination of health and sickness. And each of us has a unique combination of abilities and disabilities, both emotional and physical.

As we grow up, we learn that we are loved for our abilities but hated for our disabilities. This happens at home, at play, at school, and at work. Sometimes, this even happens with our doctors, especially if our disabilities mystify them or remind them of their own disabilities.

So, we try to hide our disabilities from people and from ourselves. This charade undermines our relationships and our self-esteem. We learn to fear society and hate ourselves.

Self-hatred is the most debilitating sickness. It interferes with our ability to seek and accept help. And everybody needs help. How do we free ourselves from self-hatred?

First, we reclaim our disabilities, whether society accepts them or not. This means that we learn to accept ourselves. Then, we cope with our disabilities. This means that we learn to take care of ourselves.
(read more. . .)

healingarts | July 3, 2005 |

Fire Meditation | DailyOM

Each of us has unresolved issues revolving around our relationships that linger in our souls. People don’t always say or do what’s right and it can seem impossible to heal that breach, particularly when that person is unresponsive or has passed away. The following fire meditation is a way to release pain and to heal a past or present relationship, or to deal with unresolved interpersonal issues. Through this type of meditation, it becomes possible to seek out reconciliation and forgiveness, as well as to rid yourself of the spiritual baggage that can come when you harbor emotional pain.

During this meditation, it can be helpful to have a partner who reads the instructions to you in a soothing voice. Or, if you prefer to meditate alone, you may want to record yourself reading the instructions and play it back when you are ready to start. Begin by finding a quiet, relaxing space. In choosing, keep in mind that you will want to have your back be as straight as possible, either by laying down on a flat surface or sitting up straight in a chair. Breathe deeply and relax your body and mind.

When you have reached a state of deep relaxation, envision the place where you feel most safe. It needn’t be a real location; it can be an isolated private island, a tropical beach, or a mountain sanctuary. It can even be your own bedroom. Take the time to really see and experience your safe place. Smell the air, listen for sounds, and feel the ground under you. When you are relaxed in your surroundings, envision a road. Look down it and watch for the arrival of the person or animal you wish to make peace with. Let them come at their own pace and, when they are in full view, ask if they are willing to heal with you. If their answer is yes, look at first at yourself. How old are you? What are you wearing? How old is your companion and what do they look like?

The next step is to envision a fire. It can be in any form you wish: a camp fire, a ceremonial fire, or a bonfire. As you begin to heal, throw your baggage into the fire and ask for forgiveness or the closure you are seeking. If you wish, you can step into the fire; it will not harm you. Release everything that you no longer desire for yourself or your companion into the fire. In doing so, you may feel your body temperature rise, or you may shake a little. This is normal. Take as much time as you need with your companion. When you are finished, release them, and they will turn and walk back the way they came. Stay in your safe place for as long as you desire. When you feel comfortable, open your eyes and note the great weight that has been lifted from you.

healingarts | July 2, 2005 |

You have Domino’s Pizza on speed dial, and laundry piled high on your dining table. Your kids think Veggie Booty is one of the basic food groups. You spend more time in the car than in the kitchen.

You’re not alone.

The home-cooked family meal is quickly becoming a thing of the past. A recent survey conducted by the University of Minnesota shows that the number of American families who regularly eat dinner together has dropped by more than one-third since 1970, as busy parents opt instead for the convenience of restaurant meals or takeout in front of the television. But Marialisa Calta, a food writer and working mother, is on a mission to turn back the clock. And while encouraging American women to unleash their inner Betty Crocker might not seem progressive, Calta’s serious commitment to helping parents embrace domesticity, at the dinner table at least, has landed her in the ranks of a quiet revolution taking place in small towns and cities across the country. Backed by a spate of studies showing that children who routinely eat dinner with their families not only perform better in school but are also less vulnerable to depression, drug and alcohol addiction and eating disorders, a Columbia University substance abuse counseling center (CASA) has even set aside an official holiday — Sept. 26 — devoted to getting parents and kids eating together.

Calta’s new book, “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the Modern American Family,” takes readers into the kitchens and dining rooms of a dozen families across the country as they attempt to make a healthy, home-cooked meal every (well, almost every) night. With unpretentious advice and simple menus drawing on pantry staples such as beans, chicken stock and pasta (and featuring a special section on that Nixon-era workhorse, the slow cooker), “Barbarians” offers an antidote to the fussy, labor-intensive Martha Stewart mentality that intimidates many home cooks. “You don’t have to chain yourself to the stove,” she writes. “If you are organized enough to get your tired self dressed and to work every day you have the tools to get food on the table.” Around that table, Calta believes, parents and children share much more than food — they exchange stories, learn about each other’s lives, and hone social graces that serve them in school and beyond.

Sarah Karnasiewicz | Salon (read more. . .)

healingarts | July 1, 2005 |

DailyOM

1. We seldom concretely identify those situation and people we find stressful. To understand what brings on stress in your life, try to maintain a heightened awareness of your physical and mental feelings for a week. When you feel your heart racing, your muscles tightening, or your stomach contracting, ask yourself why. Keep a list of those things that trigger stressful feelings.

2. Make relaxation part of your daily routine. Deep breathing and simple stretches can be performed both at home and in the office. Taking a few minutes to sooth your soul by savoring a cup of tea or grounding yourself can center you, giving you the ability to deal with stress more effectively.

3. It can be difficult to let go of worries or thoughts that provoke anxiety. One technique involves dissipating stressful thoughts before they get out of control. Concentrate on the thought and firmly say “Stop” to prevent the thought from recycling itself in your mind. In doing so, you will be free of the thought’s power to influence your mood.
(more…)

healingarts | June 30, 2005 |

Dr. John Sarno | The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain

Pain, disability, misinformation, fear — that quartet has plagued the Western world for decades and the plague shows no sign of abating. Back, neck and limb pain are rampant, and statistics indicate that the epidemic is spreading. Disability in American industry from low back pain continues to increase year by year.

Industries that employ large numbers of people working at computers are experiencing great disability and health insurance problems because of a new pain disorder known as repetitive stress injury (RSI). Millions of Americans, mostly women, suffer from a painful malady of unknown cause called fibromyalgia. While gigantic medical industries have arisen to diagnose and treat these conditions, the plague continues.

This book is about that epidemic. It describes both a clinical experience that has identified the cause of the pain disorders and a method of treating them. Sadly, mainstream medicine rejects the diagnosis because it is based on the theory that the physical symptoms are initiated by emotional phenomena. Intelligent laymen in large numbers have embraced the concept, however, no doubt because they are not burdened by the bias imposed by a traditional medical education.

As if the pain epidemic were not of sufficient magnitude, a large group of physical disorders have been identified as equivalents of the pain syndrome, since they appear to stem from the same psychological process. These maladies have occurred commonly for years and, taken together with the widespread pain maladies, are universal in Western society. I refer to many of the headaches, gastrointestinal symptoms and allergies, as well as respiratory, dermatologic, genitourinary and gynecologic conditions that are the stuff of everyday life.
(more…)

healingarts | June 15, 2005 |

John Bradshaw, from Homecoming : Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

Buckminster Fuller, one of the most creative men of our time, loved to quote Christopher Morley’s poem about childhood:

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold
Of being only four years old.

Still young enough to be a part
Of Nature’s great impulsive heart,
Born comrade of bird, beast and tree
And unselfconscious as the bee-

And yet with lovely reason skilled
Each day new paradise to build
Elate explorer of each sense,
Without dismay, without pretense!

In your unstained transparent eyes
There is no conscience, no surprise:
Life’s queer conundrums you accept,
Your strange Divinity still kept. .

And Life, that sets all things in rhyme,
May make you poet, too, in time–
But there were days, O tender elf,
When you were Poetry itself!

(more…)

healingarts | June 14, 2005 |

Kara Jesella, Nerve.com

Like most children of the ’80s, I had received a reasonable sex education via pop culture by the age of 11. In fourth grade, I asked my mother what Darryl Hall was referring to when he sang “I Want to Play that Game Tonight,” and laughed knowingly when she answered “Monopoly.” I suffered eye strain from repeated late-night viewings of the Spice Channel and was a longtime aficionado of The Joy of Sex. Still, nothing quite prepared me for the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) I found in my parents’ basement.

It wasn’t the detailed diagrams of the female reproductive system, or the drawings of six different types of hymens that captivated me. Nor was it the righteous, womyn-power assertions such as, “We are learning to live our sexuality on our own terms.” No, it was the book’s explicit, unflinching description of fantasies: real women revealing their most private erotic imaginings about horses (ew) other women (less ew) and men (totally awesome, as I may actually have said in 1986). I read the scenarios over and over in the privacy of my locked bedroom, until I finally left for college, where the logistics of living with a roommate promptly put an end to that.
(more…)

healingarts | May 19, 2005 |

Louise Hay, from You Can Heal Your Life

Life is Really Very Simple. What We Give Out, We Get Back

What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us. I believe that everyone, myself included, is responsible for everything in our lives, the best and the worst. Every thought we think is creating our future. Each one of us creates our experiences by our thoughts and our feelings. The thoughts we think and the words we speak create our experiences.

We create the situations, and then we give our power away by blaming the other person for our frustration. No person, no place, and no thing has any power over us, for “we” are the only thinkers in it. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our minds, we will find it in our lives.

Which of these statements sounds like you?

“People are out to get me.”
“Everyone is always helpful.”

Each one of these beliefs will create quite different experiences. What we believe about ourselves and about life becomes true for us.
(more…)

healingarts | May 11, 2005 |

Jerry Jampolsky, from Forgiveness: The Greatest Healer of All

Consider for a moment that happiness is our natural state of being. At the Center for Attitudinal Healing, where forgiveness is so much a part of everything that we do, we say that the essence of our being is love!

We learn to look at life from the perspective that we are spiritual beings who are just temporarily in these bodies of ours. When we look upon our lives that way, we also begin to see that love and happiness are inseparable. And what forgiveness teaches us is that it is possible to choose love over fear and peace over conflict regardless of the circumstances affecting our lives.

Before we talk about forgiveness, let’s briefly explore the roots of unhappiness. By looking at where unhappiness starts, we can move toward a very different way of looking at the world. A good place to begin this exploration is with that part of us which believes that our happiness lies in external things.
(more…)

healingarts | May 9, 2005 |

Katherine Ellison | The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter

Anyone shopping for a Mother’s Day card today might reasonably linger in the Sympathy section. We can’t seem to stop mourning the state of modern motherhood. “Madness” is our new metaphor. “Desperate Housewives” are our new cultural icons. And a mother’s brain, as commonly envisioned, is impaired by a supposed full-scale assault on sanity and smarts.

So strong is this last stereotype that when a satirical Web site posted a “study” saying that parents lose an average of 20 I.Q. points on the birth of their first child, MSNBC broadcast it as if it were true. The danger of this perception is clearest for working mothers, who besides bearing children spend more time with them, or doing things for them, than fathers, according to a recent Department of Labor survey.

In addition, the more visibly “encumbered” we are, the more bias we attract: When volunteer groups were shown images of a woman doing various types of work, but in some cases wearing a pillow to make her look pregnant, most judged the “pregnant” woman less competent. Even in liberal San Francisco, a hearing last month to consider a pregnant woman’s bid to be named acting director of the Department of Building Inspection featured four speakers commenting on her condition, with one asking if the city truly meant to hire a “pregnancy brain.”

But what if just the opposite is true? What if parenting really isn’t a zero-sum, children-take-all game? What if raising children is actually mentally enriching for mothers - and fathers?
(more…)

healingarts | May 8, 2005 |