Nature’s rhythms or cycles include the four seasons and the 24-hour rotation of the earth. The physical body responds to these cycles by utilizing planetary signals and cues for the proper timing of secretions of hormones, chemicals and neuro-transmitters. Morning light sends the message to produce neurotransmitters, which then signal when it is time to wake-up. Neurotransmitters then prompt the body to produce cortisol and serotonin, elevating blood pressure and raising body temperature. At sunset, the body secretes melatonin and blood pressure drops in preparation for sleep.
The night shift, fluorescent lights, frequent traveling and lighting late into the evening have disrupted our connection with the sun, the primary circadian rhythm regulator. People used to follow the sun by waking at dawn, working outside during the day and going to sleep when the sun set. Now people are lucky if they get 30 minutes of sun on a lunch hour or the drive to work.
Disorders indicating the possibility of disrupted rhythms include depression, bipolar disorders, PMS, mood and sleep disorders, low libido, prenatal/postpartum depression, fatigue, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), ADD/ADHD. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers usually have affected circadian rhythms. Simple corrections in lifestyle habits are all it takes to shift the body back to the correct pattern. If difficulties persist, light therapy sessions will reset the circadian clock, restoring the body’s timing and levels of melatonin and serotonin. Some researchers believe that depression sufferers have unresponsive body clocks.
Wake therapy “reboots” the body clock, by waking the patient up several hours earlier than usual. Wake therapy needs to be used for only one night, followed by waking the patient every morning with a bright light. This reverts the rhythms back to an active day cycle, alleviating symptoms of depression.
Light therapy is usually administered (or recommended for home use) by a physician, physical therapist or psychologist. Look for a well-trained, experienced clinician.
]]>Eating habits, stress, toxicity, improper elimination, most prescription medications and the inability to excrete acids all contribute to an over-acidic state. The biggest factor is a diet with acid-producing foods such as meat, eggs and dairy, white flour, fried foods, coffee, soft drinks, alcohol, sugar and artificial sweeteners. The lower the pH, the more acidic the body fluid; the higher the pH, the more alkaline. You can easily test your saliva and urine with inexpensive pH test strips (litmus paper) that are available in the fish section of pet stores or order at www.HealerGuide.com/phtest.
The goal is to get your urine pH close to 7.0 and your saliva pH above 6.0. Correcting the pH balance is fast and easy and is accomplished by eating alkaline-forming fruits and vegetables.
Make an effort to continuously maintain a balanced state. Make a list of foods and beverages you consume on a regular basis and replace a minimum of 50 percent of the most acid-forming foods with alkaline-forming ones. The most acid-forming foods are sweeteners, coffee, alcohol, drugs and meat. The most alkaline-forming are fresh vegetables, green juice drinks, figs and lemons.
Start with simple things. Have a glass of water with a few lemon slices at each meal. Make one meal a day an alkaline-forming one. A food’s acid or alkaline-forming capacities have nothing to do with the actual pH of the food itself. Lemons are alkaline-forming in the body, but they test acidic before eaten. Cooked meat tests alkaline, but is highly acid-forming when digested.
]]>The media can create awareness in what truly is a brief amount of time. How many people believed in global warming two years ago? And how many of those were actually doing something about it? The challenge of healing our environment and restoring Mother Earth seems overwhelming, but when we take a small step by looking at our relationship to the environment, it’s a little easier to understand. At this level we can heal and master our lives and the lives of our families, and hopefully take the next step and participate in healing our world.
A multitude of environmental factors in our immediate surroundings contribute to poor health or lack of vitality, including a seemingly endless list of chemicals, pollutants and additives. Even so, the human body is continuously evolving and adapting. Mankind has survived the most destructive influences and will continue to do so.
Sometimes we’re so close to them that we can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. Imagine yourself in the cockpit of an airplane with a transparent floor. Now look down on the Earth. There are areas of deep forests, broad deserts, oceans and lakes. Using intuition and logic, which areas appear best able to support life? On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the most supportive, which would you consider a healthy place to live? Take a good look at the city of Los Angeles; how would you rate this city you call home?
Major influences always supersede minor ones. Imagine you are a fish living in an aquarium filled with dirty and disease-laden water. Even though you get adequate exercise by swimming, eat the healthiest fish food, meditate and pray every morning, chances are your energy, vitality and the quality of your life are less than perfect. The chances of getting sick are almost inevitable, because the environmental field or aquarium water is simply not supportive of life. Now, if you, as that same fish don’t exercise, meditate or pray, eat fish junk food, but live in the waters of the Amazon, it is much less likely that ill health will manifest, due to the extremely life-supportive Amazonian field. Healthy environmental fields can override bad personal habits, to a certain extent.
Given the above scenario, the first question to ask is, “Is my environment life-supportive?” If the answer is yes, then it’s time to pay attention to the more minor details. If you as an individual are unable to make a dramatic improvement where you are, then moving to a healthier environment is not such a bad idea. Following this advice does not necessarily mean moving out of town, unless of course, this choice appeals to you and is feasible. It may simply mean moving to a more environmentally supportive area of the city, maybe from downtown Los Angeles closer to the ocean, or from a house beside the freeway to one close to a park or the mountains.
All living creatures, including humans, have an energy field, a bubble of life force surrounding and permeating their bodies, called the aura. When we live in close proximity to each other, these fields mingle. If you could see these energy fields from a plane, you would see a huge mass of mingled fields in the big cities, creating a collective field. This collective field affects individual energy fields positively or negatively and influences the condition of one’s health. The degree of influence depends on several factors. The following experiment further demonstrates this. When a calm, emotionally balanced person enters a room filled with 10 anxious, upset or stressed-out people, he or she will have a tendency to become stressed as well, due to the group influence of the bio-energetic or radiatory field (auras) of the others. If you have never noticed your reaction to this common occurrence, try observing the shift in your thoughts, emotions and energy level when stuck in rush hour traffic.
This influential ability of the collective energetic field affects, but is not limited to health, relationships and finances. Observe the predominant characteristics of the field you live in or are surrounded by daily. If the environment is unhealthy or unsupportive, implement changes wherever and whenever possible. Even though it may seem like too big of a step, the payoff is an improved quality of life on many levels.
The sum of many negative minor influences may be as detrimental to your health as living in a garbage dump. Many of these corrections are easy to do on your own. If unable to investigate whether your home or office environment is unsupportive or harmful, work with a Feng Shui practitioner. Feng Shui is the healing modality that investigates and corrects unsupportive environmental influences. Professional Feng Shui practitioners apply and utilize the laws of nature to balance the environment of a home or office, helping create balance and harmony by promoting the flow of positive energy and neutralizing, or minimizing, negative or destructive energy.
After taking care of the major influences it is time to start correcting the secondary, minor influences.
]]>Remember a time when you couldn’t wait to get older? Each birthday was an eagerly awaited milestone. Then somewhere along the way a shift occurred. You no longer wanted to get older. Each birthday was less welcomed; you were no longer growing up, you were “aging.”
For me, that turning point didn’t come as early as I expected. The dreaded “30″ came and went and I wondered why people made such a big deal about getting older. Then 40 came and I was still wondering when this “aging” thing happened. I felt great. I looked great … well, at least still like the me I knew as myself. But then day I saw myself on a television monitor and I thought “Who is that? Oh dear, it’s me! I look so old!”
Not long after that I began to feel old at times too. That’s when I stopped looking forward to having another birthday … until I realized I had choices my grandmother and mother didn’t have.
My grandmother didn’t have many choices when it came to aging. She pretty much had to accept the idea of “aging gracefully.” My mother had more choices. We today we have lots of choices:
We can age gracefully, as my grandmother did without even thinking about it. We can stay active and young at heart despite the effects of aging on our bodies, as my mother whose now 89, has done.Or we could do what neither my grandmother nor my mother had the opportunity to do - take advantage of the many anti-aging regimens available to enable us to look and feel better than ever.
Well, at that point, I decided on the later. Now years later, Paul and I are far “younger” than we used to be. We feel better and look better than years ago. I had confirmation that it was just my imagination when an alumnae at my last high school reunion said, “Sarah, you look better now than you did in high school!” Boy, did that make my day! Paul got a similar confirmation when he attended his high school reunion. We won’t say what year that was, but just that it was long enough ago that the group class photo raised an intriguing question.
Why did some people at our reunions look at least 20 years younger than others?
Although they were all within a year of the same age, some folks at our reunions looked like they could have been the parents of others. Why such dramatic differences? The answer according to Dr. Michael Roizen, author of the book Your Real Age, might surprise you. Genes account for only 25% of the differences between why some people age more quickly than others, says Roizen. Our “real age” is determined by our lifestyle not just our birth date. Roizen has developed a test that tells you what your Real Age is and provides a detailed report for how you could knock years off your “age” by changing certain habits.
Thanks to my anti-aging regimen, it turns out I’m now 11 years younger than my chronological age and I could be “younger” yet if I did a few other things differently.
It seems we have a choice about how we age. Paul and I are choosing to stay as young and healthy as we can. When our doctor asked Paul at his annual physical how he was feeling, he could honestly say, “I feel better and am more fit than I was at 20 or 30!” He felt good saying that and meaning it. And that’s what’s most important, to feel good about our choice and about ourselves, no matter what our age.
You can find out your “Real Age” and what you can do to reverse the clock and grow younger than your years at realage.com.
]]>We work from home and live in the mountains about an hour from the city. Every three weeks or so we go into LA to run errands and do routine shopping. The trip usually ends up taking most of a day and each time we do this we notice we begin feeling ill about the time we start to drive back to the mountain.
On the way home I often feel so tired and achy that I yearn to go straight to bed the moment I get home. I can’t imagine having the energy to unload and put away the groceries et al, let alone wanting to fix and eat dinner. I’m always certain this time I will just collapse on the bed as soon as I when walk in the door.
But instead, oddly once when we get out of the car, breathe in the clean, clear mountain air and smell the vanilla fragrance of the Jeffrey Pines, suddenly we’re not only feeling better, we’re full of energy. Everything gets put away quickly and before I know it we’re enjoying a nice meal before starting out workout routines later in the evening.
Now I found out what accounts for this bizarre phenomenon. The LA Times reports that long hours of commuting are bad for one’s health. Researchers are finding that long commutes tend to:
The article is quick to point out that the affects of the “Sick Commuter Syndrome” are cumulative. In other words, the longer and more often one commutes, the more illness one may experience. Also when you in your 20s or early 30’s and have been commuting only for few years, you might not notice these affects. It’s once the years pass that the toll begins to show.
So, now I am feeling lucky. I only have to commute once every few weeks! But I’m sad there are so people must commute an hour or more each way every day, making them prone to feel these effects day after day.
These findings suggest that in the best of all possible worlds, health-wise at least, we would all work from home or near our homes and meet most or all of our shopping needs within a short walk or at worst a few minutes drive! Sounds good to me! While I hate urban sprawl, now I guess I don’t mind as much that the stores and shops we frequent are growing closer and closer to us each year as new development stretch its way up and down the Central California Valley.
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