Low Thyroid, Adrenals, and Iodine?
There's a lot of conflicting information around the use of iodine supplementation. There is conflict surrounding whether or not supplementation is helpful or injurious, as well as, which forms of iodine are best. Since iodine is necessary for the proper function of...
Support for Stressed Adrenals
The adrenal glands bear the brunt of our overly stressed lifestyles. Adrenal overwork and fatigue help to explain how 'stress', something that can seem so mental or emotional, leads to physical illness. Chronic stress disrupts the balance of the adrenal hormones which...
Body Awareness Quiets the Mind
Have you noticed how a mind can be a terrible thing? A busy mind can torment us in many ways, negatively influencing both our psyche and body. The mind is busy, often negative … worrying or obsessing, and the body is tense. Many of us are so hypnotized by our minds...
How Do I Quiet My Busy, Anxious Mind?
A busy mind, one that disturbs our peace of mind, or sleep, or makes us anxious, is a reflection of a deeper imbalance. A busy mind reflects a stressed nervous system and brain with negative implications for our mental, emotional and physical health. A busy mind can...
Anxiety and the Breathing Cure
When you're anxious you tend to over breathe versus breathing silently and slowly through your nose. When you breathe too much you tend to exhale too much carbon dioxide and this actually lowers the amount of oxygen that is available to your tissues and especially to...
Talking to … Versus Drugging Chronic Pain
The author of Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert recently shared her account of how she dealt with chronic, severe knee pain that hadn't responded to treatment, natural or otherwise. She decided to get very quiet and simply ask her knee what it needed. The response...
Combating Stress-induced Food Cravings
It becomes more difficult to exercise self-discipline when your brain function and body chemistry are negatively influenced by stress. During the stress response, which could be triggered by something as ordinary as an upsetting phone call, our neurology and chemistry...
Best Treatment for Stress-Induced Pain
One of the primary reasons that chronic pain doesn't resolve is that the cause of the pain isn't being addressed. Surprisingly, most chronic pain is driven by brain circuits that are stress-induced. One scenario is when we've had pain for a period of time the brain...
Acupuncture, Stress & Your Brain
New research is confirming that acupuncture exerts a powerful influence on the brain. These findings help to explain why acupuncture can be so helpful for so many issues. A new study from the Georgetown University Medical Center published in the journal...
Chronic Pain is Brain Pain
One of the most respected clinicians in the treatment of chronic pain is Dr. John Sarno of the NYU Rehabilitative Medicine department. His research shows that up to 95% of chronic pain lingers because it is ultimately generated by the mind and brain. This...
Progesterone and Breast Health
I recently read a study published in the journal Nature showing that the addition of progesterone should be helpful in treating about 50% of breast cancers. It’s known that your body produces progesterone naturally, but that this production is minimized by the body’s...
Train Your Brain, Transform Your Health
This blog is about the value of befriending and taming your limbic brain in the pursuit of health and happiness. Ever since Swami Rama, the noted yogi, was studied at the Menninger Institute in the 1960's it's been known that we can indeed influence unconscious bodily...
ADHD, Sleep Disturbances, & Acupuncture
It's often believed that the overactive mind that prevents an adult or child with ADHD from falling asleep is a symptom of that illness. My experience is that the overactive mind is a symptom of an imbalanced autonomic nervous system (ANS) that in fact contributes to...
Heart Intelligence, Inflammation, and Healing
Inflammation is epidemic and leads to pain and illness ... in fact most illness, both physical issues like arthritis and psycho-emotional diagnoses like anxiety or depression. Inflammation is a natural, temporary part of a healing process, but when it becomes chronic...
ADD, ADHD, or Just Scattered?
Whether we've been diagnosed with an attention disorder, or we're just feeling scattered, we (adults and children) can learn to be more in control of our minds and bodies. To improve brain function we need to be aware of what causes foggy thinking, a lack of focus,...
Rapid Steps for Stress
While much of the research concerning the benefits of self-regulation practices like meditation and mindfulness focuses on 20-30 minute periods of practice daily, quite a lot can be accomplished within very brief 30 second sessions. 30 seconds is all it takes Within...
Depression … It’s Not What You Think
We’ve been taught to believe that depression and anxiety are the result of chemical imbalances in the brain … that are best treated pharmaceutically … without any consideration for what was actually causing the imbalances in the first place. That’s the mainstream...
Your Body is a Source of Guiding Wisdom
In my experience most of us are unfamiliar with our body as a source of knowledge or wisdom. It may be because of an almost universal identification with the thinking mind. I don’t know if we blame this on Descartes who said “I think, therefore I am” or on stress...
From Drugs to Bugs
In my previous posts regarding the stress response I mentioned how damaging stress was to our health and well-being in general and to the digestive system more specifically. The takeaway was that we need to learn to turn off the stress response as best we can ......
How to Measure the Stress Response
One of the insidious effects of a chronic stress response is that we can become desensitized to it's harmful influences. So it's common that an individual may not subjectively feel the appropriate degree of the injurious effects of stress. And because stress is so...