I've written about how chronic back pain is best treated with a mind-body approach. This week a JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article shows that mindfulness, yoga, and cognitive behavioral therapy outperform usual care when it comes to low back...
The pace, pressures, and traumas of life pull us out of our heart and into our head. Living in our head keeps us in control and at a safe distance from reality and the creative, often vulnerable, felt wisdom of the heart. The heart's wisdom communicates as an energy...
One of the most effective healing techniques I've experienced, which also happens to be one of the easiest to learn, so easy you can teach it to your children, is also one of the most difficult to explain or to make sense of from a western scientific point of view....
A key theme of my blog posts is that ignored, avoided, and especially, unconscious feelings trigger a stress response that's largely responsible for the breakdown of mental, emotional, and physical health that's so prevalent. Recently a meta-study that was...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...