Getting In Tune With You

Get In Touch With A NOW Attitude!

Food For Thought

Getting In Tune With You

Our thoughts and emotions can get us well and keep us well, or make us sick and keep us sick— Our thoughts and feelings affect us. They affect all aspects of our lives: our health, relationships, even finances. What I come across most often in my work is the impact that thoughts and feelings have on overall health and well being. Negative thoughts and unexpressed feelings can create energy blockages, which become the birthplace for disease.Ancient wisdom and modern science describe the inherent link between mind and body, and described scientific research that demonstrates the effect of thoughts and feelings on our physical health.

Our medical and mainstream culture doesn't readily support being in touch with our emotions, especially ones that are judged to be negative. Many of us spend our lives not even knowing how we feel, let alone being able to express feelings. Instead, we may medicate ourselves or escape into various activity to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings. Workaholics, food, alcohol, addiction to exercise, dependence on pharmaceuticals and relationships are some of the ways we can avoid knowing our feelings and ourselves.

Feelings are our natural gauges. Anger, sadness, fear, whatever you are feeling, are sensitive instruments for knowing what is happening within us. It's what we do in response to our various feeling states than can become harmful to us. Keeping uncomfortable feelings inside and even releasing them in a negative way can make us sick. When we learn to observe our feelings, and "just watch" them, rather than keeping them stuck inside our bodies, we can release the negative energy that poisons, and learn to harness the amazing inherent power that each one of us holds.

Stream-of-Consciousness - Become aware of all your thoughts and feelings, including fears, resentments and anxieties. If you are not certain, then just write that. Even if you are feeling that you don't want to write, write that down! Be "in the moment" with whatever is going on. Do not censor or judge what you are writing. Take your feelings to the limit. For example, if you are worried about money, write why, what might happen—your innermost and deepest fears. If you are having a hard time with a spouse, significant other, or co-worker, write about this. As you are engaged in this process, your mind will naturally have reflective thoughts in response: Difficult feelings will surface – now step back and observe these feelings as if you were looking at someone else. Once this is done you have begun the transition to gaining control and choosing positive responses.

Scientists and Mystics - What distinguishes Western allopathic medicine, based on the pharmacological treatment of diagnoses, from all other healing traditions are two key concepts: the separation of mind and body and the notion that nature can be explained materialistically. On the other hand, every non-allopathic healing tradition recognizes the essential link between psyche and soma (The body of an individual as contrasted with the mind or psyche). "Dis-ease" is the result of the disturbed and imbalanced mind showing up in the physical body with negative thoughts and emotions as the causative factors. Holistic Healing necessitates addressing these elements. Getting well is not just about fixing the physical body.

Thoughts are powerful vibrations that can keep us well or make us sick. Negative thoughts can make us sick and keep us sick. Removing the negative clears the path for Positive thoughts and energy that can heal us and transform our lives. These concepts do not come from the realms of pseudoscience. In fact, there is a tremendous body of scientific research that can support these principles. Researchers in physics and engineering have been conducting experiments that suggest the profound effects of consciousness on the material world—how our thoughts can affect us.

For over 25 years, scientists at PrincetonUniversity's Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory have demonstrated powerful correlations between human mental/emotional intention and machine behavior. They have shown that untrained individuals can influence the output of random mechanical and electronic number generators, just by thinking in which direction the numbers should go. These effects were found to be independent of space and time. Effects also occurred when the individual was thousands of miles away.

These principles are timeless and have roots in many of the world's ancient traditions. However, Western allopathic medicine usually ignores these concepts. Most doctors did not study advanced physics or nutrition in undergraduate or medical school. These models dramatically influenced our understanding of nature, and physicists became more like philosophers. These new views of nature were parallel to the ancient traditions of other cultures, to the healing traditions of other cultures and to mystical, views of life.

Homeopathic medicine, a Western traditional medicine with ancient roots, based on the law of similars, treats patients according to their mental, emotional and physical symptoms. Ancient Chinese medicine and Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine) draw links between bodily symptoms and emotions. In Chinese medicine, the lung is the repository for grief, the liver for rage, and the kidney for fear. In Ayurveda, the vata dosha (thin body type, light and airy), may yield many types of arthritis and worry, while the pitta dosha (medium build, fire and water elements), ulcers and rage.

Healers vs. Hoaxers. Before the take-over of pharmaceutical giants, with their vast offerings of new fixes for our physical failings, physicians were healers. Voltaire described the healers role as that of the amuser, to keep the patient amused long enough so that nature could do her healing work. Sir William Osler, considered one of Western allopathic medicine's founding fathers, maintained that it was more important to know the patient that had the disease, than to know what kind of disease the patient had.

However, Western allopathic medicine is not in the business of healing. Rather, it is a disease care system. By its very nature, our Western allopathic medical model makes people sick and keeps them sick. Indeed, its approach to chronic illness cures no one of anything. Pharmaceuticals merely suppress symptoms, interfering with the true and natural healing mechanism of the human organism. Skeptics and those who promote the current dominant biomedical paradigm, prescribe inexplicable cures to the realms of placebo or perhaps an initial incorrect diagnosis. In fact, they are ignoring that most powerful mediator of healing: the awakened mind, the ability to be objective, the power of consciousness.

All these ancient concepts, once lost, are now enjoying resurgence with the advent of unhappy patients and truth-seeking scientists. These scientists are the pharmacologists, experimental toxicologists and immunologists doing low-dose research to support the veracity of the homeopathic phenomenon. They are the physicists and engineers mentioned earlier, lending credence to the concept of mind affecting matter and mind affecting body. They are the open-minded physicians and other researchers conducting research on the power of prayer and on the healer phenomenon.

Some examples of how our minds can affect our health include the following: positive thinking lowered blood sugar levels in diabetics, lessened asthma attacks, reduced colitis symptoms and improved immune function in HIV-infected individuals. Not only can our thoughts affect our bodies, but also our thoughts can affect others. Numerous studies have demonstrated the clinical efficacy of prayer, most notably the positive effect of prayer on patients in a coronary care unit.

In addition to this concept of the inherent connectedness of mind and body, as suggested by both ancient wisdom and modern science, is the existence of some absolute source-entity, energy, connectedness—which embraces all and affects us all. Healing traditions around the globe draw on this source as a conduit to healing.

While we may delight in acknowledging this ancient wisdom, we are still missing the link. Until we can realize that the mind is more powerful than molecules, than pharmaceuticals, and that we can apply this concept to actually heal our own bodies, we are not realizing the full potential that lies within each of us.

I love you! I hate you!
The Los Angeles Times

Emotional extremes can thrill in books and films, but in real life, low self-esteem may be the cause of such rocky relationships.

As the playwright, poet and marriage counselor all know, the emotional boundary between love and hate can be surprisingly porous. For many, partners can inspire intense tenderness and devotion one week and glassy-eyed loathing the next.

For others, the feelings for a loved one are much more constant and less apt to flip between extremes.

Such flips between loving and loathing can make for a wilder life — witness the sizzling combat and sex scenes between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" — but not necessarily a happier one.

Until now, there have been few explanations for why some people exist in states of emotional extremes while others are able to accept the fact that nobody is perfect.

Now social psychologists have come up with a possible explanation for the emotional roller coaster some people ride. A recent study exploring love-hate relationships suggests that the fuel behind it is that old workhorse of the self-help movement: self-esteem.

Margaret Clark, professor of psychology at YaleUniversity and lead author of the study, wanted to see if self-esteem was the trait enabling some people to integrate positive and negative information about others in a healthy way, and whether its absence prevented a realistic picture of partners as that inevitable mix of positive and negative characteristics.

Researchers found that people with low self-esteem — as measured by standard psychological scales — seem to have "separate stores of positive and negative partner information." In other words, their partner, relative or friend is either idealized or vilified.

The report, published in May in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that healthy self-esteem — and not superhuman powers of forgiveness — is what enables a wife to say, "Even though my husband completely forgot our anniversary, he was so sweet and apologetic when he realized his mistake we had a glorious evening out two days later."

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Blood pressure rises in stressed-out workers

Reuters - New study findings confirm what some office managers, senior management officials and other white-collar workers have suspected for years: working in highly stressful jobs can increase your blood pressure.

"We found that cumulative exposure to job strain resulted in significant increases in systolic blood pressure among male white-collar workers, especially those with low levels of social support at work," Dr. Chantal Guimont, of Laval University, in Quebec City, Quebec, and her colleagues write in this month's American Journal of Public Health.

Some of the studies assessing the impact of job strain on blood pressure have yielded conflicting results, so Guimont and her colleagues looked at the issue again in a study of 6,719 men and women white-collar workers, aged 18 to 65 years, in Quebec City.

These participants completed a questionnaire about their physical activity level, smoking history and other potential items that might increase their risk of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, as well as about their family history of the two conditions, and characteristics of their work and social life. They also had several measurements of their blood pressure.

At follow-up, 7.5 years later, men who were exposed to high levels of job strain throughout the course of the study had blood pressures that were nearly two points above that of men with no exposure to job strain -- an increase comparable to that observed among men with sedentary behavior.

In particular, men with the most job strain were 33 percent more likely to experience an increase in blood pressure.

What's more, men with a high level of job stress at follow-up, who initially reported no such stress, had similarly increased blood pressures, the researchers report; those with high levels of job strain at follow-up only were 40 percent more likely to have increased blood pressures.

The association was similar for women, but the effects were more pronounced among men, the researchers note