Category Archives: Health and Wellbeing

Humanity/Healing – compared to – Medical/Medicine.

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“My training as a doctor focused almost exclusively on science, relegating everything else to, at best, second-class status. When treatments didn’t work, instead of recognizing the impact of societal, cultural and systemic factors or limitations of our research and care, we blamed the patient or moved on to a better case.”

(Dr Louise Aronson, Elderhood, 2019)

Dr Aronson is a professor of medicine at the University of California. She has numerous awards including the Gold Professorship in Humanism in Medicine.

Her book is another clear case study in the difference between medical medicine and humanity and healing. And the reason I chose her quote today is to help reeducate you further in your own self healing abilities, which you will not readily learn from the established medical norm.

She says, “Like many doctors, I went into medicine because I wanted to help people. And like many medical students, I quickly discovered that medical education is more about chemical structures and biology, diseases and organs, than about humanity and healing.”

Connecting deeper with your humanity is key to deep inner self healing. A Body Mindfulness practice is an avenue to tapping this inner healing ability that you carry around within you every moment of every day. You have the ability to heal remarkable things within you and Dr Aronson is yet another highly respected doctor that verifies this.

Continue to believe that with deep inner focus, you can heal yourself in ways medicine cannot yet comprehend. But you have to do the deeper work and for it to go deep you need to sit with yourself through everything that arises, comfortable or uncomfortable and do it regularly. Even when the results are not yet showing up.

You can do it, I know you can. I’ve seen it time and again with many people.

Staying vital and alive for a lot longer, as you age

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“There’s …a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We’re capable of both, but simply keeping people alive – decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility – is no virtue.”

(David A. Sinclair PhD, Lifespan, 2019)

Australian researcher Dr Sinclair has just released a book on his research into extending life and vitality and he has made a few breakthroughs. He says,

“Many of my colleagues agree. There is no biological law that says we must age. Those who say there is, don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Dr Sinclair believes ageing is a disease and not an inevitability, and that he has managed to reverse ageing in mice. He says prolonged vitality will include more active, more healthy and many more happy years and it is coming sooner than most people expect.

I’ve long believed that as time goes by, you have more years to actually get healthier as long as you are doing the biological natural things that create this. With the proof that our brains can continue to grow and evolve indefinitely, we know now that you are not condemned to growing painfully old as was once thought.

Dr Sinclair is applying some of these breakthroughs to himself and says he is now 50 years old and feels like a kid.

Creating good stress in your body helps – intermittent fasting, regular intense exercise and lowering the temperature of the room to make your body work a little harder.
I would add – a good mindfulness practice and regular access to your hidden emotional blocks and traumas that over stress your body (the bad stress) for prolonged periods of time.

Having the Courage to face your Demons

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“Manning up in the past was to suffer in silence, manning up now is to put your hand up.”

(Danny Frawley, AFL Football Great/Coach, 2019)

Danny Frawley died in a car crash hitting a tree last Monday afternoon. He was only 56. The whole Australian AFL football world was in shock that this great man had died.

He was the second longest serving captain ever of the St.Kilda football club – the club that I follow – so I remember his playing days well. He also did some good things in his coaching days and then was a great host and commentator in the media, radio and TV. He was a great leader and inspired many. He was much loved by all.

Danny had major depression issues over the last ten years. He was one of the first men in football to go public with his mental health issues. Having them splashed across the newspapers would not have been easy. This was such a brave thing to do for a celebrity and for a man so much in the public eye of the australian football world.

I am hoping his legacy will have a wide reaching effect on all men, to stop playing tough and pretending ‘she’ll be right mate’ and be brave and courageous enough to speak up and ask for help without feeling it is a sign of weakness. In fact it is a sign of great courage.

It takes great courage to face your demons. It takes men even greater courage to do that, because of cultural conditioning growing up. I believe it is the beginning of a death sentence when a man decided to completely suppress his real feelings in order to be or look strong. This is just not healthy whatsoever. Blocking off feelings reduces your life span.

It takes great courage to face what you have going on within you. I see this regularly with new clients, coming in shaking and scared at what will be revealed. I was the same. Having been through it myself, most are able to calm down fairly quickly and begin the deep inner process.

Looking back at all the sessions I had over the years, I would often be sitting in the waiting area terrified at what I was likely to show to the therapist which had never been safe to show ever before in my life, even to myself. This type of courage leads to freedom and greater health in your life. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.

Doing a regular Body Mindfulness meditation practice means you will have to go within and eventually face some of your old traumas and demons that you could not face in the past. Don’t give up when uncomfortable feelings arise. Just take a smaller piece, whatever is manageable and face that. Do that regularly and you will progress further than ever before. You will thrive.

Your body – the door way to greater health

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“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”

(Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005)

Last week I quoted from Eckhart’s book that preceded The Power of Now. This week the quote is from the book that followed The Power of Now.

Everyone will have events in their lives where there are strong negative emotions that are hard to deal with. People find ways to cope with such events.

But coping is not healing and at some point those negative emotions need to be dealt with and released. If not, as Tolle says, they accumulate and join together to form tensions, pressures, pains, muscular restrictions, energy drains, limitations, stiffness, and then later, affect our thinking creating anxiety, depression and if still not dealt with, much worse, disease and even serious injury.

The good news is that you can do something about it for yourself by mindfully connecting to your body on a regular basis. Taking time to connect within allows you to contact the cells that are carrying that built up negative emotion.

By switching off distracting thoughts you open an inner door way within your body that allows you access to the community of cells that make up the different parts of your body. This crucial connection allows for a lot of self healing that scientists and doctors are still coming to grips with.

Learning to connect within, gives you unprecedented access to your physical vehicle as well as your past unprocessed emotions and traumas. Facing this past material is not always easy but it is worth the resulting freedom, reduced drama and enhanced health that is waiting on the other side of that old hidden pain.

This can be difficult to believe if you have been brought up thinking you have to always take something when you are unwell.

But if you learn how to face something now,
you most likely won’t have to take something later.

Your Practice, Your Spirit and your Better Health

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“Recent research studies show that, on average, religious people suffer less from anxiety and depression than non-religious people; they are less prone to suicide, less likely to smoke, and less likely to abuse alcohol or other drugs.”
(Rupert Sheldrake, Science and Spiritual Practices, 2017)

Biologist and Biochemist Rupert Sheldrake has written some very interesting books over the years and this one is no exception.

Religious people seem to enjoy much better health and wellbeing because of their spiritual practices. Some of these practices involve meditation, gratitude, forgiveness and improving relationships.

It’s the meditation aspect that interests me here. Praying is a form of meditation, when a person slows down their thinking, closes their eyes and focuses on something other than their conscious thinking mind. Anything that takes you out of the conscious intellect for a little while and allows you to focus on your body, your surrounding space and other people, turns out, is very good for your health.

You don’t have to be religious to enjoy the benefits of body mindfulness meditation even though you can have experiences in the process that feel spiritual. The more you practice, as you become comfortable in just being in your body and your body heals further, you can begin (if you want) to expand out further outside your body and experience much more.

There is growing evidence that our minds can extend beyond our physical body. Through years of personal practice, this is certainly my experience. Sheldrake through his research coined the term morphic resonance to explain this link, and what a link it is!

More on this later.

Feel Positive, Live Longer

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Last post covered the health of your Heart. In this one, we focus on longevity.

“Just as attitude affects the heart,…Yale scientists even concluded that attitude was more influential than blood pressure, cholesterol levels, lack of smoking, a healthy body weight and exercise levels in how long a person lived.”

(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)

How important is research like this that keeps coming out? Strongly and continually pointing to how positive emotions improve your health and help you live many years longer than negative based people. The overall research indicates clearly that attitude impacts your health in a very significant way.

So anything you can do to be more positive and feel more positive emotions throughout your day will improve your physical health directly and have you live longer.

In my experience, this is why people who keep a gratitude journal where you write in it what you were grateful for during the day tend to feel a big positive difference. So making this activity a habit can really help. Even if you just do it in your head, but do it everyday.

If feeling more regular positive feelings equals a healthy and longer life, it makes sense that you should jump on board and do it everyday. A lot of people can’t do this for very long because it is not always easy. For to genuinely feel positive emotions (and this is key) you must allow the negative ones to release. Otherwise you are just faking it and not really feeling anything of substance.

Going within, in a body mindfulness practice, helps you to face and release the negative emotions that cover up your natural positive ones. Once the negative ones (usually pain, anger and fear) are acknowledged in your body and allowed to move naturally, the positive health benefits can begin to surface and spread throughout your body.

This is the natural authentic way to positive emotions, with no push, pretending or force of willpower.

Anger and its link to the risk of Heart Disease (Attack)

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I focused on Cancer in the last post. This week we look at Heart Disease (Heart Attack).

“The connection between attitude and the heart is so reliable that a 30 year study published in 2003 in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that ‘…hostility is one of the most reliable indicators of coronary heart disease risk’.”

(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)

According to the World Health Organisation (in May 2018) the leading cause of death in the world in 2016 was Heart Disease (Heart Attack), followed by Stroke, accounting for 27% (15.2 million) of all deaths world wide.

Then we have studies like the above quote that strongly link heart attacks to hostility, or as I would word it, the emotion of excess and prolonged anger in your mind and body.

If you would like to self heal yourself through body mindfulness meditation, it is imperative that you also focus on the emotion that sits with the sensations you feel in your body during a practice. Taking the time to feel the emotion, will go a long way to improving your health and immune defense against disease.

By spending quite, deep and prolonged time in a body mindfulness practice you can uncover your hidden frustrations, blame, hates, people you cannot ever forgive, angry judgments and hostilities towards others. Deeper down there will probably be suppressed rage and fury at injustices.

Your intellect can rationalise these old traumas and subdue them, but going deeper (into your body) you can uncover what is still actively firing in you emotionally. If it is anger related, then we have a red flag for a future heart attack.

Express that anger, acknowledge it, get it out, throughout your body, release it and make peace with what you have hated for however long, This will literally bring peace and lightness to your physical heart and lower the risk of ever getting a heart attack.

But it must be felt IN YOUR BODY not just intellectually in your head, hence why doing a regular body mindfulness practice is so vital to your health.

Expressing Emotions to Heal Disease

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“In our body, cancer cells never arise in the heart or small intestine, because the heart and small intestine are warm, with high blood circulation and high oxygen content…Cancer is the end result of alexithymia – or not expressing feelings or emotions.”

(Kelly A. Turner, Ph.D, Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, 2014)

Body Mindfulness work is excellent for getting you still and inward enough to heal a lot of issues and diseases. Cancer’s link to emotional suppression is very strong now with many studies and research all pointing to the truth of the above quote.

In your practice when you go within and stay there long enough, the diseased or suppressed parts of your cellular structure begin to reveal themselves to your awareness and consciousness. You begin to bring these cut off parts into the light of the present moment where they can heal. Most times when they reveal themselves, the releases can be somatic, physical, emotional and feeling and even involve small or big movements, depending on what was unfinished in the traumatic event, that shut that part of you off, in the first place.

So as you advance with this work, you have the opportunity to go very deep and heal things that the majority of doctors in western medicine cannot make sense of. It’s a whole other paradigm, a whole other world where you have much more control of your health and wellbeing then you were ever taught was possible.

You are that amazing on the inside and can do (by today’s standards) remarkable things. (I’ve certainly witnessed this with clients often, in my private practice.)

I look forward to the day when this is the new norm.

We are well on our way 🙂