Health, Relationships, Success, and Spirituality

Fear of Meditation

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 08:34:35 -0800

Question:
I am 52 and have learned no formal techniques of meditation, but because I am always so full of fears I was advised to meditate. When I sit down to do it, immediately I start moving towards an engulfing darkness. ...

Letting Go of a Relationship

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:54:13 -0800

Question:
I have just come out of a relationship (he ended it) and am having difficulty letting go. I understand that this man may not be my soul mate / twin flame, but I still wish we could be together, if only to experience one another in the moment because I was happy when I was with him. ...

Exaiming Psychotherapy

Wed, 28 May 2008 06:21:45 -0800

Question:

What is your opinion about psychotherapy as a healing tool if in the process one has to continuously focus and analyze the past in order to understand and overcome the suffering/effects caused by past experiences?

Answer:

Psychotherapy is such a broad category and so many different practices are done under that general name, that it would be overly ...

Trust Your Body and Reconnect to Its Healing Power

Fri, 16 May 2008 06:17:34 -0800

Western medicine has proceeded on the assumption that the mind is intelligent but that the body isn't. In effect, the body is a machine made of meat. This machine needs fixing at times, and being deviously complicated, with billions of interconnected parts, it has innumerable ways to break down.

Medical research doesn't so much deny the body's intelligence as ignore it. ...

Examining the Mind-Body Connection to Health

Thu, 15 May 2008 05:55:03 -0800

Even as alternative medicine becomes more popular, it faces a huge challenge. Can it reliably replace or enhance conventional medicine? In earlier posts, I sketched in the faults of conventional medicine, which are well known in any case. I don't want to gloss over its triumphs, however. ...

Can Alternative Therapies Enhance Conventional Medicine?

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:48:32 -0800

The great promise of mind-body medicine will never be fulfilled as long as the treatments are unpredictable. This has been a major stumbling block in the West, ever since the original excitement over acupuncture in the '70s and Ayurveda in the '80s. Patients who have been helped sing the praises of alternative medicine while official clinical trials don't satisfy the skeptics. ...

How You Think About Illness Affects Your Recovery

Fri, 02 May 2008 10:32:51 -0800

A tide of media articles over the past few years has made it clear that medicine is putting almost all its future hopes on genetics. But a small study from UCLA offers an intriguing alternative, one that could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Researchers found that children and teenagers who described themselves as positive thinkers had higher thresholds of tolerance for pain. ...

Experiences, Pain and Your Brain

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:38:34 -0800

The issue of the experience of pain very confusing. There is a lot of subjective control over pain. Researchers are aware by now that what rates as a 10 (excruciating) on the pain scale for one person may rate as only a 2 or 3 (tolerable) for another.

It is also known that even when surgical patients are placed under general anesthesia to block pain entirely, under hypnosis these same patients recall that they experienced excruciating pain. ...

High-Fat Diets, Their Dangers, and Other Medical Myths

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:06:09 -0800

Recently I wrote about half a dozen medical myths that float around society. This was in the wake of a huge, definitive government study proving, once and for all, that a high-fat diet doesn't cause breast cancer or heart disease in women. ...

Why the Healthiest Don't Get Sick

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:12:48 -0800

The assumption that healthy people are just lucky, have good genes, or practice preventive medicine is actually no more than a half-truth. The healthiest people in our society - meaning those who avoid catastrophic disease and live to old age without major illness - fall into a different profile.

With good genes you can expect to add roughly three years to your life span, but no one who has lived to 100 ever had a child who lived that long. ...