Real change is hard work. Think about a time when you changed a habit, really shifted something, and consider all the effort that was involved. Maybe it was something proactive (like quitting smoking) or something reactive (letting go of someone who broke up with you). It required a lot of repetition to sculpt a new […]
Pain is Feeling that has Become too Tightly Connected to the Body
Ever met someone who has a really weak and limp handshake, the kind where the hand flops around in your grip? It is not very satisfying. In fact, it can be a little disconcerting because you don’t feel like you have been properly able to meet or encounter the person. Where is she? What is he […]
Cancer and Chemotherapy Support
An exciting development is that more and more people are learning about mistletoe therapy as a supportive treatment for cancer care. This is probably related to news of an ongoing study at Johns Hopkins related to tumor therapy with mistletoe preparations and the education and advocacy of Believe Big. Immuno-therapies for cancer are also becoming an important […]
Spring Cleaning, for the Body, Heart, and Mind
If you listen very carefully you can hear that the earth is beginning to wake up, with bulbs pushing out of the soil and new buds on the trees. What had become brown, dry, frozen and mineralized over the winter is now enlivened and reinvigorated. Sometimes we are right there with this process and have already […]
What’s the Healthiest Way to Work with Fever?
There are times when you find that the way you have been approaching things, even if it is by doing exactly what you were instructed to do, is backwards. I remember vividly a professor saying in the first week of medical school that “fifty-percent of what we are going to teach you is wrong and […]
A Fourfold Approach to Healing
There are a lot of different terms for describing therapeutic approaches that think differently from a conventional, Western-medicine approach. For a long time, they were considered to be “alternative” therapies—meaning something completely different and separate from usual medical practice. Then the term “complementary” therapies became popular—suggesting something still different from usual practice, but which could […]
Skin: What a Marvelous Sense Organ
You can read in many different places that our skin is the largest organ of our body. Some parts of our skin we know quite well, such as the skin of our face. We identify with that skin a lot. Other parts of our skin we may hardly notice, like the skin on our elbows, […]
Pain, Sleep, Seizures: Windows to Healthy, and Imbalanced, Wakefulness
The beginning of August offered a powerful experience for me when a wide-ranging group of anthroposophic doctors, nurses and therapists gathered for a conference about “Transforming Chronic Pain–a Spiritual Task for Our Time.” The meeting included very inspiring presentations from several doctors in Europe, especially one with deep experience in palliative care and another with very poor and challenged patients in central […]
Why Trying Harder Doesn’t Make Anxiety Better
In many areas of life if you try harder, focus more, consciously push further, then performance and success improve. It is tempting to extend that logic to all areas of life, but medically that principle does not always work. In truth, only specific portions of our body’s activities are open to conscious guidance, while many other realms […]
Stomach Flu, Probiotics and Digesting the World
Here are three paragraphs about supporting and strengthening your digestion: When you have an acute gastroenteritis (more commonly know as the stomach “flu”), a simple, but very helpful trick: If you get a stomach virus–the kind that quickly goes around schools and workplaces and causes multiple episodes of vomiting–it is very easy to get dehydrated. This […]