Different Ways for Thinking About “Building Immunity”
Let’s flip our usual thinking for a moment: maybe this whole time of the corona virus is about getting stronger, not sicker? What if this time is truthfully a deeply needed push, urging us make changes that would otherwise be inconvenient or ignored? Most of the news we hear centers around masks, quarantines, social distancing and vaccine development. Those are all outside factors, which will only influence our health from outside. What about inside factors—can they make a difference? How does our soul state influence our health and our immunity?
How do you Define Healing? Thinking about Symptom Reduction vs. Lasting Resolution
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 way of thinking or willing. Usually, whether the new habit is exercise, eating healthier food, not picking at mosquito bites, meditating, not getting stuck in anger or turning off all screen in the hour before going to bed, we do well for a while, then it falls apart and we have to start over again. Changing something in a meaningful and sustainable way takes time and it takes repetitive practice. Research by Phillippa Lally has shown that there is actually quite a broad time frame for changing a habit (18 to 254 days), with an average of 66 days, and she and others suggests a 10-week plan for really shifting a habit. That means on average that it takes more than two months to transform some part of ourselves.
One way to help reduce the chances of getting ill is to proactively give the body what it needs. Warmth, whether physical, emotional, or social, helps integrates us into a whole. That’s not just a physiologic process—helping others in our community by sharing useful information is a social and spiritual correlate to that process. Right now is a time in the world when we need to think about how we help each other, not just get stuck in fear. Consider sharing this with others in your community.
Plastic Surgery for Food? The GMO Question. Living an Authentic Life, part 4
Is there such a thing as living food? If so, does that mean that there is dead food? Why should it make a difference, if the most important thing about nutrition is the calories, fats, protein and vitamin content of a food? Let's explore this a little: certainly fresh food tastes better, and fruit that has ripened on the tree or vine has a whole different quality than fruit that was picked green and shipped around the world. It also seems increasingly clear, from all kinds of different perspectives, that highly processed food is not good for us. Processed food is not the same. Like formula for babies, which even if it chemically is as close as we can possibly make it to breast milk, it is not an equivalent. That is at least in part due to the fact that the nutritive substance in breast milk has already been enlivened by the mother's body. It can easily be digested and taken up into the body. The substance of the milk is living—it loses some of that when it is frozen or stored for too long, but it is still an amazingly living nutrition. We can think about general food nutrition in the same way—that the closer the food we eat is to its original growing state, the better we can make use of it. We meet it in a different way and can incorporate it into our own living physiology in a better way. Therefore, we can say (though someone who relies solely on laboratory analysis will often argue this) that the Vitamin A, K, and B vitamins in spinach are more living and healthier than if we eat those same vitamins in a concentrated pill form….
Why email can’t possibly meet our full humanity (and yes, I’m sending you an email): Living an Authentic Life, part 2
One part of leading an authentic life is about being conscientious with our body, and trying not to repetitively deceive our own physiology (see last month's post about artificial sweeteners, as well as a little update at the bottom*). But that is not the only place where we are being numbed into disconnection. A lot of our human authenticity is threatened by the way we connect to the outside world around us, especially the people we know and love. How do you communicate with them? How often do you feel that you have made a real connection? It's easy these days to do a lot of communicating, but not very much connecting.There is an important distinction between them—we can speak, write, or text a lot, but that doesn't mean that a real connection is being built. Other times—miraculously—we may not need to say very much, but feel that there is really good understanding and that a deeper connection develops. Those latter experiences are more rare, but also more valuable. So how do we create a space where we can really connect?