Staying Healthy, Part 2: WARMTH
How many different kinds of warmth can you think of? There is the warmth of a sunbeam, the warmth of a fire, warmth of interest, warmth of heart, warmth of anger, warmth of fever, and the fiery warmth of enthusiasm! Warmth is powerful–integrating and overlapping–and a tool that our body intentionally creates during an inflammation. Anthroposophic medicine places a lot of focus on warmth because it plays such a key role in processes of transformation.
Rest, Warmth and Cleansing Workshop Recording
A lot of people emailed in the last month to say that they didn’t sign up for this workshop at the beginning of November.
They asked: “Is there is any way to register and view it now?” The answer is yes!
Click here to sign up and watch it on your own schedule.
Why Do Children Have So Much Milder Symptoms with COVID?
This pandemic period has lasted a long time.
Most everyone I know or talk to feels fatigued and is ready for this to be over. It’s a time that has seen a lot of pain and loss—physical loss, health loss, family loss, movement loss, community loss.
The other thing I hear now, all the time, is that people are also ready to move into a new phase and start to rebuild…
I have been thinking about children a lot because they are so wonderfully capable at rebuilding. They heal and adapt very flexibly. Using anthroposophic medicines with children is sometimes much easier than with adults, because children open up to change. They more naturally “drink in” a treatment. With adults, medicines and therapies are still tremendously valuable, but some accompanying shift in consciousness is usually also required for the treatment to last. So what allows children to respond differently? This pandemic period has lasted a long time. Most everyone I know or talk to feels fatigued and is ready for this to be over. It’s a time that has seen a lot of pain and loss—physical loss, health loss, family loss, movement loss, community loss.
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 will be corrected over time–the problem is that now we don’t know which half.” That was a remarkable admission from a very experienced and seasoned clinician.
I believe that not so many years from now we will recognize that the way we have been working with fever is all wrong. Too often fever is treated as a bad symptom (and yes, you might temporarily feel better if your temperature is lowered), but routine fever treatment blinds us to fever’s essential role as a tool of the immune system. The importance of fever has long been appreciated within anthroposophic medicine, and now it is increasingly confirmed by good, modern, scientific data.
Below are some facts and recommendations that might help shift your thinking a bit.
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?
Inflammation as Transformation: How to Get Unstuck? Part 2
One of the truest definitions of health that continues to prove itself over and over again is that when we get sick, our immune system can work thoroughly and efficiently so that the illness comes to a full resolution. In other words, being healthy does not mean that we never get sick (which would assume that at baseline we have some kind of perfection of physiology, and illness is always a deviation from it). That makes for a clean model, but is a very static view. We are more dynamic beings than that. At important times an illness process can actually open the door for us to transform and rebalance. Small children are particularly good at this. When they get stressed or worn down, they quickly show the world that they don't feel well (adults are not quite so honest, and we can hold out a lot longer with supports like caffeine, deadlines, duty, and yes, the fear of finally letting down…). But sick children do what their bodies need: they slow down, they lose their appetite, get a fever, whine and cling, and discharge what they don't need (with a drippy nose, loose stools, a red rash, etc). That process needs a few days, but usually children swiftly turn the corner and build back to a good appetite and full activity–often better balanced than they were before. So an essential part of health is that our body has the flexibility to loosen and shift and change to a new state as needed.
Why Warmth is so Important
It is really important to nurture and protect your warmth. Warmth deserves more attention than it usually gets. Warmth holds a very special place in the life of both the developing child and the adult, because it works throughout the entire spectrum of human experience. There is physical warmth, emotional warmth—the warmth of love, of generosity, of true morality—and all of these “warmths” pour over and merge with each other. Perhaps most importantly, warmth is the essential ingredient in transformative work. Without warmth we cannot change, and our life is full of processes of growth and adaptation. Warmth helps us be healthy human beings on many different levels.