Can you be healthy without being spiritual?

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how Spirituality and Physical Well Being are connected. It seems intuitively obvious that they are related, but how? Clearly, there are spiritual giants with frail bodies; likewise, the glow of physically radiance in a human body can exist without a whiff of spirituality.

Is there a formula? Those of you who know me, will smile at this; always the quest for the mathematical formula. All questions at this point. All hypotheses with too many variables, too many definitions of both well being and spirituality. So maybe head on is not the way to go here: defining terms, creating a debate. Maybe we need some stories.

I started out writing a health book about eight years ago. I was so gung ho, herding all my ideas into one corral so I could hang onto them:
1. hot little health tips
2. ideas about intention setting
3. the power of one's attitude in creating health
4. alternative therapies from magnets to reflexology
5. the science relating mental activity to immune response
6. the power of water (that was before Dr. Emoto and What the Bleep)

I had this idea that humans had factory settings like appliances and power tools, and if we could dial those back in, we could regain the unimaginable level of vibrant well being for which we were designed.

I found several of the settings, even finished the book proposal, then suddenly stopped writing. Some things happened that were the knock out punch for my book:
1. I was off track. I knew it. No matter how accurate my factory settings were, there was a missing piece to this puzzle.
2. I realized no publisher would touch a health book written by a non-expert. My year of pre-med didn't count to anyone but me!
3. I realized the issue with health was not information but willingness. Almost everyone I knew, including me, knew what to do to be healthy. We just didn't do it!! Why write another book that wouldn't really deliver.
4. Then the knock out punch:
MDs' Oz and Mesmet came out with You: The Owner's Manual; that ghost written, Disneyesque , formulaic, aspirin pushing, career building drivel of a best seller. ( Oh my, she sounds bitter). I now believe Dr Oz and Co. are really helping people get healthy with their TV shows and website, even if the book was lame.

One problem with modern medicine is that the patient's experiential 'ground zero' is often not taken into account. Even Hans Selye knew that recent losses could so skew the patient's immune system that disease was almost inevitable. Grief and loss have to be taken into account. Stress is finally on the board as a contributor to physical health. Some MDs even give a contribution percentage to stress, like 60-90%.

Spiritual Bank Account

But how about the other side of the equation? The ledger has two parts to balance. If stress is the red ink then optimism and hopefulness, empathy and joy, are the black. According to research, these emotions or attitudes actively create a medium for the maintenance of physical/emotional/spiritual well being.

I guess it's impossible to go further without defining spiritual well being. We all know what physical well being looks and feels like, at least for ourselves. For some, it means what it looks like-great skin, 6-pack, perfect figure, super endurance. For me, it is the internal homeostasis created by organs humming away at optimum performance that produces abundant energy, physical comfort, compassion, alertness, great sleep, elastic joints, etc. I feel good. I mean, I feel so good it should be illegal! Yeah, sing it, James.

To Be Continued...

Can you Be Spiritual and a Cell Phone User?

Well, I am a hold out so far. I don't have a cell phone. I may one day, when landlines are obsolete. But why hurry? My objections to cell phones are legion. If you read the warning that comes with it, you realize that the company knows there is a problem.

Common sense tells me that a microwave strong enough to send a signal to a satellite and back to my ear is probably going to do some mischief in my brain, less than one inch away. Hello! Wakey... Wakey.

But a really interesting question is the more subtle ways that it creates interference in our lives.

More and more I believe in the idea promoted by all spiritual traditions that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. When we embrace the present moment, we are able to co-create reality with the Creator. To be present to everything happening right now is the goal of countless spiritual disciplines like yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, Chi Gong,

They had other ideas in the middle ages but current wisdom, informed by quantum physics even questions the existence of time. So, according to Eckhart Tolle, the past is a memory residue. It doesn't exist in any real way. Neuroscience cosigns that idea with the newsflash that how we store memories actually distorts them, so even our impressions of the past are seriously subjective, i.e. not real. The future, it should be obvious doesn't exist at all, yet. Therefore, if I am thinking about the past or future, I am not in reality. So the present it is.

How do cell phones figure in this? Here I am driving over the hill to Ronan. In the present moment, I am noticing the wildflowers, growing grass, clouds along the Missions, oncoming traffic. The cell phone rings and I leave the present moment, because I am talking to someone who isn't there! That is level 1 displacement. I am talking to someone who is not in my present moment with the road curves, soft breeze, and wildflowers. Then, when they start talking about their wildflowers, wind, etc., I have second displacement into another reality that is not my own (right now).

We start talking about another person, a meeting we will be having, a problem to solve and there is the 3rd level displacement to the future and to other people in other places. Then we talk about a 3rd person's reality and what is happening to them. You can see where I am going with this. Depending on the topics and how riveting they are, the cell phone talker has left the present moment by a magnitude of 6-10 in a few short minutes. No wonder the driver who is cell talking doesn't see the pedestrian crossing, the car pull out, or the speed sign.

So you could say, well, any phone call does that. People have been talking on phones for decades. What's the big deal. But cell phones are mobile. When I get a call on my land line, I am not hurtling down the road, rounding corners, pulling up to stop signs.

So I just realized, there are really two dynamics I am looking at. One, is how a cell phone conversation creates a fracture that takes you out of the present by various magnitudes of displacement. Two, is that we are inadvertently training our minds to divorce our senses.

What if I trained my two eyes to look in two different directions at once. Would it be possible that they might get used to that independence and do it without my okay?

What effect over time will these phone calls have on people, with their multi-level migrations from the present moment ? But more importantly, by forcing the mind to focus so far from actively operating senses, what consequences might be in store for cell phone users? Could it eventually cause permanent disabilities such as inability to concentrate, mental confusion, intensification of sensory stimulus to the brain, or possibly psychosis?

Don't shoot the messenger, dude. I just think we need to look at how we are asking our minds and bodies to do things they weren't designed to do. Eventually we might realize that we can't be in 2 (3,4,5,6) places at once unless we are Jesus or Padre Pio, who clearly had the super powers and a super calling. as well as a lifetime of prayer, meditation and service to God which all took place in the sacred present.

Are Doctors Bad for My Health?

My Dad was a surgeon so we grew up with a weird take on modern medicine. On the one hand we were completely indoctrinated into the belief that doctors knew all. On the other hand, our esteemed papa when off the job was a shower singing, beer drinking, risk taking maniac. At rest, he often seemed to be dissociated. He could fart a trumpet riff-several stanzas (in public or private). He once had to haul his fainting daughter out of church and was unconscious of the blue streak he cussed the length of the church aisle.

Besides all that, he was one of the most rascally, hilarious and creative humans I've ever met. Off duty it was almost impossible to think of him as a doctor.

In my early 20's, my gynecologist's misinformation almost killed me, so I had a parting of the ways with allopathic medicine. That and a childhood hospitalization for spinal meningitis, terrorized me into looking for the truth about health for my body. Yes indeed.

My beef with medical science and those who 'practice' it comes down to this. The one-size-fits-all paradigm is clearly hazardous to many. And given the obvious fact that science is always in process, always changing with expanding research, doctors could be more humble about their information. Today's medical doctrine is tomorrow's embarrassment, always. Look at the cholestral fiasco. There are still people not eating eggs under the complete disinformation campaign of a few decades ago.

Near the end of his life, my Dad admitted that there was no way to know if the surgery/ and treatment got rid of the cancer or something else. He once had a patient with a watermelon size tumor who went home and cured herself. When he developed prostate cancer, he went inter-dimensional looking for solutions. We could finally talk about medicine.

I get so pissed off when MDs give a 'diagnosis' of arthritis, for example. In America, there is no cure except eventually replacing joints. In Europe, you go to a spa, alkalize your body with juices, get the lymph moving with massage and sauna, and upgrade the entire system so that organs are working, toxins are expelled, and the pain is eased because the conditions that caused it are removed. That is modern medicine on the continent. Why not here? (Don't get me started!)

If I go to an MD with anything outside the slender realm of that specialty or level of knowledge, I am in danger of misdiagnosis or a diagnosis that puts me in the group of 'unhelpables'. So I am very careful with my choice of professional. Those awesome practitioners whose love of the human body allow them to utilize and transcend the limits of that science are a joy to work with. I hope you have one.

My own family physician admitted (God love her) that there was no evidence that neither mammograms nor self exams did anything to save lives through early detection. I was just concerned about the radiation. So she supported me to decline the procedure.

How Do I know It's Food?

How do we tell the food from the non-food? You know that joke when looking at the cereal aisle in the grocery store, it might be a toss up whether the box or the contents provide more nutrition. I don't know if someone has tested that!

Last few weeks, I got obsessed with sprouting, especially things on my grain list for Type A. So I started a little buckwheat farm. After a week, that thing wouldn't stop. I ate 3 inch sprouts that were pretty tasty all week. They just kept growing, new ones coming. In the photo you can see the little hulls dangling on the ends. About ten cents worth of seed and I had salads all week. Interesting! Then amaranth and chia for cereal. That took care of two thirds of my meals, which left Quinn's Wrap Shack and a couple friends' soup/stew gifts to round out the week. I probably spent under $10 for food. But the big payoff was how good I felt. That bulge in my belly went away and my guts were happy.

Remember chia seeds? Among his Elvis memorabilia, my friend Fran had an Elvis chia pet which was too cool to be believable. What got lost in the 'chia pet' frenzy was the high nutritional value of chia. It was considered sacred for that reason in Mexico and parts of South America, yet another gift from that region. Soaked in a little water, chia can be added to anything-bread, cereal, waffles, smoothies. It seems to enhance flavor as well. Just getting started on this project. I can get a close to a gallon of chia seeds for $4.37 from Azure Standard and I use a couple tablespoons for a serving. That comes to 1.7 pennies per tablespoon. I defy you to find a bigger nutritional bang for your buck. The complete protein is super portable since you can eat them any way you want. Amaranth costs half that but it takes more so it comes out about the same.

The former sacred cows of nutrition are justifiably under attack. Milk, whole grains, fresh greens and vegetables (non-organic). When do the sulfites, pesticides and herbicides in commercial produce cancel out the nutritional value. Is anyone doing the math? GMOs, growth hormones, anti-biotics, ultra-pasteurizing and preservatives have unbalanced the nutrition in dairy products. I didn't even count the herbicide and pesticide dose from the cattle feed. I don't see that commercial dairy products even qualify as food anymore.

In a brilliant marketing move, the dairy industry has shifted the blame onto the consumer. Lactose intolerant. Interesting. Pasteurizing while important for sanitation, killed the digestibility for most adult and many infant humans by removing the enzyme that allows us to digest it. A calf could not get anything out of her mother's milk if passed through the gamut of pasteurizing, homogenizing and hormone enhancing that has been the recent fate of all commercially available milk.

I'm going to continue the optimum diet experiment. What I demand-freshness, affordability, and maximum nutritional wallop. Check out alley grazer for more ideas on that.

The question for me is, even if the food has maximum value on all these scales, can my particular body digest it? Is it food if I get nothing out of it? There is so much more to nutrition than what is in the food, though that is the first hurdle for sure. If it isn't there in the food, I'm not going to manufacture it out of thin air. Might have to question that presumption as well. Still, it is good to look at everything involved from when the substance enters my lips to all the work those nutrients do and how, in my specific human body. More on that next time.

Happy Eating!

Unintentional Affirmations

My friend Jenifer called today about crazy stuff happening, in addition to her back pain. For some reason I started telling her about 'affirmations' we use every day without thinking. Such as:

I'm getting old
I can't stand it!
My back is killing me
This is absolutely the last straw!
This piece of cheesecake will add 5 pounds to my hips

If he does that one more time, I'm going to shove this laundry up his...

We lie to ourselves all day long. I tell myself impossible fibs, outright untruths, most of which I am unaware of. Why? Why with a perfectly splendid mind, would I use it in this fashion? That is a whole other topic. But if this sounds familiar, the same principle that works on positive affirmations, I believe, operates in the cellular activation of negative messages. Well, two things happening, really.
1. It is a lie. Always. Almost any statement I make extolling my limitations is a lie. This I suspect creates a dissonance within my system related to my intention to be truthful. That is different from the normal cognitive dissonance which an affirmation creates.
2. It is an Affirmation because it is declarative. It states something as a given. Not a question, not a possible scenario, not 'I wonder if'. Every statement I make to myself gets run through the truth filter to determine whether something has to change to make it so.

All affirmations work on the principle of cognitive dissonance, I seem to remember from Psychology 101. There is a part of our mind that is like the 'go-fer'. If we say to ourselves, cheeseburger for lunch, the mind starts unraveling that into a plan. If I say my positive affirmations...the world is a safe and loving place, for example, then, supposedly, the primitive brain will begin to arrange my actions and perceptions to make that true. The mind has two contradictory pieces of info and tries to reconcile them. It can't stand the dissonance. Like a bad chord. Aaaaah, stop that noise.

So when I say, my back is killing me, who is to say what takes place in there. What if that reptilian brain doesn't question my logic and go, "Yo, does not compute, dingbat". What if cognitive dissonance demands a specific response as in MAKE IT SO. Then I think I better question some of those lies I tell myself.

Here is my favorite. I was lost in the woods about 10 years ago (still comes up on google). My hiking partner and I had bushwhacked over a couple, up-hill miles of the worst country I had ever come across. Our day hike near Kintla Lake gone horribly wrong. Me in shorts and a tank top going over fallen trees that were scattered like pic up stix (remember that game). We had been at it 3 hours and hadn't found the trail. As we sat on a log panting, me examining my bloody legs. I was dizzy from exhaustion. I thought, I'm toast...can't walk another step.

Well, guess what ? Six and a half hours and 15 miles later, including a close shave with grizzlies, I was still hoofing it. The next morning when search & rescue caught up to me, I had spent the night by my fire, watching for predators with a sharpened stick, floated down the North Fork (think ice) on my day pack, followed countless dead end trails. No, I had such a monumental 'second wind' that it makes me laugh now when I tell myself I'm all in, all exhausted, couldn't do another step!!So whether those negative affirmations encourage the universe to play tricks on us, or our polarized brain to make it so, it is worth tuning in on the internal monologue. It might be a 'to do' list you don't want your brain to take on. Also, those negative affirmations may have more to do with our physical well being than we could ever know. Experiment freely. It's your body.

Eating for Blood Type

Several years ago I read Eat Right 4 Your Type, by Peter D'Adamo. It was a revelation both the story and the science behind the book . The premise that some foods act as medicine and some as poison is intuitively obvious to most of us. However, the tie in to blood type is ingenious, as is the sleuthing that led to the discovery.

I was already attracted to many of the foods for blood type A+. But the grains that really help my body are allegedly, buckwheat and amaranth. Huh? All the rest are neutral, so they are okay. But if I eat the things that act like medicine, that is supposedly the upgrade. Buckwheat I once used as a cover crop when I used to garden on a large scale. Amaranth is a family that includes an extremely weird looking flower, called Love Lies Bleeding, and does look somewhat gory.

Long story short, this week my breakfasts included both buckwheat and amaranth and it was a decidedly different experience from eating other things. Hard to put into words, but eating buckwheat was like eating air. It was both light and filling. I prepared it by sprouting it, drying it, roasting it, then boiling it in water. Talk about good. Then the amaranth I just boiled on the stove. With a little sweetener, nuts and raisins, it was a great start to the day.

So you might want to check this out. Whether the foods on the list just give your body a total vacation by digesting themselves or whether they are doing something sneaky and wonderful inside, who knows. For me it feels like a rest.

Meat is not medicine for blood type A. We must be the veggie blood type. Whereas Type O's who forgo meat often suffer. But in case I indulge, I have HCl pills that make short work of a mess of ribs or a hot dog. There is no blood type that can boast hot dogs as medicine. Dream on!

Chaos For Real

Today, as promised earlier, I'm going to talk about meditation. The dictionary is no help here. MEDITATE: to reflect on or muse over; CONTEMPLATE; INTEND, PURPOSE; to engage in contemplation or reflection. The definition my friends have range from formal zazen to taking big drags off a cigarette in a contemplative way. I think fishing might be the modern day equivalent. With a rod in my hand, aside from a jingling anticipation of the BIG BITE, I feel at one with the water, trees and dirt.

The thing I never realized about meditation is that it is truly a litmus test for sanity. Hey Zeus! The minute I attempt quiet on my own, all hell breaks loose in my mind. A tidal wave of agendas, instructions, manic fantasies, music, a horror movie, ear splitting harmonics. Its like I got cable in my head. Like there is a conspiracy to keep me rattled and unable to actually think something through. Well, the good news is that if I am willing to attempt it over and over, sitting on my cushion with my eyes closed, breathing deeply, it settles down in there and I can breath and have some 'no thought' spaces before the other stuff sneaks back in.

If I get away from it though, it takes 3-4 days of sitting on my zafu (cushion inherited from my buddhist Dad) before I find peace. That feels like failing every minute, while exerting maximum exertion. Try that one on for size ! Could be I'm doing it wrong. Today I heard about a better way.

More later. The demons are dancing on my head today.
Time to read a book.