A Right Rest

For most of us, when the need to rest arises, the first choice taken is to lie down or nap/sleep.  The awareness that other types of reprieve are possible if we follow the availability of the body's call, is often unavailable.  This requires a more nuanced listening.

Rest is required when we have expended considerable energy, negativity has created a leak in my energy channels, or the failure to shift my energy through another type of activity (or too much repetition of even a good thing) can be draining.  Sleep is not often the only or best resolution.  Evolving one's own individual care-taking approach is possible.

There I was, wrapping spring rolls for 60 people, about 100 in all.  It was a lovely task:  the beguiling stretchy rice wraps, fresh vibrating herbs and slivered vegetables in interesting layers, ending with a careful tuck .  It was a small motor hand coordinated, delicate operation-- very pleasing to the senses.  About two hours into the task, it became apparent a gear switch was necessary.  A fatigue came over me, my legs had been in one place for hours, my hands in a small repetitive pattern for same.  I picked up a broom and vigorously started to sweep the floor.  I then mopped it with big wide sweeping arcs, a sort of dance that was fully enjoyable, a static containment getting released.

An entire day of large, challenging movement, considerable perspiration in extreme heat conditions, with a concentrated attention to a myriad of tasks --called me to rest.  I took half an hour, went into an air conditioned room and crawled under a large work table. (A vague recollection of spending a lot of pleasure time under tables as a child came to me.) There, I rested on my back, pulled my knees up, rolled side to side, enjoyed some prone stillness, played with my hands and elbows and provided a rolling touch to mostly unrecognized places like ankles, groin, back of legs near buttocks, sacrum, moving and smoothing (energy?) layers of self.  I followed impulses, some surprising, all of them deeply restful. I finished by rolling out from under the table, picking up a water loaded watercolor brush on the table and ran it across a piece of paper, appreciating its movement and action.  I completed the period by adding  a dot of color at the end.  Sublime satisfaction.

Unexpectedly, I spent most of a morning with someone with a consistently mild thread of sarcasm running through their dialogue.  By the end of the morning I was feeling depleted and fatigued.  Realizing, despite my efforts not to let that particular brand of negativity impact me, I had indeed been influenced.  I took a "bathroom break" and instead went out into the drizzle and energetically walked around the block, feeling the hips, femurs in the sockets, my arms swinging up and wherever they felt like going, the cool heavy precipitation dampening my exposed arms.  It wasn't an easy start; the body was halting and apparently in a stuck rhythm at first.  But before long, attention to the way the movement was unfolding and the almost joyous arm swings had me emitting small yelps of pleasure and the shift was made. I did a few chi (energy) baths at the end for good measure.

The common aspects in these different scenarios is awareness of the need for a change in energy and a willingness to let the body play (a type of rest/release any child would attest).  Rest for the weary can be finding play in the heart, mind and body. The right configuration is limitless, it just depends on following the call to where the awareness is leading you. Fingering a delicate branch of a plant, submerging oneself in water and receiving that new impression.  Lying still or allowing fingers to find their expression through another media or their own manifestation.  Sleep is a delicious mode of respite.  But a rightful, authentic rest can be found in our own nature's beckoning if we listen a little closer and respond.

Rest

"Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically."*     --David Whyte

Out of the four stress management principles I advocate in my teaching to others and in my own practice, rest is the most difficult for me (and many of my clients) to grasp. (Maybe we should try NOT grasping...) Not being able to relate to rest must be an American thing.  Or maybe its a 21st century thing.  We have trouble not multi-tasking.  We resist sleep.  We struggle with stopping, not doing.  It might seem we are hard-wired to 'accomplish' or that our worth and value is seated in purposeful activities.


In my post, A Right Rest, I speak about the many varieties of rest that are available to us, that sleep or napping might not always be the right rest we are looking for.  It delights me that only a poet (Whyte) could so eloquently speak about rest being a conversation about loving and being.  It must be our tendencies to leave feeling out of our purposeful driven doing activity and the disinclination (due to discomfort?) to stay far from a closer connection to our being.

"We are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside, when we are an intriguing conversation between the potential that lies in our imagination and the possibilities for making that internal image real in the world; we are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe."*

Whyte's quote above and in his excellent essay, Rest*, eludes to the play of outer and inner and the ability to let go, to be closer to our more whole selves through the influence of our breath.  Many of our indoctrinations have us resisting quiet or rest because it is a type of death; we have little to externally show for it; and that is unacceptable to the most of ourselves.  In short, we most likely have an attitude distortion about rest: what it looks like, feels like and what it does for us.

"To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner bulls eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange."*

*David Whyte, Essay #21 "Rest" 

Surviving and Thriving During a Collective Crisis

"When everything is moving and shifting, the only way to counteract chaos is stillness. When things feel extraordinary, strive for ordinary. When the surface is wavy, dive deeper for quieter waters." --Kristin Armstrong (most decorated women cyclist in US history)

These are extraordinary times we are living in:  calamitous, turbulent, and nerve-wracking.  We have been forced to engage like we never have before.  We witness the extraordinary power of democracy in action and the often terrifying forces challenging democracy.  It has our adrenals and central nervous system working on overdrive.  I am hearing and seeing the bouts of crippling exhaustion and despair from many.  How can we survive and thrive during this crisis, especially if it is long and drawn out, as it appears it will be.

In my experience, the single most important quality necessary is self discipline.  Without this, it is very easy to be pulled off our center of gravity, to lose focus, to become physically or emotionally disabled. These are the days when routine and purposeful activity is mandatory, healthy outer and inner habits leaned upon. 

What does this mean in relation to the 4 fundamentals of wellness: rest, nutrition, exercise and spirit work/play?

REST:  Make sure you get a lot of it.  Try to go bed nightly the same time and wake the same time.  If your sleep is broken, start employing self-care tactics to ensure a better night's rest.  

Sleep is the most obvious aspect of the rest fundamental.  But to give our sympathetic nervous system periodic breaks we should be having other relaxing actions as part of our day.  Needlecraft's like knitting, crocheting is a great relaxer, helping get repetitive deeper breathing patterns in play.  Playing an instrument, playing record/CD, radio music, watching funny or non-intense movies, reading novels.  Know where your threshold is with stress and anxiety and take a break.  Take a whole day off from social media or political activities and just have some guilt free fun. In a crisis, it's very important to have a lapse of engagement, where you are not thinking or acting on behalf of the crisis.  And in that lapse, to feel joyous in the activity and not guilty you are not "on it".  Pick your battles, you can't be part of every march and rally.  Know what is the right action and when for you. Become aware of fatigue, burn out, depression and readjust your approach.  Navigating this terrain for ourselves is very interesting as you begin to recognize signs and symptoms in yourself and the subsequent choices you make in caring for yourself. Self-discipline brings order and a healthy repetition.  Following are some previous posts that might help with this.  The Fine Art of Self Soothing, Modern Toiletry, Energy Field Surveillance, Sleep Tight, A Right Rest,  Witnessing: Attention, Intention and Healing

"We adore chaos because we love to produce order."  M. C. Escher

Photo credit:  Lalu Danzker

NUTRITION:  Inevitably, we will capitulate to comfort foods; it's winter and there is a crisis. Add some broccoli to your mac and cheese, make some good bone broth for the base of your soups-- very healing, and worth the effort.  Cook.  Cooking and baking and engaging in that way is very important.  It slows us down, it put us in relationship with what we are about to receive, it's caring in action.  Sometimes you gotta get takeout.  Most of the time take the time to cook for yourselves and your loved ones.  Following are some previous posts on this that might help.  On Fire: the State of Chronic Inflammation, pH: It's all about balance, Bone Deep.

"Chaos is a friend of mine."  "I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me." -- Bob Dylan

EXERCISE: I bring this up a lot in my work.  Exercise is a major stress buster, helping to regulate our functions and systems.  Being mindful of all movement from washing dishes to just spending time in bed stretching legs and pelvis is bringing an attention to the body. It grounds us, creates a sense of the vertical in myself.  When crisis hits, most of us fly into our emotional and mental responses, leaving our body disconnected.  Our bodies are everything in a crisis; we depend on them for reality checks. Our bodies are constantly giving us cues as to the truth of the moment.  If we aren't attending to the body, we miss the cues of what is going on inside and outside.  Stay close to the body.  Moving the body, the breath in the body opens up our perception; we think more clear, our feelings become regulated. I just said it but I say it again:  the body is everything.  You lose your connection to your body, you lose your groundedness, your sense of reality, and become subject to the craziness your feeling and head gets into without a relationship to your person.  Without your body, you literally lose skin in the game.  The body is an equalizing factor. We discount it, disrespect it, bemoan its inconveniences. We have to love it and we have to move it.  Following are some prior posts centered on this fundamental wellness principle:  Designed to Move

"The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies."-- Napoleon Bonaparte

SPIRIT WORK/PLAY:  

Spirit work are activities that center our being.  Obvious examples are meditation and prayer.  Less obvious examples are walking with an attention to the body ("Zen" walking puts a name on it), Buddhist breathing exercises that open one's heart, and/or dispel negativity. Qigong exercises of bringing in images of patience, magnanimity and letting go images of hate and fear, are among a few.  Spirit work grounds us in our internal truths and helps liberates us from the frantic, over kinetic external.  It is peace-making.  Play is wherever there is fun and humor, satisfaction and that which touches the essential in oneself.  All of these can be found in the "mundane", such as knitting or cooking or car mechanics, or guitar playing to name a few. This kind of work brings us closer to who we are and our purpose, not from the activity itself, but from the internal engagement rooted in love of peace.  When we get a frequent (self discipline!) taste of this, it becomes much harder to lose that vertical, to be pulled out of an inner, more real alignment. Prior posts that elucidate on this:  Humor and Health, Prodigal Return: Community of Self, Oneness: Ho'oponopono, 

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence. --Buddha

As separate as these 4 fundamentals might seem, they are actually deeply connected.  They support each other and are often part and parcel of each other's expression.  When they're working together (for the most part), I experience an established discernment.  My mind quiets to the dramatic headline; it starts to look for plausibility, it becomes inqurious, the guile radar engages. My emotional intelligence kicks in without hysteria.  Everything starts to work together.  I'm grounded.  My more whole self is centered.  Thank you self discipline.

Become aware of energy: your own, others and the collective.  Pace yourself.  Step into the fray when your vertical is vibrating "yes".  Be respectful of yourselves and others, others who might not be as equally aligned in a moment.  Practice compassion as best as you can with yourself and others.  Remember:  Kindness.  Be kind, no exceptions (even when your mad as hell).  Kindness, like forgiveness, like love is a boomerang, it comes right back to you.  And hate, fear, ego righteousness-- it does the same thing, it comes back to you almost immediately, toxifying what could be otherwise.  So, for your well being's sake, be kind while you are being courageous.

Following are some essays that might be helpful:

The Collective: Group Energy, Anxiety: Inside the Box, Meditate? Do I Have To, Violence: A Cautionary Truth

MEDITATE. Do I Have To?

Truth 1:  not all things are for all people.

Truth 2: we are living in a very compressed world at the moment.  And as I've said in prior posts, our central nervous systems (CNS) are on overload (guaranteed).  Physiologically speaking, a taxed CNS means lower immunity, and a much higher susceptibility to disease.  Of course, one's mental health and overall well being is drastically effected, impacting one's personal life and work performance.  Personal and cultural interventions are required.

Meditation in the last 15-20 years has been the trending panacea for the ills of stress.  And I'd be the first one to promote it, (mostly) enjoying a 38 year meditation practice, having taught meditation and having had it at the center of my work with others for over two decades.  I've been around long enough to find, meditation (as we think of it, sitting on a cushion in a quiet room) definitely is not for everyone.  I wish it was.  But it's not.

So, let's think.  What does the CNS require to stay my body healthy during trying times?  What is it about meditation that covers this territory?  What are other options if meditation is not for me?

A little physiology lesson to start:  The CNS is made up of the SNS (Sympathetic Nervous System, "flight or fight" response") and the PNS (Parasympathetic Nervous System, "rest and relaxation" response).  Ideally, these are in harmonious relationship.  But, in today's world it's rare this is the case.  The SNS is on overdrive related to this earlier mentioned cultural compression most everyone is experiencing, added to the electromagnetic over stimulation of technology and media, added to the often poor food/fluid intake, laced with GMO, pesticides, overprocessing, toxic air and environment conditions etc, added to the high anxiety of family, neighborhood, community, country, world events.  And if you aren't experiencing any of these at the moment, just get in your car and go for a drive (all that stop and go and the traffic!) or open the paper and your SNS will do what it does, kick in.  It's on overdrive.  Believe me.  The PNS can't get an impulse in edgewise.  It doesn't have a chance.  Even the rest periods at night, we're still expected to have, are not restful.  Insomnia is a huge problem.  People today sleep 20% less than they did 100 years ago, more than 30% of the population suffers from insomnia, including 40% to 60% of people over the age of 60, 90% of people who suffer from depression also experience insomnia, and approximately 10 million people in the U.S. use prescription sleep aids.  We have a sleeping problem, we are not getting the rest we need.

Our relaxation is not relaxation in the least.  For many, it's vegging on the couch watching a movie.  Or hanging on Facebook for a few hours after work, playing phone games or obsessing over word puzzles.  This is just more electromagnetic stimulation and mental gymnastics.  We never stop going; and many of us wear this like a badge of honor. It's not.  It's distracting foolishness.  It's wearing our body's systems down, creating conditions for disease to move in.

So, back to what does the CNS require to stay my body healthy during trying times?  We need to give the SNS a break and allow the PNS to deploy.  Meditation is a wonderful groundwork for this.  It brings stillness to a series of moments.  Helps us see and experience the separation from the busy mind and other parts of myself.  It slows the SNS down and encourages the PNS to do its thing.  It's a great practice-- if you can do it.  If you can't, other tools must be used.

Rest and Relaxation can be found in a lot of places, meditation doesn't have a corner on the market here.  Playing is a supreme place for some r&r.  Playing for adults is very individual.  How do you have fun (good, clean fun not involving substances)?  Engaging in a creative process is not only fun, but often elicits a meditative response.  Again, this is very individual.  Creativity doesn't necessarily require art supplies.  It can be making a garden, re-thinking a use of an empty room, fooling around with a recorder (musical instrument or auditory machine).  Writing an entertaining letter (do people still write letters?), decorating a child's stool, even scrapbooking.  Six of the top 20 books selling on Amazon are adult coloring books.  Coloring is a great decompressor and it's immediate and they say, it's a contender with meditation for getting into that still, quiet place in oneself.  Pull out those watercolor pencils and go to town!  Let go of control and illusions of a perfect product, just enjoy your senses.  Explore. Risk. Fail. Triumph.

Handwork like knitting, crocheting, sewing and needlepoint are rhythmical and repetitive, hence meditative in nature.  They bring the energy down into the middle of myself (unless the patterns are tricky and require a lot of mental attention).

Exercise is the number 1 stress buster.  Catch two fish with one net (two benefits from one activity) and do QiGong, TaiChi or Yoga.  All 3 practices are meditative in nature, work with creating deep breath work (meditation!) in the movement sequences.  Imagination is key in especially yoga and Qigong.  Poses in yoga have imaginative names that inspire more of me to participate (i.e. Warrior I, Pigeon pose,  Downward Dog) and Qigong integrates imagery as part of layered sequences.  The third fish is they're all really fun to do, once you relax into it. These are "low impact" exercises, so your cardiologist and physical therapist will love you for doing them.  Swimming is low impact as well.  Doing laps gives you the opportunity to get into "the zone" (meditation!). Again, it's rhythmical and repetitive, it's exercise (!).  A lot of fish with one net.....

Many people say Great Nature is their church, their temple their 'resting' place.  If this is so for you, surround yourself with trees, get a fish tank or table-top water fall for the office.  Enter the magnificence that is nature.  If this is where you find your breath,  resonating with the slowness of the Mother in your midst, than here is where you must be a good deal of time. Not just weekends, not just holidays-- several days a week.  Nature's impact is fast, but its penetration is slow; unless you give yourself some generous time there.  Nature works in layers (like meditation).  But you have to give yourself time there.

Yes, giving oneself time.  This is the key in all these practices, including meditation. This is the obstacle.  All of these practices require a discipline, a commitment.  They require a shift in perspective.  Do you have to meditate? Shrugging off instituting a meditation practice because it's not your thing is one thing.  But we can't shrug off the connection that is inherently right in myself that I'm missing.  Choose your rest and relaxation path, your direction and embrace it.  Your health and well being depends upon it.

The Peace of Wild Things,  Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Creative

When I am completely myself, entirely alone...photo credit: World of Dance

"When I am ..... completely myself, entirely alone... or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.”  

--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

From different snippets of a news program, a magazine article and notes from a music program, the energy from what I call "the creative" has been infiltrating into my now. When synchronicity arrives, one does not turn away, but sits up, begins to open to, examine and follow.

As a culture, creativity defensively hides in a small box and is not well respected (if you can't make a lot of money by doing it, as a rule).  Somehow, it's all well and good for small children to explore art materials, but a few years down the pike, these explorations or most other "impractical" inquiries are subtly discouraged. Imagining, thinking outside the educational box, unrecognizable (by the majority) delving into unvalued areas are not seen as useful in a standard education. (Thank God for Montessori and Steiner.)

Like owning our physicality, the creative is our birthright.  All people are of spirit, all people are creative.  It is a general misconception that a creative idea has to be "artistic" oriented or even original.  Some say there is nothing original, that accessing the creative is borrowing and renewing (for self) of the old.  As a nurse, the creative is a resource I depend upon, especially when in relationship with patients or other staff.  I have seen when I am reactive, judgmental ("spirit sick") my choices are limited, and I am unavailable to the creative.  Relaxing into the moment, identifying the interesting aspect of the irritating-other (a separation of sorts) produces the possibility of relationship.  

A difficult, hostile dynamic between a married couple in a small hospital room where no one is listening, all my various (and thin) cajoling attempts are rebuffed and what is imminently required is locked out by what feels like an endless habitual polarization. I go back to the nurse station sense my agitation and take a few moments to breathe.  How can I approach them rightly, what do they need?  The creative arrives. A novel thought comes to me.  I am a bit unnerved by this notion, it counters my usual modus operandi. It feels edgy, but somehow right.  I breathe a few more times, feeling my feet under me.  I go back to the room to the deadlocked couple and begin to order them around with definitive assertion; I do a lot of arm flailing, throw my head every which way, appear fed up.  This they understand.  This they respond to.  Their previous sarcastic contempt of me is now replaced with respect and they begin to listen and do what is necessary.  Go figure. 

A terrified chiropractor is admitted for unexpected surgery. He is resistant to all care, all procedures, he refuses to cooperate with anyone on anything.  When I greet him at his bed, he is hunkered down, arms crossed, his face a wall of tension. Somehow, I recognize this state he is in and it actually inspires me to let go of my own tensions. I ask him about himself, his practice, what he needs now.  He asks me to do a right brain-left brain exercise with my arms and hands (validating his own knowledge and understanding of the relationship of the brain to the body).  We do it together and it is very cool, I can feel my brain connections switching sides.  Afterwards, he's good to go with all the tests he has refused thus far.  Getting met.


These stories could easily be paralleled by a bus driver dealing with unruly kids, Greenpeace canvassers on hostile territory, air traffic controllers on a holiday weekend.  We all have access to the creative and we are creatively relating a lot of the time.  It's a question on how to recognize it when it arrives (or is quietly dwelling). Is it the spontaneous wry comment defusing a room of tension?  A moment of "intuition" that deflects an accident? The organism is very pliant and the creative is ever ready.  

A relaxed state has a lot of faces:  Post a glass of wine, the time before sleep, the ill state (ego out of commission), the state of vacation, the chaotic state (so much static, creativity can sneak by), the purposeless ("lazy") state. I heard a radio interview wherein the musician/lyricist being interviewed was watching her girlfriend dye her hair.  What must have been a relaxing, pleasurable time, she wrote in her mind while watching her, the song which would be her next hit (nothing to do with dye-ing hair).  Or the guy snacking on a bag of chips on a subway car who witnesses a slap fest between a male and female rider, stands up (still snacking) and walks to the exit door of the subway car, stopping to stand between them, without saying a word, somehow diffusing their hostility. 

These are all examples of fertile ground for the creative to reveal itself.  Allowing something to rest long enough to receive something else.

2012-13 Post Culmination

Season's greeting!  Following is a handy-dandy group categorization of IntegratedMedPhiladelphia's posts (easy reference!).  When looking for a specific subject (ie anxiety, relationship, etc), you can go to the blog and write the word in and all the posts with that label will line up for you.  handy, eh?    Thanks for staying tuned in.  Joy and robust health to you in 2014!

Nutrition

Food Fascism and the Convenient Microwave

Trojan Wurst III: Organic

Trojan Wurst IV: Sustainable Protein

Trojan Wurst II: SALT

Trojan Wurst 1: EGGS

Giving Thanks: Relationship in Food Preparation

FAT FACTS

Sustainability and Health

Food Glorious Food

Meddle with Nettle

Adaptogens: Love in a bottle

Play With Your Food

Water: the Elixir of Life

Cooking with Economy and Grace

Environment

Welcome to the Anthropocene

The Quan Yin of essential oils: Lavender

Place Travel: Experiencing Culture

Nature as Healing

Place, Space, Materiality and Health

The Body as an Ecosystem

Cultvating Sacred Space

cloudpunch

Spirit/Play/Prayer

Active Listening

Shared History

Giving Receiving

Layered Impressions

Foreign Territory (over 40)

Patience

Dynamics of an Inner Call

Dispassionate Empathy

Creativity and Wellness

Holy Denying: the Feminine

Resiliency

Resistance

Taking Risks

A Perfect Contentedness

Forgiveness

Laughter: the Best Medicine

Building the Heart of Your Fire

Oneness: Ho'oponopono

Humor and Health

A Redeemable Injury

Grief as Medicine

The Oldest Language

The Creative

Reception

Oy Vay: High Anxiety

A Walk In My Shoes

Lost in the Wilderness

Dooo Be Dooo Be Do

The Art of being a Play-er

Grief and the Heart's Desire

Grief Work

Spring forward

Laughter: the Best Medicine

The Arts and Health

Modern Love

Belief

Leaning On

A Significant Movement

Exercise / Movement

QiGong: Imparting a Study

Designed to Move

MYSTERY: The Practices of QiGong and Authentic Mov...

Authentic Movement: a Larger Listening Intelligenc...

Sleep / Rest/ Rejuvenation

A Right Rest

Rest

The Fine Art of Self Soothing

Sleep Tight

Self Care / Relationship

The "Care" Effect

Raising Up: Children and Parenting

Witnessing: Attention, Intention and Healing

Present to Death

The Edge

Provide and Protect

For Every Season: Aging Gracefully

Stress, Self-Responsibility and Health

Addiction

Turning Toward: An Approach to Addiction

Energetic Communication

Nature's First Aid Kit (Part II)

Nature's First Aid Kit (Part I)

The Oldest Language

The Creative

Social Beings

Unexpected Healings

Have Mercy

O, You Beauty You

All for one and one for all........

Violence: a Cautionary Truth

The Collective: Group Energy

(Hu)Man & Beast: Soul Relationship

A Dosha for Now

Prodigal Return: Community of Self

Physiology/Bodywork/Healing

Unmentionables: Menses

MAKING WAVES: Alexander Technique and the undulati...

Memory and the Body (Part I)

Memory and the Body (Part II)

Rebirthing

Authentic Movement: Flying Solo

The Jester and the Healer

Bodywork, Energy Medicine: Whole Healing

Energy Field Surveillance

Use: The Alexander Technique

Reflexology as Informant

Making Scents/Sense/Cents

Somatic Healing

QiGong: Following in a Purpose-Prone World

Oneness: Ho'oponopono

A Sustainable Healing

Healing Practice: the Slippery Slope (Part II)

Memory: Portals and Thresholds

Healing Practice: the Slippery Slope (Part I)

Healing in the Unknown

Misc.

Good Life, Good Death: Advanced Directives

Advocating for a Loved One in the Hospital

Paying for Health

Finding A Healthcare Partner in a Practitioner

Place Travel: Experiencing Culture

Science Set Free:

The Body as Political Forum

Intelligence
Repetition and Transformation