Many people struggle with diets and exercise plans with temporary success.
The key to success is resolving the deep unconscious conflicts within each and every one of us. These conflicts when unresolved lead to destructive behaviors and addictions, i.e., excessive drinking, eating, smoking, use of drugs, sexual addictions, etc.
My approach helps people by resolving the deep conflicts while incorporating a wellness life plan. Weight gain or other addictions is about lifestyle and choices. With my approach, my clients change their lifestyle and lose their weight forever, because their inner conflicts are resolved.
It is wonderful to watch and experience their healing. My technique is described in my book, Tango from Chaos to Creativity.
Recently, I was sitting by a pool with a friend. We were discussing health and aging. He made the comment, “Aging is a disease,” which struck me as fatalistic.
“No, it’s reality,” he said. “At about 26 years of age, our cells stop growing and producing and start to decline.”
I was recently inspired and re-inspired while reading current research on mind body psychology and taught a college course called mind body psychology for the second time.
The new research about aging and health is exciting and encouraging. There are ways to facilitate more creativity, health, and build a better brain. Genetics of the brain and body are being unlocked revealing that we cannot just live longer, but live a high quality of life as we age.
“But aging is a disease and we are all going to die,” my friend repeated.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Has our culture been so brain washed by the pharmaceutical companies’ commercials on TV that we now believe that everything is a disease, including aging?
Think about how many new diseases are created every week? Why are they created? So that medication can be prescribed for them. It’s a big profit industry and we are buying into it. It’s brainwashing. If you are tired, overweight, too hungry, not hungry enough, sleeping or not sleeping at night, stressed, overwhelmed, addicted to food, drugs, sex, shopping, or cigarettes, depressed whatever! There is a pill for it.
Are we becoming numb or unmotivated to make healthy decisions for ourselves? Have we given our health and wellness over to pharmaceutical companies and doctors who dole out the RX samples like free candy? Then we get “hooked” on or have side effects from the medication and guess what? There is another pill for that! We are not as disease possessed as the pharmaceutical ads would like us to believe.
Aging is part of the continuum of life. The continuum is from optimal wellness to death. It is not a disease and there is no pill to cure it. Aging is part of life — just as toddlerhood, adolescence, and adulthood are part of the continuum. Here is a metaphor I use to explain the continuum and how many factors affect growth, health, vitality and quality of life.
If you plant two fruit trees, one in the shade, in a shallow hole, no room for the roots to grow, and it receives no nutrients, not much sun and there are other bushes around it that crowd it; it’s growth and health are stunted and it produces little if any fruit. The other tree is planted in fertile soil with plenty of room for the roots. It receives sunlight during the daytime and is watered as needed. It has plenty of space to grow and it grows strong and full and produces a lot of fruit.
Our bodies, like the trees, have genetic material encoded, but there are many other factors that affect growth, development, and health. Recent studies in mind body psychology indicate that enriching life experiences that evoke newness, and stimulation of new brain patterns occur during creative moments of art, music, dance, drama, humor, literature, spirituality, awe, joy, and cultural rituals and that these can positively affect healing and the aging process.
Studies show that a mother’s touch creates stimulation of the immune system, growth hormones, and neural growth in her baby’s brain. Yes, we may be living longer but quality of life begins every day with making a choice to promote health, creativity, and neurogenesis or new brain neural pathways and a strong immune system. How?
I teach a webinar course for people who want to make a choice to live a more creative, healthy, happy and stimulating life no matter what age you are.
When you pace yourself with creativity, activity, and rest throughout the day, you will not be resisting the body’s natural rhythm and you will feel less stressed. I teach Mind Body Psychology and use it with my clients in therapy and during our Life Coaching Sessions.
According to the Psychobiology of Gene Expression by Ernest Rossi, ”there is an individualized natural pacing of rhythm or creativity and rest throughout the day. If you learn to ‘catch the wave’ of the natural rhythms that occur, you will discover many hidden connections between your daily rhythm (circadian) and your ultradian (occurring many times throughout the day) rhythm and your level of stress and health.”
How will this help you? It will help you to increase your energy levels, mood, decrease your stress level, reduce addictions, and will positively effect your sexuality and relationships. You will learn to work with your natural rhythm, instead of working against your natural rhythm.
For example, from midnight to 2 a.m. is the time when deep sleep and the stimulation of growth hormones occur.
Learn more in my mind body webinar course. Send me an email if you are interested in joining in on the course.
Transitions are hard if we fight them.
Does a leaf fight every fall because it’s afraid to detach from it’s place of safety on the branch while the wind is tugging it gently to the ground? Maybe, but I don’t think so as it is part of the cycle of nature. Do birds worry every year when it’s time to migrate? I don’t think so. They go with the pull of migration. Why do we fight each change? There is life and death, of course, but what lies in between is life’s essence, which is transition.
Many of us have difficulty accepting change and learning how to cope with changes because we are fearful. The biggest choices in life seem to be beyond our control. Some of the greatest gifts come during and after change.
An excerpt from Stephen Levine’s A Gradual Awakening. This Chapter is called The Wanting Mind.
…seeing the scope of my wantings showed me how deeply and subtly dissatisfaction created my personal world, and that seeing freed me from much grasping, from thinking that all my wants had to be satisfied, that i had to compulsively respond to everything that arose in my mind. I saw that things can be a certain way without needing to be acted on or judged or even pushed aside. They can simply be observed.
Gradually, seeing the unsatisfactory nature of much of the content of mind was opening a path of freedom. When we see that what we’re grasping is on fire, we stop reaching for it. Slowly, the mind is reconditioned to see what it is doing.
And as we discover there are many ways that desires cause dissatisfaction. There are for instance, things we only get once in a while, or which don’t stay for long. There are also things we get and after we get them we don’t want -which is really disconcerting.
…nothing can be permanently satisfy us because not only does the thing we want change, but our wants change too. Everything is changing all of the time. Can we thing of any pain in our life that was not caused by change? But when we deeply experience this flux we don’t recoil in fear of what might be coming but rather begin to open to how things are. We don’t get lost in fatalistic imaginings or ‘nothing matters’ nihilism, but instead recognize that everything matters equally.
…And we watch without judging ourselves for wanting. We don’t impatiently want to be rid of wanting. We simply observe it. Each moment of non-wanting is a moment of freedom. Mindfulness allows that non-wanting. Mindfulness allows addictive thinking and behaviors to change.
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