Tag: #healthcoaching

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Ayurveda Mindfulness Self-care The Spirit

Finding Clarity in the Strangest of Situations

I had a nasty bout of insomnia (of my own making?) last night. I found myself still in front of the television at 11 p.m. before I flipped the switch and headed to bed. This is a death knell for my normally good sleep patterns. I generally need to be in bed before 10 p.m. or my brain decides to turn on at just the wrong time.  This, Ayurveda teaches me, is totally to be expected. It’s a reflection of existence. Our pita (fire) elements begin to stoke around 11 a.m. and get in the way of sleep triggers (they are more appropriately inducing deep sleep and dream states). Thus, bedtime between 9 and 10:00 p.m. is a natural way to develop healthy sleep patterns.

The times associated with the doshas indicate when they are most active. Pita, the fire element, was most active as I was trying to induce sleep. My efforts to fall asleep were fruitless due, in part, to the active fire element doing what is supposed to do in my system.

I knew this, but was compelled to complete the show I was watching, a Ken Burns documentary about the history of Country Music in the U.S. It is a subject about which I’m very interested and Ken Burns’ work has a strange way of sucking me into its “we are all in this together” vibe. Was my behavior worth it, given the rather dazed state I’m experiencing now?  My answer is, maybe, just this once, but “let’s not make this a habit.”

My Experience

As I ruminated and ruminated and meditated and ruminated and ruminated and read and tossed and turned and read some more and wandered around the house and ruminated and ruminated and ruminated, read some more, meditated some more, castigated myself, ruminated, ruminated, forced myself to not look at the clock, listened to the crickets, wondered if they were birds, ruminated, ruminated, etc (you know the drill) a strange thing happened.  I fell asleep for a few hours.

This experience disrupted my routine and left me feeling less than stellar today. But, I’m ok, have the freedom to add a few hours of sleep to the morning, and am just trying to go with the flow.

While meditating this morning (considerably later than usual) I noticed an interesting phenomenon. I felt a level of clarity I hadn’t felt for awhile. It was like all the ruminating had purged my mind of a lot of detritus. I was able to gain a glimpse of the sense of being an empty vessel. Much of what I had been ruminating over and rehearsing in my mind through the night just wasn’t there, at least for that moment,. In its place was a sense of clarity, like a calm pool of water.

Clarity comes to me like a gentle pool of rippled water. Unfortunately, clarity never seems to be intrusively “in my face.”

Naming It

So, I felt the need to write my experience down, name it, to make it real. Writing is one tool I use to remember these sort of experiences. Without some method of codifying these experiences my mind fills up quickly and these moments of clarity dissolve into the pool.

Writing a blog is an interesting experience. While I have wanted to post every week, that just hasn’t been possible. It isn’t lack of inspiration (I don’t think writing is necessarily about “inspiration”, at least not exclusively). It isn’t about “will” (whatever that is). It isn’t necessarily about the “doing” either…many days I write, just not things I want to share. Today, I think, my  decision to blog involves naming clarity.

A state of clarity is when my mind is clear of all the things that clutter it up, worry, anxiety, ego, striving, expectation, etc (you know this drill too). In these rare moments of clarity, I am able to use my mind as a vessel for whatever is out there to be shared.

Sometimes the Preamble to Clarity is Arduous

I appreciate the clarity, although, I must say, I often prefer to reach this level of clarity using easier methods. Insomnia is a pretty unpleasant experience. The problem, as I see it, is that those easier methods aren’t always apparent to me. Fortunately these days the unpleasantness is usually short lived. I have a non-pharmaceutical plan for achieving sleep bliss tonight. This plan has worked in the past and I think it will tonight.

This difficult night followed by bright clarity makes me feel like I’ve taken a another brief foray into the underworld. This time to purge myself of my chatter-box demons. Like so many mythic characters before me, maybe I’m now part of a special club. I’m surprised though;  I never expected Ken Burns would be the one to open these gates for me. Goes to show, you never can tell.

Monthly Gathering Next Thursday

I invite you to join me next week, Thurs. September 26 at 7 p.m. for a monthly community gathering at St. Peder’s church, 4600 E 42nd St, Minneapolis, MN 55406 in South Minneapolis’ Longfellow neighborhood. Cost (suggested donation) is $25 per session. I suspect, much of what I’ve been blogging about will emerge in the sessions. But, again, you never can tell. Learn more at Healing-ground.com/events or email me at info@healing-ground.com. It would be helpful if you could let me know if you will be attending but feel free to just drop in. I certainly will not be turning anyone away!

You Never Can Tell

https://youtu.be/Qv8gwgNG5R8
You Never Can Tell. Tru That! Emmy Lou Harris’ version of this classic is joyful and carefree. She hasn’t appeared in the Ken Burns documentary yet but I’m sure she will when we get to the 1970s. I first saw and heard her do this number in 1975 when she was new on the scene. I was totally blown away by her singing, her musicianship, and her incredibly fine band. And, she even has her name on her guitar strap!
https://youtu.be/qjdYBzzWsew
Emmy Lou is still performing, she’s still cool, still has her name on her guitar strap, and I’m still listening.
Categories
Mindfulness Self-care

Variations on a theme from Funk

In A Funk?

I’ve been in a funk the last few weeks.  I don’t know exactly why or what precipitated this state but I’ve felt like I’ve been operating under the radar and feeling out of sorts. I know the news of late has been bleak and the weather has been heavy, thick, cloudy, and hot. All that influenced me, but this “funk” felt deeper than all that.

I’ve lived on this planet long enough to recognize when this is happening. The discipline of meditation and contemplative practices have given me the gift of insight to occasionally look at my situation from a neutral position—like I’m observing as a third party. And on mornings like today, when the air is finally clear, sunny, and bright, my clarity often re-emerges. I find myself looking back at the past but also understanding that the present moment is really all there is.

Living in the moment? Really?

This idea of living in the moment is glibly tossed around by people in my profession, myself included. It has become so buzz-wordy that I find myself using the term yet wondering if I actually understand it. Everybody lives “in the moment”—we have no choice, right? The moment is the moment and when else can we live?

My understanding of the intention behind this idea of living in the present moment is that it requires that we marshal all of our senses and then pay attention to them when we experience them. Don’t I always do that?  Today I’m wondering if the answer to that question is “Maybe not”. Observing my time spent over the last few weeks has given me some insight into this question.  

How I experienced my funk

Things I did during my funk: maintained my daily meditation, devotional, and breathing practices, experimented with water color paints each day, observed that the gold finches are back and they, despite their tiny little squeaky voices, can be gloriously loud.  


The point of playing with watercolors was not to create great art but to play with the medium and see what happened (although I wouldn’t have objected had great art actually emerged). It’s easy to get lost in the moment when playing, and that is a great place to inhabit.

I visited the Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists show at the MIA for a second time.

I dug in the dirt. I watched the final season of Orange is the New Black, prepared beet salad, prepared cucumber salad, prepared lots of dal, millet, and chard. I began drying my prairie sage in my front porch,

The scent of drying prairie sage is amazing. It is a lemony, lily-like scent, not unlike that of ylang-ylang oil. (The pink is echinacea purpurea)

I celebrated the birth of a new born baby and I grieved the deaths of too many innocents. I circle-sang and I finally listened to a segment of my friend Joe’s new Concert Climat CD.

I finally listened to the first piece of this set. The music has a fresh and spontaneous feel and and is well worth experiencing. I’m not sure how you can purchase it–I don’t see it on Amazon. I purchased it via the Septet’s Kickstarter campaign awhile back.

I bicycled downtown, walked in the neighborhood, had lunch with friends. I celebrated birthdays, watched debates with friends, and ate cake. And, tah dah, for the first time ever, I successfully completed a Tuesday Sudoku!  

Proof of my victory over the Tuesday Sudoku. My friend Ryan taught me how to approach the Sudoku back in February and I worked at the Monday puzzle for months. Finally, I was able to graduate to Tuesday!

Why did it take a funk for me to experience all that?

The sun is shining today and I’m energized, am as optimistic as can be expected, and am feeling cheerful. Observing what transpired during my funk makes me I wonder if what I thought of as a “funk” wasn’t really my body’s way of ordering me to pay attention to all my senses, ignore the endless “shoulds”, trust my body, and to just “be present.”  I’m wondering if, like a snake shedding its skin, I’m slowly shedding my layers of “shoulds,”  and emerging refreshed and recharged. Could it be that I’m just not really accustomed to feeling the moment, to being present?

I am considering that maybe living in the present is a process of continual regeneration rather than just a thing. Maybe we all suffer (or have funks) and maybe variations on funks is the whole point. Maybe we are not supposed to function at peak happiness all the time, and maybe redemption from this suffering is found in the simple act of shedding our “should” skins and living in the moment.  And maybe it’s not the answers that provide the insight, but the questions.

It all sounds lofty and feels profound, but it really isn’t. It’s just life. And today I, and everyone else on the planet, will go on with our day-to-day lives and maybe catch glimpses of the present moment. But, no matter the questions or answers,  I’m passing on the Sudoku until next Monday. I don’t want to push my luck.

References: Variations on Funk

There are a variety of different manifestations of funk available to us. Here are two of my favorites:

Categories
Politics of Well-Being Research

Here we go again: No quick fixes

Pills

Does this sound familiar? A wonder medical drug treatment protocol sweeps through the medical establishment, is imposed on millions of people, becomes the “go to” method for preventing major diseases and encourages the belief that by simply taking a pill and individual can significantly improve their health. Then, years later, after actual longitudinal (extended over time) research is conducted, the protocol is declared null and void for general use. This time the drug is aspirin and the protocol is the use of an aspirin a day to prevent cardio-vascular disease and stroke.

Anyone who has visited their primary care physician over the last few decades has been asked if they have been taking their aspirin every day (to which, thankfully, I have answered “no”). This aspirin-a-day was supposed to lower our odds of experiencing cardiovascular disease. Now, it turns out, it doesn’t lower our odds, and, in fact, it may be harmful.  

It’s not just “a bottle of aspirin” anymore.

The history and efficacy of aspirin is reviewed in an interesting piece in The Lancet (May 2019) which concludes, “in 2018, three large randomized clinical trials of aspirin for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease showed little or no benefit and have even suggested net harm.”

Sowing distrust of health care

I find the cavalier attitude towards pharmaceutical research and public pronouncements to be maddening. Time and time again, from Thalidomide in the 1950s and 60s to Oxycodone in the 2010s, public health is compromised to the short-term interests of an establishment that has little interest in the actual health and well-being of the public. This attitude sows distrust of all health and well-being modalities, including conventional medicine, and feeds the cynical “oh well, we’re all going to die so who cares” attitude so prevalent today. It also casts dangerous shadows of doubt on the safety of well-proven and tested, public health initiatives.

And it affects people’s lives

My first experience with this phenomenon began in the early 1990s and concluded in the early 2000s. I was told I absolutely needed to take estrogen to counteract my risk for heart disease (after the debacle I described last week). I didn’t think I had a choice so I took it faithfully for about ten years, despite the miserable and debilitating side effects I experienced. One day, on the car radio, I heard a news report that said new studies showed estrogen replacement therapy not only didn’t improve a woman’s risk for heart disease, but it INCREASED her risk. I remember saying out loud: “Oh #$%^!” I went home and disposed of the hormones and, surprise, over a short period, after ten years, I started feeling happy and healthy again.

This happens how?

This cycle has deep roots and can be traced to our economic system, which dictates the parameters of our health care and pharmaceutical systems, which directs the behavior of individual practitioners, which influences the behavior of individual patients and clients, which then effects the broader public. The system under which we live is optimized for short-term results and short-term gain. Unfortunately, well-being, healing, and public health don’t work that way. Healing takes time and health and well-being develop over a lifetime. The problem also lies in the research establishment. The same economic system incentivizes publication of research that shows narrow short-term results but ignores the bigger picture.

Since changing the economic system that underlies the problem is difficult for any one individual, I suggest we each wage a guerrilla war against the narrow perspective that enables these practices.

Again, with the universal body

First, we can individually widen our perspective, remember the universal body, and engage with it on an ongoing basis. By engaging with the world at large, the big-picture view becomes clearer and the silliness of believing any single pill or food will solve our problems becomes obvious.

Educate

Second, we can educate ourselves, be more thoughtful, and stop worshiping the holy grail of clinical research: the randomized control trial. Randomized control trials, while sometimes helpful, are not the only approach to research. They are especially touted by, and are useful for, the pharmaceutical companies and large research institutions that have the financial resources to perform this style of research. And, often these trials are a snapshot of a very short period of time of a very small sample of participants. They become expensive and cumbersome when carried out over a significant length of time. And, today, we are beginning to understand that information that doesn’t conform to the research funder’s required results is often suppressed.

To this end, I suggest we start paying more attention to case reports. This approach has a long, insightful, history in the annals of medicine. No single case report explains everything or even anything. But collections of well indexed case reports can illuminate patterns and trends over time and enlighten our research.

Pay attention

And, of course, it’s essential to pay attention to our own experience and learn to trust our insights and when necessary to speak them out loud. This knowledge can be invaluable when communicating with our selves and our practitioners, providing information that will never be reveled in clinical control studies.

Trust your experience and share it with your well-being practitioners.

Finally, we can remember that research reports are human constructs, created and written by human beings, and subject to human error. No one study is last word on anything. It is simply a tiny piece of a giant puzzle–not unlike life. It is the collection of all sorts of investigations and experiences that best forms the basis of our well-being choices.

Any given research study is simply a piece of a very large puzzle.

Epilogue

As I was working on this post, I saw a NEW STUDY!!!! announcement on Facebook. It indicated that supplementation of several vitamins/minerals are helpful in the management of anxiety. They very well be helpful in the management of anxiety, I don’t know. But I’m not running out to purchase them any time soon.

Categories
Ayurveda Mindfulness Self-care Social Connection

An Anniversary

Celebrate?

Twenty-eight years ago, this week, I thought I had six months left to live.

I learned the startling news on a grueling hot day, not unlike today. I was told by physicians that I had a serious health condition that was probably terminal and that I’d “be awfully lucky” if it was a different condition (as I suggested to the physician it might be). My most vivid memory of that time is riding the clinic elevator, alone, in semi-hysterical tears, medical records in hand, heading out to have my various body parts scanned and prodded. People in the elevator looked at me, sobbing uncontrollably, like they just wished they weren’t there.  I can’t blame them for that.

A few weeks later, after extensive surgery, I discovered I was, in fact, “awfully lucky.” I wasn’t dead, nor was I intact, but I was alive. I was shaken to my core, but I was alive.

Thinking I was going to die, only to discover that, oops, I was right about the “different condition” and I would live on, was a surreal experience. I felt a combination of terror and relief at the idea that I had diagnosed myself more accurately than had those with years of medical training. Later, as I was struggling with what this all meant, I felt guilty that, after being given a death sentence, I didn’t suddenly have a revelation that all things in life were wonderful, nor was I inclined to run down the street proclaiming “I’m alive”, like in the movies. Despite the kindness of friends and loved ones, all I felt for a long time was alone in a confusing trauma. And, I was pissed-off …all the time.

I was confused, alone, conflicted and pissed.

Recovery from that experience took at least a decade and required a great deal of self-examination and reflection. I ruminated over how I ended up in such a difficult situation. I reviewed my past and I how I had approached my health. As I struggled to feel better, I found little support from the conventional medical system. But I persisted—I felt I had no choice. Over time, several key observations became apparent:

Buck Up!

  • I’d been raised in the “buck up” school of health.
  • This “buck up” attitude taught me to not pay attention to my body, mind, or spirit (whatever that was), and, it taught me to not talk about my health with anyone–these things were private matters.
  • The conventional western approach to health did of good job of eliminating the physical manifestation of my issue, once it was out of control,  but had hindered any chance I may have had of dealing with the situation years earlier, when it was not life threatening.
I’d been raised in the “buck up” school of health.

A difficult journey

Since then, I’ve embarked on a journey of discovery that has taken many wild twists and turns and seen setbacks and advances. When I look around now, I feel like I have ascended from the depths and am living a full, exciting, and happy life.  For this life, I can thank traditional Chinese medicine, conventional western medicine, ayurvedic medicine, energy work, body work, Pilates, yoga, reiki, music, painting, many other practices, friends, colleagues, family, strangers, and my own internal resources for supporting me in this turnaround. 

Ascent from the underworld

I haven’t thought about this anniversary in quite a few years and have never acknowledged it out loud (or in print) before. But like all anniversaries, it deserves to be acknowledged and named. And so, I’ll name it Persephone, in celebration of my descent to the underworld and return to the world of the living.

I’ll name it Persephone, in celebration of my descent to the underworld and return to the world of the living.