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Coming
Back to Center
by Kathi Remsen
When the Yin
and Yang of your body are in disharmony, it's like trying
to ride a unicycle with the spokes of the wheel short on
one side and long on the other.
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Stress and illness are
nature's way of telling you that you are out of balance. All life is
ruled by the interplay of two dynamic forces known in Traditional
Chinese Medicine as Yin and Yang. Yin is negative, Yang positive. Yin
is feminine, Yang masculine. Yin is passive, Yang active. They are
opposite yet complimentary forces. They are never equal, but cycle
together in harmony. One is always ascending while the other descends.
The Yin/Yang symbol is a wonderful expression of this interplay. Even
though they are opposite, Yin and Yang cannot exist independently. As
Alan Watts put it so eloquently in Tao: the Watercourse Way, "My
inside arises mutually with my outside and though the two may differ
they cannot be separated."
When the Yin and Yang of your body are in disharmony, it's like
trying to ride a unicycle with the spokes of the wheel short on one
side and long on the other. The hub is out of center and your ride is
very bumpy. If you continue for long, you'll break the wheel and
perhaps the bike. Just so, if your body continues in disharmony for
long, illness occurs.
A good example of how this works is caregivers - those people who
give of themselves to nurture, nourish, guide and heal others.
Teachers, counselors, social workers, nurses, body workers and parents
are all caregivers. When caregivers are living harmoniously, they
balance giving (Yang) and receiving (Yin) so they do not deplete their
reserves. They know when they are in need of care and allow themselves
time to receive to balance their giving. However, many caregivers
ignore their own needs until they have given so much of themselves
that body and soul begin to cry out, "What about me?" The
imbalance begins to affect their health, sleep, emotions, focus and
relationships.
The cure is simple in this case. Balance can be re-established by
receiving what was given in excess. Take the time to nourish yourself,
to nurture yourself. There are many ways to find your way back to
balance. You may find that one method works best for you or you may
find that you need a little of various methods. Here are a few
suggestions on how to begin:
- Reach out to nature. Take a walk and absorb the Qi of
nature into yourself with every breath.
- Nutrition. Take time to eat health foods instead of
grazing on empty junk.
- Water. Plenty of pure, clean water will help flush out
toxins and rehydrate you. Most people underestimate their need for
water.
- Meditation. Employ some quality quiet time to get in
touch with yourself - realize where you have become deficient and
work to correct the deficiency.
- Bodywork. Focused attention from a body worker allows
guilt-free relaxation and releases the physical manifestations of
stress.
- Medical Qigong. These practitioners specialize in
recognizing the many faces of disharmony and balancing the Qi of
the body.
- Tai Chi and Qigong classes. These movements help to
balance body, mind and spirit so that you will recognize
disharmony before it gets out of hand.
Learning to harmonize your life will smooth out the highs and lows
so the ride won't be quite so bumpy. Things that trigger stress in you
will begin to lose their power over you. If you're one of those people
riding a lop-sided unicycle, consider balancing your spokes and coming
back to center - and harmony.
Kathi Remsen is a massage therapist and Medical Qigong
Practitioner in private practice in Anchorage. For more information or
private sessions, call her at Wellness Unlimited 332-4992.
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The
Benefits of Grounding
by Sandra Talt
| To be
grounded is to be in right relationship with God/Spirit and
the world you live in. |
What is Grounding?
Grounding is the proper preparation of mind and body to absorb energy
from the earth. To be grounded is to be in right relationship with
God/Spirit and the world you live in.
Grounding gives you more energy in everyday life to accomplish your
goals. Grounding improves health. It also improves concentration so
that we can get things done amidst distractions. Grounding aids in
performance under stress, such as working under a deadline, going to
court, or surviving confrontations. In the healing arts, grounding
makes your work on others more effective, and leaves you less
fatigued.
Grounding and spirituality do not oppose each other. Rather,
grounding enhances spirituality, providing the energy to reach your
spiritual goals.
Are You Grounded?
Body awareness is a good indicator of one’s current level of
grounding. For example, martial artists performing with grace and ease
of movement often show exquisite grounding.
Body awareness includes feeling in your entire body and all of its
parts. Feel your body with your hands. If you don’t have much sense
of how your various body parts feel, if feeling isn’t equal within
your body, or if certain parts of your body are cold (such as your
hands and feet), your grounding could be improved.
Good body awareness also includes knowing if your body is fatigued.
When you get sick, is it a surprise, or did you notice that you were
dragging? Aches are clues to stressors held in the body, rather than
energy flowing usefully through the body when you are grounded.
One simple way to promote grounding is to focus on the red and
orange spectrum of color. Gazing or meditating on red and orange and
bringing awareness of those colors into your mind and body is a great
way to get started. Here’s a visualization incorporating this color
and imagery:
Visualization: The Volcano
Standing comfortably, visualize the red, hot, molten lava deep within
the earth. It seethes with power, constantly in motion. Picture the
lava from the earth moving upwards, toward you, erupting in a volcanic
blast between your legs. The volcano invigorates and strengthens you.
As you absorb the energy contained in the lava, see the orange-red
energy swirling low in your belly. Feel this power, always available
to you from the earth.
Using Awareness
Another way to increase grounding is to recognize body mannerisms.
While driving, for example, check if your shoulders are up. Are you
leaning forward? Clutching the steering wheel? At home, while going
about your normal activities, occasionally check your knees. Are they
locked? Are your hands or jaw clenched? What part of your body aches
or feels tension? As you notice your body mannerisms and identify the
places that clench or hold, you also discover where you lose energy.
As an exercise of awareness, draw your attention to your feet.
Practice contacting the ground with the whole bottom of your foot. Get
your socks and shoes off and walk around on grass, carpet and other
surfaces with texture. Focus on what your feet feel. Play with
increasing foot movement, awareness and flexibility by picking up
marbles with your toes. The following visualization focuses attention
on your feet as the means to tap energy from the earth.
Visualization: The Tree
As you stand, imagine roots growing from the soles of your feet,
reaching down into the earth. Allow your feet-roots to absorb water
and nutrients, and feel these energy aids course up your legs and into
your body. Feel your strong trunk (from legs to waist), firmly
anchored to the ground. From this firm foundation, your branches reach
upward and outward, and leaf in the vibrant energy.
Get Grounded!
To increase grounding, be sure to eat well. Including the following
roots in your diet may help: carrots, potatoes, onions, rutabagas,
ginseng and ginger. Because these roots grow in the ground, they help
to promote grounding. Alcohol does not help you ground, nor does
sugar.
Mental activities can also help us to ground. Too much mental
activity, however, detracts from grounding, so be sure to balance your
mental activity with physical activities such as lifting weights,
aerobics, or the martial arts. These disciplines help to increase
awareness of the whole body. The parts that get sore are the parts
that need increased body awareness.
To increase grounding, choose physical activities that focus
awareness on your body and the earth, not ones (such as trampolining)
that lift your focus to the heavens. Remember, ground first so that
you can accomplish your spiritual goals.
Sandra Talt, D.C.,
incorporates classic chiropractic with low-force adjusting techniques
and energy healing. NAET allergy elimination, cranial adjusting and
ion detoxification are also part of her practice.
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by Kaycie Rosen
The
more we pay attention, the more we develop an intuitive
understanding of what creates balance for us.
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bal·ance:
1. A state of equilibrium or parity characterized by cancellation of all
forces by equal opposing forces; 2. A harmonious or satisfying
arrangement or proportion of parts or elements
work:
The work done by an agent exerting a constant force (
 ) and
causing a displacement (
 ) equals
the magnitude of the displacement, s,
times the component of
along the
direction of
.
In
last month’s article, we looked at how the body reacts to stress and
the physiological processes that take place during a stressful event. In
addition, we explored what happens in the body as our short-term
reactions become patterns and how those patterns create imbalance in
different systems of our body over the long-term. In contrast, we will
now look at the other side of the coin: how the body can benefit from
nourishment and relaxation.
As
our days become shorter and we head towards winter solstice, our natural
tendencies are to turn inward and begin to examine what we may have been
too occupied to notice before. This is the perfect opportunity to start
paying attention to where balance has been lost and begin to restore
that equilibrium.
I
am a great fan of the yoga balance poses. In tree pose, for example, the
sole of one foot is placed on the inner thigh of the opposing leg. In
order to maintain balance, each part of the body must be in a dynamic
interaction with every other part. The foot of the supporting leg must
be grounded on all four sides, the arch engaged, the ankle aligned, and
calf muscles active. The thigh of the supporting leg must provide equal
and opposite force to the foot that is pressing against it. The spine
must be stacked neatly, and muscles in the pelvis, diaphragm, and
shoulders are engaged. All of this will ideally occur while maintaining
deep, regular breath and releasing tension from the face.
While
keeping all of these aspects engaged concurrently can seem stressful,
this and other balance poses have the ability to teach us something very
important about relaxation and rejuvenation. Though it may sound
redundant, the point of the pose is balance—but
not in the sense that we usually think. Simply put, our cultural
definition of “balance” could be seen as “a lack of falling
over.” Our approach in
medicine is often similar—balance from a health perspective means our
patients have no specific disease. However, in the case of the tree
pose, balance is the maintenance of dynamic tension. Each part of the
body is contributing equally so that no one part takes an undue part of
the stress. Thus, the overall system can function with ease.
Additionally,
anyone who has attempted the tree pose will know that it is not a matter
of simply getting into the pose and staying there. Balance is a
continual process of making small adjustments where necessary to keep
that ease. From a physics perspective, the definition of “work”
(above) underlines this point. When we do the pose correctly, all
aspects contributing equally and maintaining balance, no work is being
done. Because the forces are equal they cancel each other out, there is
no displacement, and thus the system is active but not at work.
This
concept can be extended to our treatment of the body as a whole. Health
is not the absence of disease; it is not a “lack of falling over.”
Rather, it is the presence of each system doing its job in such a
way that the whole person functions optimally. In Naturopathic Medicine,
our approach is distinguished by an ability to both assess and treat in
a way that works towards health in this definition. From
a treatment perspective, this can be called “tonification.”
Just as when you go to the gym to tone your muscles, they become
stronger and more able to do their job, the different organ systems can
be tonified to help restore balance to the whole person. A simple
example of this is that by correcting fallen arches in the feet, pain in
the hips or low back is often alleviated because the strain on the
muscles going up from the foot into the leg and pelvis is mitigated.
In
the organ systems, tonification is usually achieved by the use of
lower-force interventions such as vitamins or botanical remedies that
either increases the rate at which an organ is working, or nourishes and
strengthens that organ so it can work with greater ease. One example of
this often comes up when we work with allergies. An allergy is
intolerance to something in the surrounding environment. For example, in
a person who has chronic sinus congestion, the body expresses this
intolerance by producing mucus. As opposed to focusing on the expression
of the problem, which takes place in the sinuses, we can look at the
root of the problem, which is that the body is not effectively
processing what is in its environment. Frequently, by tonifying our
primary processing organ, the liver, and increasing the rate at which it
is doing its job, chronic allergic symptoms are greatly reduced. In this
context, health is not achieved by removing toxic elements in the system
or suppression of symptoms, but by nourishing and bringing balance to
the overall organism.
As
we head deeper into winter, we also have the tendency to look deeper
into ourselves. We can take this opportunity to reflect on our own
balance. The more we pay attention, the more we develop an intuitive
understanding of what creates that balance for us. From a health care
perspective, true balance is achieved when all systems are functioning
optimally (as opposed to there being a lack of symptoms). The body is
vital and active yet, as defined above, no work is being done because no
system takes an undue share of the stress on the whole body. When we
look at health in this way, wellness becomes both individualized and
intuitive. Both as individuals and health care providers, we become more
powerful to create health.
Happy
holidays, with health and wellness to you and your loved ones!
Interested in
learning more about maintaining and restoring your health?
Dr. Kaycie Rosen
practices Naturopathic family medicine and offers lectures and cooking
classes in the
Anchorage
area. Call her at 907-830-5463.
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Alignment
in the New Consciousness
by Shirley Knapp
|
The
alignment of consciousness is not so much about what we do, but
about how we feel. |
At
times our lives can be extremely challenging. We may feel frustrated,
depressed, and even fearful. In the midst of such challenges, we may
wonder how to live a more balanced life. One key to remember is that
all of our experiences lead us to the next step on our spiritual
journey. Indeed, it is important for us to understand that we already
have all that we truly need to take our next steps into alignment.
Alignment
means that we are balanced throughout our mind, body and spirit. This
is important because when we are not in balance we are stressed, and
long-term stress ultimately leads to disease.
So,
how do we shift our lives into balance? One way to begin is by living
intuitively and trusting our guidance. In working with clients and
supporting the development of intuition, I often remind them that
there will be times when guidance takes us into situations in which we
may not feel comfortable at first. However, this is all part of
learning to trust.
Three
years ago, I was guided to leave my well-settled, very comfortable and
familiar life in Vermont and move to Alaska. Many, including my
family, thought I had gone off the deep end in a traditional mid-life
crisis! After 30 years in
Vermont, did I really want to leave my life and holistic practice to
go — where?! As I
packed up my life and sold my house, I discovered that I had many
fears to release. I wondered why I was called to Alaska, and how I
would come to find balance in such a different lifestyle so far away.
As time went on, however, I realized that I needed to go beyond my
comfort zone, to stretch myself in both faith and alignment.
Our
inner soul searching will always take us where we need to go. It
doesn’t support us to skip over our lessons, or go around them. For
each lesson reveals the next rung on the ladder of our spiritual path.
In working with clients, I sometimes feel their urge to hurry through
a particular lesson, especially when it is challenging. I remind them
that a soul lesson is here until we learn it. Only then will it be
released. If it is not released, it will come around again in a new
form.
Joy
comes in finding that when we make aligned changes in our life we are
provided for. Each time I have taken a deep plunge into the unknown I
realized later that it was the dive that was the scary part—not the
unknown. Of course, the first step into the unknown is never easy; it
can be terrifying. But this is how we make the next shifts in our
consciousness: by letting go of our fears and taking the plunge into
the new.
Shifts into deeper soul alignment often have a quality of inner
release. The rational mind does not have a major role in this.
Instead, alignment may come in meditation or by sitting quietly, in
letting messages come through to our conscious mind, and in relying
and acting on the messages that speak to our intuition.
As
you take steps to align on deeper levels, the results may be felt in
your body. You will become more peaceful, experience less stress, and
have a desire to take better care of yourself with diet, exercise and
meditation. You may notice how you are more relaxed and full of
positive energy. Unhealthy situations or people will either change or
be released from your life. You may find yourself changing careers,
friends, spouses, hobbies. As you see the shifts in yourself—and as
others begin to notice—you will begin to trust more in the process.
Always remember that you are never given more than you can handle, or
anything that you cannot do.
The
alignment of consciousness is not so much about what we do, but about
how we feel. It is not what job we do; it is how we feel
when we do it. It's not whom we connect with; it's how we feel
when we connect with that person. When we are living with joy and
passion, we are in alignment; we feel alive and energized; our lives
are running smoothly and effortlessly; and we teach others simply by
being who we are how to live joyfully. Joy is our choice!
Shirley
Knapp
is an internationally recognized spiritual teacher and author of
“Sustaining Joy.” She has been in a private holistic practice
since 1986. Call her at 907-598-0015 or visit www.shirleyknapp.com
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