Health & Vitality - My Ongoing Search

Ironic, I know, that I've titled this one New Beginnings a day after one titled The Final Act.  But, I'm still here, aren't I? It's the beginning of the Labor Day Weekend and that means the end of summer for students and final preparations for back to school. This is the weekend that the major highways to all the cities with universities and colleges will be clogged with parents or friends driving freshmen to their campuses.  Any first year student staying in residence is expected to arrive this weekend to settle in and start their orientation.  That is something that hasn't changed since I headed off to university in 1972. I can still remember that very long drive from my small home town to the big city which I have lived in since.  Parents of a high school friend who were making the trip with their daughter, offered me a ride.  It seemed we would never get there, especially when we were slowed down in bumper to bumper traffic where the expressway led to a ...

It should come as no surprise, that the final section of the Elderhood book by Louise Aronson is about end of life care and death. How we will approach death is an individual process, based on many factors.  In the last century, with all the advances in medicine due to new applications of science, death became very medically oriented.  There has been a tendency to keep offering treatments or surgeries to fix acute problems until those are no longer feasible.  One hundred years ago, most people died in their homes.  In the past fifty years, most people have died in hospitals.  It's only in recent years that the pendulum seems to be swinging back to home based end of life care or at least care in a hospice setting. There is no doubt that we will all become more frail and infirm as we age.  Interpretations of quality of life as our physical abilities decline is variable from person to person, and family to family.  However, most of us would consider t...

My exposure to spices, until my adult years, was somewhat limited. There was black pepper as a standard one, paprika for recipes like devilled eggs, and then the baking spices like cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg. It wasn't until later in adulthood, as I expanded my recipe repertoire, that I became familiar with a greater variety of spices. On my journey of learning to use food for health, I've learned about the many healing properties of spices, along with the very interesting flavor variations that they add to a meal.  I'm going to mention here several that are recommended as staples for a healing diet, their properties, and the types of recipes in which I use them. Tumeric is at the top of the list for its great anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.  I purchase it ground.  It's an orange/yellow powder which also adds a lot of color to the recipe.  I mainly use it in cooking, for recipes like beef curry, roasted cauliflower, and red lentil soup as a few ex...

I dove back into the Elderhood book today for some more perspective.  How we see aging is affected by what we know and what we believe, as well as the information we are given and its context. One of my more senior friends, when she hears me talk about needing to prepare more for my senior years with my upcoming 65th birthday, says to me that to her, age is just a number.  She is telling me that my attitude toward aging is important, and she's right.  Our attitude not only affects how we feel, but also affects our health, how we spend our time and ultimately how long we live.  People who have more positive attitudes about aging are more likely to engage in things like exercise and healthy eating which will help them feel better, longer. The author of the book, Louise Aronson, makes the plea for having more geriatricians who can care for all the functional levels of senior patients, not just the elderly and frail.  The specialty of geriatrics generally has lo...

After the heaviness of yesterday's writing topic, I felt like my brain needed a break from the intensity, so I've taken a day off from that book.  That, in combination with not sleeping too well last night, despite being back home in my own bed, has left me with a mushy brain today.  As such, this post will just be a drifting one about various things. For comic relief, after completing writing last evening, I watched another episode of the Irish comedy/drama Derry Girls and had another big belly laugh, which was very much welcome and a great relief after stewing about what my elder years will be like.  Even though I'm in a somewhat privileged demographic, as far as the likelihood of my needs being met as I lose independence, it's certainly a significant fear to eventually lose control of decision making, especially for a control freak like me.  It will be my ultimate spiritual/mental/emotional test I suppose. Further to my recent computer crash, and the hope of t...

There are a couple more topics that I want to address today, based on more reading in the Elderhood book by Louise Aronson. The first is the impact of the electronic health care record, which is becoming the norm in hospital settings and probably clinics as well.  The author, who is herself a doctor, describes that these records are designed and used primarily for billing efficiency.  They have made patient records like standardized report cards, pretty much eliminating the possibility of including personal and pertinent data such as what might have been gleaned from attentive listening, shared decision making and individualized treatment.  During and after appointments, physicians have to make the content of the appointment fit into arbitrary categories.  She reports that this excessive and inappropriate form of record keeping contributes to physician burnout.  If the doctor wants to keep track of the aspects of the visit which don't fit in the system categor...

As mentioned, we are out of the city for a couple of days.  Today, we have had the pleasure of a couple of lovely outings.  First, this morning, back to the local Farmers' Market to pick up some interesting items and chat with vendors and other shoppers.  It's great to be in the relaxed shopping atmosphere, to interact with the growers of the produce that I bought or the vendors who have carefully created or accessed their products. (Our brother-in-law is familiar enough with the market to tell us to avoid the vendors who are sellers of products shipped in from elsewhere, so we can shop local.) It's not that I don't have access to these same kinds of shopping opportunities in the city where I live.  I do, and I hear about a great variety of them from friends.  I've just been a lazy shopper at home, going to my habitual places and not taking the time to seek out novel situations.  I really have no good reason for not shifting my behavior, other than habit....

I'm reading what will probably the last book about aging that I report on in this daily blog series, though there will be more than one post.  The book is called Elderhood and is written by Louise Aronson, who is a geriatrician.  It's very well written, containing lots of personal stories from her own family life and medical training and practice experience, case histories, and the historical and cultural patterns around getting older. Here is a poignant quote from the book - "the experiences of older people in our health care system are indicative of how current medical care is broken for all of us.  We have created a society where we do everything possible to stay alive, yet dread being old, a culture that discards people who don't fit the latest human 'product specification', and a health care system in which the work of medicine is often incompatible with both care and health." In her many examples throughout the book, Aronson points out how only u...

Although I wrote a post some time ago about my preference for quiet, this one is about environmental noise which is so bothersome.  Two, no three, power tools which make extremely irritating noise, are an all too frequent occurrence in my neighborhood. Two of them are courtesy of the people who come once a week to take care of the grounds where I live.  The sound of the lawn mowers is somewhat tolerable.  It's when the trimmers and leaf blowers come out that I want to slam the windows shut.  Those two devices make such a grating sound that I don't know how the users can stand them!  Just when you think they are finished, they start up again. Gas powered leaf blowers make 80 to 92 decibels of noise, weed whackers 96 decibels and hedge trimmers up to 103 decibels.  Aside from the noise, these gas powered devices create polluting exhaust emissions.  Some communities have actually banned them, or restricted their hours of use. Noise above 85 decibels...

This was another one of those days where my usual resources did not inspire me much for writing.  One concept that did come up though was that of contraction/expansion, feeling worse and then feeling better.  So, I've decided to write about that in relation to my day. It is the body's innate tendency to find a balance between experiences of contraction and expansion.  This naturally occurs in response to both internal and external stimuli, unless we have trained ourselves, either consciously or unconsciously to do otherwise. As an example, think of the startle response in a baby, a contracting, which is immediately following by relaxing and expanding.  That's how we start out in life.  Something does not feel so good.  We experience it flowing through us.  We let it go.  We feel better. In life, our experiences and reactions, whether they be in response to external events or to internal ones, like an illness, might teach us to hold onto cont...

One of the health and wellness series I've recently been following is wrapping up.  The final interviews were with first, a motivational speaker and secondly with a personal and professional coach.  I thought I would check them out as a diversion from my usual speaker diet of health strategies.  As a result, I got a bit of a motivational butt kick, and that's a good thing. Some years ago, I became interested in the personal development field.  I devoured books by people like Wayne Dyer and Debbie Ford.  Their stories and strategies helped me to shift some beliefs around my own stories and motivated me to keep pursuing improving myself and figuring out how to try to be a more authentic expression of myself.  After following teachers like that for awhile, the messages became repetitive and my interest faded somewhat. In more recent years my improvement strategies shifted more to physical health and wellness approaches, mainly due to changes and symptoms i...

Today I watched a great documentary called Living On One Dollar.  I shared it on Facebook, so you might see it in my feed there.  It's about a couple of college students of international studies who decided to spend their summer in a village in Guatemala to see first hand what living in poverty with inconsistent income is like. They provide themselves with random sums of money per day, for their group of four, from 0 to 9 dollars for realism. As they made efforts to get to know more about the villagers, mutual benefit ensued.  Their new friends showed them how to cook more nutritious but still low cost meals, and how to bargain in the market for example.  The young men already knew from their studies that massive international aid funding seldom trickled down to people like the villagers.  They were eager to learn how they lived, earned their income and how they accessed financial help when needed. Some of the community members had organized themselves into ...

In a couple of presentations that I listened to recently, the notion of needing to overcome societal expectations of perfection was addressed.  Though these presentations were on quite different topics, it pointed out to me, again, how dominant this expectation of perfection is in our culture. The impact over time of trying to meet the unrealistic standards promoted by media, in work places and a variety of avenues in life, basically leads to burn out and health problems.  For a period of time, maybe several years, we can push ourselves from morning to night, using various types of stimulants to get through our days and then sedatives at night to try to unwind. But, it is not sustainable. An interesting thing pointed out by one of the speakers was, that these unrealistic standards of performance and success are much more predominant in North America than in European countries, for example.  Other cultures value health, family life, and community more.  Their expe...

When I was a kid, we played outside all the time and ran around barefoot a lot of the summer.  We got pretty dirty and didn't think a lot of it.  My preoccupation with hygiene is something that developed over time and was amplified in adulthood.  At least couple of influences contributed to this. Our first son was born prematurely and was in the neonatal intensive care unit for 9 weeks.  This was a pretty sterile environment.  We had to gown and hand wash, probably with antibacterial soap, before we could enter the room.  I took this frequent hand washing habit home with me when we brought him home, thinking that I was protecting him from harm by keeping us and the home environment as clean as possible. Then, in the 80's and 90's antibacterial soaps were widely marketed and became common additions to the household. While we thought we were protecting ourselves and our children from germs by using these products, it now seems that they are not such a goo...

It's been a somewhat heavy week around here, with a few things happening to dampen my spirits.  (Yes, there were three, and the superstitious part of me hopes that will be it for awhile.)  First, there was the car vandalism.  Secondly, my laptop crashed, requiring the necessity of switching to another one, which is still a work in progress to transfer files.  Thirdly, the car window repair was hampered due to a faulty part.  This means that we have a window now, but cannot put it down or up.  A replacement is on the way and the car will need to go back to the shop again next week. I don't watch much TV, and when I do, it's usually something on Netflix.  Currently, I have one uplifting series, which I parse out over time to make it last.  The others are very good, but have rather intense content which can leave me feeling troubled. When friends were talking recently about programs they enjoy, a suggestion for one that is very funny came up....

Most cultures have periodic dietary changes.  Usually, these are seasonally related to food availability.  In the ancestral times of the hunter/gatherer cultures, it was common to have alternating periods of feast and famine. In later agricultural cultures, where people primarily stayed in one location, food availability became more weather and seasonal related.  Even in our modern North American culture, where we can get almost any food year round, we do have seasonal eating habits, very much influenced by the abundance of locally available produce. It turns out that an important aspect of the evolution of the human body is our ability to adapt to dietary changes.  What science is now understanding about this is, that the adaptation occurs first in the microbiome, the ecosystem in our gut.  Changes in hormonal responses and metabolism follow that.  This is where the signal to use up or store energy happens. For example, in patterns of ancestral eating,...

I've been on this path of exploring nutritional changes to improve health for several years now.  A lot of credit for that goes to my dear friend Lisa, who has suffered from chronic illness for several years, and her husband Jeff.  As part of her own health care journey, she has tried a variety of dietary approaches, so when I've visited her, I've been able to partake and frequently help them prepare the recipes for the foods she and her husband eat.  What I've learned in part, is just how delicious healthier recipes can be.  My experience in their home motivated me to implement different choices in my own home. For many years, professionals in the nutrition field have been well aware that people suffer from a variety of physical symptoms such as heartburn, bloating, gas, constipation, diarrhea, headache, joint pain and so on, not only from test diagnosed food allergies, but also due to food intolerance.  Food intolerance does not show up necessarily as a clea...

Given the impact of the car vandalism which I reported on a couple days ago, it left me pondering what to learn from it, aside from having an opportunity to rant about it. If you have been following me this long, you won't be surprised at my need to look from another perspective.  Once again, the synchronicity of what showed up in my inbox was very helpful. First, there was a video blog from nervous system expert Irene Lyon, talking about how and why highly sensitive people become that way. What that refers to is, people who are particularly sensitive to various stimuli in their environment, as well as the energies and emotional vibes being given off by people around them.  As she describes, this can be a blessing or a curse depending on whether or not your nervous system is well regulated.  This was relevant to how I, and others, reacted and continue to react to having our cars vandalized.  (I highly recommend checking out Irene Lyon's very understandable posts on...

At this moment, I'm quite grateful that I have kept up the practice started a few weeks ago, to draft these posts at least a day ahead.  Today, at the end of the allotted couple of hours for research and writing I had come up blank.  The first interview I listened to had seemed promising, but then the content was more shallow than expected.  The second one, which seemed very enticing, turned out to be such a dense topic that I'm not sure I will even finish listening. I decided to just let it go, cook and eat dinner and then go for a little walk.  Normally, writing this late in the day would have me agitated, as it is my lowest energy part of the day.  But, here I am, putting together something that will be posted tomorrow.  After my initial frustration about this afternoon, I decided that it's a bit of a joke on me about my high expectations. It sort of reminded me of an experience in my first year of university.  I was a small town girl who had be...

The first time this happened, a little more than two weeks ago,  I chose not to write about it.  That's because I don't like to dwell excessively on the negative.  I prefer to deal with things and move on, especially if no personal harm is done.  However, it happened again last night, and I'm going to have a little rant here. We live in an apartment building which has underground parking with locked doors.  Periodically, in the time we have lived here, which is 8 years now, people have gotten into the garage at night and have gone through cars, presumably looking for money or valuables to sell.  This used to be a sporadic occurrence.  After we first heard about incidents, we decided to leave our front windows partially down, so someone could unlock the door and look through the car if they chose.  This did happen a few times in the past couple years, evidenced by items from the glove box being strewn about.  We never keep money or valuables...

When it comes to individual health and vitality, I am a strong believer in learning how to pay attention to the signals from the body before they become an acute illness or chronic disease.  This does not mean that we can always side-step a disease process, but it is very likely that we can influence the outcome with the choices we make. This perspective was very much supported in a presentation with Tiffany Barsotti, who is trained in a variety of modalities including medical intuition, biofield therapies and energy psychology.  Her website is healandthrive.com where you can learn more about this if you wish. This concept of 'know thyself' is an ancient one which gives credence to the role of knowing and trusting our experiences at every level.  When it comes to health and wellness, merging spirituality and science allows a greater range of questions to be asked about what is going on.  There is 'knowing' at a science and biology level.  There is also gnosi...

When we think about how a child develops, it's fairly easy to imagine or visualize the sequence of stages that occurs to get from being a totally dependent baby to a more independently functioning child and then adult.  But, what about after that?  Is that it, or does development continue? A speaker I heard today, Terri O'Fallen, an education expert and spiritual practitioner, says yes.  We definitely carry on in our development throughout life.  Through her many years of teaching and research, she has developed a model of this, simply called STAGES.  It is based on life developmental stages and how at each stage we wake up to something new.  She describes it as a very natural process where skills build on one another. In infancy we are at first primarily developing our senses based on external input.  Then we start to sense more from inside, such as experiencing emotions in response to external things like touch and all our other senses.  Our...

Happiness is something we all know we need in our lives, but it often seems elusive and even confusing.  I watched an interview about the science of happiness which brought up some very good points to consider. Firstly, happiness is not really a specific distinct emotion, but more of a quality of life or a way of being.  It's more enduring than a brief moment.  When you think about what makes you 'happy' it is likely a variety of emotional experiences that have many nuances.  We can almost think of the concepts of well-being and happiness being the same. One way to measure your sense of happiness in your life is to consider whether it is easy to express positive emotions, whether you can generally manage the difficulties that arise in your life and, whether you feel a sense of belonging. Striving to be happy or trying to achieve happiness via a checklist approach does not tend to be helpful. So, any belief along the lines of 'as soon as I ..., I'll be happy...

I've broached this topic a bit previously in terms of biology and healing, in the vein of us being able to impact the way our genes express and how our organs and systems function via how we choose to direct our minds.  Think of the science of epigenetics, which states that how a gene turns it's function on or off is affected by the environment to which it is exposed. In the past, most of us may have thought that science and spirituality were separate categories which never overlapped.  In the world of Newtonian physics, by which most of the modern world operated in concrete terms for the past couple of centuries, this was usually the case.  Also, in the Cartesian idea of the way the world functions, the body is a separate entity from the mind and spirit. However, as science has advanced so much in the last fifty years, the models of how we see our body, the earth and the universe functioning, has changed, due to the understanding of quantum physics.  This modern...

I have seen a variety of internet posts about the new 5G technology which is supposed to be activated in North America some time in 2020.  It is being promoted as having the ability to make our internet functions much higher speed along with the ability to allow interaction among a variety of devices.  But really, the primary use of it for the public will be for entertainment, such as virtual reality devices. While it may sound good, the down side is that in North America there has not been health and safety testing to study the potential effects on people, animals or the environment.  What will make the signal faster is having antennae installed every few hundred feet in order to carry the short high frequency wavelength signal.  What this means is that everyone will get much more involuntary exposure to these electromagnetic frequencies. A lot of independent studies about the effects of various length electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) have been done.  Othe...

A few days ago, I used the title Aging Backwards.  Maybe that seems more appealing than today's title, Aging in Place.  What it refers to is, to quote an article from our federal government service website, 'having the health and social supports and services you need to live safely and independently in your home'.  There is a whole booklet available about it. I had never heard that term, aging in place, before, and frankly, the image it conjures up for me is someone standing still and gradually disintegrating.  However, sarcastic image aside, the intention behind the article is supportive.  There was a story about it in the Readers' Digest, with an example of an elderly couple who had put supports in place to be able to continue living in their own home as long as possible. There is a checklist to get you started in assessing your readiness by looking at nine different areas of your life:  health, home, transportation, finances, connections, safety, sup...