Creative Health Tip 26 June 2009

*** This video may be of somewhat poorer quality than previous videos. YouTube is having a problem with uploading my usual file format, so I've had to reformat this one to get it to upload. Hopefully, the format problem will be fixed soon and I will return to my previous format.

Meanwhile, here is the full text of the message:

Your mind creates your reality.

This is not a new concept. The Law of Attraction material has been around for a long time now, and most people understand that if/when they can "live in their dream" and really feel they are in their desire – be it a new house, car, or whatever – they will eventually manifest that item in the physical world.

I have been attending a series of workshops the last couple of months, and I have learned to take that a step further and say Your Beliefs Create Your Reality.

What is the difference, besides substituting the word Belief for Mind? Your mind is the tool that brings your beliefs into conscious awareness. Your Beliefs are what create the vibrations that make things happen.

Stress is a prime example of this. Any given situation will be stressful for some people, but not stressful for others. The difference is in the belief of the person having the experience. To go back to a popular children's book, The Little Engine That Could, the engine got stressed-out that he couldn't make it over the hill until he changed his belief to one that said "I Can." The way that worked is pretty obvious: his thought ("I think I can.") effected a change in his belief that he couldn't do it to a belief that enabled him to get over that hill!

However, there is another level, and this is the one I've been working with lately. You have all those conscious beliefs that create your response to experience: like the Little Engine's stress, he looked at that tall hill and his conscious belief said "I'm too small to make it over that hill" but he changed it through the "I think I can" process.

The deeper level is the one where core beliefs live, and these may conflict with your conscious beliefs. Core beliefs are the ones you have absorbed since birth; they are memories of and reactions to past experiences. Depending on whether these beliefs are productive or destructive, you can find yourself sailing along through life with everything going your way, or struggling because some core belief that no longer serves you is in conflict with your conscious belief and is holding you back, or even making you ill.

The series of workshops I've been attending to learn about this are with Jeb Barton here in Bend.

Jeb teaches that sustained conflict in your core beliefs is the cause of disease. Using our Little Engine again, here's how a core belief can cause disease (please keep in mind that this is a very simple example. The process itself is longer and more complicated):

Let's say that Little Engine has been told all his life that he's too little to go over any big hills – that is now his core belief. All his life, he's avoided big hills because he feels he's not strong enough to go over them. Now, Little Engine approaches the hill – there is no way to avoid it this time – and gets all sorts of encouragement from his friends, and even says, "I think I can, I think I can…." But now there is a conflict with the core belief that says "you can't" and the conscious belief that says "I can," and what to you think happens? He probably gets half way up the hill and an axel breaks, he bursts a gasket; he "gets sick" in some way due to the conflict in his you-can't/I-can beliefs.

If you are experiencing a chronic illness, it would definitely be to your benefit to examine some of your beliefs and see if you can figure out when and where you acquired a belief that no longer serves you or is holding you back, and use your Creative Mind ability to turn it around into a positive statement that will enable you to regain your health. If you can Believe yourself healthy, you will See health restored.

(There is a qigong meditation practice that works on that principle, and if you are interested let's arrange for a lesson in which I can guide you in that process. If you would like to do that, or have any comments or questions on today's Tip, write to me at bewellwithmichelle@gmail.com )

Creative Health Tip 12 June 2009

[At the 2 minute 16 second mark, the word I was trying to think of was trampoline!]

Here is your Heaven On Earth Creative Health Tip for this week:

Stand up and stretch!

At least once every hour or hour-and-a-half - this is critical, especially if you are working at a job where you do a lot of sitting without moving around – standup, stretch out a bit, walk around for five minutes, loosen up your muscles, breathe in more oxygen.

The reason this is important is two-fold.

First, if you are working at a desk, you often tend to sit a little hunched over which means you are not taking as much oxygen into your lungs because you are leaning forward and you lung capacity is compromised.

If you stand up, you elongate your body, you unfold yourself, and you can get more good oxygen into your lungs. The oxygen spreads throughout your body, of course, and helps to relax your muscles.

If you're not getting enough oxygen as you sit there at your desk, your muscles are going to start to become tense, and then when you do stand, you'll experience the uncomfortable "pins-and-needles" thing where you try to kick out your leg muscles and stretch a bit to relieve the discomfort.

You can save yourself that discomfort by just standing up and getting in some deep breathing every hour or hour and a half.

The second part of this is your lymph system.

Your lymph system works along with the movement of your muscles. Sitting still and quiet while working at your desk, your lymph system is very sluggish. It's not doing very much; it's not removing all those used and dead cells in your body nor any of the toxins that you've taken in. It's not getting them out because it's just not moving fast enough.

When you stand up and start moving around a bit with your muscles, that kicks your lymph system into a higher gear.

In fact, the best thing you can do for your lymph system is rebounding. Get one of those little trampolines and bounce on that for five minutes, or even three or four minutes….it doesn't need to be a long time. That will really rev up your lymph system and get a lot of that stuff out of your body.

A lot of that stuff (old cells and toxins) is what causes illness because it's just sort of sitting there and blah.

So….stand up! Stretch, Breathe Deeply, Move Around a little bit, and Feel Good!


Have a fabulous weekend!

Michelle

Hormone experts worried about plastics, chemicals

This is a reprint of an article I saw yesterday on Yahoo! Apparently, there is a growing mountain of evidence that the chemical BPA, which is found in some plastic products, is terribly damaging to your health, espcially heart health because of the way it interacts with estrogen.

I have added bold emphasis to the original in places where I believe it is especially important for you to take note of the damaging influence of this chemical which apparenlty has been found in the containers of these products:

Photo source: Milwaukee, Wisconsin "Journal Sentinel" http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/34532034.html

Hormone experts worried about plastics, chemicals

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090611/sc_nm/us_bisphenol

By Maggie Fox, Health And Science Editor – Wed Jun 10, 2009 11:00 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hormone experts said on Wednesday they are becoming worried by a chemical called bisphenol A, which some politicians say they want taken out of products and which consumers are increasingly shunning.

They said they have gathered a growing body evidence to show the compound, also known as BPA, might damage human health. The Endocrine Society issued a scientific statement on Wednesday calling for better studies into its effects.

Studies presented at the group's annual meeting show BPA can affect the hearts of women, can permanently damage the DNA of mice, and appear to be pouring into the human body from a variety of unknown sources.

BPA, used to stiffen plastic bottles, line cans and make smooth paper receipts, belongs to a broad class of compounds called endocrine disruptors.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is examining their safety but there has not been much evidence to show that they are any threat to human health.

"We present evidence that endocrine disruptors do have effects on male and female development, prostate cancer, thyroid disease, cardiovascular disease," Dr. Robert Carey of the University of Virginia, who is president of the Endocrine Society, told a news conference.

The society issued a lengthy scientific statement about the chemicals in general that admits the evidence is not yet overwhelming, but is worrying.

Dr. Hugh Taylor of Yale University in Connecticut found evidence in mice that the compounds could affect unborn pups.

"We exposed some mice to bisphenol A and then we looked at their offspring," Taylor told the news conference.

"We found that even when a they had a brief exposure during pregnancy ... mice exposed to these chemicals as a fetus carried these changes throughout their lives."

The BPA did not directly change DNA through mutations, but rather through a process called epigenetics -- when chemicals attach to the DNA and change its function.

WIDESPREAD EXPOSURE

Taylor noted studies have shown that most people have some BPA in their blood, although the effects of these levels are not clear.

Dr. Frederick Vom Saal of the University of Missouri, who has long studied endocrine disruptors, said tests on monkeys showed the body quickly clears BPA -- which may at first sound reassuring.

But he said when tests show most people have high levels, this suggests they are being repeatedly exposed to BPA.

"We are really concerned that there is a very large amount of bisphenol A that must be coming from other sources," Vom Saal said.

Dr. Scott Belcher of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and colleagues will tell the meeting they found BPA could affect the heart cells of female mice, sending them into an uneven beating pattern called an arrhythmia.

"These effects are specific on the female heart. The male heart does not respond in this way and we understand why," Belcher said. He said BPA interacts with estrogen and said the findings may help explain why young women are more likely to die when they have a heart attack than men of the same age.

U.S. government toxicologists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences expressed concern last year that BPA may hurt development of the prostate and brain.

A 2008 study by British researchers linked high levels of BPA to heart disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Creative Health Tip 05 June 2009

Here is your Heaven On Earth Creative Health Tip for this week:

I'd like to talk a little bit about feelings.

We know that good feelings like happiness, gratitude, and love create good health. We also know that sadness, grief, and especially anger if it's ongoing and unresolved, creates disease.

On the other hand, we do have those emotions, and we need to learn more about them; learn how to resolve them, learn how to replace them with gratitude, and happiness, and love.

If you're feeling things like anger or resentment, or grief or sadness over the loss of a loved one, that's good. Acknowledge your feelings. Acknowledge where they came from.

However, if you're not sure where they came from or why (as is sometimes the case with repressed grief or anger), that is something you are going to want to look into and resolve.

While you're working through these feelings, do try to turn the page for them.

Try to turn your grief into gratitude. If you've lost a loved one, of course you're going to grieve for them, but at the same time, you had some time with them - maybe months or years – be grateful for all that time you had and eventually that grief will turn into something life-affirming and health-giving instead of health-taking-away.

Anger can be a very, very difficult thing to work through, but it is also the most (physically) damaging of the emotions. If you can take that anger and turn it into happiness, take whatever caused you to be angry and – as I talked about in last week's Creative Health Tip – find the good in it. There's good in everything. If you can find the good in a situation that has brought on anger, that will turn you around from the side of chronic illness to chronic health. And don't we all want chronic health!

Have a fabulous weekend!

Michelle