There are so many ways to take care of yourself, especially in this hot summer heat wave but what if you are injured, paralyzed or dealing with a serious health challenge, can water therapy help? The answer is yes! While in the water we are more buoyant and able to maneuver without the added weight of gravity pressing down on us. Especially when there is the need to rehabilitate, water or hydrotherapy is a reliable way to do the work in awakening our brains, nervous and musculoskeletal systems, in fact, all of our 11 systems that make up the human bodily functioning but that’s not just for us!

Many years ago I took my beloved Shembala, an English Black Lab for hydrotherapy to aid and improve her elbow dysplasia.  By the time we became aware of this condition it was too late to attempt surgery.  That is often done when the dysplasia is in the hip but elbows are another story all together and if a surgical intervention is to be considered it needs to be while they are still pups.  The results were impressive.  Shembala regained much mobility and although we could never get rid of this condition, we improved her ability to function and live life to her fullest while we had her in our lives.  And now here’s another story of a 6 year old cat named Nazzaning.  To learn more about this wonderful success story of Nazzaning who after an accident suffered with a paralyzed front paw and quickly rehabilitated the use of his arm and paw/fingers with hydrotherapy. To learn more, click here.

I’ve been following the focus and thoughts of Dr. Joel Fuhrman for several years now. I too have difficulty always being as focused and diligent in my eating regime yet I realize that I can continue to renew my focus.  I notice the things I tell myself, becoming more mindful and returning when I fall of the wagon so to speak to a more balanced, enjoyable and delicious diet that enables me to live life to the fullest!

We all know people who are seriously charging to an early sick bed or worst. And we know how “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink!” And you can, non- judgmentally present them with information that when they are ready they can make better choices and turn things around. You know, if you’re alive, your hearts still beating and your brain still alive, there’s time.

Give yourself the time to read more about this amazing turn around story that all thought beyond hope. This is a real life story, person and a life now living to the fullest. Learn more about Dr. Joel Fuhrman by clicking here.

How many times have you heard someone tell you what the have to do or they should but you can tell by their expression and body language that their heart really isn’t in to it. Maybe it’s about working out to improve their health or lose weight, it could be any thing that we resist doing. Now what if you could connect the effects of enjoyable exercise and laughter, that’s a thought! You know what it’s like when you’re watching a show with someone or at an outing and someone tells a joke or something funny happens and you begin to laugh and laugh and before you know it you and others are laughing uncontrollably until one of you is grabbing at your gut begging with tears of laughter to stop so you can catch your breath! You know how you feel, rejuvenated, alive, you feel great! When you feel good you don’t feel bad, now that’s a thought! What are the things you are telling yourself, are they good things, insults, what you should be doing, self defeating language or beneficial things?  What if you thought of the things that make you laugh, I mean really give you a chuckle, how many times a day do you do that! We all have experiences, things that we reflect on in our lives that fuel us. Do you fill yourself up with negative thoughts and actions or positive, and how often do you laugh and then laugh out loud.? It’s contagious, laughing and those who catch the bug of laughter don’t always have to know what’s so funny because the excitement and joy of laughter is too much fun to challenge.

So think about the things that make you smile, make you happy and then take it to the next step and reflect on the things that make you laugh even if you are laughing at yourself with humor and love and go take a walk, hike, garden, play with your kids or pets, go to the gym and enjoy the things that you get to do.

To learn more about a study on the benefits of laughter in reducing stress, appetite, weight loss and improving your health, click here.

Working in the complimentary alternative medical field (CAM), I too often meet clients that want to be fixed. Something has happened in their life dynamics, they’re not happy, the pain becomes chronic and then all the justifications as to why this has happened develop. They’ve run the course of different disciplines still looking for an answer, is there one? The answer is yes and there’s something you can do about it!

“When you get injured, you limit movement to stop the pain. Once the pain is gone, though, you don’t start to move as if you were never injured — the brain still remembers the injury and protects the area,” says Elgelid. Such compensation can lead to further problems. “Unless you retrain those movement abilities, you limit yourself more and more.”

Our problems are not always from an injury but often from a lack of awareness as we move through our careers or sports passions, locked in habitual patterns of thinking and moving that limit ourself and lead to these debilitating concerns. Sometimes it’s simply that we’re not functioning or playing as well as we know we can.  How do we maneuver through this hurdles when the standard and honored approaches don’t do the trick? To learn more and find out what you can do now to improve how you live life so that you can do what you want when you want, click here!

I have been following the theme of nutrition endorsed by Dr. Joel Fuhrman.  For the past 15 years and more, Dr. Fuhrman has been espousing the benefits of a healthy vegetable based diet with non invasive approaches to reverse our modern day illnesses created by excess.  He is doing noted studies with Johns Hopkins University and now he is sharing with us how to better avoid or reverse cancers.  In this article he focuses on breast cancer but the advise is applicable to all cancers.  Here is a little to wet your appetite -

“Green vegetables are the most powerful anti-breast cancer food. Take note that a vegetarian diet does not show protection against breast cancer as much as a diet rich in green vegetables, berries and seeds. Many vegans eat a high glycemic, nutritionally poor diet, and do not take sufficient Vitamin D, leaving themselves at high risk of cancer. It is the phytochemical nutrient density and diversity of the diet that offers the most dramatic protection against cancer, not merely the avoidance of meat or fat.  Close to 300 case-controlled studies show a protective effect of vegetable consumption against cancer and that cruciferous vegetables are the foods with the most powerful anti-cancer effects of all foods.  While eating fresh fruits, beans, vegetables, seeds and nuts have been all been shown in scientific studies to reduce occurrence of cancer, cruciferous vegetables are different.  Instead of a 1 to 1 relationship they have 1 to 2 relationship with a wide variety of human cancers.  In other words, as plant food intake goes up 20% in a population, cancer rates typically drop 20%, but as cruciferous vegetables go up 20%, cancer rates drop 40%.”  To learn more, click here.

We all know that best intentions don’t always lead to desired results, and when they don’t, who’s to blame? We are too willing to give our power over to someone we consider an authority to teach us how to do something but are we really listening, sensing and feeling what we are doing? Too often the answer is no and then when we incur a problem we are frustrated, angry and sometimes resentful to try something new. We become jaded and either don’t explore other possibilities especially if immediate results aren’t guaranteed or we jump to the next trend in hopes it will be the magic bullet that fixes the problem! Thereafter, it’s the doctors office for a diagnosis and often a prescription to try and fix us or allay the problem we created for ourselves with the best intentions of improving our dynamic. So the question is do our actions best serve our intentions?

A little knowledge goes a long way and if we took a little more time to investigate and really sense and feel if what we are doing is the best approach we could stave off a lot of the compiling issues we create for ourselves. Well, good judgment is a by-product of bad judgment! How quickly do we learn from our experiences to make better calls that serve our intentions?

Stuart McGill, professor of Spine Biomechanics at the University of Waterloo, Canada has outlined a healthy, balanced approach to improve and maintain the concept of true “Core Stability” without straining, damaging and pushing our spines to the point of trauma. Have you ever heard of, it’s how you do what you do that matters, and “less is best”? What is your intention, to strengthen, flexibility, how about both! Think about saying yes and no at the same time! How easy is it to drink and talk at the same time, not very, so why is it so difficult to understand that there are times when we are saying yes and no in our musculoskeletal organization that compromise our actions and over time create a lot of the aches and pains, bulging, herniated, slipped disks that we as a multitasking, driven culture experience. It’s more about what we are doing and how we are going about it. Here is a site from the New York Times that dispels the myths of the latest trend of core exercises. To read more, click here.