Tapping Into Possibilities

Archives for 2015

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

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Is this article in today’s Washington Post a “Known Unknown” or an “Unknown Unknown”. I think the latter. But I am always excited to learn about both.

The benefits of LED Light Therapy for reducing pain and increasing circulation are a Known Unknown.

“Known unknowns result from phenomena which are recognized, but poorly understood. On the other hand, unknown unknowns are phenomena which cannot be expected because there has been no prior experience or theoretical basis for expecting the phenomena.”

The benefits of LED Light Therapy are known and recognized in scientific circles and include many 100’s of studies on LLLT (low level light therapy)  but are mostly unknown by the general public.

This exciting discovery about the brain’s lymphatic system…..meaning the brain has a way to get the garbage out……is an Unknown Unknown….new to everyone.

What is particularly exciting to me is the possibility that this Unknown Unknown may enable a Known Unknown (that light therapy increases circulation wherever the light is placed) to become a Known Known  (red and near infrared light therapy can penetrate the skull, increasing circulation to the brain, bringing nutrients in and taking garbage out, alleviating the symptoms of many problems affecting the brain).

“Scientists find the brain’s missing ‘pipes’ by Amy Ellis Nutt

brainimages

“Throw out the textbooks” and “missing link” are words rarely heard anymore in science, but that’s what researchers around the world are saying about the recent discovery of microscopic lymphatic vessels connecting the brain to the immune system…….Click to read more…….. Scientists find the brain’s missing ‘pipes’

 

 

 

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” 
― Donald Rumsfeld, 2002

 

How to survive 25 Years of Marriage……..

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The crazy thunderstorms last night that came and went as though nothing had happened were a great metaphor for my marriage which I gratefully honor today.

What I’ve learned, what we’ve learned (and not without great resistance) is

            Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff                                         

              (great little gem of a book, by the way, by Richard Carlson)

And

“I choose to respond (not react)”

(the most important lesson learned from The Presence Process  by Michael Brown)

 

Or Most Importantly

“Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow, come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a great tree in the midst of them all.”

Buddha’s Little Instruction Book

 The ups and downs of any relationship are like storms that come and go.

As Mark Nepo wrote in The Book of Awakening, “ the storm by it’s nature wants to move on, and the tree’s grace is that it has no hands”

How to survive 25 Years of Marriage…..Be a Tree

Falling…..in Gratitude

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Today I am so grateful for being able to hold a pen in my right hand and to write.

Last Monday I was doing my typical multi tasking and rushing. I still had to walk my dog before rushing to the gym and I was late, as usual. We’d had another of Washington DC’s weird snow, ice, freezing rain storms on Sunday. The side walks were sheets of ice but the streets were clear, or so they appeared.

Sidebar: “Things aren’t always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many.” Phaedrus, 4th c Roman poet

Well, you guessed it….I fell on the ice and broke my right arm leading to a day in the emergency room, a night in the hospital and a visit to the operating room the next day.

And yet I’m grateful. Grateful for the kind neighbors who stopped in their rush to get to work who lifted my big, old, deaf wet dog into their car and drove me home, the neighbor and friend who drove me to the emergency room, the professional, efficient and kind staff at Suburban Hospital who didn’t treat me like a number or just another careless person. I am so grateful for my husband, Frank, who’s Honey Do List grew exponentially, for thoughtful and attentive kids and for friends who drove me, who cut up my food and washed my hair in the sink and just kept me company.

Be grateful for the little things even when things aren’t  going along with your plan.

Florence Scovel Shinn (New Thought spiritual teacher and metaphysician) wrote almost a 100 years ago in The Game of Life and How to Play It

Today is a day of completion. I give thanks for this perfect day. Miracle shall follow miracle and wonders shall never cease.

And I couldn’t agree more.

I Love REM

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I Love REM…. no, not the 90’s band (though I like R.E.M. as well)….. that wonderful anti-aging sleep cycle.

The reason we need 7-8 hours of Ambien free sleep no matter what our age is that we need to go through the natural/normal/why our ancestors went to bed when the sun went down sleep cycles that include REM and N(non)REM (stages 1-4) sleep.

Ambien may seem like your best friend if you’ve had sleep issues but studies have found that it increase NREM cycles and decreases REM cycles.

Why should you care whether you have enough REM cycles or not? REM sleep is when you repair and regenerate.

Think: When I’m awake I degenerate; when I’m asleep I regenerate.

Healing happens during REM. Lack of REM impairs our ability to complete and learn tasks. It is also where we have memorable dreaming. REM is when the information you gathered during the day is put in to context and stored for future use.

And it just isn’t what lack of sleep does on the inside but what it does on the outside. Participants in a 2013 study from University Case Medical Center in Cleveland showed visible signs of aging including reduced skin elasticity, fine lines and uneven pigmentation, slept fewer hours and spent less time in REM sleep

“Take a rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.” Ovid

Free Alzheimers Prevention Rx!!!

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Free Alzheimers Prevention Rx:  GET MORE SLEEP!

Nothing scares me more than Alzheimers. I’ve had too many of my friends having to cope with this devastating disease with their aging parents.

Sleep deprivation causes all sorts of things we don’t want: hair loss, impaired vision and hearing, sexual dysfunction, weight gain.

Why? Sleep and your immune system are intricately entwined.

Not enough sleep leads to increased inflammation. Inflammation can turn on genetic switches…meaning the aging process speeds up. If your mother has/had Alzheimers you may be genetically programmed for Alzheimers at age 70 but if you are sleep deprived that gene could turn on earlier.

Studies indicate that the less you sleep and the worse your sleep patterns are, the more amyloid plaque your brain has. Amyloid plague is a marker for Alzheimers. There is no causal link (yet) between lack of sleep and Alzheimers but we do know lack of sleep causes so many other of the down sides of aging, why not make Sleep a Priority.

Lights, Camera, Action….2015 is the International Year of Light!

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Did you know that 2015 is the International Year of Light & Light Based Technologies?

UNESCO delegates from Ghana and Mexico introduced the idea for an International Year of Light in 2012 to raise awareness of the achievements of Light Science and it’s applications.

UNESCO and a number of scientific organizations, educational institutions, non profits, technology platforms and the private sector are sponsoring the IYL 2015 which will include exhibits, workshops, conferences.

Today is the opening ceremony in Paris at UNESCO’s headquarters kicking off a year of coordinated activities throughout the world.

100 partners from 85 countries all working together.

The purpose of IYL 2015 is to raise awareness of the achievements of Light Science and it’s applications. The IYL goal is to ensure that international policymakers are made aware of the problem solving potential of light technology.

What does this mean to you? Perhaps you think not much since light whether natural (the sun) or artificial (light bulbs) is something we take for granted and we’ve forgotten most of our high school science.

Light based technologies can provide solutions to an array of global challenges – in energy, in education, in agriculture and, of course, health.

We are human photocells. Light is the ultimate biological nutrient.  Gabriel Cousins, MD

 

http://www.light2015.org/Home.html

 

 

NOURISH

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2015 is the year of the Goat, the Sheep, the number 8, the Putin Dictatorship, an alien UFO invasion, modification of the human DNA for immortality or the International Year of Light (more on that later) depending on what you read or believe.

For me, 2015 is the year of Nourishment.

Nourish: provide with the food or other substances necessary for growth, health and good condition or to cause (something) to develop or grow stronger.

 If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.Hippocrates

Am I nourishing my body, my mind, my emotions, my family, my work with this choice, this action, this word?

  To nourish someone is to feed them deeply something that’s very good for them. Alice Waters, American author & chef

Forget the resolutions, if I can only choose nourishment in all my decisions, it is all I need for a joyous, productive and happy new year.

 

Welcome to Inlightened Wellness

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To my old friends thank you for sharing my four year journey with Intentional Health News. I am excited to launch this new site. The path has shifted but not the journey. 

Intention – a course of action that one intends to follow, an aim that guides action, an objective.

One of my very first posts four years ago read as follows:

We are all limited by our own personal experience so as I write here I’m looking at things from my perspective, maybe yours too, maybe not. I once had business cards that said Watch Me Now as my work as it was evolving at that time was focusing on new things and not staying in a rut but then I found out it was a porn site (do not go there!). Then I thought Changing Health Perspectives was a good description of where I was going but the name was a mouthful and too many didn’t have a clue what it meant. So after setting lots of intentions over the years about what I wanted, especially a great one for getting a good night sleep (email me if you want to know what it is), I realized that good health and wellness are as much about intention, your intention to be well, as it is about what pill you take or what exotic fruit you drink. So Intentional Health it is.

Enlightened – to have or show a rational, modern and well informed outlook, to not be narrow in thinking, to be spiritually aware.

Lots of fun, growth, experience and 114 posts later, a book called Light: The Future of Medicine (Liberman, 1991) and products from In Light Wellness Systems™ shifted my path this past year. Shall we say they “inlightened” me?

   A journey of a thousand steps begins with a single step. Lao Tzu (c 604bc – 531bc)

To All: Lights On! The journey begins.