Me & My Daughter Gwendolyn This Morning

I woke up this morning with a pounding headache, which is very rare for me. The day before I had eaten half a bagel when I found myself at a cafe with a client, starving and light-headed,  having run out without breakfast. Poor planning on my part, and I forgot – as I sometimes do – the extent to which gluten reeks havoc in my body. Anyway, this morning as I woke up to the pain in my head I was immediately cranky. My 4-year-old daughter Gwendolyn, who was cuddling next to me, asked me where the pain was. Then she sat up and began kissing my eyelids and my forehead and my cheeks. I swear my headache disappeared under the tender healing power of her kiss, at least for a few minutes, as my system was flooded with the endorphins of love and connection.

It’s incredibly healing to have a source of deep connection in your daily life, and I’m not just talking about soothing a headache. Connection and the deep sense of well-being that comes from it speaks to your cells and changes the way they function. Authors like Bruce Lipton have written extensively on this. It’s the primary reason that older single people who have pets live longer than those who don’t. Do you have that connection with someone or something? A person, a place, a daily meditation or ritual that you do that connects you with something greater, whether you call it God, love, or something else?

You need to be experiencing that every day, at least for a few minutes. It’s an essential part of your healing process. If you have a deep connection with your lover, or your child, or a friend, take the time to nurture it. If for whatever reason that’s not accessible to you, white light meditation is a great option. If you haven’t already, get yourself the free white light meditation I’ve created by filling in the box on the top right of this page. Or if you have a meditation at home that you love, use that. If there’s a place that you can go where you feel connected, make time in the day for it like your health depends on it, because it does.

Want more inspiration? Read Walking’s Got Nothing To Do With It or go back to the main page to Get Inspired.

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

For this reason, I have always been a fan of what has been called alternative medicine, complementary medicine, integrative medicine, holistic medicine, breakthrough medicine, and now functional medicine. Lots of names, but all referring to the same general philosophy, which is that in order to treat an illness, the underlying causes must be addressed, and we must look at the whole person, not just the diseased part. I feel so passionately and so strongly about this because it’s working for me, and because there are so many people suffering that don’t have to be.

The following 9 tips for addressing autoimmune disease were taken from an article on www.healthiertalk.com written by Dr. Mark Hyman, MD, founder of The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Dr. Hyman specializes in functional medicine. In his own words:

Functional medicine moves beyond diagnosis-based medicine to incorporate new research that for the first time allows treatment of the underlying causes of disease.

It works with the body’s natural forces to achieve a state of what Dr. Hyman calls UltraWellness—lifelong good health and vitality. Functional medicine creates UltraWellness by combining a broad range of treatments to help restore and optimize normal function and health, including conventional therapies, herbal treatments, and alternative methodologies, in one encompassing, patient-centered approach.

9 Tips for Addressing Autoimmune Disease

(If you really want to educate yourself on these issues, click on all the links throughout – Dr. Hyman’s blog is very informative.)

• ·    Read The Autoimmune Epidemic (affiliate link). This book will tell you why we have this problem, and how to fix it.
• ·    Find a functional medicine doctor who can help you address autoimmunity. (I suggest fining a center that specializes in this. There’s a comprehensive list of these centers in the back of Suzanne Somers’ book Breakthrough which I highly recommend.)
• ·    Get tested for mercury and other heavy metals.
• ·    Get tested for celiac disease (an autoimmune reaction to wheat and other gluten-containing grains), which causes over 60 autoimmune diseases. And consider eliminating other inflammatory foods from your diet such as dairy, eggs, corn and animal fats for a few weeks to see if it makes a different your symptoms.
• ·    Take immune-balancing nutrients and supplements, including vitamin D, essential fats (like EPA/DHA and GLA), and probiotics.
• ·    Practice deep relaxation daily through yoga, meditation, biofeedback, or anything that reverses the stress response.
• ·    Practice the precautionary principle, which says that we should avoid anything with the potential for harm. In the US, something has to be proven harmful before it is taken off the market. In Europe, something has to be proven safe before it is allowed on the market. This is also known as “better safe than sorry.”
• ·    Learn how to boost your body’s own detoxification system

Have you tried functional medicine? How has it helped you? If not, what’s stopping you?

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

Sugar is a drug. Powerful. Pervasive. Deadly. (If you have cancer, sugar is the fastest way to grow your tumor. If you have a cold, or a virus, sugar is a great way to feed it and stay sick longer.) I have understood in a whole new way the addiction of sugar these past few years. And I can say with certainty that our culture is caught in its clutches. I could go on about sugar for a long time, but let me get back to my point. If health were the prime concern, our nation’s food habits would have been developed very differently.

As someone with a chronic illness, everything I digest matters. I’m one of the few fortunate ones (I mean that both sincerely and sardonically) who actually feels the way unhealthy food effects me almost immediately. This keeps me on track and reminds me, if I slip a little and eat a few cookies at a holiday party, how sick I’d be if my diet weren’t pristine. What’s interesting to me is that my “abnormal” way of eating is actually the diet for health, longevity, and well-being. And if I want to maintain that diet, it’s nearly impossible to do so in public restaurants. Our culture’s food habits create and maintain illness and are in direct opposition to health.

Which brings me back to Food, Inc., which was a fascinating film on many levels. It was particularly disturbing to learn how a handful of uber-powerful companies are controlling what goes into our bodies and how poor the quality of that food is. To eat well in this culture is to be an iconoclast. It’s not easy to do, but the benefits are invaluable. I highly recommend the movie. Check it out.