Just Be There

I work in the cancer field and recently read a research article that intrigued me (1).  It has to do with how well people recovered after stem cell transplantation (getting their immune system replaced after theirs has been damaged/destroyed by chemotherapy and radiation). The article implied that the amount of close contact spent with a partner, close relative or friend improved the health outcomes of these patients.  This benefit didn’t occur with social visits; it appeared that the quality of the relationship mattered more than the numbers of friends coming by.

The question then arises as to what determines the ‘quality’ of a relationship, and how this may support our health and well-being.  The traits society glamorizes (beauty, wealth, power and fame) don’t hold relationships together and probably even contribute to their downfall.  Since these ‘desirable’ characteristics don’t sustain enduring, nurturing connections, what does?  Paradoxically, the foundation of relationship comes from beyond all external attributes, from what psychologist Carl Rogers termed ‘unconditional positive regard’.

This vision arises when we experience our own unconditioned awareness, which enables us to turn towards others with a space of quiet compassionate presence. When we recognize and affirm this, we can ‘just be there’ for our friends, relatives or partners. We then provide a comforting steady support for them, one that accepts them completely regardless of their personality or circumstances.  This connection reduces their stress and anxiety surrounding their illness. For these cancer patients, knowing they had someone there for them unconditionally may have boosted their immune system, leading to better health outcomes. Of course we can extend this to all of us, as ‘just being there’ for someone may be healing on many levels.

Foster, LW., Mclellan, LJ. Survival of Patients Who Have Undergone Allogeneic Bone Marrow Transplantation: The Relative Importance of In-Hospital Lay Care-Partner Support. Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, Vol 22 (2), 2004.

A Little Outrage, Please!

I just don’t know what to say.  In my last blog of December 13^th, I talked about chemical contaminants and their possible relationship to the recent increase in asthma and allergies.  Though I didn’t want to return immediately  to the issue of pollutants in our environment, a recent article just threw me for a loop:  Kids' Soup Cans Contain BPA Toxins : Discovery News.  For the past several  years I have made efforts  to avoid Bisphenol A (BPA) in plastic containers. Again, I’m not paranoid, as the European Union just banned BPA from baby bottles:  EUROPA - Press Releases - Bisphenol A: EU ban on baby bottles to enter into force tomorrow.  The EU prohited the use of BPA , citing concerns that the compound could potentially affect development and immune response in infants.

I have a doctorate in research and have studied epidemiology, so I believe we can’t determine the long term effects of exposure to hundreds of chemical compounds. For example, it’s even possible that BPA could be related to the recent increase in allergies, but it would take millions of dollars and years of research to try to establish such a link. Who would pay for this costly endeavor?   So I use the principle of ‘nature knows best’, trying to live as naturally as I can. I don’t like microscopic amounts of pollutants in my or my family’s bodies if I can help it. So imagine my distress when I discovered BPA commonly enters into our system through soup cans.  Now don’t tell me that food manufacturers didn’t know about BPA’s presence in their soup cans, but it must make sense to their bottom line, and since the government hasn’t outlawed it, companies haven’t been forced to change this practice.

Now that it has been uncovered, in all probability we will start to pressure these companies to remove BPA from their cans, and perhaps in a few years it will happen.  In the meantime, we should further investigate the extent of this contamination, and take measures to remove this from our food supply.  It may be that we’ll  not be having canned soups for some time!!

Here's a list of countries that already ban BPA from baby bottles.  

How will you personally respond to this information?

Rise of Asthma and Allergies

In recent years, asthma and allergies have increased in their prevalence in the US, as reported by MSNBC. Media outlets advertise any number of pharmaceutical solutions to alleviate these symptoms. However, the question arises as to the reason for this dramatic increase in these conditions, but the answer to this may come from our persistent exposure to varying levels of countless chemicals and pollutants in our environment. In essence we live in a chemical soup, one constantly challenging our immune system. 


In this context, our bodies undoubtedly have to work harder to combat these subtle and not so subtle chemical irritants. This job falls to our immune system, and thus it makes sense that we could develop sensitivities and over-reactivity to various substances, as our system gets stressed over time. Thus, even substances that may not cause any reaction to a healthy immune system now bring about an allergic reaction. While the use of medication may be beneficial, without attempting to address the underlying issues will only exacerbate the problem over time, as most medicine only covers up the symptoms. 


So what’s the best way to this? By removing, shifting and changing your life to make it as natural as possible. Then you can follow good health habits: a whole foods diet, regular exercise, ongoing stress reduction and use of regular and alternative health professionals to facilitate your health and wellness. If you have asthma and allergies you may notice a decrease in your symptoms over time; as your immune system strengthens some substances you were allergic to now will no longer trigger such responses. Of course, these changes may not eliminate all your allergies, but most importantly, as they follow proven principles of wellness they have no downside. So what can you do today to reduce your allergies?

Free Will vs. Your Environment

When we face health challenges and need to change our health habits, we must confront our own social situation, one which most frequently doesn’t support a healthy lifestyle. But we do need support from others walking this new path. I work daily with stroke patients, many from rural parts of our state. To prevent further strokes they must significantly alter their lifestyle, especially their diet and exercise routines. The problem for these people starts when they return to their homes; they have no support, role models or experience to implement these changes. My college aged son recently returned from a trip to a very poor part of rural America where he worked with Habitat for Humanity. He observed the poor people there seemed to fry everything they ate, even though eating lots of fried food almost certainly will have long-term negative health effects (especially for stroke patients). 


So returning to this type of situation for a person who has just had a stroke usually requires a monumental reversal of something as essential as food preparation. If all the food your family makes comes from the frying pan, this means upsetting the apple cart not only for yourself but for your friends and family.  So the level of available support for a healthy lifestyle will vary greatly depending on where you live. In certain areas of the country (almost invariably in more urban settings) you will find much more of a community attempting to live healthfully.  But if you live in a poor rural area, you will usually find far fewer individuals working consciously with their bodies. Therefore, it’s infinitely easier to make some small superficial attempts at changing your diet before slipping back into more familiar and comfortable (but poor) health habits.

Fortunately for those people isolated from a healthy lifestyle, new options for contact with like minded people have opened up through technology. The Internet offers low cost interaction with others through blogs, Face-book, Tweets, etc., where you can discuss with other people your efforts, successes and failures in moving forward with good health behaviors. These emerging venues for social interaction provide an opportunity for community at even a global level. While these methods of social support don’t have much research backing their effectiveness in assisting people change their lifestyle (they’re almost too new), their amazing growth almost certain validates their impact.  The Pew Internet Project reveals the power the internet already has in the United Sates to foster social interaction. Some data to consider:  78% of Americans use the internet (the digital divide is closing), 66% of users connect to social networks, 43% of which check social networks daily, and the primary reason people use social networks is to connect to family and friends (new and old) followed by connecting to people with shared interests or hobbies. 

While some people have tremendous ability to just will themselves through life change, they are the exception rather than the rule. For most of us, we don’t want to constantly face this by ourselves. While we can will ourselves to great heights temporarily, in the ongoing daily battle between our will and an unsupportive environment, the environment will usually win out by wearing us down bit by bit. To sustain ourselves we need ongoing support and now technology offers avenues for assistance for even the most geographically challenged. Trying these avenues of communication and support out will almost always be beneficial, making them well worth the effort. 


Please share interesting ways online social networks are being used to help people achieve greater wellness. 

Freedom of Choice

The other day my son and I watched a television commercial for a popular beer. This particular ad,  another installment in a lengthy advertising campaign) has, as its sole selling point, the fact that the beer cans show you when the beer gets really cold (a bar on the can turns blue). It amazed and amused us that temperature would be marketed as an important reason to purchase their beer! How can it be possible that this emerged as the best idea a room full of MBA advertising executives could come up with? Yes, I can see it now: hundreds of thousands of the beer buying public sitting in bars, remarking to their friends that they bought this beer because it’s ‘cold’. This ad campaign has been going on for quite some time, a fact that scares me, as it means the ads have been successful!  Of course, this marketing theme forms only part of their larger efforts to separate their beer from others, but it’s still surprising that they decided to go with temperature. Do they think no one else can put their beers in the fridge?

Though an absurd example, this ad typifies ways people, organizations or companies want to literally ‘condition’ our minds. I use this term literally, as in the famous example of conditioning noted by Pavlov when he trained a dog to associate a red light with food.  Eventually, every time the dog viewed a red light going on, he started to salivate, even with no food present.  We, too, get trained by others to respond in ways they want us to, whether this takes place through such avenues as consumer items or politics. We might not even know how we came to hold some of our attitudes or values, as some of these ‘advertising campaigns’ may not be so transparent to us as the above mentioned beer ad.  For example, many Americans assert that the US is the number ‘one’ country in the world, (most of time those who say this have never been out of their country!).  How did people form this opinion and why? Needless to say, a lot of people want to influence us to their way of thinking, but what role do we have in this process?

Fortunately, we have a way to choose how we want to live our life, so that (as much as possible) we become free from these external attempts to control us.  As we practice cultivating awareness, we gain the space to observe ourselves and our world, a space allowing us to reflect on who we want to be and how we want to live. Once we learn how to be more aware in our daily life, we can actually see these ‘advertising’ campaigns more clearly as they get presented to us. We also gain understanding of how we may have already assimilated some attitudes and values without ever knowing it. 

Once we have this insight, we truly start to have freedom of choice as to how we want to live. We can then consciously accept or reject these ideas, and in doing so, free ourselves from the burden of living how others want us to, instead becoming our own person.  

The essence of personal growth

I drove home the other day, just another routine trip back to my house after a day at work. I put on the radio, channel surfed, and caught the end of an interview on public radio (I couldn’t find my idol, Justin Beiber!). They had just about finished interviewing someone, and the fellow mentioned the influence his father had on him, summarizing this in a beautiful way. He observed his father had many problems coming from a very troubled childhood, problems that affected his ability to be successful in his personal and professional life. However, he said his father persisted in dealing with these problems, and in the end managed to accomplish a lot in his life. The interviewee then summarized his father’s life by simply observing that his father ultimately ‘triumphed’ over his problems.

Note that his message wasn’t that his father didn’t have to deal with his lifelong personal issues anymore, but that he struggled with these and managed to grow and express himself in spite of them. It’s a wonderful and useful way to think about personal growth; about mental and emotional wellness. This man didn’t completely overcome his personal wounds, but he didn’t let them dictate the course of his life or personal development either.  Facing these personal wounds deepens and matures us if we have the space to gain ‘insight’ into these patterns, observing them with awareness. Only when we have space from our limiting behavior patterns can we understand them, and then choose to live and act differently.  We can then aspire to be like the father in this interview, to triumph over our personal limitations by not letting them determine the quality or nature of our life.

Awareness works: a glimpse at what it might unlock for you

The Power of Invisibles

Richard Hillman, a well-known Jungian analyst, once described the values, judgments, and attitudes we live by as ‘invisibles’. These invisibles, though often unseen and unacknowledged,  powerfully direct our activities.  However, many of us remain unaware of their pervasive influence in our lives, even as we act on them with unquestioning devotion and dedication. People give their lives to the invisibles, such as the soldier who goes off to war, even giving his life, to defend his country; patriotric and honorable in his mission. Or a hospital’s unpaid volunteers value the compassionate service of others in need, so they donate their time and efforts towards this purpose.

In their own way, the principles and ideas contained in Awareness Works represent life changing invisibles, ones gradually bringing about change in many facets of your wellness.  In one sense , no tremendous revelations occur, no amazing medical breakthroughs get revealed ,and no secret alternative treatments  get espoused. Yet the invisibles detailed in Awareness Works can cause a radical shift in how you perceive your and societal wellness. These principles don’t simply complement many of the existing models of health and wellness, but instead offer a vital alternative that often challenges the assumptions of many existing health and wellness premises. 

Awareness Works’  paradigm promotes integrated, wholistic wellness that can prevent the development of many diseases, improve your overall wellness when you have chronic conditions, and allow you to develop a deeper knowledge of well-being that can be available to you throughout your life, regardless of the condition of your body and mind.  No small matter, as the ideas described in Awareness Works may require significant and often difficult shifts from existing lifestyles. Yet day by day, often quietly and subtly, you can notice changes in your health and wellness and this will be proof enough to keep on this path. 

Seven Billion, Still Growing by Leaps and Bounds

The world population has just reached seven billion, with many people commenting on this momentous occasion. So in my own small way I have taken time to reflect on this, from the perspective of awareness. The world’s population keeps adding an additional billion people in increasingly shorter time periods, almost in an exponential fashion. This exploding population keeps pressuring other forms of life on Earth, (both animal and plant), with reports that big cats may be extinct in the wild by 2030, or that the world fisheries have declined dramatically, with several commercial species harvested to the brink of extinction.

At the same time, many others seem unconcerned with this uncontrolled population growth, a fact puzzling considering the drastic long term ramifications, such as the potential starvation of vast numbers of people, severe ecological degradation or the extermination of many plants and animals. How can this be? Yet we see some of the same assumptions about the imperative for growth present in our society, where we look to perpetually increase our gross domestic product.  While understanding the need and importance of providing a livelihood for as many people as possible, at what point does the idea of ‘enough is enough’ come into play; at what point do we say we have consumed or grown enough? Conceptually and in reality, things just can’t grow uncontrolled forever in a limited environment, namely the Earth itself, even if you believe in the miracle of science!

Awareness can help us come to a new viewpoint about population growth in two ways.  First, it allows us the space for reflection on what values and assumptions make up our current view of the world. As explored in Awareness Works, a mechanistic viewpoint tends to see the world as something we can manipulate for our benefit, without the understanding of, or respect for, the complex interplay of all life on the planet. With awareness we can observe the values and attitudes promoted in society, and make our choice whether or not to continue with these or shift them as needed.   

Secondly, the ideas and practices mentioned in Core Works (such as meditation or matching the energy of thoughts with awareness) promote the idea that ‘well-being’ exists independently of our external circumstances and even our personality.  Once you become grounded in this state of ‘well-being’, the need for external fulfillment and consumption doesn’t seem to be the be all and end all of life anymore.  While not discarding the many benefits of modern technology, well-being through awareness changes our perspective on the world, lessening our need to find fulfillment through getting more and more, through consuming the world. 

Inch by Inch, Row by Row

A recent Guardian article demonstrated the need for vigilance (and yes even paranoia!) concerning our food supply. Recently, an under 17 men’s international soccer tournament took place in Mexico, with multiple countries’ youth squads participating in this event. After the event all the participants (except the Mexican team!) tested positive for steroids. It seems local farmers routinely give their cattle illegal steroids for growth, and this drug moved into the systems of the young soccer players very quickly. The Mexican team didn’t test positive for the simple reason they didn’t eat the local meat before or during the event, as they knew it had steroids in it (it might have been helpful for them to let the other international teams know about this!). Like this example, many foods we consume come from other countries where government oversight of food production can be quite lax. How do we know how these countries monitor their fruits, vegetables and meats? What other uses of pesticides, herbicides or antibiotics occurs without any or sufficient oversight?

Body Works contends the long term ingestion of chemical pollutants (even in minute amounts) poses a potential threat to our health and wellness.  It may be quite difficult or impossible to quantify the effects on our bodies of low level chemical exposures as they interact with other chemicals and our bodily functioning in complex and intricate ways. So regardless of what reassurances we may get from government scientists, we may never be able to determine the origins of certain symptoms as stemming from a particular substance found in trace amounts in our bodies. If these young people have steroids in their system after just a week or two soccer tournament from eating local meat, then it must be assumed the rest of the local population has steroids in their bodies permanently. What will be the effect of this on children or other populations? Also, it’s well known that many of the larger fast food chains use vast amounts of foreign grown meats: what traces of chemicals remain in these meats?

Health and wellness happen gradually, inch by inch, row and row, as we build a lifestyle for it. In the same way, your health can also subtly and quietly become worse without your noticing it or knowing why. To use the above example, what happens to those people living in Mexico who routinely eat steroid laced meat? Don’t reassure yourself that in our more modern society, we don’t get exposed to such things, as most American meats have traces of antibiotics in them (thus the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria)!

Thus the Body Works principle of ‘Nature Knows Best’ applies in all of these situations, as this idea asserts the closer to nature the product is, the better off we will be. Choosing ‘uncontaminated’ meats has no downsides, as ‘Nature Know Best’ advices us to eat food with as  little chemical contamination as possible, for we don’t know what consequences eating poor quality food will have now or in the future. So, for example, if you choose to eat meat, investigating its’ origins should be a priority for you. Undoubtedly, meat produced through more natural methods costs more, but if cost poses a problem for you (as it does for many of us), using less meat, but of higher quality, should be the choice. You can substitute many other forms of protein for those times when you have a meatless menu. Again, using the principle of Nature Knows Best means you can’t go wrong, as eating food close to nature means you inch forward with your health and wellness, not backwards

Overview

This blog explores the role of awareness as this relates to our sense of wellness and well-being. 

Welcome.

Geoff