A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

-Ernest Hemingway

Recently, I came across an article describing how humans today are physically much weaker than our prehistoric, and recent ancestors.

Modern Man A Wimp

Reading the article made me think that with all of our technological advances life could have been made better in some regards and worse in others.

We live in a world of technology. It has helped us fight diseases and hunger, and has made the world a smaller and less mysterious place. At the same time, we might have lost touch with ourselves and forgotten that hard work can be good for you if done the right way. Before the Industrial Revolution life was much more difficult. Life was certainly harder, but so were the people. How can we change this relaxed state we now find ourselves in? Simply put, we can use this information as a new source of motivation.

If I am just sitting around watching television, I cant help but think about how easy life is. If I want some food all I have to do is go to the refrigerator, where I will find it stocked with fresh food bought from a nearby grocery store. To cook my food I only need to push a button or turn a knob. There is no hunting required, no plowing fields, no walking to a store, and no cutting or gathering wood. I think about how this helped to make these people stronger and healthier. Granted there was a lot of diseases and sicknesses, but that can be easily combated with modern medicine. I think about how my being sedentary by watching t.v. is not good for my mental or physical health, and it motivates me to want to do something. I usually will go for a run, but you don’t have to do that. Here is a short list of other options:

1. Call a friend and go for a hike

2. Take the dog for a walk, or take yourself for a walk!

3. Go to the gym

4. Just do some push-ups and crunches until you cant do anymore

5. Stretch while watching television if you must watch it

6. Get a game of soccer or basketball together

7. Read a book

8. Get some friends together to play cards or a board game

9. Meditate

10. Sew or quilt

11. + Just do something.

With all our complicated training plans and diets telling us when and how long and how hard to train, eat, and sleep, its no wonder we no longer know how to listen to our bodies.  “How do I DO that?”, you may be asking.  Focusing too much on competition and numbers can and will drain you of motivation.

Its easy to dread an activity because you are too concerned with being the best. Try to make one day a week your “free” day. Use this day to just get back to the basics. If you’re a runner, leave your GPS, HR monitor, iPod, and stopwatch off. Don’t map out your route either, just run where you want to run, and as fast or as slow as is comfortable. Relearn to enjoy just being active.

The best thing you can do is to keep your mind and body active. An active body and mind will acclimate to any activity and unless you are tired, you will be restless, which reminds you to get up and burn off some energy until you do become tired. A great preventative method to enact this lifestyle is to make active friends. Watching t.v. or a movie, even if done with others, is a solitary activity. Surround yourself with people who you can talk and debate with, people who you can walk, run, hike, climb or bike with, and you will be healthier as a result.

Tune into your body, and learn to quiet your mind. Pay attention to your surroundings and just go with the flow in every sense. Learn to enjoy the freedom that comes without having any expectations at all.

Running is, in actuality, not thoughtless!

- Chris Regnery

And You Thought Running Was Thoughtless? Part 3/3

This is the last part of this 3-part article. Up until now we have looked at what running does to oneself during the act of running, and we have seen how emotions and pain are not things that we should run away from in running.

To fight them is to fight against something that cannot be beaten without making yourself less of a person. In this last part, I get a little philosophical and a bit more in depth with my metaphor of running being like life. Forgive me if it comes off as a little heady, but hey, running for 5 hours at a time, sometimes you cant help but dig a little deeper into things.

It will never be possible to fully explain running.  Just like Kurt Gödel, who came up with the Incompleteness Theorem for mathematics, who states that you will never be able to truly know a system of mathematics if you have to use that system to define itself.  The only way to reach mathematical truth and full knowledge is to step outside the system.  While in the system you cannot describe it fully because to do so would require you to look at it as a whole, as though it were in your hand, which you cannot do because you are inside it.

It’s like trying to describe a house while sitting in it.  You can make references to the inside, and what it would look like from the outside, but because you cannot get that critical point of view from the outside, you’ll never have full knowledge of the whole house; the truth of the house, so to speak.

Well, the house for Gödel was mathematics and logic.  If you truly want to have complete knowledge, you must step outside the system to see what it is, but you can never do that with math because you cannot describe math with anything except math. Anything else is too imprecise to use, so to Gödel, mathematics was not real, but just a fun tool used to describe reality, but would never get the whole picture because it had limitations.

Limitations are what make math the most accurate way of describing reality. Mathematics is the descriptive language of physics, which is used to describe chemistry, which is used to describe biology, which is the study of life. However, reality doesn’t have limitations, there is something naturally wild about it- hence all the strangeness in quantum mechanics which states that in reality certain things only have a probability of happening and not a certainty of happening, and so to truly grasp reality in its fullest, without any probabilities and theories and equations and limitations, you must be able to get at it by a system without them, a system without limitations, really without a system at all since a true system implies limitations- it requires separate interacting entities-and reality has none of these things, it is a limitless whole.

Well, this may have pissed a lot of mathematicians off, but it works well for this analogy.  If you were to try to get a runner to describe what it is about running they like or enjoy, or try to get them to explain why they do it, as soon as they open their mouth it has been reduced to something its not and they know it.

Running is a metaphor for truth and life. It is an individual’s expression of freedom. It is in a way, an art. The fluid effortless motion of a good runner is a beautiful thing and an expression of the runner. Each runner is different and each has their own stride, they each paint a different picture on the canvas of reality. A look at a runner should be enough to describe why they run, just as a look at a Picasso painting would answer most people’s question of why make art. In fact it is just the same as asking an artist why they paint or sculpt- the answer will never be enough.  It lies beyond descriptions in a way that to try and describe it is limiting the limitless.

Zen has something to say about this as do many religions.  Many meta-physicians also know of this truth.  The idea that you can know something with all of your being but you can’t describe it, and so it comes out as a sound, a gesture, Mu, what-have-you, shows that they know what they are talking about, so to speak.

So running is art, is Zen, is Mu, is Jesus, is God, is life, is you, and is me.  Yet it isn’t.  Its a statement of mind not a statement of words, which is why I think so many runners have a hard time describing why they run and come up with something half-assed like, ” I run because I can”, or “Why not”, or “seems like fun”, or “My dad used to beat me when I was a kid so I ran away from him until I decided I liked the feeling and joined the track team”.

These are glib answers and are offered only because in seeing the essence of running, like life, they can’t put a handle on it with words without coming up short, very short. To try and describe why a runner runs with a full-assed answer would leave you with a treatise like this, and yet all that I have said in all this is that you can’t say anything at all. Perhaps this is why to this day I will tell people to go out and run a good distance themselves, and then they will have their own answer.

The real truths in life are not told to you, they cannot be taught in the classroom, although you can teach someone the best ways to find truths, they are only what others have used to find them, truths themselves are not describable. They are attainable only by experiencing them firsthand. To know them you must feel them, but they are more than a feeling- their knowledge comes before any explanation and they are greater than any system of description such as language or mathematics.

You must live life, and not shut off or shut out aspects of it you don’t like. This is not to say that we should be okay with murderers and rapists and the like, and it is not to say that we should prescribe to some sort of anarchist mentality.

It does mean that to be a human, means that we must accept that humans are capable of some pretty horrible, gruesome, unsettling things. We are also however, capable of some extraordinarily beautiful and altruistic things.

We must deal with this darker side, but not shut it out. To lock it away allows it to grow until it becomes unwieldy. We must harness this side of ourselves and use it. This is the passion many people will describe they have when they are writing a novel, or painting, or are out with their kids, or when they are drafting a proposal at work, or making a sale for their job, or while running through the mountains.

This passion makes one feel alive; I run to be able to reach out and touch reality herself, although at times I feel she is the one that touches me. You are a human, both with the good and bad, to shut one out, you are only shorting yourself part of your own humanity.

Anyway, I have now rambled on for far too long about something that I say can’t be nailed down with words.  So, to avoid self destruction and running the risk of sounding preachy, which I fear I have already done, I leave you now to find your own meanings and to, as always, work to help yourself GrowStronger.

There are no securities in nature, life is either a daring adventure or nothing

-Helen Keller

And You Thought Running Was Thoughtless? Part 2/3

As the second and middle part of this article, I am going to share with you some thoughts on how emotions and sensations of pain are part of the journey as a

human, and how running can be a great metaphor for life. I will discuss how giving in to these sensations in running can teach you a great deal about yourself and help you grow not only as a runner, but as a person. Trying to suppress your emotions and running away from pain will leave an emptiness that many people will end up filling with money, sex, drugs, or alcohol. Working to incorporate these things also fills this emptiness and unlike the others, helps us to be better people. I think that this is a great metaphor and you can it and apply it to all areas of life.

One note on pain. I am talking about pain more in the Buddhist context, where suffering is considered pain and suffering is perhaps the main focus in Buddhist teachings.  I am not referring to the sharp immediate pain associated with trauma to the body.  This would include things like broken bones, sprained ankles, getting tattoos, or piercings.  These types of pain are immediate and denote injury.  Seeking out this type of pain just for the pain with things like tattoos is also not what I am talking about

The types of pain associated with suffering are more in line with the mental and physical and emotional pain associated with a long day at work, or with being on your feet running for 8 hours, or with losing a loved one or your job.  These sensations of pain and suffering are, in my opinion, things we have to come to grips with in life and things that help us deal with situations better.  Learning to accept these types of pain helps to make you more healthy emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and physically, and this is something that Growstronger.com is all about.

Part of being human is to feel emotions and pain; part of being alive is to suffer, if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t.  To put suffering into a negative context makes it bad, but to look at it as it is-part of being human and just another emotion and feeling- allows one to feel more alive, more high with life, than you could ever do if you gave into it.  You will be rewarded with a true high of life that truly allows you to focus now not on the intensity of the pain, but on the beauty of life and the knowledge that you are life, and you are not just running with the trees and rocks and stones and grass, but they are running with you too, they are no different from you.  By accepting pain and suffering for what they are and not seeing them as inherently bad, you become more compassionate!

This is not masochism. This is not sexual and pain is certainly not enjoyable to me. I would not want to be subjected to the emotional powder keg you get when you hit the wall every second of everyday. However, this is not because I think it’s bad.

I would get too used to it and it would cease to be what it should be. It is just like the emotions associated with fun and happiness. If someone loved to feel good and to feel the release of riding, say, a roller coaster, they would try to preserve that feeling and not destroy it. If they rode that roller coaster all day every day, the release would become mundane and no longer fun for them. In fact, they would come to see it as a bad thing because its now become just another thing they do that seems purposeless. So no, just because I accept that powder keg doesn’t make me a masochist.

Those feelings are a part of life, and to want to run away from them makes you less alive and less human. To accept them is to feel more alive, more human, and makes what was once mundane, exciting; it makes people and situations that once seemed to annoy you, to not seem all that bad at all. To accept suffering and pain makes you feel more compassionate.

At least to me it does.  Perhaps you now think I am certifiably crazy, rambling on about running as though it were the secret to life.  But this doesn’t even begin to encompass the range of feelings and the joys of running to me.  That is the reason why I run, and so much more.

The conclusion to this article will be posted next week.

Either things will get better, or you will black out on the pavement

- Dean Karnazes

And You Thought Running Was Thoughtless? Part 1/3

There are two schools of thought when it comes to distance running and how it is best to accomplish a set distance.

In one school there is the idea that the sport is running and that one should run through a race with no walking breaks outside of the necessary bathroom breaks and the time it takes to go through a checkpoint or refill a water bottle or backpack with supplies. You run the race as far as you can, then walk when you can no longer run, and if you have to, crawl, but you give it your all and leave everything out there, exposing yourself to your own limitations and pushing them to the edge.

The other school of thought surrounds the notion that you can be faster if you use a run/walk strategy. This would involve either breaking down the running with walking breaks every set number of minutes- such as 25 minutes of running and then 5 minutes of walking- or using the land to determine when to walk, such as going up or down steep inclines. The idea is that the walking helps to give your muscles a break from running and in doing so keeps them fresher for longer so you can run the sections that you do run, relatively faster.

Well, this is a tried and true strategy and the best runners in the field will use this strategy to win race after race. I don’t, but then again, I like to run.

I don’t worry about my time anymore, I just like to run, so I run as far as I can, then walk if I have to, but I would rather finish slower and run more, than finish faster and walk some.  Not that walking is bad, I just get into a zone and go, and when I hit a wall, breaking through is so much sweeter when it’s not with the knowledge that it was done while walking or knowing that I will get to walk in a few minutes, its done knowing that I hit one wall, and it hurt like hell; I broke through and let the tears flow, knowing full well that I wont get any breaks till the next one- except for the time it takes me to refill a water bottle or grab some food out of my bag if I should need to do this.

I think I finally have my answer from a debate I was having with myself about using a run/walk strategy or running all the way.  I LIKE running all the time, granted I will have very different paces through a run- moderate at the beginning until I feel warmed up, then I go very, very slowly for the next 10 miles; the next 10 are at my normal long run training pace, and I finish strong with my 5k pace- this is for a marathon length run, its different when I go longer.

The last two times I ran this distance, I would stop at halfway to refill my water bottles and grab a sandwich from my pack, although I was eating a package of shot blocks every hour too, but I had those in easy reach and just ate and ran. I had to get the sandwich out of my pack so I had to walk to do that to avoid running off the trail while looking through my pack, although it takes no more than 30 seconds to get the sandwich and put the pack back on so the walking is relatively nil.

Sure enough, both times, I hit the wall at around mile 20.  I wanted to quit so badly.  I felt worse mentally than anything my body was going through, although my feet were hurting and wet and blistered, my legs ached, my back ached, my shoulders ached, my hands hurt, my fingertips hurt and everything on my body was ultrasensitive to pain.  I could barely keep my eyes open.  I wanted to quit more than anything.  My emotions were in the toilet; I wanted to lie down and curl up and start crying, not because of the pain, but because my body and brain chemistry were committing haru kiri.

Plus, it’s mentally taxing more than you might think to keep it together and run for 20 miles.  I felt as though someone could stab me in the chest and I would thank him for doing me a favor- I didn’t care what happened to me, I just wanted to quit.

Then the depression gave way to anger. I didn’t want to quit but my body was going to make me, my mind and emotions were going to make me, and so I got angry.  I started running harder, the more pain my legs felt the better. It was their fault I was so in pain, so now they were going to be punished for this treachery.  I used my upper body more too, involving every muscle that was aching, just to let it know I wasn’t going to let its whining stop me.  I found that all this was so extreme, the physical pain and fatigue, the mental anguish and fatigue and depression, especially the severity of the emotions, that I let out this long, guttural, primal yell.  Immediately after this I felt better.

Not just a little better, but instantaneously a lot better.  My body didn’t hurt as badly- it was tired but not in pain- and best of all, my mood had cleared.  I was only a few miles until I was going to finish and be able to stop running, but I felt like I could go another 15 or 20 miles.  It was so much different now and yet my emotions were still so high it was confusing.  It was as though I had lost a very close loved one to a slow and painful death only to realize that as I was at my most depressed and angry, that it was a mistake, and they weren’t dead after all, but standing beside their casket shaking my hand .  I ran back up to the house after running more than a marathon with tears because I knew that from now on, all the fatigue and pain, and tiredness and depression, and wanting to quit, NEEDING to quit, HAVING to quit, is all mental.

Sure my body would get tired, but properly fueled and injury free, it was all in my head as far as everything else was concerned.  My body would give out well after my mind if I held it together.  I was higher than a kite, or any drug I had taken in the past, that evening.  That was the first time I had pushed that hard without giving up or walking and it paid off in spades.  The next week I went through the same thing.  Even though I had had the revelation that everything was mental, when you are that tired and feel that bad, you think it was just a trick of your mind that it happened before.  Rationalizing the irrational, or the “unrationalizable” is not possible.

Part 2 of this 3 part article will appear next week, so dont forget to check back next Tuesday, or you can become a member and get email notifications letting you know of each new post!

You need to listen to your body because your body is listening to you.

- Dr. Phil Mcgraw

Strong Mind and Spirited Body: II – Biofeedback

This is the second installment of a series of articles called:
A Strong Mind and Spirited Body.
The first installment was: A Strong Mind and Spirited Body – I

Picture yourself in a chair. Not that big of a stretch, I’d imagine. But in this chair visualize electrodes and sensors attached to various parts of your body, including your scalp, ears, and fingers.

Photo by geekgirly

All of a sudden, a buzzer sounds, and it won’t stop. You grow agitated and notice that this only seems to make the sound grow stronger. You relax and think about what to do next, which, not coincidentally, softens the annoying buzz. Through further experimentation of tensing and relaxing various muscles, as well as putting yourself into differing states of mind, you successfully get the noise to stop. But what just happened?

You completed a biofeedback session.

What is it?
Biofeedback is a form of mind-body therapy that aims to give its practitioners voluntary control over what are normally thought of as involuntary bodily processes. These include, but are not limited to: metabolism, blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and galvanic skin response (sweating). The idea behind biofeedback, then, is to provide real-time feedback of these processes in an attempt to show how you can gain varying measures of control over them.

Every time that you step on a scale, measure your blood pressure, listen to your heart rate, or use a thermometer, you are getting a form of biofeedback.

Mind-Body Applications
Here’s an example of how biofeedback can help heal your body. A migraine headache can be characterized by an intense and throbbing pain, and while each person may have their own headache trigger, such as different foods or stress, the intense and painful symptoms are commonplace among migraine sufferers. Electrical activity in the brain, produced by the trigger, eventually causes vascular irregularities, such as the constriction or expansion of your blood vessels, which produces further inflammation and that migraine headache. What if there was a way to help stabilize the vascular irregularities by diverting some of the blood to another area of the body? Is that even possible?

Amazingly enough, it is very possible, and has been done on countless occasions. By hooking your hands up to a device that measured their temperature, and provided aural or visual cues, you would eventually be able to raise the temperature of your hands, through the sheer process of experimentation. For your body to produce these results, it needs to divert some of the blood flow from where most of it is (during a migraine that would most likely be your head) and channel it all the way down to your hands.  This has had amazing effects at reducing, or even completely eliminating, pain from migraine headaches and other physical ailments.

While your hands probably wouldn’t catch fire, it certainly could be trained to be an amazing alternative to prescription medicine. In fact, many have had such success with this technique that they have been able to raise the temperature of one hand more than the other!

Eventually, you would learn the skill of being able to raise the temperature of your hands without the help of a biofeedback machine. Your conscious knowledge of this newfound ability would be with you forever.

Is pain relief the only application for biofeedback? Far from it. Biofeedback has been used to treat insomnia, anxiety, diabetes, ADD and ADHD, bowel and urinary incontinence, as well as a plethora of various other physical and mental disorders.

Equipment
There are several different pieces of equipment used in any given biofeedback session. The most common are the Electromyograph (EMG), Temperature of Skin, Galvanic Skin Response (Sweating), and Electroencephalograph (EEG).

Electromyograph (EMG) – This is the machine that uses sensors to be able to tell when a particular muscle is both at rest or is contracting, and to what degree. It does this by sensing the electrical potential generated by the muscle in question.

Temperature of Skin – Temperature biofeedback can be used for everything from sensing stress to helping you divert blood flow. It is normally measured via sensors attached to your fingers.

Galvanic Skin Response (Sweating) – Like measuring the temperature of your skin, sensors are placed on your fingers to measure the electrical resistance of the skin, or how much perspiration the subject is producing. It is a method most commonly used by lie detector machines.

Electroencephalograph (EEG) – This device measures your brain waves by observing the electrical activity produced by your brain. It uses sensors attached to both your scalp and ears. Scalp EEG is able to show the patient’s different mental states, such as how relaxed they are.

Meditation = Biofeedback?
If all of this seems a little too far-fetched for you to believe, you probably aren’t alone. It is always commonplace to have a heavy dose of skepticism when incredible claims are made. Which is exactly how Henry Benson felt.

Could meditation be a form of biofeedback? Does it help you become so in tune with your body, that you can observe all of its processes and thereby have some control over them?

Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, seems to think so. In fact, he developed the relaxation response, which is based on a form of mediation called g Tum-mo. He calls his relaxation response a physiological state which is opposite to that of stress.

But it wasn’t enough to just believe the claims of g Tum-mo, so Benson decided to put it to the test.

During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.

The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.

To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.

Source

If there was one treatment option that defined the link between a strong mind and spirited body, biofeedback would be it.

This is the first installment of a series of articles called: A Strong Mind and Spirited Body.

There is a very real connection between the mind and the body, one that must be constantly cared for and improved. A weak mind with a strong body is akin to a beautiful-looking car with a terrible engine. You must make your mind as strong as your body if you want to achieve total health, and vice versa. The connection between your mind and your body is a very real one, and you must respect that and continuously strive to strengthen that connection.

Photo by geekgirly
If you have ignored the idea of your mind, in regards to health, you can not be healthy. It is a necessary component to achieving total health.

Mind – Brain Dichotomy
Your body is a dichotomy, or a division into two parts. On the one hand, there is the body and everything physical. This is what is concrete, and what can be understood by using your five senses on a physical, not emotional, level. On the other hand, is your mind. This is not the physical brain, but more of an abstract concept of emotions and feelings. It is your conscious and subconscious experience. More subjective and open to interpretation, the mind can’t be pinned down as easily.

These two parts are constantly working together. When you touch something hot, for example, your body will react to the pain. Your nerves sense that something is hot, and it reports that sensory data back to your brain. Your brain may help trigger your muscles to pull away, but it is your mind that tells you that that was hot and not to do it again. Can you see why both parts are so essential? Your brain is a physical description and belongs to the body. Your mind does not.

A Short History Lesson
The idea of dualism, or the relationship between the mind and the body, can be attributed to a philosopher named René Descartes. Not only was he the first to distinguish the mind from the brain, but he also was the first to identify the mind-body dilemma. This dilemma, or problem, is the basis for the argument between dualism and monism. A dualist sees the mind and the body as separate from each other, while a monist sees them as one in the same. If you haven’t already discovered by now, I would place myself in the dualist camp, which is why I place so much stress and importance on the idea of the connection between the mind and the body.

But I am not alone in this regard, as many traditional Eastern philosophies have practiced the integration of the mind and the body into healing for thousands of years. There was a time, believe it or not, where even us Westerners placed more of a value on the spiritual, emotion, and feeling aspect of healing than the physical one. Medical developments in the 16th and 17th centuries further separated these two focuses on healing with the goal of control over nature. Man, or so it seemed, was the ultimate creation, and nothing was out of its realm. This attitude was further developed during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras and was finally carried out by technological advances, such as microscopy, the stethoscope, as well as the discovery of bacteria.

Fast forward to 1955, with the publication of a paper called The Powerful Placebo by Henry K. Beecher, and you will find a reintroduction of the mind into modern medicine. Beecher popularized the idea of the “placebo effect” by administering saline injections and telling his patients that he was using a powerful painkiller. His patients often achieved equal, if not better, pain relief than those using the actual painkillers. This worked because the mind, and the belief that you are being healed, is an extremely important part of the healing process. Without it, you will never truly be healed.

Recess Time!
Alright, pencils down, class!

We now know that the idea, or argument, of the mind and the brain being connected is not a new one. It has been used in medicine for quite some time. So let’s delve a bit deeper.

The Healing Powers of the Mind
We all know the processes of treating the body in order to let it heal. Nutrition, medicine, surgery, among others, are all generally well-acknowledged forms involved in the healing process. This article, on the other hand, will focus on the benefits of also using the mind to heal.

There is now evidence that medicinal techniques involving the mind have shown to be: necessary to differing forms of pain treatment, helpful in lowering the susceptibility of infection, beneficial with advancing the healing of wounds, and important in helping patients prepare for the obvious stresses involved in surgery. Furthermore, it has even been shown that mind-body medicine is one of the the best treatments for coronary artery disease.

So now what?
When I first researched this topic, the one question on my mind was: so now what? There could very well be a huge role that your mind plays on your total health and well-being, but what now?

To improve your physical health, what do you do? There are many ways, right? It is a very concrete and obvious process. If you are going down the right path, you feel better, you look better, and you can easily tell by just looking in the mirror! It’s not that easy when you want to train the mind, and for a lot of people that is one of the main reasons why they don’t. The parameters to look for improvement are not nearly as obvious. The most important part is to realize that the connection between the mind and body exists, and to treasure that connection.

World of New Possibilities
With the belief of a connection between, and importance of, a strong mind and a spirited body, an entire world of possibility and potential for growth opens up.

Practices like acupuncture, autogenic training, biofeedback, breathing techniques, cognitive behavioral therapy, group support systems, guided imagery, hypnosis, meditation, qi gong, relaxation techniques, spirituality, tai chi, visual imagery, and yoga should now be on your radar. And that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg!

If any of these sound particularly interesting to you, let me know. I will focus on some for the next installment of the series.