Painting

Why Our Posture Affects Our Energy Level And Our Emotions

    The last time I ran my annual Chakra Healing Class, one of the most interesting topics came up. On of the participants (thank you Steve!) mentioned that he noticed becoming more short of breath when his posture slumped. That brought on a wonderful discussion of all the different ways that poor posture literally physically affects your health… everything from dry mouth and dental issues to decreased oxygenation, decreased sleep quality and even increased ADHD symptoms.   But posture affects more than just our physical body… it affects our spirit.       In class I shared a link …

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Feeling At Home Inside Your Body (+ My Latest Healing Painting)

    My favorite way to release anxiety, drop out of my overthinking mind, and come home to my body is to combine grounding, deep breathing, and my favorite mantra. Repeating a mantra has been shown to help with anxiety disorders such as PTSD, and I can think of no better phrase to repeat to help release stress, get out of fight/flight mode and relax into rest/digest mode. A randomized controlled medical study comparing mantra therapy as a treatment for PTSD was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on June 20, 2018 and here is what researchers found: 173 …

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Let Me Help You Move Through (& Release) Difficult Emotions

    A few years ago I became a Death Doula. You would think as a physician we would be taught in detail about the death and dying process in medical school, but we weren’t.  Not at all. We were taught how to pronounce someone dead, how to perform advanced life support to try to stave off death, how to sign a death certificate… but never about the intricacies of it: what the body feels and experiences as the soul prepares to leave it what the dying process looks like what order the organ systems shut down in and how …

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The Golden Ratio of Our Beautiful Human Body, Both Inside and Out

      You have probably heard about the Golden Ratio (in math it’s known as Phi) before — it is a pervasive pattern in both nature as well as in the natural design of our human anatomy. Even if you didn’t know it was called the Golden Ratio, you’ve probably seen figures like this one — first described by Leonardo da Vinci — that show our body’s torso proportions, limb proportions, facial proportions, finger and toe proportions, external ear proportions, etc… are all designed according to this beautiful, reproducible mathematic principle:       This ratio is a common …

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How To Feel At Home In Your Body

      Most of us live with a sense of not really inhabiting our body fully. We want things to change about our body or about our health before we will actually want to be in it. Or we have some judgement against it, or even disdain for it, on some level. We feel, subconsciously maybe, that our body is against us. We can feel that it’s too damaged by health issues to truly cherish. We have a half hearted sense of tolerating our bodies for the time being. No! You aren’t settling for that! Your body, in exactly …

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Reflections On The Death Transition: What I’ve Seen, What I Feel

        As a physician, I’ve had quite a few experiences with patients who were dying, as well as patients who had near death experiences and told me about them. In medical school, I had an attending physician who had a heart transplant. He said as they removed his heart on the operating table, he went somewhere totally different than earth. After putting his new heart in, the surgeon shocked it to get it to start beating again. He says he felt that shock and felt himself feeling pulled back into his physical body and when he woke …

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Letting Go Helps You Heal (Here’s How)

Well I don’t know much. I do know that this world is a complicated, beautiful, painful place. And I have lived quite a few decades and for roughly half of that time I’ve been a practicing physician as well, so I’ve learned quite a bit about what allows the human body to be resilient to stress and trauma and illness and disease. And what I’ve found is that surrendering is what allows healing to happen.   Surrendering = healing.   What heals people in real life is the total opposite of what I learned about healing in medical school. We …

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