I was terrified of running when I was a kid. I’m talkin’ somebody-grab-this-girl-a-paper-bag-to-breathe-into scared. My mom is asthmatic. I’m not, but when I ran and felt my breathing quicken, I associated that with my mom’s health condition. Anxiety would take over, my throat would constrict, and just as if I had asthma, I’d lose the ability to breathe. During graduate…
Whether you’re an uninhibited veteran or a skittish first timer, there are physical secrets you can’t hide from me, your massage therapist. The good news is they’re pretty much universal. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shaped like an apple, a pear, or a bottle of pomegranate juice. Leave your underwear on, if it makes you more comfortable. The truth will…
According to Mary’s relatives, she’d had a severe water phobia since infancy. She couldn’t take a bath in a full tub of water or go to the beach. The mere sight of water triggered an extremely disturbing feeling in the pit of her stomach. Mary was so phobic that she was even frightened when it rained and suffered water-related nightmares.…
Our understanding of how heart function affects mental and emotional well-being has been advanced by leaps and bounds thanks to the Institute of HeartMath (IHM). Studies conducted by this pathbreaking research organization show that signals sent from the heart to the brain via the nervous system dramatically affect how we think and feel. As the IHM notes, “These heart signals…
I proposed, and the next week we eloped, charging forward as man and wife. After 14 months of courtship, I thought I knew everything about her. But one evening my lovely bride disclosed that during a rebellious moment while I was away, she’d started “puffing vapor” to blow off some steam. I saw her pull out the cigar-sized device and,…
We live in a time when we tend to look so far ahead into the future that we may lose sight of what’s going on in our lives at the moment. I know I used to find myself running so far and so fast that I missed an entire year here and there. All that changed when I began meditating.…
Music is now a government-endorsed painkiller. This is not to say the Food and Drug Administration has approved rock, jazz, or hip-hop MP3 downloads as over-the-counter analgesics. But stretching beyond the labels of “alternative” or “complementary” healing techniques, music and sound have been studied and applied to patients in recent years in well-funded federal labs with impressive and verifiable results.…
