Mind

A Scientific Validation Of Your Emotions

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Emotional Synonym

exciting, poignant, affecting, impassioned, sensitive, heated, hysterical, passionate, moving, nervous, spontaneous, touching, sentimental

I have read many definitions of emotions while studying human behaviour and as you can see when researching “emotional synonym” many words can be used to describe the same thing.  The scientific discourse on the subject has drifted to many meanings and there appears to be no clear consensus on a definition.

In this article I am going to weigh in on the subject of emotions by sharing the teachings of my former teacher Dr. John Demartini who draws his concepts from Universal Laws and principles.

Universal Law

Universe Laws state that there exists a divine design, a magnificent balance , a perfect underlying order that exists even at times of apparent disorder.  So let me try to explain what all this has to do with the nature of human emotions in the context of these laws.

Freeman Dyson, a renowned theoretical physicist was able to demonstrate that “our thoughts and emotions are nothing more than a cloud of charged particles of light energy,” thereby taking principles of the physical world and applying them to the metaphysical world, or the nature of the mind.

This gave scientific validation and a clearer understanding of our emotions from a universal perspective.

Universal Law Of Symmetry

The first principle that can be applied to our emotions is the Universal Law of Symmetry.  Newtonian physics states that there is not a positive without a negative, or negative without a positive, creating a perfect balance in our existence.

This speaks to the dualities that exist in our physical world and in our personal lives and in particular our emotions.  For example for every attraction there is repulsion, for every elation, a depression.  You cannot have joy without sorrow, happiness without sadness, pain without pleasure, or infatuation without resentment.

Emotional Synonym: What Does The Word ‘Emotion’ Really Mean?

As mortal beings we try to defy this Law of Symmetry.  In our illusionary world of instant gratification we seek pleasure, avoid pain and honour only our one sided nature.  Despite our illusions, our lesson is that this divine order prevails.

If we wordsmith or break down the word EMOTION, it playfully means to EMOTE (give off) IONS (positive or negative charges).  When we see more positives than negatives or more negatives than positives in our perception of any person, circumstance, situation or thing, we will have either a positive or a negative emotion.

The greater the charge the greater the emotion and stress has often been defined as lopsided emotions.  Extreme emotions takes us away from our true nature and we lower our self worth.

We tend to gravitate towards a false persona, acting either self righteous when we see more positives, or acting self deprecating when we perceive more negatives.  Our true nature is neither.

Perception Of The Mind

Perfectly balanced perception of mind is the highest form of self worth.  When we are emotionally centered , balanced, humble, and open hearted, we will naturally start to attract people, places, circumstances and events into our lives to help fulfill our destiny.

Another way to express this concept is through the Universal Law of Simple Harmonic Motion.  It states that your thoughts and feelings are unsteadied by extreme emotions and you will oscillate like a pendulum.

Note:  Looking for another emotional synonym?  Look here for another word for emotional

Emotional Duality

When your emotions are extreme you will need to steady them by minimizing the pendulous swings.  The pendulum swings between your emotional dualities of likes/dislikes, joys/sorrows, happy/sad, etc.  The pendulum will oscillate unless you are centered by balancing your perceptions of mind between these dualities.

Your thoughts and feelings are often unsteadied by ingratitude and uncertainty, living with memories of the past or seeing the future through the lens of the past, Sometimes this is referred to as our future imagined fears or our past remembered guilt’s.  Click here for a great read about Gratitude – An Attitude For Success!

Extreme emotional swings may spell a bipolar nature.  If you allow yourself extreme constant elation, you invite depression.  While a slower, smaller in amplitude, pendulous swing will minimize our emotional charges and with it, bring about order and certainty of mind.

To summarize, when your thoughts become unsteadied, you will go through these periodic emotional cycles and only by acknowledging the balance of your emotions can you express your true nature and your highest self worth.

This is a departure from traditional understanding of emotions, but certainly an interesting perspective most worthy of consideration.

4 Tips to an Abundant, Joy Filled Life

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4 Tips to an Abundant Joy Filled Life

We all want to live in a rich, fulfilling and abundant life. But sometimes it feels like it is far out of our reach. We can get bogged down with the daily struggle and sometimes it feels difficult to turn life around and create abundance, health, time freedom, wealth and happiness in our day to day lives. There are several tips that you can follow to create the best version of your life from no matter where you are starting from.

1. Gratitude

The most important aspect of creating an abundant, joy filled life is having an attitude of gratitude. By focusing on the most positive aspects of our lives, we are able to increase what we focus on. Find gratitude for even the most small things in our day – the gift of being able to move our limbs and walk! Or the gift of having food to eat throughout the day or the ability to be connected to everyone we could want simply at the touch of a button on the device in our hand.

If you are struggling to find something to be grateful for, just sit with your breath for a few minutes. Follow the inhalations and exhalations and have gratitude for the rich oxygen flowing into your body to nourish and fuel your cells and brain.

When you are able to focus on small pieces of gratitude, your overall abundance of gratitude grow and spills over to be your main focus during more of your day.

2. Detachment

Detachment from the outcomes that you are hoping for is an essential part of living a life that is balanced and healthy. It is the ability to not focus on how events will play out and how it will affect you, but how you can thrive every day no matter what happens. Things have a way of working themselves out, and by trying to stay neutral to outcomes, both good and bad, it helps you to stay level and not follow the highs and lows of life.

3. Attraction

Use the Law of Attraction to your benefit and use the magnetic attraction of like and like, to draw things into your life that you would like to see. Create space in your life to allow new things to come into your life, but again, stay somewhat detached by knowing that either way, life is good when you are filled with gratitude.

4. Refuel

Take time to refuel your body, mind and spirit and know that the time you spend with yourself, enjoying your own company is a worthwhile investment into your health. Enjoy hobbies that you have long forgotten about and devote a few hours per week to you own mental health and clarity, to clear the way for feelings of gratitude and to become clear on what you would like to attract into your life.

Spend time with your family and friends, those who make you feel good about the world and focus on the positive parts of your life and they are sure to multiply.

Nervous System – What Conventional Medicine Doesn’t Want You To Know

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nervous system

Your body is a self-healing and regulating organism.  It doesn’t require help from any chemical drugs.  In fact, you were not born with a deficiency of drugs that need to be supplemented for or too many organs that need to be surgically removed.  The master system controlling all your body’s function and healing is your nervous system.  It controls all your muscles, cells, glands, organs, and tissues.  Removing interference to your nervous system and addressing the underlying cause of your problem is the only way to truly heal.

Your Body’s Ability To Heal

Health comes from within us.  We are told by allopathic or conventional medicine that we can’t heal on our own.  That we need pills, potions, and lotions to heal.  Can you remember back to a time you fell on your knees as a child?  You looked down to see your skin was scraped open, smudged with dirt, with a drip of blood starting to form.  What would you do next?  You would remove any dirt or stones that may have embedded themselves into the skin or cut.  Rinse the area clean with water, and then cover it up with a band-aid.  However, the band-aid didn’t heal the cut.  It simply removed the chances of more interference to your body’s ability to heal.  Preventing your pant to rub against it or allowing additional foreign objects to land on your open wound.

You didn’t have to go to the best doctor in the city to heal. All you needed to do was remove any interference from your body’s natural ability to heal, and it would do exactly that with time. Heal.

Action Steps For Natural Healing

You see, your body has the exact same healing ability as it did when you fell and scraped your knee.  It has the same ability as it did the day you were born but years of physical traumas, emotional stresses, as well as chemical and toxic bombardment has caused interference to your body’s innate ability to heal.  The Family Health Advocacy community is going to continue to remind you of your body’s incredible ability to heal and how to allow it to do exactly that.

What we provide is information on practical action steps to remove the layers of interference in your life so you can bring your body back to its natural state of healing.  For some of you, your trauma’s, stresses and exposures are layers and years deep.  For others, not so much.  Everyone heals on their own timeline, some faster than others.  Click here for a 6-Step Guide To Radical Self-Healing.

Let The Journey Begin

One thing is for certain.  If you do exactly what we recommend in this community, in any of our courses or books to be released this year, you are going to see results!  You will find that one day you are doing the things you thought you would never be able to do again. You will catch yourself smiling and enjoying moments with family and friends that you would not normally be able to enjoy because you were struggling through the pain, just trying to “show up.”  We know this for certain because you are not different from the thousands of other patients we have helped along the way.

If you are willing to put in the work, you will get results.  Don’t be intimidated by the word “work.”  We refer to it as work because this healing journey is going to take time and energy.  However the benefits will repay you one hundredfold in more energy and time for the rest of your life.  Click here for more information on true health and why most of us get it wrong.

The Family Health Advocacy Movement

The Family Health Advocacy community is ALL about healing.  I think it’s fair to say that everyone’s ultimate value in life is health.  Often most people don’t recognize this until they have lost it.  We often explain this to our patients by using the analogy of car keys.  Think about your car keys.  The only time you really acknowledge just how important they are is when you lose them.  Most people have been treating their health the same way.  Until now!

Thanks for joining the Family Health Advocacy movement.

Sugar And Cancer – How One Affects The Other

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sugar and cancer

As I was considering what I should write about, I sadly learned that a dear friend of mine was just diagnosed with cancer and it made me cry.  She is a wonderful person and although nobody deserves that diagnosis, there are some who in my opinion deserve it less than others.  She’s in her 40’s and as I turn 50 shortly, I feel now more than ever before the awarness of my own mortality.  So, as a former research scientist, this got me thinking about what I have learned about the relationship between sugar and cancer and the effects they have to our bodies.  Due to my previous profession, it is important to me that I present information backed by science.  Not always easy, since science has moved so quickly recently to find novel ways to answer questions we have been trying to answer for years.

What Is Cancer?

By definition, “Cancer is when abnormal cells divide in an uncontrolled way.”  It starts when there are changes in a cell’s gene which makes one cell or a few cells begin to grow and multiply.  These cells no longer function as they are supposed to and are no longer considered pancreatic cells or lung cells or liver cells.  As they multiply, they may cause a growth called a tumor and in order for these cancer cells to grow out of control, they need energy just like all the cells in your body.  Research shows that cancer cells do not create the energy they need in the same way as regular, healthy cell would.  Scientists believe cancer cells support their rapid growth by changing their metabolisms to take in glucose.  It then ferments it unlike a normal cell, which takes in the glucose and breaks it down into carbon dioxide and water.  This alternative mechanism for getting energy and thus growth was discovered more than 70 years ago by Otto Warburg and is called “the Warburg effect.”  This is why I believe it is important to think about the relationship between sugar and cancer and how your daily diet can affect more then how you look.

The effects of sugar and cancer within the body

Fermentation of sugar is not a very efficient way to extract energy from glucose.  I have read it can be up to 15 times less effective than what our cells normally do to make the energy needed to keep our cells alive.  Based on this finding, it means cancer cells need considerably more glucose to grow than normal cells do and can’t get nearly as much energy per glucose molecule.  Scientists and doctors use special scans called PET scans to look for cancer by using a glucose injection that is marked with a radioactive dye.  They then look at where the glucose clumps on the scan.  Since cancer cells will need to feed on a lot more glucose than regular cells to stay alive and multiply, their inefficient use of glucose will clump which often will represent cancer.

If all my cells need glucose, how do I cut out carbs or sugar?

Table sugar contains one glucose and one fructose, and we call glucose or fructose a sugar.  That’s where the low-carb diet or the ketogenic diet come into play.  If you eat good quantities of healthy fat, moderate amounts of protein and keep your carbs low, your body will switch to burning fat and will feed your cells with ketones.  To learn more about the Keto diet and benefits associated with it click on this link https://familyhealthadvocacy.com/keto-diet-and-chiropractic/ 

Nearly all cancer cells cannot feed on ketones so if your body is fed correctly, cancer cells are not given enough energy to grow hence the relationship between sugar and cancer.  This allows your body’s natural defense systems to have time to put up a fight and can help stave off cancer all while feeding your cells the preferred fuel of ketones.

Can cancer can be beaten by nutrition?

I believe wholeheartedly that nearly all cancers can be beaten with nutrition when caught early enough.  What you eat fuels everything inside you, both your good cells and your cancer cells.  So eat whole foods, limit or remove simple sugars, stick to good-quality carbs and high-fibre foods.  Eat healthy fats and good-quality proteins and you will have a much better chance of living a long, healthy life.

I could have gotten quite scientific about how it all works but I am hoping that my information about how sugar and cancer work together within your body will compel you to reduce your simple carbs and sugars significantly.  Especially refined sugars and processed foods that are easily broken down by your body.

Here’s another great link to learn more about cancer fighting foods http://www.readersdigest.ca/health/conditions/how-to-prevent-cancer/

I want you to live a long, healthy life and I don’t want anyone to find out at 42 that they have cancer.

To your health,

Jack Lauzon, B.Sc. Honours Physics, Health Educator
Follow me on Facebook: facebook.com/therealketojack/ or Instagram www.instagram/ketojack or follow me around Streetsville, come for a walk and let’s talk about your health.
Relevant links and additional information about sugar:
https://globalnews.ca/news/3814185/sugar-and-cancer/

Recommended Books:
Fat Chance, but Dr. Robert Lustig
Fat for Fuel, Dr. Mercola
The Keto Cure, Dr. Adam Nally

How To Lose Weight – 3 Beliefs That Make Us Fat

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how to lose weight

One of the most common questions people ask is how to lose weight with the hustle and bustle of our every day lives?  With all the diets on the market, you’d think we could have solved the problem of obesity by now, but it seems to be getting worse. There are a lot of reasons for expanding waistlines and there is no one-size-fits-all approach, but changing the way we think about some things just might help us reach our weight loss goals. Here are three beliefs we need to rethink:

  1. You just need a little willpower – that might get you through a few hours or maybe a day, but willpower will never get you where you want to go. We need to let go of this idea that we can muster up enough will to say no to all the tempting food offers in order to really learn how to lose weight. Willpower will just keep you in an endless cycle of dieting and getting nowhere. Instead of using willpower, evaluate your habits and then tweak them. For example, if you stop off at a drive-thru for a 32 oz soda before or after work every day, bring a bottle of water with you instead and take a different route if you need to. You’ve still got something to drink but it’s not going to sabotage your goals. You just make a little tweak. Keep tweaking until you find what works.
  2. Finish your plate – this comes from the depression era when food was scarce and there probably wasn’t much on the plate to begin with, but it doesn’t serve us when food is abundant and serving sizes are astronomical. You do not have to eat the whole thing. No child is going to starve because you don’t finish your plate; that’s not how it works and how you can lose weight. If it really bothers you to leave food on your plate, then take less than you think you will eat. You can always go back for seconds if you need to.
  3. Eat it while it’s there because you don’t know when it will be available again – this is one of the problems with holiday eating. We make certain dishes once a year and pig out on them as if it’s our last chance to taste it. You aren’t on death row and this isn’t your last meal. You will be able to eat these foods again and, quite frankly, you can make them whenever you want if they mean that much to you. You will taste chocolate again, I promise, so you don’t need to eat the whole cake. A few bites will do until next time.  If you want to feel like your having a treat but don’t want the guilt try these Paleo friendly chocolate coconut bars the next time you get the urge. https://familyhealthadvocacy.com/paleo-friendly-chocolate-coconut-bars/

When it comes to how to lose weight and achieve or maintain a healthy weight, it’s not always food that is the problem or a lack of exercise. It’s the things we tell ourselves. Tell yourself something different and you might just find the scale bending to your will.

Want to learn more about what the experts are saying they wish we knew about losing weight?  Check out this article https://www.rd.com/health/diet-weight-loss/losing-weight-doctors-wish-you-knew/

Wellness – 6 Essentials for a Vibrant Life

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Wellness Clean Eating Program

In today’s fast-paced world, it can be difficult to find the time to look after ourselves.  There appears that there is no time for wellness.  Meal planning is a nuisance if we decide to do it all, and we often find ourselves scarfing down whatever is convenient, eating food to survive instead of to thrive. We find ourselves fatigued and wonder what is wrong, where does the day go?

We must learn to make ourselves a priority. We need to pay attention to what we do with our bodies because it is our health that gives us the quality of life we want. It is essential that in chasing after these things, we do not forget the organism that is helping us achieve all these things—our bodies.

1. Clean Eating

While it is completely okay to indulge in a favorite comfort food once in a while or bake some cookies to feel all warm and fuzzy, it is important to remember what our bodies really need among all the junk. Our bodies need clean, balanced diets that include fresh fruit and vegetables, clean proteins, and healthy fats.

2. Staying Active

Exercise is not scary. It comes in all forms, in all varieties, in all speeds and intensities. Walking, yoga, stretching, jogging, push-ups, jumping jacks; even gardening, playing with your kids, taking the stairs…anything that helps you move your body can be counted as exercise. Pack a pair of sneakers with you wherever you go, and you are sure to find more opportunities for exercise than you realize. If you find yourself with five or ten minutes, dance or do something with your body to re-energize you, instead of checking your social media. If your body is moving, your muscles are receiving fresh blood and oxygen that will rejuvenate you and release those happy endorphins.

3. Digital Detoxes

It is imperative that you step back from your technology every once in a while. Some psychologists say that humans are not intended to efficiently process human suffering and experience at the scale that social media allows. Take time to reconnect with people in person, practice solitude, and gain some perspective.

4. Pay attention to your feelings

What do you need? Do you need a run? Do you need a rest? Do you need a quiet night at home, or would your emotional health benefit from a night out with friends? Your body is always communicating with you; listen to you to guide your lifestyle. If you are not making healthy choices, your body will let you know. If you are not feeling like yourself, then listen to your feelings.

5. Mix it up

The only thing constant in life is change and change can be a good thing. Variety is important. Try something new for dinner, or go to a new exercise class instead of pedaling away on the stationary bike. Try a new route to work or pick up a new hobby. Just try something new to keep yourself moving forward. Experience is the exercise for the soul.

6. Rest

Everything falls into place when you take a break from work to play and rest. Schedule some time each week to do something fun, meditate, or just relax and make sure you get 7 to 8 hours of sleep. Rest is a great way to boost creativity and create balance and hormony.

21-Day Clean Eating (Wellness) Program

If you are ready to make you a priority so you can live a vibrant and exciting life full of possibilities, I invite you to join my 21-Day Clean Eating Program. It will begin on August 5th and the Facebook group is already loaded with material to get you started so you are ready to go in August.

Here is the link:

https://www.yourpersonalnutritioncoach.com/clean-eating

How To Find The Best Diet For You

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How to find the best diet for you

From keto to vegan, there are a plethora of diets to choose from and proponents of specific diets think their way is the right way for everyone. So, what is the healthiest diet?

Weston A. Price was a dentist in the early 1900s and he went around the world studying the diets of indigenous populations. He wanted to find out why Americans had such narrow jaws, cavities, and required root canals. He found that people who were eating their traditional diets (no processed foods) had wide jaws with plenty of room for wisdom teeth, few if any cavities, and no need for root canals. So, what diet provided these benefits?

This may surprise you, but Price found a wide variety of diets that promoted health, from mostly plant based to mostly animal based. He did not find a one-size-fits-all diet.

Here are some tips to finding the diet that works best for you:

  1. Listen to your body – this is key! Stop paying attention to what everyone is saying and start paying attention to how you feel. Do you have energy? Do you sleep well? Do you feel bloated? Do you have digestive issues like acid reflux? Do you have a bowel movement every day? Any skin issues, like acne or eczema? Get in touch with how you feel and what is going on with your body.
  2. Eat real food – Price did not find any healthy populations eating processed foods. Whatever diet you choose, whether keto, vegan or something in between, you need to eat real food, not fake, processed foods.
  3. Enjoyment – do you enjoy the foods you are eating or do you dread the diet you are on? Life is stressful enough without having to add to it with a diet you don’t enjoy.
  4. Can you stick to it for life? – this is important if you don’t want to keep going on and off diets. A diet should be nourishing, taste good, and support your lifestyle, otherwise you won’t stick to it.

What’s more important than what you eat is what you don’t eat:

  1. Avoid fats that did not exist before 1850, like canola, soybean, corn, and cottonseed oils, margarine, and Crisco.
  2. Limit sugar and flours.
  3. Avoid GMOs, pesticides, and herbicides. Go to ewg.org and print out the dirty dozen and the clean 15 lists to see which fruits and vegetables are best organic. If you eat anything with soy, corn, cotton, or canola, make sure it is organic.
  4. Eat animals that are humanely raised, eat their traditional diets, and are not loaded with antibiotics and hormones.

So, what’s the best diet? The diet that makes you feel good, you enjoy, and you can stick to for life.

Fibromyalgia – Doctor’s Discuss Mindset and Healing

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Dr. Casey: Hi! Whether you think you can or think you can’t, either way, you are right! Somebody famous said that once. 

Dr. Morgan: Or a few people did! Today we are going to talk about the most important aspect of healing. Before we dive right in, let’s recap what we spoke about last week. 

Dr. Casey: If you haven’t watched last week’s video (Facebook Live), I encourage you to go back and do so. For those of you who are watching for the first time, last week we talked about the diagnosis of fibromyalgia.  We also talked about the symptoms that can be associated with the diagnosis and how frustrating it can be because it can have a huge effect on your overall quality of life. It can be very frustrating.  

Dr. Morgan: We also spoke about the misconception around fibromyalgia. Whether you have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia or you think you have fibromyalgia or you haven’t been diagnosed or have symptoms of fibromyalgia.  Maybe you have been misdiagnosed.  It can also be very frustrating when you look to the medical route because of the limited options, and people are not generally happy about those options.  

Dr. Casey: I think the overall resounding feeling within the fibromyalgia community is that they are just not happy with the solutions they are being offered right now. In most cases its medication, which really don’t work that well.  We know that they can be very dangerous. People are searching for another solution, they are looking for answers. Statistically, there are a lot of people suffering. I mean, like 6… 

Dr. Morgan: 6% of people worldwide have fibromyalgia, over 70% of them are woman making that 30% for men. 

Dr. Casey: That’s 450 million sufferers with fibromyalgia all over the world. We know that a lot of people have questions because we know that over a million people are googling online the word “fibromyalgia”. So again, they have a lot of questions and are looking for answers. So, that’s one of our goals. We aim to provide a lot of those answers. 

Dr. Morgan: We have created an online community so that we can all work together. You know, in practice we talk a lot about the spectrum of health which is… 

Dr. Casey: By the way, for those of you who are watching for the first time, I am Dr. Casey… 

Dr. Morgan: And I am Dr. Morgan! 

Dr. Casey: We have been in practice as Doctors of natural health for the last 10 years.   We have seen so many cases of people suffering from fibromyalgia who have also had huge transformations. We also know there are other people who are suffering and need similar help but are no where near a clinic, so we decided to create this online community. 

Dr. Morgan: We’re all in this together and we want to create a community so that we can all help each other with accountability, resources, and put the tools in one place to help us all move in the right direction. I was talking about the spectrum of health, on one end we have death and on the other, optimal health.  Everybody is somewhere on this spectrum and where we sit is not necessarily the most important part; which direction we are going in is the most important part. We have created a community so that we can all come together and move in the right direction. 

Dr. Casey: Absolutely, so what do you want to talk about today? 

Dr. Morgan: I want to talk about mindset. I think that a lot of people are frustrated because they may have gone to doctor after doctor to therapists and may even be talking to friends and might have heard this more than once, and unfortunately, we have seen it… 

Dr. Casey: Wait, wait, what is it? It’s in your head? 

Dr. Morgan: Yeah. Have you heard that? 

Dr. Casey: Many of you have been told that its all in your head; we are here today to tell you that it is absolutely not in your head. Pain and symptoms are not in your head, they are absolutely real. The symptoms that you are feeling are 100% real and you truly are experiencing them. But what IS in your head? 

Dr. Morgan: What IS in your head is the ability to re-wire your thought pattern. And that is huge; you have the power of your perception to change your experience and how you perceive the world. In other words, how you look at something, how you perceive an experience will have an impact on how your body will respond and how you feel. So, when you feel pain, that’s an output from the brain, that’s not necessarily an input from the external environment. Dr Casey, you have a great example that you use… 

Dr. Casey: Yeah, so I mean, there are a million types of examples but let’s just say as a child you accidentally put your hand on top of the stove and the element is hot and you burnt your hand. That can be very traumatising for a child, and as life goes on, for that person, every time they go near that hot element it brings them back to that experience.  Without touching the element, they already get that sensation of pain. 

Dr. Morgan: And so, for someone with fibromyalgia, something as little as light touch may be perceived to be a very painful experience. Now, trauma, whether it be physical or emotional trauma, whether it be from childhood or more recent, past or present can affect your physiology and how your body responds. So, when we connect what can be perceived as a negative emotion like fear… 

Dr. Casey: Anger, resentment,  

Dr. Morgan: Anxiety… 

Dr. Casey: Or just general stress or guilt. The whole point here is that there is a neurological implication to your beliefs and your perception. 

Dr. Morgan: To make it more real for you and something that you can relate to, think of when you experience stress.  You often feel your shoulders tense up, your lower back starts to cramp, you might find that the symptoms you have been experiencing are getting worse, you start to get a headache or find they are getting stronger, more frequent, you experience numbness tingling or exhaustion. 

Dr. Casey: Stress affects your chronic conditions. We have both personally dealt with chronic pain in the past. You may not realise you are stressed but find you are super busy and doing a lot during your day.  Stress influences your ability to heal and recover and cause your chronic condition symptoms to flare up. 

Dr. Morgan: Let’s talk about somethings that you can do to start to feel better.  You can remove some of these interferences allowing you to heal faster. For example, exercise… 

Dr. Casey: improving nutrition, your posture and your nervous system. 

Dr. Morgan:.. Removing toxins from your environment.  All these components of health are really important when you are experiencing fibromyalgia.  You may have one aggravating factor, or it might be all of these things aggravating the condition.  It’s better to look at all of them. But, the number one thing that you need to focus on is your mind set.  What’s going on between your ears. 

Dr. Casey: Once you get your mindset in an alignment, all the changes you want to make in the other areas will fall into place. 

Dr. Morgan: The first component of mindset we want to focus on is gratitude.  I am sure you have heard of the benefits of gratitude at some point.  The exercise of gratitude along with the benefits are time-tested. When you are in a state of gratitude, you cannot be fearful, and you cannot be angry. If you are in a true state of gratitude, you won’t be experiencing negative thoughts that could be bringing on and making your symptoms worse. So, lets talk about what you can do. 

Dr. Casey: From a clinical perspective, some of the greatest miracles that have occurred in our clinic, the common denominator for those cases is that those patients, truly worked on their mindset and truly tapped into the benefits of being in a state of gratitude. 

Dr. Morgan: Yep, absolutely. 

Dr. Casey: 100% 

Dr. Morgan: Gratitude has a huge impact on your healing and that’s why it is one of the things that we drive home when we talk about and address healing with our patients. 

Dr. Casey: So, practical application… 

Dr. Morgan: The gratitude journal! So, if you have a gratitude journal or you have worked with gratitude exercises before, please engage and communicate with us (in facebook video). We are a community. We are working together and its important that people can relate to one another. So, go ahead and write a comment and let us know how much the gratitude journals have served you.   Gratitude journaling is something we have been doing for a very long time.  We were exposed to the benefits of gratitude since childhood. So, not only does it have a huge implication for practice but in our own lives as well.. 

Dr. Casey: And our own health! 

Dr. Morgan: The first thing you want to do is get a journal that is just for your gratitude. It becomes your gratitude journal!  Don’t’ use a scrap piece of paper or post-it note that you’ve found lying around. Do not use an old book that you have your grocery list or your to-do list in.  Your gratitude journal is something that you are going to keep in one designated spot.   Whether it’s a bed side table or a journaling spot in your house, keep your journal there so that you can be consistent and create a routine around journaling. The most important thing is that you are consistent with it. 

Dr. Casey:  I would love to hear about your experiences.   If you are doing this already, please comment and let us know how it’s going. If you are just starting to try this, let us know if it’s going well and let us know if it’s hard. I must be honest with you.  When I first started doing this, I was in such a dark miserable place that writing down three things, maybe just one thing that I was grateful for, would take me hours to do. I was pretty much throwing myself a pity party. However, eventually you will get through it and if you stay consistent and make this a daily practise, it becomes easier. I recommend you write in your gratitude journal at night.  If you wake up needing a lift, read through the things that you are grateful for when you wake up in the morning. 

Dr. Morgan: And so, you start your day off remembering what you are grateful for.  What are you grateful for? Some people might be struggling, they might take an hour and a half to find three things in their day that they are grateful for.  Someone else might take two seconds.  Here are some examples of things you can be grateful for.  

Dr. Casey: I mean, some days…I’m not joking, I am just grateful that I got to wake up that day, I am grateful my eyes open and I am still alive! 

Dr. Morgan: You might be grateful that you had the opportunity to have two healthy, wholesome, amazing meals that day.  You might be grateful that you were able to go outside, and your symptoms didn’t hold you back.  That your environment didn’t hold you back because the weather was nice enough.  You become grateful that you can go outside and enjoy the sun and hear the birds chirping. Those five minutes may have been the highlight of the day. 

Dr. Casey: And as bad as your symptoms are, as tough as the day may be, be grateful; “I still have my loving family”, “I have my friends”, and when you think about those things you start to feel much better. 

Dr. Morgan: You may be grateful to spend time with family and friends. Or were able to connect with an old friend for coffee. There are also plenty of resources online if you google “gratitude list” or “things to be grateful for”. Maybe some other people can motivate you or inspire you to acknowledge some of these things that you have in your life that you haven’t been able to be grateful for because you didn’t know it was something that’s special. So, one of the nice things about the gratitude journal, like Dr. Casey mentioned, is when you go into a dark season, so you can always go back to the journal and open it up. One day you will have an entire journal completed, or a pile of journals and you can just flip through it to bring you back up.   It is nice to have them as memories as well. 

Dr. Casey: This is just one aspect of mindset, I mean, we can talk about affirmations or recognising your accomplishments.  Maybe we will dive into that in one of our future videos. The most important point is that this is the first thing that you need to get right and get in place. We are going to get into nutrition, we are going to talk about exercise, we are going to get into the alignment of your body, the nervous system, toxicity in your environment, we are going to talk about all of that. But, you need to get this right first and then all that stuff will fall into place.  

Dr. Morgan: Today’s goal; go get a gratitude journal or find a journal around your house.  Create a gratitude journal and tonight, write three things you are grateful for.  You can always come back to this video and share them with us if you want or let us know how it went.  Was journaling easy or difficult?  How long did it take you? Let’s all work together as a team so that we are all moving in the right direction. Comments? Questions? Keep typing them up even after we stop filming live. We will get to them and we will talk about them in the future videos.  

Dr. Casey:  I am happy to hear how it goes with every one’s gratitude journaling! 

Dr. Morgan: We will see you soon! 

Click to read, ” The Dos and Donts of the Fibromyalgia Diet” if you suffer from severe fibromyalgia.

Top 5 Reasons Why You Can’t Heal Your Pain

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Have you ever experienced, or are you currently suffering from nagging, chronic pain?

There can be many causes of pain, and even more reasons why you aren’t getting relief from your pain.

What have you done to relieve your pain?

Many people try to do stretches, physiotherapy, ice or heat packs or extended periods of rest. While these therapies do have merit, they alone, do not usually offer the actual healing required inside of the body to find respite from pain.

Here, we will identify the Top 5 Reasons Why You May be Unable to Heal Your Pain:

1. Vitamins and Minerals Deficiency

If your body is deficient in essential vitamins, minerals, fatty acids or antioxidants, it will be very difficult to effectively heal your pain. Your body needs to be provided with abundant nutrients from various sources to fulfill your daily fuel requirements.

Your diet should consist of a variety of colours, with a base colour of many greens, and adding in reds, oranges, yellows, blues and purples. If you focus on eating 80% fruits or vegetables at every meal, you will definitely be on your way to fulfilling your colour and nutrient requirements.

Include fresh green salads into your day, with lettuce, spinach, kale, and add red/yellow/orange peppers, carrots, grapes, cucumbers, and all of your favourite vegetables for colour and nutrient value.

2. Insufficient, Poor-Quality Sleep

How many hours of quality, uninterrupted sleep do you squeeze in per night? If you’re getting less than 8, you are doing a serious disservice to your well being.

Your body needs to experience deep, uninterrupted, quality sleep to reap the restorative benefits of this resting time.

If you have trouble falling asleep, try turning off your electronics and dimming your lights at least one hour before your bed time goal. The light from your devices skews your circadian rhythm and prevents you from realizing that it is bedtime.

Sleep Goal: Go to sleep with the sun and rise with the sun!

3. Lack of Movement

Our bodies were designed to move. But our sedentary lifestyles have taken over and too many hours at the computer, at our desks and in front of the television have changed our ancestral ways of hunting and gathering to stumbling to the fridge and then back to your chair.

It’s incredibly important to build regular exercise into your schedule. Speak to your natural health practitioner about what would be the best ways to get started, but really whatever you can manage while you are in pain to move your body is great. Start off slowly and build up to your goals. Go for short walks, do some yoga stretches or any exercise that feels good to you.

4. Pharmaceutical Overload

A common treatment for pain is a prescription for pharmaceuticals. However, these medications can often negatively impact your overall health, and cause immense inflammation in your body. Inflammation is often a cause of chronic pain, and we must work to eliminate inflammation rather than contribute to it. It is important to find natural solutions that work to boost up your body, rather than add dangerous pharmaceuticals that have a long list of potential side effects.

5. Central Nervous System Interference

Your central nervous system controls every single aspect of your body from breathing to digestion to cell division. Your brain sends messages to every single part of your body and they travel via your central nervous system which is encased by the bones of your spine.

If any of the spinal bones shift out of alignment, it puts pressure on your central nervous system, and your brain is unable to efficiently send all of the messages it needs to, to every cell, organ and tissue of your body. The messages that your brain sends out to direct healing can be halted or interfered with, and this can cause the pain to continue or intensify, because the healing messages are not able to reach their destination.

The only way to detect these misalignments of your spine is to have an examination with a chiropractor, who can determine a program of care to correct your spine and help to reduce or eliminate your pain.

Unraveling Emotional Cravings

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Natural Migraine Relief

Anxiety. Self-doubt. Sadness. Loneliness. Frustration. Boredom.

These emotions are can be quite uncomfortable. When they make an appearance it is a natural inclination to push them away- with food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, excessive exercise. I’ve done it all, but for many years my most reliable self-medicating drug of choice was sugar. With that sublime hit of dopamine, sugar temporarily softened the edge of anxiety and self-doubt. The problem was that the post sugar-fix trough was even more unbearable than the initial uncomfortable emotion.

I gave up sugar a year ago; as a result I needed a new strategy to deal with my emotional cravings. Here are a few tips based on my experience (I believe the same strategies can be utilized to deal with emotional cravings for drugs, alcohol, shopping, etc.):

Address cravings directly by asking questions:

• Am I craving this because I am hungry? If not, what is going on? Am I looking for a hit of dopamine?

• Am I hoping to numb an unpleasant feeling by eating this item? If so, can I sit with this feeling for a bit?

• Where is this feeling stemming from? Is the feeling irrational?

• Is there something else I can do to address this feeling?

Make a list of things you love to do. When you recognize an emotional craving commit to trying one (or more) of these activities. For example:

• take a walk
• listen to a podcast
• cuddle with a partner/pet
• call a friend
• do yoga
• paint/draw/journal
• listen to a favorite song
• read a book or a magazine

Understand that freedom from emotional cravings is a process.

Don’t sink into self-loathing if you have a bit of a backslide. Forgive yourself and move on. You can choose to learn from the experience and be better equipped to deal with the next emotional craving.

The ability to understand the process is transformative. I am NOT cured of emotional eating. Just the other day I was experiencing a mental block while working on a big project and frustration was creeping in. I could feel the frustration transitioning to anxiety and suddenly I was daydreaming about almond butter. I could clearly envision sliding open the silverware drawer, grabbing a spoon, opening the fridge and reaching for the jar. How enjoyable a fat scoop of almond butter would be! But because I’ve been practicing, I was able to pull back and became an observer of my thoughts. It was interesting that the uncomfortable feelings led to the almond butter jar. I asked myself a few questions: Was I hungry? Nope. Was I experiencing an emotional craving? Yep.  

I turned to my tried and true anxiety remedy: I went outside. I took a hike in the woods. I stopped to notice the new buds forming on the plants and trees, to appreciate the bright green ferns poking out of the layer of decayed fall leaves. I watched the birds and listened to them calling to one another. The walk was refreshing and renewed a deep sense of appreciation in my soul. But when I returned and tried to sit once again with my project the frustration came rushing back. I clearly wasn’t done with my mental break yet.

So I played one of my favorite inspirational podcasts and cleaned out a cupboard. And you know what? The podcast happened to be about the very issue with which I was seeking guidance! I gratefully received the inspiration I had been craving, I felt accomplished about my tidy cabinet, and I had subsequent success with my project. All without almond butter!

If you are dealing with emotional cravings, they can feel impossible to resolve. Know that you have all the tools you need to start the unraveling process: awareness, a plan, and self-compassion!

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Blog by Guest Author:

Katie HarrisonKatie Harrison

I am a teacher, a Primal Health Coach, and a resident of a tiny Alaskan town. My husband and I live in a 384 square foot wood-heated cabin without running water. We love to play outside, catch fish, and forage for wild plants.

You can find me on my website, Awaken Your Glow, and Instagram.

https://www.awakenyourglow.com/

https://www.instagram.com/awakenyourglow/