Is there anybody who has not yet heard about the significance of 2012?

What is it? What is fact, what is fiction?

Without a doubt, the world is changing rapidly. The very survival of our species may be at risk if we ignore the present signs and those of the past.

Some of the signs are: global warming, increasing violence and fear, economical hardship, collapse of the financial systems, rapid depletion of our natural food and energy resources... and the list goes on...

This may sound like a heavy title. You see I really want your attention here. I will wrap up my one year of writing articles for you that (hopefully) helped you in some ways, or at least induced a reaction of agreement, disagreement or stimulation to think for yourself.

Today I want to talk about the law of life; your life as much as mine and everybody else’s. You may think “Oh I know, it is about balance and taking the golden middle path in life”. Yes, but the law of life is much more precise than that. You see, the law of life is not like the man-made laws that change from country to country and throughout time.

In two of my recent articles I shed some light on how your brain’s chemicals affect your mood.

Maybe that was an eye opener, explaining your “run away train” brain that had you like a puppet; out of control. If you were able to balance your Gaba, Melatonin, Tryptophane, and Serotonin, you should feel some relief. But, like so often, it may not be the total solution to your problems. So, what else relieves stress and anxiety? Of course your mind has a powerful role in how you feel, and I will go much deeper into that in a future article. What you may not know is that what you eat has a strong effect on your physical and mental, even your emotional, well being. How?  

In a previous article I told you a bit about low Gaba and Serotonin levels in your brain, and how such a lack may throw you into many unpleasant and stressful condition. I received many calls and visits after that article. So many of you could identify with the conditions of low Gaba and low Serotonin. Of course there is seldom just one factor that creates a certain condition; our bodies are complex and it takes a holistic approach, and sometimes medical for an acute situation, to bring back synergy and balance.  

Today I want to introduce to you the other two brain chemicals that are important to be balanced. What I do not mean by that is that Gaba, Serotonin, Acetylcholine and Dopamine should be present in equally divided amounts; far from it. But you do have all four present in your brain. Whichever dominates gives your personality a certain trait...

Tapping your stress away? Yes, and I am not talking about ‘tap dancing’ here, although that sounds like fun also and it may work, while you tap-dance (smile). What I am talking about here is a method called: EFT, which stands for ‘Emotional Freedom Technique’.

In order to understand why EFT is so successful in stress relief amongst many other issues like pain relief, phobias addictions etc., is that it influences the energy flow along the meridians in your body.  

Just imagine a road net of interstates and highways. Our meridians are like highways, or energy lines that connect important organs and body systems with each other. When you feel well, the roads (meridians) are open, which allows the energy (traffic) to run smoothly along these paths...

Sugar can be a dangerous legal drug. If you are diabetic or pre-diabetic or your family has a history of diabetes, you need to take action as soon as possible in order to reverse or prevent this awful and life threatening disease. The first call for action is knowing the glycemic index ( GI ) of food in general and especially of the foods you eat regularly.

Yes, this is what ignored and uncontrolled diabetes is. Recently I saw a TV commercial for a diabetes- testing device. The actor said, and I paraphrase: “When my doctor said I had diabetes, I thought: that’s all it is? And I was relieved”. Well I could not believe what I heard, but it made me aware of the casual approach toward diabetes, which is rampant in the Bahamas. Most people do not want to speak about their cancer, it is scary and may signal a death sentence, yet diabetes seems to be a more casual condition. It is not!

You may think that nothing can be ‘good’ about feeling pain. Although I agree that pain never feels good, you should feel blessed that this sensation may alert you to a potentially dangerous situation in your body. People with an impaired nervous system due to advanced type 2 diabetes or a severing of nerves due to an accident or other conditions that cuts off the sensory system in parts of their bodies, can attest to this. So, at times, we do need to feel pain in order to take appropriate actions towards our state of health.

As a rule of thumb: you should be attentive to the signal of pain and investigate its cause. Usually there is a site of inflammation and/or swelling of tissue, although this is not always the case, like in neuropathy. Some damage to nerves can arrive without sensations of pain; sometimes it is a tingling or numbness in your extremities like your feet, legs, arms or fingers...

Balance should be a natural state for us, but is it? Do you sometimes feel that you want to stop the world, even just for a moment, to catch up? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed and unable to complete all the items on your ‘to do list’? Do you sometimes feel that time is speeding up, giving you less time to do what you were able to do years ago? If you say ‘yes’ to most or all of my questions, welcome, and you are not alone. If you believe it or not, time is actually speeding up, and yes, we do have more to do, or so we believe.

In my last article I named a few commonly used items with toxic ingredients that may be hazardous to your health. Today I will give you a few options to replace these substances with natural alternatives that you can easily mix yourself or come by. Also, let us not forget your thoughts, which can be toxic and therefore threatening your well being also.

Let us go through a typical day and see the different choices you could implement:

You have probably slept on a mattress that was bathed in flame retarding chemicals during manufacture, and still emits small molecules of formaldehyde gas, which is a proven cancer causing chemical. Getting out of bed, on your way to the bathroom, you may walk with your bare feet over a synthetic carpet that was treated with benzene, styrene, or other cancer causing agents. If you don’t have a carpet, you may walk on tiles that were washed with chlorine or other chemical household cleaning agent. You absorb these chemicals through the soles of your feet, where they go directly into your blood stream.

When you reach the bathroom, you probably wash your face with tap water, which contains chlorine, fluoride, and even traces of pharmaceutical drugs and herbicides that leached into the ground water. Since your skin is your largest organ, it absorbs toxins very readily. When you step into the shower, even a greater amount of these toxic substances are forced into your skin...

You either love it, or hate it, or just suffer bravely through it, if you are a woman.

All women have to go through menopause; it’s as certain as ‘death and taxes’. The only difference is how a woman experiences menopause. The word ‘menopause’ is self- explanatory; it means that menstruation stops and the childbearing years are over.

For some women this is a true blessing because they don’t have to worry about pregnancies anymore, but for some it feels like a part of their womanhood is disappearing. This makes menopause as much of a physical event as a mental and emotional one. Men usually just look on, either with amusement about the obvious changes in their partner, or they are scared and irritated because they don’t understand the ‘new woman’ they are now dealing with...

I often marvel at the incredible progress science has made in many areas of medicine. The unraveling of our DNA and understanding its coding, stem cell research and its mind boggling possibilities to re-grow nerves, tissue, and complex organs, including the entire anti aging research. If we think of aging as an inevitable disease ridden path into our ‘golden years’, I am all for appropriate measures and interventions to prevent this.

There is no reason why we should not live a long life that is energetic, with full capacity of our brain function to not only enjoy every moment consciously, but also be the wise old woman or man as an asset to our family, community and country. I will have a lot to say about this in future articles...

Is there such a thing? Yes, but it is not called ‘menopause’ because there is no such event as ‘menses’ in a male’s life. A man’s drop in testosterone (the male hormone) is called ‘Andropause’. In my last article I told you a little about the important role of hormones to protect us from disease and support peak performance and wellbeing.

I start with the men today, because the coming weekend we celebrate our men as fathers. When a male has fathered a child, his most important biological purpose has been fulfilled. That does not mean that he then can sit back and be catered to, or go to look for another female to procreate. A father is also the protector and provider for his family. But this is another subject. Let me focus on what most men do not know about their bodies, what actually happens when they get older; their Andropause...

You bet it is, at least when we speak about the physiological aspects of the aging process. If you are over the age of thirty-five, you may feel that your body, and especially your energy level are not the same as when you were in your teens and twenties. You are still young, but the aging process is well underway since you passed your mid twenties. Shocking? Yes and no.

When we are young we are oblivious to aging; aging is for old people. Depending on your age, ‘old’ is anywhere from the thirties to the eighties, meaning that a teenager finds you ‘old’ in your thirties, just like fifty years old people see old age more in eighty years old people and beyond. It is all perception, but there are actual physiological changes triggering the aging process as early as 20 years into your life...

These are the third and fourth virtues of nine attributes I promised to explain. I hope you remember the previous ones; they were: Awareness and Choice. IF you have not read my article on Awareness and Choice, call me and you can get a copy. Why is willingness to honour your ability so important? You use it every day; it is what creates your life. You may never have thought about this very important connection. We actually often confuse to two. As a human Being you are fundamentally able.

Of course some restrictions due to specific circumstances, including the limitations of your body are understood, but your ability is much greater than you would believe. An ability can e a natural aptitude that you came to this life equipped with, or it can be an acquired proficiency. Your competence may not be perfect now, but you are able to learn to become competent in almost anything you choose...

Transformation is a big word with an even bigger meaning and is active in many areas of your life. Your physical body is a gigantic ‘transformation device’ by which, in more or less complicated processes, your food gets transformed into energy and building blocks for cell renewal.

But that is not what I want to talk about today. Let us look at transformation from a mental, emotional and spiritual point of view.

Most of us in the Bahamas just celebrated Easter. I practice a personal tradition of fasting on Friday. When the body is not busy digesting food, mental, emotional and spiritual awareness is heightened. On ‘Good Friday’ I spend most of the day in quiet contemplation about the meaning of remembering Christ’s journey from prosecution to crucifixion and glorious resurrection...