Be Healthy

Image Courtesy of Stephanie Berghaeuser

One of the best and easiest ways to let go of stress and tension is meditation. As mentioned in the previous article (Meditation is for Everyone, November 4th, 2010), meditation is your natural state of mind when you’re not resisting experience. When you are calmly detached and present with moment to moment experience as it arises into consciousness, you are in a very restful and rejuvenating state. Events do not have the opportunity to create tension within you because you are processing these events as they occur. In such a state, you may also be processing events that occurred a long time ago. Mindful awareness relieves build ups of past stress and tension and prevents the accumulation of stress in the present .

Meditation is quite a discipline that many people find difficult. Some say they are too busy. Others just can’t find the self discipline for it. Many people adopt a meditation practice because they have heard and read about the many benefits and that it is a simple way to relieve stress. However, for the reasons above, so many of these people abandon their practices within a few months.

The good news is that there are many ways to make meditation easier – even for busy people. One of these is through “interweaving”.

You probably remember some ways that you personally relieve stress and tension. For some people, reading the Bible has a rejuvenating effect. Yoga practitioners find that, when they stretch throughout the day, they feel much more grounded and centered. Mindful breathing and just stopping to check in with yourself, your breath, your emotions and your thoughts is quite rejuvenating if you do it frequently. Muslims pray toward Mecca five times daily. Bakhti yogis find peace while praying through song. Everyone has at least one serene memory from childhood, such as a favorite nature spot. All these things can become interweaves.

In an elevator, you have 20 seconds to do something that goes a little way toward relieving stress and tension or something which generates feeling in the body. It’s the same with grocery store lines, doctors’ waiting rooms and waiting for the bathroom to open. You can either use these moments to follow your usual habits which cause stress and tension to accumulate, or you can use your “Elevator Time” wisely by taking moments to interweave new habits which cause peace to accumulate.

I call this an “integration strategy”. Most mind body disciplines and spiritual paths have one built in. It’s called an integration strategy because it integrates peace and mindfulness into your daily life.

You don’t have to accept a one size fits all strategy. What you do need to do is find the activities that you are most compatible with so that you enjoy the whole ride. Mindful absorption in such activities becomes much easier that way.

Let’s assume that you’re a Christian riding an elevator. You can visualize Jesus showering you with light while blessing your family, friends, coworkers and enemies with the light of true happiness. Imagine broad smiles on everyone’s faces during this blessing.

Perhaps 20 seconds wasn’t enough. The elevator opens and you don’t feel a whole lot more peaceful. Maybe it even stirred you up a little bit. That’s OK. At least 90% of the positive effects of your action occurred below the level of consciousness. Most of the work occurs behind the scenes. When you’re back at your desk, wait an hour and take 30 seconds to one minute to do it again.  Take another minute and do the same an hour later. The effects are cumulative. This means that they will creep up on you in time and culminate into a powerful momentum of peace. It will become very easy to relieve stress and tension in any given moment if you keep up this momentum.

If you’ve been keeping a regular meditation practice and interweave peaceful activities into your day, you will notice that meditation becomes less and less of a struggle. With the proper strategies, it becomes much easier to relieve stress and tension.

In future articles, we’ll discuss more ways to make meditation easier for busy people and everyone else.

Tom Von Deck is an international corporate meditation trainer, stress management speaker and author of Oceanic Mind – The Deeper Meditation Training Course. You can sneak preview the first half of the book and get free guided meditation mp3s at Tom’s website, www.DeeperMeditation.net

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Tags: easy ways to relieve stress, interweaving, relieve stress, relieve stress and tension, relieve stress tension

B.Positive Magazine promotes healthy living and encourages our readers to alter their habits so that we all have a chance to live a healthy lifestyle. As we prepare for “Thanksgiving ” this  month we should also keep in mind that November is also “National Diabetes Prevention Month.” A recent study on metabolism and the immune system’s response was conducted by Diabetes Association-funded researcher, Gökhan Hotamisligil, MD, PhD, and his postdoctoral fellow Masato Furuhashi, MD, PhD at the  Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. In the study researchers demonstrate the occurrence of inflammation in mice as well as in humans for diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. Now, postulated evidence points to a process called metaflammation. This process is triggered by the metabolism of nutrients when the body processes food into energy. For people living with Diabetes Type I and II, the process of converting food into energy is diminished. The decrease in this process can be detrimental to cells and eventually lead organ failure.

Dr. Hotamisligil explains, “When mice eat a normal diet, a molecule named PKR (RNA-dependent protein kinase) is silent. However, if a cell containing PKR is bombarded with too many nutrients, PKR grabs other immune system molecules that respond to this attack and organizes a firing squad to shoot down normal processes, leading to insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction.”

Researchers will now focus on the identifying which nutrients cause adverse effects. “One of the difficulties in understanding how our diet is integrated into disease risk is our inability to understand what specific component of a diet is actually regulating particular responses in humans,” says Dr. Hotamisligil. “So the discovery of this molecule actually gives us a very specific way to identify the harmful components of the diet.”

Results from follow up studies are pending, after which clinical trials would be conducted to find the potential drug or nutrients that could regulate PKR.

To learn more about this research please visit www.diabetes.org

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Tags: diabetes, Health

Meditation is for everyone. It is the universal state of mind when you are not resisting moment to moment experience and when you are in a state of deep loving absorption. Even most nonmeditators have “accidentally” slipped into a meditative state at one time or another.

Have you ever been so absorbed in a task that you lost all track of time? This can be prayer, sewing, singing, gardening or many other things. If so, you may have discovered meditation.

The ego resists uncomfortable experience and clings to pleasant experience, often by restricting the breath. This process is what causes stress in our lives. The resulting stress and tension wreaks havoc on the body and the mind. It also distorts our clear perception of the world and ruins relationships. We must gradually train the mind to be present with reality if we are to have any chance at realizing wholeness.

Taking time to train yourself to enter a state of relaxed, nonattached awareness is extremely rejuvenating and has too many health benefits to mention here. Regular meditation practitioners say that it is as essential for you as stopping for gas is for your car.

There are two components to meditation. They are concentration and equanimity.

Concentration means just what you think it means. In meditation, you concentrate on an object of focus. You relax into it and become increasingly absorbed in it.

Imagine two people in a room with you. One of them you are absolutely in love with and hope to marry some day. The other is some schmuck from your high school days who was never very interesting. Who are you concentrating on more? You are connected with the former on a much deeper level. The two of you “touch” on finer levels. This is what you are aiming for in an object of focus. Therefore, when choosing one, think of one that you can fall in love with. Maybe it’s the word “Jesus” or a visualization of a waterfall. Maybe it’s just your own breath or a body sensation.

Equanimity is a detached awareness of whatever is occurring in the moment. When we resist experience of senses, thoughts and emotions, clarity of mind becomes distorted. Equanimity occurs when we are present with experience and detached from the poles of attraction and repulsion.

You will be distracted with internal chatter during your concentration practice. Thoughts will tempt you, and so will emotions and body sensations. However, these are all happening in the present moment. When they come up, take note by saying “thinking” or “angry”. Let the thoughts move through you like clouds through the sky. Just watch. Then, bring your attention back to the object of focus. This process trains the mind to achieve equanimity.

Now that you know the theory, let’s try it for real.

Sit down in a chair with your ankles crossed or with your feet flat on the floor. Let your hands rest on your lap. Plant your tailbone and “stack” your vertebrae one on top of the next, starting with the tailbone. When you get to the head, your chin will want to tuck in a little bit.

Take a few deep breaths through the nose. Then, just breathe normally. Watch your breath without trying to control it. Is it shallow? Is it deep? Does it start in the chest? How does it sound? Relax and observe.

Your object of focus is the cool feeling in the nostrils as the breath enters your nose and the warm feeling as the breath leaves your nose. From here onward, pay no attention to where the breath goes. Just feel it where it enters and leaves the nostrils.

This is all that exists. Become deeply absorbed in the breath. Soon, the breath will deepen naturally and the brainwaves will slow down.

When a thought comes up, silently say “thinking” to take note of what is happening in the present moment. The thought will start to lose power over you. Go back to the breath without judgment.

Don’t worry about how “deep” you’re going. Your state of absorption will vary according to the fluctuations of your mind. Do this at the same time each day, even if you only have five minutes. You will become much better at it over time.

Now you know the basic nuts and bolts of meditation. In future articles, we will learn how you can fit meditation into the busiest schedules and how to create a strategy that makes meditation much easier to do. After a while, you will realize that meditation is for everyone, and not just people who are fascinated with “eastern” religions.

Tom Von Deck is an international corporate meditation trainer, stress management speaker and author of Oceanic Mind – The Deeper Meditation Training Course. You can sneak preview the first half of the book and get free guided meditation mp3s at Tom’s website, www.DeeperMeditation.net

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Tags: meditation, meditation for everyone, meditation is for everyone, meditation techniques

As we gear up for the upcoming HIV awareness month, I thought it would be great to share a new form of contraception. Microbicides, currently still in the research phase, could possibly be used to lower the risk of acquiring HIV in women.

The Microbicide Trials Network (MTN) is leading the National Institutes of Health-funded study in which SPL7013 Gel, or Viva Gel, is being tested for the first time in sexually active young women to determine the product’s safety, acceptability and ease of use. The expanded safety study, known as MTN-004, is being conducted at the University of South Florida in Tampa and the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan through collaboration between the MTN.

Vaginal microbicides are applied topically to the surface of the vagina and are designed to reduce or prevent the sexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. A microbicide can be formulated in many ways, such as a gel or cream. Several microbicide products are being tested in clinical trials, although none is yet approved or available for use by women. VivaGel is thought to act by hampering the ability of HIV to attach to and infect healthy cells. Unlike other candidate microbicides, including those that target similar cell mechanisms, the active ingredient of VivaGel, belongs to a class of compounds called dendrimers. A dendrimer is a large molecular structure that incorporates multiple units of an active component on its surface. In the case of SPL7013, each dendrimer incorporates 32 copies of the active component. Researchers will assess the safety of VivaGel compared with the placebo gel through laboratory tests and regular clinical examinations of study participants. (Baeten, Wang, & Celium, 2005) Web-based questionnaires are used to  provide information about the product’s acceptability, such as what participants liked or disliked about using the gel, how their sexual partners felt about its use and how likely they are to use microbicides in the future. Participation in the study will last three weeks, including the two-week period that gels are used.

As of 2007 there are 33-million people globally living with reported HIV.  Approximately 15.5 million HIV patients are women whom have reported their status to a health department. In Sub- Saharan Africa 22 million people are held reported to have contracted HIV and in Middle East and North Africa roughly 380,000 people have been reported to have HIV. In eastern and Western Europe almost 1.6 million people have been newly affected victims of HIV.  (www.UNAIDS.com 2007) To any health professional these numbers would be alarming and they should alarm us all. The question is how we prevent these numbers from escalating without offending other countries and their cultural activities as it relates to intercourse. Researches saw a need to help these women so they studied a molecule known as SPL7013 gel otherwise known Microbicides.

Imagine if your right to say “No” to sex was taken away from you, rape charges were not considered a crime in your country, and your husband has the right to sleep with people outside your marriage. Adding insult to injury, you are now a newly infected woman with HIV who had no control over the circumstances that have altered your life for years to come. For many women of southeastern Europe and Africa this is the culture of the countries they live in and they have no right to determine if they want to be in contact with this disease. Some people may argue that this issue is very much prevalent for women in our own country here in the United States. The difference that sets this culture apart however is that in some parts of Africa and Europe the men residing in these countries choose to participate in intercourse and not use lubrication which could possibly cause lacerations and tears to a woman’s vaginal wall. In return it makes the women whom are the receiving partner more susceptible to contracting the Human Immunodeficiency Virus otherwise known as, HIV.

To understand why this is such a big problem for receiving partners in these countries and surrounding countries, we first need to understand what HIV is and how it affects the body.  The immune system is a network of complex cells, tissues, and organs that communicate with each other to keep pathogens from invading the body. When this system fails to operate successfully, virus, bacteria, and fungi can invade our body and cause damage to tissues and organs that can lead to permanent damage or if left untreated can cause death. HIV is transmitted through blood, bodily fluids, (semen and vaginal secretion), and breast milk. This can occur through vaginal, anal and oral forms of sex, shared use of needles, birth, and breastfeeding. Lymphocytes, which are cells of the immune system, respond to the virus. T-lymphocytes commonly known as T-cells are the cells in the immune system that the HIV virus attack and destroy

“It’s important to study this  gel in young women who are sexually active because this is the very population likely to use and benefit most from this kind of HIV prevention approach,” said Ian McGowan, M.D., PhD., professor of medicine, Center for Prevention Research at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles. “If we are satisfied with the results in terms of the gel’s safety profile we may consider conducting trials that would include more women, and eventually, look to see if the gel can help reduce their chances of acquiring HIV,” added Dr. McGowan, who, in addition to serving as protocol chair of the MTN-004 study, is MTN co-principal investigator.(Baeten, Wang, & Celium, 2005)

The Gel can be used with a contraceptive such as the Nuvaring . As the study is in research phase, scientist are trying to find a gel that dries, yet still active for women in countries where the mate prefers dry intercourse which transcends the high risk of acquiring HIV.

For more information you can visit: www.UNAIDS.com, www.Microbicides.org or www.USAID.gov

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Tags: Contraceptions, HIV Prevention, Microbicides Research, Women's Health