Diabetes is a disease of impaired carbohydrate metabolism that results from inadequate production or utilization of the hormone insulin. This vital substance is necessary to convert food into energy by facilitating the transfer of glucose (sugar) from the bloodstream into the body’s cells. Of the 16 million people in the United States with diabetes, most can be categorized into one of the following types:
Aromatherapy in its simplest form — enjoying the fresh smell of a just-peeled orange, picking rosemary from the garden, steeping mint leaves for tea.
What’s old can become new again. Take aromatherapy. Aromatics have been used for more than 10,000 years, while the use of aromatherapy and essential oils dates back at least five centuries. Today, a renaissance is occurring in homes, spas and treatment rooms, as health advocates breathe new life into this tried and true practice.
“Everything is vibrational in nature. When you’re aware of your own inner vibrations, able to witness life around you as a concert of sound, to discover that you are in fact sound, then the division between internal and external becomes non-existent.”
—Dr. John Beaulieu
In one way or another, cancer has left its mark upon us all. It has touched my own life many times. As I watched friends, family members and clients fight their own intimate battles with the disease, I realized I was being given the opportunity to grow and learn from each experience.
“What doesn’t make sense is how it works,” said Hannah Conway. “You can’t wrap your mind around how it works at all.”
Conway and others have a hard time putting to words the success of an unusual energy therapy — the Lenair Technique, designed to address the many faces of addiction. “I come from a big Irish Catholic family,” Conway said from her office in St. Paul, Minn. “I’m 41 now and went a long time drinking. I tried AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and it worked nearly five years.” Then Conway went back to drinking. “It was at least six beers a day, if not 12.”
Most of us take water for granted. It’s in our oceans, rivers, lakes and swimming pools. It falls from the sky and flows from our faucets. We swim, bathe, wash and soak in it. When we need it, or want it, we have it. Our supply of water is not the problem today, (more than 70 percent of the Earth is covered by it) the problem is the purity of the water.
All water is not the same. There are differences equating to different healing properties and, as you can imagine, its uses in hydrotherapy vary greatly.
For thousands of years, the Chinese have known the power of its healing properties, incorporating its use in their traditional tea ceremonies. Now green tea has found its way into the heart of Western medicine as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant agent capable of blocking the cancer-causing effects of free radicals in the body.
Santosh Katiyar, Ph.D., who has figured prominently in investigating the relationship between green tea and skin, says the tea has an “antioxidant activity superior to that of any other naturally occurring antioxidant known.”
Too much on your plate? Millions of Americans know how you feel.
Stress has become a “given” in our modern world, and a primary cause of physical and mental illness for millions of us. Small amounts of stress can be a good thing, keeping us alert and on-task. But unrelenting stress, whether from overbooked schedules, financial strain, too little sleep or too much bad news, can lead to a breakdown of body, mind and spirit. When an overextended life puts you on a collision course with disaster, there are simple steps you can take to recover a sense of balance.
In massage and bodywork, there is an elephant on your tables and chairs, in your spa rooms, and, in fact, everywhere you take the profession. Not the trunk and peanuts kind. No, this animal is metaphorical in nature, yet an animal, nonetheless. Strangely paradoxical, this elephant is the backbone of many modalities and to many of our lives, yet is often avoided in the name of privacy, sacredness, and because we just don’t know how to talk about it. The subject of which I speak is none other than spirituality.
When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health, that I discover I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1849
It’s difficult to find a gardener who doesn’t agree with Emerson. The reward, avid gardeners say, of cultivating the earth is nothing short of sublime. So what exactly is going on in the backyard plot that has captivated more than 85 million Americans? Well, in a word, healing.