Breathing

I have had to learn how to breathe. Breathing deeply and slowly has become a conscious practice for me. I spent the greater part of my life unconsciously focusing tension in my chest, gut and neck muscles. Tightened chest, tightened gut, poor posture, poor breathing. Poor breathing, poor oxygenation to brain and muscle, which leads to more tension and even worse breathing. The result is disease and dysfunction.

Learning to sense tension in your body is a very good health-promoting skill. Taking an inventory occasionally through the day is the key. While sitting in a task chair or walking to work or sitting on the subway, consider your own body's posture and attitude. Straighten the spine with chin up and shoulders back. Inhale deeply. Exhale deeply. Repeat. Feel the change in your body. It will relax. You may even feel a burst of alertness and increased energy, as your brain is oxygenated.

Whenever you can, follow this procedure throughout the day. Stretch your arms and legs. Remember to keep your chin elevated as you look at monitor screens, listen to lectures or carry on conversations. This helps to keep the posture erect with shoulders back.

This activity is a form of meditation. It brings you back within your consciousness of your own life, your own body, which is ultimately all you truly and temporarily possess in life. Mindfulness of your own state of well being or dysfunction is the first step to greater mindfulness. By staying well, you will have energy to practice compassion and generosity to others.

Stress

So much of becoming well in our bodies is adaptation to unavoidable stress. Stress is actually a negatively nuanced word for our natural reaction to inevitable realities, such as time, gravity and physical limitations. Our brains have the ability to visualize goals that exceed our physical and psychological limitations. Stress is often the conflict between the goals or desires and the reality of performance or ability.

Modern medicine has turned to drugs to medicate stress reactions. Tranquilizers and antidepressants are often used to combat stress reactions by alleviating anxiety, depression and insomnia. Often this approach enables individuals to cope with existing stress and to actually increase their stress levels under the influence of the drugs. Then other, more serious, symptoms of stress reactions arise. Drugs become less effective. The quest for the perfect enabling drug becomes a new stressor. A vicious circular process.

A more practical way to address stress is to diminish the stimulus of the stress. This entails mastering the mind (brain) and bringing it into a realistic accord with the rest of the body. This approach is simple and difficult. It is simple because it requires regular maintenance of the body which anyone can do. It is difficult because modern life distracts us from healthy choices.

The simplest way to begin is with your own body. A daily periods of exercise are essential. If you are overweight, that extra weight is a stressor which applies its pressure on your life 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It should be addressed as a top priority by adjusting your diet, increasing your activity and scheduling regular exercise. Yoga, walking, weight-training, bicycling, aerobics, tai chi....all forms of exercise are helpful when done regularly in moderation.

As the body becomes less stressed, the mind can be placed in better sync with the body through regular sleep, regular meditation and regular socialization. For some, this translates into less late-night TV, less self-centered obsessing and less isolation. For others, this entails sticking to a structured schedule, joining a mediation group/class and watching less TV. It's all about balancing your natural capabilities and tastes with healthy activities which are enjoyable for you.

Without the recognition of stress, we would not function well. Stress can often be a helpful motivator. It is our reaction to stress which causes us gain or loss in the quality of our lives. Mindful and intentional coping with stress can be a tremendous way to learn about yourself and life in general.

Health

We all seem to be having a problem with communication on this health care issue. As a health care professional, I thought I would try to clarify some things for those of you who are adrift with the whole health-care-reform concept. Let's start with some definitions, as I see them:

Health: This is what you have when you are not sick at all.

Health Insurance: This is a financial instrument you purchase from a third party which pays for your doctor and hospital bills when you are sick. It's actually sickness insurance, but they didn't want to call it that for obvious reasons.

Health Care: This is what you get when you are sick to restore your health. It is so expensive in the United States that it is usually paid for by the government or by a health insurance (sickness insurance) company, which also gets help from the United States government.

Wellness: This does not have anything to do with rural water supplies. This is a vague term which refers to combined physical and mental state of good functional ability, whether you are healthy or coping with sickness.

Well being: This is another vague term which refers to your "I'm-OK factor". In other words, when you feel OK, if either healthy or coping with sickness, you might be considered to have a state of well being.

Reform: This basically means fixing or improving upon something that is no longer functional.

Now, let me explain a few basic facts about health care:

1. No human being goes through life with his/her health in tact. No matter how much yogurt you eat with active cultures or green tea you drink, you will get sick, if you aren't already. The absence of 120-year-old Christian Scientists attests to this fact.

2. Many of you are already sick and don't know it. No, that's not a wise crack. Disease is often slow and progressive as you age and things happen to your body. In the U.S., you will get very little warning about this until something goes badly wrong, because the health care here is reactive or remedial, not proactive or preventive.

3. Remedial health care, based in emergency and intensive-care medicine, is much more expensive than preventive health care. In other words, if you put off getting treatment for sickness, it costs more, whether you have health insurance or not.

4. Ultimately, taxpayers already pay for the health care of the uninsured and many of the insured, whether they themselves are taxpayers or not. Since hospitals cannot refuse treatment to the seriously sick, they treat everyone and bill the government for any deficits caused by treating people without health insurance or with deficient health insurance. This is called "free care", which is a misnomer, because we are all paying for it already.

5. Health insurance companies are able to pay for all those cheery TV commercials, build those nice buildings and hire all those paper-pushers by NOT paying for health care whenever possible. In other words, they are in the business of collecting money (monthly premiums) and then working hard to avoid spending it on the people who pay the premiums. (Question: Would you pay a monthly fee to someone to pay your utility bills and then expect to have to ask them if you can turn on a light bulb when it's dark?)

6. Every full-time Federal employee gets affordable access to a superior health insurance policy to any that you as an individual could ever afford to buy. That includes Republican members of Congress!

Now, I hope that clears up some misconceptions about how all this works, or doesn't. You will get sick, or already are in some way without knowing it. The only way for us to get good health care is for everyone to participate in the health care system, even when they are well. Insurance companies are needless middlemen, who profit from not helping people who pay them.

So, a fair public insurance plan would have been the solution to your health care needs now and in the future. If you supported the people who have eliminated that option, you really blew it for yourself and everyone else. Maybe you should drop a line to Scott Brown.

Fading

Graceful and natural aging in Western industrial culture has been corrupted by commerce and the pharma-medical industry. Hedonism has ruled the day. From Joan Rivers to Nip-Tuck, neurosis about aging has evolved into mindless and vacuous self-mutilation in the wealthier classes. This is occurring in a society which begrudges basic medical care for everyone. In fact, the same tax-evading seniors who are spending fortunes on growth hormone and plastic surgery resent supporting government programs to end porverty and provide a basic social net for all people in the society. This is narcissism of the worst kind, plain and simple.

I have come to see my own experience of aging as a gentle and appreciable fading of many of the urges and impulses which made my former life so complicated and frought with struggle. By accepting age and letting go of these habitually perceived necessities, my life has become simpler, calmer and less stressful.

The key to this method of aging is embracing the changes, physical and emotional (also physical in the sense of hormonal), which are inevitable, despite any measures taken to fend them off. For me, this does not entail letting myself go to pot, by any means. In fact, I exercise more regularly than ever, but more gently. I set goals and projects for myself daily, but I do so realistically with my most basic needs at the top of the list.

The Middle Path entails balancing these seemingly contradictory concepts and actions. The Western mind thinks in dichotomy. It is best to reject this mode of thinking , if you wish to age well. One must learn to think inclusively with an acceptance that many things, some contradictory, can be happening at the same time to achieve balance and wisdom.

Letting go, fading gracefully, is the key to dignified aging in my opinion. This is a keystone of my practice.

Heat

The sudden onset of hot days in the high 80s and low 90s is an opportunity to feel and understand the automatic systems that really keep our bodies alive. We do not 'think' our bodies alive, as much as we like to take credit for our state of being. Turn off your mind by lying down in comfortable and quiet place. You can then tune into what is really happening within the complex cellular machine you usually take for granted.

Learning to find the balance of working within and with the body's machinery is what wellness is all about. It is not easy, if you have been raised in an urban, industrial society. It is worth the effort.