Brandon LaGreca
Do you check your sleep score every morning and cheer or despair based upon the outcome? If sleep tracking is an integral aspect of your self-care ritual, what happens when you take a break for a few weeks? If you’ve never done so, I would encourage a lengthy wearable vacation and a little time getting…
A colleague of mine once gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten: before a patient goes to a psychologist wondering whether they are depressed or anxious, first make sure they are not surrounded by idiots. She used a profanity for “idiots,” but in the interest of keeping this post fit for polite…
If there’s one form of exercise that deserves more airtime in cancer prevention and survivorship, it’s strength training. Not because bigger biceps are magical, but because skeletal muscle is metabolically active tissue—a living organ that helps regulate blood sugar, inflammation, immune function, and even hormone-like signals that circulate throughout the body. To be clear, lifting…
I woke to the soft pull of sheets and nothing else—not even my name. For a moment, there was only touch: fabric against skin, the quiet weight of my own limbs, the dim geometry of a body arranged in a bed. Many people know a milder version of this—those brief seconds of fog when you…
If you can sit or lie down in relative comfort, you can meditate—the only requirement is passive receptivity. The biggest obstacle to sticking with a meditation practice is the false belief that you’re “doing it wrong” if thoughts arise while you sit. Unless you have a very mature practice (usually built over decades), the cessation…
I’ve been increasingly concerned about toxicants in our food supply—and how poorly government agencies are able to protect consumers. Any big corporation selling food is complicit in this bigger problem. But today I want to highlight a smaller vendor, Wildbrine, which sells sauerkraut through a massive retailer, Costco, and how I couldn’t get a satisfactory…
We’ve come a long way in exploring the concept of spiritual medicine, so I thought it would be helpful to revisit the arc of the series with a theoretical case study. Consider a middle-aged woman I’ll call Freya: she’s married with two kids, a teen and a pre-teen, and works full-time as a nurse in…
It’s worth expanding on a topic that came up in the previous post in this series. Spiritual bypassing is the idea that one’s religious adherence or spiritual practice can be used to sidestep personal responsibility. It can show up as assigning to the Divine something that is within your control. When we question the notion…
Hopefully it is evident by this stage of the series that spiritual healing is a physiological human capacity, that stress and trauma plant the seed of imbalance, and that spirit as consciousness is the driver for healing on a subtle level. Have you ever heard of Takotsubo syndrome? First described in Japan and often called…
The last post in this series reviewed three traditional paradigms of spiritual illness, each thousands of years old. Their efficacy has been borne out over time, but just because a way of doing something has deep roots doesn’t mean the fruits are pertinent to today’s culture. As Western culture leads with the scientific method and…