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Why Sleep: And Why You Shouldn’t Use a Sleep Tracker
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…
Why Retreat: The Power of Rest
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…
Why Weightlifting: More Lean Muscle and Less Cancer
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…
One Minute Without a Name: Waking Up as Pure Awareness
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…
Why Meditation: The Ultimate Equalizer
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…
Plastic Kraut: An Unanswered Question About Food Safety and Packaging
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…
A Spiritual Medicine Case Study in Cancer
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…
The Razor’s Edge of Healing: Spiritual Abuse and Medical Hexing
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…
The Wound Is the Way: Integrating Spirit and Matter in Healing
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…
Rhythms of the Heart-Mind: A Science-Friendly Guide to Spiritual Healing
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…
Three Paradigms of Spiritual Illness
The foundation is set. If you’ve been following this blog series, you now have a firm grasp of spiritual medicine—beginning with consciousness as spirit and appreciating the subtle interplay of body, mind, and emotions as expressions of our spiritual nature. Now we need to qualify the notion that at the root of all healing is…
The Trickster’s Touch: How Expectation Shapes Healing
Many are familiar with the concept of the placebo effect, especially as it pertains to drug trials designed to determine whether a therapy’s benefit exceeds the power of expectation alone. That the bodymind can replicate nearly any pharmaceutical intervention is a staggering fact—you’d think we’d stop everything to study how best to nurture this effect.…