Natural Medicine

Moods Are Like the Weather… Seasonal Affective Disorder

November 17, 2018 by Carol Leave a Comment

From a spiritual perspective, it’s been said, you are really the vast, deep, limitless sky, and your emotions are really just the clouds that come and go across that background. Sometimes they frame the sun and create a beautiful panorama, or a spectacular sunset. Sometimes they seem to block the sun and you can feel sad and gloomy. But then the wind blows, air currents shift and suddenly you are your true radiant self again…

As we move toward winter in the Northern hemisphere, we enter a time of challenging skies, often gray and cloudy, no longer balanced by the lush green of trees and plants. And many people find it difficult to remember the sun, remember the gentle air of spring, the brilliance of summer and most especially, their own inner light. They fall into seasonal sadness, also known as SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder. And it gets really hard to maintain a spiritual view on it all…

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so what’s a detox anyway?

September 13, 2010 by Carol Leave a Comment

Detox is really popular these days, but unfortunately few people know what it really means. And that leads to a lot of ineffective and often dangerous fad detoxification diets. We humans are so good at making simple things complicated…

Our bodies are very wise. They know what we need, and often more importantly, what we don’t need to function optimally. We evolved in the wild, eating what’s known now as the Paleolithic diet; vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and lean animal protein like wild game, (and yes, grubs and snails and insects!) We usually skip the insect part these days, but the rest of it is really the ideal human diet. No human cultures were originally vegetarian, that came later to accommodate for a population that grew so fast that they ran out of game!

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Enlightenment and flossing…

July 4, 2010 by Carol 1 Comment

A friend just sent me this zen proverb “After enlightenment, the laundry.” And I thought, “and after every cool, cosmic, transformative experience, you still have to floss…”

We search for the peak experience, for the magic bullet, the Answer, the Way… Even if it existed, there’s still the regular Stuff of life; laundry, flossing, and no matter how many times you cut your toenails, you still have to do it again!

If only we could be content with the Yin and Yang of life, the excitement and the mundane, the epiphany and the falling back into our old unconscious habits, inhaling and exhaling, transformation and cleaning up dog poop. Our eternal search for transcendence makes us glorious – our stubborn denial of the mundane stuff of life makes us like ostriches.

What’s your favorite contradiction? And is it really contradiction, or is there really Yin and Yang, in-breath and out-breath, light and dark for a reason…

~Carol

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