alive

Breathe Deep to Relieve Stress

/ esfein / 5 Comments

While you’re currently engaged in deciphering the likely liquid-crystal display in front of you, your body (as always) is actively breathing. Your body does this in order to keep you, itself, alive. You breathe in and you breathe out.  What exactly is happening? How do we get energy from the breath?

Every day the average human breathes* anywhere from 12-20 times per minute. There are 525600 minutes (see theater math) in a year and the average human lives somewhere around 62.7 years. So on average that could be anywhere from 395,461,440 to 659,102,400 theater breaths in an entire lifetime. In primitive terms: You breathe an awful lot.

With all of that in-and-ex halation it is easy to take for granted how the system works. When you breathe, oxygen is transferred from outside to inside the body.

“What exactly defines inside and outside?” Is a question that will lead to many a philosophical debate regarding the boundaries of a human. That debate is for another day.

The oxygen is taken through the blood stream to muscles in the body where it is then traded for waste. The waste is deposited in various bodily systems and taken care of from that point on.

Warning: Upcoming Logical Stretch (ULS):
So supposing that you have half of a billion breaths in your life, each time you breathe you have a chance to study and/or refine your breathing. In doing so you just might find out a bit more about yourself.

To return to the Realm of Slightly Less Loose Logic (RSLLL), you really must be careful when examining the way that your involuntary body functions. If you push too hard for knowledge it may end up hurting you.  So take your time and really get a feel for yourself.

Paying attention to your breathing is a proven method in relieving stress. Science and religion alike pay special attention to understanding the way in which we breathe. Breath Prayer is a Christian prayer focus. When you start to drift away from your original intention you actively shift focus back onto the breath (Hmmm… seems like meditation is a fundamental practice).

Science too, believes in the powers of breathing. Breathing to reduce stress is a concept not all that different than Breath Prayer. Stress, in this case, can be viewed as a distraction from your original plan or “prayer.”

When a person is under stress, their breathing pattern changes. Typically, an anxious person takes small, shallow breaths, using their shoulders rather than their diaphragm to move air in and out of their lungs. This style of breathing disrupts the balance of gases in the body.

So in order to train your body out of stress all anybody needs to do is deepen and elongate their breathing. There are many ways to do this seemingly difficult task of breath training. Pranayama, aka yogic breathing, is a good place to start.

…just do what you gotta do…

to be happy.

If you’re interested in learning a whole lot more about yogic techniques A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya is a very thorough book on the topic. It gives in depth explanations of this technique and many others.

 

Sources:

http://www.normalbreathing.com/index-rate.php

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/hlw/whathappens.html

http://www.prohealthsys.com/resources/physical/vital_signs_table.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display

http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Breathing_to_reduce_stress

http://www.soulshepherding.org/2012/07/breath-prayers/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_monitor

http://onsager.bd.psu.edu/halmi/chem3airs05.pdf Experiment that you can try…

http://www.abc-of-yoga.com/pranayama/

Quotes taken from Wondergressive admin: Phil

Other Wondergressive Articles:

Seven Minute Workout Can Get You to Lose Weight

Smelling Calmness (And Other Things)

Power Posing Can Change Your World

Unsweet Dreams

Dalai Lama, “Religion is no longer adequate”

Coconut Oil Reverses the Effects of Alzheimer’s, Among Many Other Benefits

/ esfein / 2 Comments

 

Dr. Newport has discovered that ketones in coconut oil reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Because Alzheimer’s is like a diabetes for the brain, brain cells cannot accept glucose for those afflicted with the disease.  Ketone, a chemical identical to glucose, is easily accepted by the brain.  Ketones are found in heaping amounts in coconut oil.

Dr. Newport gave it to her husband who had very serious Alzheimer’s.   Within just a couple weeks his entire life was altered dramatically.  For example, after not reading for a year and  half, he was able to read again.  After not being able to exercise, he began exercising.  He began making jokes again, becoming involved socially, and generally having a second chance at life.

Researchers have actually created a remedy even more powerful than coconut oil, 10x more powerful in fact.  It’s known as a ketone ester.  This ester would undoubtedly treat and reverse Alzheimer’s disease in millions of people around the world within weeks. Unfortunately, they can’t get any funding. As the lead researcher states, it’s because there’s no profit in manufacturing the ester, which is proven to be reversing the effects of Alzheimer’s.

Interestingly, many years ago, people steered clear of coconut oil because it was said to raise your cholesterol. This was before doctors knew there were two types of cholesterol, good and bad cholesterol, or LDL/HDL.  Coconut oil, we now realize, raises good cholesterol and lowers bad cholesterol dramatically. This information has never been revised by the mainstream medical industry, and doctors still tell many patients not to take coconut oil due to the effect on cholesterol.

Coconut oil has many other extremely positive benefits outside of Alzheimer’s as well.  Coconut oil improves or treats:

  • Parkinson’s
  • ALS
  • Autism
  • Dementia
  • Schizophrenia
  • Dental care
  • Bones
  • Diabetes
  • Liver diseases
  • Kidney diseases
  • Heart disease
  • Weight loss
  • Digestion
  • Immunity
  • Infection
  • Pancreatitis
  • Stress relief
  • And helps kill viruses like HIV and Herpes due to its natural antibiotic properties

In my personal experience, coconut oil isn’t just great for your body, it’s great for your taste buds too.  I use it to cook everything, from fish, to eggs.  I even put it on my salad as a dressing.  It adds a subtle, completely natural and life improving sweetness to whatever it is added to.  Sometimes I just snack on it, scooping it right out of the container!

My favorite brand is the cold pressed, totally unprocessed extra virgin coconut oil made by Nutiva. 

Life, It’s All Over The Place

/ esfein / 5 Comments

 

 

UFOs, aliens, de-materialization, anti-gravity, velocities beyond that of light; it’s all incredibly fascinating as well as being some fantastic enigmas. I’ve just finished watching a movie on Google Videos entitled UFO: The Greatest Story Ever Denied. It documents a myriad of possible evidence, physical and spoken, that sheds some light on the existence of extra-terrestrial life, as well as the knowledge the human race currently and historically has had of life beyond our little planet.  The presenters in the video are not Joe the farmer by the way.  They hold such titles as brigadier general, former chief executive of NSC, astrophysicist, varying classes of military, including black ops, and more.

I think it’s a bit naive and downright ignorant to think that out of all the infinite space that the cosmos entails, Earth is the only planet that harbors intelligent, let alone minimally complex life. The very thought that life would be so rare is ignorant in and of itself. Life is found everywhere on this planet, even places where, by definition, it shouldn’t exist.

 

Did you know there are tiny organisms living in sulfuric acid within most limestone caves inside of the Earth? They even consume iron, and use the element as a building block for its cellular protein! How weird is that?? Very weird, which is exactly the point. Just because it’s difficult to imagine a life form that doesn’t breathe oxygen and isn’t bound by the traditional hierarchical consumption of sunlight (the food chain) does not rule out its existence. Some life forms even redefine what we think of as normal geometry in life.

 

And check this: scientists have speculated that it is not out of the realm of possibility that Venus, a planet once thought of as inhospitable for life could in fact be teeming with it!

 

All it takes is a bit of imagination and observation, and suddenly the universe seems far less lonely, and a whole lot more active!