Sunshine ☀

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It is a beautiful sunny day in New Jersey today. The temperature is in the high 60’s…truly perfect.

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Getting 15 minutes of sun on your face and arms, every day, helps with vitamin D processing. The body can become low on vitamin D, if you do not get in the sun ever.

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Low vitamin D can be a factor in depression. Being in nature is also known to help with anxiety and depression.

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Personally, my vitamin D usually comes up extremely low. The doctor has told me many times that I need to get into the sunshine every day…or at least a few days per week.

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So today is a good day for it. I hope you all can get outside for a few minutes today.

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What is the weather like today, where you live?

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Peaceful Healing of Water

Standing close to the shimmering lake

The ripples in the water have a calming effect

I feel the gentle motion of the water 

Sending flowing energies into me

Filling my mind with calmness

Creating a clarity in the midst of the brain fog

*Photo taken at Wharton Lake in New Jersey on my cell phone camera

Do We Live in Simultaneous Realities?

Everyone searches for a purpose to their lives. Some people are more focused on just surviving, but in the end humans are wired for more than simply existing.

Different people see their purpose differently. Time and age can change where you focus your energy.

Some people focus more on others than themselves and feel more fullfilled if they are serving others. Some people look to invent something that will improve the lives of others.

We need all different kinds people, with different skills and interests in order to tap into multiple kinds of brains and different kinds of intelligence.

I believe that each of us is happier when we feel like we are able to use and develop our best gifts, and what we feel drawn to do.

It is easy to get off track because others think they know what we should be doing. And some people only want to guide us in a certain direction because it serves their agenda.

We are all unique and have an inner guide that wants to lead us. When we really listen to our feelings, we can tap into that guidance. We should be careful not to get so busy that we ignore our feelings and intution.

Ctitical thinking has its purpose and can serve us in many situations. It can also talk us out of doing what we love because it can rationalize our behaviors.

If you feel miserable in a situation, there is something wrong and your emotions have their own intelligence.

We exist in multiple realities. There is the thought reality that we tend to rely on. There is our emotional reality, which is just as important. Our spiritual and intuitive reality can guide us to a higher vibration of consciousness.

There is our physical reality, which is made of pleasure and pain. The reptilian brain drives us by primal urges, and warns us about danger.

The thoughtful mind is the conscious mind. It is the critical factor that tends to make us ignore our other realities. The primal drives react and override our critical thinking.

We need to live in harmony with all the aspects of ourselves. We need to be physically comfortable and safe. But we cannot ignore our emotional reality. It lets us know when something is wrong with the direction we are going, or how we are going about it.

Make time, also, for your spiritual self and explore the meaning of that to you. Let your realities all have a voice.

Balance in everything is important for health and to move closer to enlightenment and peace of mind.

 

Blessings and peace,

Annie

The Little Brain in your Heart Has Potential Healing Power

The heart is 50  times more powerful electrically than the brain is. The magnetic fields given off by the heart are much more powerful than those of the brain. This alludes to the heart being able to send communication out of the body and to another person’s magnetic fields. Your heart can communicate love  and compassion

The Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California  has research which shows that the there is a “little heart” in your brain which has “brain-like attributes”  Triple Helix Online

This has opened up a field of study of Heart Intelligence. The field of   “neurocardiology ”  is the study of how the heart and the brain communicate with each other. There is evidence that there is two-way communication between the little brain in the heart and the big brain.

John and Beatrice Lacey were the first researchers to investigate the communication connection between the heart and the brain.  This early research was done in the 1970s. This was the first evidence that there is actually two-way communication between the heart and the brain.

On January 7 of this month, there was new research released by the Neurologist Dr. Andrew Amour.

Neurologist Dr. Andrew Amour from Montreal in Canada discovered a sophisticated collection of neurons in the heart organised into a small but complex nervous system  .bodymindsoulspirit | January 7, 2015 |

The heart has it’s own nervous system. This little nervous system contains  at least  40,000 neurons.  These  ” sensory neurites”   are responsible for two way communication between the heart and the brain. If the heart feels an emotion, it sends the signal to the brain, which in turn sends the sensation into the body.

The “little brain” in the heart is the heart’s own intrinsic nervous system—a network of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins, and support cells that are very similar to those that exist in the brain, but act independently of the brain [2]. This information processing system can control the brain, the hormonal system, and other pathways. By using this system, the heart seems to have its own logic that functions separately from the autonomic nervous system  Srividya Murthy

The Institute of HeartMath has studied the heart rhythms and the variation in the rhythms of the heart. It has been demonstrated that our emotions are reflected in the changing rhythms of our heart.

When we are feeling positive emotions there is a harmony within the nervous system and the heart has a regular rhythm. When we are upset the heart rhythm becomes irregular and this has an effect on the nervous system, creating a lack of flow and harmony.

The heart usually communicates with the brain through nerve fibers that run through the vagus nerve and the spinal column. When a heart has been transplanted, these connections do not immediately form again, but the heart may still able to function because of the existence of its own intrinsic nervous system  Srividya Murthy

Electro magnetic Heart fields seem to be able to interact with the electromagnetic fields of another person.The heart is responsible for communicating emotions to another person that they can feel. You can feel a sensation in your body when someone who is in love with you, stands near you. They are sending emotions to you via the electrical and magnetic energy fields of the heart, as well as the brain.

There is proof of electromagnetic fields that can extend at least 6 feet from your body. That means that someone within that field range will be able to feel emotions from you. You can literally send out your emotions into another person’s sensory system.

I wonder how far we have the potential to send energy fields. There have been experiments of groups of people sending out love energies in a concentrated effort . They have resulted in less crime and violence in the area that the group was told to focus on.

There are possibilities of using energy sending techniques for therapy. Anxiety can be reduced by an altering of the nervous system in your body. There is possibility that a person can regulate your nervous system with their own nervous system.

There is potential for help for addiction, depression and post traumatic stress disorder. These are all conditions in which people suffer from a malfunctioning  nervous system.

There is a lot of interesting and exciting potential with this new research.

As always, I a sending my positive energy to all of you now 🙂

The Importance of Balance in our Lives

If any of you are old enough to remember The Karate Kid movie, you may remember that the teacher always was telling the Karate Kid about balance.

This was not just balance on his feet or in his body. This was about balance of life. The karate kid was practicing constantly and was giving up everything else in a major effort to train his body and his mind for the contest that was upcoming.

The teacher found a picture that the karate kid had. That was a picture of the beautiful teenage girl that had a crush on the karate kid. She wanted attention from him but he was too focused on his training to even realize this.

The teacher showed the picture to the karate kid. He told him “Balance, You need the balance”

It  is very typical for a lot of us to lose the balance in life. I think that some people naturally maintain a basic level of balance easier than others.

Some people that are able to maintain the balance have pretty predictable lives, without a lot of variation. That is not necessarily the best thing either. It  really depends on your personality.

Certain people have a particularly difficult time maintaining balance in their lives. People with chronic pain , like myself, have a hard time with balance.

I am thinking of this example because I have such a high level of pain in my neck and spine today that I have already repositioned myself and my laptop 3 times during this post.

There is extreme pain in my neck, radiating up into my head and down my arms. My fingers and hands are going numb because the nerve is so severely pinched by the herniated disc in my cervical spine today.

So this is a high end bad pain morning. If I stretch it could help. The feeling of disappointment and feeling disheartened by the level of pain today is overpowering.

People that have chronic pain have trouble maintaining balance because the pain takes over their thoughts.

Anything that dominates your mind on a regular basis will tend  to dominate your life.

When there is something that dominates your thoughts, the other things in your life get pushed aside.

Recovering alcoholics are more aware of the importance and value of the “little” things in life than a lot of people are.

They have learned the lesson that some people never ever learn.  Life must be balanced.  When something gets 90 percent of your time and attention then something else is being neglected.

Workaholics will get so dominated by work that they neglect their loved ones. Shopaholics will become so obsessed with buying that they neglect balancing their finances.

People with mental illness will become so overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts that they will neglect the needs of their bodies and minds.

When our work lives become neglected, we will lose self esteem about our jobs and our ability to make a living.

If we neglect everything else but work, we will lose our emotional support system of family and friends.

No matter what is taking the majority of our attention, we are sacrificing some other aspect of our needs.

Everyone has certain areas of their lives that need attention. There is the work or whatever is generating income.  A frequently neglected area these days is physical health. Mental health is affected by physical health and visa versa.

You also need something that you enjoy outside of work and family. Something that helps your self esteem, like yoga, art, golf, gaming, writing , singing or some other activity.

We humans are built to have various aspects to our lives. We need to work for shelter but we also need to love and be loved.

We need to be healthy and we need self-esteem. We need spirituality of some kind to give us direction and hope.

Balance is a constant juggling activity. The balance is bound to get off, sooner or later. If we are in tune with it then we will notice. When we notice something is being neglected we can take measures to rebalance things.

So just be aware. If you feel overwhelmed by life then it could be that tipping the scales a bit will help. Sometimes simply adding in some time to meditate, go out to lunch with a friend, or do a fifteen minute stretch in the mornings will help.

Other times we have a huge balance problem such as an addiction or a severe mental health issue. One of the ways to help ourselves is to make very small changes that are tolerable. Just make a small change such as stopping to eat breakfast at a diner once a week.

Take care of yourself and take care of your relationships.  Pray for balance in our lives. Write down your areas of life.

What hats do you wear?   Teacher, Mom, Dad, brother, boss, student, artist, team mate, co-worker, fishing buddy, blogger.

Think of them in a pie pictograph, like a pizza with slices. Put one important area of your life in each slice.

Which is the smallest slice? That is the one to work on.

Is one slice taking over the pie and squeezing the others out? That is your area of dominating thoughts, addiction or obsession.

Peace and love and balance to all of you,

Namaste,

Annie

How Stella and Bob Still Stayed Close During Bob’s Late Stage Dementia – Alzheimer’s Disease / A True story of How Love Endures

Stella and Bob had been married for 63 years when I met them. I was the home health aide for Bob.

His care had become too much for Stella to do alone. It was too difficult physically, mentally and emotionally for her.

Bob had late stage Alzheimer’s Disease, Dementia, and he could no longer walk, use the bathroom, feed himself, or communicate well.

Stella felt depressed a lot of the time. Their relationship was no longer the same. He could not communicate with her like he used to. He could not comfort her or help her anymore.

She missed him, the way he used to be. He was still there in body, but part of him was gone and still continuing to get worse. She was losing him bit by bit every day.

Bob himself was depressed and angry a lot of the time. His anger was mostly directed toward the home health aides but sometimes spilled over onto Stella.

Bob had late stage dementia and he could no longer walk, use the bathroom, feed himself, or communicate well.

Stella loved Bob very much. She wanted to understand him even when he could not say what he needed or wanted. She would lean over him in the bed, and ask him what he needed. She would hold his hands and stroke his head to calm him.

He would get so frustrated that he could not put his words together but she spoke to him with kindness, in a calm tone of voice.

In the evenings, I would help her clean him and out him in his pajamas. They had 2 twin beds because he had to be in a hospital bed.

The beds were apart during the day, in order for the aides to have access to Bob, to perform care that was required.

At bedtime, Stella would help me to push the two beds together. She asked me to push them as close together as I could, so that they were touching.

She said, “He is my husband. I want him next to me in the bed. I want to be able to reach over and touch him. ”

She explained to me that during the nights, he would wake up and call out because he was afraid. He was disoriented and did not understand where he was or what was going to happen to him.

“I always hear him when he awakens, and I reach over and touch him to comfort him. I want to be close enough to him at night to be able to do that.”

So, every night , I pushed the beds together.

There is more to health care than just caring for the physical needs of the patient. There are emotional and mental needs of the patient and the family that are equally important.

*Note – The facts in this story are true. The names were changed to protect the privacy of Stella and Bob. Stella was 88 at the time of my association with her. Bob was 92.*