Author Archives: Anna McRobert

Do You Have Intuitive Intelligence?

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Intuition is now considered an “intelligence” and like emotional intelligence, social intelligence, creative intelligence, intelligence for reading, writing, & rithmatic, and a string of others, we can now acknowledge, claim and explore intuition without being ridiculed, even in scientific circles.

Intuitive intelligence is being researched scientifically and HeartMath Institute has been immersed in exciting and heart intelligence affirming research since 1991. Their research is showing that the heart appears to be involved in the processing and decoding of intuitive information. It also presents evidence that females are more attuned to intuitive information from the heart.

I read that there is an “underlying nonconscious aspect of intuition which includes implicit learning, implicit knowledge.” It is being acknowledged more openly now that intuitive perception plays an important role in business decisions and entrepreneurship, in learning, research, medical diagnosis, and healing, in spiritual growth and overall well-being.

Several researchers have contended that intuition is:
– an innate ability that all humans possess in one form or another
– is arguably the most universal natural ability we possess
– could be regarded as an inherited unlearned gift.

Although intuition is often felt as a sensation in the body, that physical sense can come with a knowingness and recognition of information from any or all of our five senses, with a vision, colour or sound, even a taste or smell. We interpret the sensations we experience.

There are times our drive to produce a particular outcome can provide a rational direction or decision, yet … a “bad feeling” gnawing away at you is a sign that your intuition is telling you that, no matter how much you might want to talk yourself into this direction, it’s somehow not right, it’s not in sync with your “inner knowing”.

Research and experience at HeartMath Institute suggests that emotions are the primary language of intuition, and that intuition is a largely untapped resource. They teach how to engage heart felt emotions, like compassion and gratitude, with breathing, to entrain the brain frequency to be in sync with the heart and generate the calm experience we intuitively seek.

Implicit knowledge or implicit learning could be knowledge we gained in the past and either forgot or did not realize we had learned something unintentionally. Like the monkeys in the mirror neuron experiments, we watched, absorbed, integrated and stored, to later bring forward the knowledge or skill as the need arose. There was no logical or conscious need to understand, just integration of how to achieve a particular result, simply by watching and registering in our own body the same muscle and energy patterns of the person we are watching. We can learn by mirroring behaviour.

The brain has a highly efficient and effective pattern-matching ability. Your brain matches the patterns of new problems and challenges with implicit memories base on your prior exposure and experience. We are not conscious that the brain is pattern matching, we just find our body is moving as needed, an idea or a thought pops up, or a solution appears in our awareness. It’s not a conscious process.

Another type of intuition might be called energetic sensitivity. Our nervous system detects and responds to changes in the electromagnetic field around our body. A common experience is becoming aware that someone is watching or staring at us. Their attentive energy focused on us has penetrated our field and registered in our nervous system.

Walking in nature we can perceive change of the Earth’s field as we move through areas of trees and plants, rock formations, and flowing water. To be walking in the bush and come round a bend and suddenly find ourselves in a clearing can starkly highlight awareness. The atmosphere can be quite different, very palpable, as our skin sensors register the change.

That change is visual and also energetic. Close your eyes and you can still feel it. Walk back and again approach the bend, more slowly this time, and pay attention to when you become aware of the change. Native tribes have grown up being sensitive to their land and its special places, for healing, for peace, for recovery. Westerners may not have honed that awareness but by paying attention in different environments we can become more sensitive to environmental energy.

Albert Einstein has been widely quoted as saying, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

To enhance your awareness of your intuition do a Touch For Health Goal Balance on:
I easily and readily access and align with my intuitive intelligence for … (problem solving, inner guidance, clarity, next step, etc). Touch For Health kinesiology uses muscle response monitoring to communicate with your subconscious, and bring up to conscious awareness that which is usually hidden from our everyday awareness. It also shows which part of our energy system to stimulate to become more aware of our intuitive ability and direct it to a specific area in our life.

Touch For Health program builds sensitivity to energy change and increases your intuitive intelligence. Workshops are held regularly.
For more information on workshops email: anna@annamcrobert.com.au

Reversing Stress, Being Resourceful

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Reversing Stress, Being Resourceful
By Anna McRobert

Even when our outer world resources seem far from abundant and we are stressing out, we still have inner resources that are amazingly effective.

We live in a body that is self-healing. How totally remarkable! But at times our body becomes overwhelmed, when life events take up more energy to deal with than the energy we can generate under the circumstances. That’s when the body struggles and symptoms become obvious, health deteriorates, causing even more stress, and we go downhill.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You have an inner resource that is constantly available.

Your mind, and how you use it becomes super crucial now, and you can harness the power of your mind to turn things around, if you know how to do that. If life events are generating distressing thoughts that are dragging you down, then give your mind some productive, positive work to do. What you think about, matters. How you think about events, matters. You can help your body and mind to heal, or you can add to their burdens. Because where your attention is focused, where your thoughts take you, that is where your energy is engaged and utilized, for good or for bad.

Stressful thinking, going round in circles, worrying, feeling stuck, all chew up your energy, lower your immune system capacity, and put you into an ever decreasing spiral of poor health, and progressively to tissue breakdown, and to energy exhaustion.

Life is not always easy, so energy lowering stressful thinking is familiar to us all.
What can you do instead of getting caught in the downward spiral?

First is breathe. Under ongoing stress we breathe shallowly. We deprive the brain and every cell in the body of essential oxygen for generating energy. Shallow breathing keeps the brain in stress mode. So breathe in and out, out, out, empty your lungs. Now you can take a full breathe in naturally. Repeat till you are emptying and filling your lungs easily.

Next, bring blood into front brain, the only area with cells designed for new thinking. This is your problem solver, the planner, the organizer, the creator of solutions. Stress increases blood in brain areas for survival, locking you into repeating how you survived in the past, no matter how unproductive that might be for you right now.

How do you put your problem solver to work? Put you hand on your forehead, breathe in and breathe out, and acknowledge to yourself your problem, your worry, your distress. Thinking those things with more blood in back brain keeps you going round in circles. But thinking those things while holding your forehead, draws blood into the front brain cells that are solution creators. This cancels the stress signal. It turns off the alarm.

The forehead will become warm very quickly, indicating there is more blood there now. Review your current problems again and breathe in, and out. Keep doing the review and breathing and soon you’ll find that the stress feeling begins to subside, that you begin to accept the problems not just fret about them. You will start to focus on producing new thoughts and new ideas. In Kinesiology this technique is called Emotional Stress Release.

With blood now in front brain, and more oxygen available for in-the-now energy production, your brain is ready to do something to help you with those problems or issues. You are reversing the stress and on the way to creating a solution.

Help your mind to help you. Instead of locking energy into unproductive worrying and depriving the body of healing capacity, direct your powerful mind to do productive work. You can specifically direct your energy to where your body needs it for healing, for regulating, for normalizing internal functions. What you think about and how you think about your health and life really matters, it matters heaps.

Slow down the adrenals. They have been in alarm, in fight-flight-frozen mode, while you were stressed. Under stress their job is to raise your blood pressure and body temperature so you heat up when stressed, also raise blood sugar for muscles to take action, block digestion and immune system, and block thinking so you can react with survival tactics, definitely not with creating a new future. This is not a healthy, productive state for daily living.

Talk kindly to your adrenals. “Thank you for keeping me going. You can take a break now.” Engage your mind to turn your adrenal thermostat down to normal, just as you would turn down the heat to your hotplate on the stove and see the fire-y red coils reducing to a lower heat level. What colour to you relate to as healing, normalizing? Is it white, blue, green? Different colours may work at different times. Direct your healing colour as a ray of light to your adrenals. Breathe in and breathe out. Allow your adrenals to respond and find their balance again as they absorb your healing rays.

Thyroid, when underactive can make you feel depressed and anxious, and when overactive can cause anxiety and insomnia. Send healing, normalizing light and colour to your thyroid. Breathe in and out.

Digestion, reset it to normal now that you are focused on reducing your stress and allowing your body and nervous system to recover, rebuild, regenerate. Send the healing rays to your digestive system too. Breathe in and out.

Liver has to detox the backlog of stress hormones and other toxic wastes. Give your liver a hand with your mind’s focus on sending healing energy to your busy liver as it does its work willingly. Breathe in and out.

Weight, imagine your stored energy in fat cells, being converted, melting, being mobilized to provide extra energy for your body and brain to recover, rebuild, regenerate. Focus the healing, normalizing rays to your fat cells so they readily help the body to restore balance. Breathe in and out.

Water is essential for hydrating every cell so it can do its job efficiently and effectively. Write the word “Love” or “healing” or “gratitude” on a folded paper, making a coaster. Put your water container or glass on that coaster. The water molecules become your healers too when you infuse them with the positive energy of positive words. Direct your healing, normalizing, balancing energy rays to the water in your body too, especially to flush your kidneys.

By harnessing your mind to do your bidding in supporting healing and balancing in your body you can achieve miracles. You can recover, rebuild, regenerate. Take charge or your thoughts. Acknowledge what issues need to be addressed, and put yourself into healing and creative thinking mode to achieve the positive results that will make for a more satisfying and fulfilling life.

If you want more tools for creating health contact me: anna@annamcrobert.com.au
If you want to know and learn more about how to work productively with our body
Register for Touch For Health Workshop on 25 & 26 March by sending an email to: anna@annamcrobert.com.au

Surprising Allergy to Good Foods

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If you are prone to sinus during pollen season then you are more likely to be reactive to specific foods too. Which foods? Raw fruit and vegetables! Symptoms can be eczema, itching, tingling or swelling of the mouth, tongue or lips, the parts of your digestive tract in direct contact with the irritating food. Does this happen to you? It’s labelled as Oral Allergy Syndrome.

In Northern Europe 70% of people sensitized to birch pollen have a reaction to raw fruit and vegetables as well. 80% of those react to apples, 59% react to hazelnuts, 51% react to nectarines and peaches, 48% to kiwi fruit, 35% to carrots … the list goes on. Peanuts come in at 24%, tomatoes 21%, potatoes 19%, celery 16%, and more.

But the symptoms continue internally too. Stomach cramps, diarrhoea, bloating, vomiting, and even vary rarely, anaphylaxis. Cooking these fruits and vegetables can neutralize the impact. So juices or smoothies may not be so good all year round or for some people at all.

Although the pollens and foods are not biologically related, the structures of their proteins are so similar that the body reacts to both, especially during pollen season. In Australia we have our own pollen season that plays havoc with people in the path of the wind.

And what affects your digestive tract will also disturb your brain. A National Institute of Health study found that learning issues can develop from a mere allergic reaction to a specific food product. This can include raw fruit and vegetables, not just wheat, milk, eggs, seafood, peanuts that we hear about so much.

The belief that food can have an impact on brain function has been studied as early as the 1920s, when Dr W.Ray Shannon reported on the successful treatment of children with hyperactivity and learning disorders, using an elimination diet, writes Dr Dorothy Fairley ND.

Can you eliminate this problem of food reactions?
It was recently reported that more than four years after a group of children with peanut allergies were treated in an Australian immunotherapy trial, 70% are still free of the allergy. The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute research could eventually change the way nut allergies are treated, but for now it’s essential to keep any nut products out of school lunches is still the official medical advice.

But what can you do right now to be healthier, and reduce or eliminate the reactions you have to foods. Science is gradually proving that allergies don’t have to be a lifetime burden and natural therapists have been helping people all along. First thing is to find out what sets off your reactions, which foods and conditions?

Attend Food: Friend or Foe workshop, Saturday 3rd February, in Brisbane and discover how to identify offending foods and what you can do to get your best nutrition from your foods to stay healthy. Contact me for details: anna@annamcrobert.com.au

What Is It With Wheat?

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We didn’t have so many issues with food sensitivity and allergies in our parents and grandparents times. It wasn’t nearly as bad or as common a problem as it is now, so what has changed?
Our food has changed. How we grow, harvest, store and prepare food, what we add to it and what we take out of it has changed. This certainly applies to wheat and wheat products of today, a staple in the Western world.

Modern wheat seems far worse for health than earlier strains like spelt and emmer. Natural mutations, cross breeding with other grasses, and selective breeding specifically to increase grain yields and gluten content, have had consequences. These are becoming more and more obvious in general health, emotional behavior, and mental functioning of grain eaters around the world. But wheat and other grains contain many components that are unfriendly to the body, and gluten is coming up as the worst of these.

Gluten in wheat is an important protein in bread making.
Gluten forms when water is added to flour and mixed into a gluey, stretchy dough.
Gluten swells up and forms cross-linked fibres that trap gas during baking and causes the bread to rise, and maybe your tummy to rise too.
Gluten is recognized as an inflammatory agent and is behind many health issues, including leaky gut and irritable bowel problems.

Gluten is a family of proteins found in grains and is highest in wheat.
The two main proteins in gluten are gliadin and glutenin. Gliadin causes the most trouble. When gluten arrives in the digestive tract the immune system may label it as a foreign invader, like it does a bacteria, and can attack it causing inflammation. and a stack of symptoms. This is a gluten sensitivity or gluten intolerance.

In celiac’s disease, the immune system attacks the gluten proteins, and also attacks an enzyme called tissue transglutaminase in the cells that form the walls of the intestinal tract. This is an autoimmune disease.

Many studies have found strong statistical associations between celiac disease and other autoimmune diseases, including Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Type 1 Diabetes, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, Multiple sclerosis, Rheumatoid arthritis, Cancer, and others.

In non-celiac gluten sensitivity there is no attack on the body’s own tissue. However, many of the symptoms are similar to those in celiac disease, and can create physical, mental, emotional, and nutritional havoc. Inflammation caused by gluten can cause Anemia, Anxiety, Arthritis, Ataxia, Autism, Bone density loss, Candida overgrowth, Chronic Fatigue, Cognitive impairment, Depression, Dermatitis … and the list goes on.

Physical Symptoms: Even without a gluten sensitivity and no gluten antibodies in the blood, there can still be problems like irritable bowel syndrome and leaky gut, both related to inflammation, that improve markedly on a gluten free diet, according to results of studies with randomized groups. Bloating, cramping, muscle and joint pain, bowel inconsistency, and fatigue, are common symptoms that subside when gluten is eliminated from your diet.

Neurological Disturbance: Beyond the effects in the gut, gluten can cause severe problems in the brain. In as study of patients with neurological illness of an unknown cause 30 of 53 patients (57%) had antibodies against gluten in the blood.

Cerebellar ataxia is an inability to coordinate muscles for balance, movements, walking, even talking, and is linked to gluten. It’s even labeled gluten ataxia and the damage to the cerebellum, part of the brain important in motor control, is considered irreversible. But patients improve significantly on a gluten free diet.

According to reports and studies several disorders of the brain responded well to a gluten-free diet, including schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, as well as cerebellar ataxia. How many of our unsteady elderly folk live on toast and biscuits daily?

“Brain dysfunction starts in your daily bread,” says Dr David Perlmutter in his book, Grain Brain. “Brain disease can be largely prevented through the choices you make in life,” he adds. “Food is a powerful epigenetic modulator, meaning it can change our DNA for better or worse… food actually regulates the expression of many of our genes. And we have only just begun to understand the damaging consequences of wheat consumption from this perspective.” (more on this in a future article.)

Addiction: Endorphins are:
– morphine like narcotics,
– that are made by your brain and body
– and bind to other proteins, the opiate receptors.

When gluten is broken down into short chains of amino acid, the peptides formed can activate opioid receptors in the brain.
Gluten exorphins:
– are a group of opoid peptides
– formed during digestion of the gluten protein
– and have been found in the blood of celiac patients.

Your self-made endorphins:
– can reduce pain,
– can sedate you and
– affect your emotions.
– They can also stimulate pleasure response
– the reward pathways in the brain
– setting up an addiction,
– so you crave more of the same.
We are pleasure seekers, and do what feels pleasurable.

Exorphins in grains (and dairy) can act just like natural endorphins, BUT, they are not self-made by your body. Exorphins are introduced from outside your body via food. They bind to your brain opiate receptor sites so you think your body is telling you to eat more of that, when actually it is your food that is telling you to eat more of that food.

Your brain also uses the exorphins instead of neurotransmitters which can impair your learning and memory, writes Dr Al Sears. Gluten appears to be the most common exorphin producer, with 5 different opioids that produce a wide variety of symptoms according to Dr Norman Shealy.
No wonder many people can’t give up their morning toast, or sandwiches for lunch, or their afternoon biscuits and cake, and pasta at night. Gluten ensures they crave it and come back for more. Surely just one biscuit can’t hurt, can it?

It’s essential we learn how to determine which food is good for us and which is detrimental. Kinesiology muscle monitoring is a tool to discover the impact of various foods on your body and brain, your health and behavior, your learning and creativity, your moods and productivity. Kinesiology is a gentle and safe skill well worth learning. Touch For Health 1 workshop is due 10 & 11 February.
Food testing is part of Food: Friend or Foe workshop due 3rd February.
Discover how to determine the best foods for your wellbeing.
Email me for more details: Anna@annamcrobert.com.au

Reverse the Digestive Decline

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Have you got a Digestive Problem?
Are you feeling bloated and uncomfortable,
suffering with tummy cramps and get headaches,
feel tired all the time and …

I think you may be shocked at what you’re about to read.
Your digestion decline can start as early as your 20s! Really? Research shows that if you have a digestive system (along with the rest of you) that’s older than 60, then there’s a 65% chance that you have insufficient digestive capacity? And the digestion decline may have started in your 20s. If you can’t extract the goodies from your foods, then you can’t repair and replace cells efficiently, which means you are actually aging faster than you realize. At age 30 your digestion could be functioning as age 60! That’s a mismatch that can be corrected.

When low on supplies your body will break down existing tissue, sacrificing muscle tissue, skin tissue, bone tissue, to get what you need to keep your vital organs going. That is one of the reasons that you lose muscle mass as you age, and develop osteoporosis, and your skin thins and wrinkles.
This reduced capacity to digest foods can lead to reactions to the foods you eat, even those that were fine when you were younger. And all the symptoms will make you think you’re sick … and need medications … that produce side effects that can be worse than your current problem. Scary!

Improving your digestion could save you thousands of dollars in costly health treatments and medications. Many medications can upset your body systems even more, hide the original cause, create heaps of further problems, make you put on weight, reduce the nutrition you can extract from foods, create a string of additional food reactions, get you on a medical drug treadmill, and keep you there, while you continue to decline. And you’ll be told that’s inevitable with age. Not true!

You don’t have to decline, you can even reverse the loss of digestive capacity, at any age. You can actually improve your digestion, naturally. Kinesiology food testing, through monitoring muscle change, can identify which foods your body can handle effectively, and which foods cause trouble, that drop your energy and create symptoms, and put an extra load on your detoxing and elimination organs.

If you have been ill your body is directing energy to healing, not digestion. If you are stressed, your body is directing energy to deal with the threat, and not to digestion, till the stress has passed. What if it never totally passes? What if every day is stressful to you? Then your digestion remains low, and poorly digested food sets up a reaction, causing inflammation in your gut, and throws your intestinal microbes out of balance too.

Attend Food: Friend or Foe workshop, Saturday 3rd February, 9am to 4pm and learn how to take stress off your digestion, and what to do to boost your digestive powers.
Take charge of your energy, digestive power and brain power. This is a face-to-face workshop in Brisbane Australia.
Email me for details and I’ll send the Registration Form.
anna@annamcrobert.com.au

Food: Friend or Foe

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Food: Friend or Foe workshop could save a lot of misery for you and your kids. If you want to know which foods are safe and which foods disturb the digestive tract, mess with energy levels, and trigger behavior problems, then this one day course is ideal for you to learn how to quickly and easily test which foods are safe and which are disruptive. That way you can bypass the problems and increase health.

Talking with people recently highlighted some issues around food:
– food reactions are a continuing problem, (worse with holiday treats)
– which foods are your friends and which are a foe?
– how can you choose the best food for your system (not all good food is good for you)
– how can you recognize which food is creating problems (how to pin point them)
– how can you drop the belly fat (expanding more on belly than else where)

Are any of these on your “find the answer” list?
Do you want clear, effective solutions?
Then this can be the most valuable information you’ll come across.

In the workshop coming up I can show you how to:
– identify which food creates which reaction in your body
– pinpoint which foods boost your health and lift your energy
– demonstrate which foods drop your energy and create disturbing symptoms
– find which foods maintain your current state and keep you going

But it doesn’t stop there. I’ll spend 7 hours in a hands-on workshop to train you in a small class, so you get to learn to do this yourself, ask questions and get your answers on the spot. And you’ll get heaps of notes to take away with you.

The topic – Food: Friend or Foe
That’s right, I’ll show you how to identify which food you can trust and which to avoid using kinesiology muscle monitoring, so you can make the right choices for you and have great energy all day.

You see, two of the biggest problems facing people wanting to know what is best for them food wise, is the overwhelming amount of information about food available today, often contradictory, and the time it takes to research and track down what you want to know for your own situation.

There’s lots of piece meal and varied information out there, many options and opinions. But how do you know what is right for you specifically, for your metabolism, for your genetics, for your lifestyle, for your energy level, for you as a unique whole person? And each child will also be uniquely different in their own right as well, so what is right for you may not be right for your child.

When I started searching for answers for myself years ago, everything I read seemed to be written for me and my symptoms, but no matter what I tried, the results weren’t there, I wasn’t getting better. Everything the doctor prescribed added more symptoms. I was still bloated, still starting the day looking and feeling ok to have my belly blow up with fluid and my waistline expand dramatically by lunch time. I was feeling nauseas, even if I didn’t eat or drink. Everything I ate made me feel worse. I felt tired, sick and disillusioned. And I had two young children to care for, one with unresolved health issues.

Where was this fluid that expanded my belly coming from? Why was I feeling nauseas all the time? How come my energy would drain so quickly? Why didn’t the supplements work? Was that the right combination of foods I ate? Am I doing enough? Should I keep going, or should I stop trying this, that, or the other?

And my young son had other issues. He was forever coming down with infections, was on antibiotics regularly, was on medication for asthma, had bowel issues, was exhausted and couldn’t get going in the mornings. He wasn’t enjoying his life and I was stressed watching him suffer.

It took time to find answers, but I did. I studied how the body works, how the nervous system works, how biochemistry works, how it all comes together.

I discovered how to go through information available and sift out what was relevant to my son and myself. I learned how to personalize options presented and address my unique situation. He got better and I got better, thanks to kinesiology muscle monitoring

So, then I could help others too. I have now been running my clinic since 1981, all the while continuing to learn and add to my skills and knowledge. By combining ancient wisdom from traditional cultures, with present day methods, and adding what science is discovering and proving, we can get the best from old and new ways to help the body work efficiently and effectively.

If you want some guidance, for yourself or your children, including:
– insight on how to adjust foods to suit your health better,
– reassurance that you are on the right track,
– gain ability to improve your results,
– to build your confidence with muscle monitoring
– and to trust your body’s ability to indicate your best options,
then you will definitely benefit from attending Food: Friend or Foe workshop
Because you will get the information, see the demonstrations, and learn hands-on how to muscle monitor foods so you can at any time test if foods are friend or foe.

Food: Friend or Foe Workshop
Saturday, 3rd February 2018, 9am to 4pm.
To Register: email me anna@annamcrobert.com.au for details.

Is Your Energy Field Healthy?

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What does your body energy field say about you and your health?

Every one of us has a magnetic field that emanates from our body, so that when we approach another human being, our two fields meet before our physical bodies interact as we greet and touch to shake hands or give a hug. We register the vibe intuitively and subconsciously, before we engage consciously and physically.

Every electrical signal, within cells, between individual cells, among clusters of cells that form an organ, signals from organ to organ, signals along the nerve fibres to the brain and back to the body, the millions of electrical firings that are continuous and constant in the living body, generates a magnetic field. This body-field is unique and constantly moving, expressing into the outer world the electrical activity of our inner workings.

The field you create when you are healthy and vibrant is very different from the field you emanate when tired, depleted, unwell, angry, frustrated or depressed. Learn how to balance your energy field with Touch For Health kinesiology muscle and energy balancing.

Bruce Lipton tells us that “the mind is an energetic field of thought.”

The energy of thoughts and intentions contribute to your body-field. Wiring up the brain to an electro-encephala-graph, EEG, every thought produces its own firing pattern of neurons that is recorded on the graph printout. Functional Magnet Resonance Imaging, fMRI, measures blood flow changes occurring as you process a thought or visual stimulus. Now we can also read the field around the brain with an MEG, a magneto-encephala-graph, without using probes or contacts on the body at all. The whole head activity measured by MEG can capture the result of the brain processing visual stimulation, or spontaneous oscillating activity, such as alpha rhythms.

So, what does all this mean?

In the documentary movie, The Living Matrix, Bruce Lipton said, “the magneto-encephala-graph is a probe outside of the head, and it reads the fields of neural activity, without touching the body. Basically, it says when you are processing in the brain you’re broadcasting fields.”

What kind of field do your thoughts and body activities and health broadcast?
What do others intuitively pick up about your body-field?
Some people have the specific gift that allows them to read the body-field without MEG. Not everyone has developed this gift, but everyone can get feedback about the inner body and brain activity through muscle response monitoring. When you learn Touch For Health kinesiology a whole new world of awareness opens up.

Touch For Health 1 is due 7th & 8th October. Contact me for details.
anna@annamcrobert.com.au
Cheers, Anna
PS. Scientists and researchers call it the body-field. You might know it as the body’s aura.

Believe It Or Not

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In the Brisbane Courier Mail this morning I read about a research team scouring Gold Coast hinterland for signs of existence of yowies. The was an article by Geoff Shearer. Believe it or not, this is serious scientific research.

Ranae Holland, research biologist, has a Bachelor of Science degree and is part of the yowie research team, but remains a sceptic at this stage. In case you are new to Australia, a yowie is a legendary ape-like creature that shuns human contact, but occasionally leaves footprints behind or is heard in the night. This Ozzie research dovetails with Oxford University scientists and others. Queensland expedition in the wilds of the Gold Coast are one of 20 such research expeditions, on the hunt round the world looking for evidence of strange creatures in our midst. Their aim is to get DNA samples to determine their genesis.

“What the Oxford study is about is if you truly are a scientist you should be constantly challenging the established norm,” Holland said.

“There are a lot of academics trying to get involved but (they) will not risk their reputation,” says James Fay, a member of the Australian team. “Science hasn’t been as open-minded as you would think.” … Really!

Reading that makes me ask what else “Science hasn’t been as open-minded as you would think” in terms of serious research. Being actively involved in clinical application and the teaching of kinesiology for 30 years, in private workshops and ten years at a registered college, has given me many opportunities to encounter “Science hasn’t been as open-minded as you would think.”

Actually it is the medical practitioners who have been the least open minded.

Believe it or not, research has been conducted on many aspects of alternate medicine to the point that body/mind medicine is now commonly recognized as real, a holistic approach is encouraged, and acupuncture, which is energy medicine, is used in medical clinics and hospitals too. Other forms of energy medicine have also been proven to be effective, including kinesiology.

This research has often been conducted by disenchanted medical practitioners and university professors as well as curious students whose bias has not yet been set by medical dogma. These are the ones who risked their reputation, refused to continue giving medications that are ineffective and cause so many detrimental side effects or direct harm. So they went in search of a better alternative. After all, the oath medical practitioners take admonishes, “first, do no harm.”

If the possibility that yowie’s, bigfoots, sasquatches, and yetis may have a recognizable DNA attracts scientific research, and is based on reported sightings round the world over eons, it makes me wonder. What if all who engage in holistic medicine over centuries may have a discernable DNA worthy of research, maybe even an energetic link. Believe it or not, it just might be so.

www.annamcrobert.com.au

How Stress Can Get To You

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We keep hearing that stress is damaging to our health. Actually stress has its place as a motivator, a stimulator to action. But too much of this useful stress becomes distress – now that’s how stress can get to you. So how do you know when you have crossed from stress into distress, from useful stress into destructive stress?

Under extreme or sudden stress various glands are triggered into action and release hormones to deal with the threat, the sudden demand or the overload in our personal world. It’s the body’s automatic reaction that bypasses rational thinking. This is your fight or flight, self-preservation, knee jerk reaction that floods your body with adrenaline (called epinephrine in USA) and cortisol secreted by your adrenal glands along with other hormones.

Adrenaline is produced during high stress or exciting situations. This powerful hormone is part of the body’s acute stress response system, known as fight or flight.

Under stress Adrenaline:
– stimulates the heart rate
– contracts blood vessels
– dilates air passages
– increases flood flow to muscles

Cortisol is one of the hormones that rises rapidly under high stress and is produced by your adrenals, situated on the top of your kidneys. Cortisol is not a bad guy in the system. It is part of regulating normal everyday activities, like getting you out of bed in the morning. Cortisol tends to peak in the morning and decrease as the day progresses. This hormone is essential for life and is high only under high stress, and is low when you are going about your normal daily business in a relaxed state. It rises and falls according to need.

Cortisol regulates:
– how we use fuel, our glucose metabolism
– regulates blood pressure
– regulates insulin release for blood sugar maintenance
– regulates rapid fat and carbohydrate metabolism in emergency
– impacts on immune system balance
– involved in inflammatory response.

Cortisol increases levels of blood sugar to help the body to adapt to changing situations or circumstances that provoke stress, to stand and fight or take off and escape. Cortisol is responsible for about 95% of stress adaption in your body.

When you are relaxed cortisol is low but rapidly increases when you are under stress so its key job is to keep blood sugar levels appropriate during stress and relaxation. The problem can be that when the stress has passed the cortisol levels may stay high for some time. If stress occurs on a regular basis, like daily deadlines and strict time frames, then the cortisol does not have a chance to drop down in the brief moments of relaxation. This can lead to adrenal exhaustion and chronic fatigue, with blood sugar irregularities, immune system deficiencies, anxiety, panic attacks, depression and various degenerative diseases.

Continuous high levels of cortisol can interfere with serotonin and dopamine production, two neurotransmitters that affect mood and sense of well-being.

General Adaption Syndrome – GAS

It’s important to recognize how stress can get to you. Under stress your body has to adjust or adapt and functions differently from your healthy norm. It does the best it can to regain balance within the changed circumstances. This is known as General Adaption Syndrome and has three recognizable phases.

Phase One – Alarm: immediately activates the nervous system and adrenal glands to increase energy for defence or offence.
Phase Two – Resistance: activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the three primary glands that manage our response to stress, often referred to as H-P-A axis. These glands together regulate energy use, immune system activity and digestion. Under stress they instantly increase energy for fight or flight, and reduce energy to immune system and digestion while you are engaged in survival activity in the moment.
Phase Three – Exhaustion or Overload: prolonged stress, or often repeated stress, without opportunity for recovery, leads to breakdown of the weakest body function and dis-ease. The most common diseases in the developed nations of the West are hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, stomach ulcers, neck and back pain, to name a few.

Signs of Stress

Know how stress can get to you. The cause of stress can be physical, mental, emotional, or environmental and the adaption to the stress will involve all these aspects. The body will do the best it can to stay productive and effective under the stress load. But the signs will become evident, not always to your self, but often to others with whom you interact.

Physically the tension in our muscles can increase and we become rigid, with neck, jaw and back pain as a result. Tension headaches are common, as are twitches and tremors and poor sleep. Dry mouth and throat can indicate very low levels of digestive juices for effectively gaining nutrition from your food, and obesity can result from comfort eating and storing instead of burning foods consumed. Bowels become over active or under active, or both in turn. Cold sweaty hands and itchy skin are further indicators, as are increased heart rate, pounding heart, high blood pressure, and shallow breathing.

Mental stress shows as forgetfulness, preoccupation, lack of concentration, diminished productivity, past focused or future obsessed, disorganized, negative view of everything, undermining self talk, loss of meaning of work and life in general.

Emotional signs of stress can be irritability, depression, angry outbursts, anxiety, impatience, narrowed focus, low self-esteem, loss of confidence, inability to make decisions, lack of interest, tendency to cry easily, compulsive thoughts, and feeling a victim. We become angry or fearful.

Behavioural changes include increased alcohol consumption, under or over eating, smoking, withdrawal, carelessness and being accident prone.

To Reduce Stress

Make sure you recognize how stress can get to you so you can stop it and reverse it. Stress diverts energy away from your immune system leaving you vulnerable to health breakdown. Medically prescribed adapaogens have been in common use for stress over the last 50 years but the results are less than favourable with many side effects and long-term problems.

Traditionally herbs from the East and the West have been reliably used in many parts of the world to reduce stress, along with acupuncture, tai chi and various martial arts, meditation and other practices. Psychologists have applied various systems and processes with varying success.

Since the 60s and 70s Kinesiology has provided effective options that allow the body and its nervous system to identify the best way to reduce stress, lift energy, and bring meaning and value back into the events of our days as we each walk our life path.

Also see: 3D “Switch On” for Your Brain http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=289
and Stress Release Process http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=118

STRESS, SAM and HPA, What’s That About?

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Stress is blamed for everything now, from forgetfulness to mistakes minor and major, to depression, overweight, poor sleep, emotional meltdown, health breakdown, poor work performance, to relationship breakup. Pioneering doctors of the 1920s to 1940s researched and collated the various symptoms that we now associate with stress, SAM and HPA.

In the late 1930s Hans Selye, a Canadian endocrinologist coined the term “stress” and defined it as “The non specific response of the body to any demand (stressor), whether it is caused by or results in pleasant or unpleasant conditions.” He first wrote about General Adaptation Syndrome, GAS, now generally know as the stress syndrome, in the British journal Nature in 1936.

Walter Cannon in 1932 established that shock or perceived threat quickly release hormones in the body for access to extra energy for survival action. We are designed to either face and attack the enemy or to out run it. Nothing else counts at that moment as all possible energy is diverted to in the moment survival, putting many functions on hold till the stress has gone.

Stress is a natural part of life and cannot be avoided. Stress is experienced when we extend beyond our comfort zone into new territory, be that socially, in our work situation, in questioning our life direction and changing direction.

Stress, physical, mental or emotional, sets off the same reaction in the brain. This reaction is in two parts, the instantaneous flight or flight reaction initiated by amygdala, the SAM axis, and the slower HPA axis triggered by long-term stress. They have opposite symptoms. Stress, SAM and HPA are part of your survival and adaption systems.

SAM – Sympathetic Adrenal Medullary Axis
HPA – Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis

SAM is the super fast fight or flight reaction your amygdala sets into action, totally bypassing any conscious thought process. It’s what happens when driving normally and suddenly a child on the footpath decides to run across the road – without looking – and you slam on the brakes and swerve to avoid hitting the child. That life saving reaction happens in less than the blink of an eye. And you are left with a pounding heart and gulping for breath.

SAM basically reroutes your blood flow to increase your heart rate, feed your brain and the muscles required for action, and limits the activities of parts of your body that are not required in the moment. This reaction settles down once the danger has passed.

HPA on the other hand, is slower in activation and continues to be activated long after the stressor has been removed. Its what happens when you go into “what if I had hit that child,” playing it over and over to the point of being too scared to drive at all.

It is regulated by hypothalamus that sends a hormone to your pituitary gland, both located in the brain, which then sends a hormone to adrenal glands in the body to increase output of cortisol. This is a self regulated system and relies on increasing levels of cortisol produced in the body to feedback to the glands in the brain to suppress the initial hormone cascade. But what if you can’t shut off the thoughts that you nearly killed a child, can’t sleep, can’t eat?

With prolonged stress cortisol initiates breakdown of muscle protein for the liver to convert to essential blood glucose, your brain’s fuel, and for other essential functions to deal with or adjust to the ongoing stress. Cortisol reduces reproductive and immune systems activity until the ongoing stress is resolved, which can be days, weeks, and even years. Stress, SAM and HPA are part of your inbuilt survival and adaption systems.

Who Is At Risk
Any stress you feel is impossible to resolve will keep you in this HPA cycle. This is common with family health carers, those who care for parents with dementia for instance, or for a disabled child. Its common after a failed business venture or marriage breakdown, or dealing with drug addicted teenagers, or post traumatic syndrome of war veterans.

Ask any world class athlete and they will tell you the risk keeping HPA cycle going through over training is very real when the focus is on winning or maintain their world ranking. Over training is a physical as well as mental and emotional stress plus a massive demand on constantly rebuilding the body to keep up with the rigorous training programs.

Even the medical professionals are acknowledging that almost all physical illnesses have mental factors that determine their onset, presentation, maintenance, and susceptibility during illness. Stress, SAM and HPA in active mode means the body is focused on survival with limited resources for recovery from illness.

What’s the Solution

Every body needs recovery time to repair the wear and tear of the day’s activity and life’s stressful experiences. Somehow we need to come to peace with the cards we are dealt in life, change our undermining beliefs and expectations, increase our resilience, adapt and lift our ability to function at our best in varying circumstances, with the least stress possible.

Kinesiology recognizes any imbalance will impact the physical, mental, emotional, biochemical, and spiritual elements of a person and they all need to be addressed and rebalanced for holistic wellness. The body will indicate the path to solutions through muscle response monitoring.

www.annamcrobert.com.au