Tag Arvhies: Touch For Health

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

Tension, Pain, Thinking – What Is The Link?

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Are pain and tension linked to thinking? How? Do we experience physical pain more than mental emotional pain? Is limited body movement and limited thinking inevitable as we age? Which comes first, the body’s lack of flexibility or fixed and limited thinking? Is rigid body and thought pattern a sign of aging? How much of our physical and mental deterioration is our stuck thinking based on childhood belief and expectation? Do you ever ponder these questions?

These are the kind of questions you may not ask yourself until your body is in pain. Then the questions come unbidden. What have I done? How bad is the damage? Am I getting old? Can this be fixed? What do I do to fix it?

So, what do you need to know about your body and aches and pains to stay healthy and to repair readily when there is a mishap, overload or accident? How can you avoid a recurrence of the pain? What do you need to know?

Habits Serve and Shape Us
All of us have habits that serve us well and other habits that get us into trouble or limit our progress. These habits will shape our body, our thinking, our health, our relationships, our joys and our distresses. How can we increase the life enhancing habits and identify and reduce or eliminate the life sapping habits?

Teaching kinesiology and stress managing skills I interact with people of all ages. Some are dealing with young children and want safe and simple techniques to help them. Some are looking to change career or add to their existing health care training. Some have had a health wake-up call and want to make changes. Some are curious about how the body works and want be more aware of the best ways to improve energy and health or to stay healthy as they age. Many are interested in how their thinking influences their body function.

Habits Grow With Us
As we grow older our habitual thoughts and emotions make their stamp more and more visible on the shape of our muscles, our posture, walking gait and range of flexibility in movement. How does this happen?

As a baby, a toddler, a youngster we were curious, instinctively experimented, reached for anything new on our horizon, till we became familiar with what was constantly in our home world. This became our comfort zone, a place to retreat to when outer world was too difficult, too demanding, or too stressful.

In familiar territory we didn’t need to make an effort to master something new. We could switch off, relax, zone out, and do only what was comfortable. Our comfort zone is a useful place to rest and recuperate in but once recovered, got our second wind, we need to venture out again and engage in the unfamiliar, the difficult, the new, to stimulate and expand our ability and capacity. This is our life journey of self-discovery and self development. Along the way we learned to recognize stress and tension.

We Know More Than We Realize
Have you ever looked at a person and thought, “he/she is tense,” even before you spoke with the person. What made you recognize and use the work “tense?” We are often good at reading body language. It’s not an intellectual process but an immediate and instinctive assessment of a person’s current state. We know the signs even if we can’t articulate them.

Chronic anxiety for example, wreaks havoc with muscle tone, tensing muscles not for movement or work activity, but as a reflex to the anxious thoughts. We tighten muscles of the body to create a hard shield against the world, against fear of emotional pain, “holding our self together” physically, in an effort to counter or avoid the emotional “melt down” or to prevent “falling apart”.

Our Language Reveals Our Knowing
The common expressions in our language are metaphors highlighting just how familiar this experience is for many of us, either living in anxiety our self or recognizing it in others. Chronic anxiety can set our body tone and over time becomes our habit and our norm to the degree that when our muscles are not tense we “don’t feel our self”. It becomes part of our internal feedback system and self-image and we only recognize self through the anxiety produced body posture, tension, aches and pains.

Our entire history is progressively recorded in our muscles. Each stage of development of physical and mental habits is the foundation for further postural habits that reflect the impact of life events and how we coped.

As the years go by the stress patterns bow us, bind us, trap us in degenerative habits within ever narrower ranges of comfortable activity. We avoid what is not comfortable, what stretches our capacity because it’s uncomfortable. With narrower ranges of extension and flexibility we lose power and strength and become narrower in our range of thinking and effort and connection with our outer world.

Awareness Opens Solution Options
Without awareness of this process happening we make no attempt to slow, stop or reverse this linked mental and physical decline. Releasing the limited muscle range can also release the mind’s range of thought, allowing for new mental exploration, for creative invention, and shifting our view to new or different possibilities to engage in for fun or interest or other benefit.

Various styles of hands-on bodywork like massage and kinesiology address the body/mind habitual patterns, releasing stress held in the physical tissues caused by our challenges, anxieties and fears. Bodywork is not just physical, it also moves the stuck energy patterns and supports the release of body/mind tension.

Regular Body Care
A regular appointment for de-stressing the physical and mental/emotional body accumulations is anti aging and health and energy preserving. Regular muscle and energy rebalancing prevents habits becoming dis-ease. As your body loosens under the influence of caring hands so does your thinking and your interest and choice of activities that you can include in your life regularly.

Attend a workshop in Touch For Health Kinesiology to learn safe and effective stress reducing skills for tension, pain and thinking. Your health and life can become better with Touch For Health Kinesiology.

Emotional Stress Release for Stress and Muscle Tension

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It is natural for muscles to tense up when there is stress on line. It is also natural for muscles to release and relax when you are not in stress. So tension can come and go with different ups and downs of life. Muscle tension is how your body tells you that you need to do something to change what is going on so you are not wearing yourself out or making yourself sick.

Trouble is we often don’t recognize that we are carrying stress as muscle tension. Because it can be such an every day part of life it feels “normal”. We are often hurrying to get things done, get kids off to school, be on time, arrange events, keep appointments, complete work tasks, plan projects, or whatever. We may be dreading some coming meeting. We may have stirred up old fears. Our thinking and self-talk can easily reinforce stress and make it all worse.

Some people are habitual worriers and always stressed to some degree, and it shows in their muscle tension. Our muscles can be 75% contracted and that tension can still be out of our conscious awareness, till someone touches a tight muscle and we become aware it is hard as a rock. Or we are snappy or irritable and realize we are “holding our self together” with muscle tension.

So once you are aware of muscle tension, or stress, or worry, you can consciously choose to do something about it. Sometimes it is when there are headaches, or shallow breathing, or tight chest, or some other symptoms that finally you have to take the time to deal with the cumulative effects of daily stress.

When you realize muscles are tight you can take the tension out of the tight muscles with Emotional Stress Release, a technique from Touch For Health Kinesiology, as a first step to reduce muscle tension.

For Example, you may have been rushing to get things done before closing time. Following is what you can do to ease muscle tension gently.

Emotional Stress Release technique for Stress & Muscle Tension

First is always to acknowledge what is, the truth of your current experience.

Place one hand across your forehead and say to yourself:
1. “My muscles are tense, and my breathing is shallow and tight. (breathe in & out).
2. “I can feel the tension as I focus on it and realize my breathing is tense too. (breathe in & out).
3. “I recognize the tension has been building for a while.” (breathe in & out).
4. “The tension is adding to my tiredness / irritability / muddle-head feeling / etc.” (breathe in & out).

Acknowledge till the tension in your thoughts and your body starts to reduce and your breathing becomes a bit easier. You may need to repeat steps 1 to 4 a couple of times. Be sure to pay attention to your breathing between each statement. You may notice the warmth increasing under your hand on your forehead. That’s a good sign.

Next accept what is.

5. “Its not surprising there is tension in my muscles, its been a busy time, I’ve been rushing.” (breathe in & out).
6. “I’ve got some things done and there’s more to go.” (breathe in & out).
7. “I’ll be glad when its done.” (Breathe in & out)

Notice as more of the tension leaves, your voice becomes less harried, your body eases and your breath slows down.

Next look forward to when you will be more at ease.

8. “The more efficiently I get it done the sooner I can wind down.” (breathe in & out).
9. “Then I’ll have a cup of tea / glass of wine / ring a friend / smell the roses / or whatever.

The stress goes down as you acknowledge the problem, accept it, and look forward to when its over and dealt with. You have diverted your brain blood flow away from stress survival program area to problem solving front brain.

I may not have covered your particular cause of muscle tension so I hope you can get the idea of the process that you can apply to your situation. There are more techniques in Touch For Health Kinesiology you can use to help yourself.

Let me know how you go with this.
Cheers
Anna

PS. Emotional Stress Release was covered in a recent Touch For Health 1 workshop presenting several ways to rebalance stress and tension. Contact me for more on theses workshops.

Patti wrote: “Thanks so much for the wonderful learning experience, I thoroughly enjoyed it and am so looking forward to our next course.”

Energy Medicine


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Chinese Traditional Medicine, the use of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbs over thousands of years, has gradually become more accepted, even among doctors. Acupuncture uses needles made of two different metals. These are inserted into the body at specific points, depending on the health state of the person in need, and act as electrical conductors to help the body discharge or redistribute blocked energy or recharge depleted energy. This is energy medicine.

Kinesiology

A whole new branch of energy medicine sprang into being in the 1960s combining the knowledge of the Chinese meridian energy system with Western understanding of anatomy and physiology. This became Applied Kinesiology.
Chiropractor George Goodheart created Applied Kinesiology when he combined his knowledge of the body and muscle systems with meridian energy influence on internal organ function. He also added the work of Chapman and Bennett to activate lymphatic waste clearance and influence blood circulation.

John Thie, fellow student and colleague of George Goodheart, assembled key strategies for muscle and meridian balancing and made this health care system available to lay people the world over. And so Touch For Health kinesiology was born and did its part to help more than 10 million people in over 40 countries since early 1970s.

People round the world have learned the ever-growing variations of Kinesiology and applied their new found knowledge at home, in the playground and in class rooms, in offices and in clinics. This has been one of the fastest expansions in natural therapies and over 120 different specializations of Kinesiology have developed worldwide in the last 40 years.

Power in Your Hands

Can you imagine how powerful it is to be able to settle down stress reactions, lift tiredness, lighten your mood and reduce your pain, all by touching a few points that change the energy flow in your body. Energy Medicine was revered by our ancestors and continues to be a blessing in our times. And science is progressively discovering why and how it works, giving it credibility in the eyes of more and more of the world’s population.

Touch For Health and Three In Once Concepts kinesiology have proven to be valuable foundation programs for every day folk to gain a personal experience of the life changing impact of moving energy in their body. It is a most wonderful experience to be all het up about some issue, or feel anxious about a coming event, and have that just dissolve with an energy balance.

A shift in energy can change emotional wellbeing, can strengthen internal organ function, can increase tolerance to a larger range of foods, can make relationships flow more smoothly. As stress dissolves our natural nature of curiosity, imagination, inventiveness and problem solving comes to the fore. I encourage everyone to attend at least one Touch For Health or Three In One Concepts workshop.

First Hand Experience

I wouldn’t tell you to go and learn Touch For Health if I hadn’t proved the benefits first hand. I proved it to myself first by helping my son get better when doctors said surgery was the only way to go. This was a drastic and distressing option, yet watching him suffer and have a restricted life was even more distressing. If you are a parent you might relate to what I was going through at the time.

What is it that helps you know whether you should find another way for you or your child to be well? You don’t have to decide now, I told myself. We took time out as a family and eventually decided I would continue learning Kinesiology and use that to help my son. And he gradually got better. Where doctors saw no way of strengthening his genetic weakness, nutritional supplements, herbs and kinesiology worked the miracle I was praying for. This is the every day miracle of the body’s capacity to self heal when given the right internal conditions.

Touch For Health Workshops 

So why is it that some people don’t see the value of discovering and learning how to bring out the best in themselves, the best in their body, the best in their mind, the best in their children? Touch For Health does just that, with simple, easy to apply techniques that activate the body energy systems and turn health issues around gently. Would you like to see better energy and health levels? Would you like to feel more energetic and vibrant? Would you like to help others feel better too?
I don’t know if signing up now is what you want to do. Would you like to see more about Touch For Health kinesiology and its benefits? Would it surprise you to know that you don’t need to have any background in health or how the body works to learn Touch For Health and get results straight away?

Imagine what would happen if you knew how to activate the body communications systems and enhance cell repair programs, increase energy, support the body’s healing mechanism, reduce stress, improve posture and stop pain.
The body is very willing to respond if you know how to communicate with its balancing programs. That’s what Touch For Health can teach you.

The next Touch For Health introductory Workshop is coming up 4th & 5th February 2012. Reserve your place now. Lock in your commitment before Christmas gets you side tracked.

Go to the Touch For Health notice with this December News and sign up now. As soon as the kids are back at school in 2012 its your time to learn how to empower your kids and yourself too, using the TFH strategies for health, for learning difficulties, for stress relief, for food testing, for sports performance.


Sign up now. You’ll be glad you did.

Cheers

Anna

Low Back Pain – the Emotional Cause

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You’ve done your best to sort out the physical side of your low back pain, yet the pain persists. Now what? As with all pain, low back pain can have an emotional cause. A persistent stressful thought or attitude can keep the pain active.

The word “emotion” explains what is actually happening. E-motion is energy in motion. Your painful emotions create energy movement resulting in physical changes in your body that can create physical pain. These changes can range from barely discernable to obvious and extreme, from tension as muscles tighten up, to going “weak in the knees” as muscles just collapse, from posture a little off centre to totally displaced, from a slight discomfort to severe pain.

Pain is a warning. Something is not right. Low back pain can be the result of cumulative influences that have put strain or demand on the low back muscles. What you do to correct that and be pain free depends on what caused the pain in the first place. Previously we considered some physical causes of low back pain and what to do to resolve that. So now lets look at low back pain and the emotional cause.

We talk of a broken heart, having a gut full, of being torn apart, feeling unsupported or let down. Our language is full of sayings of emotions being powerfully experienced in specific parts of the body causing physical distress and pain. We commonly acknowledge that emotional pain goes with physical pain, and that psychosomatic refers to the psyche, the mind, and soma, the body, so we know through our own experiences that the two are linked.

Yet in the medical world solutions are primarily aimed at treating all pain as if from a physical cause, using medication or surgery.

Scientific Breakthrough
Candace Pert, world famous scientist and author of Molecules of Emotion, has done the groundbreaking research to show how our emotions and body interact. She shattered some cherished medical beliefs about emotions being experienced only in the brain, and went on to discover the scientific breakthrough that shows molecules set into motion by emotion have specific receptor sites throughout the body, not just in the brain. These emotion molecules dock in at cellular receptor sites and change the activity in the body organs, in the muscles and other structures, giving scientific credence to the truth that emotion can be experienced, as the saying goes, as “a pain in the neck,” among other places.

Her conclusion was that the body and mind are one, what happens in the brain is happening in the body too, something natural therapies practitioners have known and addressed in their practices for centuries.

Ancient Knowledge
Centuries before our Western scientists worked out that emotions can create physical pain the Chinese had already worked out a co-relation of which emotion effects which organ function and the influence on the meridian energy system. Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture work with a system of energy pathways, meridians, that support all body functions, and with Five Element energy flow patterns of these meridians to understand where energy gets blocked when there is dis-ease or pain. They teach that pain is blocked energy and that releasing the energy block and reinstating flow will reduce the pain.

More recently, in the 60s George Goodheart, a curious and motivated chiropractor, looking for more ways to relieve pain, matched body muscles to meridian energy flow to organs, adding a further dimension to the Chinese traditional insights of organs and emotions. And so Applied Kinesiology was born and has spawned many expressions of kinesiology to give relief to human pain on all levels, physical, mental, emotional, and biochemical.

John Thie, a student and colleague of George Goodheart, created Touch For Health kinesiology to give every day people a way to work with and maintain their health and physical structure. He recognized we all need tools at our fingertips to deal with the day-to-day stresses of life. TFH has been taught round the world, and brought empower and relief to thousands of people.

Kinesiology works to reduce pain and aid healing because it taps into the body’s own resources, the meridian energy flow, the communication between body and brain through the nervous system and, as Candace Pert clearly identified and tracked, through the body’s biochemical messengers.
The word “tap” is very appropriate for Meridian energy balancing.

The dictionary states: tap – any device for controlling the flow of liquid from a pipe or the like by opening or closing an orifice. Acupuncture points are the entry to the energy flow lines, and acupuncture, acupressure, kinesiology neurolymphatic points, neurovascular points among other correction points can control the flow of energy through meridians, opening or closing special connections, increasing or reducing the energy flow, there by reducing pain effectively.

Fight or Flight Muscle Pattern
We are all familiar with fight or flight reaction to a life threat. Emotionally that is anger or fear. With anger the muscles of the upper body power up with extra energy and blood to physically fight, to defend or attack an enemy or opponent. With fear triggered the blood is primarily shunted to lower body so your legs can take off in flight, run from the enemy. Prolonged state of anger or fear will lead to muscle pain and internal organ disruption. But these are not the only emotions that are triggered up when pain is on line.

Each different emotion will produce its own pattern of energy use and muscle reactivity, redirecting energy from less needed muscles and focusing a concentration of energy in the muscles required for action.

Specific Emotions
Pain will trigger emotion in each of us. Unfamiliar pain may trigger fear or concern. A recurrence of an old pain may trigger dread of going through it all again. Long standing chronic pain can trigger frustration or anger that no solution has been found. Or it could trigger feeling sorry for self, that pain is an unfair burden. Or there may be guilt or regret over a lack of implementing lifestyle changes required to help sort out the pain. Certainly, pain can block joy.

The pain may be in the same area in different people yet be caused or exacerbated by different emotions. Each emotion will have its own pattern of under working muscles and over working muscles that shows in our posture and gait. This is the body language that we read to get a sense of how a person is feeling. The energy change occurs first, then the muscles show the distribution of energy with some muscles tensing up and others releasing.

Low Back Muscles
Muscles associated with low back pain, when related to Chinese Five Element meridians and emotions, tell their own story. The multilayered muscles each side of the spine are activated by Bladder Meridian and are affected by fear and anxiety. That’s your major back support and is often too tight and inflexible or not evenly balanced.

The psoas muscle, attached at the inner low spine and to the inner leg, is supported by kidney energy flow, and is also related to fear and anxiety. Another low back muscle, quadratus lumborum, allows you to bend sideways and is an indicator of large intestine energy flow, and goes with grief, guilt, regret.

These three muscles are all linked to elimination of body waste and toxic material. If we do not clear out the bladder and bowel regularly the concentrated toxic contents will create havoc producing health symptoms and pain in the low back. The corresponding emotions, fear, anxiety, dread, and grief, guilt, regret, can disturb the efficient elimination of the body, and conversely, poor elimination can predispose emotional sensitivity to fears and regrets.

And same as for when you do not eliminate toxic body matter, fear, anxiety, dread, grief, guilt, regret, elimination related emotions, can play havoc in your emotional wellbeing, affecting personal and work life. The emotion, the organ disruption, the stagnant meridian and the painful muscle are interconnected expressions of the same experience.

Other low back muscles relate to reproductive system, to blood sugar balance and their emotions and can also contribute to low back pain.

If the organ function is stagnant, the energy is stagnant and the emotions can be stagnant too. Stagnant means not enough movement, motionless, stale, sluggish, torpid, foul. When you face up to the emotion and move through it the meridian energy too moves freely again, supplying the elimination organs and clearing out physical waste, taking pressure of the organs and relieving the stress and pain in the low back.

There is no point in ignoring the wholistic nature of human beings. The best results are achieved when we address all three aspects, the physical, the mental/emotional, and the nutritional/biochemical. Addressing low back pain and the emotional cause is part of recovery.

“I’ve come to believe that virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic component,” writes Candace Pert. And so does pain.

How do we address the emotional side of pain? This will be covered in a separate article.
Cheers
Anna

How We Walk

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How we walk can make a huge difference to how our brain works. As babies we crawled on all fours as preparation for balancing on our feet and walking. With every movement we programmed our brains, building networks to support walking to running to dancing to specialized sports movements. But these brain networks and how we walk prepared us for much than just walking.

I was reading about a kinesiologist who developed a tiny treadmill to help infants with Down Syndrome learn to balance themselves and walk earlier. “The idea is we want to support this underlying pattern of coordination in their legs, this alternating stepping,” Dr Ulrich said.

This article drew my attention to how readily we take for granted the ability to walk and balance on our feet as we need. We never think about how we walk.

Dr Ulrich said, “Once locomotion occurs, it really advances cognitive development, social skill development and language, so the sooner you get them (Down Syndome babies) walking, the sooner they can explore their environment.” Babies start their treadmill training as early as eight to ten months of age.

And this “cognitive development” in babies continues in us all as toddlers, children, teenagers, and adults. Walking does far more than just get you from A to B.

Walking Programs Your Brain For Learning
The rhythmic coordinated movement, alternating stepping out with one leg and the opposite arm and swapping smoothly and continuously, helps to integrate left and right brain as well as well as other specific brain areas. This brain coordination is essential for easy learning, not just for babies in their first year of life, but also for later in the classroom, in the home and in the office, right throughout life.

In Touch For Health Kinesiology workshops we activate the acupuncture points that help integrate the brain side to side, top to bottom and front to back. This is a 3D “switch on” of brain neurology in preparation for processing body/brain communication in the TFH muscle and energy balancing process.

In any new learning situation this 3D “switch on” of your brain is an excellent first step to arouse the brain and set in motion coordinated networks for whole brain learning. You program your brain for learning by walking as a littlie and continue to reinforce this learning set-up in the brain each time you walk with momentum, and especially if you do your 3D “switch on” first. (See article 3D Switch On for Your Brain)

How We Walk
When we walk we lift one foot at a time, which means we are momentarily balanced on the other leg. So a sense of three-dimensional balance is as important as the coordination.

As we walk one leg swings forward in front of the body from the hip, like a pendulum, till the heel makes contact with the ground. At the same time the back foot rolls from heel to toe with a push off action to propel the body forward till balanced over the front leg. Now the back leg can swing forward past its partner that is rolling from heel to toe and in turn pushing forward.

So one foot or the other is always in contact with the ground. This is a beautifully coordinated continuous double pendulum movement. When also coordinated with opposite arm swing moving forward can be almost effortless.

In fact, it takes far less effort to walk with continuous coordinated movement than to stop-start as in window shopping or browsing or doing the grocery shopping and stopping to pick up items and compare ingredients. Each time you stop it takes extra energy and effort on the part of your muscles to begin the movement forward again. It takes a lot more energy to walk like a tourist or a mum going the grocery shopping than to set up a steady pace and keep moving.

When I watch some of the elderly walking, I often notice they walk so slowly that each step forward is from a standing start, so every step is very energy demanding. There is no push off from the back leg to propel their body forward so instead their forward steps get smaller and smaller till they are shuffling.

Meridian Energy Stimulus
And of course, if you have done Touch For Health Workshops you will recognize that the elderly are missing out on the extra that happens as you walk with momentum too. Each muscle you use as you walk is also activating meridian energy flow to the internal organs and supporting their function for active health as well.

Chest muscles engage stomach and liver meridians, arm swing uses gall bladder and lung meridian energy, knee lift and swing forward uses small intestine energy, foot lift to place the heel uses bladder meridian, push off with the back foot activates adrenal energy and large intestine energy.

A slow walk will not stimulate the energy flow in the same way, so meridian energy can remain sluggish or stagnant as a result, and be a mirror of energy levels in the internal organ functions.

Touch For Health also provides a way to check the opposite arm/leg patterns needed and has a correction that ensures the upper and lower body muscles are coordinating effectively so your walking gait has maximum gain for least effort.

How we walk often changes when you attend Touch For Health workshops. You learn how to easily and readily improve your coordination, balance, and gait rhythm, so walking is easy, pleasurable, and uplifting. The natural side effects are better internal function and improved health too.
Cheers
Anna

3D “Switch On” for Your Brain

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There are times your brain’s electrical circuits become overloaded or scrambled.

Circuits Under Stress
Any kind of stress, physical, mental, emotional, biochemical, situational or environmental, can scramble electrical signals between body and brain, between left and right brain halves, between front and back brain, lower brain and upper brain. The degree of stress or danger perceived can influence the degree of reaction. You can have side to side switching, or top to bottom switching or front to back switching, or all three. Now where is this 3D “switch on” for your brain?

Switching
Under stress your brain is programmed to go into survival mode. Stress is processed as some level of danger to survival. The normal communications between body and brain and within the brain are put on the backburner and all focus, effort and energy is directed to survival in the moment.
We switch from normal whole brain communication to survival program mode.

Touch For Health level 1
At this introductory level of Kinesiology we learn how to, at least temporarily, ensure wholistic three dimensional electrical communication, so the brain is able to receive signals from the body’s muscles and respond clearly during the TFH energy and muscle balancing procedure.

Left and Right scrambling can be recognized as confusion following instructions such as “turn right”, and you immediately turn left. “Pass this to the person on your right” and you pass it to the person on your left. When writing there is often confusion between “b” and “d” and “p” and “q”.

Top and Bottom scrambling can be recognized as feeling unstable or queasy going up or down stairs, looking up at tall buildings or looking down from a height. When writing, there is confusions between “b” and “p”, “d” and “q”.

Front and Back scrambling can be recognized as lying on your back when asked to “lie on your front,” or having trouble reversing the car using the rear vision mirror. Writing can slide up or down a page.

When feeling stressed, or before starting any new learning process or doing homework or research for a project, it is a good idea to do the 3D Switch On and take some deep breaths.

3D “Switch On” for Your Brain
– one hand over the navel + rub under collar bones just beside breastbone
– keep hand over the navel + rub above top lip and below bottom lip
– keep hand over the navel + rub tail bone at end of sacrum
– deep breath, swap to other hand over navel
– repeat the sequence above

Any time confusion re-appears just repeat the 3D Switch On.
Cheers
Anna

Are You Too Old To Learn?

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Has it been many years since you undertook specific new learning?
Are you too old to learn? Is it too late?
Is the brain set up for learning only when we are young?
What about memory, does it really get worse as we get older?

These are some of the questions that come up when adults of all ages, from 20s to 70s, take on learning Touch For Health Kinesiology.

Lets get some things straight first. If at your first attempt to learn something new you feel awkward and uncomfortable – that’s a good sign. You are in your learning mode. If it was easy and comfortable you would be using existing brain networks and programs, still in your comfort zone, and not stepping out into new territory. Congratulations for your bravery!

How old do you feel when you are feeling awkward and uncomfortable? Please be aware, what this new learning right now can do is put you back into early childhood when you first discovered that you couldn’t do something and felt inadequate, or slow, or out of step with others, or behind in some way. It usually goes with criticism or judgment by a parent or other authority like a teacher, or a sibling, or someone, or even yourself.

So if new learning was a stress to you when you were little then you will play out that stress pattern again now. You will feel as helpless and inadequate as when you were three or five or seven or whatever. All your confidence, built up over many years of doing things, increasing your ability and mastering skills … will disappear … in an instant … as if you have never learned a thing since early childhood. Just note, as soon as you feel like a child you may also readily behave like a child.

Be aware – just know – that’s a good sign. You are being real. That part is good. The feeling of incompetence is real. It feels awful, but its real – recognize it – acknowledge it – own it – welcome it.. “Wow! That’s amazing! That’s how I felt as a child.” “How awful for me back then.” “And its come back, emotions, body sensations and all”. As soon as you do that you, the adult you is back in charge and compassion for the little you is on line and available.

What has surfaced is the memory of the you of long ago who needed reassurance but was too scared to ask for it, or didn’t know how or had no verbal skills to ask, or didn’t have anyone around who understood how bad it felt and how to help you. That’s why you are doing TFH now – to learn the skills that would have made growing up less traumatic and more enjoyable.

Welcome to Touch For Health. Welcome to new learning.

Now let me remind you that with your basic TFH 1 skills you can deal with it:

– evaluate how stressful this situation is for you, 0 to 10
– take a deep breath in … and breathe out slowly
– put your hand on your forehead, take another breath in … and out
– now tell your front brain under your hand the feelings you are dealing with right now
– how it feels, what part of the body is feeling it, the degree of discomfort, what it reminds you of in the past, where were you then, who pops up in your mind as part of the recall …
– and any sounds, sights, sensations, smells or tastes.
– take a deep breath in … and slowly out
– tell your front brain again about your discomfort and what it seems connected to
– do this several more times, with a full breathe in and out at the end of each recall
– now check in and re-evaluate the stress level compared with at the beginning
– if you still feel uncomfortable, do this process again.

– if you feel calmer, you are ready to explore what you want to experience instead
– look for a time in your memories when you did actually learn easily, without feeling judged, and as you took all the time appropriate to you.
– example: when you learned to walk, fell down multiple times, failed to walk without being concerned about the failure, just had another go … until you mastered walking.
– Or when you learned to feed yourself, or brush your teeth, or dress yourself, or ride a bike, or … many skills everyone of us had to learn through trial and error, till we got it, in our own time.

– acknowledge you have very effectively gone through the process of learning new skills and information
– visualize yourself in the future, how you look having mastered the learning, notice how confident and at ease you look, how easily the words flow out as you explain what you are doing, how readily you gain cooperation and agreement with your participant, how well you work together
– go through this scene several times

– take a deep breathe … and breathe out slowly …
– and bring your awareness back to now, rub your feet on the floor, look around the room,
– re-evaluate how you feel about new learning
– know you can revisit this scene any time you feel like a boost, hold your forehead as you do that.

You now have access your whole brain to support you in your learning endeavours.

Have a whole TFH balance on a goal like “I easily and readily learn new information/concepts/ techniques (whatever you need right now) engaging my curiosity with great enjoyment.” This will align 14 meridian energy system with your goal. Swap with a fellow student or go see a kinesiologist with the skills to help you through it all.
Have fun
Cheers
Anna

Are You Destined For A Health Breakdown?

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How stressed are you? What is it that tells you that you are stressed? Are you destined for a health breakdown?

Do you recognize your stress in your impatience and irritability, in the sinking feeling or the emotional numbness that comes on or in the explosion of anger, in the headache that gets worse as the deadline gets closer, by the tension in your muscles, the shoulder pain when you feel you can’t carry any more load, the back ache when you feel unsupported so feel the strain of having to do everything yourself?

It seems that many of us are so used to being in some degree of stress that we don’t even recognize it any more. It has become our norm, and we only register when the stress increases above our usual level.

Alexander Loyd, PhD, ND, and Ben Johnson MD, DO, NMD tested hundreds of people in various parts of the world using the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) test, the ‘gold standard’ medical test for measuring stress in the autonomic nervous system.

Heart Rate Variability test has been used for over 30 years in mainstream medicine and is in the same category as CT scans and MRIs that create images of internal structures.

You cannot have good heart function and poor nerve system function. So monitoring the heart rate variability (the more varied the better) gives immediate feedback on the state of your Autonomic Nervous System too. And your ANS controls and co-ordinates all organs and cells in your body. So this is a reliable way of measuring stress in the body.

As Loyd and Johnson were doing the Heart Rate Variability testing a fascinating and relevant phenomenon emerged. Before testing they would ask people “Are you stressed?” About 50 percent of people replied “yes” and 50 percent replied “no”.

But, of the 50 percent who replied “no”, their Heart Rate Variability test showed that 90 percent of them registered as stressed!!! They didn’t realize their nervous system was working in stress mode!

Over all, that means 95 percent of people they tested were stressed! But only just over half knew it. The others were totally unaware of their state.

That’s scary. Prolonged stress plays havoc with energy and health. As time goes along 95 percent of us could be destined for a health breakdown. The weakest health link can break and become a health issue. This is a possible future for 95 percent of people right now. Are you one of them?

It really pays to know your stress level consciously, as then you can take steps to reduce stress, influence your destiny and stay on the track for wellness. Is there a way to ensure you are not destined for a health breakdown? If there is, what is it?

“Stress is at the root of every problem, emotional and physical,” according to Alexander Loyd, PhD, ND, and Ben Johnson MD, DO, NMD. They co-authored The Healing Code and provide their evidence to support this bold statement. To natural therapists the world over, this is the underlying belief that guides their approach to supporting clients to get better.

Kinesiology health care practitioners focus is on reducing stress and activating the energy production that improves the body’s functioning. Loyd and Johnson articulated that when stressed the nervous system is in defence mode, directing its resources to defending against an enemy or escaping a life threatening circumstance.

This means the body’s everyday functioning is on emergency energy rations, minimal, just ticking over. Your digestion and elimination is shut down, your reproductive system is shut down, your immune system is shut down. There is no point in defending internal cells if the outer world threat could kill you in an instant. We are set up to “fight the tiger or run from it.” When the stress has passed, then body functions can return to normal.

Prolonged stress is prolonged shut down of digestion and elimination. That means ability to extract nutrition from food is very limited. Elimination becomes sluggish and pollution builds up inside cells and around cells. Your cells are suffocating in toxic waste with too little oxygen or nutrition for efficient performance. Cells get more and more sluggish and eventually become sick. You become sick.

Prolonged stress is prolonged shut down of immune response. Energy is funneled to protecting from a real or perceived enemy when under stress and little is allocated to inside invaders like bacteria or virus. You become run down and susceptible to colds and flu and tummy bugs and everything going round.

Prolonged stress is prolonged energy focus on “the enemy” be that deadlines, peoples opinions or expectations, day to day demands, too little time and too much to do.

If you live every day stressed to your eyeballs, or even mildly stressed all day, you will not fully digest your breakfast or lunch, you will not extract necessary nutrients out of your food, you will be drawing on emergency rations without realizing the cumulative impact on your wellness.

So stress is an energy problem. Under stress your energy is withdrawn from running your body efficiently, from repairing and replacing worn out cells, from destroying unfriendly bacteria and other cellular invaders, from optimum energy use in cells for fueling and maintaining your “vehicle” in a state of wellness.

Only when stress has passed can your body return to catch up on internal housekeeping tasks. If stress is continuous and there is no respite there will be breakdown in the most vulnerable system and now the body and you are in trouble.

So if scientists are right and at least half of us, or maybe all of us at different times, are unaware of how much stress our body and nervous system is registering, how can you check your stress level? How can you discover from the body, and not just the conscious mind, what level of stress you are carrying on any issue or situation or experience in your life at any given time?

Well, thank goodness, you don’t need to invest in a Heart Rate Variable test machine. There is another way that is safe, easy and effective.

Kinesiology Muscle response testing for stress

A readily available alternative to Heart Rate Variability testing for stress level is to use Kinesiology muscle response testing.

Often when gathering information from a client in a clinic session, some event may be mentioned in passing as having been dealt with already and no longer a problem. I often suggest we muscle test to ensure the body memory has been cleared of the stress. All too often muscle testing shows a high percentage of stress still exists in the body, remaining in the subconscious, waiting to be triggered by a sound, a voice, a word, a song, a comment, a look, a smell, a body position, an environment – and the old stress or wound opens again.

It takes energy to keep a lid on those memories. As the years go by more and more of our energy is locked up in the job of keeping certain memories of pain and hurt and helplessness and fears below awareness level so that we can get on with every day life. But there is a cost for this protection from old pain. We have less energy for present day living. Stress is an energy drain, even when it is out of our awareness.

Take the steps to develop your awareness, to recognize how the body “tells” you of stress building up, and learn which stress reduction strategies work for you. Then develop the habit of regularly taking time out for your self to consciously de-stress.

Meditation, yoga, martial arts, singing, dancing, toning, music, painting – there are many ways to move your energy and find an expression for the subconscious aspects of your life experiences.

Touch For Health Kinesiology provides specific energy balancing strategies and emotional stress release techniques and you can muscle test to ensure your body and nervous system are actually able to respond to the strategies being applied. You can easily and readily reduce stress with TFH and align your energy with your goals and dreams.

Protect your health and ensure you are not destined for a health breakdown.
Register now to learn Touch For Health or make an appointment for a Kinesiology balance.

Kinesiology to Reduce Muscle Pain and Tension

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Recently during a Touch For Health level 3 workshop I had the opportunity to demonstrate how to use Kinesiology to reduce muscle pain and tension in a way that brought immediate change, right before our eyes.

A whole new segment of knowledge and skill opened up for the participants. Students now had enough muscle knowledge to consider, not just activating individual muscles, but at teamwork, and how the muscles interacted.

Whenever muscles are habitually over tight and hard to your touch, they are overworking, often doing the work for several other muscles as well as their own load. These muscles become stuck in the habit of taking over and not letting other muscles in the team do their share.

As we unraveled the patterns of use and reprogrammed the team interaction we saw some amazing postural changes before our eyes. It was truly exciting. The body is so willing to co-operate if we just know how to go about creating change through understanding what the body is communicating and co-operating with it.

Pain and tension and posture imbalances are all part of body communication that can lead you to do the right thing to bring relief and ease through Kinesiology muscle response testing and corrections.

Shoulder Tension
One student had a shoulder sitting higher than the other. This is common for many people as we are generally one hand dominant, left or right, and use the dominant arm more often and more powerfully than the non-dominant arm.

Applying a TFH release signal to the over-worker and maintaining it, we reset the under-working muscles we had identified. TFH provides a number of techniques for this to happen. The result was that the hard tight muscle softened and the shoulders became more aligned immediately. It’s always a relief to feel the relaxation happen and the extra mobility when the tension has normalized. This is a muscle program reset, not just a relaxation, so the results last.

Neck Tension
Another common problem is tension in the back of the neck causing headaches or stiffness and a limited range of movement. This easily happens if sitting in front of a computer for hours a day.

As you get tired the blood sugars drop and the muscles in the back that are sensitive to that specific biochemical drop lose their tone. We learn to test this muscle in TFH 1. Your back is no longer supported effectively and rounds out. Your shoulders roll forward and as a result you tip your chin up to see the screen. This scrunches the muscles in the back of your neck and the tension here becomes a pattern activated each time you are in front of a computer screen. This is all too common.

The trick to rebalancing is identifying the under-working muscles to take the load off the over-working muscle. Observing the posture is the beginning of rebalancing the team. You can verify your observations with a TFH procedure.

Releasing the tight back of neck muscles and maintaining the release creates the opportunity to activate and reset the under working upper back, shoulder and front of neck muscles. The result is the back is supported and not rounder, and the head now sits balanced above the shoulders and no longer forward with the chin up. It’s always fun to see how quickly muscles adjust to their new, better balanced role.

Tightly Curled Toes
Another student had toes on one foot tightly curled so they never touched the ground when he walked. This was a longstanding issue that meant he had to compensate for not contacting the ground fully and not pushing off with this foot when walking. He limited his gait to accommodate the curled toes.

By repeatedly releasing the muscles that curled the toes under and activating the opposite muscles he was able in minutes get a signal through to the toes to start moving. It was amazing to see first one toe, then next and next progressively become responsive and able to extend and be in contact with the floor.

This was a childhood pattern and considered something he would just have to live with. Now he has made a change that will have an impact on how he walks and stands on his feet. As there is no need to compensate for curled toes he can relax other muscles he was not aware he was engaging.

When you have unhappy feet you will pay the price in forcing other muscles from your feet all the way to your neck to work in a compensating way. Releasing feet muscles changes the team work required for smooth and efficient momentum when walking or running, saving energy, extending the range for movement, easily aligning the balance over your feet, and avoiding accidents.

Low Back Too Tight
Another common postural pattern is tight low back muscles, front of hip bones rolled forward, and belly hanging out, even when well exercised.

We released the low back muscles for one of the students by de-activating the muscle fibres, and while released reset the abdominal muscles. We did this a number of times till the low back became a gentle curve, the hips in place and the abdominals effectively holding their tone in the front.

The result was immediately visible and can be sustained readily. Now any exercise to strengthen the abdominal muscles will be effective. The spine will be balanced between front and back muscles evenly instead of the back muscles doing double duty.

These were just some of the experiences of students as they learned how to use Touch For Health Kinesiology to effectively reduce muscle pain and tension. The body is remarkable and when you know how to communicate with your body through muscle response testing you will be delighted with the results that happen under your hands.
Kinesiology is a very effective way to reduce muscle pain and tension.

Register now for Touch For Health Kinesiology workshop and discover just how amazing we truly are and how readily the body responds given the opportunity to communicate its needs through muscle response testing.
Anna McRobert