WELL BEING: Brush up on your hand-washing

As the cold and flu season continues, effective hand-washing remains critical. Check out Dr. Joel Cooperman's advice about how to wash your hands effectively, and other good habits to avoid bad germs that can make us sick.

GUEST BLOG: Reflection for a Happy New Year! Happy New Decade!

This guest blog--a teaching from the 11:11 Progress Group--pertains to spirituality in the old year and the coming new year, the new decade. Happy 2010!

Keep an eye out for the Blue Moon on New Year's Eve.

Photo by Colleen Smith

Computer enhanced detail from bas relief

at Art Institute of Chicago

“The message for today is about reflection on the past and planning for the future. As the closing of one calendar year approaches, it is helpful to evaluate one’s spiritual progress by self-reflection on positive changes in attitude and accomplishments in self-mastery, which were wholly absent only one year previously. Become aware and make note of these changes, and give thanks for the help you received from your guides, guardians, and teachers that led you to the place you are now. Have you become more tolerant, more loving, more patient, more giving? Have you embraced spiritual knowledge and teaching that has helped you to become aware of these more noble attributes of the growing soul? Take inventory of these things now, my beloveds, and bathe in the light of these accomplishments with tempered humility....

“Let us also become aware of the imperfections in our personalities and our attitudes towards others. Acknowledge the areas we still need to work on, and with great honesty. Hold them up in front of the ego, and declare that these areas shall be transformed, and will no longer serve as a hindrance to us, nor will they prevent us from attaining the spiritual freedom we so deeply desire.

“Let us go boldly into the future with great confidence, knowing all will be for the good of the soul and no ‘real’ harm can befall us. Allow more time for introspection as you face the challenges of life and let go of needless worries. Become increasingly aware of the spiritual guidance all around you and use this ‘spirit team’ to help you accomplish your goals and desires. And most importantly, be aware of your duty to serve others."

WELL BEING: Material VS Spiritual

I came upon this teaching today and wanted to post it for more people to consider as we enter another Christmas:

“Today’s message is about letting go of the material and commercial aspects of your religious traditions, and embracing a new and more spiritual way to worship and remember God’s visitations and promises to perfect humanity, and to bring peace and brotherhood to this confused and strife torn world. It is the Father’s will that love be the focus of all celebrations and in the joy of fellowship with your brethren, you come together in unity and project your intentions for a better future. To answer the Father’s call to perfection, we must continue to change and evolve our thinking, and put into practice those high ideals we have when caught up in the moment of celebration and ceremony.

“For thousands of years man has capitalized on the traditions and celebrations of religious holidays to turn profits by exploitation of man’s good nature and worshipful attitude to honor God. This exploitation has become so intense that the very meaning and spiritual inclinations of the celebration have been supplanted by clever commercial campaigns aimed at appealing to the vanity of the ego to fill the spiritual longings of oneness with God with material gratifications. This serves the money changers well, but leaves the soul and the pocketbook empty.

“Man has become a slave to this perpetuation of materialism in connection with his celebrations and religious festivals, and this leads to anxiety and depression in many, because they feel they have lost control and must conform to peer pressure to perform in opposition to the longings of the soul for sincere relationships, and worshipful unity.

“Let us focus on the ‘good will.’ What is the ‘good will?’ The ‘good will’ is God’s will, and His will for us is to enjoy life; to love Him; and to love one another. When anxieties and ill will enter into our traditions and festivals, we must change our way of approach. It is not my place to tell you how to live, but it is my desire that you become aware of that which you have become, and to hold your intentions to the light, and see if they embrace truth, beauty, and goodness. Begin a new tradition this year, one that is focused on love and relationship and less on material gratification. In the worlds to come, relationship is the gift of celebration, for material things are left behind with the flesh. Let us learn these lessons of love now, my beloved friends, and enjoy this precious time you have on the earth.

“Peace on earth, and good will toward all mankind."

For more information, Google the 11:11 group.

GARDEN GATE: Look at this post on lavender--nature's way of keeping holiday stress at bay

Photo by Quincy Benton

Lavender, the lovely herb, will help you handle holidaze.

Here come the holidays. If just the thought of all the stress sends a shiver up your spine, remember that a little vial of lavender essential oil goes along ways toward peace of mind at a time of year that for many of us seems to stimulate anything but. Find out about how lavender can make your days more merry and bright--or at least a bit more calm.

Just click here.

Discover yourself in "the wilderness of your intuition"

“The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.”

—Alan Alda (b.1936); actor, screenwriter, director

Dale Chihully glass installation at Desert Botanical Garden in Scottsdale, Arizona
Photo by Colleen Smith

NAMASTE': Happy Yoga Month: What's So Cool About Hot Yoga?

September is yoga month, or so I’ve heard.

Photo by James Baca

Interestingly, three friends have asked me recently about trying yoga—or trying hot yoga--so maybe the publicity will pay off with more practitioners.

I’m just beginning my 17th year of hatha yoga (the physical branch) —and I've practiced with a fair measure of devotion and discipline; and every hour I've invested on my mat has served me at least tenfold off my mat.

By good fortune, not my own wise planning, my asanas (or poses) rooted in the Iyengar tradition. And speaking of good fortune, I had the profound honor of meeting Mr. Iyengar once, and sitting with him, and posing some questions to the guru. (Maybe I’ll post about that later in yoga month.) I still admire Mr. Iyengar immensely; and I’m grateful for my solid instruction in his alignment and his props.

But I defected. For the last five years now, I’ve practiced hot yoga—specifically Bikram yoga and also Baron Baptiste Power vinyasa yoga. Yes, this is that insanely hot yoga you may have heard about: For Bikram classes, my school heats the studio to 105 degrees Fahrenheit (sometimes hotter!), with humidity as high as 50 percent. For Power classes, the studio is not as hot or humid, yet still warm. The heat serves various purposes, one of which is to render muscles more malleable and another of which is to detoxify the system through profuse sweating. Works for me.

What’s so cool about hot yoga?

I aim to tell you. Please tune in again: I’m writing an informative and, I hope, inspirational piece for my three inquisitive friends; and I’ll share it with you, here, too.

Meanwhile, remember this: Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not get bent out of shape!

Namaste’

• Please see the links below for my earlier posts on yoga.

Watery reflections: swimming laps outdoors

The closing of the 50-meter, outdoor pool where I swim my laps adds to the mounting melancholy of August’s dog days. Today is my last day for making my way length after length, lap after lap in this big, beautiful blue gem of a pool. It’s almost as sad as closing day on the mountain at the end of ski season except there are other swimming pools. Indoors.
But swimming laps outdoors is the best: submersed in the quiet aquamarine water beneath the blue sky, observing the rippling nets of sunlight on the pool bottom, feeling the sun on my face every time I turn my head for a breath, watching the clouds as I backstroke.

Stroke. Kick. Breathe. Stroke. Kick. Breathe. Stroke. Kick. Breathe.

Demanding repetition and conscious breathing, lap-swimming becomes meditative and washes my mind clean. Gliding through the water feels akin to flying, albeit slowly. Do you ever have that flying dream that allows you to breast-stroke across the sky?

The buoyant sensations of the swimming pool bring to mind my youth. Water is my element. Even before I learned in elementary school science that water can take three forms—liquid, solid, or gas—I knew water was magic. As a kid, my little sister and my best friend and her little sister spent every afternoon at the pool. We hosted underwater tea parties, dove for buried treasure, then raced our Stingray bikes home to watch Star Trek while slurping Popsicles or Eskimo Pies. In high school, I got my first real job as a lifeguard and instructor for kids’ swimming lessons. I have the wrinkles and sunspots to prove that I sunbathed with abandon, my only concern that the pool chemicals might be off enough to turn my blonde hair chartreuse.

Somewhere in one of my many journals, I made a list of all my swimsuits over all the summers, beginning with a tank suit color blocked to resemble a beach ball. I had the suit when I was about four years old.

At the pool, pulling on my swimcap and goggles, I eavesdrop on conversations that now have switched from opinions about Michael Phelps’ racing suits and Dara Torres’ injury to opinions about the best indoor lap pools. Many are 25 meters, or crowded, or costly, or more difficult to get to, or offer limited parking. All are indoors. Not the same. Not at all the same. The pool chemicals have no way to escape, so the smells are all off in a nautatorium.

Last winter, after skiing, I had the good fortune to swim in the most glorious pool in Vail. Gorgeously constructed, the pool was filled with saline. Aaaaaah. Like the watery womb, this warm and salty pool comforted.

One of my favorite aspects of the outdoor pool is that when rain falls—and lots fell this season—it mingles with the water in the pool. Then evaporates. And falls again. The water cycle teaches us that all water on the planet is the same water, eternally antique. The same water I swim in is more or less the water dinosaurs drank, the same water Jesus Christ turned to wine at the wedding at Cana, the same water I swam in as a child whether ocean, pond or pool.

The only thing better than an outdoor pool is an ocean. Not that I swim laps there, but the beach heals me in another way, and I'm soon to be on the sands of the Jersey shore. A beachcomber, I've had a seashell collection since I was a girl. About 10 years ago, on a beach at the southern tip of Portugal, I began collecting seaglass. I have a large bowl filled to the brim with translucent glass from far-flung beaches. The ocean has a way of softening even my sharpest edges.

I've always thought if I could be another animal, I'd be a dolphin. I had a swim with the dolphins in the Bahamas a few years ago. They are the dogs of the deep blue sea.

When the astronomers seek life on other planets, they look for one necessary element: water. Water is life. And we, when alive, are made up of mostly water. H 2 Ohhhhhh.

Photo by Colleen Smith
Image shows detail of one of Monet's waterlily paintings in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For a slideshow with more captivating details from Monet's masterful waterlily garden paintings, click here.

WELL BEING: The Friendship of Trees

Redwoods tower over an enchanting forest road near California's Sonoma Coast.

"Friendship is a sheltering tree."
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And oftentimes, trees are sheltering friends.

WELL BEING: "How much is that doggie in the window?"

A lighthearted moment that made me smile, and might make you smile, too.

While walking through a parking lot at a garden center last weekend, I saw this dog wearing goggles. I happened to have my iPhone, so couldn't resist a photo. When I closed in on the car with my camera raised, this little blondie climbed over the back seat, introduced her dog, and without promting, posed for a photo.

I'm not sure whether the pooch sported the shades to protect an eye problem or whether this little ragamuffin accessorized her furry friend.

WELL BEING: Make Peace More Than a Symbol

On April 4, 2009, the peace sign turned 51 years old. Peace remains as elusive as ever, but--with the nation in at least two wars and styles of the Sixties and Seventies enjoying a resurgence--the peace symbol shows up everywhere: clothing, jewelry, home decor, tatoos, stickers, and stationary. Recently, I even saw ice cube trays with peace symbols; and Vail’s tony jewelry shop, The Golden Bear, added to their catalog a tasteful peace symbol pendant.

British designer Gerald Holtom designed the pictogram.
“I drew myself…a man in despair…put a circle around it to represent the world; Planet Earth with one little man in despair in it. The problem in justifying this symbol was resolved when I began to analyze the origin of the despair gesture…perhaps such gestures pre-dated alphabets? Obviously, I turned to semaphore signals and found that this gesture stood for N (Negative) and that the vertical stood for D (Divide). So here I had the justification for the symbol Nuclear Disarmament.”

Images show, at top, Archbishop Desmond Tutu on a poster I shot in Chicago last summer. Center, a Bonnie MacLean-designed rock-and-roll concert poster from “Psychedelic Experiment,” now exhibited at Denver Art Museum. (Sorry for the fuzzy photo.) The DAM's gift shop currently carries a T-shirt titled “The Art of Peace” with riffs on the peace symbol in the style of six artists: DaVinici, Picasso, Warhol, Van Gogh, Pissarro, and Mondrian.

Peace be with you.

WELL BEING GUEST BLOG: Brushing Up On Hand-Washing

Joel B. Cooperman, D.O. is a trustee of the American Osteopathic Association and a past president of the Colorado Society of Osteopathic Medicine. He practices at the Denver Osteopathic Center.






Brushing up on hand-washing
By Dr. Joel B. Cooperman


Patients and physicians alike fret about the public health emergency and the possibility of a swine flu pandemic.
Now seems an ideal time to brush up on the importance of hand-washing. Washing one’s hands is one of the best preventative practices any time—even when a public health emergency has not been declared. But now that informed and concerned people are looking sideways at anybody with a hacking cough or an aaaah-chooo, I hear myself repeating to patients this sage stay-well advice: Wash your hands; wash your hands; wash your hands. Doctor’s orders.
It’s handy advice, particularly when considering how readily microorganisms transfer from doorknobs, shopping cart handles, and other innumerable publicly held surfaces.

Cleanliness is next to healthiness.

But as a former orthopedic surgeon accustomed to the rigorous rituals of scrubbing in, I assure you there’s more to the matter than mere soap and water. If you watch ER or Gray’s Anatomy on television, you’ve seen the surgeons painstakingly scrubbing in before entering the surgical theater. Compared to casual hand-washing, scrubbing-in requires more time, more temperature, and more friction to rid the hands of bacteria that spread infection.
A surgeon’s first scrub of the day is 10 minutes. Every subsequent scrub is five minutes. Surgeons routinely use antiseptic solutions and brushes to meticulously scour all surfaces of the hands from fingertips to elbows. This includes over nails, under nails and all sides of fingers, as well as the webbing between the fingers.
The average citizen doesn’t perform surgery, and their hand-washing routine is considerably less detailed. But we’re seeing that the invisible influenza virus is a huge force to be reckoned with. And once you view a virus through a microscope, you don’t easily dismiss these viral critters. Think science fiction bugs.

It's not enough to wash your hands

So it’s not enough to wash your hands; you have to wash your hands thoroughly. The average person rubs a bit of soap between the palms, rinses in tepid water, and grabs the hand-towel that the last person--or persons--used to dry. Which is better than not washing the hands at all, but nowhere near effective enough to protect against germs.
Effective hand-washing is therefore a combination of the antibacterial agents used and the mechanical action involved. Here’s the drill for effective hand-washing:
• Just as dentists tell us to brush our teeth for four minutes, doctors advise washing hands for at least 60 seconds.
• Wash in hot running water. As hot as you can handle.
• Rub the hands together. The idea is to create a lot of friction, then rinse hands under running water so germs are washed away.
• You might also use a nail brush for added dermabrasion and for scrubbing under fingernails.
• Wash the backs of your hands, too. Wash between fingers. In fact, wash as far up your wrist as you’re able without soaking your sleeves.
• Rinse. Rinse. Rinse.
• If more than one person washes at a sink, paper towels are, hands down, more sanitary. If you’re an environmentalist, alleviate your conscience by tossing the used towels in your compost bin.
• Liquid soaps tend to be less messy, but bar soap is acceptable.
• In between hand-washing opportunities, you might use antiseptic gels to keep hands fresh.
• Keep tissues on hand so you don’t have to sneeze or cough into your unprotected palm. Tissues, not handkerchiefs. For what should be obvious reasons, handkerchiefs are an abomination.
• Teach your children to sneeze or cough into the crook of their elbow instead of into their bare hands if they don’t have tissues available.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth, where germs spread more easily into mucous membranes.
While scrupulous hand-washing won’t guarantee a clean bill of health, this dose of common sense will help prevent the spread of colds, influenza and other germ warfare waged day to day in your home and in your body.
Guzenheit.

WELL BEING: Flowers As Medicine

Snapped this image last Spring in Chicago, where they really know how to plant containers. What they lack during the frigid winter, they make up for in spring and summer plantings.

You know how we tend to bring or send flowers to people who are sick? Well, as it turns out, maybe flowers have some healing properties.

At least that's implied by Dr. Andrew Weil. Today's mail included a slim booklet titled "Dr. Weil's 8 Week Plan for Optimal Healing Power." The good doctor has made a good name for himself in integrative medicine, as well as founding an entire industry that includes Weil Lifestyle and the Weil Foundation.
In this booklet, Dr. Weil includes for each of the eight weeks four sections: Projects, Diet, Exercise, and Mental/Spiritual. In the Mental/Spiritual sections for weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, and 8, he advises readers to bring flowers into the home and place them in a prominent place. In week 8, he also advises readers to buy some flowers for somebody else.
Now that's my kind of prescription!

You might like to check out DrWeil.com for news, daily tips, and weekly updates.