The Tree Of Life

Here’s a heads-up about a useful article on coconut oil:

77 Coconut Oil Uses & Cures

If you haven’t discovered coconut oil yet, you’re in for a treat. There are so many things you can do with it that you can even throw out lots of shop-bought products and replace them all with just this one healthy resource. As the article by Dr. Axe points out:

“The coconut tree is considered the “tree of life” in much of Southeast Asia, India, the Philippines, and other tropical locations.”

Dr. Axe details 77 uses of coconut oil, dividing them into four areas of application:

– food uses
– beauty and skin uses
– household uses
– health uses

You’ll be amazed at what you can do with coconut oil.

Happy reading.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

Important Documentaries About Cancer

Just to let you know that the fascinating and eye-opening documentary series “The Truth About Cancer: A Global Quest” is showing again on the internet for free starting 12th April 2016 at 9pm USA Eastern Time.  More details at:

*The Truth About Cancer

This is a must-see series for anyone who wants to be properly informed about cancer, its causes and remedies.  As 1 in 3 of us is likely to be diagnosed with cancer during our lifetime according to the latest predictions, we owe it to ourselves to know what we’re dealing with.

This series offers viable alternative solutions to the standard cut, poison and burn treatments that conventional medicine has used for decades and continues to use without any real regard for patients.

I guarantee you will come away from watching these films with a new sense of hope with regard to this devastating disease.  As Ty Bollinger, the producer says, a diagnosis of cancer need not be a death sentence.

Here’s the link again:

*The Truth About Cancer

Hope you find this invaluable.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

P.S. * denotes affiliate links.

About Exercise (and other things….)

I wanted to give you a heads-up about this video:

I found it while reading an article about making exercise easier at:

Mercola.com

which, as you know, is a site that I really love.

The point is that Alexander Heyne, alias Modern Health Monk, is spot on about much more than exercise in this video.  The bit about money not being sufficient to motivate us in a job is priceless.

I teach English a few hours a week to a class of 15 to 16 year olds. Some of them have signed their apprenticeship contracts and feel it is no longer necessary to work in class.  I ask them what they will do when their employers give them tasks to perform in a few months’ time.

“Ah, but that’s different,” they say.  “We’ll be getting paid.”

My reply is that doing things for money will be the start of their problems, not the end.

This video indicates in the space of a few seconds why that is true.

Real progress in exercise, as in life as a whole, depends on creating healthy habits, whether we’re talking about our mind-set, work, relationships, eating or an exercise routine.  Ultimately, it’s all the same thing.

A habit, though, is not necessarily cosy and comfortable.  The best habits push us out of our comfort zone at least a little, and this is when the most progress is made.

A closing thought:

“We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”  Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Sneaky ancient Greeks!

Have a great weekend.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

 

Stepping Back From Sugar

There’s little doubt in my mind that industrial sugar is poison.

Granted, we need a certain amount of sugar to power our bodies, but it’s really very small compared to our daily intake.

The problem is that we eat a lot of processed foods nowadays and these contain a huge amount of sugar. If you start looking at the composition of what you are eating, I guarantee you will be truly shocked. Often, an apparently savoury product contains as much sugar as you might expect in a sweet one.

Sugar is highly addictive. Like any addiction, you need more of it as you go along in order to get your fix. Any company that has enough money to advertise on TV will run extensive testing before putting their product on the market. As people become increasingly addicted to sugar, the version with more sugar tends to be the most popular in testing and that become the definitive product ending up on the supermarket shelves. It’s a vicious circle.

What to do?

Ultimately, we need to re-educate our taste buds. We need to get back to a state where we can actually recognize the taste of sugar. We’re so used to it that we don’t even really taste it any more. And that’s the problem.

So how can we step back from sugar?

Here is a small suggestion.

Drink a glass of water with a little lemon juice in it every day.

It’s particularly effective first thing in the morning or last thing at night before going to bed. I personally have a glass of lemon water on my bedside table at night.

If you’re a sugar baby, you probably won’t like it to begin with, so you are going to need a little will power. But persevere.

As the days and weeks go by, try to increase the dose of lemon in the water so you really get a good strong taste of lemon. And try to drink more water instead of Coke or other sweet drinks!

If you can’t justify this course of action on a taste basis, then be aware that lemon juice exerts a number of valuable effects on the body.

It’s a great source of vitamin C, of course, but it’s also a formidable digestive, helping you to reduce acidity and reflux after meals. For those of you with heart problems, it also acts as a blood thinner. Fresh lemon is obviously best, but if you can’t be bothered to squeeze a lemon, you can buy flasks or bottles of pure lemon juice at the supermarket and use that.

As time goes on and you become used to the taste of lemon, you will find that your perception of the taste of food in general will gradually change. You will learn to identify the taste of sugar. You will start to enjoy the taste of real food. And you will start to wonder why so many products are so sweet.

You will end up by realizing that the taste of sugar is perhaps not really so pleasing after all.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

 

*Thetruthaboutcancer.com

On Decision Making

A long time ago, as I reached the end of my teacher training, I started going to interviews for my first job. It was the end of the 70s and people were already going on about high unemployment and a shortage of jobs.

In the end I applied for something like 35 jobs and went to 18 interviews. I still remember things about a lot of those schools. The one in Cornwall where you could look from the playing fields down over sheep grazing on the hills to a glimpse of the sea. The one with incredibly narrow corridors where the students had to turn sideways to pass each other. The one with cherry trees in glorious pink blossom in early May.

But the one I go back to in my mind is the one where I got offered the job and couldn’t make up my mind. I sat in the headmaster’s study in an agony of indecision. It was late in the day, and everybody had gone home, including the other candidates for the job. There was just the headmaster and me and my indecision.

After a while, he said to me that he had to go and check on one or two things and lock up. Then he would come back and I would have to give my answer. That would give me a few minutes on my own to make my decision.

I was still no nearer to a decision when he came back in.

And then something clicked in my mind and the situation suddenly became clear. And I said to the headmaster, “If I have to think about it as much as this, then the answer must be no.”

And I walked out of there with a sense of relief.

I’ve never regretted that decision.

I had another situation recently where someone made me an offer and it was going around in my mind. Lots of arguments for, but did I really want to do it? And then this incident came to mind again and I knew the answer had to be ‘no.’

I share this little story with you in the hope that it may ease a difficult decision for you in the future. Just remember, if you have to think about it, then the answer’s probably ‘no.’ The best decisions are the ones you don’t even really think about. You know exactly what you’re going to say.

Another pointer: we often have a lot of different voices and motivations going round in our heads and it can be difficult to know which of them really belong to us and which are those of our parents, loved ones, friends or simply the one that doesn’t want to upset the person in front of us.

Try to decide what’s you and what isn’t.

And then ask what you really want to do.

It’s you that will have to live with the decision, not someone else. So don’t get trapped into saying what you think other people want to hear. You’ll be selling yourself short and ultimately, you’ll be selling everybody around you short as well, even if they may not recognize that immediately.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

Diving In An Airplane

I’ve flown on many planes to various destinations and I’ve heard the same dubiously useful information given out by the cabin crew over and over again. Much of it is just reassuring bla meant to comfort our psyches and some of it is downright impossible to apply. For example, passengers are squeezed so tightly into ever smaller seats that the likelihood of them being able to bend over to assume the ‘crash position’ recedes with each passing year.

And how often do people survive a crash anyway?

Yes, I’ve heard many useless pieces of information over the years, but not once have I ever heard any crew member give an announcement about how to equalize the pressure in your ears.

You know – for that moment in the flight when the plane is descending in altitude in order to prepare for landing and every baby and child aboard starts to scream.

They are screaming because the pressure on the outside of the tympani (ear drums) in their ears is greater than the pressure inside. And it hurts. A lot.

Any diver knows about the importance of ‘equalizing’ when you descend into the sea. Every ten metres, the pressure doubles. Even if you dive to the bottom of a swimming pool, you will feel discomfort or even pain in your ears if you don’t equalize them.

The remedy is simple:

You pinch your nose with your fingers so that air can no longer escape and blow slowly into your nose as you would with a handkerchief. You keep up the air pressure until you hear a slight popping in each ear.

And hey presto, no more discomfort or pain.

On a plane, your hearing will suddenly become much clearer, as if all sound was previously muffled.

Equalizing is usually only necessary when the external pressure of water (or air in our plane situation) increases, not when it decreases.

A diver on the way back up to the surface does not usually have to equalize any more than a passenger in a plane taking off and climbing to its cruising altitude. When the pressure inside the ears is greater than that outside, the body normally releases the internal pressure naturally on its own.

So it’s only when the aircraft descends and the air pressure in the cabin increases that there’s a problem.

Some people are aware of this and chew gum which can help to equalize the pressure. However, I suspect that a great number of people who have never been diving do not know why their ears are hurting nor how simple it is to rectify.

Imagine how much pain and suffering could be avoided with a simple cabin announcement. Add to that the discomfort to other passengers of loud wailing in the cabin. Of course, babies and very small children may not be able to perform this simple manoeuvre, but it would still help a lot of children and adults.

So why does no airline company do it?

Beats me!

Have a great week!

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

P.S. In my humble opinion, the designers who construct planes so that toxic fumes from the engines are funnelled into the passenger cabin when the plane reverses out from its parking bay (yes, that disgusting oily burnt smell – you know exactly what I mean!) should have the same mixture funnelled into their homes on a daily basis until they come up with a responsible and healthy solution.

Recentering

A little while ago, I listened to an interview between Gabrielle Bernstein and Jessica Ortner in the context of the Tapping World Summit 2016 (See also my post Healthy Comment).

I thought the content was valuable so I checked out Gabrielle’s site and stumbled on this quick one minute recentering process video, which I thought I’d share with you:

What’s intriguing about Gabrielle is that she looks like an angel, but she has a voice that indicates she hasn’t always been one!

Don’t be put off by the word ‘meditation.’  I know that some people get a bit skittish when they hear it.  It’s a really good breathing exercise and a useful tool to help you recenter in a time of stress.  I heartily recommend that you give it a try.

There are so many situations where a bit of rapid recentering can come in handy – before exams, tests, difficult interviews or conversations, in the face of panic or anger, to name but a few.

I think you’ll be glad to have this in your toolbox.

Have a great weekend.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

Dominoes

So you get out of the office after a really long, hard day, slump into the seat of your car and drive off in the direction of home. Almost immediately, the traffic snarls or stops completely, and you’re crawling along when you really only want to get home as fast as possible and put your feet up.

And what about that driver on a side road trying to push in? Doesn’t he realize what a hard day it’s been? ‘Hell, I’m going to give no quarter. There’s no way he’s going to push in front of me.’

Does this scenario sound familiar?

But wait a minute.

What happens if, this time, you react differently?

What happens if you not only let the guy in but smile as well? Suddenly all that pressure building inside you eases off a little. You’ve succeeded in letting go a bit. Of course, if the guy doesn’t thank you, you may not be quite so happy. There’s nothing more irritating than being taken for granted or just bad manners.

But you might just see something amazing happen. You might see the person you let in allow someone else in. And that person might let someone else in too. And suddenly, where you are, right now, doesn’t seem quite as frustrating as it did a few moments ago. You may even have a smirk on your face. You may even feel better about yourself.

And so you should. You’ve turned the world upside down and back to front for a moment and it’s a better place. You definitely deserve that drink you’ve been promising yourself when you get home….

This is what happens when you play dominoes.

Have a great weekend.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

The Empire Strikes Back

I mentioned recently that I am a huge fan of Dr. Mercola and his site:

Mercola.com

I have just left a comment on an article at that site and I thought it important enough to share both with you.

My comment:

“I keep saying to people that we’re in an “Empire Strikes Back” phase and they look perplexed. Yet it’s perfectly obvious to anybody who cares to look that the world is now run by previously unimaginably huge business corporations motivated uniquely by greed. Governments and politicians are controlled by these corporations – they do not have any real power.

We are a far cry from “Small Is Beautiful.”

The only comforting thought in times like this is that historically, no empire has ever survived. There is no particular reason to think that these will either, unless people are incapable of waking up from their technological dream. We must not underestimate the power of the individual, throw our hands up in the air and say,”But what can I do?”

We must vote with our feet. If you don’t like eating crap, then don’t buy it. If the good stuff is more expensive, then eat a little bit less. Put your money where your mouth is. Falling sales are the only thing that speak to these corporations.

This is an important article and should be read by a lot of people. The agro-industry, the scientists and the politicians will try to convince you that GE and increasing pesticides, weed killers and artificial fertilisers are the only way that we will be able to feed the planet in the future. Don’t believe a word of it. Try to inform those around you.

Only if people are properly informed will they be in a position to make a sensible decision.

Good luck to all of us.”

The article:

Regenerative Farming

Hope this is useful.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

 

Sunglasses Are Cool?

I’ve worn sunglasses a lot over the years and then I saw this video which made perfect sense to me:

I now try to restrict my use of sunglasses.

Actually Andreas Moritz, whom you see being interviewed here, was a really interesting person with a highly individual take on health issues. Sadly, he died in 2012.  There are a number of videos with him on the Internet. Check out:

ihealthtube.com

And the ihealthtube channel on YouTube or Andreas Moritz’s own site:

ener-chi.com

and his YouTube channel: just run a search with Andreas Moritz.

Hoping you’ll find this interesting and beneficial.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses