It was Earth Hour last night at 8:30 pm, and we happened to have tickets to an evening of Beethoven with Andreas Delf conducting. The feature of the evening was to be Eroica (The Heroic), the Third Symphony. We wondered as we sat down whether the lights would be turned off and the symphony would play in the dark from 8:30 til 9:30 … most of the time that pianist John O’Connor would be performing a piano concerto. Fortunately, they left the lights on, and we could see the full expressions on Delf’s and O’Connor’s faces.
During the intermission, we spoke to a friend, Norman Foster, who plays clarinet in the symphony. He always steps outside and mingles with the crowd during the intermission. I told Norman that we were wondering (not seriously, but wondering nevertheless) whether they would tip their hats to Earth Hour.
“Curious you should ask,” Norman said. “Yesterday, we finished rehearsal 10 minutes early and were waiting for the chairman of the orchestra society to come in to address us. Since we had 10 minutes to spare, Delf introduced us to a little game.”
“I don’t care how well you remember it,” Delf said (I’m paraphrasing, but this is essentially what Norman related), “But I want you all to do your best to remember your parts of Brahms Flirst Symphony. ” With that, he gave a downbeat, and the orchestra struck up some Brahms. They remembered it remarkably well, proving that yes, indeed, they could probably have played a Beethoven sympony in the dark.
Glad they didn’t try, because it was a delight to watch. Delf was deft, so to speak. He alternately quited and called for crescendos from various parts of the orchestra, emphasizing the theme and variations that are so prominent in Eroica.
The result was nearly an hour of rapt attention from a packed house, followed by four very boisterous standing ovations. Delf was so busy acknowledging the orchestra that he didn’t even notice that someone was standing behind waiting to bestow a flower lei around his neck.
What does all this have to do with coaching? Quite a bit. As a client, you have to start from where you are, and do the best you can with your current resources. It’s like playing Brahms without a score, and without rehearsal. You remember what you can, and follow along when you can’t remember. You are going in the right direction, and soon, your approximations will lead to practiced gains in your life. Instead of Brahms, you could be striving to lose weight, to exercise more, to meditate so that you aren’t so stressed out … whatever the goal, you are unique, and with your coach, you can invent the score as you go along.
In the end, you won’t end up performing in the dark, and if nobody else notices, at least you will be able to give yourself a standing ovation. Congratulations on the responding to the downbeat (in an upbeat manner, of course.)
I was discussing my active dreaming with a friend, Chris Mallman of the Wardrobe Workshop in Toronto. Chris suggested looking at Somatic Healing. I missed a workshop with David Quigley, of the Alchemical Institute, while on the Noetic Sciences Consciousness Cruise, but Chris managed to sit in on the workshop and thought it would probably help with my “RBD.”.
Somatic Healing is similar to what I do with freeform Qigong. You tap into your inner consciousness and use hypnotherapy, movement, and other techniques to unwind some of “soma” that are tying up the memories of old injuries. The way I’ve always described it, when you have a trauma, you subconsciously build a protective structure that keeps the trauma in a controllable stage. But old wounds have a way of working themselves out in other conditions a few years down the road. Hence, a limp becomes bursitis becomes arthritis. A bad memory becomes an avoidance pattern becomes a psychological manifestation … maybe even a REM Behavior Disorder (RBD) as described in my previous blog post down below. Anyway, Chris is probably right (again, eh, Chris?) that there is at least an element of post traumatic “soma” involved in my active dreaming.
So, assuming that the old trauma of Vietnam, say, is being held in a subconscious avoidance pattern, maybe I can unwind some of that pattern, essentially healing part of the cause.
That, by the way, is the principal of classical homeopathy. Trace a condition back to its first cause, and prescribe a homeopathic dose of a remedy that will bring about the same thing result as that first cause, only in a microscopic does that will simply remind the somatic body about that original trauma, and help unwind the memory of it until it results in a healing crisis.
The body knows what it needs in order to heal itself. That’s also one of the tenets of health coaching. Sometimes it just takes the right question before one can find the right answer. Thanks to Chris, and thanks to David Quigley, I may have at least part of the answer to restless dreams.
Last night, I went for my long-anticipated night at the sleep clinic. Long-anticipated because I act out my dreams, having somehow overridden the slight level of sleep paralysis (atonia) that protects most sleepers during dreaming. What ends up happening is that my body takes a swing at that phantom threat in my dream, and I wake up when I smack the side table, or the wall, or worse, my wife. At least twice, I have taken a dive and ended up on the floor. The first time that happened, I almost bit my tongue off, and thought for several hours that I had broken my jaw. As a result, I now sleep on a futon on the floor, for the safety of all involved. So much for that nice new bed we just bought.
So I got a referral to the sleep clinic. Most of their clients are there for sleep apnea and snoring … REM Behavior Disorder such as I display is fairly rare … according to the literature, I join less than half a percent of folks with sleep disorders, which is fortunate, since RBD can be dangerous. And at least one study has shown that people with RBD have a higher risk of developing Parkinson’s and/or Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s well worth the time and effort to get a study done.
I drove to the far side of town, where the sleep clinic is situated upstairs from a bank and overlooking a muffler shop. The light commercial district doesn’t matter terribly, since the sleep clinic has nighttime hours of business. Inside, there was a subdued tone. Aside from a doctor’s reception window, it looked more like a home than a clinic. A living room, a kitchen and bathroom, and several comfortable bedrooms that look rather like a moderate hotel room … TV, lounge chair and of course a bed. There was even a sample Hawaiian Host chocolate on the end of the bed. The only things out of place are the infrared video camera mounted to the wall, and the bedside table with a rats nest of electrodes and sensors.
A male technician came in and told me I could watch the TV, read, do whatever I wanted, but they wanted to have me try to sleep by 10:30 pm at the latest so they could get a full night of monitoring. He then wired me. A strap around the chest to monitor breathing, and another around the belly. Electrodes attached to my scalp at several places to measure brain activity. A nasal attachment to measure temperature. Electrodes to monitor eye movement, and sensors on the jaw and chin to monitor teeth grinding. Then a couple of sensors to monitor heart activity, and a couple more on each leg to monitor leg twitching. Okay, I looked like Franenstein’s monster.
Then I went to sleep. I’ve always been blessed by the ability to fall asleep quickly. Two minutes and I’m out cold. At the sleep clinic, it was the same thing. Except that I was wired, and the first time I moved even slightly, one of the sensor wires must have tugged at me enough to wake me back up.
Nothing wrong there, I’ve hypnotized myself back to sleep hundreds of times. Focus on a pleasant place or experience, move into that space, and start the voyage to inner consciousness. But not this night. I spent 10 hours lying in bed, wired like a marionette, and could not find that doorway to sleep. I could even roll over … left, right, on my back, I tried every position that I could get into (given the wires) until nearly 6:00 am, when one of the assistants tapped at the door and said it was time to disconnect me.
“Looks like you had a rought night,” she said.
Not a moment of sleep. No REM. No unconscious acting out of dreams because there were no dreams. Now I go back to the neurologist, who will look at the results and try to map out an alternative course. All I can do is shrug.
I had to skip work today, went home, and immediately fell into a deep sleep. After two hours, I woke myself up when I shouted out encouragement to a character in my dream, and reached out to grab a ball he had thrown to me. When the ball evaporated into empty air, I knew it was another dream, more REM behavior. I was back home. Is this what they mean by “wireless networking”? (joke)
I coach people to attain “optimal” health. It might help to have an idea of just what “optimal” means, because health is relative. There are approximately six billion correct answers to the question, “What is optimal health?”
If I asked “What is perfect health,” I would still get a variety of answers, but they might be more predictable. An Adonis, or a Venus, youthful and beautiful, capable of rising to any physical challenge, immortal, never aging, no body fat that isn’t supposed to be there, perfect hair, perfect teeth, never gets sick … in short, an unattainable and unrealistic ideal.
Well, we aren’t all Adonises or Venuses (are those the correct plurals?).
Every living person is a unique blend of genetics and environmental influences. Who were the parents, the grandparents and distant ancestors? What genetic traits did they pass down? Probably more important, where were they born, under what conditions, and if you believe in astrology, under what combination of stars and planets? What was their diet like as an infant? What is their diet now? What did they eat for lunch yesterday? What is the quality of air they are breathing?
Going beyond that, everyone looks different! Some of you may be tall, some short. Some may not have any legs at all, so tall and short aren’t even part of the equation. Some will be fat, some thin. Some may have a slight curvature of the spine, or a rheumatic heart, a club foot, or an overbite. Some will be bed-ridden and totally dependent on the good will of others to even stay alive. Whatever your circumstance is, you are unique. There is nobody quite like you, not even if you have an identical twin.
So what is “optimal” health? Optimal means quite simply that you are as healthy as you can be, given your current circumstances and your physical, psychological and spiritual heritage.
Health is a day to day journey. You can make that journey one where, every day, you get better and better, a little bit at a time, until you are as healthy as you can possibly be. Or you can be on a downward spiral where you have given up on self-improvement, and surrendered to the temptations of an unhealthy lifestyle.
Wherever you are on that journey, the journey to optimal health can begin right now. When you go to sleep tonight, you can be as healthy as you can possibly be, starting from where you are right now. That, for you, is optimal … being as healthy as you can be under the current circumstances. And since the circumstances change from day to day, optimal health will always be a moving target.
One of the techniques a health coach uses is to help you set achievable goals and targets that are meaningful to you, then to help you keep the goal in mind while making small, easy baby steps every day in the direction of the bigger goal.
I like to think of Candide, the protagonist in Voltaire’s 18th Century novel. Candide went from living an ideal existence to a life of travail and disillusionment, but in the end, his optimism won out, and he concluded, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” In terms of optimal health, that means that you are on a continual path to being as healthy as you can possible be … whatever that means to you.
I happened across the following through a link in the twittersphere from Perry Belcher. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, Perry, and thanks to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for publishing it.
40 FACTS ABOUT SLEEP YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW…(OR WERE TOO TIRED TO THINK ABOUT)
Okay, I know you’re not supposed to self-diagnose. But about five years ago, my dreams became very active … or rather my body became very active while I was dreaming. No more “atonia” that keeps the body from moving during dreams.
The RBD has become more severe over time. One night, I dove out of bed, hit my chin on a side table, nearly broke my jaw, and bit through my tongue. A few times, I have hit my wife, hit the wall, kicked items that were left too near the bed, and recently I scared off a room full of folks at a hostel when I sat up and yelled incoherently in the middle of the night. So, time to do something about it.
I originally associated my active dreaming with Qigong. I started studying medical Qigong with Dr. Hong Liu, and during an advanced workshop, we learned eventually to drop the conscious control of our body movements, instead allowing the qi to flow through us and move us in ways that balanced and healed us. Master Hong warned that we had to stay grounded, and that many people who entered into advanced states of Qigong displayed signs of mental illness. Was active dreaming a result of this?
Another thought … it was delayed reaction to PTSD residue from my time in the jungles of Vietnam.
I did a quick bit of research on the Internet, and now almost wish I hadn’t. Scientific American says that RBD has a high correlation to early signs of Alzheimer’s, which my mother and great grandmother both had. There is also a good chance that RBD is an early symptom of Parkinson’s, and is usually associated with brain stem deterioration. One thing it isn’t — it is not a psychological problem.
Anyway, I’ll try to blog a bit about what is happening. For starters, I have an appointment with my GP, and I’m going to ask him for a referral to a sleep clinic. I also have a new bed that makes restless sleep less disturbing to my partner.
And no jokes about RLS. This is Restless Body Syndrome, and perhaps restless brain syndrome. Maybe some L-dopa will do the trick. And almost time for the days to start getting lighter … lots of exercise in the saddle of my bike coming up. I’ll start putting in 400-500 miles a month soon. That will oxygenate my brain cells!
The Obama transition team asked for community input on healthcare reform. Here are the questions they were asking, and my responses to them:
1. Briefly, from your own experience, what do you perceive is the biggest problem in the health system?
Healthcare is currently based on the treatment of symptoms, usually through pharmaceutical methods. The model should be moved in the direction of finding root causes of illness, and focusing on the root cause rather than focusing on symptoms. That is a matter of education, primarily. Also, people should be rewarded for proactively preventing illness, since prevention reduces dependence on the healthcare system.
2. How do you choose a doctor or hospital? What are your sources of information? How should public policy promote quality health care providers?
I choose by asking others who they go to and who they would recommend. I rarely see a “gatekeeper” physician, preferring to take responsibility for my own health.
Public policy should reward physicians who successfully move their patients to individual responsibility rather than rewarding those who see the most patients, because the “quantity, not quality” paradigm encourages the use of pharmaceutical fixes of symptoms, which eventually leads to more prolonged and burdensome end-of-life illnesses. Policy should also look at redefining laws regarding “practicing medicine without a license” to allow traditional naturopaths and health coaches more latitude in their work with clients, since they can successfully help their clients reduce their reliance on the healthcare system.
3. Have you or your family members ever experienced difficulty paying medical bills? What do you think policy makers can do to address this problem?
Haven’t yet experienced difficulty keeping up, but anticipate the possibility in the future due to family members with expensive dental problems and degenerating vision problems.
No specific ideas on this one other than the obvious ones: put a cap on medical expenses, with the cap reduced for early childhood and people on permanent disability or social security; make a higher percentage of medical expenses tax deductible and/or tax free; and provide a predefined and guaranteed level of care for all individuals (e.g. UK’s National Health Service).
4. In addition to employer-based coverage, would you like the option to purchase a private plan through an insurance-exchange or a public plan like Medicare?
Yes, especially to help the unemployed, self-employed, and part-time workers.
5. Do you know how much you or your employer pays for health insurance? What should an employer’s role be in a reformed health care system?
In my home state, employers are required to pay for health insurance. This keeps wages lower, makes it harder for small businesses to survive, and is a burden on all employers. I would like to see the expense spread out so that the burden is shared by all, rather than being solely the responsibility of employers.
With an insurance pool, employers could be rewarded by encouraging healthy lifestyle habits among their employees, since they could purchase health insurance at a lower premium. In other words, they could buy primarily accident and emergency insurance, and would not be forced to pay for expensive medical treatments for those who should share responsibility for illness developed due to lifestyle choices (e.g. most heart disease due to poor dietary choices, lung cancer and emphysema from smoking, diabetes from poor diet and lack of exercise, some forms of arthritis, etc.) In other words, if somebody wants to smoke, drink, be obese and not exercise, they should expect to pay a higher medical premium, and if someone wants to consciously live a healthy lifestyle, they should not have to subsidize the insurance for those who do not make healthy choices.
Also, insurance coverage should include a broader recognition of alternative therapies, and should include dental and vision care as a part of basic coverage.
6. Below are examples of the types of preventive services Americans should receive. Have you gotten the prevention you should have? If not, how can public policy help?
I have gotten the screenings and preventative measures I felt I should have. I have not had a flu shot and do not intend to get one in the foreseeable future, but I do use a variety of public service screenings to monitor my health and fine-tune my lifestyle choices to stay within healthy parameters.
7. How can public policy promote healthier lifestyles?
I have mentioned several items above, and have included others below:
· Reduced insurance costs for those who elect healthy lifestyles
· Remove or reduce legal restrictions on traditional naturopaths, nutritionists, health coaches and others who offer alternatives that keep people from having to rely on allopathic medicine
· Reward physicians who wean their patients from reliance on the healthcare system
· Do not allow pharmaceutical companies to patent natural medicines
· Develop a creative commons for researching new medications
· Ban public advertisements for pharmaceutical products
· Ban payments to physicians for prescribing certain drugs
Going outside of the healthcare arena:
· Automobile disincentives to reward alternative means of commuting
· A Healthy America campaign, with participation in the campaign being recognized as a form of public service
An audience of dandelion-blowing kids gathers around to see what is so curious. They have spent part of the summer morning chasing through a field playing tag, sending dandelion umbrellas floating into the sky with a single breath, collecting ladybugs, tentatively tasting a wild berry that was not yet ripe … but now, they gathered around a new curiousity.
Stooped in the middle of the group, on center stage as it were — although the setting is in a meadow — a young girl no more than seven years old reaches out to touch the leaves of the plant she just discovered.
“Watch,” she said.
As her finger neared the leaf, the leaf quickly closed itself by folding the edges into the middle.
The other kids in the group abandoned their dandelions to look for more of the same kind of plant. Their attention did not move on to other magical bits of the day until everyone had their fill of the mysterious leaves that seemed to shrink shyly away from human contact. It was a sensitivity plant, or sensitive plant, they soon learned.
That moment had many echoes throughout the years. There was an echo when walking through a thick patch of ice plant … the polar opposite of the sensitivity plant. That was on the seashore, where the sea anenome makes a very similar gesture to the sensitivity plant as it captures food carried on the tide, closing itself upon its unsuspecting prey — as well as closing at the touch of a child’s finger. There was a strong echo of the sensitivity plant when picking a basketful of fiddle-head ferns for a salad. They had to be picked at the right season, and the right time of day, before they opened their leaves for the day. And there is a faint echo of the sensitivity plant every year as the seasons change and different facets of the natural world go into dormancy, pulling back to a protective stance.
Years later, the thread that started that day in the meadow would be revived for one of the students when he learned in a botany class that the mimosa pudica was a carnivorous plant, and when the leaves closed, the plant was hoping to enfold an insect small enough to ingest for a bit of nutrition. A magical moment of childhood resolved by finding a scientific explanation. The moment from childhood was no less magical, but the universe was one step closer to having a comfortable explanation.
Discovery seems to satisfy a deep urge in people. Something as simple as the sensitivity plant may already be known to millions of other people, but the moment when one particular child reaches out a finger for the first time and sees the plant respond to them … that is always magical, no matter when and no matter where it takes place.
That sense of wonder, that awe, is repeated in a kaleidoscope of different situations for children who are just discovering the universe on their own. The magic eventually evolves into a structured way of looking at the universe, a way of explaining away the parts that are not yet understood, or that have not yet been discovered. The world view evolves into a familiar structure, but that does not mean that there are no more surprises, no more discoveries to be made.
It just means that the way one’s mind understands the universe is sufficient at the moment. There are no overwhelming mysteries, no anomalies so obvious that they cannot be ignored.
That is not to say that there are no anomalies. It’s just that the mind has a way of ignoring what it doesn’t understand … ignoring the unknown until it is impossible to deny its existence. The proverbial “elephant in the room” that may be obvious to most people, but is invisible to anyone whose view of the universe has not yet discovered a rational explanation for elephants.
I bought a new set of wheels this weekend … something more fuel efficient, of course.
You see, I’vebeen riding the same old Team Fuji bicycle since I bought in new back in 1986, and by now, it’s accumulated more than its fair share of road grime, rust, bearings that pop inside the crank, and various squeeks and rattles that don’t go away for more than a few miles afer a good session with a can of silicone spray. As soon as I get a chance, it will go to a neighborhood charity that refurbishes old bikes, and some young man will get himself a chance to dream of being in the Tour de France.
My new wheels are mounted to a Bianchi Volpe, a sturdy road bike made for touring. If my memory serves me properly, volpe means fox, so when I’m cruising along the road, I’ll imagine a long tail flowing in the wind (maybe my ponytail will do). In the next couple of years, I hope to find my way to retirement, then I’ll give that bike a workout like it never imagined. I’ll ship it to the Pacific Coast, then see if it will last longer than my legs do on the trip to the Atlantic. It’s got the gears to climb every mountain west of the Mississippi (and east), as well as a speed gear to accelerate when I have the prairie winds at my back.
If this one lasts as long as the last one, I’ll be looking for another new set of wheels for my 84th birthday. Meanwhile, I’ve got many a mile to go before evening. I’m just stopping by some woods on a Spring evening, then I’ll mount up and see how good the daily commute to the office (25 miles round trip) feels on the new Fox. Meanwhile, I’ll let the car gather a bit more rust and dust.
I’m working from home today, in part because nobody would want to see me in my current condition. My face is bright red in spotchy patches. I cannot touch my skin, it burns so badly, and I have to be heliophobic for the next 48 hours — in other words, I have to stay out of the sun. The reason — I had photodynamic therapy (PTD) on my face yesterday.
That is the cost of growing up in a sunny climate (Colorado) with a fair complexion. After awhile, you get so many actinic keratoses (not sure if that is the right plural, but they are the pre-cancerous skin cells that the dermatologist likes to freeze off when they are few and far between) that only a more generalized treatement will work. What’s it like?
First, your skin has to be thoroughly cleansed. The clinic I went to (Straub, in Honolulu) used an acetone wipe. Then your face gets wetted down with a substance known by the trade name of Levulan, or aminolevulinic acid (ALA). Precancerous cells grow more quickly than normal cells, and they are thirsty for the amino acid that gives ALA part of its name. That will shortly lead to the downfall of the AK cells, who in this case suffer from gluttony. The first part of the PTD process takes five minutes at the most, then you get sent away for an hour and a half of “marinating.” The ALA has to soak in, and meanwhile, you have to stay out of the sun. Fortunately, it was just coming up to lunch time, so between lunch and a good book (Earth: The Sequel), 1.5 hours was easy to kill.
The remaining ALA is rinsed off the face, then comes a pair of yellow swim goggles and a space helmet — a U-shaped wrap-around blue-spectrum sunlamp. I had a small fan that blew in my face, and a spray bottle full of water that I could use to keep myself cool, and the radio running in the background to keep my mind off the sharp pinpricks that started erupting all over my face. For 16 minutes and 40 seconds (exactly), I sat in this contraption listing to Don Maclean sing about American Pie. And meanwhile, my face was turning into a mince-meat pie.
When the egg timer goes off, the blue-light special is done, and so am I — well done. I leave with instructions to avoid sunlight for 48 hours, use sunscreen for four months, and itching and peeling over the next several days. The first two days of that feel like a bad sunburn … can’t touch my face, can’t pucker, can hardly open my mouth wide enough to slide a bite of food past my teeth. But I must say, it’s better than the alternative.
I’ve had all sorts of people say, “You’re a naturopath, why don’t you use a natural cure? I heard about some kind of tar you put on a precancerous spot …” and so forth. Well, maybe there is some tar that works naturally. But I would have been tarred and feathered from the top of my bald head to the bottom of my chin, and then some, in order to cover all the spots. That’s the thing about natural remedies … the best ones are those that are preventative. Once something starts up, you have to weigh the alternatives. There is a ledger that balances between effectiveness and expediency, between an ideal lifestyle and the need to carry on with daily life. In this particular case, the dermatologist’s therapy came out on the positive side of the ledger, even if my face does look like hamburger for a couple of days.
