Renewal

Hello Desktop Yoga, Goodbye Stress

Tucked away in the land of cubicles, your day begins listening to ten new voice mails and scrolling through 30 new emails. You have reports to finish before the afternoon meeting and your boss is calling your cell phone. By three o’clock the multi-tasking has taken its toll. Your focus and productivity are waning. You could grab another cup of coffee or you could do what hundreds of successful organizations are now promoting: Desktop Yoga.

Desktop Yoga was written by local, internationally known wellness author Julie Lusk. Lusk is the CVO and president of Wholesome Resources and has been a yoga instructor since 1977. She is a popular keynote speaker and travels coast to coast presenting workshops and retreats to individuals and groups, including Proctor & Gamble, United Health Care and the National Wellness Conference.

A Desktop Yoga workshop begins with initiates learning to do a combination of stretches (at your  desk, hence the name “Desktop Yoga”) to relieve tension in the neck, shoulders, wrists, face, back and legs. Ways to increase energy, jump start creativity and minimize frustration are also taught. Lusk teaches how to take a two hour nap in two minutes 

“I loved yoga and knew it had a place in the office,” says Lusk.

Hopefully more companies take Lusk’s lead and realize by decreasing their employee’s stress they are increasing their bottom line. Until then, look for a revised copy of Desktop Yoga (to be released soon) and say goodbye to stress.

For more information visit www.wholesomeresources.com

- Chera Schweitzer

Eating Healthier Can Mean Just Doing a Little Better

The Zen Habits blog offers a plan to be healthier and lose weight by taking very gradual steps. It's the exact opposite of those "Lose 15 lbs in a Week" scams.

From Zen Habits:

The rules:

1. Apply these changes, one at a time, until you get used to them. This will probably be 3-4 weeks per step. But in a year’s time, you’ll be eating as healthy as possible.
2. Focus as much energy as possible on each change for at least a couple weeks. Don’t deviate if you can. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.
3. If it seems too difficult, make a smaller step instead. For example, instead of cutting out sweets, just cut out cakes and donuts. Smaller steps make things much easier.
4. Always replace bad food with healthy food that you enjoy. What I’ve given are just examples — everyone has different tastes.

OK, so here’s an example of how this step-by-step process could work:

1. Eat fruits for snacks. If you snack on junk food during the day, have some fruits by your side at all times. When you’re feeling hungry for a snack, eat a fruit. One of those bags of small apples is a handy thing — you can’t go wrong with apples.
2. Drink water instead of soda. The only thing I drink (besides an occasional beer) is water. I’m not saying you need to do that, but try to cut out sugary drinks a bit at a time, replacing them with water.

More at Zen Habits.

- Stephen Carter-Novotni

Green Lifestyle Events at Park + Vine

Renew your environmentally conscious selves this week at Park + Vine, 1109 Vine St. at Central Parkway in Over-the-Rhine's Gateway Quarter.

Hook up with local green organizations 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Feb. 21 at the Hamilton County Go Green Challenge Luncheon. RSVP by calling 513-946-7734 or dashing off a note to Susan Schumacher.

Later this week the staff of the Civic Garden of Greater Cincinnati presents Composting 101. You'll learn about converting your food waste into nutrients for your soil. If only we could bury all the McDonald's restaurants and end world hunger with the resulting superfarms. In the meantime, the event runs 10-11 a.m. Feb. 23. RSVP by calling  513-721-7275 or writing Park + Vine.

— Stephen Carter-Novotni

Why You Shop When You're Sad

Some of New York Times writer John Tierney's article Why Brooding Shoppers Overspend may be obvious at second glance, but it's still interesting to muse about.

Says Tierney:
The researchers explain this by quoting William James, the 19th century American psychologist, who theorized that our attachment to our material possessions is so strong that losing them causes “a sense of shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness.” So when you’re feeling blue and focused on yourself, you’re more eager to go shopping and spend whatever it takes to make yourself whole again: I have stuff, therefore I am.

Tierney references a recent, Harvard University study of impulse purchasing and sadness. The Harvard researchers found that people pay more for things when they're sad. Tierney writes that he expected people to devalue the things around them when they are sad, but the Harvard study found that people devalued themselves and sought out stuff to buy to fill that void, that which they saw lacking in themselves. (See, that's the obvious part.)

I thought it was interesting that the researchers said that, in general, people see themselves as being above this sort of emotional irrationality. In fact, one of the researchers wrote, " ...we have people from elite universities who are trained in quantitative analysis serve as subjects and they still show that emotions from the past carry over to present, simple economic decisions." It's still easier to fool yourself, no matter what your education or standing.

- Stephen Carter-Novotni

Bart Campolo on the Smell of Poverty

I do my best in these articles, but no words can really communicate the essence of what we are doing here. For that, you'd need Smell-O-Vision.

In case you didn't know, Smell-O-Vision was a system developed in the 1950s that released odors during the projection of a movie so that the viewer could actually smell what was happening on screen. Thirty years later, cult filmmaker John Waters tried the same thing with scratch and sniff cards. In both cases, the idea was to take advantage of the scientific fact that smell is easily the strongest and most vivid of our senses when it comes to processing emotional experiences. If you've ever smelled something and had memories you hadn't thought of in years come flooding back, you know what I’m talking about. 

What you may not know, however, is what the scent of urine in a hallway tells you about a low-rent apartment building, or what the combination of cigarette smoke and baby formula on an infant’s blanket tells you about a family, or what cheap liquor on an addict’s early morning breath tells you about the rest of their day, or maybe the rest of their life. These are some of the smells I’m learning these days.

I know a few already. At the grocery store the other day, I didn’t even need to turn around, let alone ask any questions to be sure the man behind me had no house, no car, no job, and nobody looking after him. What I needed instead was the intestinal fortitude to talk with him like a friend even though he was mentally unstable, and to offer him a ride to the soup kitchen even though it would take half a day to get his stench out of my van.

I know marijuana in the afternoon air means I’m going to have to answer a lot of bizarre theological questions from my street corner buddies. I know the smell of mold and too many cats means helping a friend pass her Section 8 housing inspection is going to take more than a morning, and the smell of an open electric oven means we might as well not bother because her lousy slumlord still hasn’t fixed the furnace. And, unfortunately, I know the smell of fecal matter coming out from under a dirty set of clothes means it doesn’t much matter how skillful I am as an after school tutor.

There are wonderful smells here too, of course – ammonia in the spotless kitchen of a single mother with two jobs, soul food in a neighborhood restaurant, talcum powder on the older church ladies, my warm house at the end of a long day – but not nearly enough to cover the others. If you are highly sensitive in that way, like Marty, how much you can love poor people sometimes boils down to how long you can hold your breath.

There is more to it than that, though. As I said earlier, smelling things is probably the most powerful way that we feel where we are and what we’re doing at a particular moment in time. No wonder a hospital administrator recently told me that his boss devoted an entire staff meeting to making sure their hospital smells as clean as it is, in order to subconsciously instill confidence in their patients’ families. For better and for worse, smells communicate things that words just can’t. 

The bad smells here do not instill confidence at all. On the contrary, what they communicate is a deep, visceral sense of neglect and decay and futility that threatens to overwhelm this whole neighborhood and our hope along with it. So then, when I tell you that my dream is to motivate and organize folks to clean things up around here, you can rest assured I mean that quite literally. We have plenty of souls to soothe, to be sure, but we also have bodies to bathe and clothes to wash, basements to clean out and houses to renovate. 

I know we can’t change everything in our poor little neighborhood. Honestly, my best guess is that we can’t even change very much. But even on my most dismal days, when the odors of brokenness around me are more than I can stand, I believe we can, at the very least, leave some places and some people around here perfumed with the sweet smells of care, healing, and hope. After all, most of those smells are simply a matter of soap and water, and hammers and nails, and meat and potatoes. 

In the meantime, since you don’t have Smell-O-Vision, or Odorama, or probably even a good aroma therapy kit, I guess you’ll have to take my word for it that loving poor people can be an awfully smelly business. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you just know a different set of smells than I do, because you are trying to love a different kind of poor people. I hope so, because I suspect that at least part of the reason God calls us to all this smelly loving in the first place is so we aren’t completely knocked out when we’re the ones who stink.

- Bart Campolo

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks and writes about grace, faith, loving relationships and social justice.  Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship, a local ministry in inner city Cincinnati.  He is also founder of Mission Year, a Christian ministry which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the country, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

What Autism Reveals about Animal and Human Minds

A quick test:

Consider a church steeple. What do you see in your mind? If you're like 60-70 percent of the human family you see a simple icon or stick drawing of a steeple, says Dr. Temple Grandin. The rest of us (including Dr. Grandin) picture specific steeples.

From Grandin's article, Thinking the Way Animals Do:
Most people use a combination of both verbal and visual skills. Several years ago I devised a little test to find out what style of thinking people use: Access your memory on church steeples. Most people will see a picture in their mind of a generic "generalized" steeple. I only see specific steeples; there is no generalized one. Images of steeples flash through my mind like clicking quickly through a series of slides or pictures on a computer screen. On the other hand, highly verbal thinkers may "see" th e words "church steeple," or will "see" just a simple stick-figure steeple.

A radio station person I talked to once said that she had no pictures at all in her mind. She thought in emotions and words. I have observed that highly verbal people in abstract professions, such as in trading stocks or in sales, often have difficulty understanding animals. Since they only think in words, it is difficult for them to imagine that an animal can think. I have found that really good animal trainers will see more detailed steeple pictures. It is clear to me that visual thinking skills are essential to horse training, but often the visual thinkers do not have the ability to verbalize and explain to other people what it is they "see."

Grandin is an autistic animal behaviorist and a Colorado State University professor. She is the author of Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, a fascinating look at thinking without words.

From Animals In Translation:

I mentioned at the beginning of this book that I think animal genius is probably the same thing as autistic savantry. I've felt this way for years, just from being around animals and observing them, and I mentioned it in Thinking in Pictures. But I didn't know why autistic genius and animal genius looked so similar to me, or whether autistic genius and animal genius might come from the same difference in the brain.

It's not that autistic savants and animal savants do the same things. Animal savants show brilliance when they learn complicated migratory routes after just one flight or discover how to perceive seizures before they happen. Autistic savants do lightning-fast calendar or prime number calculations inside their heads, or become artistic savants who can make almost perfect line drawings of buildings and landscapes from memory, often starting from a very young age -- and using perfect perspective. That's especially amazing, because even great artists have to be taught how to draw using perspective. A four-year-old autistic savant just naturally knows how to do it.

Even though autistic savantry and animal savantry seem so different on the surface, the one thing that did jump out was that a lot of these talents involve amazing feats of rote memory. Autistic people are known for their ability to memorize whole train schedules, the capitals of every country in the world, and so on. Autistic savants are the only people who seem like they could give a Clark's nutcracker a run for its money when it comes to remembering where they hid thirty thousand pine seeds. But beyond that, I didn't know why animal genius felt so familiar to me.

Snyder and Mitchell say that the reason autistic people see the pieces of things is that they have privileged access to lower levels of raw information. A normal person doesn't become conscious of what he's looking at until after his brain has composed the sensory bits and pieces into wholes. An autistic savant is conscious of the bits and pieces.

That's why autistic savants can make perspective drawings without being taught how. They're drawing what they see, which is all the little changes in size and texture that tell you one object is closer up and another object is farther away. Normal people can't see all those little changes without a lot of training and effort, because their brains process them unconsciously. So normal people are drawing what they "see," which is the finished object, after their brains have put it all together. Normal people don't draw a dog, they draw a concept of a dog. Autistic people draw the dog.

Be sure to listen to the NPR interview and Jean Feraca's Here On Earth discussion with Grandin. She describes how she helped to redesign more than half of the slaughterhouses in the U.S. to be more humane and less frightening to animals by crawling on her hands and knees through the animal pens and shafts so that she could experience it the way the animals do.

- Stephen Carter-Novotni

Organ Donation and the Flesh Trade

Indian doctor Amit Kumar has been accused of operating an illegal kidney scheme from his home in Delhi. According to the BBC article, the doctor convinced impoverished people to yield a kidney for $2,500.

From the BBC:
Amit Kumar was reportedly discovered  in a jungle resort in southern Nepal.

India has asked Nepal to hand Mr Kumar over. He is expected to be questioned about a house in Delhi where illegal kidney transplants were carried out.

Officers say hundreds of poor labourers were lured from across northern India and bribed into selling their kidneys.

The whole world is dealing with a shortage of kidneys. Simply put, it's not many people who will offer one of their vital organs to a stranger, even if they do have a matched set. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, the operation is low risk — only 3 in 10,000 people die from the surgery (of course, air travel would cease with those sorts of odds) and recovery takes about six weeks. Donors are tupically back to life as normal after that.

Here in the States, some doctors have argued that the current system of unpaid donations doesn't work.

From the Wall Street Journal:
"There's one clear argument for sales," Dr. Matas told a gathering of surgeons earlier this year. The practice, currently illegal in the U.S., "would increase the supply of kidneys, save lives and improve the quality of life for those with end-stage renal disease."

The doctor supports a regulated market only for kidneys, since live donors can give one up and survive without excessive health risks. (Transplants of other organs, such as livers and lungs, pose greater complications to a living donor.) And Dr. Matas doesn't rule out financial incentives for the families of deceased donors.

Among his opponents on the issue is a friend and colleague, Francis Delmonico. A Harvard University professor who has played a central role in shaping national transplant policy, the 62-year-old physician has several objections to organ sales. He fears such a system would attract the poor, vulnerable and unhealthy, and that altruistic donations might wither away.

"Payments eventually result in the exploitation of the individual," says Dr. Delmonico, who also worries about encouraging black-market sales both here and in developing countries. "It's the poor person who sells."

Any thoughts on this? Have you ever given up an organ or considered donation? What about after you're dead? Are you listed as an organ donor on your driver's license?

- Stephen Carter-Novotni

Boost Your Metabolism

Even with the sporadic warm spells recently, the dead of winter can be a gloomy place, especially when you're trying to meet your fitness goals. Here's a list of some great, common sense tips for overcoming the sluggishness and boosting your metabolism.

From Lauren's Fitness:

Eat enough
It’s extremely common for people on diets to eat too little. You will lose weight to start, but your body is smarter than you. Way smarter. It will start thinking, “this crazy kid is simply not eating enough to survive, I’m going to drop his/her metabolism, so he/she doesn’t burn as much during the day and can survive off this ridiculously small amount he/she is eating”. Bottom line, starvation won’t work as a diet, your body will make sure you don’t burn too much and die. Cut down your calories a little, and exercise more. Also check out this post on cheat eating and how it can help you trick your metabolism.

Eat more frequently
Try to eat 5-6 small meals a day. Don’t let yourself get too hungry in between meals. By getting food into your body regularly, you keep your metabolism firing, and leave your body in a much better state to burn some energy for you. The best way to do this is to plan your meals a week or so in advance, until you are able to get into the habit of eating 5-6 times a day.

More at LaurensFitness.com.

- Stephen Carter-Novotni

Needle Exchange a Simple, Rational Way to Curb AIDS

February 7 was Black HIV/AIDS Day. The idea is to raise awareness and help prevent the spread of AIDS in black communities across the country. Locally, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority at Northern Kentucky University passed out condoms and literature to students on campus. Nationally, there were many similar outreaches designed to educate the public.

The San Francisco Chronicle offers this insightful editorial on America's backwards needle exchange policy. There's no good reason not to support needle exchange. No one is going to go out and become an addict because of these programs, but we could stop up to a third of the new AIDS cases if it was implemented.

From the Chronicle:
... Congress thinks differently than health professionals and organizations such as the Black AIDS Institute, National Minority AIDS Council, NAACP, National Urban League, American Academy of Pediatrics; American Bar Association, American Medical Association and U.S. Conference of Mayors.

These groups see needle exchange as a viable means of slowing the spread of the virus. Nearly a quarter of the annual 40,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS in this country are either a direct or collateral effect of intravenous drug use. The failure to have access to clean needles has wide-ranging implications not just for drug users, but also for their families and entire communities. Up to 75 percent of new AIDS cases among women and children are directly or indirectly a consequence of intravenous drug use.

If most Americans knew, by simply removing a political plank in congressional appropriation bills, that we could reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS in the United States by up to one-third, they would run to their congressional representative's office and demand answers. They would want to know why our elected officials ignored a proven strategy to prevent the spread of HIV - a strategy that has already been approved by 16 counties and four cities in California, as well as in more than 20 nations from Europe to Canada.

- Stephen Carter-Novotni

Five Proven Techniques To Help Detox Your Body

Today's world is full of ways to get toxins into your body. The trick is to find ways to eliminate those toxins at the same rate or faster than they are introduced. Finding a body cleansing detoxification method that does more help than harm is important.

Our bodies do a pretty good job of eliminating toxins by filtering them out in the kidneys and liver and then eliminating them through sweat and our excretory system. The problem comes when these natural systems for detoxifying get overwhelmed and cannot keep up, creating toxic overload. The results can cause respiratory, digestive and many other general health problems.

Fortunately we can help our natural systems keep up with toxic overload with these basic steps:
Change your diet - The foods we eat are the source of so much of the contamination we take in. Processed foods are well known for their unhealthy makeup. What is less known is that natural foods like vegetables and fruits can contain herbicides, artificial hormones and pesticides.

Many detox diets consist of fasting, eating more organic whole foods including mostly vegetables and drinking lots of pure fluids, especially water. These diets will flush out your system but should be used only for short periods of time. Some of the essential nutrients needed for a healthy diet are missing and need to be replaced after a detoxification style diet.

Herbal body wraps - Covering yourself with mixtures of salts, clay, water and other ingredients such as oils is a common recipe for a detoxifying body wrap. Problem toxins reside in the cells of the body and the theory behind a body wrap is that the salts will draw these toxins out as it draws out water from the skin.

Picture yourself lying on a table covered for several hours with a thick clay based concoction and you have the basis for a body wrap. It is important to replace the lost liquids after a body wrap. Drinking lots of pure water is a great way to do this. In fact drinking plenty of water is often reported to be one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself in general.

Eat herbal supplements - Using herbal supplements has become another common way to try and eliminate a toxic backlog. It is definitely possible to alter the way your body functions by changing the amounts of various vitamins and minerals you take in. Changing the basic chemistry of your system for the better can become a somewhat complicated process. A complete understanding of the effects is important before you start such a procedure. Lots can be learned on the Internet but this background research is no substitute for the advice of your doctor.

Cleansing plans - There are many spas that offer an established program designed to cleanse your body tissue of toxins. They vary greatly but many are a variation of a daily schedule including enemas, liquid supplements and cleansing drinks. The sequence is repeated throughout the day for a period of a week or more. This certainly takes a commitment and dedication on your part. Many but not all of these spas are reputable so some due diligence on your part is required to find an affordable situation that is right for you.

Regular use of a Sauna - My favorite and arguably the easiest (my kind of plan) is the use of a sauna for detoxification. The main way toxins are eliminated is through the excretory system. Elimination of solids and liquid urine are the paths that come to mind immediately. The truth is, however, that the process of sweating also eliminates surprisingly large quantities of fluids. Excessive sweating, as in a sauna, dramatically increases the rate that toxins are included with the sweat. This happens because many of the toxins are found within the cellular fluid.

The fluids for typical sweating (mostly water) come from the liquids that surround the cells, not the fluids within the cells. As the non-cellular fluids are eliminated it becomes necessary for the inner-cellular fluids to take the place of non-cellular fluids and this is where the dissolved toxins are most concentrated. Both are purged.

All of these body cleansing detoxification methods work and have their own advantages and disadvantages. The one that is best is, as they say, "the one that you will actually use". Today's home sauna options are offered at surprisingly low costs and ease of operation. It is no wonder they are becoming the method of choice for so many families. This method is much less harsh and more enjoyable than any of the others. In fact I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that it is the only body cleansing mentioned that anyone would do even if it didn't have the detoxification benefits.

- Mike Hirn