How speed = stress

In his latest book, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed, Canadian journalist Carl Honore touts the benefits of slow living.

Honore claims that the old paradigm “time is money” is being replaced by the “slow movement” model. Slow living produces more pleasure and better health. The slow city movement is fostering personal connection over speed. He makes a good point about how holistic medicine is inherently slow. Apparently, Italians have even expanded the “slow movement” into sex.

As I mentioned before, slow work is producing higher production. Multi-tasking is not productive. From the workplace to the home, Honore claims slowness is growing.

Stress reduction needs to integrate slowness for our kids, too. In his book, Honore reports about kids lacking spark and passion because they’re being pushed with homework and extracurricular activities.

Fortunately, a lot of us are putting the brakes on our speed. We’re making conscious choices to have a richer, whole life by traveling through it slowly.

There are places where speed is good. Having faster Internet connections certainly increases production and reduces stress. The unconscious conditioning around speed that we created in our lives is not good, though. Being mindful of where speed serves us, and where slowing down serves us, will enrich our lives. As my mother used to say to me, “What’s the hurry?”

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What is the hurry?

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I learned from my family and my home state, Vermont.

Are You a Yankee?

I recently heard someone on NPR describing being a Yankee. If you ask a European what a Yankee is, they’ll say an American. An American will say a New Englander. A New Englander will say a Vermonter. And a Vermonter will say a farmer.

Yankees grow up self-reliant. Vermont farmers learned a long time ago to take care of what takes care of them – the soil. Unlike the Western U.S., Vermont doesn’t have virtually unlimited land. You only have so much land, and you have to make it work for generations.

While growing up, I remember watching my mother create balls of soap by melting down soap remains with those small soaps my father brought home from hotels. Granted, for most of my childhood, my mother’s only job was being a mother, so she had more time to devote to sustainability.

The Answer Is in Our Past

Some of us barely have time to handle the necessities of life, let alone spend time mending, cooking, clipping coupons, shopping for bargains, gardening, cleaning…. In our quest to achieve (some might argue, survive), we have lost some of the simple acts of sustainability many of our parents performed. We look to the media, the market place and the future to direct our behaviors. Maybe we should start looking to our past.

In traditional societies, the elders, the connection to the ancestors and traditional way, are honored. When a man or a woman has a problem they can’t solve, they consult their advisors – the elders. In the current Western world, we believe our sole salvation lies in the future and data. If I had more knowledge, I could solve this problem.

Self-Reliance

Obviously, I believe in technology’s ability to assist us; after all, I created this blog. There is great potential with what we are collective creating. Yet, there is something missing. We need more than knowledge and technology. We need the wisdom of our past so we don’t repeat a history we wouldn’t want.

People like my mother, who grew in rural towns in the Depression, understood what it meant to rely on the land—and each other—as resources. Traditional “self-reliance” is being repackaged as “sustainability”. Self-reliance sounds like “I don’t need anyone”; sustainability is about working together.

Sustaining Together

While I was living in Phoenix, my mother got me a subscription to Vermont Life. Every month included an article about a community coming together. Every month I would read the article in tears. Just writing this brings back the tears.

A family’s barn would burn down. That weekend the entire town would show up to rebuild the family’s barn. It was a party. Much like the Amish, Vermonters took care of each other. They took care of themselves.

I remember years ago reading an article about a town that created a halfway house for state prisoners. The community felt it was a good investment to support and train the men who were their soon-to-be-neighbors. My tears were flowing reading about how a local resident developed a new relationship with one of these men. The resident saw goodness in the man. He took great pride in supporting the development of that goodness.

My hope is that we can slow down enough to experience simpler pleasures. As we slow down, we utilize the resources of our past and our community to deepen our collective sustainability. Are you slowing down to sustain a deeper life? Let us know your challenges and your successes with living a sustainable lifestyle.

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Finding Sustainability In Rural America

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It was inevitablethat someone would bring social networking to grocery shopping. Now we just need someone to do it for us.

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Zeer - Social network for food

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Off the Wall Green

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When Not to Go Organic

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The green movement is becoming an institution. The whole movement has yet to be defined. Conferences such as LOHAS are beginning to address what is a whole company. As with the green movement, much of that answer will come from the consumer. You will determine what it is to be a whole business.

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How Whole is Walmart?

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From the perspective of language, this begs an important question: Are GREEN principles being adapted by a larger demographic, or is it the GREEN aesthetic that is being co-opted by the mainstream?

Historically, being Green has existed as a fringe marketplace. It has survived in part defining itself as NOT being in the mainstream - somehow counter-culture. In fact, when we look at the very word “Green” we can see that we have been labeled by the old mainstream using an outsider’s pejorative. “Greenies.” Today’s consumers don’t even identify with it personally. They may Go Green, but they are no Green, personally.

But, thanks in part to smart companies, blogs like this, a failed U.S. energy policy, a few well-timed storms, a rockstar “Almost President,” and the initiatives and campaigns of Fortune 50 companies scrambling to establish some green street credit - we’re suddenly not so fringe anymore.

Just like any fringe group that talks only to itself, Dr. Paul Ray’s - one of the first to identify the fringe segmentation - prompting of “Authenticity.” when communicating with the GREEN consumer is dead on. But consider this - if mainstreaming America is chasing an aesthetic framing – a brand experience – rather than principles, I argue that “authenticity” may mean very little in the very near future.

So, what happens when this authentic language of the fringe is borrowed by the mainstream?

Think in terms of modern America adopting military language - like BlockBuster, a popular video store and a bomb dropped during World War II. Today, the military couldn’t use that word and still maintain any credibility as a big, bad monster. It adapts its language.

Or, look at urban street slang co-opted by white suburbia. When the skinny white kid steals your language, you don’t want it back. It is no longer subversive if it’s common.

What happens is that the language creator – the fringe – must push it further.

A language war is being staged between GREEN and the Mainstream. When language or expression is stolen, the language will evolve to distance itself from the mainstream. Things move fast today and so does language and it will change faster and faster. It is this way that the fringe has power. Mainstream only ever moves because of the fringe. It shifts.

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MAKING IDEAS WHOLE - The Power of Language

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Patients frequently ask, “Why don’t the needles hurt?” Most of us are familiar with the “ouch” that comes with an injection with a hypodermic needle, however acupuncture needles are very different and so is the feeling. The needles used by acupuncturists are much smaller diameter – more like thin wires. In fact, as students in Acupuncture college we experimented to see just how many acupuncture needles we could fit inside of a hypodermic. Eight!

So how else are they different? A hypodermic needle is like a tube used to pass material through the skin. In acupuncture, no substances are delivered by the needles. They are simply sterile “signal wires” used to communicate with the body’s nervous system. Another reason they are not painful is the shape of the tip. Instead of a tube with a bevel, as the tip of a hypodermic, the ancient Chinese designed the tip of an acupuncture needle like a pine needle. Therefore it slides smoothly and doesn’t hurt.

What does the needle touch? Acupuncture “points” are places on the body which are tried and true over the centuries for creating specific physiologic responses. For instance, the acupuncturist may want to prompt the patient’s body to regulate peristalsis (gut mobility) in order to care for a patient with diarrhea or constipation. A different acupuncture point could convey to the body to ease the muscle spasm causing sciatica or neck pain . Often the points used are located distal to the affected area, just because that is how the nervous system is designed. The acupuncturist doesn’t touch nerves with the needles, only the correct area of soft tissue to give the signal.

When the acupuncture needle is slid into the correct place, the patient’s soft tissue will very lightly “grab” the needle – like a fish grabbing bait – which informs the acupuncturist that the communication is received. Patients often feel this sensation and may call it a “zinger” because it is so quick. Once the pins are in place, people simply feel relaxed and may even doze off to sleep.

The arrangement of the acupuncture points on every human body is consistent and similar on all mammals. They are arranged in circuits often referred to as energy meridians. An Ohm meter passed along the skin on the meridians will indicate the acupoints as distinct areas with a different electrical charge. The “zinger sensation” coincides with as a rapid change in the electrical charge of that point of soft tissue.

Several factors influence how skillfully the acupuncture is being applied. The acupuncturist’s diagnosis and pattern recognition is the first step. For instance, if a patient reports having been diagnosed with “osteoarthritis”, their condition may be one of several distinct patterns of disharmony to the acupuncturist. Differential diagnosis is made based upon the patient’s answers to a wide range of questions about sleep, thirst, characteristics of the pain, etc. and observations of their face, tongue and pulses. Once the pattern is distinguished, the treatment principle and choice of acupoints is fairly clear. Then, of course, they must locate points correctly and apply the proper signal.

My tomcat, “Turbopurr”, a.k.a.” Razzledazzle”, is a perfect model of the sensitivity of acupuncture needles. His whiskers are flexible and just about the same diameter as an acupuncture needle. He uses them well, even in the dark, which is marvelous. Even more marvelous is that, when they brushed your arm, your nervous system can pick up the signal. If sterile signal wires that size are used to touch the right acupoints your body’s nervous system can perceive the signal and alter your physiology.

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Like a Tomcat’s Whisker

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We all know eating when under stress isn’t good for us. It’s as if we are mindless when we reach for that bag of potato chips, yet we do it. Why? We do it physiologically because stress is a survival response that causes us to crave quick energy food. We do it habitually because we’ve grown up in a culture that models this type of behavior and the media seduces us into believing it’s the thing to do. When we do diet, 97% of us gain it all back within five years. In The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie, Craig Pepin-Donat state, the “diet industry is amazing — it’s really a $40 billion rip-off.”

The United States is a country of diets; and most are diets of deprivation. They vary in what we don’t allow ourselves. However, there is a new approach emerging that shifts the model from not being concerned about the experience of eating and just concerned about its effects – to an approach based on the experience of eating. Think of the possibilities – you can lose weight as you enjoy your food more. Although it sounds too good to be true, it is being proven. Recently the WSJ ran an article on a Duke and Indiana State University study showing the efficacy of mindfulness eating.

After all we have invested in panic eating, it’s difficult to believe that if we are mindful and enjoy our food more, we lose weight. Focusing on the experience of eating allows our minds and bodies to slow down; thereby causing our body to go into a parasympathetic response verses the sympathetic response (fight or flight) of mindless eating.

When I had an integrative medicine clinic in Scottsdale, I was also a partner in a business that taught Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Stress Reduction Program. The business didn’t make much money, but we did help many. Near the end of the eight-week course, we would teach mindfulness eating. It was always interesting to hear the comments of how common food tasted different. Only anecdotally did I know eating with awareness would create weight lost. It’s great that a publication like the WSJ is telling us that awareness may give us what diets often can’t – maintained weight loss and enjoying eating.

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Enjoy Eating – Lose Weight

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As we focus on the health of our bodies and our planet, we are becoming concerned with the health of our homes. Are you living in a house that is a toxic dump, like the FEMA toxic trailers? As publications such as Natural Home Magazine tell us how to create and live in a clean environment, we learn how to detox our homes. What is happening now with our homes is very similar to the growth cycle of holistic health, which was once a fringe phenomenon. Now it is a huge market and the green building sector represents a $50 billion dollar annual market.

It is true that the weak economy is affecting the home improvement market. Yet, the green/whole sector continues to grow. We not only want to live in healthy homes, we want to live in homes that we enjoy and that nourish us. Esoteric arts such as Feng Shui are now commonplace. People are recognizing are realizing subtle factors such as the placement of a piece of furniture can affect the flow of the chi – the feel of a room.

The home was once considered a man’s castle. Today it is the family’s sanctuary from the stressors of modern life. Our homes are the base of operations for our whole life. Join us in sharing your thoughts and feelings around your home. What do you do to make your home whole? What are your plans for creating the whole home of your dreams?

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What Is a Whole Home?

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