By Edel Jarboe

There is a common misconception that walking is not exercise. A lot of people believe that in order to be healthy and to lose weight, you need to do high impact exercise. Luckily, this is not the case. Studies have shown that walking provides great overall cardiovascular fitness, reduces the risk of cancer and heart disease, lowers cholesterol levels, lowers blood pressure, helps alleviate lower back pain, and reduces the risk of arthritis and osteoporosis. Walking also alleviates stress and depression and improves your immunity as well. Additional benefits of walking include stimulating creativity and problem solving skills, as well as being used as a form of meditation. Walking gives you the opportunity to be outdoors in the fresh air and the chance to watch the seasons change. It is also the perfect way to get away from phones, pagers, faxes, e-mail, and other interruptions. And, in addition to all these great benefits, walking is safe, easy, and cheap. What more can you ask for? Get out there and start walking!

Getting Started
(Consult your doctor prior to starting any exercise program if you are sedentary, a 40+ male, or a 50+ female.)

Stretch first to warm up your muscles. You should concentrate on stretching your torso, quadriceps, hamstring, gluteal muscles (buttocks), calves, and Achilles’ tendon (heel). Hold each stretch for 15 to 30 seconds each, repeating at least once for each muscle group and being careful not to bounce. Read more »

You can make a determined effort to know the way you think. This can be done by drawing inferences from past experience. You can know why you have a fear for a particular activity or object by delving deep into the way you reacted to that fear or object. This will give you a better insight into your inner-mind. Once you understand the basic cause of a fear, you can take steps to overcome it.

Do you remember your first day at school? Were you afraid to leave your mom and dad to go to a new place? After a while, you enjoyed going to school. How was this possible? By analyzing and understanding, the way you overcame this fear can help you to conquer any other fear that you have.

Your behavior is highly influenced by external forces. These forces can be negative like violence, racism, poverty, crime and abuse — or they can be positive, like a loving family, best friends and supportive teachers. Like your past experience, you also can draw inference from these events. You can analyze your reaction to a particular event and then analyze the cause-effect relationship. By determining the cause and by understanding the effect, we can make a premeditated decision to overcome any negative effect of that event or use any positive effect to help you out at a later time. Read more »

You have probably come across exotic-sounding terms such as “chakra,” “prana,” “aura,” and “tantra” in your course of reading books on spirituality, sex, and healing in the New Age literature section of the bookstore. But what’s the real scoop behind these exotic vocabularies?

Are All Energy Healings the Same?
Chakra or energy center is a term used in Pranic healing, an ancient Hindu system of energy healing. Prana means life energy. Aura is another term traced to Pranic healing and is a non-physical body that consists of energy, existing along with our physical body. The aura that covers our body is said to have seven layers pertaining to the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of an individual as manifested by energy. Studying the color and thickness of auras give ideas on the state of health of individuals. Six colors are associated with the aura and interpreted into six personalities. These colors are all present in an individual but one or two are more pronounced.
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by Greg Landry, M.S. (© 2001)

If I had to pick a single factor that I thought was most important in a successful exercise or weight loss program, it would be to exercise first thing in the morning - every morning! Some mornings, you may just be able to fit in a 10 minute walk, but it’s important to try to do something every morning.

So why mornings?…

1. Over 90% of people who exercise consistently, exercise in the morning. If you want to exercise consistently, odds are in your favor if you exercise first thing in the morning.
2. When you exercise early in the morning, it “jump starts” your metabolism and keeps it elevated for hours, sometimes up to 24 hours! That means you’re burning more calories all day long just because you exercised in the morning!
3. When you exercise in the morning you’ll be energized for the day! Personally, I feel dramatically different on days when I have and haven’t exercised in the morning.
4. Many people find that morning exercise “regulates” their appetite for the day - that they aren’t as hungry and that they make better food choices. Several people have told me that it puts them in a “healthy mindset.”

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You know the old saying — “an elephant never forgets.” Whether that’s true or not, it is clear that the mind of an animal can be substantially large in its learning capacity, using memory to perform amazingly in many ways.

With humans, we’ve discovered that memory can be shut down, temporarily or permanently, depending on how traumatic the remembered event was. People have protected themselves subconsciously by disengaging the memory. The mind sometimes seems to play tricks on us by confusing one memory with another. Sometimes this causes the person to be unable to function in society. What seems to be a problem with memory can actually be a problem with the processing of information going into the mind.

Memory can be adversely affected by a variety of things, such as medication, diet, attention when an event occurs and more. For me, the latter is most prominent in my life. I have ADD and if I’m not paying attention, I don’t remember. On the other hand, I have a fantastic memory for things that I’m engaged with. Read more »