The ways that my dogs can make me - and my visitors - happy constantly amazes me.
Remember that breath walking - as with any meditation technique - should not be pursued with a grim determination to 'get it right.' The point is to cultivate openness, relaxation and awareness, which can include awareness of your undisciplined, wandering mind.
While sleep is clearly vital to emotional well-being, what is it, exactly, about sleep that is so necessary? As it turns out, mood disorders are strongly linked to abnormal patterns of dreaming.
Meditation while walking has a long, noble history in ancient spiritual disciplines.
We have known for many years that we need vitamin D to facilitate calcium absorption and promote bone mineralization.
The more people have, the less content they seem to be. In America, the cultural expectation that we're to be happy all the time and our children are to be happy all the time is toxic, and I think that really gets in the way of emotional well-being.
One of the most obvious ways dogs can improve our physical and mental health is via daily walks.
Citizens must pressure the American Hospital Association, the American Public Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and other relevant governmental agencies to make greening our hospitals and medical centers a top priority so that they themselves don't create even more illness.
Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization.
Excess exercise tends to be counterbalanced by excess hunger, exemplified by the phrase 'working up an appetite.' A few people with extraordinary willpower can resist such hunger day after day, but for the vast majority, weight loss through exercise is a flawed option.
The usual justification for eating extra meals is that it keeps the metabolism 'revved up' so that weight loss is easier. There is, however, very little hard evidence that supports this idea, and a fair amount that disputes it.
Human beings and plants have co-evolved for millions of years, so it makes perfect sense that our complex bodies would be adapted to absorb needed, beneficial compounds from complex plants and ignore the rest.
If you have difficulty sleeping or are not getting enough sleep or sleep of good quality, you need to learn the basics of sleep hygiene, make appropriate changes, and possibly consult a sleep expert.
Fitting a walk into a busy life can be challenging, so I suggest walking rather driving to work or to run errands as often as you can - in other words, think of walking as alternative transportation.
Pay attention to your body. The point is everybody is different. You have to figure out what works for you.
The best way to detoxify is to stop putting toxic things into the body and depend upon it's own mechanisms.
By keeping my hand in that, it's the way I keep learning. The main way you learn in medicine is by practicing and working with patients.
For many in the modern world, carving out time for both traditional seated meditation and exercise has become close to impossible.
As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, I was fascinated by my visits to psychologist B.F. Skinner's laboratory.
Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson, I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens - roughly 200,000 years - people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people, and doing physical things.
