As follows:

Client Guidelines

We greatly appreciate you doing your part to help maintain everyone’s health by waiting in your car until your appointment time, providing and wearing masks during your visits which includes during sessions, especially when you’re face up on the table. Please wear your shoes except while on the table, and using good hand washing before getting on the table and again before leaving the room. We’ll have the supplies required On Hand for your convenience.

Practitioner Changes

Masks will be worn when greeting clients, with a face shield during the session, and until clients exit the building

Hand washing beginning and end of each session

Body Apron worn and changes with each session

Treatment Rooms

We’ll be wearing masks and gloves during the cleaning of rooms and both will be disposed of exiting the room.

In addition to our standard cleaning practices we will be applying additional cleaning to treatment rooms in the high touch areas as defined below

Table Top to Floor – this zone will be cleaned and completely changed out after each session. All surfaces will be sprayed and wiped down to include counters, chairs, and shelves, equipment including towel warmers will be disinfected, all linens, blankets, aprons, and towels will be bagged, pre measured one use oil containers and trash will be bagged and removed from the room for total containment at the finish of each session.

Welcome Back! We’re looking forward to seeing and working with you.

Heartland Massage and Bodywork Center Owner

Necia Gamby

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Muscle of the Month I hope will be an easy access tool to study or become familiar with different muscles and muscle groups of the body. I’ve added a link to a video that show anatomy and movement for reference here:
https://youtu.be/D3GVKjeY1FM
Thanks Arlando

I must give a huge shout out to The Books of Discovery Team for the use of these lovely images and permission to publish them here . . https://booksofdiscovery.com/product/trail-guide-to-the-body-flashcards-complete-set-6th-edition/ The above link takes to their latest edition. On the site we will using an earlier 4th edition.

We’re gonna start with Muscles of the Shoulder and Arm. These 3 cards give you a complete view of shoulder arm area. Starting next month we’ll be showcasing one or two muscle each month until we cover this complete muscle group. WooHoo!

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I love all the points that the author makes about living with an empath. At one point, Rebecca mentions that empathy is a blessing and a curse, and I couldn’t agree more. Speaking as an empath and operating more from my feeling center than thinking center, these are some observations about how to live as an empath.

1. Honor and appreciate the empathic, feeling state of consciousness.

Empaths often experience pressure for being different. Operating from the heart is a trait which the modern world looks down upon. Being different brings a great deal of challenges. It’s easy to be misunderstood by others, and then to take their disapproval within. Most sensitives that I have encountered try to deny this aspect of themselves at great cost.

Being empathic is a normal human trait. It’s a gift to be attuned within and without. Sensing moods of people and tones in environments is an essential ability for health. I’d even say that it’s a core survival trait: knowing who and what is a danger to oneself and one’s family.

2. Identify how empathic consciousness is different from thought consciousness.

Day and night have obvious differences because they are observable with the eye. Empathic awareness is much harder to identify because it cannot be seen. It is only felt and experienced within. By identifying the differences in how empathy works, its traits turn from a curse to a blessing. By knowing when the mind and its thoughts are dominant, self-knowledge is attained. Thoughts and feelings are different, and recognizing the differences and their internal results is liberating.

Rather than being pulled by energetic tides, observation gives a powerful defensive response to remain centered.

3. Believe your intuition—it is accurate.

Most empaths deny their gut-instinct. Never do this. Your intuition is accurate. This does not mean that the feeling can be fully understood or embraced. The knowledge may be incomplete. Yet, the feeling itself is real and there is a deeper communication occurring that needs to be embraced.

4. Just because it can be felt does not mean the observation is complete or fully understood.

Making assumptions based on a felt observation is a huge pitfall for sensitives. The connection between the feeling and thinking states has just as many complications as communication between men and women. The feeling and mental states are simply different. Reflecting on what the feelings may be trying to reveal is wise. Jumping to conclusions can bring disastrous results.

Because emotions are always in flux and have various depths, the messages may be mixed and hidden. They can change. Details and subtleties may become apparent with reflection and taking time to understand.

5. Notice the changing feelings within and identify key emotional states and what influences them.

One of the biggest gifts for an empath is relating to feelings and identifying different emotional states. This is similar to a musician who can identify different musical tones or an artist who recognizes various shades of colors.

The internal emotional landscape can change based on external influences; different people, environments, foods, sounds, scents and more can alter the empathic response. Being able to know who, what, how and why these feelings change enables empathy to become a gift. Rather than being driven by empathy, it allows responsiveness.

6. Nurture the states of feeling that you want to live with.

In being responsive and knowing which internal emotional states matter, empaths can do what it takes to feel right. A musician knows to play certain combinations to make particular sounds, and an artist knows which color combinations will create the desired form.

An empath can sculpt their emotional landscape by bringing into their life more of what works, and releasing what doesn’t.

7. Empaths are also “feeling” projectors.

Most empaths are unaware that the ability to sense emotions also grants the ability to project them. The influence happens regardless if one is aware of it or not.

An empath can influence the moods and feelings of other people and can alter the energetic climate of a room, eventor group of people. Most empaths do this unknowingly. Once you are able to see how this happens, it enables your mere presence to be a gift to others. It can also become a silent language, speaking disapproval or discontent without saying a word or even moving a muscle.

Awakening to this aspect of empathy empowers the sensitive to take responsibility for their sphere of influence and how their own moods, feelings and emotions can impact their family, friends and environments. This is why it is essential for empaths to wake up to their ability—honoring, appreciating, recognizing and taking responsibility for what happens within themselves.

8. Find ways to be an expressive empath through creative channels.

Empaths often don’t feel heard or understood. It is an internal domain that many people never understand. To rely on others for self-understanding can become a detriment and distraction.

More importantly, empaths often don’t know how to express their spirit. Other channels of communication are essential for getting those feelings out. Art, writing, music, dance, science—any form of active creativity that channels the creative source into tangible results clears the internal channels and is self-nurturing.

To close, I share the words of my most favored wisdom guides.

“May the force be with you.”

~ Yoda

Originally published at elephant journal.
Editor: Cat Beekmans

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Overwhelmed, Hersey wanted to quit school. Instead, she started napping. She napped in the campus quad, in the library, in the upholstered balcony pews of Cannon Chapel. It was transformative, she says, and enabled her to keep going. “I was healing. Naps really saved my life in that way.” Hersey talks about naps the way some people might describe a spiritual experience—because for her, that’s what they are. “Sleep is such a vulnerable place, and I believe that when you rest, it’s a healing portal,” she says. “You have space to talk and vent, to hope, to dream. You can work things out you can’t work out when you’re awake.”

The epiphany inspired her to research the idea of rest as both a healing mechanism for cultural trauma and a form of resistance against oppression. Hersey dug into the Emory library’s African American history archives, researching the lives and legacies of enslaved Africans who labored on Southern land, including her own ancestors. She studied this history through the lens of black liberation theology. “It was this whole examination of labor in the South, and how bodies are commodified, and how capitalism and white supremacy help that,” she says. Hersey talked to African Americans who’d lived through the Jim Crow era about how their decades-old trauma manifested physically. After exploring scientific research on how the brain uses sleep to process trauma, she became transfixed by the idea of rest as a form of reparations and sleep deprivation as an issue of racial and social justice. Rest wasn’t just personal; it was political.

In 2016, Hersey founded the Nap Ministry, initially as a kind of performance art experiment. She hosted its first collective napping event, which 40 people attended, the following May at Colony Square, three years before Killer Mike espoused similar ideas with the “Church of Sleep” in his Netflix show Trigger Warning. Since 2016, Hersey has led a dozen similar events, in both Atlanta and her hometown of Chicago.

Those attending the group naps are provided with yoga mats, pillows, blankets, and music. Hersey displays a Sleep Altar with candles, an anthology of first-person testimonies from enslaved people, and cotton from Southern farms—“I always like to ground the room in the space of our people before us who weren’t able to rest,” Hersey says.

As the “Nap Bishop,” Hersey, who’s 44, opens each event with meditation. After an hour of napping, she leads the group in a “nap talk,” wherein attendees can share any discoveries unearthed during their rest. Typically, at least one person sheds tears. “I really feel like we’re deprogramming people,” she says. “We’re pushing back against these systems telling us we should feel guilty for laying down and taking a nap.”

In April, Hersey announced a series of similar events held on the first Wednesday of each month at Oakhurst’s Yellow Mat Yoga. Studio owner Siha Collins met Hersey last year at an event for Lead to Life, a group of activists who volunteered to collect soil samples from lynching sites for an exhibit at Montgomery’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice. After the soil collection, they gathered at Yellow Mat with the jars of soil. Hersey led a ceremony for resting and remembrance. Her mission and ideals resonated deeply with Collins. “Resting was a skill I just didn’t have,” Collins says. “All of us need to learn what she’s teaching. Everybody knows what it’s like to need good sleep.”

Hersey’s sermon will soon reach a wider audience. Filmmaker Ebony Blanding first met Hersey four years ago and attended her first collective nap last year. She finds Hersey’s ideas revelatory: “Beautiful and so compassionate, but also so radical.” This fall, Blanding will direct And So They Rested, a 30-minute film starring Hersey proselytizing. “Instead of Tricia preaching about God, she’s preaching about rest,” Blanding says. The film, for which Blanding was awarded a $1,500 grant by Idea Capital, will be released in 2020.

Hersey hopes to secure a “nap temple” for the Ministry, which she envisions as a haven for anyone in Atlanta. Longer-term, she hopes to cultivate and build a movement around the idea of rest as radical resistance. “How can we resist these toxic systems that want us to be disconnected, that want us to work 80 hours a week, that want us to feel like we’re not worthy unless we’re producing something? This isn’t just about naps.”

This article appears in our May 2019 issue.
https://www.atlantamagazine.com/health/the-atlanta-nap-ministry-preaches-the-liberating-power-of-rest/?
=IwAR1GLcehrY2qMwRtugTr0t-ITUnuG8enaLyTo_YMSd7iVEGUdWGTWWyn6S4

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BY MARIA POPOVA

Friendship, C.S. Lewis believed, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself … has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” But the poetic beauty of this sentiment crumbles into untruth for anyone who has ever been buoyed from the pit of despair by the unrelenting kindness of a friend, or whose joys have been amplified by a friend’s warm willingness to bear witness.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry
I often puzzle over the nature, structure, and function of friendship in human life — a function I have found to be indispensable to my own spiritual survival and, I suspect, to that of most human beings. But during a recent interview on Think Again, I found myself concerned with the commodification of the word “friend” in our culture. We call “friends” peers we barely know beyond the shallow roots of the professional connection, we mistake mere mutual admiration for friendship, we name-drop as “friends” acquaintances associating with whom we feel reflects favorably on us in the eyes of others, thus rendering true friendship vacant of Emerson’s exacting definition. We have perpetrated a corrosion of meaning by overusing the word and overextending its connotation, compressing into an imperceptible difference the vast existential expanse between mere acquaintanceship and friendship in the proper Aristotelian sense.

In countering this conflation, I was reminded of philosopher Amelie Rorty’s fantastic 1976 taxonomy of the levels of personhood and wondered what a similar taxonomy of interpersonhood might look like. I envisioned a conception of friendship as concentric circles of human connection, intimacy, and emotional truthfulness, each larger circle a necessary but insufficient condition for the smaller circle it embraces. “I live my life in widening circles,” Rilke

Within the ether of strangers — all the humans who inhabit the world at the same time as we do, but whom we have not yet met — there exists a large outermost circle of acquaintances. Inside it resides the class of people most frequently conflated with “friend” in our culture, to whom I’ve been referring by the rather inelegant but necessarily descriptive term person I know and like. These are people of whom we have limited impressions, based on shared interests, experiences, or circumstances, on the basis of which we have inferred the rough outlines of a personhood we regard positively.

Even closer to the core is the kindred spirit — a person whose values are closely akin to our own, one who is animated by similar core principles and stands for a sufficient number of the same things we ourselves stand for in the world. These are the magnifiers of spirit to whom we are bound by mutual goodwill, sympathy, and respect, but we infer this resonance from one another’s polished public selves — our ideal selves — rather than from intimate knowledge of one another’s interior lives, personal struggles, inner contradictions, and most vulnerable crevices of character.

Some kindred spirits become friends in the fullest sense — people with whom we are willing to share, not without embarrassment but without fear of judgment, our gravest imperfections and the most anguishing instances of falling short of our own ideals and values. The concentrating and consecrating force that transmutes a kinship of spirit into a friendship is emotional and psychological intimacy. A friend is a person before whom we can strip our ideal self in order to reveal the real self, vulnerable and imperfect, and yet trust that it wouldn’t diminish the friend’s admiration and sincere affection for the whole self, comprising both the ideal and the real.

It is important to clarify here that the ideal self is not a counterpoint to the real self in the sense of being inauthentic. Unlike the seeming self, which springs from our impulse for self-display and which serves as a kind of deliberate mask, the ideal self arises from our authentic values and ideals. Although it represents an aspirational personhood, who we wish to be is invariably part of who we are — even if we aren’t always able to enact those ideals. In this sense, the gap between the ideal self and the real self is not one of insincerity but of human fallibility. The friend is one who embraces both and has generous patience for the rift between the two. A true friend holds us lovingly accountable to our own ideals, but is also able to forgive, over and over, the ways in which we fall short of them and can assure us that we are more than our stumbles, that we are shaped by them but not defined by them, that we will survive them with our personhood and the friendship intact.

For a complementary perspective, see poet and philosopher David Whyte on the true meaning of friendship and John O’Donohue on the ancient Celtic notion of “soul-friend.”

Special thanks to my friend Wendy MacNaughton for the diagrammatic inspiration

The post Reclaiming Friendship: A Visual Taxonomy of Platonic Relationships to Counter the Commodification of the Word “Friend” appeared first on Heartland Massage & Bodywork Center.

Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to not build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

The act of self-care has become yet another thing women are expected to be good at. Did you use the right filter for that ‘gram of your impeccably prepared acai bowl? Are the candles you just lit in your Snap story made from organic hand-poured soy or are they that mass-produced factory shit? And how can we stem the inevitable capitalist tide from turning something as simple as self-care into yet another thing to be bought and sold? These are all things I wrestle with as I order Dominos in sweatpants under the guise of ‘being good to myself.’
– quote via Amil Niazi

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it. TC mark

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BY Jessica Stillman
Contributor, Inc.com@EntryLevelRebel
http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/10-signs-you-have-exceptional-mental-strength.html?cid=sf01002

Just a few weeks ago here on Inc.com we published advice from psychotherapist Amy Morin laying out bad habits you need to break if you want to achieve incredible mental strength. But what if you read the list and were inspired to give your brain a workout, axing unhelpful thought patterns from your life and boosting your resilience? Certainly, you’d want to be able to gauge how you were doing.

Are you average when it comes to mental strength or has putting in some effort made you more resilient than most? In a follow-up piece on Business Insider, Morin offers a huge list of 21 tells that indicate your efforts are bearing fruit and that you’re now more mentally strong than most folks.

You can check out the complete list for a really deep dive, or read on for a taster of 10 signs of mental strength to watch out for if you’re looking to monitor your progress and celebrate your newfound resilience.

1. You balance emotion and logic
You can’t make good decisions without some emotion, but you can’t make good decisions with too much emotion either. The truly resilient strike the right balance. “Mentally strong people understand how their emotions can influence their thinking. In an effort to make the best decisions possible, they balance their emotions with logic,” Morin says.

2. You feel confident you can adapt to change
Change is a constant. That reality doesn’t stress out the truly mentally strong. “Mentally strong people know that although change is uncomfortable, it’s tolerable. They focus their energy on adapting to change, rather than resisting it,” claims Morin.

3. You face your fears
Everyone has fears and not every one of them needs to be conquered, but the very resilient among us “strive to face the fears that hold them back,” Morin says.

4. You learn from your mistakes.
Don’t justify them. Don’t hide from them. Learn from them. That’s what mentally strong people do.

5. You balance self-acceptance with self-improvement
This is tough to get right, but according to Morin, “mentally strong people accept themselves for who they are, while simultaneously recognizing their need for personal development.”

6. You celebrate others’ success
If you truly feel strong, there’s nothing to fear when others do well–in fact, there’s a great reason to celebrate. The truly mentally strong “don’t feel as though other people’s success somehow diminishes their own achievements,” Morin says. So if you sense your feelings of envy are diminishing, take it as a good sign that your resilience is improving.

7. You live according to your values
“Mentally strong people make decisions with relative ease because they understand their priorities and they live according to their values,” notes Morin.

8. You don’t need to achieve to feel good about yourself
It’s natural to feel good when you succeed and bad when you fail, but the mentally strong don’t let the ups and downs of life interfere with their essential self-image. “Mentally strong people feel good about themselves, whether they win or lose,” Morin insists. Next time life deals you a blow, then, notice how deeply it affects you. If you can shrug it off more easily without feeling too bad about yourself, congratulations! You’ve likely achieved a high measure of mental strength.

9. You express gratitude
It’s easy to look around and see all the things you lack, but the mentally strong choose to focus their attention on the things they do have–and feel grateful for them. Do you?

10. You don’t try to hide your weaknesses
Not only does trying to mask your weaknesses waste your energy, it also makes you less likely to put in the work necessary to improve these areas. “While many people work hard to disguise their vulnerabilities, mentally strong people invest their energy into improving their shortcomings,” Morin says.

How many of these 10 behaviors do you exhibit?

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October 7, 2015 by Jessica

Let’s talk about the sewer system of your body. Did you know the lymphatic system circulates, cleans, and filters all the leftover blood in the body? Surprisingly, there are three times more lymph than blood in the body. It is far too important not to educate people about this before society’s toxic, consumeristic products overwhelm our most important detoxification system.

The gut contains up to 80% of our immune cells. They’re contained in GALT, or gut associated lymphatic tissue. From our tonsils and adenoids in the throat to our colon, the gut is the storehouse of the lymphatic system. Lymphocytes, or white blood cells that are part of the lymphatic system, are also stored and made in the thymus behind the heart, the spleen, appendix, bone marrow, and lymph nodes scattered throughout the body. See how important mouth to colon health is? Why would the body put nearly our entire immune system there if exposure to food wasn’t so vital?
What is the lymphatic system’s role?
It is the sewer system of the body. The body pumps 90% blood and returns it to the heart. The other 10% comprise what is known as lymph and has no pump to return it to lymphatic channels for disposal. All viruses, bacteria, toxins, cancer cells, and chemicals are passed through the lymph, where the body is alerted if a foreign particle needs to be removed.
Just think about it! Every cancer diagnosis comes with a lymph node biopsy. Why? The lymphatics are the leftover blood which covers every organ routinely on a daily basis. If it isn’t moving properly (like in most Western countries, due to the Standard American Diet), then toxins and cancer cells cannot be emptied into lymphatic ducts which eventually lead to the detoxification methods in the liver/kidneys. Waste is then permanently disposed of by the bowels. These toxins fester in the system and are not recognized by the immune system in the lymph, but are still slowly exposed to organs where they “seed” that organ and cause metastasis.
This is how cancer spreads. This is why every diagnosis comes with a lymph node biopsy and it’s BAD news if cancer is located there. It’s been carried all over the body and Western medicine now initiates poisonous chemotherapy due to systemic spread. Chemo does not have the capability to discriminate between healthy cells and carcinogenic cells, therefore, it creates apoptosis, or cell death, for every cell in its path. This explains why it is absolutely necessary to keep the lymph system moving and healthy so it can alert the immune cells if there’s a problem and swiftly move lymph to the liver for detoxification and to the colon for removal.
The lymphatic system is exposed to a myriad of toxins daily, including cigarette smoke, pollution, exhausts, prescription pill ingredients, food additives, chemicals, and pesticides. On top of that, most of us eat improperly, so we are lacking nutrients that serve as fuel. If we aren’t putting the proper essential amino acids, vitamins, and minerals in our system, then at some point, the system will falter. Symptoms of a sluggish lymphatic system include but are not limited to:
Swollen fingers or bloating
AM Soreness/stiffness
Exhaustion
Constipation
Discoloration of legs
Breast swelling or soreness with each cycle
Dry or itchy skin
Brain fog
Cold hands/feet/poor circulation
Cellulite
Here are some simple tips to get the lymph flowing again, incorporated from Ayurvedic science:
1. Exercise! What pumps lymph? Remember, the lymph system doesn’t have a heart. Movement of muscles stimulate valves in the veins which help to churn lymph upwards towards the heart. Anything that creates moments of zero gravity also helps move lymph (think trampolines or roller coasters)! Also called rebounding, creating zero gravity helps the lymph move upwards to the heart and axillary lymph channels. This usually requires muscular effort that is pushing against gravity. With even a few seconds of no gravity, the lymph has an easier time making its return.
2. Inversions also pull lymph towards the heart from the lower extremities. What do you get when you add exercise+inversions? YOGA. Yoga has been known to detoxify and rejuvenate many sluggish lymph systems. Hot yoga also helps speed up the process through perspiration. Sweat is a potent detoxifier!
3. Positive and negative pressure from deep, diaphragmatic breathing is a great way to move lymph towards lymphatic channels. Our bodies have far more lymph than blood so pranayama breathing in yoga as well as slow, deep breaths throughout the day help to filter lymph and move it properly. Again, yoga is quite beneficial.
4. Diet is imperative. Make sure you’re eliminating boxed or processed food. Avoid GMO or pesticides. Eat whole food and accentuate a plant based diet. Eat with the seasons, meaning warm food in the winter and cooling foods in summer. The lymph literally becomes thickened like gravy once the toxin load reaches its threshold. Eat raw fruit alone on an empty stomach. In Ayurveda, it’s known for its lymph-cleansing properties. Remember, it’s far easier to prevent disease than to cure it later.
5. Dry brush in the morning. Use a natural bristle brush and brush towards the heart where the lymphatic duct is located. Lymph drains in this direction. Brush upwards on the arms and legs towards the heart, using a circular motion.
6. Drink lots of lukewarm water. Ditch the sugary drinks and sweets! Water lubricates the lymph and lets it flow easier. Cold water can actually hinder digestion. Make sure you have a fluoride filter.
7. Massages, preferably gentle, stimulate the majority of stagnant lymph up to the heart. Stress can also play a role in poor lymph flow and massages can aid with this too. There are even lymph specific massages which are skillful at removing infections through manipulation of lymph. Remember the lymphatic system is mostly immune cells!
8. Low iodine has also been reported to be a sign of improper lymph flow. Lugol’s iodine helps to support toxin removal from lymph. Always be sure to contact your healthcare provider before starting a new medication.
9. Eat red foods like pomegranates, cherries, beets, and cranberries! All have lymph stimulating qualities and are used in Ayurveda to cleanse the system.
Treat your body with love. It is your temple, and a healthy physical body is one of the keys to mental and spiritual health.
Sources:
1. Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, 16th Edition
The lymphatic system
2. The Fat Flush Plan by Ann Louise Gittleman, PhD
3. www.lifespa.com: The Miracle of Lymph-Dr John Douillard’s Lifespa

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“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”

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Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
Editor notes
Desiderata are, technically, things considered necessary or highly desirable OR something lacked and wanted.
The poem is a list of things desirable in life.

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