The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) has defined pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with ACTUAL or POTENTIAL tissue damage”.
Pain is personal, difficult for an outsider to understand fully, but it is not unusual—all of us have some understanding of pain. Each individual learns through experiences related to injury early in life.
Acute pain is usually adaptive and can alert us to something that is harmful.
Persistent pain is not adaptive. This may not indicate tissue damage, but it also triggers those psychological responses that have been learned at an early age and with past painful events.
Letting Go of Stress
Did you know stress is energy-based and one cannot see stress in the body under a microscope? We can only see the effects of stress and what it does to the body and mind. Never relaxing fully, never truly breathing deeply – your body is unable to go into parasympathetic mode, which means there is no healing and no digesting. What are you doing daily to allow your body to de-stress? Bars sessions are like cleaning out the hard drive of your brain to be more in the now and to think clearer. Are you ready to let go of stress now?
Clean Eating Recipe: Winter Fruit Salad
Fruit salads aren’t just for warmer weather. Enjoy this delicious raw winter salad, chock-full of health benefits! Ingredients: 1 Tbsp. lemon juice, 3 apples cut into 1-inch cubes, 1/8 tsp. cinnamon, 1 cup red grapes (seedless), 1 tsp. maple syrup, 1/2 cup pomegranate seeds, 1/2 cup almond yogurt, 1/2 cup raw shredded pumpkin. Directions: Combine all ingredients and refrigerate for 15 minutes to set. Serve and enjoy!
Book Club
Hack Your Anxiety: How to Make Anxiety Work for You in Life, Love, and All That You Do. What if anxiety is not a monster to be tamed, but a resource to be tapped? In this revolutionary book, Dr. Alicia Clark recognizes anxiety as the unsung hero in the path to success and happiness. It can become the motivating force that will lead to a better you, and The Anxiety Advantage aims to restore anxiety to its rightful place as a positive resource. Reclaim your anxiety as a powerful energy source, ad bring yourself peace, growth and success.
Time for Change
Access Bars – A simple body process that is changing the world. There are two things that will change anything in your life; choice, and Access Bars. The Access Bars are the very core and foundation of Access Consciousness. It can be the starting point of a great adventure, and it can be something you add to your life that will assist you in creating a greater ease with everything. Access Bars has assisted thousands of people to change many aspects of their body and their life including sleep, health and weight, money, love making and relationships, anxiety, stress, and so much more. During a Bars session, a practitioner lightly touches 32 points on your head over the course of an hour to an hour and a half. Touching the bars allows for the electromagnetic charge that holds thoughts, feelings, and emotions in place to dissipate, allowing you to perceive
Keeping Cold & Flu Bugs at Bay
At this time of year, I’m sure you know it’s important to get rest, eat healthy, and exercise so your immune system can function at its highest potential. However, life gets busy and the next thing we know, we’re under the weather with a cold or flu bug. For moments like these a little help to fight those bugs can provide your body much needed welcome relief. Consider a high-quality cold-pressed oregano oil and black seed oil. Look for a combination with vitamins A & D added to give your immune system the best tools to beat the bugs and jumpstart your immune system!
Getting Enough Magnesium
Our diets are providing less magnesium than they used to. The composition of what we eat and the quality of our foods has drastically changed over the past hundred years, and this has made it difficult for even the most health-conscious Canadians to get enough magnesium.
Magnesium is involved in many processes throughout the body. Overstimulating these processes will result in an increase in our magnesium requirements. For instance, when we suffer from high stress, our body produces a hormone protein called cortisol. Producing and regulating this hormone means spending and excreting more magnesium. High-sugar diets also cause more magnesium to be used.
Exercise for SAD
SAD stands for Seasonal Affected Disorder, which is mainly attributed to the reduction in sunlight hours in winter and is your body’s reaction to the changes in season. With SAD you might feel sluggish or moody, have a loss of appetite, and even lose interest in activities you normally love. One way to combat these feelings and the wintertime blues is to get your body moving! Exercise, even light exercise, has been shown to improve mood and energy through increased blood flow and the release of certain endorphins, as well as improve sleep and alertness, and reduce anxiety and stress.
Should You Stop Driving?
As we age, driving may become more difficult or stressful due to health issues, vision problems, or slower reaction times. So, how can we tell when it might be time to stop driving? If you answer yes to some of the following questions, consider having a conversation with your doctor or looking into getting a driving assessment done. Ask yourself: Have I had some accidents, even minor ones? Do I get lost even on roads I know well? Do I have trouble staying in my lane? Do other drivers often honk at me? Do things seem to appear out of nowhere?
Core Exercises and the Pelvic Floor
Core Exercises and The Pelvic Floor Your abdominal muscle strength may exceed the ability of your pelvic floor. If you have, or are at risk of, pelvic floor problems, it is important you train for the “weakest link” and out your pelvic floor first. There are several ways to modify your core exercises to protect your pelvic floor. *Crease strong abdominal exercises. *Reduce the level of your abdominal muscle exercise program. *Avoid breath holding by exhaling with effort. *Maintain good posture. *Lift your pelvic floor first and hold it during the exercise, then relax after. *Notice how many repetitions you can do before your pelvic floor muscle tire. You may need to add some rests or reduce the number of repetitions until your pelvic floor muscle fitness improves.
Essential Oils for Stress Relief
Scents are powerful — a simple smell can immediately trigger a powerful memory, place, or person. Scents have power to evoke emotions and memories instantly and can directly impact our bodies through our nervous system. If you experience stress (like most of us) – relaxation is only a whiff away! The best essential oils for de-stressing include rose, clary sage, frankincense, lavender, bergamot, marjoram, ylang-ylang, lemon, geranium, orange, sandalwood, chamomile, and vetiver. An easy trick for alleviating tension in 30 seconds flat? Massage an oil blend with calming scents into your temples, which are pressure points.


