Aching back? Is it sitting posture? Or is it something else?

Aching Back? Sitting Up Straight Could Be The Culprit offers an interesting light on the problem of our aching backs. Some doctors in Scotland use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment to study the biomechanics of sitting posture to see if they could determine the optimal posture. They showed that sitting in an upright position places unnecessary strain on your back, leading to potentially chronic pain problems if you spend long hours sitting.

Their observation is that our bodies did not evolve in with a 90 degree body-thigh angle in mind. Instead the optimal body-thigh angle was found to be 130 degrees. In other words those kneeler chairs are pretty close to an optimal body-thigh angle. Another kind of chair that would be beneficial is one whose back reclines easily.

I'm having a hard time imagining a desk and chair arrangement where you can easily work while sitting in a chair that reclines to give you a 130 degree body-thigh angle. The kneeler chairs seem more feasible in this regard.

However let me offer a different consideration, which my chiropractor constantly is drumming into me. Stretching, walking, exercise, etc.

The problem, she says, is probably more to do with sitting for a long time. Modern life has most of us in work situations where we sit for long periods, perhaps in front of a computer. These force us to take body positions that are unnatural and leads to back pain and wrist problems like the carpal tunnel syndrome.

There's a simple solution, she says. Get up every 40 minutes or so, take a break, and walk around a bit. And, she recommends, stretch your muscles.

What I'm learning is, our bodies evolved through millennia to be physically active. Most of our ancestors did not work for long hours in unnatural sitting positions, like we do. Hence our bodies work better if they move around regularly and do strenuous things. So, why not incorporate some of that into your daily regimine?

There are some simple stretching exercises, or Yoga if you prefer, that can help you build strength in your muscles. And these stretching exercises act to loosen the muscles that may be learning to stay tight because you're sitting for long periods.

Choosing what direction you take in life

What is your purpose? Where is your life taking you? How do you decide the life you are going to live?

These are universal questions, ones I've been pondering very much lately. I had an interesting inspiration this morning I'd like to share.

Riding my motorcycle on the way to work I was in a curve I regularly take. Halfway through this curve there is an entrance into a parking lot, and today I was behind pair of cars, one took the turn into that parking lot, and the other did not. Which struck me as exemplifying choice. One went one way, the other went the other way.

Life is a series of choices. Where you end up in life is based on the choices you make. Constantly, choices. Every day you choose to go to work, or whether to call your boss and tell him/her what to do with that stinking job. And the choices are far more continual than that, because every step you walk, every breath you take, every word you say, every moment is a choice. Your life is made of those choices.

Riding the motorcycle exemplifies one aspect of life and making choices. When you're taking a curve on a motorcycle, inertia, centripetal forces, gyroscopic forces, the friction of rubber meeting the road, and more, all go together to place you in a delicate maneuver. On a motorcycle in a curve your choices are pretty limited so you had better look ahead and make your choice before entering the curve.

If we choose to fly, what keeps us anchored to the ground? There is more to life than simply the choices you make. The choices you make occur within a context, and the context acts to shape your choices into the results.

A few years ago I had been having these dreams about jumping off a cliff, and flying. Shortly after I found myself on a trip in Arizona, in a national park, standing at the top of a cliff, and thinking about that dream. If I had taken the dream literally I might have chosen to jump off the cliff expecting to fly. But I suppose if I had chosen that course I wouldn't be here typing this message to you, would I?

The context we live our lives in is this material world. It follows laws which the physicists call Inertia and Gravity which go together to say that if I had chosen to jump off that cliff expecting to fly, Gravity would have grabbed ahold of me causing me to plummet to the bottom of the cliff several hundred feet below.

Another context is our bodies. We inhabit human bodies and the nature of our bodies give us a certain perspective whereas if we inhabited the body of a household cat we might have a different perspective. The perspective and nature of the body we inhabit give our choices room to fly (in some cases, if we inhabit a bird) or they also limit us in some ways (for instance, birds do not have hands or arms).

What are books on Divorce doing in the Business books section?

I had an idea to check out the business books sections for books about sustainable business. I didn't find much, instead the books appeared to be all about greed and making zillions of dollars. Like Find It, Fix It, Flip It!: Make Millions in Real Estate--One House at a Time, a book about making a zillion bucks by fixing up broken down old houses. Like Internet Riches: The Simple Money-making Secrets of Online Millionaires and other get-rich-quick schemes. Like Power and Persuasion: How to Command Success in Business and Your Personal Life and other books about dominating your way to the top.

A small percentage of the books are about being a centered and soul-inspired business participant, and I did buy one of those.

What shocked me was finding books on Divorce in the middle of the Business section. Not one book but 3 or 4 of them.

Living as if my decisions matter

What affect do we have on others? What effect do we have on the quality of society or environmental conditions we live in?

You and I are just one person. What can we do? How can we affect world issues? How can we make peace happen in the world? As one person, what can you or I do?

All sorts of decisions are made for us ahead of time. What kind of food can we buy and is it nutricious? That decision is made by the restaurents and grocery stores. Do the clothes we wear or the furnishings in our house contain toxic chemicals that are slowly poisoning us? That decision is made by the manufacturer and regulated by the government.

It goes on and on. In the U.S.A. we have a dizzying array of choices in the stores, and we have a lot of personal freedom. But there are limits and to a large degree most choices are predetermined by big organizations. They choose the quality of the air, the quality of the water, the kind of food we have available, the kind of cars we have available, the sort of transportation system in our cities, the way electricity is delivered and generated, the makeup of all the products, etc. All that is predetermined by those big organizations.

The "choice" in our stores and in our life seems to me to be an illusion. Any time a decision has predetermined parameters, you control the outcome of the decision. It's just like when one person is asking questions, the choice of questions the questioner asks tends to limit the respondant in their answers. By limiting the range of choice the big organizations tend to control the outcome.

The oil companies for example want to keep us from choosing alternative energy sources besides oil. So in cahoots with the car companies they've gone to great lengths to control the politics of the country and the beliefs of the people so that the only feasible choice people can make is to continue driving oil-burning cars.

Spiritual teachings say we have complete freedom of choice. We can choose anything we want at any time. Well, I suppose our power of choice is ultimately limited by the behavior of the physical universe. I don't know anybody who has chosen the ability to fly, for example.

Excercising freedom of choice offers a liberation, it offers choosing your own destiny rather than living by the destiny others have chosen for you. Where one goes in life is pretty much determined by the choices they make as they go through life. Obviously there are other choices made by other people which also effect where one goes in life. Living in this world is, after all, a cooperative endeavor.

Excercising freedom of choice can mean going against the status quo and perhaps facing ridicule from those around you.

For example take the alternative choice for powering your vehicle than oil. You can choose to ride a bicycle everywhere, you can choose several alternative fuels like biodiesel or natural gas, or you can choose an electric car. All those have their own difficulties and tradeoffs, but those are choices you can make which do not involve burning fossil fuel (oil).

Excercising freedom of choice can affect the choices others make. If someone sees you doing something, like driving an electric car, that might lead them to thinking an electric car is okay after all.

Excercising freedom of choice sends a message to the big organizations. It is your money and every time you spend your money on X versus Y that's like voting in an election. The dollars spent by all the purchasers of X tend to reinforce the manufacturers to make X and other products like it.

An herbal way to beat the heat

On my other blog site I've written an article about cooling off without having to run the air conditioner.

Air conditioners are useful in making our houses more livable. However, the cost to air conditioners is they amplify the advance of global warming. There's more details on the blog entry (linked above) but this acceleration of global warming happens because air conditioners effectively shift heat from inside buildings to outside, plus the electricity required to run the air conditioner adds carbon to the atmosphere directly affecting the greenhouse gasses and directly causing more climate change.

For the time being it's perhaps best to avoid air conditioners. Perhaps in the future humanity might develop a way to generate electricity without adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. Well, some methods for that have already been developed, but the powers that be don't see it fit to actually deploy those methods. So for the time being the use of air conditioners will simply make the heating problem worse. It's kind of like squeezing a baloon, which just makes the baloon plump up elsewhere.

Anyway .. I want to discuss a little about herbal ways to cool off.

Air conditioning is a recent invention, which means our ancestors have for thousands of years been developing ways to beat the heat using other means.

I want to go over some herbal treatments to help one cool off, which come from Healing with the Herbs of Life

First let's discuss a general principle. Every herb or food substance has a heating or cooling nature. That nature isn't directly related to the temperature of the thing, but has to do with the chemical and energetic makeup of the herb or food. For example cinnamon is a heating herb, and the company that makes the Red Hots candy knows this very well because Red Hots are made from cinnamon.

If you ingest a heating food or herb on a hot day, that's just going to make your body hotter. Likewise if you ingest a cooling food or herb on a hot day, that'll make your body cooler. And, again, this doesn't have to do with the temperature of the thing, though a cold beverage of course will have an cooling effect. We're just looking at a way to amplify it by also using the right herbs or foods.

Cools and releases the exterior: These are said to be used for "wind heat" conditions that inlcude sweating and thirst, severe sore throat, intense headache, etc. Mint, peppermint, Lemon, Chrysanthemum, feverfew, boneset

Clear summer heat: This has to do with over-exposure to heated conditions, heat exhaustion, profuse sweating, fever, irritability, sunburn, sunstroke, etc. Diuretics and antipyretics are recommended, with examples being watermelon, mung bean, soybeans and cucumber.

There are other heat conditions covered in the book. However, just like the heating or cooling nature of herbs do not have anything to do with the temperature of the herb, so do the conditions that chinese medicine calls heat. For example inflammation is a heat condition, which you can see for yourself because the inflamed muscles are themselves hot to the touch. The herbal way to treat inflamation is with herbs that cool inflammation such as gardenia or bungleweed.

It's interesting that watermelon and cucumber are both popular summertime foods, and they are recommended as a method to clear summer heat. If you think about how watermelon or cucumber salad feels in your mouth, don't they have a cold nature? It's that cold nature that the herbalists recognize as producing the cooling effect in your body.

Mint is an interesting example. In the Middle East there's a traditional drink, senkajabin, which is made with mint. There's also the Mint Julep, a popular drink in the Old South. Even if you make a hot tea with mint, it will cool you off. Isn't that interesting?

Side Effects

Side Effects is a movie about the drug industry. Not the illegal drug industry, but the legal one, the one that controls the kind of medicine we can receive in order that they can continue selling us drugs.

You can buy it from amazon.com who says: Plot Synopsis: KARLY HERT has spent the last ten years selling drugs...legally, that is. Although conflicted on a daily basis by the values within the pharmaceutical industry, and industry driven by profits at the expense of patients; Karly has been seduced by the golden handcuffs of corporate America. Enter ZACH DANNER, who convinces Karly to be true to her values and walk away from her lucrative but empty job. As their relationship blossoms, Karly devises a plan to get out. But leaving is never quite as easy as it seems...

A related movie is Money Talks - Profits Before Patient Safety. The maker of Side Effects raised so many concerns with that movie, that she turned to experts and produced this documentary. Plot Synopsis: Money Talks explores the many questions surrounding the ethical and societal implications of the marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It is a gripping documentary that features interviews with key opinion leaders from Harvard, Columbia, UCLA and more. These experts frankly discuss pharmaceutical influence as it relates to consumers, physicians, research, the FDA and Capitol Hill.

Side Effects

Side Effects is a movie about the drug industry. Not the illegal drug industry, but the legal one, the one that controls the kind of medicine we can receive in order that they can continue selling us drugs.

You can buy it from amazon.com who says: Plot Synopsis: KARLY HERT has spent the last ten years selling drugs...legally, that is. Although conflicted on a daily basis by the values within the pharmaceutical industry, and industry driven by profits at the expense of patients; Karly has been seduced by the golden handcuffs of corporate America. Enter ZACH DANNER, who convinces Karly to be true to her values and walk away from her lucrative but empty job. As their relationship blossoms, Karly devises a plan to get out. But leaving is never quite as easy as it seems...

A related movie is Money Talks - Profits Before Patient Safety. The maker of Side Effects raised so many concerns with that movie, that she turned to experts and produced this documentary. Plot Synopsis: Money Talks explores the many questions surrounding the ethical and societal implications of the marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It is a gripping documentary that features interviews with key opinion leaders from Harvard, Columbia, UCLA and more. These experts frankly discuss pharmaceutical influence as it relates to consumers, physicians, research, the FDA and Capitol Hill.