Avoidance Is Not Helpful

Written By Don Shetterly

This subject is one I still haven't fully learned.  Maybe it is because it is a human condition that we employ when things get a little too tough.  Avoidance is one of my go-to-coping skills, but when I avoid things, I tend to make them worse.  It was my survival tactic growing up in a world full of trauma and abuse.


Take for example the recent tooth pain that I kept trying to mask and ignore.  I found ways to compensate for it that kept me disconnected from it.  I'm amazed at just how far I went so I didn't have to deal with it.  I avoided it instead, and by doing this, I've probably caused myself a lot more expense.

Avoidance is being employed by almost everyone at record setting paces these days.  Times are tough in life right now.  We are going through horrible moments as a civilization on this planet.  The atmosphere and energy all around are divisive and toxic.  Everywhere you look there is something that is upsetting.  Even if you try to distance yourself from all of it, the feeling of that toxic energy is still prevalent.

We Turn To Things That Distract Us...

To deal with it, we do as I did on the tooth pain.  We turn to things that distract us and keep us from dealing with reality.  We consume things to help give us comfort.  We act all happy and smiles when we're crumbling inside.  We put our attention on anything but the moment that is happening before us because it is just too difficult.

Avoidance can be good in the short term.  It may help you get from one moment to the next so you can deal with the issue.  However, when we continue to avoid the issues that are troubling, we only do harm to our body, mind, and spirit.  We take in the toxic poison as if it is our sustenance, thereby hurting us for years to come.

Avoidance brings us out of consciousness and awareness.  It puts us in the passenger seat instead of being in control of our life.  When we are out of control, the fear and panic and despair set in causing us further long term effects.

During these times of immense stress and toxic poisoning, we owe it to ourselves to reverse the course.  There are things we can do to help alleviate it and take care of ourselves, rather than just giving in to what is happening.

Here are some things that help in moments like this.

• Try spending some time outdoors listening to the birds and feeling the rays of the sun upon your face.  Try feeling the wind or breeze on your skin and just feel every bit of it that you can.  

• Trying focusing on your breathing for 30 seconds or a minute at various times during your day.  Connect and feel your breath.  This does not need to be elaborate and can be very simple. The act of stopping and noticing your breath can be very centering and be grounding in your body.

• Learn to disengage from the toxic conversations occurring online for they are not as helpful as they may seem.  They get the body and mind all revved up as if you are going into battle.  Online conversations do little but fuel the fire and hatred that is so prevalent in our society these days.  If you disengage, you are stating to yourself that you are valuable and worth more.

• Learn to shut off the TV because the news is not enlightening as you may think.  The videos and sounds and opinions stated are meant to engage you into an emotional reaction.  The more you keep your emotions wound up to the max, the less you are connected to your body.  In time, it leads to avoidance of your mind and body.

We all have choices we make.  We may or may not be conscious and aware of them, but we make these decisions every day.  Either we employ avoidance, or we stand up and choose differently what we engage with in a day and all that we take in with each moment we are alive.

You don't' have to hide your head in the sand to what is going on, but a fraction of the toxic poisoning these days is more than enough.  It may help to picture yourself drinking a glass of toxic poisoning each time you engage with what is going on in the world.  However, before long the effects of the poisoning would be felt.

If we want to change the world, we need to stop avoiding life and learn how to give our mind and body a choice of rest and peace, comfort, and love.  We need to choose wisely because if we don't, we will pass the point of no return, and then it will be difficult to find our balance.

What are some ways you avoid difficult things in life?  What do you do to deal with them?  Share your thoughts in a comment below.

Follow Me On

• Twitter:  @MindBodyThought

• Facebook:   MindBodyThoughts

---

Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

---

Main Causes Of Death

Well, ain't this blog a downer!  After all, who wants to think about the  top three main causes of death.  Unfortunately, when I saw this list the other day in a class I took, I was kind of shocked.

Maybe you're not as shocked as I am.

In fact, as I look at this list, I'm thinking to myself that many of them could probably be altered.  In a way, it feels like they are something we can do something about in this country.

Yet, why do we not do the things that we need to do to make ourselves truly more healthy?

Top three main causes of death

1. Heart Disease
2. Cancer
3. Medical Errors

Before reading any further, take a look at the list again. 

Let it sink in for a few moments.

Heart Disease

Heart Disease is something that can be impacted I think by lifestyle and healing those rough experiences in your life.  If you don't eat right and push garbage into your body, you're only going to get garbage out in the way of disease, illness and in this case, heart disease.

There are far too many broken hearts out there and hearts that have had to endure far too much pain.  In fact, if you read the ACE study, you'll see how past experiences and trauma physically impact the body.  Take a look at an earlier blog post I wrote on "The Bomb In The Brain" for more details.

The point is, there are things that we can do and change in our daily life that will impact our body in a positive way.  We only have one heart and if we beat the crap out of it every day of our lives, can we expect any different result?

If we are living a sedentary lifestyle with no activity, a poor diet, and not dealing with things in our life, we're just setting ourselves up for this ultimate cause of death.

You may want to read Jeff's article on The Truth About Sugar and Heart Disease.

Cancer

Next up is Cancer.  We had a personal loss in our family with this one and it is not easy to watch someone go through it.  Cancer is growing to alarming rates.  When I was a kid, it was something you heard people getting every now and then.  Now, it seems as if everyone knows someone with cancer or who died from cancer.

While I realize a lot of research is still going into this, there are lifestyle things that we can do to change it.  Again, if you fail to take care of your body and your mind, you are just setting yourself up for failure and disease at some point in the future.

One of the last things a family member said to me before she passed away was to cut down on sugar.  I have been trying to do that, but I also know that some of the stuff that goes in our food is no more healthy than sugar.  If you're not reading the labels on what you buy at the store or paying attention to what you eat in restaurants, you're walking into a mine field.

What we are doing in this country is not working and in order to change things, we need to change our approach.  I don't believe taking more medications is the answer.  This is my personal opinion and belief.   I believe there are other ways to take care of ourselves that are natural, not for the profits of a pharmaceutical industry.

Each day, we do our smoothies made from fresh and whole vegetables and fruits found in our local grocery store.  We blend it up and it helps not only digestion, but we just don't get flu and colds like we once did.  No, I do not buy into the flu vaccinations either.  I do natural stuff instead and even if I pick up a little virus, usually by the next day, it is improving.  We have seen remarkable effects of doing these smoothies and I would urge you to read my blog post on "Healing Diseases With Smoothies"

Medical Errors

The last one up on the list is medical errors. This one shocks and horrifies me, especially knowing just how addicted we are these day to surgeries and procedures.  I know that in Florida as a Licensed Massage Therapist, we are required to take CEU's on medical errors to renew our licenses.  I'm sure most of the medical professional in this state are required to do that as well.  I'm not sure what other states require.  Obviously the training is not working!

Just think about this for a moment.  Someone's death has been caused by a medical error and it is the third leading cause of death.  It is mind blowing to me.  I can't even begin to comprehend this.  Yet, we are looking for surgeries and procedures to help save us from ourselves.  Take a look at Dr. John Sarno's book, The Mind Body Prescription. It is mind blowing some of his pioneering discoveries that are still being ignored to this day.

Instead of taking care of ourselves and realizing that we are in control of our health, not our doctors, we're opting for surgeries and procedures that are putting us at risk of death through medical errors.  Does that make sense to anyone?  Perhaps, there is a different way we should be doing things with our health?

Health Care System

We are reaching a critical mass period I think in our health care system.  No, it is not the fault of some politician or some company or whatever it is you may feel.  It is the result of each one of us not taking care of ourselves and being so numb and disconnected to our body, that we don't see what is happening until it is too late.

Our body sends us messages, but more often than not, we don't hear the messages and even if we do, we don't listen.  We push our bodies beyond the limits.  We put garbage into them expecting them to just balance and keep going.  We allow the food industry to entice us with healthy stuff and then eat as if there is no tomorrow.  We sit at our computers and in front of our video games and TV, hoping that a trip to the refrigerator for another beer or more food will be all the exercise and activity we need.

Surely we can do better as humans.  Surely, our brains know much more than this.  Each one of us has a much greater impact on our health than we realize or even care to think about in a day.  We just know that we've got health insurance and our doctor will give us a pill or a surgery or a procedure to make us all better.  Unfortunately, we're living in an illusion.

It is up to each one of us to choose how we will live our life and what we will do to our mind and body.  If we choose wisely, it has good benefits.  If we continue to make poor choices, than we may become another statistic in the main causes of death.

#Health

---

Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

---

What More Could You Be Doing?

Our health is one of those things that we think about, know about, and act on every day, but sometimes we just don't do as much for our heath as we should.  So, my question to you is, what more could you be doing for your health?

It sounds like such a simple question but in all reality it is not.  If we all did as much for our health as we should, our country and the world would be far healthier than it is.  Health care costs would be lower and people would most likely not be as cranky because of pain.

Part of the problem is that we see the doctors as holding the key to our health, rather than impacting our health through our daily actions and activities.  We think because we have insurance for when something goes wrong, that we can put off the little healthy activities that add up.  It is part of our human behavior to do this.

I am always amused when I hear people talk about how healthy they eat.  I worked in a fast food restaurant and people would order the salad bar and then add on fries and a milkshake.  I always sat there dumbfounded, but hey in the fast food world, its profits over health.  We weren't allowed to encourage people to think about what they eat.  We were to sell them as much as we could get them to eat.

People talk about how healthy they are...

I see people talk about how healthy they eat, but then if you go into the grocery store of certain areas, it does not match what people claim.  If you look at the overall obesity in these same areas, there is plenty of evidence that people don't eat as healthy as they think they do.  Look at how much produce is purchased versus how many soft drinks, snacks, and processed foods go through the cash registers.

How many people go and gulp down sugar-flavored coffee drinks every day.  Do you realize just how many calories are in one of those things?  If not, do a google search and you'll find the answer.

If you aren't reading the labels in the grocery store, you're eating stuff that is of questionable value and most likely full of sugar or other things that do nothing for your health.  I am constantly amazed at what is put into foods in the grocery store.  It blows my mind and if you don't read every label, you're going to get bamboozled.

Activity that gets you moving...

How many people go out and walk or take part in activity that gets them moving where they can burn some calories, move the toxins from the cells, and get those joints a rocking?  We've all got the same amount of minutes in a day and its really up to us in how we use those minutes.  Are you being effective with your minutes?  If not, what can  you do to change that?

Diabetes is fast becoming a major health issue in this country and so much of this is caused by lifestyle choices.  If you keep dumping sugar and junk into your body, sooner or later it is going to catch up.  Why not start cutting back on sugary drinks or sugar in your diet.  Add more "water" to your day.  Keep a glass of water close to your desk and see how many of those you can drink in a day.

There are so many things we can do to impact our health, but for whatever reason, we don't do them.  We talk about it.  We sometimes mock those that don't do it.  Yet, we're right in there making the same poor choices.

About medications and doctors...

Just because you're on a medication that has balanced whatever issue out in your life, it doesn't mean that this condition is okay.  It just means the medication is replacing your role in the condition.  Yes, I know that there are some medications that are needed and I'm not telling you to stop your meds.  What I am urging you to do is think about your role in the situation.  What more could you be doing?

Don't expect your doctor to have the time to hold you by the hand.  Many doctors are so overwhelmed with patient loads that they have little time to counsel you.  Many really want to help, but outside factors, including your willingness to change, often prevents them from doing what they need to do. Far too often, doctors have their own paradigms of healing, so why not learn on your own and discover how you can interact with your own health.

We all make choices on our health.  We all make decisions as to whether we're going to work to be more healthy or not.  Often, everyone waits until they are at the critical emergency state before we wake up and start to do something.

Our health is not going to improve on its own if we keep treating our mind and our body like garbage dumps.  So, I'll end with the question I started with on this blog post.   

What more could you be doing for your health?

Feel free to leave a comment of what you think you could be doing to help your own health.  See if you can come up with a plan where you take action and do something.  You may just be saving your own life from misery, pain, and expensive medical bills.

#health

---

Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

---

Making Choices And Decisions

According to Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, this hypothetical situation was used to help illustrate a greater concept. It is also known as the story about Buridan's donkey

Imagine a donkey standing between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. The donkey continues to look to the hay and then to the water. However, the donkey is unable to decide which to consume first. Eventually the donkey falls over and dies of hunger and thirst.

While there are many ways this could be interpreted, it is easy to see that if we get so locked up in the fear of the decision, we fail to make a choice. When we fail to make a choice, our life is at a standstill.

Sometimes decisions and choices aren't always easy and sometimes we treat them as a matter of life and death. However, regardless of the choices we make today, we can always make a different choice tomorrow. While it is true that the choices we make today do impact those of tomorrow, with each new day, we are still able to make choices with our life even in the roughest of circumstances.




-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blog Post & Images (c) 6/10/11 Don Shetterly - use by permission only
http://www.donshetterly.com

If any part of this post is used or shared, a link back to this site is required.
http://mindbodythoughts.blogspot.com/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pain, It Does A Body Good

Pain scares me as it does most humans. it often leads us to think that there is something wrong or abnormal about ourselves. In conjunction with fear, it can create doomsday scenarios in our mind. It can alter reality to the point that we barely recognize life in the way that it actually appears.

Yet, pain is a messenger. It is something that lets us know there is a situation that needs our attention. Just like there are warning flags at the beach, so is pain a warning flag to our lives. It is something to get our attention and get us to acknowledge our bodies, instead of ignoring them.

All too often, we want to avoid the pain. This is so understandable because it sometimes becomes very hard to live with. Pain affects our day, our mood and our quality of life. We usually strive to flee from it through medication, surgeries and procedures. We even use alternative health procedures to stimulate, treat or wish it away. Yet, in the end, have we really gotten rid of the pain or have we just masked it so much that we don't recognize it? Does it just return a few days or weeks or years later? Does it morph into something else that becomes the new face of our pain?

Fear is a big motivator in the desire to not feel pain whether we consciously connect to it or not. Fear is a strong force that can alter the view of how we see pain, how we feel it and how it shows up. Fear can make pain appear as being much harder to give up and let go than it really is. I'm not talking about theory either. I have faced some horrible pains and fears in my own life. I've been there, done that and got way too many t-shirts as souvenirs.

To try to avoid or ignore the pain is the same as letting fear talk you into ignoring the messages coming from the body. Yes, it would seem to be that relief from pain is the right thing to do. However, you're hiding valuable messages the body and mind are sending you.

There are times when some pain relief is needed to help us hear the messages more clearly and take care of ourselves. If we however, look to medications, surgeries, and alternative health treatments to give us our reasons for the pain, we are only letting fear fool us. There is a time and a place for different treatment methods but only if we do these in a consciously connected way with our mind, body and soul.

If you really want to get at the source of your pain, you need to feel it more - not less. Yes, it may hurt and it may be difficult to do that, but by doing this, you are able to travel deep to the source of the pain. Remember, fear is very deceptive and it alters how we feel, view, sense and understand pain.

By going into the pain through the fear, we get the opportunity to take back our power and heal parts of our life that were untouchable before. We give ourselves the moment to grow and evolve in consciousness, so we can make different choices for our life. It gives us the ability to heal our body in ways we can barely imagine. It makes us more human. It helps us discover and reclaim more of who we are.

I'm not going to state that it is easy to do this. However with courage, we all have the ability to stand up to our fears, take on our pain and discover the wisdom waiting for our life. No person, treatment or thought can do that for us. This must come from within. After all, this ability is in all of us and it has always been there. May we search our lives and find it.


*For more articles, check out the Mind Body Thoughts Blog

Your Choice to Awareness

We are what we are in life and we are what we have not dealt with in our lives. While that may sound complicated, it is really a simple statement.

All of your sum experiences up until this moment in life is what has made you in to the person you currently are. All the good, bad, ugly, beautiful and even the forgotten moments come together and have created you as a person, a soul and an entity.

In addition to this, the unconscious or conscious choices we have made to not deal with all aspects of our life is a part of who we are as a human being living in a breathing, physical, body. Yes, there are many things that we choose to not become aware of just as there are many unconscious things we have chosen to not become aware of.

So often though, I've run into people of all ages and walks in life that paste the happy, I'm past these things smile on to their face. They proclaim that the best way forward is to just not think about the past and move on. They hint that you just have to focus your attention on the present and what lies ahead, while you forget all that took place which may have been unpleasant. Often you will hear these people say - just put your past behind you or you just need to move on. I've moved on, why can't you? You might even hear things like - quit living in the past or you just need to pick yourself up and move on or get over it or just move on. There are a number of things that get said and most of these statements reflect more upon where that individual stating them is in their own life, rather than what you need to do.

Many of us may have been given a horrible hand in our past to deal with and there is no way at this moment in our lives that we can go back and change that. What happened to us is part of us whether we want to own it or not. On the other hand, if we do not deal with all that happened, then we are playing with a ticking time bomb. Yes, all of these things will continue to eat away at us through anger, relationship issues and problems, excessive indulgences like drinking, smoking, drugs, work, etc and through difficulties in many areas of our lives. If we continue to let these things fester and find a home in our lives, they will become a ticking time bomb that will go off at some point. How it goes off will vary by the person, but it is almost guaranteed that it will.

So is this a life sentence? No! It does not have to be unless we allow it to. I know, I hear you saying - well its not fun or easy or pretty to deal with. I hear some saying as they are reading this that I've got better things to do with my time than to deal with all of this stuff that I'd just rather forget. I hear some saying that you just don't know how hard I had it in my life.

Unfortunately, I do know how difficult it can be in life and I've been through so much in my own life. Yes, we can choose to not deal with it because it is too tough, or difficult or too ugly but then we are truly robbing ourselves of what it really means to be human. We are affecting everyone around us that we interact with and we are affecting the entire population and the universe as well. We don't just rob ourselves of all that can be. We rob the entire universe of being all that we can be.

It is a choice we make whether it is a conscious or unconscious one. To make no choice at all means we are sticking with the status quo in our life and choosing to not become all that we are meant to be. It is as simple and complicated as that is stated. We have the power to make the choices for our lives that we desire and we also have the power to free ourselves from the fear, the pain and horrors of our past whether we feel like we do or not.

It is up to each one of us to make the choice of what we will do with the hours we have today. It is up to each one of us whether we will remain unconscious in our awareness or if we will consciously choose to become aware of all that we are. No one else can do this for us and no one else can make the choice. Yes, it does take others to help you walk through some of these troubled journeys but the only way you begin walking is by making the choice to take the steps.

*For more articles, check out the Mind Body Thoughts Blog

Each Day We Create Our World

Every day we wake up into a world that has not been created at that moment. It is with each waking moment, each step we take and each thought we derive, that creates our day. What we choose to do with it and how we choose to live it, is our choice and our choice alone. In this moment, no one in our past, present or future, can create the day for us. While others may influence and impact it, the choices we make are still up to us.

Yet for so many of us, we go through life feeling as if events and circumstances are in control of who we are. We are blown by various winds in our day, drenched by the storms and drawn to pretty colored fake neon signs. These things take our eyes off our path and draw us away from that which we are here for.

May we be as a ship coming into the harbor watching the beacon from the light house that illuminates the path ahead. May we not lose sight, watching the lightening from the storm and run aground into the rocks.

Pain, It Does A Body Good

Pain.. ahh yes, you might be saying. I've got pains here and there and in places I didn't even know could hurt. Then you might go on to tell me that you've been to the doctor and the doctor has all kinds of fancy names for your pain as well as medications to take to "rid" your body of the pain (also known as numbing the body from the pain).

But.. that's a loaded word and I would agree. Have you ever stopped to consider what's behind the pain? I mean, it is usually there for a reason. Sure we tend to know that but do we really know that that means. Come on be honest. Be totally 100% honest now.

You see, our bodies are made up of a lot of sensory nerves and tissue that brings information back to the brain. For the sake of an example, let's say you smash your thumb with a hammer. Now most of us realize that this hurts like everything and most of us would know that the pain information gets sent back to the brain and then the mouth usually goes "OUCH THAT HURT". In a simplistic way, that's how our body works. The pain is there to tell us something is wrong and it needs attention or correction pretty darn quickly.

Of course though, in our modern times, we're too busy or too preoccupied or have a zillion and one other reasons why we just want this pain to go away that invades our body. Some of it may be conscious and most likely a fair share of it is unconscious. That is, we really don't know why we have the pains we do. And while people may want to attach all kinds of reasons for what this pain or that pain means, it is much more deep than that.

So let's get back to the pain we feel and what's the first reaction we have: how do I make this pain go away. You reach for the meds or the aspirin and hope that it will make the pain disappear. If that doesn't work, you try and live with it hoping it will go away. And if all else fails, you make an appointment with a doctor to get some more meds and find a way to attach a cutesy little label to your condition. So now you've got it all taken care of right? Well as long as you take your meds and remember to tell everyone what cutesy name is attached to your condition.

What if there would be another way to deal with the pain. One that you might not have thought about before. And yet, it is one that is built in to our biological systems we call our body. What is this other way, you ask? It's all about going into the pain and letting your body feel it. But not just feeling the pain and stopping there. Letting it go all the way through until you've reached the dark side so to speak. When you can allow yourself to push through any fears that may arise and go into the pain, you will have much greater awareness of yourself and your body, thereby giving you the opportunity of making new choices to free yourself from the pain. I'm not saying this is easy for most people to do but with a little training and support, this is not some pie in the sky concept. It is a very viable way to give freedom to yourself.

You know, there are times when medications and doctors and surgeries are necessary. I'm not saying that it is all one way or the other. What I am trying to say is that all too often, we as a society tend to focus on masking the pain instead of truly going in and freeing ourselves from the pain. It is a choice that we make every day we are alive. While we may not fully understand how this process can unfold, we do make a conscious choice of what information we allow into our lives and what we allow ourselves to experience.

So the next time you have pains or you feel sick or whatever is going on, try to take a moment and see what's behind the pain. Maybe it is something in your current situation that if you made a change, the pain would go away. Sometimes just stopping and listening to our bodies can be one of the best gifts that we could ever give ourselves. It is in that moment, that we allow ourselves to become so much more unified and have greater awareness. The more awareness we have, the more information we can access to make much more informed decisions about our lives.

What are the possibilities?