The underlying idea behind P.A.C.E or Peak 8 is similar, in terms of engaging in short bursts of high intensity activity, interspersed with rest periods. This form of alternating high and low levels of activity actually provides benefits which are not generally obtained from more typical longer endurance cardio exercises, which can even produce more detrimental effects than positive. As some have explained, our ancient physiology would not have been built for running for extended periods of time under normal circumstances, unless we were under a severe degree of stress, and running for our lives from a sabre-tooth tiger.

The form of Peak 8 prescribes a brief warm up period of about 3 minutes to start, and then 8 repetitions of the following pattern : 30 seconds of high intensity cardio, followed by 90 seconds of a resting pace. The exercise itself can be anything of your choice, depending on what you like, and what equipment or terrain you have access to. The key idea is to pick anything which you enjoy, which will get your heart and breathing rate up for a period of time.

This form of exercises is just about the only way of increasing your natural human growth hormone (HGH), which is critical for maintaining strength, and contributing to longevity. A lack of exercise during the adult years will contribute to a serious decline in this hormone.

Doing this a couple of times a week, as well as your Slow Burn routine about once per week will maximize all of the positive benefits from exercise you can get, and only takes about 90 minutes per week to do a sufficient amount of all of these exercises.

If you have been away from regular exercise for any length of time (or in fact, for most of your life!), then it is a good idea to work with a personal trainer for a period of time to help you get started at a pace and intensity which is appropriate for you, and which you can gain progressive “wins” from as you work up to a state of being more in shape, and ready to manage your fitness routine yourself.

Speaking from my own personal experience, I only started taking regular exercise seriously in the last few years, and it is truly amazing how much more energy and general feeling of health I have when I am in a regular exercise routine. It can be really hard to take the first step, but every step towards more regular exercise builds momentum, and it gets easier and easier as you go.

In Slow Burn, a series of exercises are done which effectively target all of the different muscle groups in sequence. Leg lefts, and  arm curls will not be new to anyone who has worked out, but it is the form and technique of Slow Burn which makes it different — the basic idea for each of the different muscle group exercises is to work each muscle group with very slow movements, to the point of complete muscle fatigue, when you literally can’t move that muscle another inch. The amount of weight for each exercise is adjusted so that this point of total fatigue is reached between 3 and 4 repetitions, and between 60 and 90 seconds. A metronome set to 60 beats per minute (1 per second) is suggested, to count out the seconds, so that you can easily count 10 ? 12 seconds for each movement on its way up, and then another 10 ? 12 seconds as you’re returning back down. The goal is to achieve a slow, steady, and smooth movement, without any jerking, straining, or grunting as you go.

To complete the full set of the Slow Burn routine takes less than half an hour, and to achieve the maximum benefit, it is only necessary to do once every 7 to 10 days. Avoiding exercise with the “not enough time” excuse suddenly disappears in light of Slow Burn. It is also much safer than the conventional form of strength training, and is a more thorough workout, as it works through all 3 layers of muscle (fast twitch, medium twitch, and slow twitch), which regular weight exercises cannot do.

Although the three historical figures never met, a great deal of fruitful research can be produced by creating imaginary “conversations” between them, thus cross-pollinating, and clarifying the therapeutic concepts that each put forward. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and such an exercise of bringing these three geniuses together produces a form of knowledge which is more penetrating and therapeutically effective than any one of them produced on their own.

I’ll let Hahnemann speak first, and explain why he published his method for anyone to use, when he could have profited much more if he kept it to himself:

Did I not know to what intent I was here on earth–”to become better myself as far as possible and to make everything around me better that is within my power” — I should have to consider myself as lacking very much in worldly prudence to make known for the common good, even before my death, an art which I alone possessed, and from which it was within my power to eventually profit from as much as possible by keeping it secret.

Steiner understands this very well, and goes on to explain to us the purpose of ethically-based deeds in the world:

On the other side, we evolve by permeating our deeds and actions, our will-nature, with thoughts; deeds are performed in love. Such deeds detach themselves from us. Our deeds do not remain confined to ourselves, they become world-happenings. If they are permeated by love, then love goes with them. As far as the cosmos is concerned, an egotistical action is different from an action permeated by love. When, out of semblance, through fructification by the will, we unfold that which proceeds from our inmost being, then what streams forth into the world from our head encounters our thought-permeated deeds.

And we can always count on Reich to point out where everything in nature is grounded, in terms of our healthy biological structure. [Note: his term "the genital character" was a product of his early studies with Freud, as he struggled to overcome the errors in Freud's thinking, and find a real, grounded energy to explain health vs. neurosis, as opposed to Freud's abstract notions such as "libido". At this early phase in Reich's thinking, "the genital character" was his representation of the state of a person unfettered by neurotic conflicts, where all of the life energy flowed freely through its natural pathway.]

In the genital character, motive, goal, and action are in harmony with one another. The goals and motives are rational, i.e., socially oriented. In accordance with the natural character of his motives and goals, i.e., on the basis of their primary biological foundation, the genital character strives for an improvement in his own conditions of life and in the conditions of life of others. This is what we call ‘social accomplishment’.

Putting these three in a room together actually leads to many hundreds of hours of conversations, but for now I’ll leave you to mediate on these opening remarks. The practice of Heilkunst involves not only a dedication to update the highest professional standards, but a grounding in a deeper ethical love impulse towards doing good in the world.

 

The other event I participated this weekend was a screening of the documentary American Harmony, which followed a few of the top men’s barbershop quartets vying for the top position in some of the recent International Conferences. The grass-roots fuelled, “anyone can sing” philosophy of the Barbershop Society produces some music and musicians who can go toe-to-toe with any number of ‘professional’ musicians who may be well-trained and quite competent, yet may not necessarily match the degree of love and enthusiasm. The best professionals, of course, are the ones who always retain their ‘amateur’ or beginner’s spirit, and infuse it into all of their work.

Here is a prime example of the beautiful and subtle artistry that can be produced by so-called amateurs — this is the Barbershop quartet “Crossroads”, with one of their performances that won them the first place medal in the 2009 men’s international competition:

One of the key lessons to take from this is an example of what it looks like when you lock into any of the threads of your desire function, through resonance. It may or may not be something which you do as your career, but that is irrelevant in terms of the function of what you are activating within yourself through participating such things in your life.

So, what are the benefits of journaling, if examined through a Heilkunst lens?

• Growing and unfolding your inner world, in contrast to the highly outer-oriented consciousness we tend to have during this “cancer” stage of human consciousness.
• It is a parallel activity to what happens inside the consult room, which provides the same degree of confidentiality, and space within which to discharge one’s emotions in a safe way.
• As a tool in healing from specific shocks or traumas, in parallel with your current Heilkunst time line remedy. The inner content of such events often begs to be expressed before it is fully healed.
• To sort out the deeper questions and mysteries about yourself, such as clarifying what your desire function is, and what might be the practical steps you can take to get to connect to more of it.
• As a forum in which to play out some of your more significant life conflicts, where the other party is either not available to participate in the conflict (if they are deceased, for example), or it is not necessary or appropriate to play out the conflict “in the flesh” with them. The proverbial “letter” written, but not actually sent can be done in a journal.
• To track daily and weekly ups and downs, in order to keep track of the cycles of healing reactions provoked by the remedies in Heilkunst treatment, in order to better assist in raising your self-knowledge, as well as to help the practitioner to understand what sort of changes may be applicable moving forward.
• Noticing re-emergent themes over time, which may represent deeper issues that wouldn’t have been noticed in the normal day-to-day flow of life and experiences.
• To clarify, and bring much more precision to how you understand yourself and your core issues, and your ability to express them.
• As a means for turning the flow of life’s mundane events and experiences into an object of meditation. Likewise, this can help in the development of a greater objectivity, applied to increasingly heated degrees if inner content, which then may carry forward into real-time scenarios. Ultimately, this tool of self-reflection can increase the objectivity that you may have about your self.
• As a place to develop your imagination, as you may wish to apply towards forming the qualities and parameters of your desired future, or to go back in time and “revise” previous events to turn out with better endings.
• To help you disentangle your three distinct streams of thinking, feeling, and willing.

An Asperger’s patient of mine posted his personal review on Amazon (which I’ve copied below) of a book that introduced him to the possibilities that Homeopathic treatment might give him. The book is A Drug-Free Approach to Asperger Syndrome and Autism: Homeopathic Care for Exceptional Kids by Judyth Reichenberg-Ullman, Robert Ullman, and Ian Luepker. I always enjoy hearing the different ways that people cross paths with Heilkunst.?

Very interesting and eye-opening, November 29, 2007 By Jonathan Davies (Ottawa, ON, Canada)
I read this book just after it came out, and it is one of the books I have read in recent years that have really encouraged me to “think outside the box”.
I have Asperger’s myself, and by the time I read this book, I had started working with someone who has Asperger’s quite severely. After reading the case studies in this book of people with Asperger’s who were very difficult cases before receiving certain treatments, but changed dramatically after these treatments, I started to wonder if the difficult case whom I was working with would benefit from these treatments. It just so happened that when I was reading this book, I was already getting NAET treatments to eliminate some of my allergies (I found out about NAET treatments from other sources), so I asked the naturopath who was giving me my NAET treatments if he knew of anybody in Ottawa who gives homeopathic treatments. He then gave me the name and phone # of a homeopath whom he knew, and then, I contacted him, and asked him if he treated autism. He told me that he did, so I then told the mother of the Asperger client I work with about him, and then she proceeded to take her to him.
After my client started getting treatments from this homeopath, I started getting treatments from him as well. Even before I started getting homeopathic treatments, my Asperger symptoms were not as severe as those of my client, but I still wanted them to be even less severe! Why have Asperger symptoms (even mild ones) if you don’t have to? Eh? I believe that I am further ahead now than I would be if I hadn’t “thought outside of the box”, and this is one of the books that has encouraged me to “think outside the box”!

Jonathan certainly has gotten “outside the box” of Asperger’s since undergoing Heilkunst treatment with me. The man I originally met, and the man he is today are almost not even the same person — while he is not completely free of some of the qualities of Asperger’s, there have been tremendous strides as we’ve worked through clearing his time line (including childhood vaccinations), and through the deeper genetic factors (the chronic miasms). One of the things which interests me the most about Jonathan is the way he thinks through things, and is always asking questions, and never settling for any pat answers.

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

~Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’

Nothing that is complete breathes.

~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

These two quotations keep popping back into my mind lately, as they imply some very important concepts around health, disease, and the goals of treatment.

At a micro level, these quotes can be interpreted in terms of the cancer miasm, which I wrote about recently. Interestingly, the above quote about breathing has a profound meaning in terms of cancer, which completely inverts the healthy function of the cell to be anerobic instead of aerobic. In my recent blog on the cancer miasm, I mentioned the psychological characteristic of perfectionism, which can be likened to a false form of trying to being “complete”, and therefore not breathing.

A meditation on the macro questions of health, illness, disease, and the purpose of treatment can also follow from these quotations. The concept of resonance, which I’m always making reference to in these blogs, functions in both positive and negative ways. The “crack” through which disease enters us is this very resonance — no disease can be contracted which we do not have a resonance for. This points to one of the absurdities of the Pasteurian germ theory, which posits that a mere proximity to a germ is sufficient for contracting the disease. The best immunity, in this sense, is to ensure that we do not have resonance with the state of mind of the disease which is going around.

Without having this “crack”, or capacity to take things in through resonance, we would not breathe or be living at all. Furthermore, this continual taking in through resonance prompts change, transformation, and growth. When our “crack” is covered over by chronic disease and armoring, our capacity to have these growth experiences through resonance is limited. I think you’ve met people like that, who have such a thick wall around them, that their capacity to take in anything new is virtually non-existent. This is also why, when a new patient tells me that they “never get sick”, a red flag goes up in my mind, wondering if they are sufficiently armored that nothing appears to move on the surface, while a much more serious chronic illness is brewing at the depths.

The book The Healing Power of Illness does a brilliant job at expanding on this concept, and illustrating how the goal of healing is to raise our resonance quotient, so that we can experience and discharge all of our negative resonance at the least consequential level possible. “Bumping” into someone as we walk down the sidewalk is a much more safe form of discharging a particular resonance, than “crashing” into them in our car at 100 km/h. The purpose of Heilkunst treatment is to raise the level of our negative resonance discharge as much as possible, in order that we “get” the meaning of our lessons as gently as possible.

There are many aspects of the healthcare industry which get turned on their head by this concept. Everything from drugs or herbal products which are packaged for specific conditions, such as “antidepressant meds”, or “PMS herbal formula”, are all built around the upside-down concept of putting the symptoms first, and marketing products for their elimination (read ‘suppression’). There are billions of dollars of annual revenue reinforcing this model of producing and marketing these kinds of healthcare products.

The well-known “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” TV ads are actually quite clever from a marketing point of view, in terms of emphasizing the difference in the state of mind between the two operating system, and largely de-emphasizing the technical specs (ie the ‘symptoms’, so to speak), which are usually how electronics are marketed and sold.

Take a look at the original commercials here, and allow your mind to sit back from any mention of tech specs, and instead take in the overarching state of mind being portrayed of each system. The old “hip vs. square” polarity is the guiding principle differentiating the two states of mind.

First of all, we need to distinguish between a person’s “ambient”, and their “environment”. If you and I are sitting together in the same room, we co-exist within the same environment. Each one of us, however, has a unique ambient, which is the subset of the environment which is composed of our individual resonance, both positive and negative. Everything in the environment which has some relationship to your desire function, is “lit up” before you. Two people walking into the same room will likely notice entirely different details for this reason.

It’s akin to the type of experience where you have just bought a new car of a particular make and model, and suddenly everywhere you go you see that same model.

As I mentioned, our ambient is composed of both positive and negative resonance, meaning that not only will our ambient display things which we desire, but also objects or events which are mirrors of where our desire function is suppressed or blocked. This is the meaning of all forms of “accidents”, which are aspects of our negative resonance coming at us in progressively increasing intensities until we “get” their intended lesson. A complete case-taking of a patient’s state of disease must include this whole picture of occurents (all of the things which “happen to” the patient), accidents, as well as the positive events which come into their life.

Likewise, as a patient walks through their time line treament, the healing and release from the remedies will often be accompanied by specific events or “chance” meetings with significant people (or archetypal representatives of those people), as the patient finally integrates and then lets go of the original meaning of the trauma in question.

An aspect of Hollywood films which is often criticized, is how unrealistic certain plots or turn of events unfold on the screen. The fact is, that these “only in Hollywood” scenarios are usually only slightly exaggerated versions of real-life occurents, “accidents”, and other strokes of luck which are not based on a rational logic, but on the force field which draws a person to confront whatever they need to within their ambient.

It becomes a sobering thought on the path to greater health that everything which unfolds in our life is a function of a part of our mind and consciousness, whether or not we have fully realized the source of any given part of our ambient. A definition of healing, from this perspective then, would be an increasing level of consciousness, and command of both the waking conscious mind, as well as all aspects of the sub- and un-conscious parts of the mind.

One of the areas of nutrition that I advise patients in is in the “Eat Right 4 Your Type” blood type diet. This app includes some general information about each blood type, as well as very detailed food lists of “Highly beneficial”, “Neutral”, and “Avoid” foods. It also integrates into a grocery list, which is very useful for quickly cross-referencing which foods are suitable for different family members, all together in one app. The only thing it doesn’t do is tell you what your blood type is.

For couples who use natural family planning methods, there are a number of apps to help track all of the important variables indicating high and low points of fertility. There are many apps that offer much of the same functionality, including this one. Knowledge of the method, of course, is a prerequisite to effectively using the app, which is simply offering a quicker way to track than pen and paper.

For many reasons, journalling can be a very useful adjunct to your Heilkunst treatment — from tracking the cycles of remedies and their healing reactions, to getting more in touch with your true desire function, to simply having an outlet to express emotions which don’t fit into the 9 ? 5 workday world. There are numerous journalling apps available for the iphone, but “Day One” is an app which is particularly pleasing aesthetically. It also syncs with a Mac desktop companion app, which makes it much easier to journal wherever you are, whether with your Mac, or just your iPhone. This is the electronic version of the leather-bound paper journal, with a fountain pen.

Sunrise Sunset! — The inclusion of this app has a bit of an unexpected reason to it — in working on restoring your vision with natural methods, one of the techniques involves “sun gazing”, which means to stare directly at the sun for a certain number of minutes each day. Before you panic, there are actually safe times to stare at the sun, namely the first hour after sunrise, and the last hour before sunset. Not only is staring at the sun for small intervals during these times safe, but very nourishing for your eyes, as well as your hormonal and immune systems.

A significant part of health is education, and for those of you who regularly follow health websites (such as Arcanum Wholistic Clinic’s), a good RSS reader is invaluable for organizing the incoming feeds of all new articles from your favourite sites. Reeder overlays on top of your Google Reader account, and has a pleasing and efficient interface to work through your feeds on your iPhone, or Mac Desktop.

Which other smartphone, tablet, or desktop apps do you use to keep your health on track?