The other day my client Jane walked into my office with her humongous pink water bottle. It made me laugh not only because it’s the largest water bottle that I’d ever seen, and its soft pinkish color pattern made me feel happy.

We joked about the size of the bottle. She said: “At least I’m hydrated. I drink at least one and half gallons of water a day.”

Almost as a reflex I challenged her: “Actually I think you’re dehydrated!”
We decided to find it out with muscle testing.

Dehydration Test

I tugged her hair lightly and pulled her right arm that she held at her side. It came out to about 45 degrees quite readily. She was dehydrated.

I guided her through a simple exercise to balance her electrolytes. (The video for this exercise is at the end of this article.)

On the 2nd test she passed the hydration test.

Water Bottles Comparison

Out of curiosity I decided to find out if it was the water in the bottle that was causing her imbalance.

I placed my glass water bottle next to her pink bottle and had her place her left palm over the water bottles, one at a time, while I tugged on her right arm that was held at her side. Her water is filtered water. The water in my glass water bottle is mineral water from a clean source in Italy.

When her left palm was over the pink bottle her right arm came out easily. In Eden Energy Medicine we say that she tested weak.

When her left palm was over the glass water bottle her right arm stayed put. We say that she tested strong.

I then shifted the energy of the water in her pink bottle by making some figure 8s over it. She tested strong.

Results Explained

Remember dehydration is the loss of body water and important ions (salts like potassium and magnesium), not just to have insufficient fluid intake. Water filtration system can remove minerals from water.

And it’s possible to drink too much water — that’s a topic for another day.

The take-away from this exploration is that simply drinking enough water might be insufficient to keep you from dehydration. You’ll need to make sure that the water you drink is charged water.

Ways to Charge Your Water

Here are some simple ways to charge you water:

• Natural mineral water
• Clean filtered water with a pinch of clean sea salt, Celtic salt or Pink Himalayan salt added.
• Water which you raised the vibration of with chanting, prayer, or a simple thank you.
• Water charged with crystals
• Water placed over the north side of a magnet

What do you like about this blog post?  What’s most helpful for you?  Let me know below. Thank you! 🙏

Have you ever been handed a large medical bill?
Have you ever wondered what you would do if you were handed one?
Do you dread going to dentists, like me?

Well I was going on my merry way until a tooth of mine cracked, in January 2022.

My husband took out a pair of pliers & pulled it out. For Real! Yes I thought he was joking too.
For $2K my surgeon extracted what was left of the tooth.

Then he sent me to a dentist to fix the rest of my teeth so they wouldn’t end up with the same fate.

One dentist flat out rejected me as a patient, saying that my case was too complex.

A 2nd dentist wanted to put a crown on every single tooth in my mouth, right away.

The 3rd dentist had the same diagnosis as the first two, that I had been grinding my teeth for decades. Most of the teeth are about half of their original height. Not only were 2 more teeth prime candidates for extraction, but also my bite, a new term that I’m learning, needed to be raised.

All in all I was handed a couple of $40K dental treatment plans.

..S..H..O..C..K..

Here I thought that I was healthy. And I thought I was doing everything RIGHT!

The shock of a missing tooth and $40K treatment plan stopped me in my tracks.

What had I done wrong?
How could I have NOT known that I grind my teeth in my sleep?

Where was I being stupid? The words of my Tai Chi teacher rang in my head.

“Do you take supplements?” He asked, knowing that I was vegan.
“No.” I said proudly.
“Don’t be stupid… there’re some nutrients you can’t get from a vegan diet.”
He was a blunt man …

Over the next 12 months I did a lot of research, reflection and self-inventory on what led to my teeth problems, what to do to fix them, and how to get back to a healthier state. It was a scary thought to think that maybe I was at the beginning of the end of feeling healthy and vibrant…

One of my discoveries was that I was too proud of my organic, vegan diet to want anything else. My ignorance and over-confidence was going to cost me my a lot of money.

Here are some of the lessons that I learned:

1. Stress from the pandemic and the post pandemic world seeps in and goes deep.
2. Your body breaks at its weakest link. Mine was my teeth. Yours might be your kidneys, or digestion.
3. Whatever you’ve been doing is great. It probably has helped you to avert bigger health issues, like kidney failure. FYI, teeth deterioration is an indication of kidney weakness.
4. Whatever you’ve been doing is probably not enough. Just look at how many family and friends have died or are dealing with bigger health issues. They’re simply a step ahead of you. Your turn may be next.
5. Good food itself is insufficient. You may be missing critical micro nutrients. Because mine was organic, etc I didn’t believe I needed anything else.
6. The sooner you look at the any problem you have, the better. I could have saved the two adjacent teeth had I gone to a dentist 3 years ago.
7. There’s always something you can do to dig yourself out of the health challenge that you’re in. Sometimes it may give you 5% improvement, sometimes 95%. It took me 18 months to get my teeth taken care of.

There might even be a silver lining if you persist! Mine has been an interesting journey to say the least.

I added a new health regime into my daily health routine as a result.

It’s been a really great addition! Here’s the proof 😁. My dentists were surprised to discover that new bone grew to cover the implant stem that they placed 6 months ago. My teeth are getting stronger as a result of my new health habits instead of keeping going downhill.

I’ll elaborate my journey in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Comment below/email me if you want to know more of what I’ve been doing sooner.

Do you have picture frames dotting your house? Paintings?

Me too. I especially like goofy pictures of my young grandchildren!

Did you know that those photos can impact specific meridians of your body, making them stronger or weaker?

An Artistic Photo and a Teenager’s Mischief

A wealthy family once consulted Denise Lynn, one of my favorite healers and writers, on their teenage son’s drug usage and frequent disappearances.

She went to their house & saw a black-and-white, artistically framed picture of their son by a well-known photographer. The artist caught the boy in a moment of sadness and froze it in time.

Denise advised the parents to take down the photo and replace it with a happy family picture, among other things. The family protested but complied nevertheless. A few weeks later, not only was the boy’s mood lifted, but he also became friendly and pleasant to be around.

In Ancient China what Lynn did would be called Fengshui, which can sound like magic.

Imagine my surprise when I came across a book by a psychiatrist, a New York Times bestselling author, on emotional state, facial expressions, and meridian energy. The book provides a more logical explanation of what happened to that teenager.

It’s most fascinating reading if you want to have more vitality and feel vibrant!

A Psychiatrist’s Take on Emotions and Meridians

You may have heard me talking about emotions, 5 elements and meridians as the best kept secrets in Chinese Medicine.

In this book the psychiatrist expanded the teachings from Chinese Medicine into western psychology and common feelings and emotions that you experience in every day life.

Armed with kinesiology, muscle testing, a meridian chart and his expertise as a psychiatrist, he

• Clarified emotional states from a psychiatrist’s perspective
• Mapped out Meridian energy testing through Kinesiology
• Combined them in his psychiatric practice
• Used this on his patients

Instead of taking months or years to resolve in a normal therapy setting, he was able to pinpoint the exact emotions and thoughts of his patients in their subconscious mind and guide them to resolution in one or two sessions.

My Take Away from the Book

In particular what I find fascinating is that

• Facial expressions convey messages such as love, contempt, caring, anger.
• Those emotions / thoughts trigger a subtle response in you.
• Your response results in an imbalance in a particular meridian.
• Kinesiology muscle testing can identify which meridian is weak by testing on the Alarm Points of meridians.

Here’s a couple of my quick take-aways:

1. You need both hemispheres of the brain to live your full potential
   An affirmation can correct the specific imbalance of a particular meridian
2. One of the most important affirmations for keeping your Qi (life energy) STRONG is:
   “I have love, faith, trust, gratitude and courage.”

It strengthens your thymus, which is THE key indicator of the vitality of your Qi.

Here’s the link to the book “LIFE ENERGY”.

Have I perked your curiosity enough to check out the book itself? Let me know what you think! 🙂

A while back I had a client Bill who was in his late sixties but looked as if he was in his mid-forties. He attributed his youthful body to good habits such as having a bowl of cooked oats for breakfast every day for 40 some years.

Bill came to mind as I’ve been thinking about why some people age quickly and are ill, while others stay healthy longer. One of my aunts is 88 and sturdy. An uncle is 70 and quite ill.

I’ve learned to appreciate the power of habits through observing my own health journey and those of my clients. These observations give me new appreciation to the basic, day-to-day habits that I’ve formed over the years, many of which I’ve been practicing for over 20 years.

They reminded me what Albert Einstein, the famous Physicist & Nobel Prize Winner, called the 8th Wonder of the World – the Power of Compounding.

In today’s post you’ll find 7 foundational habits that changed my health forever. They’re foundational because they’re so basic yet they are the cornerstones of my and your health.

In the coming months I’ll share other behavioral habits and practices that have been instrumental to my good health and wellbeing, so you may find some inspiration…

1. No white rice or processed wheat. I replaced highly processed grain with brown rice and whole wheat. They allow for slower release of sugar into the blood, which helps the pancreas. They also support healthier bowel movements and keep me feeling full longer.
2. No table salt. I replaced table salt with sea salt. Table salt is highly processed with minerals stripped and declumping agents added. Sea salt is minimally processed and retains the trace minerals that are essential to bodily functions.
3. No sugary drinks: My daily drink is water, mostly boiled water, with fresh ginger or lemon. By staying away from sugary drinks it’s saved me a lot of calories. It also allowed me to avoid all kinds of additives, including artificial colors, which are one of the most damaging substances to our body’s energies.
4. No microwave oven: Putting aside the risk of radiation from microwaves leaking out of the oven, microwave cooking creates extremely Yin food, which takes a lot more stomach fire to digest. It’s like cooking something fresh out of the freezer, which takes a longer time than cooking something starting at room temperature. 

   Besides I can taste the difference between microwaved water and stovetop boiled water.

5. Organic food when feasible: Any chemical you ingest needs to be removed from your blood by the liver. I learned recently that if our liver stops working we’ll die in a few hours. That’s how critical the liver’s job is. 

   Unfortunately the liver is already over worked given that it performs over 500 functions every single hour. The more chemicals in your food, the more your liver has to work overtime.

   A stressed liver can cause high blood pressure, kidney disease, diabetes, sleep trouble, mensural issues, among others.

6. Plant-based dish detergent & hand soap: Did you know that your skin is your largest organ and is a part of your nervous system? With pure plant-based hand soap, which I even travel with, I avoid as many toxins as possible.
7. Organic shampoo and conditioner: Your scalp will absorb what’s in your shampoo and conditioner. Once I allowed my hairdresser to use her shampoo on me before a haircut and it gave me headache for the rest of the day. You may not be as sensitive as I am. That doesn’t mean your body isn’t absorbing the chemicals which again your liver will have to work on getting rid of it.

I made these changes because I was tired of going to doctor’s offices all the time. Now more than twenty years later I’m so much healthier than back then!

What are your habits around health and how are they contributing to your well-being?

Happy New Year! Here’s my New Year’s wish for you based on Chinese Medicine / Five Elements:

May you have the hope & optimism of Water.
May you have the success and productivity of Wood.
May you have the joy and celebration of Fire.
May you have the caring and connection of Earth.
May you have the wisdom & understanding of Metal.
May 2023 be your best year ever!

For years I considered the Five Elements as the best kept secret of Chinese Medicine. Here’s one incident from my private practice that shows the power of this way of living and thinking.

If you want skip ahead and watch the video right away, click here. 🙂

Disappearing Anger Behind the Wheel

Years ago I had a retired UN attorney as client.

He was such a nice English gentleman, always kind, always proper.

One day in my office his wife casually mentioned a problem: that he would get quite angry at bad drivers, we have a lot of them here in South Florida. They drove a relatively long distance to come to see me.

He was recovering from cancer and was seeing me to deal with low energy, not for anger management, I asked if he was open to a simple suggestion. He was.

I gave him one thing that he could safely do while driving.

The next session when they walked into to my office they were elated — he did what I suggested and his anger behind the wheel totally disappeared.

It sounds like magic but it isn’t. It’s a straightforward technique based on the science of the Five Elements.

Five Elements Chinese Medicine

Five Elements Chinese Medicine is based on the observation of the changes in the nature through seasons: winter, spring, summer and autumn.

• Winter: we see snow covered soil and frozen lakes. Life goes underground. The element of this season of water.
• Spring: trees are everywhere. The element of this season of wood.
• Summer: there’s heat and feast of ripen fruits. Summer is the season of fire.
• Autumn: leaves are falling into the ground. After harvest what’s returned to the soil are the most important things for the next cycle. Soils is enriched by the minerals condensed from the entire cycle. The element for this season is called metal. Strange word, I know!
• Indian summer, solstices and equinoxes, the transition time ties together all the seasons. Earth nurtures all of nature. The element of the transition is earth.

Each element has its associated emotions and virtues. Together they represent the whole universe, or the entire human being, your bones and muscles, your likes and dislikes, your emotions and thoughts.

That’s the origin of the 5 Element based New Year’s Blessings.  My dear friend Dr. Vicki Matthews came up with it. 🙂

Five Emotions

Each element has a set of emotions of associate with it, emotions that come up when the element is out of balance, the emotions that arise when the element is balanced.

For instance for the Wood element:

• Emotions while under stress: anger, frustration, irritation
• Emotions when balanced: kindness, assertiveness, forgiveness

It’s when wood is balanced that we achieve success and productivity with ease.

To manage anger is a simple thing of balancing your wood element, which includes pressure points, sounds, energy exercises, etc.

You can see some exercises in the video below.

What do you think about the Best Kept Secrete on Anger? Leave me a comment below.

And you can find Dr Vicki at her website DrVickiMatthews.com

Do holiday family gatherings stress you out? Me too, even though I love so many things about them.

Here are 3 simple tips to help you to relieve stress, digest better, and protect yourself from energy vampires, or simply other people’s moods, during holiday family gatherings.

Best of all you can use these tips at a dinner table WITHOUT drawing any attention to yourself. 🙂

You can either keep reading or watch my latest video showing you these exercises.

1. Use a modified (self) hug to relieve stress and anxietyThis hug is known as Triple Warmer/Spleen hug. It’s similar to crossing your arms. Instead of holding both palms on your arms, you hold one on your ribcage and the other one on the arm. And then you switch arms.It’s super soothing!
2. Hold your fingertips & cross your ankles to protect your energy from energy invaders and vampiresA simple way to do that is the hold all your finger tips together and cross your ankles. It works like a charm. Try it.Not that I’m implying anyone in your family or party is like that. 🙂
3. Improve digestionWith all the turkey (or tofurkey in my case) and the pies, you want a way to digest your food faster and more efficiently than normal. You can use three fingers to massage the middle of your trunk right below the breast bone to digest food better.

Let me know how you like these exercises by leaving me a comment below!
Have a great weekend & Happy Thanksgiving!

My dad always had a head of thick hair that grew upwards like weeds in an unkept backyard. He had the loudest voice that I’ve ever known. His complexion grew brighter as years went by.

As he grew older he didn’t turn feeble, not even a bit.

All that for a man who went through abject poverty in his childhood, begging for food, starving days at a time, and who at the zenith of his life spent an entire decade in prison and a labor camp during Chinese Cultural Revolution.

In old age he had such vitality that it was still stronger than the rest of my family.

Kidney Qi

The secret to that level of vitality was his strong Kidney Qi, also known as vital energy, according to the Chinese Medicine.

Your Kidney Qi is the origin of your prenatal health. It stores the Qi that fuels your growth.

The kidney energy not only supports the reproductive organs and activities, it also governs your continued growth and aging. When Kidney Qi is abundant, your sexual life and life in general is vigorous and lasting.

To be more specific, your Kidney energy supports the generation of your marrow, which produces bones, teeth, blood, the brain, the spinal cord, and hair.

In addition, all other organs in the body depend on Kidney energy for regeneration and activation. It’s like both a mother that nourishes other organs and like a coach that puts fire under your feet to propel you forward. For instance, it enables the Spleen to metabolize food and the Heart to pump blood.

At mental and spiritual levels, it houses your will. It gives you courage and will power.

Dad’s Secret to Vitality

Even though dad had a turbulent life, he was endowed with strong Kidney energy that carried his ancestral energies, passed down to him from his parents. His mother protected him with a thick blanket of unconditional love amidst the wars. And he didn’t waste it with fear or indulgence.

Even with everything that my dad went through, he still had a joyful heart and grateful mind. It took courage and strong will to not be destroyed by the vicissitude of life. He was strong willed!

His kidney energy stayed strong all the way until the end of his life.

Some people are lucky like that, with family inheritance, be it financial or physical.

For the rest of us, we can strengthen our Kidney Qi with other techniques. In this week’s feature video I’m sharing a simple technique to promote strong Kidney Qi.

Please leave me a comment below. To you heath!

Early this week through the grapevine I learned that my college classmate Lucerne died. He had a heart attack while jogging, something that happens far too often for a man in his 50s. Several hours later he died in the hospital.

So many successful men like him get caught up in their pursuit of their interest and career that they don’t take good care of themselves. Stress has a way of creeping up when you’re going about your life, especially if you’re successful.

Everyone’s shocked. Not only because we lost him, but also because we are of the same age and mostly we’ve got similar life stories. We all came to US for graduate school, a year or so after we graduated from college.

Chinese Medicine Perspective

I can’t help but wonder what caused his death. His mind was so active, as to writing essays on mathematical equations and entering stock trading competitions one after another, and of course on social issues.

Chinese Medicine doesn’t differentiate the mind from the heart. The western brain may house the mind, yet it’s the energy of the heart that powers the mind. And the energy resides in the heart is the spirit, the supreme controller of the human being.

A super active mind therefore places a heavy workload on the heart.

From a Chinese Medicine perspective, heart problems can also be caused by the weaknesses in other meridians and organs: lungs, stomach, spleen, kidneys, pericardium, liver and gallbladder.

Stress’s Role

In addition, stress plays such an important role in how efficient the human machine runs. Even when you don’t feel stressed, the stress of the last two years, especially the stress of the lock-down, of whom to trust, whom to see face to face, wears your organs down.

By the time you feel stressed, the damage to your body has probably been done.

It’s like the recommendation of drinking 8 glasses water a day. Some say don’t wait until you’re thirty. By then your cells are dehydrated already.

A New Model

The more I thought about the common conception that men like Lucerne are so caught up in their pursuit for success and money that they forget to take care of themselves, the more I realized that’s not the whole picture.

The Western model of taking care of our well-being hasn’t evolved much in the past 50 years even though our life style has changed drastically. The demands that we put on our bodies are much higher, especially if you’re successful.

We’re driving our body like a Formula One (race) car but we take care of it like a retiree’s car that only goes to the grocery store and back.

“Are you taking care of yourself” is no longer the right question. It is instead:

“Are you taking sufficient care of yourself in proportion to the demands that you make of your particular body that has gone through your unique life experiences and carries your specific family genes?”

— or, to put simply,—-

“Are you taking sufficient care of yourself that’s appropriate for you?”

I don’t have an answer to what caused Lucerne’s death even though I have inklings on what might have contributed to it. We’ll never know for sure.

I do know that managing the stress of everyday living can make a difference. Maybe that’s the difference in being alive and being dead.

What you can do

For that, there are two videos on my YouTube channel to support you:

1. 7-min Daily Stress Routine: It’s designed to be a Daily Habit for you to use to calm stress and anxiety effectively and quickly. It’s based on the principles of Chinese Medicine and Qi Gong practice.
   
2. 3-min Stress Relief on the Go: This is my latest video with 3 simple techniques that you can tap into anytime you have a little break. One of the techniques works on a key acupressure point for high-blood pressure and other heart-related issues.
   

I hope everyone’s safe with a strong heart! Please leave me a comment below.

To you heath!

Seven years ago I attended a July 4th party at the edge of a golf course overlooking a waterway. My friend Jon joined us. Before he sat down he warned everyone at the table that he had PTSD.

We nodded and carried on with our conversation.

For those of you outside of the U.S., a July 4th party is our Independence Day celebration and almost always ends with watching fireworks by the local municipality.

Long story short, when the fireworks started Jon jumped off his chair and ran towards the door, face white, body tight, and he yelled that “I’ve got to go!”

Another friend Betty stopped him and pointed to me: “Dan may be able to help you!”

Jon turned around and sat back down, while I got up and stood behind him.

I held his head with my palms while the fireworks exploded and whistled all around us.

Within a few minutes he shouted, all excited: “My goodness, they have no effect on me! The fireworks don’t scare me anymore!”

His PTSD reaction to the fireworks was gone.

What I did was simple yet the result was miraculous. I simply held a couple of specific points on his head which reprogrammed his brain’s stress response.

In this video you’ll learn how you can manage 5 prime emotions – fear, anger and frustration, panic and anxiety, worry, and sadness – with the technique that I used with Jon.

Additionally you can EFFECTIVELY help someone else, like your spouse, or your grandchildren!

Be sure to leave me a comment below after you’ve watched the video!  Thank you!

It’s been well publicized throughout the pandemic that the #1 risk factor of someone dying from Covid is diabetes.  

What do you think the #2 risk factor is?  Make a guess now.  We’ll come back to it later.

Allow me to digress.

The other day my client Susan (not her real name) returned for a visit.  

She first came to me a few years ago for treatment of fibromyalgia.  Pretty quickly her symptoms disappeared.  She ended her treatment right before the pandemic started.  

With everything going on since the Covid lockdown, her fibromyalgia actually stayed away through 2020-2021 even with quarantine and social isolation.  

We kept in touch.  She kept saying that she was doing well.

Then one day she ended up in a hospital because of a dizzy spell.  She was treated for high cholesterol and was put on several medications.

Soon after, her fibromyalgia returned.  That’s when she returned for a session.

She said that one of the new medications triggered her pain reaction… But that’s not the whole story. There’s a more important factor that she overlooked.  

I’m making this statement not only from my experience as a healer, but also from her text message the following morning:

“Our session had a huge impact on me.  When I arrived home I was so tired.  I slept from 1pm until 5am. … I can’t remember when I have experienced more sound sleep.  Thank you!”

Now let’s look at the world that we’ve been living in for the past two years.

1. The #2 risk factor for death from Covid is fear and anxiety-related disorders, according to Center for Disease Control on the data of around 500,000 cases.
2. According to American Psychological Association the rates of anxiety and depression of U.S. adults are about 4 times higher than before the pandemic according to the data from April 2020 through August 2021. 
3. In 2020, death from drug overdose was the highest number ever recorded.

Even though Susan kept telling me that she was doing well, she and all of us have been living under highly stressful circumstances.  We just got used to living with that level of stress, sort of.

We as human beings are designed to live with stress.  A little bit of stress is good.  It actually makes our nervous system and our immune system stronger.

Our innate stress response system is designed to adapt to the environment.  That’s how our species evolved.  However, evolution moves slowly on the scale of millions of years, not centuries or decades, let alone a couple of years.  

We’re not designed to live under the high stress of a two-year pandemic, and now with the war in Ukraine and the price hikes every time we stop by a gas station or a grocery store, it’s even worse.

We sort of go along with it but our bodies are screaming.  Some scream louder than others.  Some muffle it off more successfully than others.

At this dangerous level of stress, our body and mind require us to help them to evolve more intelligently and effectively.

With that, I’m offering you the 8-min Daily Stress Relief Routine to support your body’s evolution.  It’s a part of 9-day Stress Relief Challenge that’s coming up this summer.

You can also find the video on my YouTube channel.  I invite you to subscribe, like and comment on YouTube so the videos can get to more people.

Feel free to leave me a comment below.

To your health!