karen

Couple of thoughts. One, it's not correct to assume that symptoms = disease. Respiratory symptoms can sometimes be part of a healing reaction from releasing grief. Just hearing that someone had respiratory symptoms doesn't tell enough to know whether it's a disease process or a healing process. (I had respiratory symptoms the past month that were no disease at all. I didn't use the word "sick," which helped ) Second, maybe a practice is not inherently right or wrong but suitable or unsuitable for a particular student at a particular time. The sense of inhaling suffering can mean very different things to different people. I often have experiences (just a few mintues ago of going deeply into my direct perception of something in order to penetrate to its real nature. A sense of suffering can come from layers of interpretive thought superimposed on or blocking the actual direct experience. And often when there's suffering, the person is quite out of touch with what their real core level experience is. Then, focusing on the actual perception often opens up the blockage and leads to experiencing it completely differently. That could be thought of as "breathing in" the suffering and transforming it. It may be similar to doing EFT, where you're acknowledging the condition as you interpret it, and from there you peel away the interpretive false beliefs to experience the purity of the feeling at the core of it. "Suffering" and "compassion" are just concepts. I'd rather penetrate to real experience. Maybe one person would get hung up in the concepts, and for another it may be "skillful means" to work with the concepts in order to go beyond them. The point, I think, is that the practice is just a tool, and may not be right or wrong on its own terms. If it's helping to take the person beyond it, cool. Karen

Hey Cat. I agree with Pietro, raw dairy products are immensely healing, and have none of the allergenic potential that commercial (pasteurized) dairy products do. Trick is to find raw dairy at all in the U.S. Some imported cheeses that say "from milk" instead of "from pasteurized milk" may be raw. Speaking of pets, maybe you could get a goat for milk . Re. MSM, that can sometimes be helpful, but I wouldn't count on it as a magic bullet. A more common cause of inflammation is deficiency of omega-3 EFA's, especially for people who don't eat a lot of animal products. Even then, the commercial factory-farm animal products are very low in omega-3, but products from grass-fed or wild animals are higher. Cod liver oil to the rescue. Also food allergies and "leaky gut" can cause chronic immune overactivity, when proteins are getting into the bloodstream that are really too large to be there. Even when the problem seems related to something else entirely, there are a lot of ways the immune system can be chronically overworked, and then some otherwise harmless substance that normally wouldn't be a major trigger suddenly becomes one. Then of course there's the lingering effect of old trauma. What you said about the dog and energetic separation sounds right on target. I do a lot of entity release work.. TAT is a good tool for that, and also I do etheric "boosting/blasting," aiming energy from the heart to the target. I also use a kind of powered crystal device to facilitate the work. Glad to hear you're digging Audacity. I actually created mp3's of old tapes of myself at age 3. Lots of fun, but strangely there doesn't seem to be a big audience for that, and I don't think I'll be posting the transcript anytime soon Karen

Interesting question. I would say that the mind tends to fixate on beliefs, and maybe the content of the belief isn't really the question, but the attachment to belief itself. I would just be aware of all these thoughts mindfully, and not be concerned with the "right" answer. You could explore the actual process of developing discernment.. in other words, your actual experience of sorting through these ideas. Do you feel that some things resonate in a way that you feel uplifted, and other things simply stimulate the mind in a way that may be interesting but really may not feel truthful and clear to you. Beliefs are like empty calories.. they can be fun, but don't really nourish. At best, I think of them as sort of placeholders for something more authentic, a deeper sense of Self that doesn't need beliefs for support. Often I learn a whole lot more valuable stuff from watching my mind and paying attention to my actual present moment experience, than from getting absorbed in the thoughts themselves. Karen

I'm looking at Intu-Flow and am very impressed. Am nudging a friend of mine to buy it . What Scott Sonnon says about flexibility following naturally from ROM makes a lot of sense to me.. so where do other stretching methods fit in, like Bob Cooley's stuff? Does Intu-Flow replace all that? Karen

Wisdom teeth come in later in life.. I think that's the only significance to the name. Weston Price, a dentist in the 1930's, did extensive research on the jaw structures of native people eating their native diets free of all modern foods. He found that their mouths had plenty of room for wisdom teeth to come in without structural problems. Unfortunately, some of us don't have jaw structures that can accommodate all the teeth, so sometimes they do need to be removed. When that's necessary, a good biological dentist can do it properly, or refer to an oral surgeon who uses methods based on biological dentistry. The book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price has loads of amazing photos of native people with healthy jaw structures and gorgeous teeth. No dentists, gorgeous teeth . BTW, I think salt can be too abrasive for brushing with, but it's great to rinse with. For brushing, I love Tooth Soap, in the liquid form. Dr. Wolfe has a tooth chart online showing the meridians that run through the teeth. In general, energetically, teeth are related to bone. -Karen

A naturopath I used to know said that the supplements you don't take are absorbed at a rate of 0%. Thank goodness for statistics. I used a bit of anchoring technique with the CLO.. got the Nordic Naturals brand which comes in those beautiful cobalt blue bottles. I LOVE cobalt blue bottles. Of course then I could still simply open the fridge and stare at it, but sometimes it works . Karen

Hi Lozen, You might wanna ask our pal Paul Bergner about flax vs. cod liver oil The omega-3 in flax is barely bioavailable. Flax is marketed to be a super food, but it's just an artifact of the health food industry, alas. Also flax doesn't contain the vitamins A and D as CLO does. From notes from a class given by Paul Bergner at the AHG 2000, entitled Clinical Nutrition for Herbalists: "6.15-20% of fats [of hunter-gatherer diets] are Omega-3, from animal food. ALA from plant foods has to go through Four conversions to get to EPA, and five to get to DHA. Average conversion to EPA is less than 3%, to DHA less than 1.5%. The developers of flax oil are jumping onto a biochemical flow chart and creating a new product category. The health food industry is sometimes the enemy of traditional nutrition and herbalism." ("Traditional" nutrition and herbalism meaning the way it's been practiced within wisdom traditions, not modern forms that have been coopted by industries). -Karen

I'm usually loathe to give unsolicited advice, but this is something I think people will want to check out if they're eating unfermented soy foods -- that means all the modern processed soy products: soy protein shakes, soy as an ingredient in processed foods, tofu, soy burgers, etc. -- any soy foods other than tamari, miso or tempeh. Turns out that unfermented soy is BAD news. The so-called health benefits of soy are complete marketing ploy courtesy of the multi-billion dollar soy industry. Soy is responsible for loads of health problems.. a lawsuit is even in the works. Good sites for independent research on this: The Whole Soy Story Soy Myths Weston Price Foundation All the pro-soy info can be traced back to soy industry propaganda and others who have unknowingly taken it for fact. The larger issue here is that the beliefs we've had about "health food" have largely been created by the powerful food processing industries, and health food stores are mostly full of junk.. there's much more that could be said about this, but for now I just wanted to mention the soy issue because soy (not to mention that it's GMO now) is everywhere and undermining our health. To your health!, Karen

Cod liver oil straight up? I think that tops raw eggs straight up. At least raw eggs have no taste except for the gloop factor. No, cod liver oil mixes with anything else oily, whew . Only precaution with it is that it has to be refrigerated, so you don't mix it with anything that you're going to leave out for a while. And then an opened bottle only lasts 3 months. If you haven't used it up within 3 months, you know you haven't taken enough of it, which means that next time you then keep it right on the top shelf in front, so that you have to be really absentminded in order to miss it ;-) -Karen

Hehe.. I don't think I've heard of any association between cod liver oil and poop texture necessarily.. but this begs the age old question, do you want to change your poop texture? Putting cod liver oil on sprouted bread.. hmm, interesting idea. Why not. Although I've tried to "spread" oils on bread before only to have it drip through, but maybe the sprouted bread is dense enough. Do you put anything tasty on the bread like almond butter? Maybe you could mix the CLO with whatever you'd put on the bread. Right now I'm thinking guacamole.. Karen

No prob. You take whatever input resonates and leave the rest. I got the impression, though, that you were looking to tweak things, but if you're satisfied with the approach you're doing, more power to you Karen

Cod liver oil.. take it with a spoonful of something pungent like an olive oil/vinegar dressing. The lemon flavored one seems the best to me. Multivitamins.. I think not necessary, or can be put in the "once in a while" stash. Bergner is right that you need nutrients in order to absorb nutrients. But that can be done other ways. You can take Schussler cell salts to get microdoses of minerals, or ConcenTrace trace minerals, which will help you absorb minerals. Cod liver oil covers A and D. As for B's, you might need a B-complex supplement for a while when under stress, but they can be hard to digest and absorb, so I would use a liquid form or sublingual. As for vitamin C, goji or lycii fruit and Ayurvedic rasayanas containing Amla fruit (delish.) -Karen

I'll try to address a bunch of these issues in one post as coherently as possible . Re. Warrior Diet vs. Zone. The WD is a lot more than just eating a huge meal late at night.. doing that without the real feasting/fasting cycle is sure to throw off digestion, metabolism, sleep and everything else. It's not just another popular diet plan to follow, but a framework to help recover our intrinsic dietary wisdom. Review of The Zone by Sally Fallon of the Weston Price Foundation The Zone gets a few pieces right, and almost any popular diet will. But mostly they all perpetuate the mainstream PC diet rules especially of avoiding saturated fat (really disastrous to do that). All that is based on flawed studies courtesy of the pharma/grain cartel complex. Many naturopaths aren't discerning about that and fall for the PC stuff. The point about fat is that the PC low-fat agenda fails to distinguish between healthy fats and damaged fats. High quality fats like virgin coconut oil, raw butter, avocados and the fats in meat from healthy animals have been eaten liberally by native cultures for ages, and they never had heart disease or obesity. The Masai ate meat, milk and blood, not even veggies. Pretty intense, and I'm not suggesting we can simply adopt other traditions that worked for people whose constitutions and lifestyle were very different from ours. But I think it gives a very interesting perspective to see what the majority of humans thrived on for centuries. Saturated fat is absolutely necessary in order for omega-3 fatty acids to be utilized correctly, not a controversial opinion but a biochemical fact that just gets conveniently overlooked. Without the right fats in enough quantity, you can't switch out of carb-burning/insulin resistance mode and into growth hormone/ fat-burning mode. Important hormones are not going to be kicking in. Then you get cravings as a result, and then have to force yourself to resist the cravings in order to follow the Zone diet. Doesn't seem right. I don't think we need to be micromanaging our diets with ratios of macronutrients . Now, that's counterintuitive to me, that humans should be calculating grams of this and that, or imposing rules about proportions of portion sizes. The Warrior Diet is probably the most flexible system, because you're really not limiting anything. You're eliminating all low-quality foods, of course, but then you're just adjusting the timing of your meals. No starchy foods during the day, and then a leisurely feast in the evening. The feast meal could even be the lunch meal if that schedule works better for you. No deprivation, no counting or measuring. You can eat your grains if you want, but the starches come later on in the main meal, and usually by that time you don't want much of them anyway. I think the Zone can sometimes manage insulin resistance but sort of by contrivance and artifical law rather than by natural law. To impose artificial rules about diet is just as oppressive as forcing yourself to exercise or meditate.. real discipline is a whole 'nother thing, and comes from aligning oneself with principles of nature. Something I think folks here are familiar with . It could take a few days for the metabolism to adjust to the warrior schedule, and it might not feel great during that transition, but I've talked to lots of people who came to love it once they got into the groove. Besides Ori's two books, another good one on diet and optimizing metabolic hormones is Natural Hormonal Enhancement by Rob Faigin. Faigin uses a similar feast/fast cycling approach although not daily cycling, more like weekly. He's a little more analytically oriented; Ori's more intuitively oriented. >>Also while I understand the concept of things I don't like the idea of being good for me, there is also the chance that things I don't like the idea of not being good for me, make sense? Sure. We know we can't trust all of our ideas and preferences because there are incorrect habits and attachments in that mix. But we also can't simply go "by the book" and not trust our own signals either. Experiment mindfully, I'd say. Examine preferences and attachments and see if they're coming from real bodily wisdom or from ideologies that are basically rooted in fear. The reason there are so many conflicting theories is because most of what we've been told about diet is coming from, directly or indirectly, biased sources like the USDA and the grain cartels, food processing industries.. scientific studies on diet are miserably flawed, and statistics skewed. When you look at independent research, you start seeing that the truth about diet is not really that complicated. I would suggest you get hold of Sally Fallon's book Nourishing Traditions. Look at what kept native cultures healthy for centuries, when they had no contact with "foods of modern commerce." Forget about scientific studies and macronutrients. Warrior Diet or not, just get more of the nutrient-dense foods going. Do the sprouting or soaking of grains that she talks about in the book, if you want to continue with grains. Paul Pitchford has a lot of insight regarding the energetics of foods, and I still use his book as a reference at times. But he's also coming from some ideologies about vegetarianism and grains. To sort out the confusion, I would skip that for now and get a good grounding in the Weston Price tradition (WAP). Ori basically comes from that tradition too and then uses those foods according to the warrior schedule. But the WAP tradition alone can keep you busy for a while. The recipes included in that book are overly complicated with too many ingredients, but they can usually be simplified. So the gist as I see it is: No matter how you individualize a diet, there's a repertoire of foods that have universally kept people of all cultures healthy, and I would recommend getting grounded in that first. Then you might be in a better position to know where you want to go from there. Re. Ken Cohen, he actually advises to limit grains, in his book The Way of Qigong. I think that the traditional TCM diet was developed for a particular population in China, within their particular cultural framework. If rice was the most available staple, then a diet was developed to accommodate that and mitigate any negative effects of that, hence all the medicinal congees. But we don't have to be limited by that. The healthiest cultures historically were more hunter-gatherers than agriculturalist. (Maybe our love of shopping has to do with the gathering instnct Avocados are one of the best foods, great source of fat. Raw foods can be eaten with warming herbs so as not to weaken digestive fire, but that's another whole topic. Also I go for whatever wild foods I can get hold of. -Karen

I gotta log off for the day .. but one quick thought.. the Warrior Diet may seem to a part of our brain as counterintuitive, but maybe it's only counter-habit. Ori's work is really about discovering your own innate healthy instincts, but the addictive cravings are making so much noise that the real instincts are hard to hear clearly. I know the idea of eating a big meal late at night sounds strange, but this is controlled feasting and fasting cycles, which is very different from the kinds of erratic bingeing and starving that we're familiar with. I couldn't count how many times the very thing that I didn't like the idea of at first, turned out to be the best thing for me. I'm just suggesting that there may be something there that can be of use to you.. even just to learn more about the biochemistry of insulin resistance and then apply that in whatever way works for you. The marketing stuff that Ori does is a bit hyped, in my opinion, and I would ignore the product line, but I think the work is sound.. his second book goes into that in more detail than the first. To be continued, I'm sure Karen

Chatting for hours with food and music, and I'm in, although I wouldn't force the raw bison burgers on you Ok.. here's the thing.. when the body is screaming for starches, it's not because it really wants it. "Trust your body" isn't always the way to go, because there are a lot of false signals that a metabolically imbalanced system will put out. Craving for starches has many possible causes.. a few would be: 1. deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids 2. hyperinsulinemia (most everyone eating grains is going to have some degree of insulin resistance, and this is all stuff that Paul Bergner teaches, BTW 3. deficiencies of Magnesium and B6 (related to insulin resistance) 4. aspartame or MSG in the diet (probably doesn't apply to you, but hidden sources of MSG maybe) 5. deficiencies of certain amino acids lower serotonin which triggers carb cravings to raise serotonin Plus the fact that grains don't have dense nutrition so you have to eat a LOT of them to be satisfied, and then you're overdoing the carbs. Have you heard of Ori Hofmekler's Warrior Diet? Limited grains there, but after the body adjusts, you don't miss them. He does a great job of explaining the way that the various hormones including insulin and growth hormone go through daily cycles, and how we can harness the anabolic advantages of our hormones while minimizing insulin resistance. You'd only have to eat protein at ONE feast of a meal , and then the metabolism is shifted over to fat-burning mode where you cruise at an even keel throughout the day and don't have insulin spikes or carb cravings. There's a lot more to it, but that's the very quick gist. Karen

For years I could never have imagined a diet without grains. (One thing that helped me get over it was discovering breads made from almond flour . The book Dangerous Grains by Ron Hoggan is an eye opener, although that pertains mostly to gluten grains - wheat, barley and rye - not rice, oats, quinoa, millet, etc. But even the latter are really not dense sources of nutrition as food needs to be. The healthiest cultures historically have been those that emphasized animal foods (meat especially from wild animals and organ meats, fish, raw dairy, eggs) and veggies, and had a smaller percentage of grains. (Weston Price did the groundbreaking research on many different non-industrialized dietary traditions). The other thing I'd be concerned with is that if you're not sprouting or pre-soaking whole grains to neutralize the phytic acid, you can be causing mineral deficiencies including iron. Phytic acid is actually a treatment for iron overload, yikes . Take care, Karen

Re. Floradix, you're right, the elemental iron part of it (ferrous gluconate) is absorbable, although it's a very small amount, but the herbs aren't. Floradix is marketed as an herbal iron source, but it's kind of misleading, because it's really only the elemental iron that does the trick. Then it's not much different from cheaper iron supplements, and in general I don't think the body interacts with fractionated nutrients in a beneficial way. If you're turning on a faucet and providing something that's missing but there's an open drain, you can get some short term results but not really be fixing the problem. So I'd be looking at where the drain is, and there are a number of possibilities.. eating whole grains, having insufficient hydrochloric acid, heavy menstruation, just to name a few. -Karen

Hi Lozen, Just a couple comments.. Iron from non-animal sources is very poorly absorbed, because it is "non-heme" iron. I don't think Floradix does much, neither does beta carotene supplements. Cod liver oil is right on. Great yin builder. And not just for the A and D, but extremely important for the omega-3's. Meats, bone broths from big marrow bones, raw milk if you can get it, pomegranate juice, black sesame seeds. I like the Ayurvedic tonic jams called rasayanas, or specifically chyavanprash. Yummy and a relief from so much pill popping. Also herbal wines like Draksha (amazingly yummy). I would also expect the practitioners to be investigating why you're anemic, beyond just giving blood building foods and herbs. Aversion to protein is a common symptom of protein deficiency. After 27 years of being a strict vegetarian, I wasn't too fond of meat either! That changed. -Karen

It's a blessing wherever that capacity is still intact! Certainly what we've come to know as scientific thinking is suffering from tunnel vision. Having TCM treatments undergo double-blind study is not exactly what thrills me But then I would change the definition of science to mean natural law, and principles based on natural law. Then I would say that herbal energetics and Heilkunst-homeopathy are all scientific, and our intuitive senses are part of that as well. -Karen

>Fair enough but then I would say that the only similarity between flower essences and herbal infusions is that the plants were in water at some point...and it ends there... Yup, fair enough . >I guess I may not be making much of a distinction between the two because the way I have seen them used has been similar--look up your emotional imbalance on a chart (for flower essences) or your physical ailment on the rack (for classic homeopathics), and buy the one that will "fix" it. Eeek . But you're right, that's often the way homeopathy is used, unfortunately. There are a bunch of points to sort out here. First of all, choosing a homeopathic according to what's printed on the labels will rarely give you the correct remedy. But even if we look at the few occasions on which that might actually work (for example, Ingnatia for ailments caused by emotional states), even then, using homeopathy like that is like saying that putting calendula on a cut represents the whole system of herbal medicine. Now you're probably saying Eek too . Classical homeopathy, in my opinion, is utilizing a very small corner of the whole system of homeopathic medicine which Hahnemann called Heilkunst. But even within classical homeopathy, a very detailed workup is necessary and people apprentice for years to learn the art of prescribing. The indications that are printed on the labels of the vials really should never be used in choosing a remedy. A principle from one paradigm only become distorted when squeezed into another paradigm. If you look at the homepathic materia medica (fun book to skim through), you see several pages of indications (rubrics) for each remedy. I just took some Gelsemium yestereday.. the bottle said "For flu symptoms." Well, Gelsemium is ONE remedy that's used for flu symptoms, but then again, "flu" is not a symptom but an allopathic designation. And there are at least a dozen other homeopathics that might be used for "flu-like" symptoms. We need to get the whole picture of this particular expression of flu-like symptoms in this particular person. For example, if my flu-like symptoms include fatigue but no thirst, not sweaty, and I'm not particularly irritable, then Gelsemium might be a good match (oversimplifying this just to make the point). But on the other hand, if someone's flu symptoms include fatigue, marked thirst, sweaty, and irritability, then Gelsemium is NOT the similar remedy, but Bryonia might be a possibility. Many indications are considered, including things like "right middle toe hurts every other Thursday in the summer" (ok, I made that up to exaggerate the point, but really it's not far off). And all this only holds true for the realm of acute prescribing, for self-limiting conditions like colds, infections, accidents, childhood illnesses like mumps, etc. What is known as constitutional prescribing, in the realm of classical homeopathy, is a whole 'nother thing. The practitioner usually does a long interview with the person, eliciting great detail of their likes and dislikes, what kinds of influences make them feel better or worse (seasons, temperatures, environments, etc.), and all their peculiar sensitivities. Then the practitioner has to know to weigh each indication in the analysis, because certain signs and symptoms weigh more heavily than others, and choose a remedy that has proved to be most similar to that pattern. Provings are the experiments done on healthy people to determine the characteristics of a remedy. The basis of the law of similars is that a substance given in crude dose will produce the same symptoms that it will cure in the minute (and dynamized) dose. In order to come up with a basis for giving each remedy medicinally, Hahnemann conducted "provings" on each remedy. He gave a small crude dose (not enough to hurt the person) of a substance to a healthy person (beginning with himself), and then observed the symptoms that developed. Each substance would create a variety of symptoms unique to that substance. Then that substance when diluted and dynamized would be used to treat those same symptoms, essentially. Substances used were herbs, minerals, animal parts, and many toxic substances like heavy metals. I've taken homeopathic arsenic probably hundreds of times (in a higher than 12th potency so there's no material substance left!) (New remedies have been proven since Hahnemann's time, including the recently proven Lac Humanum, which is mothers' milk!) Now about flower essence provings.. I know a classical homeopath who works with flower essences, Eileen Nauman, and she has been conducting provings of new flower essences. She has people take the flowers, I'm not sure in what form, but they report their subjective experiences and the results are compiled in order to learn the profiles of these flowers. Here's a bit about her provings: Medicine Garden > using drop doses of tinctures (like just one drop instead of 30 drops or 90 drops a day) can be really similar to flower essences, but you mentioned using arnica--one pellet in a glass of water and just sipping a few times a day, and that seems similar as well. Similar in that it's a small dose. But even if you took the whole bottle of arnica in one shot, you'd still be getting less than one molecule of arnica :-) > But seriously though, if you are using the law of opposites, wouldn't a vaccine (like a Western medicine vaccine) be a homeopathic remedy? Good question. (I assume you meant "similars" there, not opposites?) Vaccines use what I'd call the nonexistent law of sames, not similars . And in a very misguided way, but the law of similars does seem to make intuitive sense to people (a hair of the dog that bit you), and some mistakenly believe vaccines = homeopathy. But when you're giving material doses of toxic substances, you're not doing homeopathy -- you're doing poisoning. If all the criteria aren't met, you don't have homeopathy.. sometimes you have something that's ineffective yet harmless, and sometimes you have things like vaccines which are very harmful. I wrote an article on Homeopathy vs. Vaccination >Uh, but I think my point is that ideally, TCM docs, as well as naturopaths, will give remedies according to all symptoms...as will herbalists...so it's not just homeopathy. For sure. I would say that Heilkunst even gives remedies that are not based on current symptoms at all, but treat old traumas that have lodged in the energy body.. disturbances in the vital force due to vaccinations, injuries, traumas of all sorts. We could compare the different systems in a multitude of ways, and they're each unique. Hope that's helping to clear the confusion, or maybe the flower essences will Karen

Cat, Re. converting tapes to MP3/CD.. I was just talking to my bro-in-law today about that. I've been converting tapes using the free Audacity software (from Sourceforge I think?) Works like a charm. I just pulled out my speaker cable and connected the output of the tape player to the input of my laptop, hit the record button in Audacity, and then you can save the file as MP3. I'm not too swift with electronics, but this was a snap. I use Audacity mainly for recording my guitar playing, but also for preserving stuff on old tapes. Glad the info on allergies seemed useful.. hope it really helps! Karen

Geez, what's up with these cute guys dissing homeopathy. I know what you mean. Swiss cheesy arguments there, but mainly I think it's interesting when people put so much energy into dissing homeopathy. To me that's more interesting than the content of the argument itself. I've had such.. um, discussions, with an ex-boyfriend until we realized that we weren't really arguing about homeopathy at all.. that was just a trigger for some unresolved power issues. In more recent years I've conserved a lot of energy by not climbing on the soap box anymore . There are more fun things to do. Karen

Good article, although I'd make some distinctions.. "consistent with homeopathy" suggests it has some things in common with homeopathy, and I'd say sure. But not the same thing. Now here's where things get a bit sticky, because the term homeopathy really indicates the way a remedy is used, not only the way it is prepared. Actually, technically, a remedy isn't prepared homeopathically. It's given homeopathically. Because if you take a so-called homeopathic remedy and give it according to the law of opposites, not similars, you aren't doing homeopathy. So we're talking about how the remedies are prepared, but we also have to talk about how the remedies are given. And the flower essences are given according to the mental/emotional picture, because they act on that realm, while homeopathics also include physical indications. Classical homeopaths generally give remedies according to the total symptom picture, weighing a multitude of minute indications. (that's pronounced my-nute :-) I'm not a fan of classical homeopathy, but it's a good example for this. Also, Dr. Bach developed the remedies according to his own experiments on himself and his own intuition, not testing them on many people as Hahnemann did. I know there are people currently who are doing provings on flower essences.. I've only read a little about it.. maybe you're familiar with that? Those recent provings are pretty interesting. -Karen

At first I thought you said "pests", and in that case, I'm sure that we all were ;-) Otherwise, I have no idea. Re. Buteyko, I found a good source was the book Breathing Free, by Teresa Hale. It emphasizes that the "reduced breathing" is really the therapeutic part, rather than the breath holding. It started to seem rather like a qigong exercise I learned on a Ken Cohen tape, embryonic breathing, but had never really practiced much. Where I learned the most about Buteyko, though, was from Carol Baglia, Correct Breathing I summarized her recommendations here: Intro to Buteyko Breathing Re. TAT, yes, Tapas is an interesting person. I've talked with her and know she has a lot to offer, with her acupuncture background and having developed TAT which helped her heal from cancer. -Karen

Couple of quick suggestions.. 1. TAT (Tapas Acupressure Technique), TAT gets great results with allergies, and is a much simpler do-it-yourself version of NAET which is big in the naturopathic world for allergy desensitization but not even as effective, IMO. 2. EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), EFT 3. I agree with Michael Winn about homeopathy.. 4. Buteyko breathing, which Sean introduced me to! Take care, Karen