HLife | Healthy Living Redefined

Movement is all around us – and it is also within us. With change as the only constant, we are in a continuous state of transformation. We need to learn to handle this impermanence, and we can do it by studying the Law of Rhythm and the principles that work with it to bring about change inside and outside of us.

In an earlier article, we explained the basic idea behind the seven Universal Laws, seven principles that govern nature and everything in it, all explained in a text called The Kybalion (nothing to do with Kabbalah, just sounds similar). Today, we’ll share how some of them work together to generate what we call life, and how we can be active participants in this motion. As a good friend of mine once said, “you can either let change happen to you, or you can be the one to make it happen.” Read More…

Ah, the scent of a flower, the sight of a sunset, the sound of the ocean. The taste of fresh fruit…the touch of a loved one. Your senses – smell, sight, hearing, taste and touch – are your tools to experience the external reality on this planet, and while you may not think twice as you use them daily, you would definitely notice if one of them were impaired. Read More…

Change is and has been in the air – in the economy, in the way we relate and communicate via technology – for a while now. We can all feel and see it. But are we personally engaging in that change? While most of us know that something has changed in the world in a collective way and we are also feeling this in our own selves somehow, we may not be able to fully embrace this change unless we bring that change along into our conscious minds. Read More…

Nutrition: For centuries, ginger root has been used as a folk remedy for things like colds and upset tummies. Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found that daily ginger consumption also reduces muscle pain caused by exercise (sports or recreation). Ginger had been showed to exert anti-inflammatory effects in rodents before, and this study has concluded that the root can reduce muscle pain in humans by as much as 25%; it is also believed that heating ginger, as it happens when it is cooked in a soup or sauté, might increase its pain-relieving benefits. The study will be published in the September issue of the Journal of Pain. Read More…

Mind: No time to reap the mental benefits of a workout? No problem. According to a study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, just five minutes of exercise in a park, working in a backyard garden, on a nature trail, or other green space will benefit mental health. So called “green exercise”, physical activity in the presence of nature, has been proven to decrease the risk of mental illness and improve a sense of well-being. But until now, nobody knew how much time people needed to spend in green spaces to get those and other benefits. The study analyzed activities such as walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming. All natural environments were beneficial, including parks in urban settings. Green areas with water added something extra, and the researchers noted that a blue and green environment seems to be even better for health. Read More…

Everyone wants love, but not everyone seems to find it. If we have not yet found love, it is a sign that we have some work to do internally. We are walking magnets, attracting all that we are. So, if we are not attracting love, that is because we are not at a frequency of love.

A good starting point to find what you’re looking for is to look at what you are attracting. If you’re attracting loss, it means that your life, the way you are conducting it, is in a frequency of loss. If you attract lack, it is because your life is lacking. My question for you is: Who creates your life? And the answer is obvious: You do. You make your life the way you choose to. There’s no blaming God (the Universe), or parents, or anyone else on this one. You are all grown up, no longer under your parents’ care. You are no longer a kid; you’ve left home and now it is you that is in the driver’s seat of this thing called Your Life. Read More…

Mind: A new study sheds light on the role that dreams play in the important process of learning. The new findings suggest that dreams may be the sleeping brain’s way of telling us that it is hard at work on the process of memory consolidation, integrating our recent experiences to help us with performance-related tasks in the short run and, in the long run, translating this material into information that will have widespread application to our lives. “What’s got us really excited is that after nearly 100 years of debate about the function of dreams, this study tells us that dreams are the brain’s way of processing, integrating and really understanding new information,” explained Robert Stickgold, PhD, senior author of the study and Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The study is reported in the online issue of the journal Current Biology. Read More…

This is the concluding Part Two of HLife’s interview with Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, continued from last week’s Part One.

MC: You mention that being vegan is a starting point. What do you mean by that?
WT: People think that that’s the end – you are vegan, that’s it, you made it. The only thing you can do higher than that is to go raw. I think that is not true. When someone goes vegan, that’s actually the very beginning of transformation. For example, I’ve been a vegan already for more than 20 years, and I would get into certain conflicts with Madeleine, my wife. I would not be that cold, but she wanted to turn on the heater, and I’d say, ‘Come on, it’s not that cold, we don’t need the heater.’ Then, I realized that when she would say, ‘but I’m cold,’ even though I’ve been a vegan for 20 years, the mentality of discounting the suffering of others was still there, sort of like what we do to pigs, chicken and cows. They’re in horrible conditions but we just discount their suffering, we minimize it in our own minds, ‘oh its not that bad, they are just cows.’ And we have to able to see these patterns that have been injected into us along with eating animal foods, and we have to do the difficult inner work of pulling them out of our consciousness and really treating everyone with respect. You are respecting them as a being with their own unique qualities, and I think that’s when we begin to see veganism as a path to nonviolence, and as a spiritual journey that never ends. Veganism is basically an ongoing spiritual journey that just goes to higher and higher levels, to ultimate enlightenment, eventually to ultimate wisdom, love, compassion and awakening. That’s really what it is, the actual outer behavior of not eating animal foods anymore is a wonderful leap, but its just a tiny step. We have a long way to go after that. Read More…

Green: Harvesting…electrons? Yes. In an electrifying first, Stanford scientists have tapped the power of plants, as researchers looking for alternate sources of electricity experimented with plugging in to algae cells and succeeded in harnessing a tiny electric current. They found it at the very source of energy production – photosynthesis, a plant’s process of converting sunlight to  chemical energy. This may be the first step toward generating high efficiency bioelectricity that doesn’t give off carbon dioxide as a byproduct. In the experiment the researchers intercepted the electrons (using gold electrodes) just after they had been excited by the light and were at their highest energy levels. “We believe we are the first to extract electrons out of living plant cells. This is potentially one of the cleanest energy sources for energy generation,” said WonHyoung Ryu, lead author of the paper published in Nano Letters. Read More…

You probably already know that your eating habits (methane from the meat you eat) and your car (carbon dioxide from exhaust) as well as other habits (like throwing away recyclable goods) affect the planet. You also know that  conserving water (taking shorter showers) and electricity (turning off those lights) help too. But did you know that, above all of those, there is one action that can pollute the atmosphere and drain the planet of resources in a worse way?

Negative thoughts are the worst toxic pollutant on the face of the planet. Read More…