Health Education

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the intersection of mind and body. We really need a word that includes what we mean when we say “mind” and what we mean when we say “body” because there is really only one thing, most ways you look at it, and we have created a lot of difficulty and confusion for ourselves by seeing them as separate. What kind of trouble, you ask? I think the easiest way to answer that question is to consider this – we humans are somaticizers. Big time! By which I mean, an awful lot of the emotional strain we experience (mind) get expressed in our bodies (body). We get scared and our chest squeezes up on us or our head hurts or our throat gets dry and tight. We get really scared and we are trotting to the bathroom. Our jaw clenches and hurts when we’re mad. Water falls out of our face when we’re sad. Etc. Etc. And often we have these or a range of other physical reactions when we aren’t even aware of a difficult emotion. We have the physical reaction instead of the emotion because somewhere along the line we learned that this was preferable to feeling anger, or sadness, or whatever feeling we have learned is in the no-go zone for us. Sometimes (ok, maybe surprisingly often) this can even translate into chronic, problematic, physical symptoms that seem quite unrelated to our emotional life.

Submitted by Allison Allen So here we are, one year into a worldwide experience of disruption, dismay, fear, grief, and

So, I was chatting with someone as we waited for a meeting to start earlier today and we were discussing

Good morning fellow NorthLakers! Happy Monday! I hope you had a great weekend. What, though, makes a weekend “great?” Usually