Why we should use nature medicine

There are so many reason why we should use nature/natural medicine. For the first, read this article below:

Change Your Life

By Karin Evans

haron Snyder is facing a long swim in choppy waters, and she couldn’t be happier. Less than a year ago, the northern California college administrator quit her day job and realized a long-standing dream of becoming a personal trainer. “I have this whole new life that I absolutely love,” she says. Recently, she set a personal best in her swim time for a Half Ironman relay competition. Now she’s training for an ultra long distance rough water swim in the ocean next year. “Off Waikiki,” says Snyder with a blissful grin. “It doesn’t get much better than this.”

Talking with Snyder today, it’s hard to imagine what she describes as her past life. Flash back to her darkest moment: eleven years ago, when she was traveling with a tour group visiting Israel. “I was the slowest of the slow,” she says, “the fat girl holding everyone back.”

On a hot August day in the Golan Heights, the tour group took a wrong turn and hiked down a steep, sandy ravine. Everybody else turned around and hiked back out, but Snyder couldn’t make it up the grade. “I was terrified,” she says. “Finally some Israeli soldiers came. They formed a team and one would push me from behind, and another would pull, to get me from boulder to boulder and back up the hill. It was so humiliating.”

At the time, Snyder was 21 years old and weighed more than 320 pounds. “I had high cholesterol,” she says. “I was in the early stages of gallbladder disease, and I had to buy seatbelt extensions when I flew on airplanes.”

Today, Snyder has shed most of her excess weight, ditched her old career, and transformed her life. Her specialty as a personal trainer is coaching people like her former self—people who suffer from too much weight and too little encouragement, those who’d like to show up at the gym but are often afraid to.

Snyder is one of those rare people who—somehow—manage to make enormous transformations in their health habits, changes that reverberate through many other aspects of their lives. To the rest of us, who often struggle to make far smaller changes stick, such stories sound almost miraculous.

But, say mind-body practitioners and psychology researchers, they really aren’t. In fact, the way people are able to make such shifts has become a matter of growing scientific and clinical inquiry. The good news is that there’s more than one way to succeed. Experts have uncovered three key pathways to change, any one of which, followed step by step, can lead to happier, healthier lives.

Whichever path to change you select, physician James Gordon, director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C., recommends using mind-body techniques such as visualization and yoga to ease the process. He particularly favors meditation. “It’s a wonderful tool for clarifying what you want to change,” he says. “It helps you become aware of how you feel, how you think, and where you are stuck.”

Here are three life-altering strategies from four well-regarded “masters of change,” along with stories of ordinary people who managed to thoroughly transform themselves, one small step at a time.

ADOPT A NEW IDENTITY

or southern California policeman Walter Williams, the initial prompting to change was more akin to a whack on the back than a whisper in the ear.

At 26, Williams began work as a police dispatcher in southern California, went through the sheriff’s academy, and eventually joined the El Segundo Police Department. He worked patrol for five years and moved up to the detective bureau, burglary detail. Had you asked Williams during any of those years what he was going to do for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t have hesitated. He was a career cop, and that was that; his chosen profession was an intrinsic part of his identity.

But one day he began to have severe back spasms, which got worse and worse. Soon he was seeing doctors, checking in and out of the hospital, lying flat on his back, taking medication, going to physical therapy. Finally, his back problems so interfered with his ability to function that he had to retire from the force. That’s when things began to get interesting.

“I didn’t know my place any more,” he says. “That had been my career for the last twelve years, and now what was I going to do?”

With time on his hands and continued spasms in his back, he decided to try some alternative approaches to healing, including yoga, acupuncture, and massage. In the course of being treated, he found his mind wandering down new paths. Gradually he began letting go of the policeman’s identity that he’d carried for years.

Williams found himself drawn toward doing the very thing that had helped him. He enrolled in massage school, but soon found that—in what seemed rather a cruel twist—doing massage made his own back pain worse.

While some people might have abandoned their new path at this point, Williams kept moving in the direction he’d set for himself. One weekend, he stumbled into an introductory course in Thai massage.

He was surprised to find that this form of bodywork helped his back, even when he was working on someone else. “By the end of the weekend,” says Williams, “I knew what I was supposed to be doing.” He was soon on a plane to Thailand to study with a master teacher.

Today, Williams practices in the same southern California town where he once walked the police beat. “When I was a police officer, the job was very regimented, without much room to make mistakes or explore,” he says. “But now I feel more open to all the possibilities in life. At 42, I feel the most alive I’ve ever felt.”

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF
hirley Dockstader has been listening to her body for a long time—and the can-do messages she’s heard have taken her to places she never expected to go.

She calls herself a “late-blooming jock,” although in truth she’s been active for much of her adult life as a yoga teacher and recreational runner. When she hit her sixties, though, she needed to find aerobic exercise that was kinder to her body. So she switched from running to racewalking. But instead of strolling gracefully into the sunset, she found herself blossoming into a world champion, winning silver and gold medals as part of teams at numerous racewalking competitions, including the World Games and the U.S. Nationals.

How’d she do it? Having inspiring role models helped a lot. “One of my friends started racewalking when she was in her eighties,” Dockstader says. “When she started, she couldn’t walk from one tree to another, but she went on to set all kinds of records.”

Seeing this woman and other racewalkers who were well along in age made Dockstader believe that she, too, could do something unexpected for her stage of life. And once she got started, her body did the rest.

“I used to avoid competition at all costs,” says Dockstader. “But when I realized I could go really fast for my age, something happened to me inside. It was something I’d never experienced. I hesitate to use the words ‘warrior energy,’ but I got in touch with my strength in a way that I never had before.”

Another element that helped Dockstader make this leap was Qi Gong, the ancient Chinese movement and breathing practice that’s thought to create energy and improve health. By visualizing the energy of the sky flowing into her body, she found herself propelled to a new level.

“I found if I could just relax and practice, I was getting fueled by the universe when I walked,” she says. “That sounds far out, I know, but it’s amazing what a difference that made.’

“Now that I know I can do something that really surprises me, I’ve got a new confidence that has begun to translate into other parts of my life,” she says. “Who knows where it’s going to go from here?”

Create change from the inside out, by letting go of old perceptions
In the past 23 years, thousands of people seeking healthier, saner lives have made their way to the stress reduction program at Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Many of them suffer from chronic illnesses and pain, as well as from a wide range of job, family, and financial stresses. To ease their burdens, they must learn to make adjustments in the way they live. Over the years, executive director

Saki Santorelli has found that in order to make new habits stick—whether it’s adopting a new exercise regimen or mending troubled relationships—people need to learn to alter their perceptions of themselves.

“Change is not so much about doing something different as it is about becoming different,” says Santorelli. The key to this approach is not planning and strategizing, but being willing to let go of fixed ideas about who you are—and opening up to new ones. Once you begin to habitually perceive yourself in a different way, you’ll become more at ease with the identity you’re trying to create.

How to start moving in this direction? The critical first step, according to Santorelli, is to slow down and listen to the small internal voice piping up to tell you that you need to think and act differently. Maybe you’ve been carrying around 20 extra pounds for too many years, or you suddenly realize you can’t remember the last heart-to-heart you had with your spouse.

Hearing such messages can be uncomfortable, so it’s often easier to suppress them than to pay heed. But, says Santorelli, “paying attention itself becomes a way of crossing the threshold,” moving you closer to the person you want to become.

Once you’ve accepted that change is inevitable, Santorelli says, the second crucial step is to choose a single element to focus on, so as not to become overwhelmed. If you’re trying to lose weight, for example, start with a simple walking program three or four days a week. Concentrate on that alone, rather than on trying to cut back on desserts at the same time.

The next element is making the new activity a routine. “Consistency is critical,” Santorelli says. So if you’re determined to make more time for your family, for instance, set aside one part of each day that’s reserved for your kids no matter what.

As your new habit becomes a part of your life, you’ll gradually start to feel like a different person. In fact, Santorelli’s approach has a bit of a behaviorist element to it: If you change your actions, the perception will follow.

“Even little shifts in self-perception, which are often unconscious in the beginning, begin to place a new mirror in front of your eyes,” Santorelli says, “You become encouraged from the inside out.”

Pull together a support team to fortify your faith

Remember the little engine that could? Turns out the plucky locomotive was onto something: If you think you can, and think you can, after a while, you really can.

That, in a nutshell, describes the theory of self-efficacy, developed and refined over the past 20 years by Stanford psychology professor Albert Bandura. He’s discovered that a crucial element in self-transformation is learning to believe in one’s capabilities—and holding onto that faith no matter what. Much of his research has focused on how people learn to believe in themselves, and how this process helps them create happy, productive lives.

“People need a sense of self-efficacy, strung together with resilience, to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life,” he says.

One good way to attain this is to seek out people who have struggled with, and overcome, the same difficulties you have—a stubborn smoking habit, say, or a tendency to lash out at others. Seeing their successes can reinforce your confidence that you, too, can cover the same ground.

Better yet, find people to encourage you. Bandura’s research has shown that it’s a great boost when people whose achievements you admire express their faith in you.

Not surprisingly, another way to strengthen the can-do muscle is to succeed. It sounds self-evident, but the trick is in setting attainable goals that still provide a challenge. Rewarding yourself liberally after you’ve reached your first goal reinforces the idea that you can accomplish the next one—and the next, and the next, until one day, like the little engine, you’ve reached the top of the hill.

PLAN SMART
It sounds almost too simple. Having studied more than 3,000 people in various stages of change, two of the leading psychologists in the field, James Prochaska of the University of Rhode Island and Carlo DiClemente of the University of Maryland, have identified five stages that successful life-changers typically move through. The first three they call precontemplation (when the idea of shifting hasn’t even entered your mind); contemplation (when you’ve decided to shake things up but haven’t done anything yet); and preparation (when you map out the roadblocks and start plotting exactly how you’re going to get around them).

It’s the preparation phase, they say, that trips most people up. It’s easy enough to state your desire to change—you say to yourself, I’m going to start running three days a week, period. But this doesn’t drill down far enough into the details. The critical thing, the researchers say, is to make a realistic assessment of the obstacles to your plan, and to plot a strategy for surmounting them.

Running three days a week, you say? First think about what’s likely to keep you away from the track. If it rains, can you wear something that will keep you dry? What will you say to get yourself out the door on those chilly mornings when you’d really rather stay in bed? Anticipating obstacles and finding solutions ahead of time can help you power through the inevitable rough spots.

The first stretch of Sharon Snyder’s road to a new life was paved with many such bumps and potholes. The debacle in Israel pushed her into the contemplation stage, but while she carried through with her initial set of plans, they weren’t successful in the way that she’d hoped. To get her weight down, she first tried surgery. But years later, she still felt so sick and discouraged that she decided to take her health into her own hands.

This time she prepared differently, taking a new tack that focused on physical activity she could easily blend into her schedule. Since there was a pool at the college where she worked, she started swimming, a form of exercise she loved. Building on the energy she got from that, she joined a gym that offered weight training, spinning classes, and yoga. To ensure she’d stay on track when her motivation flagged, she hired a trainer.

By this time, she was well into what Prochaska and DiClemente have identified as the fourth stage, action. It’s here that successful life changers implement their plans, reward themselves for small goals attained, and monitor their progress.

As she got stronger, Snyder set clear goals for herself. “I had always been fascinated with triathlons, but afraid of running,” she says. To get past that hurdle, she found a coach who specialized in low impact work, then went to a training camp to prepare for a women’s triathlon.

She completed the race and finished strong. Exhilarated, she started a triathlon club to urge other women to join her. Before the year was out, she’d competed in other events and quit her desk job.

The fifth stage, maintenance, marks a point where you’ve integrated a new habit into your life and are well on your way to making the new behavior second nature.

Snyder knew she had hit the mark when someone said to her recently, “You look like a personal trainer.” At that moment, she realized how far she’d come. “I feel like one,” she said.

“One of my clients recently wrote me a note,” she adds. “It read, ‘Thank you for following your dream.’”


Source: http://www.alternativemedicine.com/common/news/store_news.asp?task=store_news&SID_store_news=984&storeID=02AD61F001A74B5887D3BD11F6C28169">http://www.alternativemedicine.com/common/news/store_news.asp?task=store_news&SID_store_news=984&storeID=02AD61F001A74B5887D3BD11F6C28169