Muscles Related Quotes

But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more 'manhood' to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind.

When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.

Everything is relative.” The man didn’t move a muscle as he spoke. “A knife is a godsend to the man tied in ropes, death to the man in chains.

Dear Goat, How does one fall in love? Do you trip? Do you stumble, lose your balance and drop to the sidewalk, graze your knee, graze your heart? Do you crash to the stony ground? Is there a precipice, from which you float, over the edge, forever? I know I'm in love when I see you, I know when I long to see you. Not a muscle has moved. Leaves hang unruffled by any breeze. The air is still. I have fallen in love without taking step. When did this happen? I haven't even blinked. I'm on fire. Is that too banal for you? It's not, you know. You'll see. It's what happens. It's what matters. I'm on fire. I no longer eat, I forget to eat. Food looks silly to me, irrelevant. If I even notice it. But I notice nothing. My thoughts are full and raging, a house full of brothers, related by blood, feuding blood feuds: "I'm in love." "Typically stupid choice." "I am, though, I'm racked by love as if love were pain." "Go ahead. Fuck up your life. It's all wrong and you know it. Wake up. Face it." "There's only one face, it's all I see, awake or asleep." I threw the book out the window last night. I tried to forget. You are all wrong for me, I know it, but I no longer care for my thoughts unless they're thoughts of you. When I'm close to you, in your presence, I feel your hair brush my cheek when it does not. I look away from you, sometimes. Then I look back. When I tie my shoes, when I peel an orange, when I drive my car, when I lie down each night without you, I remain, As ever, Ram

The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

The only dream I ever had was the dream of New York itself, and for me, from the minute I touched down in this city, that was enough. It became the best teacher I ever had. If your mother is anything like mine, after all, there are a lot of important things she probably didn't teach you: how to use a vibrator; how to go to a loan shark and pull a loan at 17 percent that's due in thirty days; how to hire your first divorce attorney; what to look for in a doula (a birth coach) should you find yourself alone and pregnant. My mother never taught me how to date three people at the same time or how to interview a nanny or what to wear in an ashram in India or how to meditate. She also failed to mention crotchless underwear, how to make my first down payment on an apartment, the benefits of renting verses owning, and the difference between a slant-6 engine and a V-8 (in case I wanted to get a muscle car), not to mention how to employ a team of people to help me with my life, from trainers to hair colorists to nutritionists to shrinks. (Luckily, New York became one of many other moms I am to have in my lifetime.) So many mothers say they want their daughters to be independent, but what they really hope is that they'll find a well-compensated banker or lawyer and settle down between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-eight in Greenwich, Darien, or That Town, USA, to raise babies, do the grocery shopping, and work out in relative comfort for the rest of their lives. I know this because I employ their daughters. They raise us to think they want us to have careers, and they send us to college, but even they don't really believe women can be autonomous and take care of themselves.

They say that, if we manage to live without too great an effort, it is entirely owing to the automatism which makes us unconscious of a great part of our movements. In order to take one single step, it seems, we displace an infinite number of muscles, and yet, thanks to this automatism, we are unaware of it. The same thing happens in our relations with other people.

The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation,” Blair wrote. They could develop a drug, have it clinically tested, secure favorable reports from the doctors and hospitals with which they had connections, devise an advertising campaign in their agency, publish the clinical articles and the advertisements in their own medical journals, and use their public relations muscle to place articles in newspapers and magazines.

The most common theory points to the fact that men are stronger than women and that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission. A more subtle version of this claim argues that their strength allows men to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labor, such as plowing and harvesting. This gives them control of food production, which in turn translates into political clout. There are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power. First, the statement that men are stronger is true only on average and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease, and fatigue than men. There are also many women who can run faster and lift heavier weights than many men. Furthermore, and most problematically for this theory, women have, throughout history, mainly been excluded from jobs that required little physical effort, such as the priesthood, law, and politics, while engaging in hard manual labor in the fields....and in the household. If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina, women should have got far more of it. Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. ...Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. Another theory explains that masculine dominance results not from strength but from aggression. Millions of years of evolution have made men far more violent than women. Women can match men as far as hatred, greed, and abuse are concern, but when push comes to shove…men are more willing to engage in raw physical violence. This is why, throughout history, warfare has been a masculine prerogative. In times of war, men’s control of the armed forces has made them the masters of civilian society too. They then use their control of civilian society to fight more and more wars. …Recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are…on average, better suited to serve as common soldiers. Yet, granted that the common soldiers are all men, does it follow that the ones managing the war and enjoying its fruits must also be men? That makes no sense. It’s like assuming that because all the slaves cultivating cotton fields are all Black, plantation owners will be Black as well. Just as an all-Black workforce might be controlled by an all-White management, why couldn’t an all-male soldiery be controlled by an all-female government?

Humans are built to move. We evolved under conditions that required daily intense physical activity, and even among individuals with lower physical potential, that hard-earned genotype is still ours today. The modern sedentary lifestyle leads to the inactivation of the genes related to physical performance, attributes that were once critical for survival and which are still critical for the correct, healthy expression of the genotype. The genes are still there, they just aren't doing anything because the body is not stressed enough to cause a physiological adaptation requiring their activation. The sedentary person's heart, lungs, muscles, bones, nerves and brain all operate far below the level at which they evolved to function, and at which they still function best.

Somatic Symptoms: People with Complex PTSD often have medical unexplained physical symptoms such as abdominal pains, headaches, joint and muscle pain, stomach problems, and elimination problems. These people are sometimes most unfortunately mislabeled as hypochondriacs or as exaggerating their physical problems. But these problems are real, even though they may not be related to a specific physical diagnosis. Some dissociative parts are stuck in the past experiences that involved pain may intrude such that a person experiences unexplained pain or other physical symptoms. And more generally, chronic stress affects the body in all kinds of ways, just as it does the mind. In fact, the mind and body cannot be separated. Unfortunately, the connection between current physical symptoms and past traumatizing events is not always so clear to either the individual or the physician, at least for a while. At the same time we know that people who have suffered from serious medical, problems. It is therefore very important that you have physical problems checked out, to make sure you do not have a problem from which you need medical help.

Since the experience is different for each individual, the tension will reflect that experience. In some persons the whole lower half of the body is relatively immobilized and held in a passive state; in others the muscular tensions are localized in the pelvic floor and around the genital apparatus. If the latter sort of tension is severe, it constitutes a functional castration; for, although the genitals operate normally, they are dissociated in feeling from the rest of the body. Any reduction of sexual feeling amounts to a psychological castration. Generally the person is unaware of these muscular tensions, but putting pressure upon the muscles in the attempt to release the tension is often experienced as very painful and frightening.

The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters

Dr. Bone Specialist came in, made me stand up and hobble across the room, checked my reflexes, and then made me lie down on the table. He bent my right knee this way and that, up and down, all the way out to the side and in. Then he did the same with my left leg. He ordered X rays then started to leave the room. I panicked. I MUST GET DRUGS. "What can I take for the pain?" I asked him before he got out the door. "You can take some over the counter ibuprofen," he suggested. "But I wouldn't take more than nine a day." I choked. Nine a day? I'd been popping forty. Nine a day? Like hell. I couldn't even go to the bathroom on my own, I hadn't slept in three weeks, and my normally sunny cheery disposition had turned into that of a very rabid dog. If I didn't get good drugs and get them now, it was straight to Shooter's World and then Walgreens pharmacy for me. "I don't think you understand," I explained. "I can't go to work. I have spent the last four days with my mother who is addicted to QVC, watching jewelry shows, doll shows and make-up shows. I almost ordered a beef-jerky maker! Give me something, or I'm going to use your calf muscles to make the first batch!" Without further ado, he hastily scribbled out a prescription for some codeine and was gone. I was happy. My mother, however, had lost the ability to speak.

Everyone gets to go crazy in long-term relationships, but you have to take turns. I call this relational integrity. It means that you hold the (Wise Adult) fort while your partner goes off their (Adaptive Child) rails. It’s not an easy practice, but it builds strong relational muscles.

Coming under others has a power to do what laws and bullets and bombs can never do—namely, bring about transformation in an enemy’s heart. This is the unique “Lamb power” of the kingdom of God, and indeed, this is the power of God Almighty. When God flexes his omnipotent muscle, it doesn’t look like Rambo or the Terminator—it looks like Calvary! And living in this Calvary-like love moment by moment, in all circumstances and in relation to all people, is the sole calling of those who are aligned with the kingdom that Jesus came to bring.

Another, related issue is that longevity itself, and healthspan in particular, doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current healthcare system. There are few insurance reimbursement codes for most of the largely preventive interventions that I believe are necessary to extend lifespan and healthspan. Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed. Similarly, there’s no billing code for putting a patient on a comprehensive exercise program designed to maintain her muscle mass and sense of balance while building her resistance to injury. But if she falls and breaks her hip, then her surgery and physical therapy will be covered. Nearly all the money flows to treatment rather than prevention—and when I say “prevention,” I mean prevention of human suffering.

Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation. In school classrooms children are shown anatomical charts, each depicting different aspects of the human body. One chart reveals the body as a skeleton, another the body as a network of blood vessels, another the nerves, another the muscles. If we made equivalent sets of diagrams to portray ecosystems, one of the layers would show the fungal mycelium that runs through them. We would see sprawling, interlaced webs strung through the soil, through sulfurous sediments hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, along coral reefs, through plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, in

I love Sara, but something was taken from me at the church, something that she can’t relate to. Every time I walk outside I think maybe someone is going to grab me. I take a sip of a glass of water I got out of my own tap and swish it around in my mouth first, like maybe it’s a threat. And I’m starting to understand why Alex walks around on the balls of her feet, why her back muscles are always tensed, like a cat ready to spring. She knows. She gets it. So that’s why I’m going to tell Sara that I’m okay and leave it at that.

As I look back right now, I realize that it was all of those mindless, repetitive tasks I was forced to endure day after day, the getting up and doing every scene the best I could, over and over, that gave me a kind of “miles in the saddle.” They strengthened muscles not located in my body but in my heart—muscles not easy to access and certainly not fun. But easy is overrated and fun is extremely relative.

But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.

Enid and Sylvia resumed relations stiffly, their emotional muscles pulled and aching from last night's overuse.

ideas—relaxation, alignment, and rootedness—are all related. In tai chi, relaxation implies poise—that is, upright posture. The better your alignment, the less the muscles have to do to hold you up.

The industrial and technological revolutions have made our lives simpler, in terms of what is physically required of us on a daily basis, but they have also made it possible for us to do a whole lot less than we ought to be doing, and we suffer for it. We have become flabby and overweight; our joints and muscles have become stiff from lack of use. We suffer from all sorts of problems related to our lack of physical exercise; it affects us on all levels, causing high blood pressure, increased cholesterol, anxiety, depression, insomnia and the list goes on and on. We know, too, how much better we feel for a bit of exercise. Those “feel-good” hormones lift our spirits, boost self-esteem and improve our overall sense of well-being. It’s a sort of built-in reward system. There’s a reason for that. It’s because we are meant to be active.

Just as muscles slowly increase their resemblance to steel, so we are gradually fashioned by the world; and although neither the steel nor the world can very well possess a sense of their own existence, idle analogy leads us unwittingly into the illusion that both do, in fact, possess such a sense. Otherwise, we feel powerless to check up on our own sense of existence, and Atlas, for example, would gradually come to regard the globe on his shoulders as something akin to himself. Thus our sense of existence seeks after some object, and can only live in a false world of relativity.

Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters. Moments of intensity are also moments of power and control; yet we have so little understanding of this that we wait passively for some chance to galvanize the muscle that created the intensity. But whether you use the negative methods of relaxation (which is fundamentally 'transcendental meditation') or the positive method of intense alertness and concentration, the result is the same: a realization of the enormous vistas of reality that lie outside our normal range of awareness. You recognize that the chief obstacle to such awareness is that we don't need it to get through an ordinary working day. I can make do fairly well with a narrow awareness and a moderate mount of vital energy. I have 'peak experiences' when I occasionally develop more awareness and more energy than I need for the task in hand; then I 'overflow', and realize, for a dazzled moment, what a fascinating universe I actually inhabit. It is significant that Maslow's 'peakers' were not daydreaming romantics, but healthy, practical people...

I sense a dark foreboding in man’s separation from his body, as if it heralded the severing of man’s direct link to nature’s laws. This is not a minor issue: it’s about whether man is a human being or a machine. This question is related to even more profound matters — in fact, the most serious matters of all. The most crucial question regarding every human action in this era is how much strain it exercises on nature: the choice is between growth and preservation. This increasing lack of physical exercise does not bode well. The replacement of muscle power with industrial energy means, of course, a great increase of burden, the fiasco of all fiascos.

Many stages of a baby's development in the mother's womb are related in the Qur'an. As described in Surat al-Muminun 14, the cartilage of the embryo in the mother's womb ossifies first. Then these bones are covered with muscle cells. Allah describes this development with the verse: "… [We then] formed the lump into bones and clothed the bones in flesh.

This was Dr. Ham’s whole theory: that because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relationship trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful. That meant future relationships with anybody would be harder for people with complex trauma because they were wired to believe that other people could not be trusted. The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people. Not just reading self-help books or meditating alone. We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place. “Relationships are like sports. It’s muscle memory, it’s all the action of doing. You can’t just read about tennis and know how to play tennis. There’s a lot of duelling involved. Interpersonal duelling!” As he saw it, his office was a safe place to practice duelling. Learning how to listen, how to talk, how to ask for what I needed.

Good riding techniques result in immediate automated control forces, resulting in controlling scary situations automatically. Sliding changes seat, peg and grip positions relative to the rider. Good riding techniques use these changes to your advantage. Good body posture, weight distribution and muscle tension then result in the desired immediate automated control forces.

Thanks largely to the attempts to integrate women into the armed forces of many modern countries, the physical differences between the sexes have been precisely measured.[296] One study found the average U.S. Army female recruit to be 12 centimeters shorter and 14.3 kilograms lighter than her male brethren. Compared to the average male recruit, females had 16.9 fewer kilograms of muscle and 2.6 more kilograms of fat, as well as 55 percent of the upper body strength and 72 percent of the lower body strength. Fat mass is inversely related to aerobic capacity and heat tolerance, hence women are also at a disadvantage when performing activities such as carrying heavy loads, working in the heat and running. Even when the samples were controlled for height, women possessed only 80 percent of the overall strength of men. Only the upper 20 percent of women could do as well physically as the lower 20 percent of men. Had the 100 strongest individuals out of a random group consisting of 100 men and 100 women been selected, 93 would be male and only seven female.[297] Yet another study showed gthat only the upper 5 percent of women are as strong as the median male.[298]

He reached for me, and fast as lightning, he boxed my ears. All I remember is the world exploding. Cassandra says she helped me back to our room, and there was blood coming from my left ear. My right ear mended in a day or two, but I could only hear a little out of the left one, and there was a beating pain deep down. Soon I took ill with fever. Mama said that had nothing to do with the ear, but I think it did." Pandora paused, unwilling to relate any of the distasteful details of her ear suppurating and draining. She glanced cautiously at Gabriel, whose face was averted. He was no longer playing with her braid. His hand had clenched around it until the muscles of his forearms and wrist stood out. "Even after I recovered from the fever," Pandora said, "the hearing didn't come back all the way. But the worst part was that I kept losing my balance, especially at night. It made me afraid of the dark. Ever since then-" She stopped as Gabriel lifted his head. His face was hard and murderous, the hellfrost in his eyes frightening her more than her father's fury ever had. "That bloody son of a bitch," he said softly. "If he were still alive, I'd beat him with a thresher's flail." Pandora reached out with a fluttering motion, patting the air near him. "No," she said breathlessly, "no, I wouldn't want that. I hated him for a long time, but now I feel sorry for him." Gabriel caught her hand in midair, swift but gentle, as if it were a bird he wanted to hold without injuring. His eyes had dilated until she could see reflections of herself in the dark centers. "Why?" he whispered after a long moment. "Because hurting me was the only way to hide his own pain.

the existence of the muscles vanished into thin air. And yet, it was then that the muscles played their most essential function, grinding up with their sturdy, invisible teeth that ambiguous, relative sense of existence and substituting for it an unqualified sense of transparent, peerless power that required no object at all. Even the muscles themselves no longer existed. I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light.

The “noble” person has a completely naïve and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naive” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one’s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately. The noble man’s naive self-confidence, which is as natural to him as tension is to the muscles, permits him calmly to assimilate the merits of others in all the fullness of their substance and configuration. He never “grudges” them their merits. On the contrary: he rejoices in their virtues and feels that they make the world more worthy of love. His naive self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being. Therefore he can afford to admit that another person has certain “qualities” superior to his own or is more “gifted” in some respects—indeed in all respects. Such a conclusion does not diminish his naïve awareness of his own value, which needs no justification or proof by achievements or abilities. Achievements merely serve to confirm it. On the other hand, the “common” man (in the exact acceptation of the term) can only experience his value and that of another if he relates the two, and he clearly perceives only those qualities which constitute possible differences. The noble man experiences value prior to any comparison, the common man in and through a comparison. For the latter, the relation is the selective precondition for apprehending any value. Every value is a relative thing, “higher” or “lower,” “more” or “less” than his own. He arrives at value judgments by comparing himself to others and others to himself

Plants made me, after all. Every bundle of muscle in my body was woven from the sugars plants spun from moisture and air. My blood cells that course through my veins like water through rootlets are each kept ruby red with the oxygen plants made. The branching structure of my lungs are suffused with that too. Every inward breath of mine was first breathed out by plants. In this material sense, in terms of what they’ve contributed to my physical being, they are as much my relatives as any family member I know.

Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface—all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. This process appears to involve no muscles or nerves. The middle layer contains the tiny iridophores, each 100 microns across. These also reflect light, including polarized light (which humans can’t see, but a number of octopuses’ predators, including birds, do). The iridophores create an array of glittering greens, blues, golds, and pinks. Some of these little organs seem to be passive, but other iridophores appear to be controlled by the nervous system. They are associated with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the first neurotransmitter to be identified in any animal. Acetylcholine helps with contraction of muscles; in humans, it is also important in memory, learning, and REM sleep. In octopuses, more of it “turns on” the greens and blues; less creates pinks and golds. The topmost layer of the octopus’s skin contains chromatophores, tiny sacks of yellow, red, brown, and black pigment, each in an elastic container that can be opened or closed to reveal more or less color. Camouflaging the eye alone—with a variety of patterns including a bar, a bandit’s mask, and a starburst pattern—can involve as many as 5 million chromatophores. Each chromatophore is regulated via an array of nerves and muscles, all under the octopus’s voluntary control.

Here, I felt, I was gaining a clue to an inner understanding of the cult of the hero. The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero; and when he does so, how dishonest it is that his phraseology, partaking ostensibly of a logic so universal and general, should not (or at least should be assumed by the general public not to) give any clue to his physical characteristics. I have yet to hear hero worship mocked by a man endowed with what might justly be called heroic physical attributes. Facile cynicism, invariably, is related to feeble muscles or obesity, while the cult of the hero and a mighty nihilism are always related to a mighty body and well-tempered muscles. For the cult of the hero is, ultimately, the basic principle of the body, and in the long run is intimately involved with the contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death.

Time seemed to stop, and the Lakota phrase mitakuye oyasin—we are all related—came to me, and in that moment I understood what those words meant. I inhabited them, as images, thoughts, and memories arose amidst the old vehicles. I saw my mother, gone but still with me, my father, who’d died too soon, and my sister, who I’d loved like my own life. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends. They appeared before me, all of my relations, my ancestors, Native and white, who’d loved and struggled, hunted and gathered, worked and played; they’d stood on this continent, looking up at these stars and these planets. It was daylight, but I could see the stars now, all of them, surrounding me, lighting the air, their brilliance shining and radiating off the monoliths. And then it was dark, a black-hole sky. But I looked down and saw that the stars—every one of them—were now in my hands, lighting up my veins, my muscles, my bones. I stood there, alone with my ancestors, and listened to them. Finally I turned away. As I walked back to my life, the words my mother used to say finally came to me. Wakan Tanka nici un. May the Creator guide you.

If the body is no longer a site of otherness but of identification, then we have urgently to become reconciled with it, repair it, perfect it, turn it into an ideal object. Everyone treats their bodies the way men treat women in projective identification: they invest them as a fetish, making an autistic cult of them, subjecting them to a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is the body's resemblance to its model which becomes a source of eroticism and 'white' seduction -- in the sense that it effects a kind of white magic of identity, as opposed to the black magic of otherness. This is how it is with body-building: you get into your body as you would into a suit of nerve and muscle. The body is not muscular, but muscled. It is the same with the brain and with social relations or exchanges: body-building, brainstorming, word-processing. Madonna is the ideal specimen of this, our muscled Immaculate Conception, our muscular angel who delivers us from the weaknesses of the body (pity the poor shade of Marilyn!). The sheath of muscles is the equivalent of character armour. In the past, women merely wrapped themselves in their image and their finery -- Freud speaks of those people who live with a kind of inner mirror, in a fleshly, happy self-reference. That narcissistic ideal is past and gone; body-building has wiped it out and replaced it with a gymnastic Ego-Ideal -- cold, hard, stressed, artificial self-reference. The construction of a double, of a physical and mental identity shell. Thus, in `body simulation', where you can animate your body remotely at any moment, the phantasy of being present in more than one body becomes an operational reality. An extension of the human being. And not a metaphorical or poetic extension, as in Pessoa's heteronyms, but quite simply a technical one.

I was discussing it with my teacher, over the jeejah—no pictures, just our voices. We had this long talk about this nerve and the muscles and ligaments around it and how I should manipulate them to help alleviate the problem, and suddenly I just flashed on how weird the whole thing was—two of us both relating to this image—this model—of another person’s body that was in his mind and in my mind, but—” “Also seemingly in a third place,” I suggested, “a shared place.” “That’s what it felt like. It freaked me out for a little while, but then I put it out of my mind because I thought I was just being weird.

Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles... Attention is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort. Of itself, it does not involve tiredness. When we become tired, attention is scarcely possible any more, unless we have already had a good deal of practice. It is better to stop working altogether, to seek some relaxation, and then a little later to return to the task; we have to press on and loosen up alternately, just as we breathe in and out. Twenty minutes of concentrated, untired attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application which leads us to say with a sense of duty done: “I have worked well!” But, in spite of all appearances, it is also far more difficult. There is something in our soul which has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue... Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.

Myth #3: Fasting Causes Low Blood Sugar Sometimes people worry that blood sugar will fall very low during fasting and they will become shaky and sweaty. Luckily, this does not actually happen. Blood sugar level is tightly monitored by the body, and there are multiple mechanisms to keep it in the proper range. During fasting, our body begins by breaking down glycogen (remember, that’s the glucose in short-term storage) in the liver to provide glucose. This happens every night as you sleep to keep blood sugars normal as you fast overnight. FASTING ALL-STARS AMY BERGER People who engage in fasting for religious or spiritual purposes often report feelings of extreme clear-headedness and physical and emotional well-being. Some even feel a sense of euphoria. They usually attribute this to achieving some kind of spiritual enlightenment, but the truth is much more down-to-earth and scientific than that: it’s the ketones! Ketones are a “superfood” for the brain. When the body and brain are fueled primarily by fatty acids and ketones, respectively, the “brain fog,” mood swings, and emotional instability that are caused by wild fluctuations in blood sugar become a thing of the past and clear thinking is the new normal. If you fast for longer than twenty-four to thirty-six hours, glycogen stores become depleted. The liver now can manufacture new glucose in a process called gluconeogenesis, using the glycerol that’s a by-product of the breakdown of fat. This means that we do not need to eat glucose for our blood glucose levels to remain normal. A related myth is that brain cells can only use glucose for energy. This is incorrect. Human brains, unique amongst animals, can also use ketone bodies—particles that are produced when fat is metabolized—as a fuel source. This allows us to function optimally even when food is not readily available. Ketones provide the majority of the energy we need. Consider the consequences if glucose were absolutely necessary for brain function. After twenty-four hours without food, glucose stored in our bodies in the form of glycogen is depleted. At that point, we’d become blubbering idiots as our brains shut down. In the Paleolithic era, our intellect was our only advantage against wild animals with their sharp claws, sharp fangs, and bulging muscles. Without it, humans would have become extinct long ago. When glucose is not available, the body begins to burn fat and produce ketone bodies, which are able to cross the blood-brain barrier to feed the brain cells. Up to 75 percent of the brain’s energy requirements can be met by ketones. Of course, that means that glucose still provides 25 percent of the brain’s energy requirements. So does this mean that we have to eat for our brains to function?

There is no greater reason for children to honor parents than for parents to honor children, except that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than the children. The same thing, of course, happened in the relations of men and women. It was the duty of the wives to submit to husbands, not of husbands to submit to wives. The only basis for this view was that if wives could be induced to accept it, it saved trouble for their husbands. 'The man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man; neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man' (I Cor. xi. 8,9). I defy anyone to find any basis for this view, except that men have stronger muscles than women.

existence of the muscles vanished into thin air. And yet, it was then that the muscles played their most essential function, grinding up with their sturdy, invisible teeth that ambiguous, relative sense of existence and substituting for it an unqualified sense of transparent, peerless power that required no object at all. Even the muscles themselves no longer existed. I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light. It is scarcely to be wondered at that in this pure sense of power that no amount of books or intellectual analysis could ever capture, I should discover a true antithesis of words. And indeed it was this that by gradual stages was to become the focus of my whole thinking.

I hear footsteps, which is my first indicator that something is off—Dr. Zhang is feather-boned, and her light steps would barely register through the thick metal of her door. Still, I’m staring at where her eyes should be when the door jerks open. Instead of her kind, slightly wrinkled face, I’m met with a bronze wall of rippling abdominal muscles. Washboard isn’t a good descriptor because these abs are so chiseled they seem like they could hurt you, like you could lose a finger to a freak sit-up related accident if you reached out to stroke them at the wrong moment. This is an imminent threat because, clearly, their owner must spontaneously break into abdominal exercises without warning all the time to maintain this physique.

Oh we’re not together. I mean, we’re sitting together and we came here together but obviously we’re not together-together. How could we be together?  I’m probably never going to see him again after today. We’re not even friends. I don’t even know him. I mean, you know, really-” I inclined my head toward her and a small laugh burst from my lips, “can you even imagine? It’d be like Planet of the Apes- and he’s Charlton Heston with all the muscles and such and I’m that girl ape. They can’t be together because it’d be like a Neanderthal with a human, cross species breeding…and that’s just not right. Although Neanderthals are closely related to humans and are in fact part of the same species- if you want to be precise- they are a sub-species or alternate species of human...

Needless to say, elderly people taking steroids may also experience the same side effects as younger persons. So, if you are a senior and need to be on a long course of steroids, what should you do? We would suggest a practical approach—which could apply to anyone on steroids, regardless of age, but may be particularly relevant for seniors because they are particularly vulnerable to side effects: • Understand and verify the need for steroids in your own situation, weighing the anticipated benefit with the possible risks. This means that you should explore the range of other treatments that may be available for your particular condition. You need to learn about the benefits and risks of any other treatment suggested. In other words, get all the information you can prior to going on treatment, be it with steroids or other medications. • Be sure that your health is well-assessed before or at the start of therapy. If you have underlying, separate health conditions, those should be noted and followed while you are on steroids. • Assess bodily systems that might particularly be affected by being on steroids. This means an assessment of your skeletal health, your eyes, your teeth, and your internal organs. • Request guidance about staying active. Physical therapy should be planned, to minimize the chances that your muscles and joints will be overtaxed or that any existing damage might get worse. • Ask to reassess the length and dose of your medication course at various intervals. A reasonable interval is every couple of months, if you are on a long course of steroids.

I can't get over the fact that Descartes compared the human body to a machine or an automaton." "The comparison was based on the fact that people in his time were deeply fascinated by machines and the workings of clocks, which appeared to have the ability to function of their own accord. The word 'automaton' means precisely that -- something that moves of its own accord. It was obviously only an illusion that they moved of their own accord. An astronomical clock, for instance, is both constructed and wound up by human hands. Descartes made a point of the fact that ingenious inventions of that kind were actually assembled very simply from a relatively small number of parts compared with the vast number of bones, muscles, nerves, veins and arteries that the human and the animal body consists of. Why should God not be able to make an animal or a human body based on mechanical laws?" "Nowadays there is a lot of talk about 'artificial intelligence'." "Yes, that is the automaton of our time...

Sleepwalking is a parasomnia, a strange behavior that occurs during sleep. Over the years, sleep experts have identified two main stages of sleep by recording brain waves—rapid eye movement (REM) and non–rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep. Sleepwalking usually occurs after an abrupt and incomplete spontaneous arousal from the non-REM sleep that occurs in the first couple of hours of the night, turning one into a mobile sleeper. Trying to waken sleepwalkers is fruitless and can be dangerous, since the sleepwalker may feel threatened by physical contact and respond violently. Normally, non-REM sleep shifts into REM sleep, during which there is a loss of muscle tone, preventing motor behavior during REM sleep. The majority of sleepwalking episodes tend to be relatively harmless and usually make for a good story as told by the witness, often beginning with “You won’t believe what you did last night!” And if you are the sleepwalker you don’t believe it, because you will have no memory of your midnight shenanigans. Most parasomniac behaviors appear

Suddenly every muscle in my body tensed as if standing up in greeting, even though I didn’t move. “Barrons.” I dropped my hands and raised my head. “Ms. Lane.” He took a chair across from me with such eerie grace that I wondered how I’d ever believed he was human. He poured himself into the brocade wing chair, like water over stone, before settling into sleek muscle. He moved as if he knew where everything in the room was, in precise measurements. He didn’t walk, stalk, or prowl; he glided with flawless awareness of all other atoms in relation to his. It made it easy for him to conceal himself behind inanimate objects and to assume a similar . . . structure or something. “Have you always moved like that in front of me and I just never noticed? Was I oblivious?” “No and yes. You were oblivious. Head up that tight pink ass. But I never moved this way in front of you.” His looked dripped sexual innuendo. “I might have moved this way a time or two behind you.” “Not hiding anything from me anymore?” “I wouldn’t go that far.” “What does someone like you conceal?” “Wouldn’t you like to know?” His glittering eyes raked me with a hard once-over.

PRESCRIPTION 5 Low Back and Trunk   This prescription can be used to treat these symptoms and restrictions: Abdominal pain Compromised breathing Hip extension range of motion Hip pain Low back pain Sciatica Spinal rotation, flexion and extension range of motion   Overview Methods: Contract and relax Pressure wave Smash and floss Tools: Small ball Large ball Small bouncy ball or under-inflated soccer/volleyball Total time:  14 minutes   This prescription is great for treating low back pain and supporting the hardworking muscles of your trunk. We’ve established that poor spinal mechanics and sitting can cause adaptive stiffness and irritation in the discs, ligaments, and muscles around your spine and trunk. And when that happens, low back pain is often the result. Although there are other contributing factors to consider, like previous injuries, arthritis, obesity, and stress, we would argue that one of the leading causes of low back pain and trunk-related problems stems from poor posture, prolonged sitting, and a lack of basic self-maintenance. Having spent the majority of this book outlining a protocol for preventing and resolving the issue from a mechanical standpoint, let’s turn our attention to the maintenance side of things. This prescription targets the muscles that are responsible for keeping your spine braced, as well as the muscles that may get stiff when you move poorly or sit for too long.

YOU CAN COME to the end of talking, about women, talking. In restaurants, cafés, kitchens, less frequently in bars or pubs, about relatives, relations, relationships, illnesses, jobs, children, men; about nuance, hunch, intimation, intuition, shadow; about themselves and each other; about what he said to her and she said to her and she said back; about what they feel. Something more definite, more outward then, some action, to drain the inner swamp, sweep the inner fluff out from under the inner bed, harden the edges. Men at sea, for instance. Not on a submarine, too claustrophobic and smelly, but something more bracing, a tang of salt, cold water, all over your calloused body, cuts and bruises, hurricanes, bravery and above all no women. Women are replaced by water, by wind, by the ocean, shifting and treacherous; a man has to know what to do, to navigate, to sail, to bail, so reach for the How-To book, and out here it’s what he said to him, or didn’t say, a narrowing of the eyes, sizing the bastard up before the pounce, the knife to the gut, and here comes a wave, hang on to the shrouds, all teeth grit, all muscles bulge together. Or sneaking along the gangway, the passageway, the right of way, the Milky Way, in the dark, your eyes shining like digital wristwatches, and the bushes, barrels, scuppers, ditches, filthy with enemies, and you on the prowl for adrenalin and loot. Corpses of your own making deliquesce behind you as you reach the cave, abandoned city, safe, sliding panel, hole in the ground, and rich beyond your wildest dreams!

Just how important a close moment-to-moment connection between mother and infant can be was illustrated by a cleverly designed study, known as the “double TV experiment,” in which infants and mothers interacted via a closed-circuit television system. In separate rooms, infant and mother observed each other and, on “live feed,” communicated by means of the universal infant-mother language: gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions. The infants were happy during this phase of the experiment. “When the infants were unknowingly replayed the ‘happy responses’ from the mother recorded from the prior minute,” writes the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, “they still became as profoundly distressed as infants do in the classic ‘flat face’ experiments in which mothers-in-person gave no facial emotional response to their infant’s bid for attunement.” Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. All that was lacking in the instant video replay, during which infants saw their mother’s face unresponsive to the messages they, the infants, were sending out. This sharing of emotional spaces is called attunement. Emotional stress on the mother interferes with infant brain development because it tends to interfere with the attunement contact. Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional selfregulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at that moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb. Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill. As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. The muscles of smiling are exactly the same in each case, but the signals that set the smile muscles to work do not come from the same centers in the brain. As a consequence, those muscles respond differently to the signals, depending on their origin. This is why only very good actors can mimic a genuine, heartfelt smile. The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. Infants, particularly sensitive infants, intuit the difference between a parent’s real psychological states and her attempts to soothe and protect the infant by means of feigned emotional expressions. A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. The emotional sensory radar of the infant has not yet been scrambled. It reads feelings clearly. They cannot be hidden from the infant behind a screen of words, or camouflaged by well-meant but forced gestures. It is unfortunate but true that we grow far more stupid than that by the time we reach adulthood.

What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts Apollonian and Dionysian which I have introduced into the vocabulary of Aesthetic, as representing two distinct modes of ecstasy? — Apollonian ecstasy acts above all as a force stimulating the eye, so that it acquires the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are essentially visionaries. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole system of passions is stimulated and intensified, so that it discharges itself by all the means of expression at once, and vents all its power of representation, of imitation, of transfiguration, of transformation, together with every kind of mimicry and histrionic display at the same time. The essential feature remains the facility in transforming, the inability to refrain from reaction (—a similar state to that of certain hysterical patients, who at the slightest hint assume any role). It is impossible for the Dionysian artist not to understand any suggestion; no outward sign of emotion escapes him, he possesses the instinct of comprehension and of divination in the highest degree, just as he is capable of the most perfect art of communication. He enters into every skin, into every passion: he is continually changing himself. Music as we understand it today is likewise a general excitation and discharge of the emotions; but, notwithstanding this, it is only the remnant of a much richer world of emotional expression, a mere residuum of Dionysian histrionism. For music to be made possible as a special art, quite a number of senses, and particularly the muscular sense, had to be paralysed (at least relatively: for all rhythm still appeals to our muscles to a certain extent): and thus man no longer imitates and represents physically everything he feels, as soon as he feels it. Nevertheless that is the normal Dionysian state, and in any case its primitive state. Music is the slowly attained specialisation of this state at the cost of kindred capacities.

Vitamin D3 boasts a strong safety profile, along with broad and deep evidence that links it to brain, metabolic, cardiovascular, muscle, bone, lung, and immune health. New and emerging research suggests that vitamin D supplements may also slow down our epigenetic/biological aging.29, 30 2. Omega-3 fish oil: Over the last thirty years or so, the typical Western diet has added more and more pro-inflammatory omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids versus anti-inflammatory omega-3 PUFAs. Over the same period, we’ve seen an associated rise in chronic inflammatory diseases, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease. 31 Rich in omega-3s, fish oil is another incredibly versatile nutraceutical tool with multi-pronged benefits from head to toe. By restoring a healthier PUFA ratio, it especially helps your brain and heart. Regular consumption of fatty fish like salmon has been linked to a lower risk of congestive heart failure, coronary heart disease, sudden cardiac death, and stroke.32 In an observational study, omega-3 fish oil supplementation was also associated with a slower biological clock.33 3. Magnesium deficiency affects more than 45 percent of the U.S. population. Supplements can help us maintain brain and cardiovascular health, normal blood pressure, and healthy blood sugar metabolism. They may also reduce inflammation and help activate our vitamin D. 4. Vitamin K1/K2 supports blood clotting, heart/ blood vessel health, and bone health.34 5. Choline supplements with brain bioavailability, such as CDP-Choline, citicoline, or alpha-GPC, can boost your body’s storehouse of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and possibly support liver and brain function, while protecting it from age-related insults.35 6. Creatine: This one may surprise you, since it’s often associated with serious athletes and fitness buffs. But according to Dr. Lopez, it’s “a bona fide arrow in my longevity nutraceutical quiver for most individuals, and especially older adults.” As a coauthor of a 2017 paper by the International Society for Sports Nutrition, Dr. Lopez, along with contributors, stated that creatine not only enhances recovery, muscle mass, and strength in connection with exercise, but also protects against age-related muscle loss and various forms of brain injury.36 There’s even some evidence that creatine may boost our immune function and fat and carbohydrate metabolism. Generally well tolerated, creatine has a strong safety profile at a daily dose of three to five grams.37 7.

FASCIA: THE TIES THAT BIND Imagine a collagen-rich, stretchy slipcover for every organ, nerve, bone, and muscle in our bodies, and you start to get a sense of how fundamental connective tissue—specifically fascia—is to the entire body. Suspending our organs inside our torso, connecting our head to our back to our feet, fascia protects, supports, and literally binds our body together. Fascia can be gossamer-thin and translucent, like a spider web, or thick and tough like rope. Ounce for ounce, fascia is stronger than steel. Other specialized types of connective tissue include bones, ligaments, tendons, cartilage, and fat (adipose) tissue. Even blood, strictly speaking, is considered connective tissue. But to me, the most exciting aspect of the latest research on connective tissue relates to fascia. Fascia is the stretchy tissue that forms an uninterrupted, three-dimensional web within our body. Our body has sheets, bags, and strings of fascia of varying thickness and size, some superficial and some deep. Fascia envelops both individual microscopic muscle filaments as well as whole muscle groups, such as the trapezius, pectorals, and quadriceps. For example, one of the largest fascia configurations in the body is known as the “trousers,” a massive sheet of fascia that crosses over the knees and ends near the waist, giving the appearance of short leggings. This fascia trouser is thicker around the knees and thinner as it continues up the legs and over the hips, thickening again near the waist. When the fascia trouser is healthy, supple, and resilient, it acts like a girdle, giving the body a firm shape. Fascia helps muscles transmit their force so we can convert that force into movement. The system of fascia is bound by tensile links (think of the structure of a geodesic dome, like the one at Epcot in Disney World), with space and fluid between the links that can help absorb external pressure and more evenly distribute force across the fascial structure. This allows our bodies to withstand tremendous force instead of absorbing it in one local area, which would lead to increased pain and injury. Fascia is also a second nervous system in and of itself, with almost 10 times the number of sensory nerve endings as muscle. Helene Langevin, director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has done landmark studies on the function and importance of connective tissue and its impact on pain. One of the leading researchers in the field today, Langevin describes fascia as a “living matrix” whose health is essential to our well-being.

Raphael pulled out a paperback and handed it to me. The cover, done back in the time when computer-aided imagine manipulation had risen to the level of art, featured an impossibly handsome man, leaning forward, one foot in a huge black boot resting on the carcass of some monstrous sea creature. His hair flowed down to his shoulders in a mane of white gold, in stark contrast to his tanned skin and the rakish black patch hiding his left eye. His white, translucent shirt hung open, revealing abs of steel and a massive, perfectly carved chest graced by erect nipples. His muscled thighs strained the fabric of his pants, which were unbuttoned and sat loosely on his narrow hips, a touch of a strategically positioned shadow hinting at the world’s biggest boner. The cover proclaimed in loud golden letters: The Privateer’s Virgin Mistress, by Lorna Sterling. “Novel number four for Andrea’s collection?” I guessed. Raphael nodded and took the book from my hands. “I’ve got the other one Andrea wanted, too. Can you explain something to me?” Oh boy. “I can try.” He tapped the book on his leather-covered knee. “The pirate actually holds this chick’s brother for ransom, so she’ll sleep with him. These men, they aren’t real men. They’re pseudo-bad guys just waiting for the love of a ‘good’ woman.” “You actually read the books?” He gave me a chiding glance. “Of course I read the books. It’s all pirates and the women they steal, apparently so they can enjoy lots of sex and have somebody to run their lives.” Wow. He must’ve had to hide under his blanket with a flashlight so nobody would question his manliness. Either he really was in love with Andrea or he had a terminal case of lust. “These guys, they’re all bad and aggressive as shit, and everybody wets themselves when they walk by, and then they meet some girl and suddenly they’re not uber-alphas; they are just misunderstood little boys who want to talk about their feelings.” “Is there a point to this dissertation?” He faced me. “I can’t be that. If that’s what she wants, then I shouldn’t even bother.” I sighed. “Do you have a costume kink? French maid, nurse . . .” “Catholic school girl.” Bingo. “You wouldn’t mind Andrea wearing a Catholic school uniform, would you?” “No, I wouldn’t.” His eyes glazed over and he slipped off to some faraway place. I snapped my fingers. “Raphael! Focus.” He blinked at me. “I’m guessing—and this is just a wild stab in the dark—that Andrea might not mind if once in a while you dressed up as a pirate. But I wouldn’t advise holding her relatives for ransom nookie. She might shoot you in the head. Several times. With silver bullets.

When we finished we sat quietly and watched the endless view. I was slowly realizing that this was one of the Seer’s qualities that I appreciated the most. To be present without words, without expectations and without any judgement. These were the times when I felt that he could communicate his thoughts and visions through his presence alone. Looking out became looking in. It was an undramatic kind of transmission, which would move you almost imperceptibly and silently. At these moments I felt my body relax completely. Each fibre, each muscle and every single cell found its correct place. An empathetic vigilance grew from this relaxed condition, a vigilance, which saw people and things as they were on their own merit. This was not about acceptance any more, since there was nothing to accept. Everything was as it was. It was a long-forgotten language. He showed me how almost all communication between people, the spoken and the written word, is nothing but our desperate attempts to cling to illusory personalities and identities tainted by prejudices, fear and vanity. A language which did not allow any room for listening, which focused on itself, which was excluding and only lived due to its attack and defence system was, according to him, a poor and inhumane one. Although the users of this language were usually very good at repartee and were able to write infinitely, they were really only good at maintaining and communicating limitations without end. It was this maintenance of limitations which was one of the main reasons that the great paradigm change, which all were waiting for, did not happen. He did not judge. He simply looked at and worked for the release of limitations wherever he met them. Not until the dissolution of all mental noise would it be possible to practise the transmission of stillness as a transforming kind of communication between people. It was not possible to enter this condition with a limited attention. The road to the transpersonal and the related level might seem difficult, because it demanded an obligation which included the complete human being. It was not enough to be just a little bit pregnant. You either were or you were not. And the paradoxical difference between the one and the other was the simple fact that the sleeping person decided to open his eyes, to wake up and become conscious of his wakeful condition. The fact that such a seemingly simple decision could appear so difficult lay in the fact that it entailed the release of more or less everything that you have ever learned and gained, and which you erroneously have interpreted as a true realization. He presented all these considerations to me on the mountain. In one single thought, without words, without judgement.

Prologue “Pain!. Oh, Father of the Dark, how it hurts! My muscles, my bones – every millimeter of my body. Damn locusts! They’re skinning me alive. Do I have any skin left? It seems like it will never end. How many years have passed since I’ve been buried here? One, two, ten? Or maybe, a hundred? Time itself has melded into total dusky looming. A bloody and merciless one. All my thoughts have been mixed up since I’ve been immured in this stone coffin. Without any possibility of escape. Without any chance for freedom. I feel endless agony under the teeny weeny teeth of ghostly beasts. And their small daggers shred my immortal flesh. Time after time, they’re driving me to madness. But I’ll find a way out, or my name is not Rave Eridanus Castro-Firel. And then, I swear, I’ll kill everyone who has taken part in torturing me. Ulfricus, you traitor ass. I hope your soul has never found sanctuary and is being tormented somewhere in the abyss of the Twilight, while I’m decaying here, in immortality. I hope you’re answering for every minute I’ve spent here, in this tomb. Even for every second. And if not, I promise I’ll kill all your relatives. Every person you love. Your wife, your children, your parents, your grandchildren. And your dam cat,...” The man’s interior monologue was interrupted by a restrained growl. “Oh, demons, how it hurts!.. But wait. Someone will surely wander across this damn field again. Someone whom I’ll kill without coming out of the ground. I’ll exhaust the last drop of magic. And, one day, I’ll be able to get out of this trap. Oh, no, who am I kidding? Nobody has appeared here so far. Even animals avoid coming to my field. I don’t sense any living being whose energy I could suck dry and use to appease the burning, even a little... They all sense me. They don’t understand, but they sense that death is there under their feet. Oh, Father of the Dark, I’ll be decomposing here forever! Damn Ulfricus, Banshee take your soul into the Twilight and love it to death.” The internal voice stopped again, and the man stopped short, listening attentively to the sounds of the outer world. “Oh, that just can’t be... Now for the first time since so long ago! A woman. A girl. A very young one. I can almost hear her heart beating... I feel the energy concealed in her blood. Come closer, dear. I don’t have to get out of here to play with you. So sweet... I can practically feel your odor. A strange, unusual smell of blood. What’s wrong with you? You’re a necromancer, for sure. Almost my soulmate. Well, even this won’t save you. Come closer, dear... Yes, this way. Oh Dark! what magic you eradiate! But not black, certainly not. I couldn’t care less. Any energy will suit me...” At this point, somewhere on the surface, somewhere nearby, a woman began singing. The accursed man, chained in the living grave, lay down, having suddenly forgotten the respiratory reflex, which still had not been exterminated through hundreds of years spent under the ground. Without air, without life. “What a pretty voice. A very, very pretty voice. I haven’t heard human voices for so long...” The man’s broad chest rose again. Then, a sequence of dark thoughts continued: “A girl with a ringing voice and strange magic... You’ve come here to the Ash Field in vain. You’re so enigmatic and courageous. You’re alive. But not for long.

Parasites means that which does not have its own independent life, but gets empowered, comes alive by the nearness or the existence sitting on you willingly or unwillingly. Whether you like it or not, it catches, it sits in you and gets empowered. Your muscle memories have parasites. The parasites sitting in your muscle memory is responsible for all your addictions and tiredness.These parasite can just trigger you, it can trigger the muscle memory of certain food or certain drug, alcohol, smoking, marijuana; it can trigger any of these memories and force you to consume them again. Addictions related to eating, drugs, sex, pornography or any type of addictions, is because of the parasites sitting in your muscle memory.

The uncomfortable assumption had begun to dawn on me that maybe this was all some sex-related thing I was better off not knowing. I looked at the side of his face: petulant, irritable, glasses low on the tip of his sharp little nose and the beginnings of jowls at his jawline. Might Henry have made a pass at him in Rome? Incredible, but a possible hypothesis. If he had, certainly, all hell would have broken loose. I could not think of much else that would involve this much whispering and secrecy, or that would have had so strong an effect on Bunny. He was the only one of us who had a girlfriend and I was pretty sure he slept with her, but at the same time he was incredibly prudish — touchy, easily offended, at root hypocritical. Besides, there was something unquestionably odd about the way Henry was constantly shelling out money to him: paying his tabs, footing his bills, doling out cash like a husband to a spendthrift wife. Perhaps Bunny had allowed his greed to get the better of him, and was angry to discover that Henry's largesse had strings attached. But did it? There were certainly strings somewhere, though — easy as it seemed on the face of it — I wasn't sure that this was where those particular strings led. There was of course that thing with Julian in the hallway; still, that had been very different. I had lived with Henry for a month, and there hadn't been the faintest hint of that sort of tension, which I, being rather more disinclined that way than not, am quick to pick up on. I had caught a strong breath of it from Francis, a whiff of at times from Julian; and even Charles, who I knew was interested in women, had a sort of naive, prepubescent shyness of them that a man like my father would have interpreted alarmingly — but with Henry, zero. Geiger counters dead. If anything, it was Camilla he seemed fondest of, Camilla he bent over attentively when she spoke, Camilla who was most often the recipient of his infrequent smiles. And even if there was a side of him which I was unaware (which was possible) was it possible that he was attracted to Bunny? The answer to this seemed, almost unquestionable, No. Not only did he behave as if he wasn't attracted to Bunny, he acted as if he were hardly able to stand him. And it seemed that he, disgusted by Bunny in what appeared to be virtually all respects, would be far more disgusted in that particular one than even I would be. It was possible for me to recognize, in a general sort of way, that Bunny was handsome, but if I brought the lens any closer and tried to focus on him in a sexual light, all I got was a repugnant miasma of sour-smelling shirts and muscles gone to fat and dirty socks. Girls didn't seem to mind that sort of thing, but to me he was about as erotic as an old football coach.

It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more " Manhood " to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind.

Some will have a scientific explanation, for example muscle spasms or migraines can be related to low magnesium levels, but some will have a unique meaning to us and it is down to us to decode them. I have a friend that has always said “By the time I get a mouth ulcer, I know that I have pushed myself too hard and my body is not getting enough nutrients to keep going.” I have taken note of that for myself. A cousin said that his stress always shows up as a feeling of toxins built up in knots in his shoulders. I recognize that one too!

With proper training, you should gradually get measurably stronger. Strength gains may take place quicker in the first year. When this happens, you’ll notice it’s getting easier to reach your five or six reps — that’s the time to consider gradually adding weight. Add weight carefully, sometimes starting with just a couple of pounds. Adding weight replaces the need to perform more repetitions. If, for whatever reason, you go through a period when you don’t perform any strength training, such as a few weeks or months, you may eventually lose some of the strength you gained. In this case, when getting back into training, reduce the amount of weight you previously used until you begin to get stronger again. Then you can increase the weight as needed. Sometimes we think we’re stronger than we are, relating to those days when we actually were stronger.

There are many examples of how Medicine 2.0 gets risk wrong, but one of the most egregious has to do with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for postmenopausal women, long entrenched as standard practice before the results of the Women’s Health Initiative Study (WHI) were published in 2002. This large clinical trial, involving thousands of older women, compared a multitude of health outcomes in women taking HRT versus those who did not take it. The study reported a 24 percent relative increase in the risk of breast cancer among a subset of women taking HRT, and headlines all over the world condemned HRT as a dangerous, cancer-causing therapy. All of a sudden, on the basis of this one study, hormone replacement treatment became virtually taboo. This reported 24 percent risk increase sounded scary indeed. But nobody seemed to care that the absolute risk increase of breast cancer for women in the study remained minuscule. Roughly five out of every one thousand women in the HRT group developed breast cancer, versus four out of every one thousand in the control group, who received no hormones. The absolute risk increase was just 0.1 percentage point. HRT was linked to, potentially, one additional case of breast cancer in every thousand patients. Yet this tiny increase in absolute risk was deemed to outweigh any benefits, meaning menopausal women would potentially be subject to hot flashes and night sweats, as well as loss of bone density and muscle mass, and other unpleasant symptoms

Key Points As you age, your body naturally becomes less efficient. Changes you will go through include losing muscle mass, slowing of your metabolism, and producing less testosterone You have the power, through exercise, to slow down the aging process Exercise will improve your self - image and your self-confidence Regular exercise will make you physically and mentally stronger, improve your bone strength, body composition, coordination and balance Exercise will boost the efficiency of your heart and lungs and make you far less likely to succumb to age-related disease

Are you fit enough, are you progressing in your hobby, are you competent as a cook or gardener? And family life—is your marriage intimate enough, your sexual life optimal, have you done all that you can do to raise excellent children? The infant/body rebels under all this pressure, signaling its distress. In response, we find ways to toughen it or to medicate it into silence. So the chronic stress-related symptoms arise, like digestion problems, muscle tension, constant fatigue, insomnia, migraine headaches; or a weak immune system makes us more susceptible to the flu and to colds.

The physics of diffuse axonal injury Given our understanding of the rotational nature of diffuse axonal injury, it is now possible for us to take what we learned about levers and rotational motion in the previous chapters and apply that knowledge here to help us understand how a punch to the chin ends up stretching and damaging axons in the brainstem and throughout the brain. The first step in this process is the punch. This punch must meet a minimum energy requirement because we will be causing structural damage to axons in the brain. This punch must also meet a minimum momentum requirement because we need to spin the whole head around to damage those axons. Considering what we know about knockout punches and how boxers train, it is relatively safe to say that meeting the minimum energy requirement is not difficult, but meeting the minimum momentum requirement is. Fast punches are important strategically, but increasing the effective mass behind your punches is what gives your punch the ability to lay your opponent out on the mat. Figure 5-2. The process of diffuse axonal injury from punch to axon stretching. Left: The punch hits your opponent. Center: The punch rotates your opponent’s head around an axis located in the neck. Right: Axons located a small distance from the axis of rotation become stretched as one end of the axon travels around the axis of rotation. This story takes us from the fist to the axon, but there is still something missing. We turn our heads left and right every day, sometimes very rapidly, so what makes a punch so special? The science is still too young to be sure, but I will speculate that the peak of the force curve (figure 5-3) is typically where the axon gets rapidly extended to its natural limit, but the tail of the force curve is where the axons are damaged. The primary reason for this speculation is the empirical knowledge that pushing off the back foot is essential for a good knockout punch. Boxers and martial artists from all styles stress the importance of this push to the success of a punch. Some strikes, such as a front-hand palm strike or a square-shouldered wing chun punch, for which a back-foot push is impossible, will still generate the same long-tail force profile in figure 5-3 by making contact before the arm is fully extended and using the muscles in the arm to apply force by continuing the extension. The same profile appears when athletes tackle each other in other contact sports. There is an initial peak force at the moment of collision, but the legs continue to push after the initial peak.

X Enhance Male Pills X Enhance Male Enhancement ay of means of real customers of the strategies. Anyone will ken proper away what to be sincere works precisely what does now no longer paintings. The following step is to squeeze your laptop muscle via way of means of preserving your clench for an extended duration all of the time. Do three squeezes, every lasting five seconds - have a 2 2d hole related to every rep. As you may do surely see, the use of those drugs encompass an related to advantages. Attempting to shop for male

All muscle cells, including those of the heart and of the smooth muscles lining the blood vessels, contain more magnesium than calcium. If magnesium is deficient, calcium floods into the smooth muscle cells of blood vessels and causes spasms, leading to constricted blood vessels and therefore higher blood pressure, arterial spasm, angina, and heart attack.12 A proper balance of magnesium in relation to calcium can prevent these symptoms. Dean Md Nd, Carolyn. The Magnesium Miracle

All muscle cells, including those of the heart and of the smooth muscles lining the blood vessels, contain more magnesium than calcium. If magnesium is deficient, calcium floods into the smooth muscle cells of blood vessels and causes spasms, leading to constricted blood vessels and therefore higher blood pressure, arterial spasm, angina, and heart attack.12 A proper balance of magnesium in relation to calcium can prevent these symptoms. Dean Md Nd, Carolyn. The Magnesium Miracle (Second Edition) (p. 55).

existing metabolic disease, the resumption of an active lifestyle can significantly improve preexisting cellular damage and promote gains in muscle mass. Regular endurance exercise, by itself—independent of changes in diet—can normalize age-related mitochondrial dysfunction by stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis. (20

this routine is known as flexible dieting, and it has four steps: 1. Regulate your calories according to your body composition goal. 2. Eat a high-protein diet. 3. Get most of your calories from whole, nutritious, relatively unprocessed foods. 4. Find a balance of carbohydrate and fat intake that works for you.

bulk n. 1 [mass noun] the mass or size of something large: residents jump up and down on their rubbish to reduce its bulk. large size or shape: he moved quickly in spite of his bulk. [count noun] a large mass or shape. [as modifier] large in quantity: bulk orders of over 100 copies. roughage in food: potatoes supply energy, essential protein, and bulk. cargo in an unpackaged mass such as grain or oil. [PRINTING] the thickness of paper or a book. 2 (the bulk of) the greater part of something: the bulk of the traffic had passed. v. [with obj.] 1 treat (a product) so that its quantity appears greater than it is: traders were bulking up their flour with chalk. [no obj.] (bulk up) build up flesh and muscle, typically in training for sporting events. 2 combine (shares or commodities for sale): your shares will be bulked with others and sold at the best prices available. bulk large be or seem to be of great importance: territorial questions bulked large in diplomatic relations. in bulk 1 (of goods) in large quantities and generally at a reduced price: retail multiples buy in bulk. 2 (of a cargo or commodity) not packaged; loose. Middle English: the senses ‘cargo as a whole’ and ‘heap, large quantity’ (the earliest recorded) are probably from Old Norse búlki ‘cargo’; other senses arose perhaps by alteration of obsolete bouk ‘belly, body’. bulk buying

(Standen et al. 2014). They took populations of the African ray-finned fish known as the bichir, or Polypterus (distantly related to sturgeons and paddlefish), and made them cross over dry land over and over again. Within 8 months, the bichir that had had been raised on land had modified their ray fins and the muscles to control them so they were more efficient walkers; those that were kept in their normal water habitat did not change. The remarkable footage of these walking fish can be seen online by searching for videos of “walking fish Polypterus.

I feel uncomfortable and experience building tension or discomfort that seems to come out of the blue when I think about a particular situation. ____ 2. I avoid specific situations that make me feel uncomfortable. ____ 3. I have at least four of the following symptoms at the same time: shortness of breath or feeling smothered; heart palpitations (rapid or irregular heartbeat); trembling or shaking; choking; dizziness or unsteadiness; nausea or abdominal distress; numbness, feeling detached or out of touch with myself; fear of dying; fear of going crazy or out of control; hot flashes or chills; sweating without exertion. ____ 4. I worry excessively, and so I feel restless, keyed up or on edge, irritable, easily fatigued, have trouble falling or staying asleep or I wake up tired, have tense and tight muscles, have difficulty concentrating, and/or find my mind going blank. ____ 5. I have recurring intrusive thoughts such as hurting or harming a close relative, being contaminated by dirt or a toxic substance, fearing I forgot to lock my door or turn off an appliance, and/or have unpleasant fantasies of catastrophe. ____ 6. I perform ritualistic actions such as washing my hands or counting to relieve my discomfort because I have fears that keep entering my mind. ____ 7. I have witnessed or been subjected to a life-threatening experience and have persistent symptoms that have lasted for at least a month, including repetitive and distressing thoughts, nightmares, flashbacks, attempts to reenact the situation, emotional numbness (out of touch with your emotions—feeling no anger, sadness, guilt, or relief), feeling detached from other people, losing interest in activities that once gave me pleasure, sleep or concentration problems, startling easily, irritability and/or have outbursts of anger.

It is not too much to say that, in light of advancing science, many of the infirmities that beset us, whether of heart, intellect or temper, are the results of defective education. ... The principle which underlies the possibility of all education is discovered to us: we are taught that the human frame, brain as well as muscle, grows to the uses it is earliest put to. ... We find that we can work definitely towards the formation of character; that the habits of the good life, of the alert intelligence ... are somehow related in the very distance of his brain. Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life. ... education is a life; all life must have its appropriate nourishment ... the spiritual life is nourished by ideas; and it is the parent's duty to sustain a child's inner life with ideas as they sustain the body with food.

We want a relatively low overall dose on each area of skin, of roughly 3-15J.

FOR DEEP TISSUES: For deeper issues in muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, glands, the brain, organs, etc., you want much higher doses more in the neighborhood of 10-60J. In general, this means that you want higher power devices and you want to be 6-12” from the device (as opposed to further away as with treating the skin) to get optimal doses of light to those deep tissues. The deeper the tissue you’re trying to treat, the closer to your body you want the light to be (i.e. 6” is ideal) and the higher the overall dose you want to do, so that you deliver adequate therapeutic doses to the deeper tissues. Also, for use on the brain, this may require higher doses (or doses on the higher end of the spectrum shared here) because it takes a relatively higher dose for enough light to penetrate through the skull and be delivered to the brain. Here are my general suggestions for treating deep tissues below the skin: Using the light from 6” away for between 2-7 minutes per area is the ideal dose range. Or 5-10 minutes per area from 12” away. (For treating deep tissues, I don’t recommend going further away than 12” away from your body.) If you get the lights I recommend, that’s really all you need

The Caesars by Stewart Stafford A dynasty regurgitated: The Emperor is mad, Bloodily decadent, Corrupt in the mind. Thank the Gods, No hubris eclipses Rome's, Let them have their toys; Lives to violate and end. Satire prickles august flesh; As Suetonius's profiles bite, Caligula's infamy was my youth, Now déjà vu relative Nero reigns. Bull and Aquila check Caesarean power: Senatorial consensus, martial muscle; Praetorian fealty is the Golden House, Whilst gory "games" slake Plebeian thirst. The ghost of the Old Republic, Laments its peacock successors; Barbaric beasts to wrestle with, Not sport for imperial whims. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

So you’re sprinting down the street with the lion after you. Things looked grim for a moment there, but—your good luck—your cardiovascular system kicked into gear, and now it is delivering oxygen and energy to your exercising muscles. But what energy? There’s not enough time to consume a candy bar and derive its benefits as you sprint along; there’s not even enough time to digest food already in the gut. Your body must get energy from its places of storage, like fat or liver or non-exercising muscle. To understand how you mobilize energy in this circumstance, and how that mobilization can make you sick at times, we need to learn how the body stores energy in the first place.

It’s Thanksgiving, and you’ve eaten with porcine abandon. Your bloodstream is teeming with amino acids, fatty acids, glucose. It’s far more than you need to power you over to the couch in a postprandial daze. What does your body do with the excess? This is crucial to understand because, basically, the process gets reversed when you’re later sprinting for your life. To answer this question, it’s time we talked finances, the works—savings accounts, change for a dollar, stocks and bonds, negative amortization of interest rates, shaking coins out of piggy banks—because the process of transporting energy through the body bears some striking similarities to the movement of money. It is rare today for the grotesquely wealthy to walk around with their fortunes in their pockets, or to hoard their wealth as cash stuffed inside mattresses. Instead, surplus wealth is stored elsewhere, in forms more complex than cash: mutual funds, tax-free government bonds, Swiss bank accounts. In the same way, surplus energy is not kept in the body’s form of cash—circulating amino acids, glucose, and fatty acids—but stored in more complex forms. Enzymes in fat cells can combine fatty acids and glycerol to form triglycerides (table). Accumulate enough of these in the fat cells and you grow plump. Meanwhile, your cells can stick series of glucose molecules together. These long chains, sometimes thousands of glucose molecules long, are called glycogen. Most glycogen formation occurs in your muscles and liver. Similarly, enzymes in cells throughout the body can combine long strings of amino acids, forming them into proteins. The hormone that stimulates the transport and storage of these building blocks into target cells is insulin. Insulin is this optimistic hormone that plans for your metabolic future. Eat

If this was easy, anyone could do it. Hard makes us stronger. It builds the muscles we need to traverse this crazy thing called life. Hard makes us better if we let it. We can emerge a better person. They say that a broken bone grows back even stronger than it was before it suffered the break, and the same is true with our minds as we relate to overcoming adversity. We grow back stronger and better if we learn from the experience, if we have the heart to endure it.

untrained seniors can build muscle and strength comparable to masters athletes who have been training for decades.11 Another study from the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology found that the primary driver of age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) was not age itself but reduced neuromuscular activity.

Another, more subtle problem occurs with chronic stress as well. When something stressful happens, you don’t just block insulin secretion. Basically, the brain doesn’t quite trust the pancreas not to keep secreting a little insulin, so a second step occurs. As noted earlier, during stress, glucocorticoids act on fat cells throughout the body to make them less sensitive to insulin, just in case there’s some still floating around. Fat cells then release some newly discovered hormones that get other tissues, like muscle and liver, to stop responding to insulin as well. Stress promotes insulin resistance.

Save it, pup,” cried Dick, pointing to the child, which had been caught in an eddy, and was for a few moments hovering on the edge of the stream that rushed impetuously towards the fall. The noble Newfoundland did not require to be told what to do. It seems a natural instinct in this sagacious species of dog to save man or beast that chances to be struggling in the water, and many are the authentic stories related of Newfoundland dogs saving life in eases of shipwreck. Indeed, they are regularly trained to the work in some countries; and nobly, fearlessly, disinterestedly do they discharge their trust, often in the midst of appalling dangers. Crusoe sprang from the bank with such impetus that his broad chest ploughed up the water like the bow of a boat, and the energetic workings of his muscles were indicated by the force of each successive propulsion as he shot ahead. In a few seconds he reached the child and caught it by the hair. Then he turned to swim back, but the stream had got hold of him. Bravely he struggled, and lifted the child breast-high out of the water in his powerful efforts to stem the current. In vain. Each moment he was carried inch by inch down until he was on the brink of the fall, which, though not high, was a large body of water and fell with a heavy roar. He raised himself high out of the stream with the vigour of his last struggle, and then fell back into the abyss.

Make performance-related goals, not weight-related ones. It’s all about body composition. Not weight. You will be replacing fat with muscle. Muscle is smaller but heavier. So a scale reflects progress poorly, especially in females, whose weight can fluctuate by six pounds daily due to factors like water retention.

He bared thick teeth. ‘I am Zacchariah. My price will be right. You show me now?’ In that moment, ten generations of horse-traders counted for more than half a lifetime in the legions. I was my father made young again, itching to make a sale. Abandoning the Eagle – I was a horse-trader, what did I care for a gold bird on a stick, however venerated by the Hebrews? – I gathered Pantera and Horgias about me, and trekked back to the inn of the Cedar Tree. Along the way, we collected Zacchariah’s well-muscled younger relatives, three other, unrelated, horse merchants who gazed at him with undisguised venom, a woman who claimed she could more accurately assess the sex of the foal our pregnant mare carried, a bone-setter who set to arguing with Horgias but gave up when his poor Greek met Horgias’ worse Greek – and Nicodemus and his seven zealots who stood about as we conducted our business, obviously waiting for a chance to inflict violence upon us.

Respiratory Nursing   Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Diagnosis: Ineffective Breathing Pattern related to airflow restriction Desired Outcome: Following intervention, the patient's breathing pattern improves, as evidenced by absence of dyspnea and oxygen saturation >94%, pH >7.35, and PaCO2 <60 mm Hg. Assessments and Interventions Rationales Assess respiratory rate and depth q6h. Restlessness, dyspnea, tachypnea, use of accessory muscles of respiration are signs of respiratory distress, which should be reported. Auscultate breath sounds q6h. A decrease in breath sounds or an increase in wheezes is a sign of respiratory failure. Administer bronchodilator therapy with albuterol metered dose inhalers 2-4 puffs every 4 to 6 hours as needed. Albuterol increase expiratory volume by decreasing airway smooth muscle constriction. Administer ipratropium (Atrovent) 80 mcg, three times per day. Formoterol (Foradil) 12 mcg every 12 hours. Or administer tiotropium (Spiriva) 1 capsule (18 mcg) inhaled once daily by HandiHaler device Inhaled anticholinergics

Preteen Warning Signs Lack of peer relationships outside the family Difficulty engaging in age-appropriate conversations Social skills difficulty Inability to make and keep friends Obvious anxiety, fear of social situations Afraid of groups Angry outbursts Restlessness Inability to concentrate Temper tantrums—sustained argumentative or “acting-out” behavior Inability to complete projects Clumsiness—not good at sports Poor muscle coordination Poor academic skills Depressed mood, seems withdrawn Stress-related physical symptoms Insecurity Limited tolerance of frustration Fear of new situations Learning disabilities

These guidelines will help put you in the right frame of mind to begin practicing relaxation techniques: 1. Give yourself permission to relax. You must nurture yourself. Even if it has been difficult for you to relax in the past, now is a new beginning. It may not be easy at first, but in time, and with practice, relaxation is possible for everyone. 2. Create the right environment. This means no distractions: no TV, no telephone, no music, no food. This is a time for you to be at peace with yourself. Wear comfortable clothing and allow yourself to focus only on the present. Allow yourself to let go, to relax emotionally as well as physically. Be careful not to think of letting go as losing control. The opposite—holding on—is what causes heightened anxiety. To really control anxiety, you have to let go of it, become familiar with it, and then find a new way to lessen its intensity. The process of letting go and achieving relaxation can sometimes feel uncomfortable. But it is this uncomfortable feeling that has to be worked through to achieve success. 3. Learn diaphragmatic breathing. Diaphragmatic breathing is the basis of all relaxation and internal self-regulation. Often, breathing exercises of this type are in and of themselves a good means of stress management. Start breathing deeply to slow your body and mind down in preparation for relaxation. Conscious breathing is an essential part of this exercise. Inhale through nose, draw slowly into stomach (diaphragmatic region) and exhale through your mouth. This process should be done slowly and rhythmically. 4. Learn muscle relaxation. This is fairly easy to learn. The first step is to become aware of the difference between tense muscles and relaxed muscles. Then, learn to make your muscles feel limp and heavy. 5. Cultivate warm, dry hands. As you relax, your blood vessels dilate and the peripheral blood flow (at the skin’s surface) increases, resulting in warm hands. Anxiety is related to the fight-or-flight response. When confronted with stress, the body naturally sends blood away from extremities toward the torso in preparation for escape. While normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees, hand temperature is slightly cooler, and varies considerably depending on the degree of stress or relaxation. Don’t confuse the two—extremities are always cooler. Remember the mood rings of the 1970s? True, they were a gimmick, but they relied on stress-related surface temperature changes to create the desired effect. Bio-dots and stress cards available today work the same way, and can be a useful tool in learning to bring yourself down from an anxiety state. Still, you may not need a machine or other equipment to tell you how cold your hands are. If your hands feel cold to you, they are responding to stress. If your hands are warm and dry, you’ve achieved relaxation.

There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the life. Because it is so natural it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is; but its outworkings are tragic. We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed. Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him. They should be recognized for what they are, God's loan to us, and should never be considered in any sense our own. We have no more right to claim credit for special abilities than for blue eyes or strong muscles. "For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive?" The Christian who is alive enough to know himself even slightly will recognize the symptoms of this possession malady, and will grieve to find them in his own heart. If the longing after God is strong enough within him he will want to do something about the matter. Now, what should he do?

Consider the power of love. I remember a mother I met once as I made a professional house call. This woman was confined in an iron lung. The ravages of polio had effectively destroyed all the breathing muscles so that her life was completely dependent upon the large metal tank and the electrical motor that powered its noisy bellows. While there, I watched her three children as they related to their mother. The oldest interrupted our work to ask permission to go to a friend's house for an hour. Later the second child asked her mother for help with arithmetic. Finally the youngest child, so small that she couldn't see her mother's face directly, looked up at the mother's image in a mirror that had been placed over her head and asked, "Mommy, may I have a cookie?" I've never forgotten that lesson on the power of love. This woman, virtually disabled and certainly incapable of any degree of physical enforcement of parental authority, sweetly influenced that home solely with the power to love.

Poetry Reading To be a boxer, or not to be there at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare— it’s time to start this cultural affair. Half came inside because it started raining, the rest are relatives. O Muse. The women here would love to rant and rave, but that’s for boxing. Here they must behave. Dante’s Inferno is ringside nowadays. Likewise his Paradise. O Muse. Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, for lack of muscles forced to show the world the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists with luck. O Muse, O bobtailed angel, Pegasus. In the first row, a sweet old man’s soft snore: he dreams his wife’s alive again. What’s more, she’s making him that tart she used to bake. Aflame, but carefully—don’t burn his cake!— we start to read. O Muse.

I walked the short distance to Nogizaka, then strolled up and down Gaienhigashi-dori. It took awhile, but I finally spotted it. There was no sign, only a small red rose on a black awning. The entrance was flanked by two black men, each of sufficient bulk to have been at home in the sumo pit. Their suits were well tailored and, given the size of the men wearing them, must have been custom-made. Nigerians, I assumed, whose size, managerial acumen, and relative facility with the language had made them a rare foreign success story, in this case as both middle management and muscle for many of the area’s entertainment establishments. The mizu shobai, or “water trade” of entertainment and pleasure, is one of the few areas in which Japan can legitimately claim a degree of internationalization. They bowed and opened the club’s double glass doors for me, each issuing a baritone irasshaimase as they did so. Welcome. One of them murmured something into a microphone set discreetly into his lapel. I walked down a short flight of stairs. A ruddy-faced, prosperous-looking Japanese man whom I put at about forty greeted me in a small foyer. Interchangeable J-Pop techno music was playing from the room beyond. “Nanmeisama desho ka?” Mr. Ruddy asked. How many? “Just one,” I said in English, holding up a finger. “Of course.” He motioned that I should follow him. The room was rectangular, flanked by dance stages on either end. The stages were simple, distinguished only by mirrored walls behind them and identical brass poles at their centers. One stage was occupied by a tall, long-haired blonde wearing high heels and a green g-string and nothing more. She was dancing somewhat desultorily, I thought, but seemed to have the attention of the majority of the club’s clientele regardless. Russian, I guessed. Large-boned and large-breasted. A delicacy in Japan. Harry hadn’t mentioned floorshows. Probably he was embarrassed. My sense that something was amiss deepened.

This research suggests the usefulness of prediet exercises to first build your self-control “muscles” before addressing bigger challenges such as sustained weight loss regimen. One could start with noneating-related tasks by, for example, committing to make the bed within thirty minutes after waking up, and then take on another task, such as cutting out a type of food, like cookies or chips. Having a successive number of small wins gives a feeling of confidence, which builds over time. Inching your way toward controlling food rather than adopting an all-or-nothing approach builds a foundation for future success.

Cell Salts are very important for the human body as they provide the basic nutrition to the body at the cellular level. They combine with other vital components and helps maintain the millions of cell which form the body. When there is an imbalance of these important salts at the cellular level and imbalance is created. This loss of balance gives rise to several types of diseases. These diseases can be cured by restoring the lost balance of the cell salts in the body. There are 12 cell salts in homeopathy which are derived from human tissue. These salts are Calc Fluor, Cal Phos, Calc Sulph, FerrumPhos, Kail Mur, Kali Phos, Kali Sulph, Mag Phos, Nat Mur, Nat Phos, Nat Sulph and Silicea. Each and every cell salt has an important impact on human body and help cure a range of diseases. In homeopathy it is believed that their impact is also dependent on the nature of the person. Calc Fluor is helpful in maintaining health of bones, teeth, tissues and joints. Flexible and healthy tissues can be maintained with the health of this tissue salt. It is usually applied on the loose teeth,cracks on the skin, and administered in the cases wherever there is loss of energy due to poor blood circulation. CalcPhos is extremely helpful aiding good health in malnourished children, strengthens muscles, and helps in the development of strong bones and cures rickets. Calc Sulph is great for maintaining healthy skin. It helps eliminate impurities in the blood and cures acne, common cold and sore throat. FerrumPhos is the iron of homeopathy. This tissue salt is administered to the patients who suffer from weakness due to lack of hemoglobin, inflammation of joints, fast pulse, congestion and fever. This salt helps maintain nerves, blood, hair, muscles in good condition. Kali Mur can cure conditions related to blood, salaiva and muscles. It is given to patients suffering from indigeston, cough and cold, sore throat and helps purify blood. Kali Phos gives nourishment to nerves, eases breathing, sharpens brain. It helps remedy headaches, skin ailments, bad temper, timidity and insomnia. Kali Salph can take care of the problems related to inflammation of joints, stomach catarrh, shifting pains, skin eruptions, etc. It helps in carrying oxygen, perspiration, respiration and improves health of skin and hair. Mag Phos helps make strong bones, nerves and muscles. It eliminates menstrual pains, stomach cramps, sciatica, neuralgia, headaches, and flatulence. Nat Mur helps in the distribution of water which helps in the distribution of water which is the basis of glandular activity, growth of cells, nutrition and promotes digestion. Nat Phos neutralizes acid and helps in the digestion of nutrients and fats. It is prescribed in the cases of rheumatism, swellings of joints, flatulence and lumbago. Nat Sulph is a promoter of digestive system and strong liver. This tissue salt removes excess water from body and helps cure rheumatic ailments. Influenza, malaria, humid asthma, liver can be treated with this salt. Silicea is capable of promoting healthy connective tissues and problem-free skin. It can treat conditions like pus formation, tonsillitis, boils, brittle nails, smelly armpits and feet and stomach pains are conditions in which Silicea is prescribed.

What happens over time is your brain gets trained into feeling certain emotions and you grow used to them. You literally memorize the feelings and they become intertwined with your memory of the literal experiences. Once your body has memorized a specific emotion associated with a particular experience, it will automatically trigger you to feel that emotion when any new and related experience occurs. Feeling these old emotions becomes routine–just like when you have peeled an apple so many times, you don’t think about it anymore, an emotion can be embedded into your muscle memory. Even if they are unpleasant, they become where you feel the most inclined to be because they feel “comfortable.” When you feel an emotion repeatedly, your body grows a tolerance to the feeling and it becomes simply “normal” and therefore, to move opposite the feeling causes a sense of fear and anxiety. The feelings you’re used to, just like the way you peel that apple–that feeling is what you know, it’s where you feel safe.