it’s all energy: all time favorites pt 2

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all time favorites: pt 2

by christina ferber

The Front Porch Magazine is part of the bedrock of the Fredericksburg community and I feel more than blessed to have been able to share holistic and integrative ways to achieve good health and wellbeing for the last five years. As I close out this chapter of things, I would like to continue with some of my favorite Eden Energy Medicine (EEM) exercises that have helped me maintain balance in my life.

Calming the Triple Warmer Neurovascular Points helps us to relieve stress and worry and is a great way to find a sense of calm throughout your day. Place your thumb, first and middle fingers in a cluster together, called a 3-finger notch, and place those fingers at the "V" at the bottom of your throat above your collarbone. If this feels funny, you can use a flat hand over this spot. Place the other hand on the side of your face with your fingers flat at your temples. Take some deep breaths and then switch sides.

Connecting Heaven and Earth makes space in the body for energy to move, can help alleviate joint issues, and grounds us. Rub your hands together vigorously and shake them off. Place them on your thighs with your fingers spread and take a deep breath. On the next inhale, circle your arms out and bring them to a prayer position in front of your heart and exhale. On the next inhale, stretch one hand up and one down, stretching as far apart as you can, and hold your breath. Come back to prayer position on the exhale and repeat on the other side. Do this twice on each side and after the last stretch, bend down as far as you can, letting your arms hang in front of you. Take two deep breaths, and then swing back and forth making sideways figure eights all the way up your body.

Holding the Main or Frontal Neurovascular Reflex Points seems very simple, but it can have a profound effect on us when we feel stressed or worried. Simply place your hand on your forehead, being sure to cover the points above your eyebrows. I also like to place the other hand on the back of my head. Take some deep breaths and hold for as long as you would like.

Figure Eights are a hallmark of EEM. They are good to do over any part of your body that does not feel well, and they also strengthen our aura and surrounding energy field. Simply move your hands in a large figure eight pattern around your body. There is no wrong way to do thisjust trace eights in a way that feels right to you.

Heaven Rushing In helps us tap into the bigger picture and bring more inspiration into our lives. Place your hands on your thighs and take a few deep breaths to ground yourself. Then on an inhale, raise your hands to your sides and over your head, touching your hands above it. On an exhale, bring them down to a prayer position in front of your chest. On the next deep breath, open them wide to the sky above your head and stay there as long as you need to. When you are ready, bring your hands to your heart and breathe a few times.

I hope these exercises help you to find a sense of balance and calm. You can always view these and other exercises at www.itsallenergywellness.com. Until next time, may peace and joy be regulars in your life.

Christina Ferber is a Certified Eden Energy Medicine Practitioner

Emancipated Patients

writing complusion

By Patrick Neustatter, MD

I have bent your ear before about how writing is one of two compulsions that runs in my family. I am the fourth generation of doctors. But there seems to be an SNP in the family genome that creates this need to write also most prominently displayed in great aunt Henry, who has become one of Australia's better thought of novelists (but who, at that time and place, had to write under a man's name).

You could call Joy O'Toole an enabler. A facilitator of a malady sufficiently common that 199 people were willing to sacrifice a beautiful autumnal Saturday, to either sit in some somber lecture theater or attend virtually, to learn about 'Finding Your Voice,' 'Editing Essentials,' 'Recipe for a Perfect Romance,' 'Writing Memoire' and so much more.

She was enabling in her role as head of the conference committee at Fredericksburg library that just put on the fifth Annual Rappahannock Writers Conference at Mary Washington Stafford campus - though she also enables yearround, running the 'Inklings' writers' group, and a memoir journaling class for the Fredericksburg library.

She is, however, a victim herself of a psychopathology I have written about previously that I suffer from also - and which seems sufficiently much an illness that it justifies writing about here in The Emancipated Patient.

The subject I am dancing around is an almost pathological compulsion to write.

The Malady "My fifth grade teacher told me I was going to be a writer" Joy O'Toole told me. And she admits to the fact that she has always had a "need to write something".

A problem that presumably afflicts the other attendees at the conference, and that is well recognized by psychologists and professional authors like New York Times writer Denise Webb who notes "it's not so much that we choose to write; it's that we must write." Medicine and writing are a common comorbidity - Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Atul Gawande, Oliver sacks, Wendell Holmes, William Osler, Deepack Chopra all suffer. But it was Chekov who claimed, "medicine is my lawful wedded wife, and literature is my mistress."

Or Is It a Therapy? Perversely, some people see writing not as a disease, but as a therapy. This particularly applies to journaling.

Joy admits to being a compulsive journal keeper. "It helps people communicate. Make sense of the world."

I am also a strong believer in what I call "write it out" - reinforced by an article in Psyche Central that talks about how one is "talking to another consciousness- 'the reader' is another part of the self."

A form of mindfulness - but which allows a romance with words. How can you not be seduced by words like fecundity, salubrious, lugubrious, grommet, disparate, and mellifluous?

Enabling a Worthwhile Disease In the same way that I always say a little bit of obsessive-c compulsive disorder helps people do a good job, Joy O'Toole and the library encouraging people to write is a constructive thing to do - even if it does seem fanning the flames of a compulsion.

She would be happy to help "light your fire." And I personally, can't wait for the sixth Annual Rappahannock Writers Conference.

Or writer Julia Cameron puts it on a more spiritual level and claims "writing wants to be written and loves a writer - like God loves a devotee." Patrick Neustatter, MD is the Medical Director of the Moss Free Clinic.

www.donatelifevirginia.org