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NEWSPAPERTM COACHELLA VALLEY


Welcome to Healthy Times Newspaper. We provide up- to-date local wellness information to the desert cities of the Coachella Valley. For a quick look at what you will find in this issue, check out some features below:


Natural Solutions Aloe Vera: Miracle Plant for Pain Relief


Those of us who live year-round in the desert are familiar with the aloe vera plant. It is a familiar sight in the back garden or on the kitchen windowsill. Many people share stories of an elder family member who would always have an aloe plant handy. They would slice off a section of the juice-filled leaf to take the sting out of sunburn or treat a scrape, cut or burn. Read more on page 15.


Nutrition The Easiest Way to Improve Your Health


The health benefits derived from drinking alkaline water (or ionized water) have been the center of much heated debated. Some doctors and nutritionists are not convinced of it's health-enhancing properties. However, there are many doctors who claim to see improvements in themselves and their patients after consuming alkaline ionized water over time. Read more on page 20.


Fitness Yoga and Stress Management for Fibromyalgia


Fibromyalgia is now recognized as a medical disorder with debilitating symptoms such as chronic muscle and joint pain, fatigue and anxiety. These symptoms often interfere with day-to-day activities. And, because the symptoms frequently overlap with those of other diseases, people with fibromyal- gia may not know what’s causing their pain until properly diagnosed. Read more on page 12.


Health Care Chronic Stress and Adrenal Fatigue


It has been well documented in medical literature that prolonged periods of stress are correlated to degenerative diseases, aging, inflammation, hor- mone and immune system dysregulation. In the world where you and I live, most people lead busy, if not frantic and unbalanced, lifestyles. Modern chronic stress can be mental or physical. Problems with relation- ships, jobs, finances, social pressure, crowds, noise, traffic, deadlines, delays, information overload and decision making are examples of mental stress. Read more on page 9.


JULY/AUG 2010 • VOL 15


BY JAKE EAGLE


Most of us are familiar with the often-used concepts of body, mind and spirit, but the celebrated philosopher Ken Wilber, with the release of his latest in a long line of best- selling books, has added shadow into the mix. In the book, Integral Life Practices, Ken and his co-authors claim that you either own your shadow or are owned by it. The shadow represents hidden aspects of ourselves, aspects that are capable of sabotaging even our best efforts. Given the limited success rate of so many self-improvement endeav- ors, it may be time to pay the shadow some respect.


Jake: Why do you give the shadow the same impor- tance as body, mind and spirit?


Ken: It’s just really important. It’s a discovery pri- marily of the modern West. Many people know the names associated with it, such as Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. They really made some profound discoveries and you tend not to find them in the contemplative traditions and the pre-


meditative traditions because the shadow is not really something that comes up in meditative practice. It’s something that is sealed off. The shadow rep- resents all of those aspects of yourself, usually perceived as negative, that you can’t accept or don’t include in your self-image, but also includes posi- tive aspects of yourself that you don’t acknowledge. You disown them and push them away.


So, there are things of which we remain unaware – certain drives, angers, emotions, sexual urges, the desire for power and so on – things that as a “good girl or boy” in our society we aren’t supposed to feel. We push all of these out of our awareness, but they are still there. They still come up. Their energy is still there. But, now it gets converted into a neurotic form that robs us of our psychological energy.


Many people take up meditation at this point. For a long time we thought Continued on page 14


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