Category: Health

I don’t believe there is a single person on the planet that has not spent at least one night worrying about their health. The $3 trillion dollars spent in the healthcare sector in the US is more than any other country in the developed world. What’s worse, prevention in the US ranks low compared to other developed countries. The US ranks as one of the worst countries in preventing deaths from treatable conditions.

Having synthesized five drugs for cancer treatment and having worked in the healthcare industry for the best part of two decades, I can tell you with certainty that when it comes to our health, it is what we do not know that kills us. What are some of the least known hidden causes that prevent optimal health? Join me in finding out.

Energy Efficiency

It seems that there is a concerted effort to improve our energy efficiency, including by targeting more sustainable resources and by rewarding consumers with rebates, discounts, and tax credits. I have invested quite a bit of time myself identifying improvements in my energy usage and potential energy leaks in my house. I am updating my twenty-year-old attic insulation and my pool pump, and I am going solar.

But all of this work to improve my home’s energy efficiency got me thinking -Why aren’t we investing time in identifying the optimal flow of energy in our precious body, mind, and spirit?

I recently had an unexpected health scare that led me to an endless series of tests to rule out serious issues. My lack of personal energy efficiency has come with a big cost in my life. Hence, I decided to dedicate this week’s blog post to compiling the biggest energy efficiency lessons that I have gleaned through my successes and failures.

Here they are:

  1. We all have a finite amount of energy every day.

When we put our energy into people, places, and things that do not return at least the same amount of energy that we expend on them, we end up with an energetic deficit. In order to keep up with our daily activities, we then have to turn to our own body tissues for an overdraft to cover the energetic debt, which leads to a great amount of dis-ease in our bodies. Its not very different with the way we make deposits and withdrawals in our bank account. Prudence is required as to where we allow our energy to flow. It is part of life that we may sometimes lose energy, for example, when we nurture relationships with people who fail to show up for us when we need an energy boost ourselves. However, when we point out this energy imbalance to them, and we do not see a change in the energy exchange, it is time to reconsider if the investment in the relationship is worth it.

2. Energy is power.

Power is often defined, incorrectly, as having influence over others. When we look at the dictionary for the definition of power, we realize that power is also defined as our ability to do something effectively. If and when we find ourselves drained, a sure way to get our power back is to fine-tune how effective our approach is at arriving at our desired outcomes instead of worrying about others’ mishaps and ineffectiveness. Is there a part of your life that you feel that you need to become more effective at? You, and only you, have the power to change that aspect of your life. All it takes is mindset, commitment, and practice.

3. Negative emotions, situations, and people are big energy suckers!

In fact, it is scientifically proven that when we allow unhealthy and toxic habits, people, and behaviors into our life, our metabolic energy will be hi-jacked from our essential, higher structures and functions and redirected to our large muscle groups to address the threat posed to our internal integrity and balance. Furthermore, if we allow this emotional hi-jacking to go on for too long, we are subject to long-term damage to essential organs and functions, congruent with the impact of chronic stress. This is now well documented in scientific literature. The term, allostasis, coined in the mid- nineties by scientists, McEwan and Stellar, describes the long-term wear and tear on our body when we willingly expose it to chronic stress. This wear and tear is the ultimate price we pay for not practicing energy efficiency in our own body systems. Yet it is completely within our control to improve our energy efficiency. All we have to do is to look for the gold in unexpected situations and set firm boundaries to protect us from people and situations that cause us unnecessary stress.

4. One of the greatest energy leaks for each and every one of us happens when there are misalignments between thoughts, words, and actions.

Whether we are the ones that don’t have synergy between our words and actions, or whether important people in our life present us with differences between what they say they are going to do and what they actually do, the energy cost to our brain to reconcile these differences is great. It is important to recognize and take corrective action to ensure harmony in the flow of thoughts, words, and actions. Mahatma Gandhi defines this harmony as happiness. Neuroscience can certainly back up that claim!

5. We are the most profound source of energy and power for ourselves.

Although we have adopted the societal view that external things (money, titles, accomplishments, people) will give us power, if and when we get all of those things, we arrive at the most noble truth: Nothing can match the source of energy and power that only we can grant to ourselves through investing in our own self-actualization—healing anything that holds us back and cultivating a profound, deep-rooted sense of self-worth. Trust me. I know this very well from my own life story. What is it that you can do within your control that makes you feel whole? If you are waiting for someone to treat you how you deserve to be treated, how can you generate this love for yourself today?

6. Taking responsibility is one of the most immense sources of power we can ever claim!

We have been conditioned to blame external circumstances for anything that is not going according to plan in our life. We blame our parents and our humble beginnings, or the economy, or our boss, or our corporate culture, and the list goes on. What we overlook every time we blame others is how much power we are actually giving away when we essentially say we have no ability to change the outcome of a situation that we are not pleased with. Instead of blaming others, we can recognize that we are in charge of the reality we create, being accountable for when our actions do not match our desired outcome, and choosing what we will do different to get to the end result we want. When we do something differently, something magical happens: we get different results!

7. Becoming more energy efficient means getting a better sense of what is associated with us gaining or losing our personal power.

We can start by paying attention to our thoughts and where we spend our energy. Instead of mourning our losses or failures, we can look at all of our life’s twists and turns as exactly what we needed to experience in order to be where we are today. Every single mishap, difficulty, and challenge has served its’ purpose as a guidepost to highlight new truths that we had to learn. Maintain an ongoing inventory of how your body feels based on what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with. Regardless of how intelligent or well-educated we may be, our humble biology—our own bodies—run amazing surveillance on what is good or bad to optimize our systems. All we have to do is be still enough to listen!

We go through life driven by internal forces that propel us to get closer to pleasure and stay away from pain. Yet we seem to overlook the fact that all of life’s experiences require energy that we often lose when we attempt to fill up our energy reserves through external sources. We are in charge of organizing our life in a way that works for us. It takes discipline to learn how to be in our own power and become our core source of love, approval, and acceptance. We may not know where to start to fine-tune our relationship with energy.

Working with an intuitive energy healer may be a great start to help you identify where you may be losing your energy and to help you create a road map on how to claim it back. My own work with Sarah Grace, sarahkgrace.com, was an invaluable beginning for me in learning how to take small steps daily that helped me heal my past missteps and become better at claiming and taming my own noble power. This work led me back to my true, authentic self.

There is never a better time than now to claim some of your power back. If you wish to change anything in your life that is not working for you contact me for a free check up. (tzeli@myndzen.com)

We can all place our energy on so many different things, but the one thing I can promise you is that committing and incorporating practices to improve your energy efficiency is one of the most profound changes you can make toward living the healthy, wholesome, and joyful life that you want.

The incredible benefits of Meditation

Are you sometimes stressed and overwhelmed by the numerous demands of life? If you are, you are not alone. Almost 70% of us experience moderate to severe symptoms of stress regularly.

However, I am happy to report that there is a very tangible, free, simple solution to this problem that has no side effects—it’s called meditation!

Most of us have heard about meditation, but we seem to be resistant to this practice, although it has been scientifically proven to have tremendous benefits in reversing the negative impact of stress in our life.

The reasons we resist meditation seem to revolve around us not knowing how to do it or feeling we cannot do it because we don’t have time, because it seems like a foreign concept and, most of all, because we are not aware of its’ myriad benefits.

Eight years ago, at the lowest point of the most devastating loss of my life, I was fortunate enough to experience the power of meditation during a weekend retreat. I would love to share with you my inside view of why meditation has single-handedly changed my life for the better over the last eight years and, I am sure, for the rest of my life.

The problem that meditation solves.

Stress is the epidemic of the century and it is now linked to more than 90% of today’s disease.

But what is stress?

What we experience as stress is nothing other than the way our body responds to demands from the environment in order to maintain our internal balance and sense of safety.

A critical part of our stress response that we often overlook is that what causes the symptoms of stress we experience actually comes from the way we interpret life situations and not the situations themselves.

For example, if our boss gives us a large task to complete in a short amount of time, it is the thoughts we have about our ability to complete the task and the consequences of not succeeding (our mental activity) that overwhelm us and trigger the mind-blowing cascade of events that elicits our stress response.

Chronic stress has been proven to cause significant damage to organs and functions of our body, as well as structural changes in our brain regions that are associated with resilience, motivation, executive functioning, and mediation of conflicting information.

We have so much power in how our psychological states are expressed in physical states in our body; we just don’t know it yet.

What is meditation?

“Meditation is the experience of the limitless nature of the mind when it ceases to be dominated by its usual mental chatter.” —David Fontana

It is estimated that we have over 60,000 thoughts per day and that 95% of these are worries. Yet only five percent of what we worry about actually happens!

This means that we invest a tremendous amount of energy in engaging our body systems to address imaginary threats or demands from the environment that are not actually happening now!

As foreign a concept as it may seem, meditation is nothing other than the practice of becoming an active participant in shaping our mental activity by being mindful of what we allow our attention to rest upon.

Meditation involves our ability to adjust the volume of thoughts that do not serve us by simply observing them as thoughts and redirecting our attention to something neutral. This process intercepts our body’s tremendous power and effort to adapt to situations that are not happening and thus reinstates the internal balance of our body systems.

Meditation is often misunderstood as the act of organizing or sorting our thoughts. In reality, it’s more about observing our thoughts and redirecting our attention to what is actually happening in the present moment.

We may think that by redirecting our attention from the thoughts we have about the challenging aspects of our life that we are not being realistic. Quite the contrary, meditation helps us maintain our nervous system in a calm state, in which we may be able to acknowledge the complications each challenge brings forth in our life and determine the most effective course of action for its’ resolution.

How does meditation work?

I must admit that a decade ago, while on chapter three of the book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, that when he posed the question, “Have you ever really looked at a flower?” I caught myself rolling my eyes and saying out loud: “Eckhart, have you seen my to-do list? I don’t have time to look at a flower!”

Today, I admit that I was completely missing the point.

The main point I was missing is how much power our mind has over our body—a riddle that we have been trying to solve for millennia and which we are barely scratching the surface in solving.

Science is just catching up with the old truths of ancient philosophers and traditions, substantiating that by keeping our mental activity on neutral, we maintain access to the parts of our brain involved with our ability to overcome problems faster and easier and find more creative solutions to challenges, which leads to a positive outlook. The more positive we feel, the more confident we feel.

Learning how to change what we think so we can change how we feel is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which has been proven to be very effective in alleviating the impact of many illnesses associated with the mind, like depression and panic disorders.

By adopting a meditation practice, we essentially engage with the mental gymnastics that yield a positive outcome similar to CBT.

The inside view of meditation

A tremendous amount of research, done with the help of imaging techniques, has uncovered that a regular meditation practice is linked to significant, measurable changes in the brain in regions that allow us to manage our body systems more effectively and increase our capacity to deal with stress.

It appears that our mind takes its’ shape by what it repeatedly rests upon. Specifically, at the cellular level, depending on what we focus on, neurons fire and wire together in different parts of our brain. Much like building our biceps by doing bicep curls, redirecting our attention to positive feelings, like empathy for example (even for someone that cuts us off on the freeway), results in neurons firing and wiring together in the parts of our brain associated with those positive traits.

Neuroscience has lent us much knowledge about the relationship between inner strengths or weaknesses and different regions of our brain.

By consistently being mindful about where we place our attention, we actually have the ability to build gray matter and grow regions of our brain that allow us to be more effective in our life endeavors and to experience more joy and well-being overall.

Here are some research findings on how meditation positively impacts our brain structures and functions even with a practice of only ten minutes, three times a week:

  • Increased cortical tissue and more blood flow to parts of the brain in the frontal regions that help regulate attention and emotion.
  • Increased activity in the left prefrontal regions of our brain, which are involved in our ability to regulate negative emotions. An active left prefrontal lobe means we will be more effective in managing emotions like fear, anger, or shame.
  • Increased gray matter in the temporal lobes of the brain, called the insula, that help us tune into ourselves. We are then able to be more self-aware. As an added benefit, growth in the insula region of our brain allows us to experience more pronounced feelings of empathy for self and others.
  • Increased tissue in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved with memory, learning, and ability to calm down another brain structure, called our amygdala, which is much like our alarm system and critical in eliciting our stress response. A thicker hippocampus means we will be much better in deciphering true threats as opposed to imaginary ones, so that we do not waste our metabolic energy unnecessarily.
  • Improved immune system function. Calming down our stress response means that our body functions are not compromised by the redirection of energy to address non-existent threats.

Research shows that we can use our mind to change the anatomy of our brain and cultivate elements like attention, compassion, motivation, or resilience.

The way meditation works is by allowing us to nurture parts of ourselves that we already have that are good and beautiful and associated with great outcomes.

There are many different ways to start a meditation practice, and there are many free, guided meditations to ease anyone into the regular practice of quieting their mind. In the “Quiet Your Mind” section of this website, I have saved a few of my favorites for you to try out for yourself.

But the most important component to experiencing the incredible impact and benefits of meditation is being open to the magic that happens when we choose, even for a few minutes a day, to leave behind our conditioned way of thinking and open up to the possibility of simply connecting with anything that is here in the present moment, for example, our breath.

Although we often think that a specific life outcome is what will help us reinstate a sense of safety and calm, the truth is, only when we quiet down the limbic mid-brain (the part of our nervous system involved with emotions, instincts, and memories) can we access problem-solving, motivation, compassion, creativity, innovation, joy, and empathy.

Happiness is finding peace in the natural flow of all the natural changes in life and learning how to be calm and relaxed with all the uncertainty that every day brings.

Meditation is the most impactful way to stay centered in the midst of change. But the only way to truly know the incredible benefits of meditation is to incorporate a meditation practice into your own life.

By shifting our attention away from the endless thoughts our mind usually rests upon, to come into our bodies and the true sensations we experience, we actually awaken to seeing things for what they truly are. Connecting with the infinite light within us allows us to change for the better, which in turn gives us the opportunity to bring positive change in the community and the world we live in.

And not many practices have benefits that can top that!

Are you afraid of your own shadow?

Have you ever found yourself-acting out of character, doing and saying things that did not take you to your desired outcome, and that you later regretted?

If you have, you are not alone. There seems to be something in us humans, which we are not aware of, which is a major obstacle in our quest to achieve all great human pursuits.

Could it be that the problems we face and our never-ending energy spent in trying to control situations, people, and things are a manifestation of a dance of opposites inside ourselves? Could it be because we don’t yet know or have power and control over our own dark side—our shadow?

When we break our challenges down to the basics, we can see that anything that presents as “an issue” in life is a never-ending battle between darkness and light, good and evil, fear and love.

We have adopted the stance that only we are good, and the bad or negative parts of our human experience are others’ issues or are outside of our control. However, our state of health, our relationships, and the discord in our smaller and our global communities reflect that we could be missing the boat by not making amends and working with (instead of against) our dark side, our shadow!

This may be the perfect time to realize the impact of fully recognizing and embracing our shadow—the one thing that stands between us and our ability to reclaim our personal power and change the trajectory of any aspect of our existence.

What is our shadow?

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the father of psychoanalysis and world-renowned for his theory of individuation, described the shadow as “any unconscious part of our personality that we do not identify in ourselves.” The shadow is the collection of the parts of us that were rejected, not rewarded, or not acknowledged by our environment during the early years of our life. We therefore hid those parts away establishing them as “unacceptable” and rejected. But what happens with all that stuff we put away deep in our unconscious?

Imagine if while you were sleeping at night, there was a stranger walking through your house. How would that feel?

What if instead of a stranger, your significant other is in your kitchen cleaning up after your wonderful dinner while you are given the luxury of some needed self- care before retiring to sleep at night? How would that feel in comparison?

All the things we have disowned in ourselves formulate a stranger, or shadow, that we carry along in all that we do and which, without our permission, runs our life on autopilot.

But our shadow is also the ultimate ticket to our personal freedom from everything that does not serve us.

Getting to know our shadow and bringing it to the light is kind of like replacing the sensation of a stranger walking through our house with the sensation of a person we love and trust, whose actions are predictable, tried, and true and aim toward the best outcomes for us.

Shadow work involves the exciting discovery of what we don’t yet know about our self and bringing back to the surface that vulnerable part of ourselves that was unprotected and unrecognized when we first formed our inner self.

How do we know when our shadow runs our life? What can we do about it?

The shadow is a universal element among all of us. I have one and you have one too. However, since our shadow is comprised of all the things that we stashed away throughout our life, by default, most of us are not aware of its existence. We work hard to maintain a self-image that is acceptable to the status quo and that provides us with the biggest rewards and acceptance from our environment. But what I have learned from deciding to venture down the path to make friends with my shadow is that our shadow is truly the biggest saboteur in anything we ever strive for.

Here are some ways our shadow sabotages our life without our permission until we choose to invest in the work to blast it with light:

  • We find ourselves wasting a good chunk of our energy in judging others.

According to Carl Jung, anything that we have established as unacceptable and we do not yet recognize in ourselves, we unconsciously project onto others. Projection is a defense mechanism where any of our intolerable thoughts, traits, feelings, or actions are ascribed to other people as an attempt to establish a false sense of superiority for ourselves and to continue to deny their existence in us. Judging others as a way of finding relief with the things we have not yet processed and made coherent stories of in ourselves creates major issues for us.

The problem:

  1. It deprives us of the opportunity for change.
  2. It alienates us from others, disrupting the sense of trust and authentic connection, which is hardwired into our DNA.
  3. It forms a lifelong source of unnecessary suffering.

The solution: If you find yourself choosing the path of defining another’s experience by subjecting them to your disapproval and judgments, take a step back and instead of judging them make a list of all your judgments. This list presents an incredible key to unlocking the secrets to what it is you judge unconsciously in your self. Ultimate freedom is when we are free of judging others, which is a clear indication that we have come to the point where we love and honor ourselves, and our relationships are defined by empathy and goodwill, even when we have to communicate unpleasant emotions.

  • We have a hard time being accountable.

Saying or doing something that hurts another’s feelings is part of our human experience. A problem arises when we are made aware of the impact of our actions and are not able to take responsibility. Instead we shift the responsibility onto the other person. We have mastered the art of acting as if we were accountable, for example by saying “I am sorry,” but we don’t blast with light what was the true force behind our actions. We apologize for the way the other person feels, instead of acknowledging how, momentarily, we disrupted connection with them through our own actions.

The problem:

  1. We continue to disown the one thing we have control over and perpetrate a behavior that does not serve us.
  2. We allow our shadow to keep us imprisoned in unconscious games of manipulation.

The solution: The next time you find yourself in a position where someone is brave enough to hold you accountable for your actions, see it as an invaluable pearl of knowledge toward the incredible adventure of discovering your true self. After all, our behaviors are born from our state, which is driven by our emotions. Recognizing the negative emotions that propel us to not want to take responsibility for our own mishaps, which sabotage our efforts toward anything noble, is a powerful way to carve the path ahead towards self-mastery!

  • We work so hard to present a positive self-image, but deep down our fears drive our ship.

Fear is a powerful human emotion and one that has kept us alive for millions of years. However, there is a healthy dose of fear and an unhealthy dose. An unhealthy amount of fear has a tremendous impact on destruction of ourselves, our community, and the world we live in today. We are afraid of our own brother and sister; we are afraid of our differences; we are afraid of losing what we have; we are afraid of things that are not here now.

The problem: “Whatever we focus on becomes our reality.” Neuroplasticity, which is the greatest neuroscience discovery in the last 150 years, has proven this statement with hard-core science. When we look at ourselves, our fellow human beings, and life situations from an unconscious stance of fear, we not only operate at diminished capacity, but we continue to aid in the development of nerve cell connections in parts of our brain that are associated with weaknesses and not with inner strengths.

The solution: The next time you find yourself experiencing physiological arousal that relates to fear, such as increased heart rate or defensiveness, recognize it and chose to put your attention on something neutral, like your breath. Once you reinstate your internal state of balance, you can spend some time exploring what it is you are truly afraid of. The practice of challenging our challenges by having a dialogue with ourselves is extremely powerful in dismantling emotional bombs of self-destruction. Then we can have a fair battle and defeat the imaginary culprit called fear, that is ever present when we don’t own our own shadow.

  • What we say, what we think, and what we do are not in alignment.

We say we are fine when our body language shows we are obviously upset. We say we want true, authentic connections, but we aren’t brave enough to let others see who we truly are. We think that we are “easy breezy” and that we need nothing from others, but then we are upset when our needs are not met. We love someone with all our heart, but we don’t do the small things often that build the foundation of safety and trust. We deny and challenge reality when someone points out our incongruences.

The problem: There is a tremendous amount of energy that is used up by our body and mind trying to reconcile differences, both practically and from a neurobiological perspective. Many of our physical and emotional health issues are a result of our inability to practice energy efficiency in ourselves. Internal misalignments clearly are the result of the disruption of the dance of the opposites within us—our shadow self and our true self.

The solution: Chose today to be the day you commit to recognizing and making friends with the parts in you that lead to any and all misalignments in your life. One of the biggest parts of our shadow is its’ bratty nature and the collection of ways it will act up when ignored and unattended, such as: manipulation, entitlement, self-righteousness, taking everything personally, criticism, stonewalling, contempt, and much more. Lighting up the candle of knowledge by simply recognizing the ways we ourselves are incongruent is the most important step toward creating harmony, first and foremost, within ourselves. After all, we cannot receive anything from the external world until we master it first in ourselves.

For the greatest part of my life, I thought that my path to wholeness was all about reaping the fruits of my labor to be a good citizen to the world I am blessed to live in. But when I found myself at the peak of my outward success with no fulfillment, accompanied by unexplained health complications, I was finally set free to see the truth:

True mastery can only be found when we dare to consciously face the dance of opposites within our true self, and are brave enough to get reacquainted and make amends with the dark aspects of our being.

When we have the courage to take the journey into discovering the parts of ourselves we have disowned and end the facade of our false self it is unnerving and challenging. However, this journey truly is the greatest adventure we can ever possibly take.

Things will continue to happen that challenge us. But freeing ourselves of the fear that comes from what we have forbidden ourselves to see and, finally, not being afraid of our own shadow is the first step toward entering the grace of our unlimited potential, our true divinity, and being the change we want to see in this world.