SoulTending.com

Absolutely! Welcome to the most extreme attempt to control the sale and use of dietary supplements ever seen. This past December, the FDA put a document on its web site titled “Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.” This document is open to public comments until April 30, 2007 - just a few days from now.

• Do we already have a health care system that is unaffordable and becoming a major social problem for the US?
• Do we need to compound the injury by adding more regulations and restrictions?
• Do we want to enslave people even more to be part of the failing medical system?

Or

• Do we stop the course of dependency?
• Do we stop meddling in areas where the public can be self sufficient and take charge of their own lives if left alone?
• Do we empower our people or do we give power to a select few, who are already lining their pockets?

Modern medicine is still in its infancy compared to the history of the human race. Who needs complementary and alternative medicine to be regulated? The drug company, the doctors and the health care system do, not the people. What the people need, is easy access to complementary and alternative medicine products. So that they can keep taking care of themselves as they have for hundreds of years. Keep big business and government out of self care. Stop meddling and interfering in the health aspects that work and focus instead on regulating the outrageous price margins that the Pharma industry puts on its drugs. Keep medicine affordable and accessible at all cost to avoid a complete collapse of the health care system once and for all.

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Time to act!
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If left undone, supplements might become so tightly regulated that you would have to get a doctor’s prescription to use them.

Of all the times to raise our voices, none is more important than this time.

You can find the full text of the FDA document at this link:

http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/06d-0480-gld0001.pdf

And you can use this link to submit your comments:

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/oc/dockets/comments/COMMENTSMain.CFM?EC_DOCUMENT_ID=1451&SUBTYP=CONTINUE&CID=&AGENCY=FDA

In addition, we also need to let our representatives in Washington know that we strongly resist this attack on our healthcare freedom. You can find the names and e-mail addresses for your congressmen at this web site: congress.org.

This is part I of the series:

Emotions, Behaviors and our Kids

In the first 16 years of my life I experienced repeated molestations from various different sources and directions. Being the polite, nice girl I never learned to speak up. I never learned to set boundaries. I never learned that I could share my misery with a caring adult, who listens and doesn’t judge. So I internalized it all. I withdrew and became even more shy. Since I never experienced any adults around me empathizing with my feelings and validating them, I too started to discount them and even started telling myself that the molestation was not really that bad, that I didn’t really get hurt and worst of all that I was safe.

So it is no wonder that 20 years later, when I hear a caregiver say to my 2 year old: “Oh don’t cry, it is nothing.” I go out there and teach her about empathy. I tell her that in our parenting style we are doing something that is called empathy. “It is about validating his feelings.” I then proceeded by asking my child who was still crying in my arms: ”Did you hurt yourself? Where are you hurting? You must feel shocked that this happened. Are you still crying because you feel upset that you fell?”

If the emphasis of parenting is on validating what is going on for everybody involved and less on politeness and being a nice girl or a good boy, our relationships would look way different. We would have learned to set appropriate boundaries. Say “Yes” when we mean yes and “No” when we mean no. We would have learned the skill of feeling into any given situation and person and the willingness to understand life as they see it. We would have learned that we matter and that we can make a difference. In the old style of parenting we are left to feel different, not part of, me versus the rest of the world, alienated from our truth and full of inner struggle between what we think we should do and what we want to do.

I am now healing the thought patterns of the effects of my upbringing. I am a lucky one. We all are. There is so much more information out and readily available. The subconscious mind of our species is realizing more about the subtleties of existence at a rapid pace. This means that we do not have to be bound to the past as much as just the generation before us was. With this gift comes also a responsibility. We owe it to our selves, to the generations before and after us, to do as much as we can to stop the perpetuation of hurt.

Every one of us is so unique, so stopping the perpetuation of hurt means different things to each one of us. The way I believe I serve the best is to continually search to uncover old patterns of behavior and thought that don’t serve me anymore. I do this by engaging into what I am passionate about: Writing, dancing, singing, drawing, organizing, being creative, teaching, loving, serving and following my bliss.

I am happy and proud of my past. It made me the person I am. I do not regret anything. I know that I and everybody around me did the best we knew. Life is a dance and we are the prima ballerina as well as the stage hand, the make up artist, the seamstress, the choreographer, the chorus girls, the audience, the light and sound engineers. My dance with life made me more caring, courageous, deep, graceful, passionate, powerful and certainly stronger.

Your Life, unplugged

All over the house your appliances are using energy even when you’re not using them. There’s even a name for this money-draining phenomenon: Phantom Load.

The Environmental Defense Organization estimates that the power we waste costs Americans $1 billion a year. And it’s fueling the climate-altering greenhouse effect that is wrecking our planet. All those little things, like leaving your cell-phone charger plugged in when not in use, add up. The easy fix: Keep everything from your TV to your toaster connected to a power strip switched to “off” until you are actually using the appliance.

From “Parents” Magazine March 2007

The war on shopping bags
Plastics of evil
San Francisco

San Francisco swaps polyethylene for potato starch

“This day has been long in coming,” declared Ross Mirkarimi on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall this week, flanked by compost bins and boxes of re-usable cloth bags. “We can take the steps to make our economy just a little more soulful. Karma is with us.” The city he helps govern, in short, is ridding itself of the plastic shopping bag.

And quite right, too. They get caught in trees (hence the epithet “witches’ knickers”), take hundreds of years to decompose and push up demand for oil, used to make plastics. Outlawing plastic bags in San Francisco alone will reduce oil consumption by nearly 800,000 gallons a year, the city reckons. Less than 5% of the 100 billion bags thrown away by Americans each year are recycled.

Jared Blumenfeld, head of the city’s environment department, says the ban will reduce litter and the cost of clearing it: sending a worker out to pull bags from trees costs up to $150 a time. And the recycled-paper and compostable bags that must be used from now on – made from corn starch and potato starch – will help to shift food waste from landfill to compost bins. People would do a lot more composting, he says, if they had biodegradable bags to help them. He expects the move to bring San Francisco’s overall recycling rate – at 69% more than twice New York’s – to close to 80%.

Other cities may now follow suit. Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Oakland and, naturally, Berkeley are exploring similar moves. There is some talk of restrictions or a tax in New York. The plastic-bag lobby fought hard to stop a ban in San Francisco precisely because it feared that defeat there would start a nationwide trend.

This is one area of greenery where California cannot claim to be the global leader. In Taiwan and Ireland, you pay for plastic bags. They have been banned already in Rwanda, Bhutan, Bangladesh (where they cause flooding by blocking drains), South Africa (where distributing them can land you in jail) and Mumbai. Paris will join the list at the end of this year, the rest of France in 2010. But bags are only the start: much more landfill is taken up with packaging. Now that would be some good karma.

Read in “The Economist” March 31st 2007