Just Breathe! is the ezine of The International Breath Institute (IBI) sent to you from Dr. Tom Goode. IBI shows you how to enjoy optimal health through lifestyle management -- learning to live in alignment with your holistic nature. We provide shortcuts from science, tips for your health, and reminders about your breathing.

Content
IBI's web site focuses on Full Wave Breathing because it is the single most important exercise for your health. Use it to get well, be well and do well.

Healthcare
Either you take care of your health or you don’t. If you don’t you become a participant in what is known as “Healthcare.” Healthcare is a system predicated upon the study of sick people and focusing on how to “fix” them. It addresses symptoms rather than causes and treats disease as an enemy to be eradicated.

Self-Responsible Self Care
If illness were a message concerning stressors in your mind and body, as opposed to thinking of illness as an opponent, how would you treat it? Likely you would cooperate with the body using principles based upon natural health. The first place you might start is at the beginning—with the most basic foundation of life, your breath. Your mind and body work pretty well until you start storing stressors in your breathing muscles. Then you become a shallow breather, creating chronic tension that wears down your immune system. Your blood becomes toxic. Lacking oxygen and energy, your body is unable to defend itself against environmental stressors. The result is disease.

Holistic Practices
The most basic holistic health practice is breathing. Because breathing is basic it affects everything. If it is harmonious the entire system moves toward greater harmony. Master your breathing and you master the ability to stimulate your healing resources.

Use your breathing to promote the unimpeded flow of consciousness through every cell in your body. Healing takes place on all levels. Your breathing determines your physical vitality, your emotional calmness, your mental focus and your spiritual awareness.

Today's Challenges
These are times of great stress: Disasters, warring, environmental toxins, crowding, lack of resources, noise levels, deprivation, social isolation, limited education, inadequate diet, hazardous occupations, financial and time pressures, drugs and addictions, lack of exercise, obesity and poor health care. Most people are simply overwhelmed with all that is happening. You, however, can make a difference by being different. Love yourself enough to take care of yourself. Then you can help someone else.

The Cure
If you truly want to cure an illness, you must identify and eradicate the habits that led to it in the first place. Then give your body the foods, natural supplements, sunlight, and exercise that will enhance its ability to heal itself.

The Duh Factor
To live longer and livelier:
Eat food, eat less of it, burn off the excess through exercise, take supplements when your food provides inadequate nutrition, and drink pure water.

IBI’s holistic health approach keeps you healthy. Beginning with your breathing, everything suggested is intended to keep you alive longer, leaner and more joyfully. Last year the nation’s attention in the news shifted from anti-aging to obesity. Now the focus is being brought to bear on the flu. Our message for you is essentially the same—to do the things that nurture you and stop doing those things that weaken you and undermine your health. In this respect, the flu elicits the same response.

5 Ways of Improving Your Life Style to Live a Longer and Livelier Life
1. Eat natural foods. Organic eggs and produce provide you with the most nutrition and the least contaminants (pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, preservatives, hormones and antibiotics) that can undermine your health. Drink and bathe in pure water with no chlorine or fluoride in it.

2. Take supplements. Denatured soil and produce, grain-fed meat sources and modern pick-it-green harvesting together add up to less nutrition than your body needs. Feeling old? There are safe supplements that will absolutely help you feel better and exercises that work to restore energy on all levels.

3. Dedicate a time for sitting. Can you make your mind stop chattering? Practice sitting and simply breathing. A couple of times a day are enough to renew your sense of purpose and connection. Not everyone can meditate. Most everyone, however, can sit and breathe!

4. Get a good night’s sleep. Eight hours is recommended—and you have to plan for it and schedule this time in your life. Your body can’t renew itself if you keep overstressing it. Make up for lost sleep on the weekends.

5. Exercise less. Instead increase your intensity. Walk up and down stairs for a couple of minutes and rest for a couple, then repeat twice more. You’ll improve your circulation and your heart’s ability to effectively deal with sudden stress. Alternately complete a couple of rounds of hustling up a hill for two minutes and ease back down for two more. Rest for another minutes before repeating. No hill? Run in place for two minutes interspersed with pauses of equal length.

Holistic Heart Health
In an earlier edition of Just Breathe! I promised to begin reporting on how you can naturally improve your cardiovascular health. Here’s how it all works in a simple description.

If you are doing the five things I mention above, your body is producing a substance called Nitric Oxide (NO). Based on the 1998 Noble Prize winning research by three American scientists, we know that NO keeps your blood vessels flexible and clog-free. However, as we age the natural tendency is for the body to produce less nitric oxide. Chronic stress also compromises NO production. Those two factors contribute to clogged arteries. That’s why cardiovascular disease is the number one killer today. Yet there is hope and even great promise with a new development.

Who do you know who may work too much, can’t eat right, doesn’t get enough exercise, and doesn’t take time to relax? Most of us, right? Well, what if there was a supplement that stimulates NO production in the face of our often overwhelming lifestyle? That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?

And that’s exactly what IBI and the Inspired Living network of companies has found for you. Imagine being able to take a one-ounce dose in the morning and having your heart health receive a tremendous, all-natural boost to the point of preventing and reversing cardiac disease. I’ve got a book coming out on the topic of heart health and you don’t need to wait to get started with your own cardiac cure.

Until IBI puts up the web page and the book is completed, you can order the supplement directly from us with a 60 day total satisfaction guarantee from the manufacturer. To find out more, email me your address and telephone number (thomasgoode@earthlink.net) and I will send you a brochure by mail and info by email. Then you can call me if you want to take action.

EXERCISE CORNER:
The cleansing breath is performed by exhaling with an “sss” sound and drawing the lower abdomen back toward the spine and bending forward from the waist. Next perform the Full Wave Breath raising your arms over your head and stretching backwards. Hold for a count of two and relax quickly and completely, lowering the arms as you make a “Ha” sound. Pause for ten seconds and repeat up for up to ten repetitions.

Keep breathing!

Tom

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