Certain sports are played alone. Certain are played as part of a team. Weight lifting, for example, is usually done alone. Football, on the other hand, must be played as part of a team. It requires team coordination and the results depend on everybody either working or not working together. Team sports are more yang.

Then there is competition, either individual or group. Competition is yang, an expression of energy becoming more and more contracted or condensed. Yin activities are those in which energy moves out to the periphery. The game of solitaire is very yin! Then there are social card games, played with others for fun: those are more balanced. Serious gambling, with direct competition, is by far the most yang. A social card game is more harmonious, played just for fun, either won or lost. It is more yang than solitaire because it requires social interaction.

Any sport you do by yourself is yin and has a yinnizing effect. Anything you do in a group becomes more yang, whatever it is. If you add competition to that, it becomes even more yang.

I hope you choose a good activity for yourself today!

The temperature has been high lately. When it is hot, it is more easy to be hot-blooded! If someone is feeling too emotional, we describe them as too hot, excited, off-balance, volatile or irrational. We can also think of that person as being too wet or wishy washy or overflowing. However we describe them, one thing is clear: for emotion, we need liquid! The liquid can be internal or external. If you want to have an emotional trip, you go to Venice or Niagara Falls or to the sea. You usually choose a place where there is liquid – some canals, water flowing, a lake, the seashore.

Another way to feel more emotional is to use temperature, to go to a warmer place. Finland is a great country but not associated with arias. For emotions we need a higher temperature. If someone is passionate we call them hot. That means they have a lot of temperature, a lot of heat. Similarly, fire is very romantic. It brings more heat and activity to the environment. An electric heater is not very romantic.

We also use fire. More fire in cooking activates emotions as well. Whether it is fire in cooking or in the environment, both have that effect. Stimulants like coffee are the same. In Southern countries they make espresso very well. Since it is roasted, there is a lot of fire energy there, and furthermore it is made under pressure. When you drink espresso, a lot of energy or emotion is produced!

I hope you have enjoyed this discussion and not become too heated up.

In the spring we considered blood quality and emotions. You don’t have to think a lot about these things to practice them. Everyone knows, consciously or unconsciously, how to change their blood in order to affect their emotions. For example, we all have certain foods and drinks we rely on to create some type of emotional response. If you want to go out and have a romantic meal, you know what type of food, what type of restaurant, you are going to choose because automatically you know that when you start to eat or drink certain things, you start to feel a certain way! There are certain foods on which we rely for that. That’s amore!

If we want to quickly pick up our energy and be more outgoing, there are certain other foods we will choose. If we plan a party, there are certain traditionally accepted snacks we know will make people more social and active. They will talk more and be chatty and feel happier from eating these foods. Doritos were not an accident.

If we don’t want to face something that is coming up, we have other foods we will choose. They are more dulling and block us from that experience. These are things everyone knows. At the same time, If you feel happy, your blood starts to become more alkaline. If you laugh this is also true. Everyone knows that laughter is the best medicine! When we take certain foods, we create our blood. These foods generate certain emotions, which in effect are helping to return our blood to balance.

For example, if you take sweets, for a while you feel more happy, and your blood is more excessive. Then through that happiness, that laughter and activity, you are helping your blood return to normal. On the other hand, if you feel or experience some negative emotion, you change your blood. If you have a shock about something, instantly your blood starts to turn acid. If you get angry, it makes your blood more acidic. It makes your blood boil!

Happy and unhappy emotions have the effect of either improving or weakening the quality of our blood so please go watch a funny movie! For your health.

\In macrobiotics we look at illness as a developmental progression. The first major stage, which is not really an illness itself in many cases, is our blood starting to become imbalanced. Our blood, which has hemoglobin, iron containing protein at the center, is important for maintaining our direction in life. When our blood quality is strong, it is easier to maintain a good direction. When our blood quality starts to become weaker, it is easier to lose our direction. Also, our sensitivity is affected. Once we have a disorder with our blood, which includes allergies and skin diseases, we become much more emotional than we were before and emotional sensitivity starts to change. We start to become more sensitive, overly sensitive, or start to lack sensitivity in certain areas. It can go from one extreme or the other.

From there, illness passes to the next level, emotional disorders. Here, emotional imbalances, which started on a previous level of blood, start to become more fixed or deeper. This then becomes our state of being, where we have free-floating fears or anxieties and become more depressive or angered. Our view of life or our approach to life starts at this point to be affected, in the area of so-called emotional disorders. Finally, from emotional disorders, we develop organ or gland problems. This is the area where most modern problems fall, heart disease as well as diabetes and chronic hypoglycemia. Intermittent hypoglycemia we can classify on the level of blood.

It is not by accident that emotions are between our blood quality and our organs or gland quality. Emotions play a kind of balancing or harmonizing role in our lives. We will look at this more next week.

“I am HIV positive. Macrobiotics chose me to follow its Path and not the other way around. I was diagnosed in May 2006, two days after my birthday. I was devastated. Fortunately macrobiotics found me, and I have never had to take anti-retroviral medications.” – Alejandro Aguilera

Alejandro’s HIV symptoms began while on a trip to Turin during the 2006 Winter Olympics. It started as night sweats and a viral rash. Shortly after returning to the US, he caught a cold which kept getting worse. He had to change his shirt at least five times in one night because he was soaked in sweat. As symptoms progressed and being knowledgeable of HIV, he feared the worse. He wept. He had doctors test for everything else and went to three anonymous testing centers. Finally, he was running out of options and while waiting for the anonymous results, he agreed to be tested by my doctors twice. He had no insurance at the time. Out of the five tests, three came back positive for HIV. He then decided to accept the virus now living in my body. He contacted his attorney and closest friends to share the diagnosis. Eventually, in time, he would contact his family.

Alejandro recalled a young Minneapolis bartender suggesting macrobiotics. The bartender had tried it with much success in regards to his condition but had given it up. He also mentioned a homeopath and a bookstore in South Minneapolis.

Alejandro’s soul sister in Minneapolis, Daniella took him that weekend to see the homeopath. It was at “Present Moment” bookstore that Daniella bought his first macrobiotic text for his birthday: Michio Kushi and Alex Jack’s “The Macrobiotic Path to Total Health”. He went home and devoured the entire section on AIDS and found himself agreeing with the precepts and principles. He proceeded to empty his pantry into brown grocery paper bags, and recycled his teflon and aluminum cookware. The next day, he returned unused groceries back to the neighborhood convenience store and then went to Target to buy stainless steel cookware. His next stop was the Wedge Community Coop to buy “MACRO” food. The cashier turned out to be macro and this was the beginning of a mentoring relationship. She would give him first pressure cooker and his first Le Creuset pot. She would eventually take him to Philadelphia to see renowned, Macrobiotic Counselor, Denny Waxman.

Alejandro witnessed his viral load diminish from over 300,000 copies per milliliter of blood down to a bit over 9,000 copies per milliliter. He also has a fluctuating immune system, CD4 count that keeps him in very good health. He has only had the flu once since becoming macrobiotic, and the only symptom which reminds him of his condition (and his humble existence) is the hairy oral leukoplakia on his tongue.

Emotionally and spiritually, Alejandro moved from anger and punching walls, to fear and endless tears, to a place of peace, light, service and redemption. He now suggests to others that: “If you want to LIVE and fully embrace your purpose in Life, then give macrobiotics a chance to change your point of view. It did that for me.”

Listen to Controlling HIV with Macrobiotics

There are three types of exercises: harmonious exercise, physically or emotionally-oriented exercise and spiritually/mentally or energetically-oriented exercise.

Harmonious exercise means everyone can do it and everyone benefits. This is universal exercise and should be the basis of all exercise programs. Examples of harmonious exercise are walking, laughing, body rub, reading, making love, breathing, cleaning, chewing, gardening, swimming, dancing and hobbies.

Today I will consider walking. Walking is the universal exercise. When I say “part of life,” I don’t mean power walking, which is an unnatural stride. Walking in the past was how you got from one place to another. That was part of life. And our idea of walking, what a short walk is, has changed very much. When you walk naturally, your arms swing like a pendulum and your legs do the same. This is setting a rhythm that helps to regulate all of our bodies’ natural rhythms, including the balance of the branches of our automatic nervous system, our heart beat, our digestive system. Plus, walking helps every condition. It makes you more flexible, and if you are tired, it gives you energy. If you are full, your digestion improves. If you are down, it picks you up. Whatever your state is, you benefit, you return to balance from walking, if it is a natural walk, especially outside. This is so-called harmonious or universal exercise. Everyone should do it and everyone benefits from it. Now of course, if you have certain injuries where this can’t be done, don’t try to do it. But under normal circumstances, everyone benefits from walking. It should be done at a natural stride, at a brisk pace. As if you have somewhere to go and you want to get there.

Food is our strongest desire. No one can conquer his or her appetite. If you eat in an imbalanced way, your appetite always wins. For example, if you take something salty, you are forced to drink. You can’t escape because the salt needs the water to make balance. If you eat something dry, you have to drink. With the best modern packaging, we still can’t keep pretzels dry. It is impossible, because the dryness seeks moisture, seeks liquid. If you eat salty pretzels you seek liquid.

We can say, who is thirsty? Are you thirsty or are the pretzels thirsty?

When you eat the pretzels it is the same thing. There is no difference anymore.

If your condition is not balanced, then you can’t control your appetite. Even though you know what to do, you can’t do it. The secret is learning how to make a balance for your condition, so that you can naturally start to control your appetite. Everything changes to its opposite. The current approach to losing weight is restricting yourself. But when you restrict yourself, you want to eat. Of course to lose weight we have to have some restriction, but the overall approach has to be one of not restricting, of satisfying ourselves.

In the world of occupational therapy, prescriptive music for sound therapy is considered a medically reputable and viable treatment for some neurological disorders. Now with so many mainstream occupational therapy clinics prescribing sound therapy, it is no longer considered an alternative form of treatment. However, it has yet to become widely accepted across other areas of medicine. READ ARTICLE

One of the observations I have had again and again in counseling is that so many people I see who have serious health problems have spent their lives doing what they didn’t want to be doing. And often, when that realization comes strongly enough, it is already a very serious situation. Our career means something like our course or plan of action through life. A lot of people think of career as what they do from nine to five and that the rest of the time is their life. However, career is like exercise, which must be a kind of activity that is part of our life, not separate from it. Career is the same. Our career and our life should be exactly the same.

When people ask me what I do, I don’t really know what to say. When I go to different countries and am asked my occupation, I don’t know what to say. Teacher? I don’t know. Macrobiotic person? Human being? That is my career. Basically, to understand careers we have to know about our basic nature, because whatever we do in life has to complement or build on our nature. But the real question is, what is the purpose of our career? What shall we look for in the first place in understanding our career? Of course we have practical considerations to make, we have to support ourselves, make a living. But that is the secondary or minor part. Really, a career means: How to realize our infinite nature. How to realize our endless nature. Day by day we should try to have different experiences which take us further toward our full potential in life, or our endless nature. You can say, to the realization of our oneness. In essence, if somebody is coming to macrobiotics because of health, then, if they are able to overcome a terminal illness, basically what they are doing is realizing their endless nature, their endless ability to create, not only sickness, but health.

Career should be the same thing, but in a much larger sense. Day by day, we should have this deepening realization of who we are and why we came here.

When does life begin? When does life end? This is a very good question. Does life begin when you are a twinkle in your parents’ eyes? Does life begin at the point of conception? Does life begin at the moment of birth? When the cord is cut? When does it begin? Does life begin when you are weaned? No-one can really say. And in the same way, when are you dead? People have been brain dead and have come back to continue to live their life. We can’t separate opposites. Opposites complete each other to Oneness. However, we have grown up with an idea of good and bad. One or the other. Black and white. But this idea does not exist in nature because we can’t separate things in the same way. When we look at health and sickness, when are we really healthy? And when we are sick, when did that sickness begin? Everything moves in a wave-like movement. If we have a wave, then when we are at the top. we call that health. When we are at the bottom, we call that sickness. At what point does sickness really begin? Is it when you are at the top of the wave, at the midpoint, or at the bottom? We can’t say.

The next question is, is there ever health without sickness? Can yin exist without yang? They cannot. Is there such a thing as absolute, perfect health? I don’t think that there is. Health cannot exist without sickness. No one has everyday just the same perfect energy, perfect clarity, everything going smoothly as planned. I haven’t met that person yet!

No one has perfect sickness. There is nothing that is one-sided. Everything contains its opposite. We have come to think, health is good and sickness is bad, but they are always connected. There is a movement between health and sickness and between sickness and health. In macrobiotics we lean how to move from sickness to health, unhappiness to happiness and chaos to clarity. Trying to practice my Seven Steps will help you move towards health and happiness.