Jacob’s Blog

The mind - body connection is possibly the most important practice to integrate into our life to improve our health.  Our thoughts and actions create feelings. For example, when we exercise appropriately especially while engaging with nature we create a beneficial biological response. That response enlarges our blood vessels, reducing vascular resistance, while triggering hormones that provide beneficial feelings or emotions.  Through thought, specifically deserving or beneficial thought, we produce a similar biological response that also results in the triggering of hormones that provide beneficial feelings or emotions. The neurons in your brain are so impressionable that they can make the body feel as though it is physically experiencing pleasure.  The same process of action and thought can also provide negative effects. If we overwork or overtrain the body we can trigger stress hormones that in turn create feelings of fatigue or sickness. The same is true for negative thinking...

For the last 30 years, I have been practicing as an emergency medic in urban and austere environments. During that time I have been instruction & teaching emergency and heart based curriculum and piecing together volumes of research and literature regarding the mechanical and emotional components of the heart. During this time I have come to some of my own conclusions. There seems to be a   lack of a holistic understanding of how to treat patients emotionally in the practice of emergency and treatment based medicine to obtain better physical results. And while these ideas are shared by many others in the field of medicine, those number are far too few to be heard over the roar of common western practice. Some of our best medical institutions use using these understandings in their practice. Unfortunately, the cost associated with access to these facilities and the limited availability of these institutions reduces its overall effectiveness as they are the exception. And most...

Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations.   - Earl Nightingale  One of the observations that I am constantly making is that I can only see myself through others, my habits and nature.  We never get to see ourselves in this existence. We are always looking out, sometimes looking inward although never at ourselves. Therefore we only see ourselves through the reflection of others. How others react and respond to us provides us with a better understanding of who we are. Nature also provides us this mirror. When we engage with the natural environment we are presented with a reflection of our character and condition. How we react or respond to the challenges of the natural world shows us our limitations or strengths respectively. Have you ever done something difficult in the out of doors and gotten frustrated? You may have through your frustration was with the conditions or the difficulty. I would argue our frustration is with...