A Systems Perspective on Chronic Pain By: Todd Hargrove

"Our healthcare system is amazingly good at dealing with acute injuries.  It has a long way to go in treating the global, systemic and complex problems that are currently the biggest health problems we face -- obesity, diabetes, chronic pain, etc.

We can understand the essence of these problems betters with the systems perspective, and hopefully this will allow us to see that these problems will not be solved by highly specific interventions like pills, gogi berries, or foam rollers.  They will require blunt, nonspecific, but effective instruments for regulating systemic health -- diet, exercise, sleep, and stress regulation.  These are the fundamentals that get ignored in favor of magic bullets and quick fixes."

Who Owns Yoga? w/ Bhanu Bhatnagar

Reporter Bhanu Bhatnagar  investigates Who Owns Yoga? through interviews in the west + east. Yoga Dork recaps it here.

Make Your Soul Grow - Kurt Vonnegut

"What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow."

(Kurt Vonnegut responds to high school children at Xavier High School in this letter. This is an excerpt from that letter.)

Conversation with Judith Hanson Lasater

It's all yoga baby : Judith Hanson Lasater's Holiday Survival Tips

NY Times: Less Talk, More Therapy By: Jessica Wolf

"When Ann E. presses into fascia that has become gummed up like glue, holding parts of our insides where they don't rightly belong, her touch somehow "dissolves" the gooeyness and allows the fascia to revert to its original light, fluffy nature. With each of these releases, the "necklace tangle" loosens and our bodies can start to sort out the mess that has been accumulating for so many years.

As I discovered on the first day, she rarely works where the pain is. She says that the body provides here a map of where it's really hurting, pulling, stagnant, frozen, and she starts there, unfurling one little piece of the necklace ball, so that the body can begin its own organic process of unwinding itself back to health."

Bessel Van Der Kolk: Restoring the Body: Yoga, EMDR, and Treating Trauma

Book:The Body Keeps the Score

Krista Tippet's conversation with Bessel Van Der Kolk Onbeing.org  

Photo Credit: Dr. Kenneth Hansraj/Surgical Technology International 

CBS News: Texting your way to back pain

"The average adult head weighs 10 to 12 pounds when it's in the upright or neutral position. However, because of that pesky thing called physics -- gravitational pull -- the cranium becomes heavier the more you bend your neck. Several times heavier, according to research from Dr. Kenneth Hansraj, chief of spine surgery at New York Spine Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine, which will be published in Surgical Technology International."