Happiness Vitamin D--Part III

I don't usually write about nutrition, but the value of taking vitamin D seems so important to our health and well-being, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it again. You may read more about Vitamin D in my January 2009 original Vitamin D post and my second entry May 18.

In this article I'll focus on Vitamin D and its ability to lower the risk of cancer.

More than 60 epidemiology studies conducted over the last 30 years have indicated that Vitamin D deficiency is associated with an increased risk of more than 16 different types of cancer.

According to research from the newly published study by Cedric F. Garland, Dr. P.H., FACE, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and Moores Cancer Center of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), "It is projected that raising the minimum year-around serum 25(OH)D level to 40-60 ng/ml (100-150 nmol/L) would prevent approximately 58,000 new cases of breast cancer and 49,000 new cases of colorectal cancer each year, and three quarters of deaths from these diseases, in the US and Canada."

Most experts recommend getting blood tests to evaluate Vitamin D levels, and taking up to 2000-5000 IU of Vitamin D each day to help increase your levels. As I first mentioned in my January '09 post, I checked my Vitamin D level when I had lab work done for my annual cholesterol test. However, I had to ask my doctor to specifically request the test from the lab (they don't automatically check your Vitamin D levels).

My Vitamin D level was 24ng/ml (the healthy therapeutic range is 50-65 ng/ml). After one week of taking 5000 IU per day, I felt clearer and happier, even though I wasn't expecting to feel anything dramatic, and especially that soon, so it was not a placebo effect. My follow up appointment is scheduled at the end of summer.

There is now overwhelming evidence pointing to the fact that many of the 560,000 cancer deaths expected to occur this year could have been safely prevented with one simple lifestyle change – sun exposure.

If health officials would simply recommend that you get some sensible sun exposure, or supplement with oral vitamin D3 if you can’t get out into the sun, there could be major advances made in the fight against cancer.
One recent study also points out vitamin D’s potential in treating breast cancer; not just in preventing it. They found that calcitrol (the active form of vitamin D) can induce a tumor-suppressing protein that inhibits the growth of breast cancer cells specifically.

Calcification of blood vessels and other tissues is much more common with low intakes of vitamin D-3 than high intakes.

According to an article by Dr. Mercola, "it’s important to realize that even if you live in a perpetually sunny environment but work the entire week indoors and don’t make a conscious effort to go outside during the weekends you can, and probably will, become vitamin D deficient.It is simply not enough to walk from your car to work and home and expect to get enough sunshine to alter your vitamin D levels.

In order to reap any and all the benefits that vitamin D has to offer you need to make sure your levels are within the therapeutic range of 50-65 ng/ml."

Dr. Mercola again stated in an article, "According to Dr. Heaney -- whom I interviewed for my Inner Circle expert segment on the topic of sun exposure and melanoma, earlier this year -- your body requires 4,000 IU’s daily just to maintain its current vitamin D level." So in order to actually raise your levels, you’d have to increase either your exposure to sunshine, or supplement with oral vitamin D3.
Remember, if you chose to take an oral supplement it’s essential that you get your levels tested regularly by a proficient lab to make sure you’re within the therapeutic range. In the U.S. Dr. Mercola recommends using LabCorp."

One of my blog readers recommended this Vitamin D site that is free and chockfull of information about vitamin D.

Have you experienced greater health and well-being using Vitamin D?

Thoughtful Thursday: Change & Acceptance

Every Thursday I post a quote or thought for all of us to ponder. Today's quote is:
The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. -- Nathaniel Braden

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if we could somehow not focus on whether something SHOULD or SHOULD NOT be happening to us?
I think making the choice to accept what is and release what was is a spiritual practice. However, it involves all aspects of our lives--intellectual, emotional, and physical. It looks like this…instead of shrinking away from what is occurring in this day and each day, we learn to embrace it.

In her book, Broken Open, Elizabeth Lesser, described spiritual teacher and world renowned speaker/author, Ram Dass searching for words while recovering from a stroke. “I began to fill in the blanks for him. After one such awkward exchange, he turned to me, and out popped one of his one-liners: “I speak more slowly now. Now people finish my sentences and answer their own questions.”

Elizabeth did the same, finished his sentences in response to her questions about his stroke and its aftermath. In doing so, she answered most of the questions herself.

Ram Dass began to see his stroke as ‘fierce grace.’ He said, “For me to see the stroke as grace required a perceptual shift. It was a shift from taking the point of view of the Ego to taking the point of view of the Soul.....What changed from the stroke was my attachment to the Ego. The stroke was unbearable to the Ego, and so it pushed me into the Soul level...faith and love are stonrger than any changes, stronger than aging and, I am very sure, stronger than death."

How have you successfully dealt with change, especially the fierce grace kind?

PHOTO: Octopus at the Mote Marine Lab, Sarasota, Florida

Thoughtful Thursday: Life Vision & Desire

Every Thursday I post a quote or thought for all of us to ponder. Today's quotes are:

"Burning desire to see or do something gives us staying power-a reason to get up every morning or to pick ourselves up and start in again after a disappointment."--Marsha Sinetar

"Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything."--Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)

Today was my first appointment at the Italian Consulate Office in Chicago to apply for dual citizenship with Italy. I have never sat in more uncomfortable seats in my life. They were metal bars on the seats and backs that left deep creases in my body. There was a steady stream of people arriving for visas, passports, citizenship and other things.

If I did not have a strong desire to acquire dual citizenship with Italy, I would have given up long ago. My journey is a metaphor for life's journey. Over 3 years ago, I requested records for my Italian grandfather from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. It was two years before they even looked at my request. Then they began the search to see if he was still an Italian citizen when my dad was born. He was, but I need the proof of that. I cannot even list the difficulties that have challenged me. Even this morning, my dad's legal document that was overnighted to me in Chicago did not arrive. It was a day late.

I have been gathering marriage certificates, death, birth, on several generations of family members in the US and Italy, with roadblocks along the way that made me cry and laugh. All documents had to have apostilles (gold stamps verifying authenticity) and be translated into Italian.

We waited a year for an appointment, and flew both of my children to Chicago, so they could apply also. But the road is taking a sharp turn again. Now, I have to have all the spelling of my maiden name changed on all documents for my deceased grandfather, my dad, and all of my documents, and my name on birth certificates of both children. It's so outrageously difficult I had to laugh. But, again, I have a burning desire to see this through and I'm not giving up.

I hope that whatever it is you envision is a burning desire that pulls you toward the fruition of that seed desire.

I guess the great quote that reinforces my desire to spend more time in Italy and to become a dual citizen is from the opera, Attila: "You may have the universe, if I may have Italy." -Giuseppe Verdi

PHOTO: I took this standing on top of the mountain in Caulonia, Calabria, Italy where my maternal grandfather grew up.

Thoughtful Thursday: Death & Transition

Every Thursday I post a quote or thought for all of us to ponder. Today's quote is:
There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in…Leonard Cohen

I heard these words on the radio several weeks ago, jotted down the line from the song, and it kept floating through my days, like a hot air balloon that got stuck in a tree somewhere. It's so true. There’s a crack right now. A dear friend and mentor passed away last week, very suddenly. Her New Years card sent the 2nd week in January said “Happy Enlightened New Year. Call me at this number. “ I tore out the part of the card that included the number, and left it on the shelf above my blue kitchen desk for 5 months. Everyday I looked at it and left it there because I knew when I had a moment I was going to sit with a cup of tea and talk with her.

Then a few weeks ago, I decided to clean off my shelf. I added her cell number to my cell phone, so I would always have it with me. I realize now that throwing away the torn card coincided with her going into the hospital.

I don’t regret that I didn’t call in time to talk with her. It just was one of those things. What I focus on is her sparkling eyes, giggles, and laughter. I'll always be grateful to her because she turned me on to my coaching career by bringing the Option Method into my life in 1991, then introduced me to Mandy Evans, who I then studied with for many years.

Karling's gift of teaching and inspiring others reached around the world. She taught meditation from Hawaii to Spain and places in between. Her new years letters were filled with names of all of her 10 children and stepchildren, their spouses, children, grandchildren and how she and her husband had visited most of them that year.

There’s a crack in my heart, but the light is coming in. Broken open, broken free. She will always represent fullness of life, love and laughter. I feel her presence very tangibly. I know I felt the essence of St. Francis in his church in Assisi also . I wasn’t expecting to, especially since there were hoards of tourists stomping through the church, passing the pew where I sat crying soft tears. But it was clearly palpable.

Is it love that’s left behind? Love from the flash of light?

Karling drove to Chicago once with me, my husband, and my son. My son was 3 or 4 years old. When he asked how much longer and I said, 3 hours, he cried, “Oh my GAW” He had a little problem saying some letters like “D”. Karling roared with laughter from the back seat she was sharing with him. It was our personal joke whenever she and I were together, and something outrageous happened, we’d look at each other and say, "Oh my GAW!”

I did call her to give her my love, but later found out she had already made the transition. I left a message.
If you're thinking of getting in touch with a loved one, do it now. If everything has a crack, then may lots of light come into your space..

How have you allowed the light to enter after you have dealt with death of a loved one?

Thoughtful Thursday: Lynn Twist & Pachamama Alliance

Every Thursday I post a quote or thought for all of us to ponder. Today's quote is from humanitarian, Lynn Twist, pictured on the right with me in Fairfield, Iowa.
"When a tree falls in Brazil, there is less oxygen in Ohio."

Lynn is the bestselling author of The Soul of Money and co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance. I had the privilege of taking a long walk with Lynn and my visiting friend and New York Times best selling author, Marci Shimoff, on the walking trails along the lake in my hometown of Fairfield, Iowa. Lynn was visiting our town because she was receiving the Mayor Malloy's humanitarian award. I found Lynn to be the most genuine down-to-earth yet global thinker I've ever met.

Lynn has spent more than three decades working in positions of leadership with many global initiaves including: ending world hunger, protecting the woldks rainforests, empowering indigenous peoples, inproving health, economic, and political conditions for women and children, and advancing the scientific understanding of human consciousness.
She has had many teachers in her life. In addition to being trained by Mother Theresa, some of Lynn's great teachers are the people she meets in third world countries. For instance, she traveled to Ethiopia during the 1984 famine that killed 1 million people.

I know it's important in our growth to happiness, not to label everyone. She encouraged us not to label anyone as poor. "They are intelligent, creative, resilient human beings. They exhibit more courage in a day than most of us will need in a lifetime. The human spirit cannot be suppressed. Their desire to feed their children would inspire any one of us. Don't label someone as rich as it holds them to a certain expectation."

During the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine, she sat with 7 women in a circle after they all had lost their children to the famine. This is incomprehensible to me but one of the mothers had lost all 11 of her children. The healing circle began with each mother telling the story in detail about the death of each child. First her 16 year old, then 12 year old, down to her 11th child who died at her breast. After each telling, the group of 8 in the circle would wail and grieve for each child. They began to make a commitment to create a new life from a seemingly impossible situation. Today those 7 previously illiterate women have finished school all the way through college. Four have graduate degrees, two are lawyers, and three are ministers in government.

If they can do that, we can do anything! So, if we say they are poor, we diminish them and ourselves.

Her focus now with the Pachamama Alliance is to prevent the destruction of the world's tropical rainforests. As stated on the Pachamama Alliance website, "The desctruction of the tropical rainforests has reached global proportions. Alarm about the extinction of species, the permanent loss of potentially life-saving medicinal plants, the irreversible damage to the delicate balance of the Earth's climate control system and the tragic disappearance of indigenous cultures has captured the attention of millions of people around the world."

"When a tree falls in Brazil, there is less oxygen in Ohio." We are all family connected on a deeper level than we can imagine. Continued from the Pachamama Alliance site, "After centuries of living in harmony with their environment, indigenous cultures see things very differently. They are informed and guided by the knowledge and spirit imbedded in nature. Rather than viewing the natural world as a collection of separate elements from which humans are apart, they recognize all of creation as an interconnected web, and each of us as an integral element in this miraculous and fragile weave of life. The Pachamama Alliance believes that our ability to meet the challenges that face humanity as we make the transition to the next millennium, depends on our ability to successfully combine the best elements of these two worldviews into a single global vision, an alloy that blends the intellectual and scientific prowess of the modern world, with the deep and ancient wisdom of traditional cultures. This is the commitment which underlies the work of The Pachamama Alliance." For further insight into the Amazon Rainforest, see this Amazon site.

Did you know that 3.5 billion people live on less than $2/day in a world of opulence? Lynn's vision is to re allocate world's finances from fear to love. That's what she calls fund raising!

Here's to catching ourselves when we want to label. Here's to Global support to end world hunger and devastation of our rainforest.
Have you traveled to indigenous areas? Are you a facilitator with Pachamama Alliance?

Do you know the meanings of words?

With certainty know that we all have different interpretations of whatever we hear. We put different meanings on words, events, and conversations. I usually see this in the way we use our belief systems to interpret. Recently, it became so clear to me in yet another way--in my writing group.

I just started meeting with a group of women writers every Wednesday afternoon to enjoy free writing in the spirit of author Natalie Goldberg and her book Writing Down the Bones.

We have a stash of topics in a pile, or someone just makes one up in the moment. We set the timer and start writing. At the sound of the bell, we stop and read to each other, sometimes repeating the reader’s lines that were memorable or meaningful.
I find it fascinating how we can take one topic and have a different perspective, voice, and style.
One of last week’s topics was, “What’s Blooming?” There were 8 of us with 8 different perspectives, like fingerprints, each unique. It may help increase our happiness quotient if we realize that we are each writing our own memoir as we make our interpretations throughout the day. Someone else may have a whole different slant on things, and that doesn't make them wrong.
Anyway, I thought I'd share a few of the interpretations with you from What's Blooming?

Mary Ellen: What’s Blooming? Bright daisy-yellow sneakers in a shoe box marked "summer."
Sassy strappy black heels in the box marked "dress up."
Heavy brown and denim blue on thick soles
in the box marked "hiking."
Glassy heels, thin clear straps dotted with diamonds
in a white box marked
"for dancing on the patio near the beach in Hawaii."

Day dreams blooming on the page like peonies in the garden.
Each week a new flower arrives in the garden of her mind,
color and scent creating visions on the page.

Lenora: What’s Blooming? I’m actually excited about driving to Hy Vee in Washington to pick up my butterfly weed plants, not butter fly bush, but weed. Bright orange like Diana has in her wonderful garden. I looked for it last year with no luck. The dark purple bearded iris, smelling like grape bubblegum or Popsicles I used to buy at Lopez store up the alley from my house. Daisies, that dance like skinny legged ballerinas. I tried to pull them up this spring because they are so messy after they bloom. A mess for the rest of the summer. But they insist on dancing. Dancing as fast as they can in their garden beds.
Purple climbing jackamani up the white crooked trellis.

Sallee: What's blooming? Besides peonies and old-fashioned roses, wild phlox in the ditches, geraniums in the window box and in the pots at the foot of the back steps, Poppies soon will come. Purple sage and hints of wild almond that almost got taken out a few years ago by an unwitting gardener who didn't recognize it, Chives in the herb garden and wild indigo under the witch hazel.

Brianna: What’s blooming? I so enjoy the lotus flower blooms in Dee’s pond. The gorgeous white beauties are celestial beings that sit gracefully on boats of lush green lily pads, floating on muddy water.

Carolyn: What’s blooming – onto the roses – they’re having a riot of fun, showing off on street corners and among shrubs. The June roses – growing, growing – even October’s change can’t stop them – but then again it does…
What’s blooming – new streets down Burlington – stimulus package money? Or a pre-determined repair from some transcendental budget forged long ago? I see young men – kids, working on these street projects – one who looks to be no more than 19, wielding a jack hammer on the corner of 5th and Burlington.


Want to free write? Choose this topic, “What’s Blooming.” Set a timer for 5-10 mintues and keep the hand moving. Write without editing as you go. We did this particular writing in 3 minutes.

Have fun and let me know how it goes!

Thoughtful Thursday: The Power of Questions

Every Thursday I post a quote or thought for all of us to ponder.

I am a coach who asks questions to individuals who come to me with questions. We have the answers within ourselves and we are our own best expert, but we don't always realize it. Have you ever found yourself asking others for advice, and then you sift through it, and decide whether or not to act on their 'brilliant' advice? Often, it's just our doubts and fears that block our clarity and creativity. Those doubts and fears can be questioned.

So many of us try to change our circumstances and other people so that we can be happy. This rarely works. It's like wearing purple tinted sunglasses and complaining that everything is too purple. We try to change that color, by reaching our arms away from ourselves to erase the purple off. But, it's our glasses that need to be removed. Once we understand that we can change the lenses in the eyeglasses (our PERCEPTIONS, BELIEFS) we start to experience empowerment, peace and happiness. HOW? Question our thoughts, really our conditioned perceptions called limiting beliefs.

Powerful questions yield powerful solutions. I'm always willing to ask a few.

Here are some of my favorite quotes concerning questions.

You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel. The same questions, asked again, bring you just the answers you need just the minute you need them. --Richard Bach

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself. --John Fowles

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question. ~ e.e. cummings

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. ~ Voltaire

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life. --Alvin Toffler

The "silly question" is the first intimation of some totally new development. --Unknown

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.”--Rilke

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. --Rilke

Look for the answer inside your question.
- Rumi