>   I hate to be an “I told you so” but I did. As a matter of fact, I have been saying so for the past 10 years, at least. What it is that I have been saying is that the technology has outpaced our social development and that what we have created runs us..instead of the other way around. So it was no surprise to me that there it was, yesterday, on CNN’s home page. >TimeBanks USA, a nonprofit group
that treats time as money, was created by Edgar S. Cahn, a retired 73-year-old attorney “to put the brakes on people’s high-velocity
lifestyles.”
    It seems there’s a growing awareness that all the technology has so sped up our lifestyles that we are sick of it. More accurately stated, the accelerated  (and I would argue unnatural) pace of things has literally, made us sick.
    In fact, Cahn, the CEO of TimeBanks, says he “came up with the idea in 1980 after suffering a massive heart attack from a frenzied lifestyle that included being a speech writer and founder of a national legal services program and a law school.” And he’s not alone.  The American Medical Association has shown the
negative effects of stress on health. They say stress is a factor
in more than 75 percent of all illness and disease today. And, stress accounts for two-thirds of family doctor visits and half
the deaths to Americans under the age of 65, according to the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
    So, why do we resist making the connection between how we live our lives and how healthy we are?
    Just today I was with a friend who has had a chronic cough for two years. The only time she was able to get relief from it, without taking three different prescription drugs, was when she restricted her sugar and wheat intake on the recommendation of a holistic practitioner. But she got bored with the diet and went back to her old eating habits and the drugs. Just recently she saw a new alternative medicine physician and he recommended a vegan diet and told her that in less than a year she would be rid of the cough and off the drugs. Now she’s debating whether or not to follow the diet, knowing the drugs are bad for her liver. When I asked her what she would do if instead, the doctor had told her she had 6 months to live unless she went on a vegan diet and she said, “I’d be on it right away.”  Further, she went on to tell me of a female friend who recently went through a devastating financial crisis as her husband had personally pledged their home as collateral for a business expansion he was certain would pay off and instead collapsed.  The young wife spent a year fighting to save her family home and finally did. Yet she remains in dire financial straights and  has now come down with a muscular disease that prevents her from the most routine tasks. Countless medical doctors and as many tests have provided no clue to an origin or a cure. I wonder if any of them considered stress?
    We live at a frantic pace…out of alignment with Nature and our own bodily rhythms…pretending we don’t know the cause of so much illness and disease. This is not a complicated mystery to solve.  But the solution necessitates that we take a serious look at how we live our lives and how we prioritize our wants and needs.     Further, that we actually do something about what we discover.
    Books and personal accounts abound of people who have cured themselves of allegedly incurable illnesses with such means as laughter, laying down upon the earth, prayer, visualization, “energy” medicine, holistic healers…and a list that goes on and on.
    There are Laws of Nature that, when defied, wreak havoc not as punishment, but rather as an arrow pointing to a sign that says,”Your way isn’t working. Try Mine.” The staggering statistics of stress related illness from we humans trying to live at the pace of the technology we created is exactly that arrow pointing at that very sign.
     I am hopeful, and optimistic, that once awakened form our lethargy, we will seek out our internal rhythms and follow them back to health.
    In the meantime, back off of the technology for awhile. And if you don’t want to read my blog, or anyone else’s, for a week or so, well, that’s just fine with me.
    Here’s to your health.

REMEMBER to click here to download my FREE e-book, “Too Many Secrets.”

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