Listen To Your Gut

Back in June, I was woken up out of a dead sleep with RANCHO LA PUERTA sounding in my head and the words written out in my mind’s eye. What the what? Write it down.

So I wrote down: Rancho La Puerta. And immediately went back to sleep. In the morning I googled it and turns out it’s a famous health spa that’s been around since the ’40’s – who knew?! So of course I booked to visit there in September for 4 nights.

Rancho La Puerta – Tecate, Mexico

One of the main draws of this health spa is the non-stop activities from 6:30 am – 7:00 pm; from cross-fit to pilates and everything in between. Perusing the list, my gut drew me to the Feldenkrais classes, offered twice a day. I booked into those, along with 1 private session with the instructor, Donna Wood.

My gut leading was interesting to me, because I had a series of 10 private Feldenkrais sessions (where the practitioner just worked on me) about 15 years ago and it was nice, but nothing remarkable.

However, as I experienced that week, the difference with the group sessions is the instructor gives the group verbal instructions only. She won’t demo anything, as the point is for you to explore and find it within your own body. And THAT is what I found so powerful; learning the dialogue and conversations between the different parts of my body.

Spending 45 minutes learning how to lift my hip using only a foot pressing lightly into the floor with a slight forward movement of the knee – virtually no effort at all. And voila, my shoulders are now lying flatter on the floor! And more importantly, STAYED that way for 2 weeks until I did 7 non-stop hours of manual labor out at my barn.

Donna Wood – Feldenkrais Maestro

So I don’t know if it was Feldenkrais in the group session (vs private) that was so remarkable – or the instructor. Donna Wood is also a sculptor, black belt in Judo and Capoeira and dancer. So I suspect – like all therapies – that the practitioner plays a huge role in the experience/learning of this healing technique.

You can share the benefits!

Donna has SO generously provided 24 amazing Feldenkrais lessons you can practice at home – at no charge! I really encourage you to give this bodywork method a try and see what your body has to say about it. The brilliant thing about these Feldenkrais sessions from Donna is that you don’t need to have access to a computer – as they are audio-guided sessions.

As I mentioned, Donna will not demo anything for you – even in a live session. YOUR body has to explore and discover the movement that feels good, that feels easy, that feels delicious. So being guided by these audios is very similar to what you’d experience in a live class with Donna – you just can’t peek to see what the other people around you are doing! The other difference is that in a live session Donna will tailor the class to the people present. There are thousands of Feldenkrais lessons, so if Donna sees that your knee is in trouble (she is able to just scan people’s bodies and see where the difficulties are), and someone else’s neck is really stiff, then she will tailor the class to help those people. So if you’re in San Diego (or visiting), definitely contact her to join in some of her live classes!

I have grabbed the audio off each of her YouTube videos for you, so you can simply load them onto your mp3 player or iPod/iPhone and away you go. Here they are:

Donna Wood Feldenkrais – Lesson 1 – DOWNLOAD MP3

Donna Wood Feldenkrais – Lesson 2 – DOWNLOAD MP3

Donna Wood Feldenkrais – Lessons 3-9 – DOWNLOAD Zipped File

I would LOVE to hear from you, after you’ve done about 4-5 of these sessions and see if this bodywork is as transformative for you as it was for me.

I would also be interested to hear from people who’ve already attended Feldenkrais classes with a different instructor – and then tried 3 or 4 of these sessions with Donna. HOW much difference does the instructor make? It would be cool to share our experiences, so don’t be shy! Just post in the Comments section below.

Some of you may have seen this short video already – I created it years ago as a resource for people to watch whenever they were feeling down, discouraged, or when it seemed like their Healing Journey was taking forever. I just re-formatted it and uploaded it to YouTube so it’s easier to watch and share.

As a bonus gift to continue this process, I’m also giving away the MP3 Audio of my teleseminar with Dr. Gabor Mate – the bestselling author of When The Body Says No.

You can download the teleseminar here (right-click and save as…)

Or just click the PLAY button below:

Enjoy!

Jini Patel Thompson

The host of Healthy You! Radio – Dr. Keesha Ewers is a functional and ayurvedic medicine doctor, a psychotherapist, reiki master and certified sexologist. This means that her interview with Jini is pretty rousing and goes into some uncharted territory!

You can listen or download the interview below:

Keesha and Jini discuss the emotional roots of dis-ease, along with practical physical things you can do to heal your gut. They also get into a discussion about constipation.

enjoy!

If the whole complicated mess about food allergies, food intolerances, blood allergy testing, skin pinprick allergy testing and what that means – i.e. what tests you should have done, who you should listen to, what impact (really!) does this have on your health – is driving you crazy…

Then be sure and join us as we put our knowledge and experience together and sort through the maze of exactly what is known (hard scientific fact) and what experience has shown us, to come up with some useful, meaningful guidelines that you can put into action.

After my teleseminar with Dr. Wendy Ellis on Blood Food Allergy Testing, although I learned a lot, I was left with even more questions!

So now we’re going in-depth and totally open (no one’s pushing an agenda!) on this 2-hour roundtable discussion, bringing together:

Jini Patel Thompson (me) – author of 16 books, specializing in natural healing for IBD & IBS.

Debbie Sarfati Steinbock – Certified Holistic Health Counselor in Colorado with a lot of experience in dietary modifications.

Dr. Shirin Kalyan – Director of Preclinical Research at Qu Biologics in Vancouver, a biotech firm focused on immunotherapy for cancer and inflammatory bowel disease. Shirin has a PhD in Immunology and Experimental Medicine.

Things we discuss during this call include:

Click the PLAY button below to listen in, or download the call:

Have you ever wondered what blood food allergy tests actually mean?

When you order an IGE or IGA test, to test your blood for food allergies – what exactly is being tested, what do the results mean, and how reliable are they?

This is NOT a cheap test to have done (around $250-$300), so if you’re thinking about ordering it, or if you’ve already had it done, I encourage you to listen to my teleseminar with Dr. Wendy Ellis where we discuss all the aspects of food allergies and testing:

I’m even going to show you the results of my own IGG4 and IGE test, so you can follow along and see exactly what we’re talking about.

DOWNLOAD Jini’s Food Allergy Blood Test Results (so you can follow along)

Now click the PLAY button below to listen in…

*Note: The typed Transcript of this teleseminar is available here.

Now that you’ve educated yourself on a doctor’s position/experience with blood allergy tests – are you left with even more questions? Did certain things just not ring true for you? Are you wondering if there’s more to this story than docs realize?

I sure did!

So I organized another call with 2 other experts with lots of experience – one sees patients, tests for allergies and guides them in dietary modifications and the other is a PhD in Immunology and Experimental Medicine. I thought, ‘Let’s bring both sides of this investigation together and throw all our questions and observations on the table and see if we can’t come up with some meaningful guidelines in this arena!’

Come join us for this Food Allergy Roundtable discussion!

The noteworthy thing about Dr. Katharina Johnson is that not only is she a Medical Intuitive, she is also a Medical Doctor (MD). And if you’ve ever wondered what a medical intuitive does – and how she melds that with the scientific MD side of herself… well come on in!

Here are some of the fascinating things you will learn in this call:

Click the PLAY button below to listen in, or click here to DOWNLOAD this 45-minute exploration into the world of the medical intuitive.

And here is the link to the FREE WEBINAR Dr. Katharina has for you.

I’ve recently learned about a new, experimental Crohn’s treatment I want to tell you about.

It involves stimulating the innate immune system to wake up, and clean up ALL pathogens in the body (kill all the bad bugs). The mechanism used to achieve this is by injecting components of dead E. coli bacteria into the skin (dendritic cells). The preliminary trial showed a promising remission rate, so they have moved into a full clinical trial.

Dr. Gunn is looking for 24 more trial participants to test this treatment, and all travel and accommodation costs (from anywhere worldwide) will be paid for – maybe that’s you?

I’ve done a teleseminar with the doctor in Vancouver (Dr. Hal Gunn) who’s holding this clinical trial and I have asked him every question I could think of. So if you’re at all intrigued, download or listen to this 17-minute interview where I ask Dr. Gunn to explain the pros and cons for us:

DOWNLOAD QU CROHN’S TRIAL INTERVIEW

Here are some of the questions I ask in this interview:

I asked Dr. Gunn 2 more questions after the call – here they are, along with his responses:

JINI: What is the longest time you have tracked anyone who has used this treatment?

DR. HAL GUNN: The first compassionate use patient began treatment with SSIs in Sept 2008.

JINI: According to the data that you have (and your imagination) what is the worst-case scenario you can think of, in terms of possible long-term negative consequences, or complications of injecting components of dead E.coli into your skin?

DR. HAL GUNN: Based on the composition of SSIs (i.e., killed bacteria), we don’t expect any long-term negative consequences or complications from treatment. In our compassionate use program, we treated 270 patients with cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and autoimmune disease with no long-term negative consequences or complications from treatment reported. However, like any drug or treatment, we will need to treat thousands of patients before we can determine, with certainty, that SSIs have a very good safety profile.

Then – as those of you who know me are aware that I am very cautious – I asked a friend of mine who is a Medical Geneticist if he could think of anything else that could possibly go wrong for someone who received this treatment. He replied that the only thing he could think of that might potentially be a problem is if somehow the bacteria is not actually dead when injected.

However, being that Dr. Gunn has been using this treatment on cancer patients since 2008, and this scenario has never occurred, I would suspect they have a good quality control process in place! Dr. Gunn addressed this concern:

“Qu’s manufacturing processes are controlled and validated to ensure complete inactivation of E. coli in the production process, including retesting of the final SSI product consistent with high quality control standards.”

Dr. Gunn is looking for 24 more trial participants to test this treatment and all travel and accommodation costs (worldwide) will be paid for – grab an application form, or ask any other questions you might have: www.qucrohnstrial.com

ALSO, Dr. Gunn recently recently did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit and there are some great questions & answers there too.