Category: Natural Health

You’re aware, at least in a half-hearted, vaguely guilty sort of way, of the creeping horrors wrought by sitting too much.

But let’s be honest, you’ve probably done next to nothing about it, and right now, here you are, sinking into your chair as you read this.

If that stung even a little, well… excellent. That prick of discomfort might just be the only thing capable of dragging you out of your sedentary stupor. Consider it your only hope.

What changed my perception was a conversation that took place many years ago…..

I remember the way he looked at me, not stern, not smug, just faintly sorrowful, as though I’d confessed to microwaving a soufflé.

“You Europeans age because you sit,” he said. “We removed this habit two millennia ago.”

It was delivered without malice. A diagnosis, not an insult. The tone a consultant might use while pointing at a shadow on your X-ray and murmuring, Yes, that’s the trouble. You’ve been marinating in your own convenience.

In the West, we have engineered life into right angles and upholstery. We sit to work, sit to eat, sit to travel, sit to recover from the exhaustion of all that sitting. We have turned the chair into a throne and then chained ourselves to it.

Meanwhile, he explained, in China movement was never exiled to Lycra or New Year’s resolutions. It was folded quietly into the day, as ordinary as tea.

“Man wasn’t made to collapse into chairs,” he said. “Stillness is not a habitat.”

And when you think about it, he’s right. Watch a child: they squat like philosophers in a marketplace, spring up, fold down again, spin, stretch, wander. Then watch an adult in London: vertebrae fused to an office chair, glowing blue in the light of a spreadsheet, ossifying gently before lunch.

People in the Western world spend small fortunes to delay their ageing process.

He told me that eight to ten hours of sitting doesn’t merely make you tired, it accelerates decay.

“Eight extra years,” he said. “Not from time. From stagnation.”

Not dramatic years. Not cinematic decline. Just the slow betrayal of joints, the sulk of circulation, the body muttering, Is this it? Is this all we’re doing now?

While we outsource vitality to the gym – a sort of penitential hour of sweating between cappuccinos – Chinese children grow up with Tai Chi and Qigong: slow, deliberate movements that look like choreography for invisible birds.

Grandparents in parks move at dawn with a serenity that makes our treadmill sprints seem hysterical.

Then he said something that landed rather harder.

“Western medicine treats symptoms. We prevent them.”

We swallow tablets for twinging backs, sore shoulders and necks ruined by chairs we refuse to abandon. We ice knees that haven’t bent properly since university. We medicalise what is, at heart, architectural folly.

They, he said, simply designed life differently. Study while standing. Walk to talk. Build spaces that encourage drifting, not docking. In old temples and schools, stillness was transitional, not permanent, a pause, not a postcode.

I asked him what we were supposed to do, given that our civilisation is upholstered. Our offices swivel. Our cars recline. Even our leisure requires lumbar support.

He laughed – not unkindly.

“Stand up. Every hour.”

That was it. No incense. No Himalayan pilgrimage. Just a minute. Sixty seconds of squats, or a lap around the room, or even standing tall enough to remind your spine it has ambitions.

“Sixty seconds,” he said, “and you erase most of that hour.”

No marathons. No heroic reinventions. Just a refusal to surrender entirely to gravity and furniture.

But the sharpest cut came at the end.

“Aging doesn’t begin with wrinkles,” he said. “It begins the day you stop moving.”

We imagine old age as a number – fifty, sixty, eighty. He suggested it is a posture. A decision repeated daily. The quiet choice to remain seated when you could rise.

And suddenly our culture….efficient, productive, upholstered….seemed less advanced and more embalmed. Rows of us, gently stiffening in ergonomic coffins, proud of how comfortable we’ve become.

I stood up while he was still speaking.

Not dramatically. Just enough to feel the blood remember its route.

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net

PS. The notion of perching on your shins like a penitent monk is hardly a novelty cooked up by some ergonomic evangelist. People have been folding themselves into kneeling poses for centuries, from the meditative stillness of Buddhist practice to the disciplined neatness of the Japanese seiza position, all ankles tucked and spine upright as a broom handle.

What is new, or at least new-ish, is the wheeled, foam-padded contraption that crept out of Scandinavia in the 1970s and tried to pass itself off as office furniture. The modern kneeling chair, as we now know it, was born in Norway: a land so sensible about backs and posture that even sitting down comes with moral instruction.

I’ve used one of these since I first came across them in the 1980’s. Sitting this way encourages a straight back!

….or get yourself a standing desk. Many schools have adopted this in their classrooms

Us human beings were not designed for polluted environments, we don’t thrive; we merely struggle to survive. 

Our ‘battery’ or life force is charged from these resources, yet these days, the simple function of drinking water has become an act of faith; our food is laced with an overwhelming number of controversial additives or has been subjected to questionable methods of growth, and the air we breathe has become a terrifying cocktail of chemicals.

Human beings are creatures of clean air and honest water, of forests that haven’t been laminated and mountains that haven’t been monetised. Put us somewhere pure and we flourish; put us somewhere polluted and we manage, just about, like a neglected houseplant.

Our internal battery, call it spirit, or vigour, was designed to be charged by these elemental things.

Food arrives tattooed with additives whose names read like failed passwords, grown by methods that would make a Victorian poisoner blink. And the air, once invisible, dependable, has become a nervous system irritant, a paranoid haze of particulates and promises.

If you’ve seen the film Dark Waters, you’ll remember the starring villain: PFAS, the forever chemicals. Indestructible, accumulating patiently in rivers, soil, bloodstreams, quietly indignant at the very idea of decay. They are in the water because someone, somewhere, decided that persistence was profitable.

You may ask how this was allowed. You may even sound surprised when you ask it. But the answer, as ever, is spelled in a font so large it’s practically landscape architecture: £££, and quite a lot of it.

Water is supposed to be the dullest of subjects: flavourless, virtuous, municipal. It comes from the tap like a birthright, a civic handshake. You drink it without thinking, as you breathe air or queue apologetically.

Yet for the past year, tens of thousands of Britons have stopped doing precisely that. They have quietly, politely, almost embarrassedly opted out.

This is not a cult, nor a fad imported from Los Angeles via Instagram. The refuseniks are not twenty-three and vegan; they are fifty-eight and retired. They are ex-consultants, engineers, teachers, cyclists. They do not stockpile Evian. They distrust gimmicks. They are the kind of people who still believe the BBC when it says “experts agree.”

Yet they no longer trust their tap water.

The story begins, as these things now do, not with outrage but with fatigue. A retired NHS nephrologist (a medical doctor specialising in diagnosing and treating kidney diseases) tells us something quietly heretical: the water she told her patients to drink for three decades is no longer the water coming out of British taps.

The pipes are Victorian, the treatment industrial, the chemistry modern and strange. The water is “safe,” she concedes, but only in the sense that it will not kill you immediately. It will not give you cholera. It will simply burden you, slowly, invisibly, every day.

Britain’s water infrastructure is a museum piece still in daily use. Beneath our streets run pipes laid when Queen Victoria was young, when men died at forty-seven and nobody cared very much what happened at seventy.

Water sloshes through corroded iron, past leaks and sewage incursions, then arrives heavily chlorinated and fluoridated (in many places), scrubbed into submission. It passes standards written in 1989, which is to say it is safe by the lights of a world without microplastics, PFAS, or the idea that chronic inflammation might matter.

The modern insult is not bacterial but particulate. Microplastics, those indestructible crumbs of ‘convenience’, are now everywhere: in blood, in lungs, in placentas, in brains, in the earth and in our rain.

Water companies test for what the law requires, not for what biology fears. The result is a postcode lottery. Highland water, tumbling politely from protected reservoirs, arrives relatively clean. Thames Water, leaking a quarter of its supply through decrepit pipes, delivers something closer to a chemical miscellany.

Same country, same tap, wildly different burdens.

None of this produces a scandal. It produces symptoms. People feel tired. Foggy. Inflamed. Older than their years. They visit their GP, who does precisely what the system asks: bloods, scans, reassurance.

Everything is “normal.” They are told to hydrate more.

Some of them don’t. Some of them start filtering. Whole-home systems appear in the houses of the affluent, humming away at some expense, stripping water back to something like innocence.

For everyone else, this is unrealistic.

Into this gap steps an engineer, which is how solutions usually arrive when institutions cannot. He builds, first for his mother, a device that does not filter water but alters it. Hydrogen-rich water, long used quietly in Japanese clinics, turns out to be less mystical than it sounds.

Molecular hydrogen is very small. Absurdly small. Small enough to pass where other antioxidants cannot, slipping through cellular barricades to neutralise the most vicious free radicals, the biochemical exhaust fumes of modern living.

People who use it do not talk about miracles. They talk about mornings without stiffness, afternoons without collapse, conversations followed without effort. They say they feel less clogged. Less old. Their language is domestic, not evangelical. Something is no longer in the way.

This is not an argument that hydrogen water is a panacea, nor that Britain’s water will kill you tomorrow. It is something more dispiriting and more British than that. Our systems still work… just well enough.

They prevent catastrophe while ignoring attrition. They are excellent at stopping nineteenth-century diseases and helpless before twenty-first-century ones.

So people adapt. Quietly. Without banners. They buy devices. They change habits. They stop waiting for pipes to be replaced or standards to be rewritten.

Water, it turns out, is no longer boring. It is a mirror: of infrastructure deferred, of regulation fossilised, of a country that still congratulates itself on safety while mistaking survival for health. The pipes will not be dug up soon. The chemicals will keep flowing. The plastic will keep shedding. And so, politely, pragmatically, we adapt, one glass at a time.

Drink from plastic bottles if you will, but remember who owns them and what power they are gathering over consumers: https://www.facebook.com/reel/777322265377290

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net

PS. And now for the good news. Eight years after a federal court settlement mandated urgent action, Flint (MI) has officially replaced 11,000 lead pipes and restored the water supply to 28,000 homes.

A progress report submitted on July 1, 2025, confirms that nearly 11,000 lead service lines have been successfully replaced, removing a primary source of contamination from the city’s ageing water system. This achievement marks a significant milestone in the long-standing effort to restore public health standards and ensure clean drinking water for every household in the community.

Additional information:

Parasites: Hells Angels of the Bloodstream

http://resourcesforlife.net/coming-to-a-glass-of-water-near-you/

The Hydration Myth

Drinks: A History of Bad Decisions, Neat

You’re Not Full of H₂O

Life in a Body is not a self-help manual in the antiseptic sense; it is a deep, unvarnished exploration of the flesh and bone of human existence. A

t the heart of Phylipa’s project, forged from two decades of clinical reflection and therapeutic engagement, is a radical premise: your body is not the passive vessel you were taught to think it is.

It is the archive of every beginning, every wound, every negotiation you ever made with life and with those who bequeathed you that life.

From the first page you realise this book isn’t interested in pretty metaphors about the heart. Phylipa writes as if she is palpating the reader, hands under the ribs, fingertips into the groin, a kind of somatic interrogation that’s both tender and implacable.

There is no detachment here. To be “in a body” is to be implicated in it, to acknowledge its inherited accidents and its daily betrayals. Any reader immediately feels that the body Phylipa describes is less a biological machine and more a living autobiography.

Its scars, aches, sensations and silences are the sentences of a life written at tactile speed.

This is a book that insists on intimacy with itself. The prose is precise where others would be precious: she will have you consider your breath not as a poetic metaphor, but as the first and last gesture of life you will ever make.

She treats birth not as a beginning that happened to you, but as a process that leaves a permanent imprint on the psyche and the body’s structural and emotional memory. The shock of entry, the violence of muscle and bone rearranging themselves for air, the very first cry – these are not isolated events but root conditions for a lifetime of negotiation with the world.

In an early chapter, Phylipa dismantles the commonplace language surrounding birth and physical identity. There are no euphemisms here: the body is described in its terrible, miraculous, exasperating reality.

She refuses sugary language, choosing instead to speak with the bluntness of someone who has watched hundreds of bodies – and the stories lodged within them – cross thresholds of illness, ageing, desire, and loss. It makes for prose that is sometimes jarring, often beautiful, and always honest.

The body is at once your oldest companion and your cruellest betrayer. The sentences are at their best when they lean into that paradox – when she makes you feel the tender absurdity of being both prisoner and proprietor of this flesh.

She notes, somewhere between a sigh and a challenge, that your body remembers what your mind has forgotten. The twinge in your hip when you reach for a glass of wine is not a random complaint; it is an echo of some past negotiation between pleasure and damage. The way your shoulders round forward is the biography of your posture, your anxieties and accommodations traced in muscle memory.

Though rooted in therapeutic insight, Life in a Body soars into the realm of cultural critique. Phylipa refuses the sterile boundaries of academic discourse; she writes instead with a moral urgency about how society trains us to hate our bodies before we truly understand them.

Life In A Body is available here – (Kindle anf Paperback)

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net

Over the past four decades the human psyche has begun to resemble a municipal theme park after a hostile takeover: half the rides broken, the lights flickering, and a queue for the exit that snakes off into the next fiscal year.

Depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, the whole mangy flea circus of modern malaise has swollen into what the World Health Organisation now calls the single greatest threat to human health. Bigger than cancer. Bigger than obesity. Bigger, even, than the queasy despair induced by reading the comments under a news article.

What’s remarkable is not that we’re coming undone, but that we appear so baffled by it. For forty years, while clever people in lanyards have been inventing ways to improve our lives with devices that ping, track, nudge, vibrate, glow and count, we’ve quietly mislaid something rather fundamental: the ancient knack of being comfortable inside our own heads.

I watch my grandchildren, fizzing with the sticky delight unique to four-year-olds, discovering wonder in puddles, cardboard boxes and the shadow of their own hands. They inhabit joy with native fluency. And I wonder: what happens between four and twenty. How does a species capable of splitting the atom forget how to be happy?

It’s as though we’ve contracted a universal ailment – a kind of spiritual head cold so widespread we’ve mistaken it for the climate. It’s what allows us to wipe out 99 per cent of our fellow creatures and raze rainforests like a teenager ripping posters off a bedroom wall. It fuels half a million murders a year, ideological slap-fights dressed up as geopolitics, and the deranged funfair of global finance, where everyone owes everyone else an imaginary fortune no one intends to repay.

It’s how you end up with a world where, for every person who dies of hunger, two expire from eating too much. Humanity: the only species clever enough to invent a famine of plenty.

We live in a century of permanent alarm. Stimulation is our drug, our religion, our preferred method of self-harm. A Harvard study found that when left alone with nothing but their thoughts for fifteen minutes, two-thirds of men preferred to electrocute themselves. One chap did it 190 times. This wasn’t masochism, it was boredom, our most forbidden emotion.

We check our phones during sex. We sleep with one eye on the blue glow. Silence feels accusatory. Our adrenal glands, those innocent endocrine onions, have been worked to a pulp. Designed for the occasional dash from predators, they’re now being milked hourly by notifications, deadlines and the phrase “Let’s jump on a quick Zoom.” The bloodstream becomes a chemical mosh pit: fight, flight, freeze, feast, fornicate…….often before breakfast.

And despite all this frantic activity, we age like neglected salad. The average European woman can expect to spend a decade of her longer life disabled, ground down by the chronic hum of modernity, too exhausted to enjoy the prize she’s won.

Still, there is an exit from this hall of mirrors, and it begins with connection. Often it takes a shock, a heartbreak, a crisis, a moment of unexpected beauty, when the world stops looking like a to-do list and starts feeling like somewhere you belong.

Love does this. Love of a person, an animal, a painting, a poem, even a quiet idea. It reminds us that consciousness isn’t private property but shared terrain. The old philosophies knew it. Advaita Vedanta told us we build our minds from thoughts, our bodies from sensations, and the world from perception, all of it arising in a vast, borderless field of awareness. You don’t need a beard or a cave to understand this. You just need to sit still long enough not to electrocute yourself.

To be fully human is to connect across all domains: body, senses, heart, mind, spirit. Our weak spots aren’t failures; they’re invitations. Because disconnexia thrives on the illusion that we’re separate, from each other, from the Earth, from ourselves.

The cure begins the moment we realise we’re not.

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net

One important aspect to fully understand about your body is that in many instances the symptoms you see are rarely the diagnosed condition.

Here’s a simple example: When the liver is eliminating toxins, those toxins will exit the body along the path of least resistance. This could manifest in one person as bad breath, or in another as body odour, diarrhoea or a skin rash.  

If you book an appointment to see your GP and present your symptoms of diarrhoea, your symptoms will be given a label, and you’ll get a prescription for something to ‘bung’ you up.

The medicine will help because it’s designed for that.  

But the liver will continue detoxing, and a few weeks later you’ll be back in doctor’s waiting room preparing to show off a new skin rash. The next batch of medicine will eliminate the skin rash, body odour or whatever symptom you went in with.  

In the end you’ll have taken drug after drug for what’s only the symptom, not the underlying cause.

While the symptoms may have been successfully eliminated, they were only acting as a dashboard warning light, pointing out a problem that lay elsewhere in your body; in the example given, an issue with your liver. 

Dashboard warning lights are valuable and should never be eliminated as this risks being able to track the root cause.

For many years, singer Kris Kristofferson struggled with debilitating memory problems.  Diagnosed with, and treated for Alzheimer’s Disease it transpired that he had been suffering from Lyme’s Disease all that time.  

His wife said to journalists: “He was taking all these medications for things he doesn’t have, and they all have side effects.”

In the same way, brain fog is not a disease in itself. It’s another dashboard warning light, signalling a deeper problem in one (or more) of four key systems.

So, rather than prescribe a series of pills, these four systems should be checked:

1. Your brain is the most energy-hungry organ in your body. If the mitochondria (the power plants in your body’s cells) are inefficient, the brain is the first to experience a brownout. Specific nutrients are the primary tools here.
2. Your body has a systemic inflammatory level. If it’s running high (often due to a poor diet or gut issues), it creates “neuro-inflammation.” This is like static on a radio, disrupting the clear signals your brain needs to function. The repair work starts in the gut.
3. Your brain needs a constant, rich supply of blood flow, oxygen and nutrients. If your vascular health is poor, that delivery system is compromised. Exercise that improves nitric oxide production is the key here. Humming can help with that.
4. Wild swings in blood sugar from a diet high in refined carbohydrates and sugar are like giving your brain unreliable, sputtering fuel. It can’t run cleanly. Stabilising your blood sugar by prioritising protein and healthy fats is non-negotiable.

For support in these important areas we use Avazzia equipment (microcurrent) and a Vielight (blood flow).

These four systems are essentially a map of ”the what.” They describe the immediate physiological terrain where the dysfunction manifests.

What represents the deepest layer of personalised medicine, is the “why.” It’s the exploration of the upstream stressors that caused the terrain to become dysfunctional in the first place

The “ghosts in the machine” (or root causes) could be anything from unresolved trauma which stimulates sympathetic fight-or-flight system. It turns on when you’re under stress, danger, pressure.

The ethos is the difference between expertly repairing a repeatedly failing engine component versus asking the critical question: “What is it about the way this car is being driven that causes this specific part to keep breaking?”

Without addressing the “why,” the “what” will always be a Sisyphean battle against recurring symptoms.

There is a profound alignment here, operating at different but perfectly complementary layers within the system.

Graeme DInnen
ResourcesForLife.net

Although we’re here as humans, and one of our purposes is to grow, we’re following an invisible script.

It’s worse than that – we grow up in a system that only teaches us to survive, not thrive.

When you were born, squalling and astonished, the world pressed into your tiny hands a blueprint – not for a life, but for a performance. A flat-pack masculinity. Strong. Controlled. Bulletproof. The sort of man who doesn’t wobble, weep or ask directions.

And like good boys everywhere, you set about assembling yourself according to the diagram, even though half the screws didn’t fit and the instructions were printed in a language no one speaks.

It wasn’t designed to set you free. It was designed to make you behave.

From that moment, the programming began. Treats for compliance, consequences for tears. Slowly, methodically, you learned to box and shelf every tender, inconvenient, unprofitable part of yourself. The bits that didn’t match the cultural costume of a “real man.”

Be tough. Don’t cock it up. Don’t cry. Be successful. Get a proper job. Achieve. Achieve. Achieve.

And so you built the mask. We all do. The Swiss wizard Carl Jung called it the “persona,” but really it’s just the outfit you suspect the world will applaud: the nice guy, the achiever, the granite stoic, the walking wallet, the dependable plank of a man. All perfectly aligned with the blueprint you never asked for.

For some, it works. For a while. But in the small hours, when the house and your bravado have gone quiet, there’s a whisper: This isn’t it, is it?

Behind the mask lurks the Shadow – the feelings you were told were too much, or not enough. The bits of you that were exiled for the crime of being human. The soft, frightened, furious parts you locked in the attic.

Freedom doesn’t arrive in a Ferrari. It doesn’t slip between the sheets with someone younger, or bounce off your bank balance. Those are just more expensive masks.

Every man drags around the collective conditioning of his tribe, an invisible cage assembled from the anxieties and expectations of everyone who came before. A polite hypnosis.

We’re told success equals freedom. Yet the successful men you admire are perspiring under their own disguises. We were sold a template for boys, and we mistook it for a destiny for men.

What strangles us isn’t failure; it’s the invisible hand of who we think we’re supposed to be.

Joseph Campbell, collector of myths, put it neatly: men aren’t searching for purpose – they’re searching for what makes them feel ALIVE. Which is to say, what excites them. And you can’t feel alive when you’re living inside a costume stitched by culture.

To escape, you have to commit an act of treason against your conditioning. You have to step outside the blueprint and meet, for the first time, the man underneath. The real one.

Individuation, Jung called it. Finding yourself, not the version others told you about, like a Chinese menu order, but the one you’d choose if you weren’t afraid.

We’re sold the lie of the perfect body to lure women, forgetting that women aren’t shopping for Greek statues. Perfect male bodies in lycra just makes them feel inadequate and that they should skip dessert.

But the world doesn’t want free men; they’re inconvenient. They don’t salivate on cue. So we’re fed the distractions: celebrities, status, the noble cult of hustle, anything to keep us docile and dazzled.

If you’re living someone else’s story, you’re quietly dying in your own. The moment you wake is the moment the old identity starts to crack, and you find yourself asking: Why am I chasing this? Who told me I needed it?

And yes, you’ll feel the pull to return to “normal.” Don’t. Ever. Instead go down to the cellar and face your Shadow. Shake his hand. He’s been waiting.

Your life begins when you abandon the blueprint you never consented to.

Picture this: you’re 90, it’s your last day. on earth. I show you two films. The first is the life you lived – faithful, dutiful, familiar. The second is the life you could have lived if only you’d been braver – astonishing and vivid. Technicolor with the brightness turned up.

Would you go back and change it? If the answer is yes, then for Heaven’s sake start now.

So here’s the rude awakening, delivered without anaesthetic: no one is coming to give you permission. There will be no trumpet fanfare, no stamped certificate declaring you officially yourself.

You either shrug off the ill-fitting suit and step into your own weather, or you potter obediently to the grave, well-behaved and quietly baffled. Life, alas, is not a rehearsal, and authenticity doesn’t come with a loyalty card.

The only real failure is mistaking comfort for courage, and applause for truth. Take the mask off now because it’s chafing. If the world looks startled, good. It means you’ve finally arrived.

And when you have that mid-life crisis, know that it isn’t a crisis at al, it’s simply a belated re-assessment of your values.

Every day is precious. Don’t squander a minute. Whatever monster stands between you and yourself, turn towards it.

And to borrow from Kerouac, patron saint of restless souls: “Live. Travel. Bless. Be in love with your life, every uncooperative bit of it. There’s nowhere to go but everywhere. Keep rolling under the stars. Nothing behind you, everything ahead.”

As ever, on the road.

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net

P.S. 20 years ago I was sent a copy of Steve Biddulph’s book “Manhood”. Well worth the read, It was sent to me by my 18 year old son!

This is the time of year when we wish everyone a wonderful time over the festive period with friends and family. And genuinely, we do hope you have that.

But today, I’m offering you something infinitely better, and far more enduring.

The opportunity to reveal your shadow.

Shadow work involves diving into the unconscious material that shapes our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. It’s bracing, often uncomfortable, and vastly preferable to the comforting delusion of spotless virtue.

Carl Jung described the shadow as the psychic attic where we’ve shoved all the embarrassing furniture: the bad thoughts, the ugly impulses, the appetites we deny in polite company.

It is the unfashionable business of climbing up there with a bare bulb and taking an honest look.

Do that, Jung said, and you stop blaming others for the mess.

The reward isn’t sainthood, but honesty, a fuller, less pious version of yourself. You become harder to manipulate, less shocked by human behaviour, including your own.

Psychology tells us that everyone has a shadow – their dark side. It also tells us there’s a process for working with it, understanding it, and healing it.

Here, we can talk about what shadow work is, how to move through it, share experiences, ask questions, uncover wisdom, and find support as you undertake this courageous process.

Everyone has a shadow, and it’s completely normal to have one. However, the more we hide, the more disconnected we become from our true self. 

It’s time to pull back the dusty velvet curtain on that cramped theatre of your inner life, to peer at what’s really prowling backstage. The anger you nurse, the cowardice you wear like an old school blazer, the compulsive need to keep the peace as if the world might implode over a raised eyebrow. That shivering dread of failure. The long, grey sadness that slips in without knocking.

And yes, those hidden talents, feral and forgotten, crouched in the long grass of your life, waiting for you to stop mistaking neglect for modesty.

That neglected, malingering part of you, as yet unresolved is calling for its reckoning. And you owe it a hearing.

Your shadow isn’t your enemy; it’s your key to wholeness. I can’t think of a better way to end 2025 and embrace what lies ahead, considerably better resourced.

We get what we expect, once we raise our expectations, we get that.

To shine a light on your shadow, click the link below to start – this is not something to put off for another time. The point of power is NOW.

https://workwithshadow.com/main/2month7-c/quiz

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net

The Hidden Battles Happening in Every Drop of Blood

If you were ever foolish enough to shrink yourself down and swim through your own bloodstream, you’d quickly realise this so-called “red liquid” is anything but ordinary.

It’s a crowded, slightly unhinged city at rush hour…..polite on the surface, brutal underneath.

Red blood cells drift past with the tired patience of commuters who’ve long accepted their lot: ferrying oxygen all day, every day, with the enthusiasm of postmen on their fiftieth round. They don’t complain because no one’s listening and no one’s offering them a better job.

White blood cells lurk nearby, doing the biological equivalent of leaning on a doorframe with folded arms. They’re the bouncers, scanning for microscopic troublemakers. A single cheeky bacterium wanders in and the reaction is wildly over the top, more commando raid than polite request to leave.

Platelets are the fretful prefects of the system, ready to fling themselves at the slightest tear. They’re the ones who mop up a spill before you’ve even dropped the mug.

And all of this plays out in plasma, a golden broth carrying hormones, nutrients, and whatever biochemical gossip needs delivering. It zips between organs with the efficiency of a courier who actually cares about his job.

Every drop is a small industry in motion, busy, dramatic, and keeping you alive while you remain blissfully clueless. You’re carrying around ten to twelve pints of it.

If that sounds abstract, nip across to the pub and order a pint. Now imagine twelve of those sloshing around inside you.

Blood’s résumé is ridiculous: oxygen delivery, nutrients in, waste out, defence, temperature control, hormone emails, patch-up work. It’s the original multi-tasker.

Poor circulation, though, is a quiet saboteur. When blood slows, your energy, mood and focus start muttering. Speed it up, give it purpose, and suddenly you’re upright and switched on, humming like a fleet of taxis with full tanks.

Blood isn’t just the stuff that keeps you conscious. It’s your internal postal service, your courier, your message, your entire logistics department.

And so the wellness evangelists shout: fix the inside and the outside will follow! Conventional medicine, they say, turns you into a back-seat passenger.

When blood flow dips, inflammation usually picks your pocket. Sugar runs the pancreas into the ground. It’s a hardworking organ few could point to in a police line up.

Then there’s viscosity, something that really comes down to hydration, minerals, and the handful of nutrients we forget until a magazine reminds us: omega-3, magnesium, and the rest of the health-shop saints.

Zoom in further and it all depends on charge, the faint electrical halo around each red cell. They’re meant to drift past each other like polite dancers at a village hall do. But throw in dehydration, infection, or the ever-accused candida, and the whole routine falls apart.

The cells stick together like drunk relatives at a buffet, oxygen delivery stalls, and the orchestra starts wheezing.

And let’s not forget those over-prescribed statins, the pantomime villain of modern medicine.

What To Do

Into this chaos strides the alchemical morning potion: eight ounces of warm water swirling with cayenne, ginger, turmeric, raw apple cider vinegar, lemon, and a ceremonial dollop of Manuka honey.

A concoction that promises everything from liver purification to the dissolution of mythical uric acid boulders and even the smoothing of arteries like a cosmic iron. A drink that claims to make your circulation leap up, stretch, and salute.

Or for the more serious…..

Healthy blood = true vitality.

Blood is our crimson river of life but it can’t perform these miracles if it’s thick and sluggish.

Most of us are lugging around blood that’s closer to treacle than a pristine mountain stream. It’s slow, it’s sticky and it’s viscous.

We have a brilliantly simple solution: shine a laser up your nose. Ridiculous? Hardly. The nasal passages are rich with blood vessels, even more so than the brain. 

Free-flowing blood – especially to the brain – ensures that nutrients reach your tissues effectively. No matter how many supplements or remedies you take, they’re useless if your blood can’t transport them to where they’re needed. 

Watch this 34 second video:

The first part of the clip above shows penetration of light energy using the MIP device; the second part shows deeper penetration using the Vielight Neuro Duo headset.

VIsit the Vielight site and determine which model is best for you, or email me for help.

The Vielight Neuro and the MIP (Multimodal Intranasal Photobiomodulation) devices are explained more fully on this page – https://www.vielight.com/systemic-intranasal-photobiomodulation-devices/

We all appreciate deals, so remember to save yourself 10% by using the code RFLBIO as you checkout

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net

In the 1970s, Phylipa ran a ski school in Austria and would happily fling herself down steep slopes that looked to me like elevator shafts.

Fast forward to 2004, Phylipa and I were driving up Highway 395 in California from Ojai to Mammoth for a few days of skiing.

For me, that trip was my introduction to ski-ing on a run appropriately named for my skills – “Sesame Street”.

A few hours into the journey, the children had curled up on the back seats, the radio was barely a murmur, and even Phylipa had nodded off. Traffic was light. Just one of those long, empty stretches of road where the landscape does most of the talking.

We were climbing a gentle rise when something felt… off. Nothing dramatic, just a nudge of intuition. I pulled over into the slow lane and braked gently. This was sufficient to wake Phylipa, who asked why I’d slowed down.

I honestly don’t know where my answer came from, but I heard myself say, “Because there’s a speed trap over the hill.”

And sure enough, the moment we crested the rise, there it was: a Highway Patrol car tucked into a layby, bristling with enough cameras and radar to catch a hummingbird doing 56 in a 55.

But it didn’t catch us; not that day.

We looked at each other, a bit stunned. Then Phylipa, ever the sage, explained that because we were together, our undefined spleen centres had temporarily become defined. Having a defined spleen meant you can sense danger ahead of time. Apparently that was all it took.

Whatever it was, it worked.

There’s a unique and powerful self-discovery system that helps people understand how they are naturally wired to move through life with more ease, clarity, and authenticity.

Created in 1987 by Ra Uru Hu, Human Design blends ancient wisdom traditions, like astrology, the I Ching, the chakra system, and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with modern concepts to create an intuitive and insightful framework for personal growth.

In short, Human Design is a practical tool for understanding yourself on a deeper level. It takes your birth date, time, and place and turns them into a chart, the BodyGraph, that shows how your energy naturally works. Many people use it because it feels surprisingly accurate and helps them make sense of who they are without judgment.

The Core Elements of Human Design are

1. see your natural strengths,
2. understand how you’re built to make decisions,
3. work with your energy instead of fighting it,
4. communicate better,
5. and live in a way that feels more authentic and less exhausting.

Why People Love Human Design

For many, reading their chart feels like someone finally turned the lights on. It explains patterns, tendencies, and struggles they’ve felt their whole life. The result is often full of AHA! moments and lightbulbs going off above their heads.

Where it helps people is the release of past conditioning, embracing who they truly are, and navigating life with more flow and purpose. And what a time we’re in right now to learn that.

Phylipa loved working with people, explaining the nuances of their Human Design Chart. In 2013 she became a Human Design Professional. We both attended talks in London and the annual conferences in Ibiza.

Here’s a succinct explanation:

To find out more information on Human Design for yourself – click here. TAO create a free Bodygaph chart, using your date, place and time of birth, visit Jovianarchive.com

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net