Did you wake up to the “alarming” sound of your alarm clock this morning? Why? Is it healthy to get jolted out of a good night’s sleep by a loud, obnoxious buzzing noise that makes your heart pound and gives you an adrenaline rush?  Music for therapy can start first thing upon waking.

The right sort of music has a definite beneficial effect on our health.  Think of a Mother’s bedside lullaby to her child.  This is a good example of how a soft melody can have a calming effect.  Now think of your favorite loud, blaring rock and roll tune that you are enthusiastically screaming along with while driving your car.  Although enjoyable, the latter is not exactly restful and relaxing.

Music Therapy is an established healthcare profession.  Wikipedia describes it as “an interpersonal process in which the therapist uses music and all of its facets – physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic and spiritual – to help clients to improve or maintain their health”.  We’ve heard that prenatal stimulation through the music heard regularly while in the womb might provide some babies with a sense of comfort.  Progressive Doctors know that music has a soothing effect on their patients who are under stress or dealing with pain.  Modern day Dentists also know that while they are drilling around at high speed in their patient’s mouths that the patient can be distracted from the work while his attention is drawn to the background music.

While our Doctors and Dentists use music to calm us, many of us don’t think of using music for therapy in our day to day lives.  If you are not fortunate, as I am, in having musical family members who love to sing and play their musical instrument and music daily, then do yourself a favor and listen for everyday wonderful, soothing sounds such as birds singing outside your window.  Why not attend local choir concerts where children or adults are singing.  Regularly treat yourself to a musical theatre production.  Play your favorite musical tunes in your car to help calm you while stuck in traffic.  If you are stressed try humming a tune yourself.

Music does not need a prescription.  Put yourself in charge of your health and remember music for therapy when you need to:

– Manage Pain
– Lift your mood
– Reduce your dependence on sedatives
– Relieve anxiety
– Ease depression
– Enhance relationships and creativity
– Promote feelings of confidence and well-being
– Relax and enjoy your life

Believe in the power of music for therapy.  Music therapy combined with laughter therapy is the best kind of medicine with no prescription required.

Take a look at Canada’s Food Guide then ask yourself the following questions in relation to a balanced diet:

– The milk you drank: How long was it in the refrigerator? 24 hours? 48? Longer? Milk is a highly perishable product that will deteriorate even while stored in the fridge.  What does this mean as a loss in nutritional value to you?  Was the milk certified organic?  Check out Fernanda’s thoughts on Milk.

– Did your meat contain any synthetic hormones which were supplied to the animal for the purpose of promoting accelerated weight gain?  Were the eggs you ate fertilized or unfertilized?  Were they laid by free running hens or were they laid by caged hens that were artificially stimulated by light for 24 hours a day while being forced to consume and digest special additives included in their feed?  How fresh was the fish you consumed? Do you know if it contained any traces of mercury or other pollutants?

– Did you eat your fruits and vegetables from a can, prepare them from a frozen state or were they fresh?  If fresh, was your produce exposed to pesticides?  Oil-based insecticides will not be washed off with just plain water (farmers would lose expensive insecticides in the fields from the first rain shower).  Some of these poisons can penetrate the skins of apples and oranges which will, in turn, permeate the fiber of the food.  Did you eat your vegetables in a restaurant?  The chances are greater that artificial colorings were originally added at the packaging plant to provide you with a brighter eye-appeal appearance to your vegetables.

– Was the bread you ate white or whole wheat?  Was it stone ground or steel ground?  Many whole wheat breads are referred to as whole wheat but they don’t contain the germ of the whole wheat seed.  Studies showed that these, like white breads, don’t contain enough nutritional value to sustain the life of rats.  If the bread you ate was soft and spongy, it probably contained calcium propionate, which, among other things, destroys your enzyme that assimilates the limited amount of calcium left in the flour. And the cereal you enjoyed this morning?  Did it contain the necessary life force of the wheat or rice grain, or did it come to you as highly refined and typically, a dead food?

– Did the protein you chose for breakfast contain all the essential amino acids?  Or did you have to grab a coffee, donut or candy at 11:00 am?  If you were exhausted at 6:00 pm the chances are very real that you didn’t get enough of the right protein, that your body needs, for breakfast.

The intricate weaving of the above variables has become the norm in our civilized North American urban lives.  Just as we breathe in polluted air, so we eat altered foods.   Most North Americans don’t know what a balanced diet means.  Salad, vegetables and meat will not insure that you receive a balanced diet.  We eat more candy than eggs.  We drink more pop than milk.  We consume more sugar than our total intake of fruits, vegetables and eggs.  More than 50% of the calories we eat come from sugar, fat and white flour.  We also over indulge in coffee, cigarettes and alcohol.  We eat non-nutritional snacks and then take drugstore remedies to counteract their effects.  T.V. commercials tell us what to buy and we run out and buy it.

We have become the product of Westernized, modern man, for we can read.  However, we don’t know how our glands or nerves function.  We don’t understand how our cells select nutrients or why they choose the ones that they do.  How can we know if we are eating a balanced diet?  Primitive groups of people with natural food sources don’t suffer from the aches, pains and degenerative diseases that plague us.  Is there something to learn?

We don’t have to suffer with sickness.  To achieve health and maintain it we must do everything to cooperate with the harmony of the life chain.  The concept is simple; whole nutrition begins with whole foods that are as natural as possible.  In our convenience-minded, fast-food society this is a very difficult task.  You must strive to fuel your body with unrefined carbohydrates, unaltered sources of fatty acids, complete protein and sources that include the necessary vitamin and mineral complexes. 

Supplementing your diet with food concentrates is needed for nutrition insurance today.  Those who say “Yes, I took a once-a-day vitamin, vitamin E and I get B12 shots regularly”, or “I’ve taken vitamin C for years” are supplementing incompletely.  A selected few vitamins will not make the difference.  Deficiencies of the unsupplied nutrients may produce abnormalities which can do more harm than the isolated vitamins can do good!

Science and nature have shown us what the body needs:  A biologically complete Protein with all the essential amino acids, companion Vitamins and Minerals, Carbohydrates and Fats.