Category: Healing Spaces
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Touchy Topic Tuesday: A Jaundiced View
I’ve been spreading a lot of yellow around these days. The latest Practical Bodywork space design project is a north-facing nursery, designed to evoke the Hundred Acre Wood. When mama and I sat down in the room with roughly 200 color swatches, it became clear that the background had to be ‘Peach Tickle,’ which leaped…
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Touchy Topic Tuesday: How To Avoid Being Swallowed
It’s impossible to overstate how big an effect your environment has on your nervous system. Living in urban environments, it’s easy to forget that human beings evolved, literally, in nature. Our nervous systems are attuned to cues that have been in place for millions of years–when to wake up (light gets blue), when to go to…
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Ben Affleck’s Hidden Power of Healing
Recently, I had a four-hour layover in Times Square. I was taking the bus up north to visit family, one of whom is critically ill, and my stress level was seismic. Times Square is not a restorative locale at the best of times; after ducking into Le Pain Quotidien for an overpriced lunch, and unwilling…
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What to Do When You Can’t DO Anything
As many of you know, my brother-in-law, Leif, is currently battling a rare form of cancer called mantle cell lymphoma. He’s young, formidably strong and has one of the healthiest lifestyles of anyone I know. We went up to Maine to visit him last week. It’s impossible to describe what it’s like to watch someone you…
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So How The Hell Do We Do That???
As some of my wise friends point out, changing the face of healthcare is a quixotic proposition. It’s all very well to saythat your doctor should be prescribing more massage than painkillers, that insurance should cover it, and that everyone should be insured. But as we all know, our broken healthcare system makes far more money by selling…
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Vision for the Future of Healthcare
‘Winter and Spring,’ stained glass by Judith Schaecter, 30″ x 38″, judithschaecter.com Wouldn’t it be amazing if: • You could go to your doctor with severe pain, and she would write you a prescription for a course of massage therapy and other bodywork, which not only blissed you out, but solved your problem without the nasty side…
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How Art Heals
As a visual artist, I have long maintained that one’s surroundings have a profound effect on one’s health, or lack thereof. I once founded a gallery in Brooklyn named ‘Healing Arts.’ Now a friend of mine, Kesha Bruce, is producing a project called 6×6, based on the premise that artists can exhibit, market and sell their work…
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Why Are Rehab Centers So Ugly? (Part I)
That’s a rhetorical question. I may never know why rehab centers are ugly, because I’m not going to physical therapy school, and you may never understand a system until you’ve worked within it. While I was researching a career in physical therapy, however, I interviewed at several institutions where physical therapy takes place. I vowed…