Saturday, 23 May 2015

Monsanto 2015 - Did it make the BBC news?

People in 452 cities across the world today, marched and demonstrated against the giant corporation - Monsanto. The third year this global event has taken place and people around the world are encouraging us all to wake up and make sure we all say no to Monsanto and their GM crops.
In a small country such as Britain, a GM crop here would soon contaminate may crops around it and very soon we could see no GM free land here.

There is no credible argument for GM crops...we certainly do not need a GM wheat crop here or GM potatoes or any other GM for that matter.

This is going to solve food shortage apparently...why then if we have food shortage, is a supermarkert in the North of the UK using its waste food to turn into a biofuel to power the supermarket and a few thousand of the surrounding homes...we are wasting food and using it to make fuel...Does that indicate a food shortage?  We have a food distribution problem not a shortage. We waste in the region of 25% of food.

If food is in such short supply, why do we suddenly have crop growing fields turned into solar farms, with solar panels stretching across vast stretches of land in our high agriculture area where I live. Why are we seeing wind farms on arable land? And why are we producing fields of Rape seed?....man can not live by rape seed alone...or woman for that matter! And actually we managed to live without rapeseed almost hidden into every pre packed food. - Avoiding that is another story!
But if we are told the GMO is the answer to our food shortage, then I think that doesn't stack up.
If this is yet another greedy corporate giant that has found a way to patten 'nature' (in its twisted form) then be honest about it.  The tell the public that you want food control and at any cost and you don't care who you screw over in the process.

If food is in such short supply, should we really see so many fast food outlets on every high street in the land. We have food coming at us from every direction. During the war, food was in short supply and yet people were at there healthiest. There wasn't the abundance of beef and chicken to be turned into some quick snack/poor nutrition food..So what is the real reason we are heading for GM food?

Funny how nature never needed a lab to provide all she has provided and never needed a lab to design life giving

What can't be good is to let patented seeds, genetically modified, be swept across our lands.

What is really odd about today's events and of the past 2 years, is that this global event gets a media blackout....If I search the BBC news site - it takes me to an article from the first march in 2013...nothing since.

Thanks to the TV station, Russia Today - news of all the marches around the world got reported

http://rt.com/news/261457-monsanto-march-third-awareness/

Shame on the BBC - The Worlds BBC?

Well done to all that attended these events around the globe - and thank you!


Wednesday, 13 May 2015

London's March Against Monsanto May 2015


This years Annual March Against Monsanto will take place on 23rd May 2015. 

The Event promises to be packed with entertainment and speakers.....updates coming soon.
March Against Monsanto is a call to action (static event).

TOGETHER PEOPLE, FRIENDS, FAMILIES AND FARMERS PEACEFULLY ASSEMBLE.

Join over 3.5 Million People in over 600 cities worldwide!


23 MAY 2015 12PM

Richmond Terrace. London SW1A 21L

Speakers:

Liz O'Neill, GM Freeze, www.gmfreeze.org/
Pete Dean, Biofuelwatch
Lawrence Woodward, Beyond GM
Elizabeth Bragg speaking about Small Farmers and Community Food
Mizan The Poet

Other speakers to be confirmed. Programme may be subject to change.


For all those who dont know about March Against Monsanto, please read below. Taken from their websitehttp://www.march-against-monsanto.com/home/

May Updates

Hi Everyone

Such a beautiful May morning and the neighbours cat is sitting under the table waiting for birds to feed from the food I've just put on it for them...now she either thinks they are all quite stupid or blind but i'm pretty sure breakfast isn't going to land in her paws quite so easily.

I should be walking the Daisy dog with a friend on a beach this morning but the north circular on Monday teatime is no friend to a persons L4, I think i will never complain about the traffic in our city again. When it takes 2hrs to travel a 20min journey and you still don't reach your destination, you can lose the will to live...how people do that everyday is beyond me....So grateful to work from home i think.


Balens

Maddy and I did get to the Balens CPD event and I think we would both highly recommend it for the future...The calibre of the speakers was the the best I've seen at any of these type of events.It was purely Complementary Medicine based and David Balen certainly is leading the way in this field on many levels..some exciting developments to come and his final speaker was Rob Verkerk from the Alliance of Natural Health, another champion of CAM.
Given the cost of the event was a mere £25, it was certainly worth it to hear the array of Dr's and academics discussing the effectiveness and the measure of that in Comp health along with where it needs to be heading.

I have put a link to Balens site where you can view the videos of past speakers at these events and very soon the speakers from this event will be up on there too.



Tip of the Spear

One more event that is looming fast and again, if you have never been to hear this guy speak, it is quite a force.

Health journalist, Philip Day will be at Bury St Edmunds on Sunday June 7th or the day before in Norwich 

Details for this at...http://credence.org/home/

He calls it his Tip of the Spear tour this year and not only witty and entertaining in his delivery, extremely hard hitting, so hang on to your hats if you go. I shall get to the Bury one and hope you can make it.


And finally....it is the Psychic development evening at the Abington Barns tonight, starts at 7.30pm   Always a great space to be in.


As always if you have anything you would like to share with the like minded people that receive this email, let us know.

Have a great month and if anyone knows how to slow down time, please give it a go!


Good wishes to all


Sarah and on behalf of Maddy

Saturday, 14 March 2015

Since when is a Blue Badge conceding defeat!

Have to get this off my chest-I just read on the BBC website a quote from Nigel Farage....

''After the air accident Mr Farage was told that he could be signed off as partially disabled, but he said that having a blue badge would be "conceding defeat".''

Shameful to even suggest a blue badge is 'conceding defeat'  to many,a blue badge is the complete opposite to that.....It enables people who would otherwise be more restricted, to get to where they need to go and be able to park near enough to be able to go about their business, very often on their own and sometimes allowing others to help them get out and about.

Conceding defeat is an awful term to link in any small way to someone restricted by a disability.  

Clearly Mr Farage doesn't need one then,  but not everyone is that lucky and needs that little bit of help so they can have a near as poss, equal access as an able bodied person.

A 'grown up'society should not see illness and disability as a problem, more of an opportunity to put the right things in place to help everyone maintain their life to the full.  Even the able bodied need that in other ways. 

So people taking up the services they need to help them get on with their lives is far from conceding defeat - quite the opposite...Society should make the 'playing field' as level as it can and there is no stigma in using the services to help you get on with life.

But such comments could be very telling of the mindset of this Mr Farage.


Tuesday, 10 February 2015

Technology invasion - does it help your health and well being?

It seems that many today have a constant need to share every little detail of their lives, every mundane event that happens - where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, what they are about to do and even, if you are really lucky, they will update you on the outcome of it all.  It seems that if the technology is there to do something, then the process is a given...I wonder when we might stop and consider where that process might end up - which genie will we wish we had never let out of the bottle?

It is not so much the idea of sharing everything we choose to, but the fact that it 'softens up' any resistance to anyone else sharing data about us or wanting data about us..after all if we don't want our own privacy and happy to share all we do constantly, then we can become immune to others wanting to know and share our data.

If you put your life out there to be viewed then you can hardly complain when others want to view it.

We seem to just accept that we are the most observed nation on the planet through CCTV.  I don't feel any safer for it, it would still be foolish to walk down a dark alley in the early hours on your own, after all that is not where the camera is likely to be...it will more than likely be in the shopping arcades or commercial areas, protecting businesses not people...that's a 'by-chance'

Put the right rhetoric with it and many people feel that why worry about it.....as many say 'if you are not doing something you shouldn't, then you have no need to worry'   Well that's true and if we are all living with reasonable laws that are protective, yet not draconian or crushing to what the general view of freedom is, may be that view is safe. If the situation changes and you find what were once normal,harmless activities such as gathering with friends becomes seen as subversive, then the once 'helpful' technology may not be quite all that is seemed.

I read yesterday of the warning that voice controlled televisions could be listening into your conversations...well i guess they are or how would they know when you ask them to change channel etc....so who might be accessing that?  But why worry anyway?   If you are of the belief that if you are not doing anything wrong, then surely it doesn't matter who listens to your conversations - many constantly share with the world anyway via Facebook or twitter.

So if the tv comes with a little camera, that's ok too I guess - after all...'if you are not doing anything wrong.....' etc

Is it all good for our health?....governments and the media generating fear is certainly not, newspapers creating division. The adverts encouraging people to inform on others.....'Tell the inland revenue if you suspect someone of tax fraud' we are told...what else will we accept that we should 'inform on'  I'm all for paying taxes, (may be we should all keep informing on those big corporations that avoid it) Adverts constantly reminding you of the statistics of you getting cancer.....well worth remembering here that where the thoughts go your body might just follow.

So what data are we happy to share and how much privacy are we happy to give up, either imposed or voluntarily?  being mindful to where the steps are taking us, not fearful, not paranoid, after all that can be the effect of the methods employed now, but being the intelligent questioning beings we are.

The CEO of google defends the lack of privacy on the internet....sharing the right data with the right people.....he claims sharing your medical records with the right research doctors would save 100,000 lives this year....all anonymously of course... 100.000 lives...well who wouldn't want to be part of that?   That is quite a high number and how did he arrive at anything like that. Stating figures without explanation....Trying borrowing money on that basis.

Sharing the right data...absolutely...what might that be then and who might really be benefiting - Hopefully you but who else?

Someone once said if you want to be a millionaire, you ask a millionaire how he did it...in terms of health, there is also mileage in asking those who rarely go to the doctor...those whose medical records are a bit thin on the ground.  What did they do or are doing that keeps from the doctors surgery.

May be we will all grow tired of the constant sharing of artificial data and go back to meeting face to face and being in the moment with the people you are with and not constantly sharing info on ourselves, then we might just start to expect others to observe our privacy again. Living a life with ability to find some quiet space, away from technology could well benefit your health on many levels.  For hundreds of years people managed it. For many of us, we grew up without it and the world still functioned.....may be we perhaps could ask the question....just because we can...do we need to?

Technology is a great thing and sharing is of course fine, may be we could all just question a little more where it might be leading so we avoid heading off on a journey to a destination we can't return from.




Thursday, 5 February 2015

CiCHealths Newsletter - Feb

Hi Everyone

We were very pleased to have hosted the event with Patrick Kingsley earlier last year and the turn out was fantastic. Last November, it was a pleasure to invite Patricia Peat from Cancer Options down for our joint event with Mary and Sue at the Cambridge Cancer Centre, David Raynor Building. She delivered 2 amazing talks to packed audiences for both sessions and I would urge any therapist to try and attend a talk from her - the generosity of the information shared is superb and helps in being a good resource of knowledge for any clients going through this illness.

As yet we have not decided exactly what we might offer this year.  There is a distinct lack of accredited therapy courses in our area now with CRC no longer offering them, and I am in the midst of writing one on reflexology and one on aromatherapy, so that is taking some of my time.  I have a CKT course starting at the end of March and if you are interested in taking this, then just let me know. I am also in the process of developing an addition to the Indian Head Massage course and when that's ready will let you know.

The health headlines today made grim reading with the predication that 1 in 2 of us will get cancer...after all that money in research we have an illness that has increased from 1:20 in the 70's to 1:3 currently and the prospect of 1;2 in the near future. If this was any other industry it would have folded by now! It is a subject very dear to my heart and I see too many people who are continually still offered the same 3 step options that have failed so many before....to be classed as a survivor, you only need to get to 5 years post treatment, if you go beyond that and die, you are technically a dead survivor, so when the adverts say more people survive cancer than ever before...i wonder what they class as a survivor....
Better still - prevention rather than cure....

Maddy and I zipped of to the first talks given by the recently formed BSIO (British Society for Integrated Oncology) on Monday.  Two great speakers, Xandria Williams and Marie Polley, both with extensive nutritional/naturapathic backgrounds.
The talk was titled ' Detecting Cancer'  in brief it looked at cancer markers in the body that might be better at showing the changes from normal cells to cancerous cells at a stage way before a tumour appears...if you had access to that information, lifestyle changes would take care of the problem and the inevitable is so less likely. This is not new as we can credit the Scottish embryologist, John Beard with this. Over 100 years ago he noted that cancer cells behaved like placenta cells and produced HCG early on in their formation. Unless someone is pregnant, there should be no HCG in their serum or urine. In a pregnant woman they would get a reading of around 20 units but a lab in America has perfected the test to detect such small amounts as 1 unit.....that would indicate a cancerous cell change but so tiny you have the ideal chance to change that back.  So 100 years back this was out there and why was that squashed?

If all that pink ribbon money went to fund a lab like that here, i would contribute to that.   This is science, it is not fools gold....this is out there now.

Lung cancer is the one that still continues to rise and especially in women. I was recently looking at a study on Vitamin E and lung cancer...early last year the press reported that Vit E could cause lung cancer....if that gets dragged up again and you have clients worried about taking Vit E....then remind them the Vit E used in that study was synthetic and derived from the petrochemical industry....pretty sure that's not going to sit well in anyone's body....Vit E must be from a natural source and when it is, studies have shown that as little as 300iu's of natural vitamin E could reduce your risk of lung cancer by 61%

The cradle to grave mentality of leaving our health care in the hands of the NHS has perhaps gone too far, the prevention of illness as best we can, must surely sit with us.

As therapists we all know that the physical and emotional are inseparable - when a client is going through any trauma in their life, encourage the increase in Vitamin C, It is cheap, easy and being proactive in their health. There is nothing like a bit of trauma or stress to eat it up faster than your food can replenish it, and without it, your immune system is compromised. I'm not keen on going through life with that system compromised in anyway. 

It has been somewhat heartening in the last few weeks, just how many clients have been given Vit D tests by their Dr's and discovered they are deficient.....This is great and Dr's doing all the right things by recommending Vit D supplementation...sadly they don't seem to know at what level that might be at, but hey...it's a start.  It has always been known that you need Vit K2 to help the Vit D do it's job properly and to make sure calcium ends up in your bones and nowhere it can cause harm, but the ratio has never been mentioned....A really recent Mercola interview finally had an expert address this - suggesting anyone taking Vit D3 (that should be all of us)  should take it in a ratio of 100-200 micrograms of K2 to every 1000iu's of Vit D   (1;5)     good sources of it comes from Brie,Gouda, Liver and Eggs.

Pro active 'doctoring' thank goodness, with so many people just handed yet another prescription, it had occurred to me that we could save the NHS a fortune, cut out the middle guy and just forward your symptoms to various drug companies and see what they recommend. May be this is the future....i jest of course?

Some of you may remember that we invited Dr Damien Downing to Cambridge to speak on Environmental medicine a year back.  He will be the next speaker for the BSIO, the venue is very accessible - being in the Holiday Inn right opposite Russell Street Tube station.  His talk will be on the Ketogenic Diet. If you are interested in knowing more on this here is the link    http://www.bsio.org.uk/event_11-05-15.php


Xandria Williams, I mentioned earlier, has recently brought out a book on the subject of her talk  Detecting Cancer - Gaining time to recover or protect from cancer

With the stats at 1:3 going to 1:2 - as therapists - not a bad time to gain a bit of knowledge in this area.  


Have a great February and if you see anything that you feel you would like to share or have a view on, let us know.


Good wishes

Sarah and on behalf of Maddy. 

Sunday, 9 November 2014

The Hidden Energy of Food - Seasoning With Love.

Why does a home made cake taste so much nicer than a shop bought one, no matter if that shop is the most top notch, high end patisserie going?
The meal that is home cooked from scratch rather than scrapped out of a carton after the 'ping' of a microwave will always have that little extra.
Going out to dinner to a restaurant is lovely and the food will probably be great, cooked well, presented well but still missing that little extra too.

What is that little extra then?

I have to confess I am a complete foody and enjoy the whole experience of shopping, cooking and eating. Even when time is very tight, which like most of us, is pretty well always, the time taken to shop,cook and eat, for me, is worth squeezing the time for.

Isn't it always great to eat what a friend has cooked for you, when that food was prepared with the guests in mind and the host wanting it to be good to eat and enjoyed, it has that special quality, love!

Can love make a difference to the taste of a meal? well there is an experiment to be had, but as we are increasingly more aware of the subtleties around us and the energy that goes into and stays within us, may be that kind and loving energy does indeed enhance the food we eat.

It is surely a given that by using the best ingredients we can afford will enhance the taste, ie butter in a cake over margarine is certainly going to make a better cake.  Organic eggs taste better than factory farmed eggs from caged birds.
But what if all that, the main ingredient is energy and i'm not talking about what fires your stove.
If the meal is prepared with kindness and care, love and compassion, then will it not taste better than something prepared in a factory? The remote human contact it has had, could be one of a factory worker, fed up that day, in a bad mood,disgruntled etc etc....even if the factory worker is the happiest he/she can be - there is no soul connection with the end recipient.

This goes all the way through the food process, the energy and intention planted with the seeds for the crops, the animal husbandry from rearing through to the butchers display.  If each step has been done by some one who cares about the outcome and is passionate about what they do and working in harmony with the environment and compassion for the animals they rear, has that not got to come through energetically in our food and ultimately effect us and our well being.

Ask any one that grows their own food.  I live near some allotments, and it is a pleasure to watch the allotment holders plant, nurture and harvest their well deserved crops. The thought of what to plant,the sharing of seeds with others.  They tend to them with a vested interest in their success and for the pleasure of eating something they have grown and nurtured themselves - look at the lovely energy that food has within it already.

The type of food and quality of it, is one thing, but food is energy or fuel for our bodies needs and if you think that we are energy beings on one level, we will resonate with other energies.

Many of us shop in a hurry,throwing the items into the trolley as we hurtle around the supermarket. We are less inclined to 'select' looking for the one we want, the supermarket homogenises that experience and we just take the next one on the shelf. Little thought and intention at this stage, but we can add that special ingredient when we cook. Supermarkets can be a soul less shopping experience, but for most of us, this is the way of shopping today, not always by choice but through necessity.

If we prepare food as if we are spitting venom, chances are it's not as great as when we prepare it from the heart and because we want to nourish and please the recipient. A quick snack, a simple spread of salad and cold meats, a full dinner or a lovely home made cake, the intentions in our heart might just be received and enhance the well being, albeit subtly, of those that get to eat it. It is not about being a fantastic cook - we can't all be Nigella, Delia, or Ms Berry, but we can all add that little bit of love.