Vitamin L

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of regular exercise, massage, and a well balanced diet with a wide variety of macro and micro nutrients. Ugne teaches us through Functional Medicine that when there is a rainbow of color on our plates our genes are able to more fully express themselves. However, this still pales in comparison with how our body’s express themselves when we have a healthy serving of Vitamin L. 

“Love is like oxygen” it has the ability to light up our biochemistry in the most amazing ways!

Not convinced, let's back up and consider the placebo effect on pain relief. When scientists are testing these drugs in double blind randomized trials, their goal is for the new drug to outperform the placebo on the control group. What’s interesting here is that the placebo occasionally outperforms the drug, so it's having a measurable effect on the test subjects too. That change is coming entirely from the power of the mind.  

Here is a meditation practice on love from the Buddhist vajrayana teachings on three-fold logic. In this meditation you settle into a steady peaceful abiding state of a mindfulness-awareness practice for 5-10 minutes depending on the kind of day you’re having. Then for about 3 minutes each bring to mind the feeling of being a lover, then the beloved, then the feeling that you are love itself. In this contemplative practice the love, the beloved and love itself become the objects of your mediation. So when you notice yourself distracted, bring your attention back to the feeling rather than the breath. At the end of the practice allow any visualizations to dissolve and return to shamatha practice. 

Give this a try and let me know how you felt before and after.