ASIS Massage Education Blog

Dried Flowers for the Dalai Lama's visit

Hello All

This msg below comes from the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas project in Montana.  They are looking for offerings of dried flower petals, for the 1,000 Buddha statues and for HH Dalai Lama's visit.  They would love to be overwhelmed with dried flower petals!

The Buddha Garden project needs your help! Each of the 1,000 buddhas we are casting for the garden contains a Tsok shing.  These consist of a number of blessed objects, prayers, mantras and Tibetan medicine with a cedar obelisk at the center, which is the central channel for each of these consecrated statues.  In addition to incense, saffron, wood and herbs; flower petals are also included as an aspect of pacification.
We need your help in collecting and drying flower petals for the Tsok shings.  Please keep the Buddha Garden in mind as the beautiful summer flowers are blooming in your own garden.  Petals can be plucked off of the seed head and simply laid out to dry.  You may snailmail your flower offerings to the sangha house
34574 White Coyote Road, Arlee, MT 59821
or email Chris buddhagarden@ewam.org with questions.
Thank you for your help.
The petals can be plucked from fresh flowers and air dried in any way, and they can also be petals which have wilted and dried naturally in a bouquet or in the garden.  No rules except for your own altruistic intention!
   We have about 450 of the 1,000 buddha statues made, so we will continue to collect the contents for the tsok shings for quite a while.  After the 1,000 buddhas are cast, we will begin to fill 1,000 stupas with tsog shings as well.
   It is OK if the petals get crushed in the mail.  In buddhist tradition, flowers bring the earth elements into harmony.  As all things are impermanent, these substances also go through a cycle which returns then to their origin.
The Garden of 1,000 Buddhas is for everyone everywhere, and the more who are connected, the greater  it becomes.  Everyone who wishes to contribute is so welcome to do so, and we need a lot of flowers for the tsok shings.  Any extras we can use to pave the pathway for His Holiness the Dalai Lama when he comes to consecrate the garden upon it's completion.
  And hey, if there's anything we want to be overwhelmed with, it is definitely flowers!! :-)
Check out the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas:

For Workshops in awareness, health, and massage:

ASIS Massage Blog Awards!

Dear Asis, Congratulations! Emma Lee here, and your blog, ASIS Massage, has just won our 2010 Top 35 Massage Blogs award! You can see your name amongst our winners here at: Massage Blog 

You can let your readers know you won by embedding the badge code below. Winners for your 2010 Top Massage Blogs award were announced on June 24, 2010. 

Again, Congratulations, and I hope to see your badge soon!

Cheers, Emma Lee www.awardingtheweb.com

 

Massage Thearpist needed in Sedona Arizona

Dr Peter Ney, a wholistic chiropractor in Sedona Arizona is looking for an organized individual to work both in his office and as a massage therapist.  This is a great opportunity to learn as you earn, along side a wholistic practitioner.

Any interested therapists can contact Dr. Ney neyfamily1@yahoo.com

or call the office at: 928-301-9696

Peace to you!

 

 

DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria. 

The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences.

DNA bases pair up with each other, A with T and C with G, to form units called base pairs. Each base is also attached to a sugar molecule and a phosphate molecule. Together, a base, sugar, and phosphate are called a nucleotide. Nucleotides are arranged in two long strands that form a spiral called a double helix. The structure of the double helix is somewhat like a ladder, with the base pairs forming the ladder’s rungs and the sugar and phosphate molecules forming the vertical sidepieces of the ladder.

An important property of DNA is that it can replicate, or make copies of itself. Each strand of DNA in the double helix can serve as a pattern for duplicating the sequence of bases. This is critical when cells divide because each new cell needs to have an exact copy of the DNA present in the old cell.

DNA

If the DNA from a single human cell nucleus were stretched out, it would measureapproximately six feet in length. 

If all of the DNA contained within the cells of a human being was stretched out and laid end to end, it would reach to the Moon and back eight thousand times.

capillaries & blood vessels

The circumference of the earth at the equator is 25,000 miles.  If the blood vessels of an adult were lined up end to end, they would circle the equator four times!

Most of the blood vessels in the human body are microscopic capillaries. There are over 60,000 miles of blood vessels in a child's body and close to 100,000 miles in an adult's.
There are apprximately 40 billion capillaries in the body.   

The human heart beats about 100,000 times a day.  At this rate it will take thirty years to beat one billion times. 

US Health Scare - why reform is needed.

Giving birth in the U.S. is more hazardous than in ANY other advanced nation - and it continues to get worse every year.

According to CDC, two decades ago there were 6.6 maternal deaths per 100,000 pregnancies; and that rate has more than doubled, to 13.3 dead mothers per 100,000.  This data ranks this great nation as 41st in the industrialized world.

"This is a national disgrace and a call to action", says Elliot Main, chief of obstetrics at San Francisco Pacific Medical Center.  In a new report from Amnesty International, the U.S. has the resources to achieve a mortality rate of 4% per 100,000, as in Great Britain.  The report blames lack of health care, costs and lack ofdoctors in rural areas, and inner cities.

Which Dirt Should Your Baby Eat? Looking for Natural Immunities

Mapping how bugs and virus help child! ren develop immunity.
By Amanda Schaffer
Posted Wednesday, March 24, 2010, at 7:09 AM ET

Too much cleanliness can be bad for your baby—so goes the prevailing theory that hypersanitized childhoods may be partly responsible for allergies, asthma, and other diseases. The idea is that early exposures to germs teach an infant's immune system to regulate itself. Just as babies' brains need input, stimulation, and training, so, too, do their immune systems.

But if bugs and viruses are a form of education, which ones make up the perfect curriculum? The research doesn't serve up a neat answer, and, of course, pathogens that actually make kids sick come at a cost. Still, evidence suggests that some gastrointestinal bugs and viruses, which might or might not cause illness, may protect later against allergy, asthma, and inflammation. Baby respiratory infections, on the other hand, probably don't shield kids in the same way. So what's a tiny baby to do? Chew toys off the floor, play in the mud, go to the petting zoo. But stay away from the flu.

The idea that germs protect against allergies started to gain traction around 20 years ago. A researcher named David Strachan found that children with more siblings, particularly older brothers, were less likely to develop hay fever. Strachan's work (like most of the research that followed) didn't prove a causal relationship. Nor did it address how, exactly, kids might school one another's immune systems. But it spurred the theory that all manner of germiness, from dirty hands to runny noses, might help kids in the long run. Researchers also linked growing up on a farm to lower risk of allergy. Dit! to for attending day care early on. (Though with caveats. In one study , for instance, day care only seems to protect allergy-prone kids if they attend before they're 3 months old.) But what is it about farms or day care that might help train the budding immune system—the scat, the snot, or something else?

It could be the scat, at least in part. Last fall, researchers analyzed a treasure trove of data from the Philippines, which tracked kids starting when they were in utero, in the 1980s. The data included information on the households the kids were born into as well as the sicknesses and symptoms their mothers reported them having before age 2. The researchers found that kids who were exposed to more animal feces, and who had more diarrhea before they turned 2, tended in their early 20s to have lower levels of C-reactive protein, a key marker of inflammation. This could mean that they had less of the chronic inflammation associated with a host of ills, from rheumatoid arthritis to heart disease, and thus better immune regulation, says anthropologist Thom McDade of Northwestern University, who led the work.

Bugs and viruses that go for the gut also turn up in studies that show lower risk of allergic conditions and asthma Helicobacter pylori is a bacterium that lives in the stomach lining of as many as half the world's people, often without symptoms, though it's also associated with ulcers. In one paper, preschoolers who tested positive for H. pylori were less likely to su! ffer from the itchy skin disorder atopic eczema, a hypersensitivity reaction similar to an allergy. In another, H. pylori colonization was linked to a lower risk of childhood asthma.

Hepatitis A, a virus transmitted by contaminated food and water, seems to bolster immune training, too: Kids with a certain common gene variant who had been exposed to hepatitis A appeared to be less likely to suffer from a range of allergic disorders, according to this review by Graham Rook at University College London. (Hepatitis A seems to do this by tweaking the balance of different immune cell ty! pes.)

The silver lining of protection against later asthma or allergic conditions is harder to spot for respiratory infections. Papers that sort through the evidence generally find scant evidence that runny noses and sore throats help kids stay healthy later. In fact, children hospitalized for severe respiratory syncytial virus or bronchiolitis may be more likely to develop asthma later on according to Anne Wright of the Arizona Respiratory Center. The flu, too, might spur asthma's development. And early bronchitis or frequent common! colds seemed not to lower the risk of atopic eczema—bronchitis, in fact, seemed to increase it. The theme here seems to be: Ingest; don't inhale.

All of this makes some sense in evolutionary terms. Some of today's bugs and viruses have colonized and infected our ancestors, including other mammals, since way back when. In certain cases, we might have evolved in response to their presence. And so these organisms may now help to establish or maintain an aspect of our normal immune regulation. Respiratory viruses probably didn't play this role, Rook says, because they were sporadic and transient, present in some groups of humans but not others. Viral infections like measles, mumps, rubella, or chickenpox probably didn't either, for the same reasons. But pathogens like H. pylori and hepatitis A that infect the gut and are t! hought to be very old make sense as regulators of immune development. So do microbes found in mud, soil, and rotting vegetation. And so do little worms called helminths.

Note, however, that this is maddeningly hard research to do. Scientists must figure out which critters to pay attention to and then untangle how exactly these organisms interact with the immune system. And they must sort through other factors that probably affect how a child responds to the germy stew of life—like how old he is when exposed, what other infections have already occurred, and what his genetic predispositions are.

And so we're not likely anytime soon to have anything like a lesson plan for boosting your child's immune system by, say, exposing him to H. pylori at 1 month and parasitic worms at 3 months (especially given the risks of deliberate infection). But what we do know helps explain why that hour in the garden or cuddle with the dog is probably all for the good.

Anatomy & Physiology

A&P: the study of who we are!

Anatomy = Structure          Physiology = Function

There was both a freedom and a challenge in recognizing

that our perception of the external world,
and our relationship to it,is a product of our neurological circuitry.For all those years of my life,
I really had been a figment of my own imagination.

Some of the Education behind the Health Care law

Lets stop all this fearful cries of government take over and look at some of the meat in the new Health Care law.