Change of Blog--new blog now on zeeva.net!

An Art of Wellness POV
 Life and times and simplification. Please check the NEW zeeva.net--totally re-created by ME! the woman who used to be known as "that poor sick brain-damaged blind woman on oxygen!"
The NEW blog is on site directory as The blog and the NEW podcast as Zeeva Radio! Playing now: the Magic Bullet--from the intro to Zeeva: the Art of Wellness the True Story of How Z Got Well Again and You Can Too! Subscribe to both--I'll be blogging or podcasting almost DAILY from my own site now!

What’s in a Name? An Injured Brain is an Injured Brain

An Art of Wellness POV
 

We  call them TBI’s (traumatic brain injury.)  ABI’s (Acquired Brain Injury.)  Few people are calling what my brain was injured by what it should be called--CBI’s: Chemical Brain Injuries. A lot of people have those without even knowing it.

We should just call them BI’s. Brain Injuries. 

Whatever event injured a brain--the injured brain malfunctions. 

The brain is central control--and when central control’s in trouble--so's the rest of you.

Brain injuries cause physical short-circuits and disabilities. Mental ones. Emotional ones. They can cause cognitive problems, short-or long-term memory loss, the inability to "find things in your brain" you know you know, do “normal” things you used to be good at, inability to recognize faces--whatever the myriad differences of experience that people with Brain Injuries are having--they’re the same kind of hell.

It’s good we’re starting to talk about brain injuries. Brain injuries are the “signature injury” of our present wars. So many veterans are now suffering from them we HAVE to help, we HAVE to talk about them. 

300,000-plus young people disabled--"forever?" What'll that cost our country that's already broke? In medical and disability costs--but more--in our HUMAN RESOURCES?

We should be talking more talk about HEALING brain injuries instead of all these identifications, diagnoses, and dooming people to think “forever.”  

We should be focusing on healing and fixing people more than the study of the “how’s” and “why’s” of the things that are going wrong. 

When it comes to Brain Injuries--the wounds and scars are not visible.  The effects are terrifying and devastating and turn lives upside-down. But people can’t SEE brain injuries--the way they can see if you’re an amputee, in a wheelchair, a brace, a cast--or blind--like I was. Notice I say WAS. For more than 5 years. I’m not any more.

When it happened to me--in 1998--mainstream medicine believed “brain cells don’t regenerate, brain injuries don’t heal.”  I got that lecture from my father-the-professor-of-pathology when I was a teen-ager, as he sliced up real brains and prepared slides for an upcoming lecture. It didn’t make sense to me then--I asked: “If every other organ in the body has cells that can regenerate--why NOT the brain? Are you sure? Do you KNOW?” He replied “There is a lot about the body medical science does not yet know.” That was in the mid-1970’s. 

Two years after I was told “it’s permanent” and I’d “never get better,” SCIENCE did one of those 180’s medicine often does: “We USED to think...but NOW we KNOW.”  They discovered brain cells DO regenerate. Good thing I’d already been working on getting mine to do just that for two years by then. I could have accepted--like the MD’s advised me to--and given up. I could have been drugged and disabled and in a board and care.

I was on my own dealing with healing my injured brain. I was lucky. I had more education on medicine than most. I was dancer and artist and a creative out-of-the-box thinker who’d studied Human Potential, Human Development and Alternative Medicine for years.  I’d been involved in the fields of Psychology, the Arts, and Peak Performance--what a human being CAN do and CAN achieve--for decades when it happened to me. 

All the doctors said I’d never get better again and wanted to treat the many diagnoses and misdiagnoses for the many bad symptoms caused by my brain injuries with drugs.  

Just like they’re doing today. Drugs can control symptoms but they don’t FIX the cause.

And they have so many side-effects--including suicidal behaviors--but they sure make a profit for Pharma.

As a doctor’s daughter--I KNEW THAT. Most people think the “medications” are helping them. I understood the concept of treating the symptom and--as my father told me when I asked--"Isn't that just killing the messenger?"--"Well if treating the symptom doesn't work--then we have to treat more aggressively." I knew how to do research and find the cutting-edge Science that was more to my liking--non-invasive and geared to FIX the injuries and help my body and brain HEAL. I knew how to find the Alternative Medicine and the Natural Healing solutions to help my Body-Mind heal. My Spirit led the way. 

Coming back from brain injury isn’t easy. But it’s possible, it’s achievable and it can be done. I DID IT. 

We just have to change our thinking and our culture from the re-active and profitable diagnosis and treatment of “permanent-rest-of-your-life-but-manageable” chronic disease and disability to the pro-active. 

And bring back that old-fashioned “CAN-DO” attitude America USED to be famous for.

Spaghetti Gazetti: Brain injury graduates celebrate a “return to real life”

Spaghetti Gazetti: Brain injury graduates celebrate a “return to real life”: "symptoms after suffering an acquired brain injury include seeing a familiar face but not being able to remember a name, always feeling tired and struggling to accept the person you have become.

It results in people losing jobs and careers, their families, hobbies and interests. “Crucially, these are the things that tell us who we are,” added Dr Quinn.

“Any one of these challenges would be enough to face without a brain injury to contend with, let alone facing them all at the same time."

An Art of Wellness POV

Coming Back from Brain Injuries--Yes You CAN!

An Art of Wellness POV

Getting Well again from brain injuries is possible--I’m living proof. When the blind woman got her sight back and could all of a sudden see--a lot of people thought “Oh she’s ALL BETTER now.” Catching up to life after being blinded and worse from toxic chemical brain injuries takes some time. Imagine what it’d be like--to be blind for more than 5 years--years during which other people had to organize (in a lot of cases--disorganize) your life! 

One of the first things I had to do when I got my sight back was try on the clothing my sighted assistants had helped me buy. More than 5 years worth of clothing. I’d take an armload and try things on in front of the mirror. Some looked just fine. Others, I’d take a look at myself and say “OMG--they let me wear THIS?”

I went through about a dozen sighted assistants in 5.5 years blind. Some thought their job was just to hang out with me. I had friends to hang out with--I didn’t need to pay companions. I needed people who’d do the jobs they’d agreed to do for the money I could afford to pay them. Some thought it was a piece of cake, telling the blind woman that the job was taken care of. Eventually a friend who’d come to visit would tell me the job was NOT being done and I’d have to find a new assistant again. 

Getting my sight back was an intense experience. It took as much getting used to having sight again as it did to losing it. The sheer input to my brain was overwhelming. Sight is a tremendous amount of input--whether to lose or regain.  When I first lost my sight, I felt like Johnny 5--you know--that escaped robot in the movie Short-Circuit who moaned for “Innnnn-put”. I’d been such a high visual person all my life I felt literally starved of visual input when I lost it. 

Getting my sight back again was wonderful and intense--but life doesn’t stop. Less than a year later, my Mom--who’d been battling cancer’s 1-5 on the opposite coast of the country while I was battling crippling and blinding brain injuries--asked for help. And the next few years of my life became about the last few of hers.  It’s almost two years since she passed and I’m only now finding my way back to an organized life and re-developing a business that went on hold. But that’s radically changed. 

The RAND Corporation says we now have more than 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering “some level” of brain injuries. They already lived through the hell of war. Now they’re experiencing a second hell. A hell I know something about.

You can’t SEE brain injuries--but they’re a terrible thing. People thought the blindness was bad--it was. The blindness was obvious to others--dark glasses and a white cane. What was much worse was a brain going haywire and out-of-control. You can’t SEE that happening to someone and people were just not getting why I wasn’t getting it.   And why sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.  

Now I am Well. And I worry about all the very many young ’un’s we have today who are going through the terrible hell of brain injury and being offered little more than disbelief or a life-sentence of disability and drugs--like I was.  Those black-box warnings we tune out when we hear the commercials telling us to “ask your doctor about”  are coming true. Who’s ready to step up and do something about all these military suicides? 

Dr Mercola on Dr Oz Pushing the Vac's

An Art of Wellness POV

Why are TV doctors pushing the flu vac's? 
See--or hear--my POV in the previous blogpost.  

But don't just take MY word for it--here's a 
really UnCommon Sense POV from one of the 
most respected Health Pro's in the US today, 
Dr Mercola:

"Dr. Mehmet Oz, talk show host and Vice-Chair and Professor of Surgery at Columbia University is perhaps the most well-known doctors in the U.S.

In the first video, a Walgreens pharmacist gives Dr. Oz a flu shot -- which was also given to everyone in his studio audience. He states that he’s been getting the seasonal flu vaccine every year for about ten years.

But what you didn’t see in that clip was Dr. Oz stating that when it comes to the swine flu shot, neither his wife nor his four children will get the vaccine. This comes up during his interview on CNN, shown in the second video.

It’s amazing how many doctors have been hoodwinked into believing that the flu shot is a necessity.  It’s also interesting to note that when employment is not on the line the doctor acquiesces to a far healthier approach, and his wife and children will be spared the toxic burden and other potential health hazards inherent with the swine flu vaccine.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/10/13/Dr-Oz-Helps-Shill-the-Flu-Vaccine.aspx

Why the Media's Pushing Swine-flu Vac's So Hard

An Art of Wellness POV

"We're seeing a parade of MD's on all the "news" programs and the great big push for scaring US into making sure we get in line for those "won't have enough and may not be ready in time" swine flu vac's. Oh please--the amount of time getting the vac's ready and distributed is plenty of time to take yourSELF in hand, and with diet, lifestyle and natural means--BUILD UP YOUR OWN IMMUNE SYSTEM! But are any Dr's on TV or in mainstream media pushing that idea?" 


I posted this podcast and the text with it) in late August 09.  


Now that the vac's are "ready" a lot of people are mistrustful. SMART! If you wonder WHY the Media's pushing so hard--it's a good re-read or listen-to:


http://alternativehealthcarediscussion.blogspot.com/2009/08/media-brought-to-you-by-drug-dealers.html


Be smart--be WELL!

Death in the non-Native Sweat

An Art of Wellness POV

By now we've all heard about the deaths in the "sweat-lodge" in Sedona. Notice--I put "sweat-lodge" in quotes. That's because a sweat-lodge as practiced by traditional Native American people and the "sweat-lodges" that new-age leaders have been offering for years for money to people who seek another way to heal themselves are very different things. Therein is the problem.

Sweats have been practiced--as Body-Mind-Spirit traditions by cultures all around the world for thousands and thousands of years. In many parts of the world, as religions changed, and people lost  awareness that human beings are Body-Mind-Spirit beings, the traditions changed too. The benefits to the health of the body were clear, and though religions changed, many parts of the world kept going to sauna as a way to heal the Body--without the Mind or Spirit practices involved. Not until the latter half of the 20th Century did Science "prove" why heating up the body is beneficial: inducing sweating--the body's natural self-cleansing process--allows our bodies to expel accumulated toxins, but we now also understand the Science of metabolism, and how the increase of body temperature "turns on" the self-healing processes that healers understood (without our modern-day technology to prove it) long before the days of Hippocrates.

Some Native American peoples were also removed from their traditional ways for many years. Some found them again. And some handed down their traditions meticulously, quietly, down through the generations of their people. In the late 1970's, involved with many humanistic psychology and alternative health practitioners, I was invited by non-Native American people to come to their "sweat-lodges." I demurred. I'd already been a seeker and a traveller. I'd been fortunate to meet traditional healers around the world--and I felt that if I were to experience a tradition, I'd rather experience it with traditional people. A Native American elder I met pointed out how important it was to prepare spiritually, knowing the right ways, the right prayers, everything involved with the construction of the lodge, even before heating the stones and going into the lodge for the actual "sweat." She said something very powerful. She asked what it would be like if someone who was not of a Christian tradition that took communion put on the vestements of a priest, bought the chalice, the other tools, the wine, and without the correct preparation or spiritual training, sang the prayers, performed transubstantiation then offered communion. "People would be offended," she said. "Yet non-Native people do not feel there is anything wrong with performing our traditions."

Later, I worked with Native American people of different tribes, and was fortunate to be invited to traditional sweat-lodges in different parts of the country. Different tribes have different traditions. They "do sweats" in different ways. But a sweat-lodge is a very serious spiritual practice and undertaking. Native people have traditions of giving, and if you come for value, you give value of yourself in return. It is a matter of respect: respect for Self and respect to the People you have come to. But I have never been to a traditional sweat where they charged money for it.  And while I've been in sweats where we were crowded close together in small quarters, they were never so crowded that the lodge leader was not able to keep a very strong awareness of each individual in the lodge--many things can happen in a sweat. Whatever reasons the sweat is happening for, whatever reasons the seekers have in coming, the Body-Mind-Spirit welfare of each individual--and the group-- is a very serious responsibility of the lodge-leader.

In the first year after the acute toxic chemical exposure that injured my brain and body, and blinded me for years, I was being bounced around clinic doctors who had only drugs and a board and care to offer me. No real help, no real relief. My Indian friends brought me food, healing herbs, and took me twice a month to a lodge at a California reservation. I'd sweated there with them when I was well. When I became very sick, they cared for me and worked on me. I probably would have died that year without the healing I experienced there. I'd done a lot of work for their people over the years and they asked nothing of me in return. Later, when I got to one of the two medical toxicologists in the entire state of California at the time, he told me that I needed to go into a sauna as often as I could--to help my body remove the toxic overload. Without the healing of the sweat and the leaders who knew how to help my Body-Mind-Spirit, I do not know if I would have survived. I am grateful.

Choose and Infect: Stress? or a Wellness State of Mind

An Art of Wellness POV

State of mind matters. A Wellness State of Mind let ME beat brain injuries--when THEY said I wouldn’t! Life IS stressful. The economy, worries about our Health-Care system--we’re  all feeling it. And some of us are acting, well, less than Well. Daily--we're programmed by messages to "ask your doctor about" anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and other  medications to calm us down, help us sleep. HELLO!

Those drugs dull some of the symptoms, do NOTHING for the cause, and are just downright dangerous! Maybe you remember--when we had a war on drugs, we knew that drugs tended to make people weak, sick and behave badly! Once the pharmaceutical industry and MD's colluded for profit; we lost our power to be Well: all kinds of diseases and disorders could now be managed with drugs. We became MORE stressed. America became much less Well!

  

Seems to me our culture of disease and disorder has made it OK for a lot of bad behaviors to flourish, for more people to have chronic disease, become addicted to prescription drugs, to feel powerless! “It’s a disease making me behave like this...”  Talk about STRESS!

Take back your power! Start to create change for yourself and others with a Wellness State of Mind! True, everyone’s stressed and Zeeva’s Art of Wellness does say “The only person whose Wellness you can really do anything about is your own.” But just like a negative state of mind can infect the people around you--you, too can infect others with YOUR Wellness State of Mind! If you work on your OWN Wellness State of Mind not only does that affect you--you impact others around you in a positive way. YOU'll feel better, more in control, and get more Well--and so will those around you.

A community Wellness State of Mind can heal US, improve our lives, and together, we can begin to change this culture of disease, disorder and bad behaviors!  Countless studies "prove" we affect one another's states of mind. Have angry people in your circle? You're likely to get angry easier than you "normally" would! Negative folks? You too get more negative. If you have happy people in your circle, you're more likely to be happy.

When asked why some people “get better” and some people don’t, my father-the-doctor-and-medical- professor would answer “Attitude.” Those who had the attitude that they would get well again would usually succeed. Those who believed the disease had them, would succumb. That was surely true for me! I got Well again because I believed I could and would! And I DID. Check your attitude! Be WELL! Be INFECTIOUS! All of us have an amazing power to change ourselves and the world around us--simply by our attitude, the things we do and the energy we put out--one by one-- into our worlds.

Yes, times are tough--but with the right attitude--you CAN make a difference for your SELF--and for the world around you.

I invite you to follow my blog--this week I begin to excerpt my book, Zeeva: the Art of Wellness the True Story of How Z Got Well Again and You Can Too! 

Learn how my attitude, my lifelong natural Wellness Lifestyle, alternative medicine, and cost-effective non-invasive cutting-edge Science let me beat a medical life-sentence of "permanent brain damage, permanent blindness, and permanent disability!"

Learn about what I’m working on today--to help our veterans whose brains have been injured in the wars! Learn how YOU can help too! And get into a Wellness State of Mind! Let’s start a Wellness Pandemic!

Coming Back--It Ain't Easy

An Art of Wellness POV

In August and September, I moved my studio and my company's offices from the Downtown Los Angeles Arts District studio I'd been for more than a decade up to Helicon--my high desert and green Creative Wellness Retreat just a short drive north of LA.  


It was a very emotional leaving for me: I'd been an Arts District gal since the early 90's. I lived a lot of life there.  It wasn't where the toxic installation that changed my life and took years away from me happened--I moved into the studio after becoming blind and disabled from the acute toxic chemical exposure that had the MD's saying I'd be "permanently blind, permanently brain-damaged, permanently disabled."  
It was where I began to heal, and the birthplace of my company Zeeva International Inc.  


I opened Bashtet Studio there back in 2002--when I started to get better and everyone wanted to know WHAT I was doing to get better.  "So many people are trying to get better and can't.  You HAVE to SHARE!" everyone said. I was blind. I was on oxygen.  I was working hard on my own rehabilitation to come back.  But still, they wanted me to "SHARE!"  It made sense to me. People needed to know how to be Well.


I saw it in my mind's eye. Sighted assistants helped me find what I saw and then set it up. I hired great teachers and we offered my urban community an escape to a beautiful peaceful retreat with classes in the kind of Body-Mind-Spirit techniques I was using to heal my SELF.  Bashtet was about Movement Arts, Dance, Yoga, Meditation, Aromatherapy, and we hosted the Community Healing Project--where alternative healers volunteered to give people in need holistic treatments for a very small donation.
It did my heart such good to hear that people who came in sickness and pain experienced some relief and left saying "OH--I feel better!"   


Moving during the California wildfires was challenging but so empowering!  Shorthanded, I did most of the move myself. An old friend came one night after work to help me load the "heavies" I couldn't hoist into my van myself. Another old friend committed to help with the one truckload of heavy large pieces, showed up on the day he told me to rent the truck and bailed, making the "I'm an ARTIST!" speech that I, who've travelled through artists' communities around the world, have only heard in LA--when someone doesn't want to do something they said they'd do.  Thank goodness there were day-workers at Home Depot. You know--those guys they say are taking jobs away from Americans. There were no Americans looking for work that day. They loaded me up in less than two hours and then I got a couple more to unload (in one hour) into my garage.


 Yet with each van-load I loaded and unloaded myself, each heavy piece I'd move into place, I'd think: "And I'm supposed to be permanently disabled!" 


It's amazing what we can accomplish when we have to. I'm 54 years old. In the last year, I've been my own contractor and rehabilitated a torn-up old house. That was supposed to be my ex's job--he chose the house as the one where his labor could make the most difference in increasing the value. The kitchen rehab I'd financed and he installed was to increase the value enough for the re-fi to pay for the next round of work. My mortgage broker said everything was in place, she was sending her appraiser, and as soon as she had a number "You'll have the cash in 3-4 weeks max."  


Then the economy crashed. My mortgage broker went incommunicado. The ex bailed with the house torn up ready for the next infusion of capital.  There was nothing to do but roll up my sleeves and do it mySELF.  I hired one guy to frame up a wall where one was needed, two others to hang the new doors--just before the coldest, snowiest winter my community had seen in 33 years hit, and an electrician to take care of the torn-out electric I couldn't fix myself.  Then I went from one end to the other of a 3800 square foot house, plastering, spackling, weather-sealing, fixing, and painting.


Thank goodness I'M an artist and I grew up knowing how to do these things. Amazing how old skills come back.  It's taken me almost a year--and it held me back from my own work and cleaned me out. But at last I have a place to work, to teach, to live like a human being. Now--to keep it.  


It's not the hardest thing that ever happened to me. I already lived through that--and I BEAT it. Today I'm WELL.  I can SEE. And life is changing again.  


Now--at last I'm ready to share the Art of Wellness with you--because no matter what age or shape you're in--by practicing the Wellness Lifestyle I lived all my life--you too can get better, feel better, and live better. And isn't that what it's all about? 

Creating an Abstract Art Painting by the Contemporary Artist Vera - www.veraarts.com

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