The Healing Farm Stinson Beach Mini-Retreat a Success!

Excited to share some photos from The Healing Farm Stinson Beach mini-retreat! We had a gorgeous day and I’d say the highlight for me was doing yoga in the fresh ocean air and listening to the waves crash on the beach while in our final meditation as the sun set and the almost full moon rose. What a way to end the day!

Creating and holding this retreat and bringing together practitioners and attendees to learn simple yet effective holistic healing practices makes me long for the day when I can open my dream retreat center. One of tasteful, yet affordable style and holistic wellness practices reaching out to people of all income levels! One step at a time!

Sara starting the morning with a water view!

Cooking demo gone awry when the oven didn’t work! Roasting the chicken on the grill for the stock worked just fine!

Beautiful, gorgeous chock full of nutrients stock simmering on the cooktop! Stock recipe from the files of functional medicine practitioner, Chris Kresser

Everyone went home with a jar.

The borscht (made with the stock) ready to be blended (recipe also from the files of Chris Kresser).

Lunch was a gorgeous bowl of beet soup and a chicken salad. Both great options for cooking with the stock and leftover roasted chicken.

A participant soaking up her vitamin D (sunshine!)

Sara Rankin of Alma Acupuncture lecturing on acupuncture 101!

Participants discussing Sara’s lecture while waiting for their turn for acupuncture.

Sara brought tuning forks! Who knew vibration also gets the Qi moving!

Patti of The Goodness blog beginning our yoga session on the deck.

We were so fortunate to have such a gorgeous setting.

I was impressed Patti could balance on a floating dock! Not hard lying down, but for the rest of the time? Wow!

Patti displays her southern heritage.

and the moon rises over the Mt. Tam foothills to end our day.

Thank you to my participants for attending The Healing Farm Stinson Beach Mini-Retreat! Stay tuned for an announcement regarding the first large scale Healing Farm retreat and the introduction of my new website and brand!

Stinson Beach Mini-Retreat This Weekend!

So excited to head out to Stinson Beach today for The Healing Farm holistic mini-retreat happening tomorrow! This retreat will feature:

• Realistic and sustainable solutions to bring holistic healing into your everyday life
• Yoga session with Patti Cocciolo of “The Goodness” blog
• Cooking lesson (making stock!) and wellness lecture by Julie Mikos
• Acupuncture lecture by Sara Rankin of Alma Acupuncture
• Peaceful walk on the beach!

I had to keep the attendees limited since it’s a small location and one of my “test” runs, but will post photos of the retreat and start posting soon about the development of The Healing Farm brand and most importantly about the upcoming first in a series of larger retreats which will accommodate more attendees! Stay tuned!

Holistic Healing Mini Retreat, Stinson Beach - Take Two!

Early December is not a good time to hold a retreat! The Holidays are wonderful, but everyone has a million things to do, so please join me in our make-up retreat to kick-off the new year and your new path to health. Learn practical ways to improve your health in a beautiful and non-intimidating setting. Space is very limited for this intimate retreat so contact me at julie@thehealingfarm.org for more details and see the invitation below to get an overview of the day’s events.

Announcing the First Healing Farm Retreat Featuring Talks and Application of Holistic Healing for Everyday Life!

Stop and Pet the Trees

I know I said this wasn’t going to be hippie dippy and certainly “Stop and pet the trees” falls into the category, but it comes from a hike I did many years ago with my friend Laurel. It was winter in the bay area which means GREEN. Lush green hillsides and glowing green moss growing on trees throughout the forests. We were hiking out on the coastal trail above Stinson Beach and we ran across a tree that had fallen long ago, but was somehow still alive. It looked like a big bench, but also absolutely glowing with lush green moss. Laurel (who IS a little hippie-ish) exclaimed that it looked like it had fur and went to “pet” it. Since then, when I hike in the wintertime I like to stop and pet the trees.

Today in trying to stick with my plan to walk or do yoga every day during my healing sabbatical, I drove to one of my favorite hiking spots. In the past week, I’ve discovered that hiking/walking in the bay area almost always includes steep and semi-steep inclines and declines. As much as I’ve always despised the uphills (I grew up in the Midwest flat-lands and am not accustomed to an uphill climb of any sort), I’ve discovered with my particular back pain that it’s the downhills that kill me. Not usually while I’m hiking which can be deceptive, but usually a few hours after I’m done or the next day. Frustrating since I LOVE hiking. I decided that for the rest of my sabbatical, I would have to forgo hiking if I’m going to attempt to heal, so this was my last hurrah for a month or so.

I ended up at Bon Tempe lake which is a four mile loop trail around a lovely lake on Mt. Tamalpais (Tam. for short) in Marin County. I recalled that it’s a pretty flat trail, so I figured it wouldn’t do much damage. The jury is still out, but oh! The trees were so PETTABLE! I’ll miss hiking and walking because it’s a great way to clear my mind, breathe fresh air and get some relatively easy (easier than running) exercise and stress relief, but I’m hoping that if I attempt to pick up swimming which I know will be much easier on my back, I’ll find that same sense of clearing of the mind I get from hiking and used to get from running. Not as beautiful and no fresh air, but I guess I can still take strolls with my husband through the flat sections of our neighborhood.

A little more about stopping and petting the trees. So much like stopping to smell the roses, in healing, I think stress-relief and slowing down are two really important elements. Consider stopping to smell the roses, the trees, the salt air, the fresh snow, the cut grass. Anything to take a tiny break, notice the world around you and de-stress.

If You Write It, They Will Come

A few weeks into my back pain, I was standing at the Berkeley Bowl grocery check-out (the best grocery store in the world in my opinion). I was scanning the various earthy crunchy magazines they had displayed (probably including the organic vegetarian pet magazine – this is Berkeley after all) and noticed a magazine about healing back pain naturally. I automatically plucked it out of the rack and threw it on the check-out counter. As I stood there and watched it make its way to the scanner, I noticed the price was $20.00. This was not a hard cover book. It was a regular sized magazine. I thought twice, but decided to purchase it. As the check-out guy scanned it, he saw the price, did a double-take and said he couldn’t believe I was spending $20.00 on a magazine. I looked at the twenty-something year-old checker and said, I bet you’ve never been in chronic back pain. If you had, you would understand. This was almost three years ago and I remember it vividly.

I think anyone with chronic pain is desperate for new ideas, compassion, comradery and understanding. I will listen to anyone who wants to talk about their pain and I’ve noticed that other people in chronic pain patiently listen to me. One enters a different world when something like this happens and we will do anything and read anything in hopes of help of relief. This is one reason I believe and I hope that others will want to share this blog and post comments with ideas and thoughts and stories of their own journey toward healing. Bring it on!

Ouch and ahhh. The Benefits of Yoga?

For almost three years I have not attended a yoga class. I used to love yoga. Well, I used to have a love/hate relationship with yoga. Love because every time I walked out of a yoga class, I felt like I’d had a massage. Hate because most of the time I thought it was excruciatingly boring and pretty painful and hard. But I’m a true believer in yoga and the HUGE benefits it provides for our bodies. I really think that if done right and regularly, it would truly be a great preventative to chronic body pain of all sorts. For crying out loud, all you have to do is look at Madonna’s body and energy to see the benefits. However, I never did it on a regular basis always on the up and down seesaw of working out. Sometimes I was dedicated and went once a week, other times I got busy or poorer and stopped working out all together. However, when I injured my back, I found that yoga aggravated the pain and when I started seeking help for my pain, some of the practitioners discouraged me from doing yoga and encouraged me to “rest my back”. This seemed like a get-out-of-exercise-free-pass to me and I took it.

What I think has happened (this according to my chiropractor with whom I think I agree) is that I’ve been so careful about aggravating my back that all of the rest of my body has gone into a protection mode and the muscles that are protecting are now so tense and in such spasm that nothing will release. Including my injury. This makes perfect sense to me except that I heard the same thing from a physical therapist two years ago. I tried doing gentle stretches and got a prescription for a months-worth of muscle relaxers which I took at night to try to really relax my muscles. It didn’t work, so I had my doubts about the spasm theory. When a year later I finally dove in and got an MRI it was discovered I had a bulging disc and some tears. Which came first the chicken or the egg? Impossible to know, but it was another get-out-of-exercise-free pass and time to try various western medical practices such as getting cortisone shots. Didn’t work.

All of this plus the recession put me in debt and I stopped doing anything for my back altogether until I could take significant time off from work for proper care and healing or had enough money (or some miracle change in health insurance) to get major back surgery.

So even though there has been no miracle change in health insurance, I’m finally out of debt and here I am. Taking the time off from work, getting regular chiropractic care and dedicated to doing yoga regularly ignoring the pain (but not over-doing) to see if eventually this might-be spasm will release. The yoga class was still a love/hate thing. The instructor was great, but it was hard. I felt a lot of popping in my pain area when doing one of the poses which made me a little worried, but it didn’t seem to cause immediate pain and when I walked out I felt like I had just gotten out of a massage. The true test is tomorrow when even if I didn’t feel aggravation of my back pain during an act of exercise, the pain will intensify the next day. Time will tell, but no matter what happens, I’m determined to stick with it. After all, I splurged on the yoga studio’s introduction ten-pass discount!

Getting on a Plane

I started pretending I was leaving. I’m leaving the country and I have to catch a plane. This is how I got into the mindset that I was going to take time off. That I really was going to go through with this. I talked to friends and family and told them my plan. Everyone was encouraging. I continued seeing the chiropractor and had little glimpses of healing hope here and there and I got through it. I finished my work and as of Monday of this week I officially began my sabbatical.

The Reality of the Situation

This is supposed to be an interactive chronicle of at-home healing. At-home to make it realistic and affordable until I can find a way to open the reality-based Healing Farm. I’ve laughed through books like “Eat, Pray, Love” and movies like “Under the Tuscan Sun”. Who the hell can take that kind of time off? Oh it would be nice to have some money stashed away or a book deal to finance the sabbatical. But really. how many people can do that? The author of “Julie and Julia” is more realistic. Isn’t she? She went off to her job every day and worked on her project when she got home. Well, here I am. Somewhere in between. Although I have the advantage of being self-employed, I also have the disadvantage of not having much money and also not being able to completely check out for a month. In other words, I still need to make money. My goal became to work minimally. It’s the booking season for my business (I’m a wedding photographer) and I need to book weddings to make money. So I’m working one hour a day answering e-mails and if a new business meeting comes up I’m going to go and do the meeting. The rest of the time I’m going to read, walk, do yoga, go to the chiropractor and write. I’m going to take a bath every day in lieu of a shower and also work on my posture. I’m going to eat well and take care of my body so that maybe I’ll start losing some of the twenty pounds I’ve gained since my “injury”. Can this be done by everyone? That’s why I say I’m the middle=ground. I’m self-employed AND I don’t have kids, but I hope that with collaboration we can work together to come up with ideas for those who are in pain, but feel they cant possibly stop the hamster wheel. We’ll see. I’ve been at this for going on three days and already I’ve hit snags.

In the Beginning There Was a Eureka Moment

Right before Christmas my good friend Lyn gave me three gift certificates to a local chiropractor. She bid on them at her kid’s school auction because no one else was bidding on them and she’s been hearing me lament about my back for the past three years. Although extremely thankful at her thoughtful gesture, I was skeptical. I’ve been in pain for three years and short of major surgery have tried just about everything (including chiropractic very early on), so wasn’t exactly positive walking into the chiropractor’s office. When I arrived, she asked me a few questions, but seemed to wave off my claim that although I believe my injury to be cumulative, it must primarily stem from my long career in photography. She didn’t seem to listen to the part about my already knowing it was a cumulative thing and focused on telling me I was wrong for thinking it was about body stress from photography and that “rolling over in bed did not cause my injury”. Well, duh. I had already said that, but she asked how it happened and I told her. She didn’t listen to the part that I understood it wasn’t just from one thing.

LISTENING is so important. We know our own bodies and I think most of us are pretty intuitive. Those who throw their backs out know that it wasn’t really from lifting that feather-light box or stepping up that curb. We know it’s a lifetime of improper care. We don’t really need to have a practitioner ask us about our “injury”, not listen and then proceed to repeat what we kind of already know. Back pain and some other chronic pains are mysterious. As advanced as modern medicine is, there are so many things in the body that are still a mystery. Especially with back pain, it might not be one thing that caused your pain to begin with and it’s most likely (at least in my case) not one thing that is keeping it from healing either.

Back to the chiropractor. I know she cares and I am actually still seeing her for my pain, but let me get back to that first appointment. She put me on a traction table and stretched me out for about twenty minutes. Then she did some deep muscle and tissue massage and then some general chiropractic stuff (all that cracking and pushing and bending). The pain raging out of my tailbone area (although that’s not where my real pain is) was on fire and then slowly it released. She told me to get up and when I did, I realized I was gloriously pain-free. One of the only times in three years I was pain-free. I couldn’t help it. I started crying. Balling. Right there in her office. Of course I was so excited, I signed on for ten sessions which is why I’m still seeing her.

She warned me that the process would be like the edge of a jigsaw (I think was the analogy). That she truly believed that although there was and still might be an injury, I’ve been protecting it so long that my muscles are in constant spasm and that most likely with walking around, the pain would come back and we just have to keep working at it until eventually the muscles are re-trained to not instinctively protect the area that’s been in pain.

I went home and took a bath as she instructed and when I got out I was still pain-free! It was a breakthrough. Glorious and inspiring. My husband was out that night and I was alone to luxuriate in being pain-free. It was a release. It was a physical release, a mental release and a creative release. It was the few hours that inspired me to do what I’m doing now. It was a humbling moment too to know how repressive chronic pain can be. It’s horrendous to be in chronic pain. It’s always there. It’s exhausting. It’s depressing, it feels hopeless. It effects your body and mind equally. I’ve gained weight not just because I eat when I’m sad or stressed, but also because exercise hurt me. I used to run. I used to do yoga, I used to hike. I stopped doing anything that would worsen my pain (except sex). Suddenly I was pain free and I was reeling in ideas and hope.

The next day I was back in pain. I was also hit with the reality that I’m self-employed, it’s my slow season (not a lot of money coming in) and I’m in pain. I was NOT inspired to start a blog. I also had a good week’s worth left of work to do before I could even think about taking time off. One week turned into two weeks of work. The “jigsaw” of pain was hopeful sometimes, but also discouraging. Could I really be inspired?