I’d like to announce a new service I’m offering that I think will be just the ticket when you need a quicker consult. For those who have some nagging questions about their health issues but aren’t ready to do a full consult, I’m now offering a shorter one for half my usual fee.

If you’d like to fill out my health questionnaire, which includes a short summary of your current concerns and what you’d like to address in the consult, I will send you a detailed email with my comments and recommendations.

My fee is $30 for this mini-consult.

The mini-consult doesn’t include the more comprehensive workup or computerized FoodPharmacy™ eating guidelines that I usually create for each individual. But I always individualize my recommendations as far as possible, and you won’t receive one-size-fits-all generic responses.

The mini-consult is perfect for you if you…

• need some input to help make informed choices for your health
• have specific questions about nutrition, supplements or using homeopathy
• just need some extra support when the bumps in the road feel extra bumpy

As my grandmother used to say, “What’s not to like?”

Make a Paypal payment here and get started with a mini-consult.

After payment, use the link provided that says “return to website” to access the online questionnaire page. Not hard to fill out, really, and just do the best you can. (The questionnaire is encrypted so your responses are as secure as private email.)

Then I’ll be in touch shortly, usually within 2 business days.

And don’t forget to come back and visit my two websites for a wealth of free articles and resources spanning the whole gamut of natural healing.

Thanks for staying tuned!

Best,
Karen

Karen Robinson DynNC
http://dynamicregimen.com
http://guideforselfhealing.com/home

So in order to begin with a rational approach, rather than to just throw whatever tools we have at the symptom, hit-or-miss, we need to understand what a symptom is and what’s required in each case.

A symptom or condition is simply the outer effect of some deeper cause, not the cause itself. And that causative level needs to be understood in terms of our life force. The life force actually has two aspects, rather like the relationship between yin and yang.

One aspect of the life force is quantitative and involves processes that need to be balanced, in certain amounts. This is where you need to fill a deficiency or remove an excess of something, and this is the realm of dynamic regimen. It includes diet, nutrition, detoxification, water intake, sleep, and other lifestyle issues that impact health.

For some people, this first category—regimen—is all they need. They may simply have some imbalances that need to be corrected, and the appropriate, individualized regimen accomplishes that.

If a person has no problematic symptoms, they still need proper regimen to maintain their health. And when the body is stressed with with symptoms, we obviously need proper diet, nutrition, water, sleep, etc.  So, individualized regimen is always the first step for everyone.

Dynamic regimen provides the foundation that you need for maintaining or restoring your health.

The other aspect of the life force is qualitative. This is the realm of true disease (and we use the term in a very specific way, not as conventional medicine does). When there is a disturbance in this area, it could involve emotional disturbances, shocks and traumas, infectious diseases, drug effects, and inherited predispositions to disease.

So, symptoms could be stemming from imbalances, or diseases, or both. Now it becomes clearer that to simply target the symptom and try to suppress it is not going to resolve the real problem.

Once the appropriate regimen is underway, some people need to go on for further treatment to remove deeper disease disturbances. Then I refer people for treatment with the Heilkunst system of medicine (which includes homeopathy but is much more comprehensive).

The causes may be very different for each person with the same type of symptom. For example, for one person with fatigue symptoms, regimen may be all they need to come back to balance. For another person, regimen is the foundation but they also need treatment to remove various deeper disturbances that are contributing to it.

Let’s take an example of a skin rash. For one person, the rash could be related to a food allergy; for another person it’s emotional issues; and for another person it could have been triggered by a vaccination or other trauma. Each case could have several causative factors, and each would need to be treated differently.

But the nutrition/regimen has to be there, in any case, to correct imbalances and support the healing process, fill deficiencies, balance the metabolism, help with detoxification and rebuilding new tissue, etc.

I can’t guarantee that nutrition and regimen will be the whole solution for a chronic health problem. But there can’t be a whole solution without it.

Study is done by distance, via email correspondence with tutors, and teleconferences. Study material is provided, and except for the shorter courses, the programs include lectures in audio file format.

I highly recommend these programs to anyone who wants to advance their understanding of natural medicine and embark on a truly unique and inspiring educational adventure.

The HCH offers various programs including:

• Homeopathy at Home, Work and Play: Certificate in Home and Basic First-Aid Use
  This is an 80-hour certificate course to learn the basics of homeopathy for self-limiting conditions. It introduces the student to the profound genius of Dr. Hahnemann and the Heilkunst system, even in such a short format.

• Dynamic Health Counselor Certificate Course
  This is a two-year program that teaches nutrition and all aspects of therapeutic regimen from the point of view of Heilkunst and the Dynamic system. This involves the deeper level of function that underlies the biochemical processes.

For information about other programs offered by the HCH, including a 4-year intensive diploma program (DHHP) in medical Heilkunst, see Hahnemann College for Heilkunst.

An example of this is “statin” drugs given to treat or prevent cardiovascular disease. Statin drugs deplete the body of CoQ10, which is an essential nutrient for heart muscle. A deficiency of CoQ10 over a period of time can lead to angina or heart attack!  So the drug actually can cause the problem it’s supposed to be treating.

Below is a list of some of the nutrient depletions caused by various drugs, so you can consider supplementing accordingly. Of course, the issue of how to supplement requires a more comprehensive look, but this is a basic guideline.  Generally, most of the drugs in the same class of drug will have the same nutrient depeletion effect.

DRUG TYPE                                                NUTRIENTS IT DEPLETES

Sometimes we talk about a great technique for preventing and getting rid of dental plaque that can make a huge difference in your oral health and save teeth. Other times we talk about the deep emotional patterns that can keep you stuck in a chronic health condition, and how to become more conscious of those patterns so you can release them.

Some people prefer to work on the pragmatic side of things; and for others, it ultimately becomes most practical to work on the side that’s more difficult to access and more challenging to face, the emotional/spiritual side. Usually the best approach is an integration of both.

Personally I have felt at times that I needed a quick fix to “put out a fire” of an acute situation. That situation might have a proximal cause like “lack of iron.” But there may be deeper reasons why the body isn’t utilizing the iron it has, and then simply supplying more iron won’t work – we need to look to a deeper level of function and a deeper cause to remedy the problem.

But each person has their own unique path, and what one person needs to experience in order to heal can’t be compared to what another needs to experience.

In many areas of natural healing we encounter injunctions about what we must do in order to get well. Your intellect might agree and say, “Sure, I know I need to do that.”

But what often happens is that your unconscious is rebelling; you are feeling railroaded or admonished and not in resonance with this injunction – because your inner wisdom knows it’s not what you need right now, even if your intellect thinks so.

This is one of the important reasons why individualized guidance can be so helpful. You can get loads of great ideas about “the best new antioxidant” or “the best detox program.” No one needs my services to find out about the zillions of products that are on the market.

But do you really know that a particular product or program is what you really need at this time, and what your own body/mind is going to resonate with and make use of, safely and without causing more imbalances?

The choices that will really support your health, and not just temporarily cover up symptoms, require more than an intellectual, linear approach.

Health is more than biochemistry. Each person has a biochemical individuality – that’s complex enough! But also the blueprint for the biochemistry is the level of energy, the soul/spiritual level, and everything that manifests on the physical level has its seed in the soul/spiritual level.

That’s why we work on all these levels to get to the root of the problems and to support each level in its re-adjustment to a healthier condition.

Even dental plaque isn’t just about an imbalanced biochemistry!

But at a higher level it’s about emotional armoring – the emotional blockage we create in order to prevent the life force from expanding too much when there is a held emotional pattern of fear. The emotional armoring has its counterpart on the physical level often as muscular tension, and/or dental plaque – there are many ways the armoring can manifest.

So for example, I teach people about oral hygiene (the kind that really works safely, not the conventional dogma), and about diet and nutritional supplements to rebuild the body and remineralize the teeth, but also about the emotional issues that can be blocking the healing process.

Healing can be complex, but doesn’t need to be complicated. There are many facets, many dimensions, but a rational program can be devised that honors your completely individual path and doesn’t leave your unconscious inner child throwing a tantrum!

Let’s start with something our inner wisdom already knows – there’s a real difference between a “living” food and its overcooked, pasteurized, microwaved, or industrially processed counterpart. The difference is chi; prana; orgone energy. But what needs to be examined is how that energy actually works to nourish us.

What we’re really extracting from foods is not the biochemical constituents, not chemistry but energy. At the cellular level, we can see that process as hydrogen transfer – that’s why pH (hydrogen potential) is so fundamental.

Foods that sustain life are like little packages of condensed energy. What we’re doing when we eat food is essentially breaking down and appropriating the energy of the food. These forces within the food are foreign until we take them in and overcome the foreign forces and make them our own. That process is mediated through heat, and that’s what digestion is really about.

How do we come to a rational understanding of nutrition?

The problem we run into in understanding how nutrition works is that we have the language of chemistry and the concepts of energy, and we tend to use whichever one is convenient, or try to mix them together randomly rather unconsciously. We might be comfortable talking about chi or life energy in a certain context, but when it comes to nutrition we tend to want to stick to the material view and explain things in terms of chemistry, because that’s the realm of sense perception and perhaps easier to look at.

Our organs of sense perception and our ordinary cognition is more developed than the more etheric, supersensible knowing, so we use what comes easier. But to be able to grasp the meaning of the flux and flow of function, we need to develop a more etheric thinking that can see the living properties of things beyond the material level. This is what has been called the Dynamic view.

The entities and substances we’re looking at aren’t static and fixed in time and space – in this view, eating a fresh raw vegetable might be functionally identical to a practice that generates chi. The intellect looking at the material chemistry would see a big difference! But functional thinking sees a distinction rather than a separation. It sees the continuity, the same underlying phenomenon.

We need a deeper physiological basis for bridging the gap between chemistry and energy. Otherwise we have a sort of schizophrenic split between on the one hand the mystical realm of energy, and on the other hand the materialistic realm of only what we can perceive with the senses.

So we have to look at energy in a way that can be grounded in the cellular structure. The way that nourishment functions, there’s an etheric process going on whereby we use radiant energy from the sun, indirectly through food, air and water, and generate internal light. There’s actually a physiology of this inner light metabolism.

This is a true physiology that’s about the deeper functioning of forces and energies which drive the biochemistry. (Rudolf Steiner laid out this understanding clearly, although extracting it from his writing is quite a workout!)

There is a critical difference between “living” foods and processed foods. “Living” water such as artesian well water could be assayed biochemically and found similar to other forms of purified or spring water. But looking at it biophysically, it’s been seen that the living water will enhance the function of cellular hydration, because of its crystalline structure, whereas processed water doesn’t. The materialistic view will just see all water as functionally equal, and focus on the presence of material toxins as making the difference.

We can sense the difference in food and water that has a lot of life energy – they feel better and taste better. That sensing is through supersensible organs, not sense organs, and isn’t measurable in the same way, but it’s no less real. Even if we’re not yet conscious of how we’re using those supersensible organs, we still know that there is something more behind the outer structure of things. No matter how microscopically we might analyze it, there’s some living quality apart from that, which we resonate with.

We can see on the biophysical level what happens when we remove the life energy from food and water. Industrial processing destroys the inherent crystalline structure which is the key to the life-giving property of food. Crystals transfer information, so at that level it’s really the information – consciousness – that we’re internalizing by taking in nutrients. Generate your own inner light, and live in truth, and you may not need to be concerned about ingesting living foods!

Although, then we’d be guided by the higher spiritual function of Reason, and resonance which is based in love would solve the problem of what to eat.

Most of us are still in the process of transforming our relationships based on attraction (potato chips, yum!) to those based on resonance. When we eat heavily processed food which is attractive but doesn’t resonate, it becomes like a dead weight, an energy drain. Animals fed on microwaved food for a month starved, although they had access to as much quantity of food as they wanted.

Some processes like culturing foods or natural fermentation or sprouting actually enhance the crystalline structure and bring out life energy especially when it’s dormant in seeds, and that’s why traditional cultures have always used those methods – they knew the benefits instinctively if not consciously.

Seen from this perspective, living foods like raw milk from healthy animals have little in common with their commercial counterparts. When we hear about the problem with milk, it’s about the commercial, pasteurized dead material that’s sold as milk, not the live food that it was to begin with.

Those live foods are suited to us, because the biophysical function of those foods promotes inner light and life. Then we need to determine whether a particular food is resonant with our particular typology – according to various typology systems such as metabolic typing, glandular typing, blood typing, Ayurveda, etc., and take various other factors into account to put together a proper diet plan.

But aside from individual needs, we need to understand the functional reality behind nutrition. Let’s look at the way that carbs are stored as fat when we don’t need any more for biological function. We assume that we’ve simply eaten too much or the wrong proprortions of macronutrients. Or we look at smaller and smaller units of biochemical substances and relationships to try to explain what’s going on.

But digestion and metabolism has a supersensible or subtle energy function in the astral body, which is prior to all that. The breakdown of food is a function of the astral body. When the astral isn’t proprely engaged, even a diet that looks perfectly suitable to the person in theory won’t be handled properly. (The Kidney is involved in this astral function of properly transforming food and generating inner light).

The astral takes us to the soul level, so this is how we can begin to bridge the gap between body and soul – they are really a functional polarity, which is not just an abstract concept but something that we can ground in actual physiology.

What are the real principles that determine whether a vegetarian or meat diet is appropriate for a particular person?

The choice to eat meat or not is an emotionally charged issue for most people, and it taps into deeply held beliefs.  But we can look at it from a dynamic view.

Plants contain etheric forces which are easy to assimilate, whereas animals contain more astral forces which require more energy to break down. This doesn’t mean that we should always go the easier route and eat only plants!

And depending on how the animal was raised, the quality of the astral forces will be different, hence animals raised on pasture and killed properly will yield more digestible food than factory farmed animal foods. And it will ground us in the body, which creates an important balance for many people.

So the choice depends on the dynamic physiology of the individual and which functions they need to stimulate and strengthen.

Animal foods are grounding, and good for a person whose “upper” bodies (ego and astral) need to be grounded in the lower metabolic pole.  For those who need the grounding and incarnating properties of animal foods, a more vegetarian diet even if done meticulously with the highest quality foods can be profoundly weakening.

A more vegetarian diet frees the  consciousness from the earth pole, which is why it’s favored in certain spiritual traditions.  When the upper bodies are too deeply incarnated in the earth forces and need to be freed up, then a vegetarian diet is appropriate.  Often the diet a person needs will change from time to time according to these functional changes; particular health challenges presenting at a particular time; typlogies such as blood type, body/glandular type, etc.

Another aspect of this issue is that animal foods with their higher astrality challenge us to bring our own digestive forces to bear to strip away the foreign astrality. If the ego/astral forces are weak, it can be difficult for the person to break down those astral forces in the food, and the foreign forces lead to food allergies and immune problems. Eating animal foods raw instead of cooked can mitigate this problem to some extent, as the raw food contains more etheric forces that are easily assimmilable.

Vegetarian diets are in this sense less challenging especially if the person doesn’t have strong ego/astral forces. But less of a challenge isn’t always what we need – it’s the challenge itself that strengthens the upper forces.  We want to provide just enough stimulation for the activation and development of our own forces, but not so much as to overwhelm our resources, just as a good teacher finds that balance with a student in any learning situation.

When you’re sick, you want to concentrate on the etheric and not challenge yourself too much with breaking down the astral forces of higher protein foods, so you can take meat broths and the raw foods that are more easily assimmilable.

Recommended reading:

Water and Salt: The Essence of Life, by Dr. Barbara Hendel
Nutrition: Food, Health, and Spiritual Development, by Rudolf Steiner

Someone you know feels energized eating a certain way, while you might feel irritable and starving on that same type of diet. Clearly the key is biochemical individuality, and no “off the shelf” diet program can take your individual needs into account.

Diet is complex, yet it can be relatively simple at the same time. There is a complex of factors we need to look at to determine which foods are best for you—the foods that will strengthen your system rather than weaken it.

Because we now have diet typing research–including Dr. Abravanel’s body/glandular typing, Dr. Laura Power’s blood typing, and William Wolcott’s metabolic typing–we can systematically determine what fuel your particular body runs well on. That may be different from what your friends or family members do well on.

There’s a multitude of diet programs and opinions about what works best. Most are based on one particular aspect of diet, such as low-carb, or raw foods. People make some seeming progress with these one-size-fits-all schemes at first—mostly due to the fact that they’re eliminating the junk foods they were eating before.

Sometimes one small intervention, like cutting down on sugar or processed foods, can make a big difference. So even one of those pre-fab diets that doesn’t really fit you can give you some benefits at first, simply because of what you’re NOT eating. But we want to take it a step further.

The factors that determine your ideal diet are:

• Body type–which of your endocrine glands is dominant
• Blood type
• Metabolic type
• food allergies and intolerances
• existing nutrient imbalances
• ideal weight
• current health conditions

Most of these are probably familiar to you, but body typing may not be. Body typing is the result of extensive research by Dr. Elliot Abravanel and others including Dr. Laura Power in very recent years. Dr. Abravanel found that each person has a particular body type, which reflects which endocrine gland is more active in their metabolism than others.

Body Typing

Dr. Abravanel found that there are four basic endocrine glands that determine body type: Pituitary, Thyroid, Adrenals and Gonads.

For example, an Adrenal type will be generally strong and sturdy, with their adrenal glands being dominant. Their body shape and pattern of putting on weight will reflect that—they tend to have a strong, stocky build with relatively broad shoulders. When they put on weight, it’s higher up on the body, not so much on the thighs and hips.

Adrenal types tend to crave greasy and salty foods, which make them feel better in the short run but actually weaken their adrenals in the longer run, by overstimulating them.

A healthy diet for each body type (and the one which would help each person achieve their ideal weight and maintain it) would de-emphasize the foods that stimulate their dominant gland, while emphasizing the foods that strengthen and support their recessive (less active)  glands.

Many people believe that their food cravings are signalling a nutritional need for that particular food. But what we’re actually craving is the feeling that the food gives us, as a result of overstimulating our dominant gland. The overstimulation weakens and exhausts the gland, and sets up a vicious cycle in which we crave more of the food to get the stimulation.

By eating foods that strenthen the recessive glands and give the exhausted dominant gland a break, we can break that vicious cycle. Then the food cravings disappear, and the foods that are healthiest for us become the same ones we actually like!

Diet is no longer a battle of will and a matter of depriving yourself of the foods that you love. Your preferences shift as you begin to eat the foods that your particular body really needs.

You can begin to experience the deep feeling of satisfaction that comes from eating food that your body really wants and needs, which is a different experience from the kind of temporary satisfaction (followed by let-down)  that comes from addictive cravings.

When you eat the foods that your exhausted dominant gland is telling you to eat, you’re relieving some tension, and that feels good in a way. But you’ll notice that you don’t really feel relaxed or satisfied in a deeper way. Something is missing…

The Four-Beat Cycle

There’s a cycle we naturally go through, which Wilhelm Reich called the life cycle or the four-beat cycle. We start with a tension, which in this case is hunger. It grows, and we feel charged. Then we need to satisfy the hunger, so we eat, and that discharges the tension. But the fourth part of the cycle is relaxation.

Foods that are overstimulating and weakening for us don’t allow us to get to the relaxation, so we never feel finished. We feel relieved of hunger in a way, but still on the prowl for something else. Many people have this kind of experience fairly often.

But with the proper diet, we can be getting to the relaxation phase at every meal, feeling satisfied and complete. Hunger naturally arises again for the next meal, and we can experience the full four-beat cycle as it naturally occurs, without cutting it short and leaving ourselves stuffed yet still unsatisfied.

Blood Typing

The diet system based on blood types was popularized by Dr. D’Adamo, author of Eat Right For Your Type, but was further developed by Dr. Laura Power who brought out some new insight based on extensive allergy testing.

Blood type determines a certain type of biochemical individuality relating to the immune system. People with different blood types evolved under different environmental conditions, so they adapted to different foods. This means that foods that a person with a particular blood type is not adapted to, will be treated as foreign, and the body will produce an immune reaction.

People with type O blood inherited a gene from very ancient ancestors in tropical areas– southern Asia, Africa, or tropical areas of the Americas. You may have type O blood even if your more recent ancestors are from Europe, because you have to go back even further to see where the genetic adaptations took place!  Type O’s are adapted to tropical hunter-gatherer foods, such as meats, some seafood, poultry, root vegetables, greens, and some tropical fruits.

People with type A blood had ancient ancestors in northern Europe, and do best with European foods including poultry, some seafood, meats, and European fruits and vegetables. They can tolerate more grains than other types.

Type B is an Asian type, and type AB is a middle-eastern type.

Metabolic Typing

Metabolic typing in its modern form is the culmination of the work of  many researchers. The work that pulls this all together is William Wolcott’s book,  The Metabolic Typing Diet.

It’s based on the polarity between the oxidative system and the autonomic  nervous system as control stystems that work to keep us metabolically in balance. Each person’s metabolic functioning will either be dominated by the oxidative system or the ANS (or a balance). Depending on which system is dominant in a particular person, and in what way that system is out of balance, the metabolic typing diet helps to bring the metabolism back into balance.

This can be very helpful for people with significant or stubborn health issues, and especially for those with metabolic imbalances related to diabetes and obesity.

Putting it All Together

So the question airses: How do we put together all these different systems, and what happens when a food is good for your blood type but not for your body type?

FoodPharmacy™ software is a new tool that allows the practitioner to input all the factors that determine which diet is right for you, including blood type, body/glandular type and metabolic typing when appropriate. A complex of factors turn into a simple, elegant food chart listing 300 foods.

The practitioner first determines which typing systems are applicable in your case. For someone who needs to lose some weight and feel more energetic, body typing is going to be important for them. For someone with no significant health issues but just wants to improve their health generally, blood tying may be the main criteria for their eating guidelines.

If we’re working with both body type and blood type, and for example, broccoli is fine for your body type but not for your blood type, then broccoli will show up in red (to be avoided). So the foods that are good for you to be eating (in green and black) are the ones that have passed all the “tests” that the software puts them through in your case.

According to the information you gave in your questionnaire, other factors may be added in—which organs and systems you need to strengthen, and which health issues you’re most concerned with. Food that show up in green reflect those factors—they are the ones that have been found to be especially supportive of your weak areas.

Breaking long-standing eating habits isn’t an easy task. Often there are deeper emotional issues involved, and there are ways to facilitate working through those held patterns. It’s a process of making small improvements over time, and the proper dietary guidelines will support you along the way and help make it easier so it’s not the kind of struggle we’ve all gone through with diets.

So by “easy” I don’t mean it’s a piece of cake. It takes effort to make changes. The Customized Eating Guidelines provide a firm foundation on which to build a diet that provides the fuel that your “engine” was designed to run best on.  Now it’s a matter of working with those guidelines in a practical way that starts from where you are right now, and doesn’t expect you to make unreasonable leaps, but supports your ongoing progress.

Reminders:

• Diet is never a static issue, and our needs change over time, so think about updating your eating guidelines as things change.

• In addition to diet, healthy “regimen” involves proper hydration, sleep, exercise, etc., and there are no one-size-fits-all rules for those things either!

Indulge in treats sometimes! Remember that striving for perfection isn’t any healthier than eating junk food. Be firm yet gentle with yourself.

Please let me know if I can help support you further in all aspects of your regimen.

All the best,

Karen

Regimen is the multi-dimensional field that includes diet, nutrition, exercise, proper sleep and many other lifestyle factors. This is the foundation of your health, supporting your optimal functioning by maintaining dynamic balance and promoting healing.

Improving your regimen means shoring up your life energy and strengthening yourself to resist illness and feel more healthy.

What is dynamic balance?

Balance is homeostasis, or the equilibrium of the functions of the organism. It’s dynamic because  your life functions are always in interrelationship, not isolated processes, and balance is constantly adjusting according to changing conditions.

Dynamic Regimen is concerned with balancing your biochemistry, but also with the more fundamental functions that drive the biochemistry. A dynamic approach draws from this deeper understanding of the functioning of body, mind and soul/spirit.

One-size-fits-all programs and fad diets don’t work, because your biological typologies are individual, and your regimen needs to accommodate your individuality.

Here’s a common predicament -

• You’d like to upgrade your diet and lifestyle, eat healthier, maintain your best weight, have more energy and improve your resistance to illness – but popular nutritional programs don’t seem to work for you.

• You feel confused and frustrated with all the conflicting advice and multitude of hyped “health food” products.
• You’re wondering why a program that works for your friend or spouse doesn’t work for you.
• You’re tired of feeling deprived on restrictive diets and struggling with fitness plans. You know there must be a way to get your health needs and your natural desires on the same team!

Now you can work with someone who can sort through the confusion – to advise on what’s right for you as an individual, working with the wisdom of your body, not fighting it.