Project Creative Vision

April Specials: Breathe and Rejuvenate!

April is the National Stress Awareness Month.  Did you know that stress accounts for 90% of all primary doctor visits in this country?  And that 48% of all adults suffer from the adverse effects of stress in their lives?

To do my part in combating this epidemic, I have joined efforts with some of the best local practitioners to offer you opportunities to take care of your health and wellness at affordable prices.  Please take advantage of these - and here's to your best and most radiant health! 

Save $30 on a Series of 3 Energy Sessions! 

Energy balancing is calming, uplifting, and rejuvenating.  It supports your body's natural self-healing mechanisms and helps you sustaing optimum health and well-being.  It helps reduce pain, relieve stress, anxiety, and depression, and support healing on multiple levels.

This package is designed to help you take advantage of the cumulative health benefits of consistent energy work while saving over 10% on each session.

Price per session with the package: $85.  Regular price $95.  Sessions are 90 minutes each. 

Package available through April 30.  Sessions can be used through July 31, 2011

To purchase your package, please use the button below:

April Special - Energy Work

3 Sessions $255.00

  

 

Breathe!  Discovering a Path to Peace, Joy and Equanimity - New Workshop!

Join us for an information-packed, experiential workshop to help you reduce stress and restore vitality through the power of breathing and aromatherapy!

We will use guided breathing techniques and the relaxing and uplifting aromas of essential oils of lavender, orange, and ylang-ylang to help you diminish stress, tension and anxiety, and create peace, joy and equanimity in your life!

Come ready to relax and reconnect with your essential self!

I am proud to be co-teaching this workshop with my colleague, Lauren Chelec Cafritz, a DC-based BreathWork therapist.  I encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to experience her work!

$35 in advance, $40 at the door.

For more information and to register>>>

Save $55 on the Soapstone Instensive!

Immerse yourself into healing experience with the Soapstone Intensive and breake through the  emotional blocks that have been holding you back!

Soapstone Intensive is a 3.5-hour session that combines into a seamless whole intuitive counseling, energy psychology (EFT), and body-based energetic release therapy.  In the course of the Intensive, you will work with me and my two colleagues at Soapstone Integrative Health Associates, Mimi Ratner and Mark Sullivan to help you achieve rapid progress with the issues you've been facing.

Clients report leaving the Intensive unburdened, uplifted and energized.  Many have reported taking their lives to whole new levels in ways they'd never thought possible.

For more information or to book your appointment, please email izabella@izabellatabarovsky.com

 

The Physiological Response of Energy Healing

This is reprinted from the Healing Touch Level I training manual and is authored by Carol Komitor, the founder of Healing Touch for Animals. Please visit her website for information on how energy work and aromatherapy can help restore your pets' health and well-being.

"Understanding the way the body responds during energy medicine facilitation provides the fundamentals of how healing occurs. This chart illustrates a full perspective of the body’s reactions to energy medicine.

Using energetic vocabulary, this chart explains the body’s physiological response during an energy medicine treatment. Following the chart in a clockwise direction, beginning with “Relaxes Body” and ending with “Regulates Immune System”, this chart demonstrates the body’s reactions during an energy healing session/treatment.

• Energy medicine treatment initiates relaxation to the body.
• The relaxation response releases endorphins in the brain.
• The endorphins relax the muscles.
• Relaxed muscles create more space between cells providing increased circulation.
• The increased blood flow elevates oxygen levels throughout the body.
• Accelerated blood flow allows nutrients to be absorbed more efficiently.
• Enzymes build for proper digestion.
• Hormones regulate to strengthen the body’s constitution.
• Toxins release from the body.
• Healthy cells begin to regenerate.
• A sense of well-being is established which promotes healing.
• When the body has a stable physiology, the immune system is regulated. The resulting stability within the immune system affects the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual facets of the body’s energy field supporting self-healing."

How to Know that Your Essential Oils are Truly Therapeutic

Essential oils are highly complex substances, and many factors affect their quality. These include the quality of soil where the plants were grown, the time they were harvested (some plants can only be harvested during a particular month of the year to generate the particular quality of the oil), the speed and temperature of distillation, the bottling process, etc. 

Unfortunately, there are too many synthetic varieties on the market, often sold, unwittingly, by the most reputable health food stores.  While syntethetic oils may still smell like the authentic essences, they contain none the originals' therapeutic qualities and may, in fact, be harmful.

(Because the oil molecules are so small, they penetrate the skin surface and enter the blood stream within moments of application.  You don't want synthetic varieties entering your blood stream.)

So here's what you want to find out if you're looking for top-quality ssential oils:

1. Does the company producing the oils own any farms on which they raise herbs for oils? If they do, are they new farms on land formerly polluted with herbicides, pesticides, and chemicals that contain residuals from the past, or are they farming land that is clean, which has never been cultivated or has been untilled for at least the last 50 years?

2. Does the company have their own fully equipped testing laboratory to verify an oil's composition?

3. Do they have anyone on staff with a trained nose who can analyze oils by their smell? (There are less than 200 people in the world with noses sufficiently trained to discern the chemistry of a fragrance.)

4. If their company purchases oils from outside suppliers, do they visit the distilleries and farms of those suppliers periodically to observe if the herbs are grown organically, i.e. without pesticides, herbicides, or chemical fertilizers?

5. Do they know if the grower has a testing laboratory on the farm to determine when the crop is at its peak for oil harvesting?

6. Do they know if the crops were actually harvested at their peak time and, if so, was there an inordinate delay in taking them to the still and into the cookers?

7. Do they know if their distillery personnel understand the art and science of distilling, how to pack the cookers, how to administer the steam, how to maintain minimum temperatures and pressures throughout the cooker, and how to continuously monitor the process throughout distillation to make sure the oil produced contains all of its components in the proper proportions?

8. If their supplier makes a mistake in the distillation or harvesting processes that results in an inferior grade of oil, does that supplier sell the oil anyway or do they discard it?

9. Do they know if the cookers in the distilleries of their suppliers have domed lids or cone shaped lids? Most stills use dome-shaped lids. Cone topped cookers deliver a better grade of oil than dome tops.

10. Do they know if their suppliers supplement the distillation process with solvents to extract additional oil from the plant matter?

11. Do they know if their suppliers bottle their oils directly from the distillery without modifying the composition of the natural oil by adding anything or taking anything away?

 

Essential Oils for Animal Health

Great piece on how essential oils can be used to support your pets' health.

Best oils to use, as the article points out, are lavender, franckincense, lemongrass, and pepperment.  Also, check out this testimonial for the use of helichrysum to remove a tumor on a dog.

As always with essential oils, knowledge is key.  Essential oils are highly complex substances.  Many factors affect their quality, including the quality of soil where the plants were grown, the time they were harvested (some plants can only be harvested during a particular month of the year to generate the particular quality of the oil), the speed and temperature of distillation, the bottling process, etc.  And unfortunately, there are just too many synthetic varieties on the market, often sold, unwittingly, by the most reputable health food stores.

In my next post, I'll give you some questions you can ask your essential oils distributor to ensure that what you're buying are pure, unadulterated, therapeutic-grade oils.

 

Frankincense Oil Shown to Kill Bladder Cancer Cells

Evidence has grown over the years, demonstrating anti-cancerous properties of one of the most ancient healing agents known to man - the essential oil of Frankincense.  Here's a link to a study by the University of Okahoma researchers, published by peer-reviewed BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Conclusion of the study: "Frankincense oil appears to distinguish cancerous from normal bladder cells and suppress cancer cell viability. Microarray and bioinformatics analysis proposed multiple pathways that can be activated by frankincense oil to induce bladder cancer cell death. Frankincense oil might represent an alternative intravesical agent for bladder cancer treatment."

 

New Vision of Holistic Health

As regular readers of this blog know, my interest in holistic holistic health and wellness has grown over the past year.  As a student of energy medicine, aromatherapy, Reiki, and general principles of holistic health, I've come to realize that, if we want to change our lives for the better, we can't be looking at just one isolated slice of our life for the answers.  We are whole, complex human beings, and to create positive change in our lives, we need to treat ourselves as such and address the challenges we face on many different levels.

This growing interest led me last week to the Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public, put together by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.  I left the Summit inspired by the discussion and the possibilities for all of us together to build a society that fosters holistic health and honors each and every one of its members as a whole and complete human being.

To continue the discussion that started there, and extend it to those who were unable to join us, I have invited several friends who are leading the effort here in the Washington, DC area to offer their thoughts and perspectives on the Summit here on my blog.  

Below are the guest posts:

Lucrezia Mangione argues that we are part of a sea change in health care and there is room for all at the table in Creating the Culture of Wellness. 

Daphne White reports on groundbreaking Senate testimonies by Mehmet Oz, Dean Ornish, Andrew Weil, and Mark Hyman, and on Sen. Harkin's moving address to the IOM Summit.  Daphne calls upon all CAM practitioners to "put in sweat equity" to make sure that integrative health care is really part of the health care reform.

And Izabella Tabarovsky (yes, that's me) chimed in with some takeaways concerning what we, as CAM practitioners, can do to make the new, emerging paradigm a reality.

I have also just added a post on Dr. Mehmet Oz's remarks at the event and may be adding more as I go through my notes. 

In the meantime, the full webcast of the conference is now available online, so you can watch the entire event or the parts that interest you the most from the comfort of your own home.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Please share your comments under any of the posts that have caught your attention.  Let's all join in the revolution that's taking place in the way we as a society view and create health and wellness! 

IOM Summit: Opportunities Are Huge

But CAM Practitioners Must Seize the Initiative

 By Izabella Tabarovsky

Note: This post is part of the discussion on the Summit on Integrative Medicine

The 3-day Institute of Medicine Summit on Integrative Health was truly mind-broadening for me.  I came away excited about the possibilities and bursting with ideas.

The key was that we are living at a time of huge opportunities.  But no one is going to hand anything to us on a silver platter.  We must fight for what we believe in - and we must get creative about it. 

We can continue complaining how mainstream establishment doesn't recognize or accept us, that insurance companies don't reimburse us, and how the public doesn't understand what we do.  Or we can get beyond the current paradigm and think creatively about our competitive advantages vis-a-vis mainstream medicine and go there. 

Two key ideas were voiced at the Summit in this regard:  Community-based care networks and work-site CAM interventions.  Both require initiative on our part. And to become viable, both require that we overcome our tendency to get silo'ed and act alone.  Right now we will benefit from acting together, from helping each other out, from, together, creating the new paradigm in which the benefits of CAM modalities will be apparent to everyone. 

With that, here, briefly, are some of my take-aways from the Summit:

• The new paradigm is being birthed.  It seemed that everyone, from MDs to insurance reps, agreed that the old paradigm of health care is broken. We are present at the birth of the new paradigm.  No one knows yet what it will be.  The moment to contribute to the shaping of this new paradigm is now.  Each of us participating in the CAM field must now step up to the plate and do our part in making sure that integrative health care truly becomes a reality. 

• From evidence-based practice to practice-based evidence.  Pedigreed scientists such as Ken Brigham and Lawrence Green suggested that "to reject a treatment because we don't understand the mechanism is a mistake." The idea that randomized control trials don't work with CAM modalities and that practice-based evidence is "the only way to integrate practices that have hundreds of years behind them" was voiced repeatedly.  This means that if your practice shows results, that should be considered good enough evidence.  Music to the ears of a CAM practitioner.

• Shortage of primary care physicians creates opportunities for CAM practitioners.  The PCP shortage is already affecting the health care industry.  By 2025 we could be short as many as 200,000 PCPs, and, according to Richard "Buzz" Cooper, the health care reform could increase the shortfall by another 400,000.  Doctors' functions are becoming increasingly narrow and high-tech.  The offloading of tasks by physicians will accelerate, leaving physicians with increasingly narrower responsibilities, more high-tech and less relevant to the real issues affecting the health of their patients.  Other disciplines will, by necessity, be called upon to fill the gap, and this is where CAM practitioners will have their entry.

• There is room for everyone at the table to provide an amalgam of services.  This means that there will be room for everyone, from chiropractors to acupuncturists to health coaches to energy healers in creating an amalgam of care.  Because of the above, we are moving into a place where physicians will share the platform of care with a broad range of non-physician clinicians. 

• We must educate MDs and the public about our modalities. For the above point to be true, PCPs have to become educated about what we as CAM practitioners do.  83 percent of PCP practices in this country are groups of 1 or 2.  They account for nearly 50 percent of primary care.  This means that there are great opportunities to develop community care groups that could include nutritionists, dietitians, social workers, all connected to small PCP practices. The problem is that many times MDs, along with general public, have no idea what it is that we do.  So it is up to each and every one of us to take the initiative and reach out to the PCPs and educate them.  Go introduce yourself to PCPs in your neighborhood, tell them about what you do, show your credentials, build a relationship.  Begin where you are. 

• Empathy is CAM practitioners' competitive advantage.  I was floored by a slide presented by one of the speakers that illustrated the dramatic decline of empathy in medical students as they progress through medical school. This shift particularly affects men, whose levels of empathy drop nearly to zero.  (I don't have that particular slide, but here's a link to another onethat demonstrates the same point.)  What this suggests to me that we as CAM practitioners are, first and foremost, in the business of empathy.  In fact, empathy is our competitive advantage vis-a-vis the MDs - all the more so because studies show that empathy is the top quality that patients long to see in their caregivers.  Emphasize this with your prospects, let this be your selling point.

The one thing I found myself wishing for was that the Summit had lived up to the word "integrative" in its name and included the discussion of mind and spirit, not just the body. Dealing with questions of meaning and purpose is integral to whole person health.  But hey, you can't get everything right right away.  Perhaps next time.   

Sen. Harkin: Time to End Discrimination against Alternative Health Care Practices

Practitioners Must Lobby Congress to Make it Happen

By Daphne White, CHTP

Note: This is a guest post that is part of the discussion on the Summit on Integrative Medicine

It was not your usual Senate hearing.  Testifying on behalf of integrative medicine before Senators Harkin, Mikulski and Enzi at the Senate HELP Committee were four leading physicians:  Mehmet Oz, Dean Ornish, Andrew Weil and Mark Hyman.  Testifying on behalf of the status quo was … no one!  That’s an unusual set-up on Capitol Hill, where panels are usually set up to represent “both points of view.”  Lobbyists for the medical establishment were present to watch the proceedings and plot their next steps, but they didn’t have a seat at the table.  Not this time, anyway.

By any measure, it was a watershed week:   the Feb. 26 HELP Committee hearing was the second in four days to focus on integrative medicine.  And the very next day, Sen. Harkin traveled across town to the Institute of Medicine, to address the 500-strong Summit on Integrative Medicine.

“Clearly, the time has come to ‘think anew’ and to ‘disenthrall ourselves’ from the dogmas and biases that have made our current health care system – based overwhelmingly on conventional medicine – in so many ways wasteful and dysfunctional,” Harkin told both groups, borrowing some quotes from President Lincoln’s 1862 address to Congress.

“It is time to end the discrimination against alternative health care practices.  It’s time for America’s health care system to emphasize coordination and continuity of care, patient-centeredness, and prevention.  And it’s time to adopt an integrative approach that takes advantage of the very best scientifically based medicines and therapies, whether conventional or alternative.”

Speaking to the IOM Summit on Monday, Harkin said, “I have just four words for you:  Our time has come!”  He added that IOM visitors to Washington might think “it looks like the same old Washington, but it’s not.” 

Creating a Culture of Wellness

Note: This is a guest post that is part of the discussion on the Summit on Integrative Medicine

By Lucrezia Mangione, CHTP/I, CMT 

Have you ever thought about . . .

• What a healthy health care system looks like?

• What a patient or person-centered approach to health and healing is?
• A place for certified, credentialed and/or licensed health care practitioners co-existing within a system that engenders cross-disciplinary connection, discussion and collaboration? 
• What happens when all credentialed and/or licensed health practitioners collaborate together, in support of the suffering person/patient with an individualized well-care program? 
• What an honest, authentic discussion of the inherent problems with our health care industry and its' sick care model sounds like? 
• The behavioral challenges to better health?
• The class/social  issues that prevent access to health care?

Six hundred health professionals joined together for a lively discussion on these topics and more on Feb. 25-27, 2009.  It was a thought provoking and collaborative experience where I was sincerely surprised to be among peers.  We, the people who genuinely wish to alleviate suffering, engaged in dialog on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public at the Institute of Medicine and Bravewell Collaborative's Summit in Washington D.C.

It was powerful. I was positively impacted.  There were more questions than answers and there is so much to share.  In the spirit of brevity, however, I'll speak to a few points that stood out for me.

This Is What I Learned:

"Person-Centered Care" Is the New Model for Health

Because of the efforts of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) practitioners and their holistic work over the years, the new model emerging for health care is a shift to "patient centered cared" or "person-centered care".    The individual is returned to the center of the health care wheel and s/he is the hub around which all else happens.  This shift will take time but there are models that are working already like the eight integrative centers of Bravewell Clinical Network. 

In the meantime, business is the force driving the shift.  Employee wellness centersare arising within large companies.  Why?  Because the return on investing in an employee's wellness is significant:  employees perform better. There are studies that prove meditation, fitness and health coaching are helping in "presenteeism: be here now" as Dr. Kenneth Pelletier puts it.  Businesses are bringing about the person/patient centered care and self-care empowerment.  See this article on Medtronic:

This Is What I Realized:

Integrative Practitioners Are on the Same Page

Building Sisterhood Conference & Retreat

Next month I will be speaking at an event that I'm really excited about:  Building Sisterhood Conference & Retreat.  The event is hosted by Danette Boone, Founder and CEO of D. Boone & Associates.  I will be speaking on a subject that's become near and dear to my heart: how we can manage our energy - physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual - to take our lives to a whole new level. 

I'm thrilled to be collaborating with Danette, because she and I share a vision of educating, inspiring, and empowering people to live their best, most purposeful lives.  And I'm thrilled about speaking on this particular topic, because it combines my two passions:  holistic health and purposeful living.  

I had a chance to interview Danette recently and encourage you to listen to our conversation.  Danette herself has chosen to follow her passion into the life of entrepreneurship and women's empowerment, rather than following a more stable and predictable career path.  Her story fits perfectly with the theme of this blog.  You can listen to the interview here:

In the interview, Danette talks about how she came to start her company, why she believes it's so important to live on purpose, and how the most lasting change comes from within. 

So take a listen, and do spread the word about the event.  It promises to be truly exciting.  Here are the details:

Building Sisterhood Conference & Retreat

Feburary 20-21, 2009

Sheraton Columbia Town Center Hotel, Columbia MD

Theme:  "Beautiful Sister": Focusing on the Total Woman

My topic:  "Managing Your Energy to Turbo Charge Your Life"