Personal and Environmental Wellness

If you're interested in reducing the amount of junk mail you receive via snail mail, you should know that there are free and inexpensive services available in most countries that can significantly reduce the amount of junk mail you receive.

If you live in Canada, simply post a "No Junk Mail" or "No Ad mail" sign in your mail box - your Canada Post delivery person should honor this request. If, by chance, you continue to receive junk mail, you can follow the instructions found here: RedDotCampaign.ca.

One of my favorite films of the past few years is Little Miss Sunshine, a story about a family that travels in their Volkswagen Minibus from New Mexico to California for a children's beauty pageant.

What I remember most about Little Miss Sunshine is a scene where Dwayne - a Nietzsche-reading, sullen teenager who has kept a vow of silence for nine months to show his commitment to becoming a pilot - discovers that he is color-blind; this discovery leads to the devastating realization that his quest to become a pilot is over.

Dwayne has a panic attack in the back seat of the van, leading his father (a struggling life coach) to pull over onto the shoulder of the highway. Dwayne jumps out of the van, and the family watches helplessly as he runs wildly on a nearby field while cursing at the world.

My younger sister is famous for telling me in a half-menacing, half-joking tone: "Ben, don't judge me!"

And I'm just as famous for responding with "Sarah, aren't you judging me right now in thinking and saying that I'm judging you?

My sister thinks that it's wrong to judge others. I think that we judge each other all the time, and that this is a good thing, as we need to judge others to make good decisions on how to use our time and other resources.

In the summer of 2000, while working at a fasting clinic in northern California, I met a woman named Myra Bailes. Over the course of about three weeks, I had several conversations with Myra, and found her to be memorably genuine, thoughtful, and kind. Myra and I stayed in touch over the years, and this past January, I learned that Myra has been working on establishing an agrarian community in Georgia. Her plans for a small, environmentally-sound, community-based, agricultural community are extremely appealing to my wife and me, and if we didn't have the family ties that we do here in Ontario, we would seriously consider being a part of Myra's proposed community.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Unbreakable, a film by M. Night Shyamalan. What I love most about this film is its suggestion that if you are not doing what you are meant to be doing with your life, you will wake up each morning with a little sadness in your heart.

I realize that every person's life is made up of countless conscious and subconscious experiences, and that it can be self-limiting and even depressing to think that there's just one thing that each of us are meant to do really well.

Since some of our regular visitors rely on news feeds rather than our newsletter to receive updates, I thought it might be useful to post my latest newsletter here; it's a look back at the most useful articles that were published on this site in 2007. Enjoy!

To embrace the idea that the best health care system that is available anywhere involves self health care, it is helpful to understand that conventional health care systems throughout the world are not designed to do their best for each individual. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, exceptions that are created by people who are deeply committed to actually following the Hippocratic oath and have done the work needed to understand the simplicity of healing. But mostly, conventional health care is driven by the profit motive.

Helping others learn to help themselves is a theme that I have long supported and striven to live by. Earlier this year, I learned about an organization in Sonoma County, California that beautifully epitomizes this way of living. They're called COTS - short for Committee on the Shelterless - and for the past two decades, they have made it their mission to provide hope and help to homeless persons in Sonoma County.

Many thanks to Harold Hoffman in Montreal, Quebec, for sharing this video with me. I hope that our readers enjoy it as much as I did.