Prep Time/ Prime Time/ Play Time

These are the three quadrants of time for living a balanced life: Prep time/ Prime time and Play Time.
-Prep Time is time used to: plan/ prepare/ organize/ clean, etc…
-Prime Time is time to do your work.
-Play Time is time to: rest, relax, rejuvenate, do a hobby, go on a vacation, etc…
When you are able to go about your life with some relative balance within the three quadrants of time, you are able to create ease, efficiency, and guilt-free fun in your life.
Look at your weekly calendar. Every week should be well balanced with adequate Prep time, Prime time, and Play time. You deserve it! – and don’t fall into the trap that you don’t have the time to plan it all out! Guess what - You will never have the time unless you take the time to plan and carve out your day, your week, your month, and your year. You get to determine your schedule and if you don’t – your life will be run by outside events and circumstances.
Another challenge:
Learn to love what you do and if that’s not possible find another job – have your vocation be your avocation. Then everything you do – be it Prep/ Prime/or Play time will all align and unify – creating for you an overall better, and ultimately longer life!

Letter to the editor on August 29, 2009 in a Jackson, MS newspaper.

Take a moment to read and digest this!

Dear Sirs:

During my last night's shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone. Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid. She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.

And our Congress expects me to pay for this woman's health care?
Our nation's health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture- a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one's self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. A culture that thinks, "I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me".

Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.
Don’t you agree?

STARNER JONES, MD
Jackson, MS

Within every misFORTUNE is a hidden FORTUNE!

Our son Jack, playing with one of his cars at a restaurant drops it between the booth and the brick wall. Aarrrgh!! “Car, car?” Jack says frantically. Our daughter, Norah, reached down struggling to grasp Jack’s car. Samantha, my wife, saw her grabbing what she thought was a piece of trash and low and behold she came up with a $10.00 bill! Then we were able to take the seat off the bench and wallah – the car was rescued & Jack was happy, as we all were realizing within this apparent misfortune, there was a FORTUNE!
An email I read described a gentleman driving home from work on Colorado Boulevard in Denver. His car died – completely out of the blue – and he was able to coast into a gas station. He got out of his car frustrated and saw a woman crying while scrambling to see how much money she had to gas up her suburban full of children. He approached the woman to see if she was okay. She said her boyfriend had left her, and she packed her children and everything they had into the Suburban and were driving to her parents in California (of which she had not spoken to in 5 years). The gentleman swiped his card to fill up her car and went inside buying all the kids food from McDonalds. The woman was so grateful and asked if he was an angel. He smiled and turned to his car, realizing what a blessing it was to have his car quit giving him the opportunity to help out a family. He sat in his car and it started right up! A FORTUNE in an apparent misfortune.
Lastly, one of our patients, previously turned off by chiropractors had 9 weeks of suffering from vertigo. Cat scans & MRI’s at the hospital revealed nothing. A reluctant husband said, you’ve tried everything, I guess it’s time to try chiropractic. After one adjustment, crawling around was no longer the means of movement – this woman could walk! Her vertigo subsided significantly and now she and her husband enjoy the benefits of wellness chiropractic care. A FORTUNE in health all brought about by an apparent misfortune.

Challenges Birth a New Perspective

Gaining perspective in your life is sometimes best achieved during the most difficult challenges you encounter. Perspective gives us the opportunity to re-adjust our compass setting (life’s direction) or create a compass setting for that matter. It gives you the opportunity to re-visit your dreams and where you are headed in your life and which direction you’d like to go or take time to think about what your dreams and desires are. In hindsight, I am sure that you will find that some of the most trying times you’ve been through have produced some of the most positive results in your life. Experiences where you had an illness, excruciating pain, the loss of a loved one… as time goes by and the suffering and grief lifts, you naturally and most of the time unconsciously chart a course for your greater good.
I don’t know of one individual or family that has not felt the effects of the economy this year on some level. I don’t know of one individual that has not had the benefit of experiencing a tough time in their life in whatever realm it may have been. But I do know – everyone is a better person because of it. So it’s time to celebrate the “tough times!”
Now don’t go looking for “tough times,” in hopes for something better. Instead work on re-evaluating where you are at in your life and what direction you are heading. Ask yourself the question: “Am what I am doing today, going to lead me to a more fruitful future?” Know that what you sow, you reap – and know that in knowing all of this, it will allow you to forge through the “tough times,” with a little more grace and perseverance!

Being Thankful

I would like to take a moment this week and give a big Thank You to all of our Food Drive and Toy Drive participants. We delivered 847 lbs. of food to the Food Bank of the Rockies! The Food Bank was in desperate need this year for donations and we feel so grateful for you that you were able to give so much.
I know we’ve asked a lot of you for the past 6 years when we do two different donation related drives back-to-back, yet every year we continue to give more and more. Thank you for being a part of our consistent growth.
The following quote sums up our gratitude to be taking care of such great and generous people!
“The heart that gives thanks is a happy one, for we cannot feel thankful and unhappy at the same time. The more we say thanks, the more we find to be thankful for. And the more we find to be thankful for, the happier we become. We don’t give thanks because we’re happy. We are happy because we give thanks.” (Douglas Wood, The Secret of Saying Thanks).

Mechanism vs. Vitalism

It is best to view your body not as a machine that is destined to break down, but rather as an organism infused with LIFE, able to heal, regenerate, repair and thrive. In fact, it has been proven that there is no signal from your brain that will create harm to your body.
Your body is always renewing and regenerating itself – so long as the force of life is present within you. Think about it, if you cut your finger vs. a corpse’s finger, who is going to heal?
You could perform any advanced surgical procedure, put on a special cream, and nothing would allow the corpse to heal. You, however, heal from the inside-out.
Every 7 days you have a new layer of skin cells, every 24 hours you have a new intestinal lining, every 6 weeks a new liver, even your skeletal structure is being broken down and regenerated with the laying down of new cells.
Why then do we age, and our joints degenerate? The answer is simple. Due to stress and imbalance we cause uneven wear and tear, we allow toxins into our system, not feeding it the right nutrition, we have negative thought patterns and behaviors. The result is increased cell division – which causes aging. Take skin cancer – too much exposure = a lot of your body working to “heal” overtime = increased cell division = dis-ease & accelerated aging with those tissues. Take that example into any structure or organ in your body and you quickly realize how important it is to feed your body the right nutrition, to exercise with balance, to begin the process of becoming more aware of what your thought patterns and behaviors are and if they serve you.
This along with consistent chiropractic care, leads to healthier, younger acting cells being laid down in every organ and system of your body, allowing that force of life within you to do its very best at giving you the highest expression of LIFE and Vitality!

Unconditional LIFE

It has been said that: Conditional love says: “I have got to find a way to stop all things that make me feel so bad.” You go about your day thinking, worrying and stressing about those things that make you feel bad – how can I fix them? What can I do?
Then you have: Unconditional love which says: “I cannot control those conditions, but I can control the direction of my thought. And the direction of thought is all I need to control how I feel.”
BOOM – you’ve got it!
Once you get a handle on this concept you are finally free. Free from trauma, free from disaster, free from all those things that make you feel terrible.
You get from this moment forward to determine HOW you will react to LIFE! You can see challenges immediately as opportunities – instead of downward spiraling into frustration and despair. You can see arguments as a means to have the chance to create more clarity with your communication and understanding. You can see the loss of a job as the opportunity to work toward something better.
We know you “get this” stuff. We just want this info. to serve as a gentle reminder to always focus on the good – it’s there, always – sometimes you just have to look a little harder.
This is such a great time of the year to focus on Gratitude. As you practice it more and more – you create momentum – momentum that will carry you through the hustle and bustle of all the holidays!

When Action meets Vision

All the great success stories you’ve read – all the great, masterful, influential, inspirational individuals you’ve met, heard about, read about, seen in the newspapers, etc… They all had one quality that set them apart. They chose to act on their dreams.
Their dreams served as an inspiration to keep them focused during times of economic downturn, during times of sickness and disease, during times of getting thru some rough days and the daily grind of some responsibilities they wished they didn’t have to fulfill. Despite all of those things, they kept on task with their ultimate vision. So, the real question we should all be asking is: “Am I doing what I can, the best that I can, for what I believe in?” If not you’ve either lost your dream, forgotten your dream, smothered your dream with day to day details, or gave up on your dream.
I hope this inspires you to at the very least start thinking about what your dream or dreams really are. What were they, what are they now and how can you gain more clarification as to make them into a tangible reality?
Don’t focus on the state of the economy, the H1N1, job losses, failures, etc… to detour you and limit your capacity to dream. There is no better time than now, than to begin reigniting passion within you to begin gaining resources and creating momentum for yourself to live from the thoughts, ideas, and inspirations on the inside rather than the fears, worries, doubts and criticisms on the outside.
You are meant to not only survive, but THRIVE.
How does this relate to your chiropractic care? Consider this: The founder of chiropractic over 114 years ago truly did not want to teach the chiropractic adjustment. He knew it would eventually end up being another allopathic method for treating symptoms. HE KNEW the cause of disease to be poor behaviors, and poor patterns of living, causing the attraction of negative thoughts, traumas, and toxins. He wanted to start a school to raise up leaders, to educate people on living a vitalistic lifestyle, not a school of adjusters.
So there you have it – the “mental adjustment” for the week!

Achieving Balance in Your Life

On the Ed Sullivan show, there was a guest that would make frequent appearances. He was known as, “the plate spinner.” The gentleman would demonstrate that he could keep several plates spinning and balanced upon rods. When one plate would lose momentum he would rush over to it and spin it, and just as he would get it going again, another would lose momentum and begin to wobble. From plate to plate he would rush, giving them appropriate attention to keep their momentum and balance going against gravity.
Our life and its many dimensions can be likened to the plate spinner experience. There are seven different realms of life: physical, mental, family, social, vocational, spiritual, and financial. Whether we consciously know it or not, we are always striving to maintain balance and “momentum” within each realm. When one needs our attention, (starts to wobble) we rush over to it and give it the needed attention.
When you begin to consciously grasp each realm and focus upon creating balance and momentum in each, you can begin to more effortlessly spin and keep your plates going! At first it can be a lot of tough work, but the joy of it all is that the better you get, you begin to add sub-dimensions and create more responsibility for yourself. The challenge and game continues and evolves as you do!
Here at Elevation Now, PC we are focused upon helping you achieve optimal health and wellbeing – one of the most important realms, for without it, none of the others matter much.

The Natural Shift albeit “behind the scenes”

Standard Process, a nutritional supplement company founded over 80 years ago has been providing seminars for health care practitioners to better understand their products and how they can help their patients. This company prides itself on providing all natural whole foods ingredients into their formulas and is currently on “INC.’s” list of fastest growing privately owned companies.
When in Chiropractic College, I attended several seminars of which Standard Process was the sponsor. I never delved too much into their product information because I was mainly observed into absorbing the philosophy and technique of the chiropractic seminar I was attending.
Several of my colleagues, however, have attended seminars here in Colorado. For the state of Colorado, these seminars are held in the Denver area. Each time they attend the seminar they report a significant growing number of MD’s present in attendance.
When approached the MD’s report – “I am here for this information to take care of myself and my family – we are not allowed to bring this into our practices.”

DO YOU FIND THAT A LITTLE BIT INTERESTING???? I SURE DO.