Onward, Upward, Inward

When I was in fourth grade in the 1960s my parents gave me a volume that I still keep in my library, Living Biographies of Famous Women. My parents felt that my sister and I should be able to go to college, have a brilliant career, and rise to the top, just like Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Florence Nightingale, all featured in my book. And they wanted me to know that I could be as successful as any man in that pre-women’s liberation era, when few women had careers.

I think I took something away from reading their stories that was different from what my parents expected, though. I noticed that while these women were indisputably powerful and successful, many of them lacked one important thing: a satisfying personal life. Only one, Madame Curie, the famous scientist who did pioneering research on radioactivity, seemed to have a happy family life and a full career at the same time.

Help for Kids with PTSD

Recently John Christoffersen wrote in the Huffington Post that mothers are still struggling to calm their children after the Sandy Hook disaster. Even though the children have been moved to a different school and have received the best counseling available, the children and teachers are still spooked by loud noises, which make them think another intruder has entered their school. Nightmares and trouble concentrating are other problems that linger.

Between 8 to 15 percent of those who experience traumas such as mass shootings develop PTSD, said Russell Jones, a psychology professor at Virginia Tech who counseled survivors of a mass shooting at his school. Fortunately, about half of them no longer have the symptoms after three months, he said.

Wellness in Children Takes More than Wishful Thinking

When you look at health statistics for children, there is a heartbreaking trend toward more disease during the past two decades. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control tell us that 9.5% of children currently have asthma, 8.4% have been diagnosed with ADHD, and a shocking 18% are not just overweight, but clinically obese.

In a recent Huffington Post piece, “The Last Well Child,” pediatrician Lawrence Rosen, M.D., remarks that he recently saw a healthy child in his office, which was such an unusual event that it got him thinking. He wonders if our health care system isn’t actually a disease-treatment system in disguise—and with so much emphasis on labeling, classifying and treating disease, we are doing our children (and ourselves) a great disservice.

Is the Mediterranean Diet the Only Way to Lower Heart Disease Without Drugs?

Heart disease used to be considered a men’s ailment. With women balancing more pressures at work and at home, cardiovascular disease now affects more women than men, and is responsible for 40 percent of all deaths in American women.

Clearly, preventing and lowering heart disease is something every woman needs to think about, for her own health and her family’s. A recent research study showing that the Mediterranean diet lowers heart disease is a huge breakthrough in natural solutions to heart disease. The five-year study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that people age 55 to 80 who ate a Mediterranean diet—including vegetables, fruits, nuts and olive oil—had 30 percent fewer heart attacks and stroke than control groups that ate a tlow-fat diet or a typical red-meat and junk food American diet.

American Heart Association Advises Doctors to Prescribe TM for Hypertension

I’ll never forget Maggie, one of the first women I taught to practice the Transcendental Meditation technique. As a young TM teacher in the 1970s, I was feeling less stressed […]

Balancing Family and Work—Can Women Have It All?

Last year “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” was one of the most popular articles on The Atlantic’s website (www.theatlantic.com)—and nearly a year later it’s still getting a lot […]

Nothing Depressing About That

It turns out I have a job that puts me at risk for depression. Writers, artists and other creatives are on a list of the top ten jobs linked to depression posted on Health.com in 2012. Understandably, caregivers, health-care workers and teachers are in the top ten, but writers? The article cites irregular paychecks, uncertain hours, and isolation as stressful elements of the job. Creative people may also have higher rates of mood disorders, with 9 percent reporting an episode of major depression in the previous year.

From another perspective, just being a woman puts me at risk for depression. Nearly twice as many women suffer from depression than men, research shows, most likely because the female brain is wired in a way that makes women more susceptible to stress. Women are affected by lower levels of stress than men, produce more stress hormones than men and recover from stress less quickly.

Stilling the Mental Chatter

A writer friend recently asked me if the TM technique would still the mental chatter that never shuts off in her brain. I said “yes,” because quieting the mind is a direct result of transcending. And it’s definitely been my own experience.

Most self-help books will advise you to control negative thoughts—or any incessant brain noise such as obsessing about what other people say or do or what they think about us. Yet as we all know, it’s not easy to control thoughts. They pop up whether we want them to or not. Whether we’re obsessing on something embarrassing we just said or did, or worse, about something sad or tragic that has happened to us, negative thoughts seem to get louder the more we try to turn them off.

Lean In by Going Within

As Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg continues to inspire spirited debate in the media over her book Lean In, which she describes as a “sort of feminist manifesto,” I can’t help but think of an early feminist meeting I attended in the 70s at Illinois State University. Young women were speaking about equality in the workplace, and suddenly the room grew quiet as a mother holding her baby in her arms stood up and said, “I don’t understand why we are wanting to succeed in a man’s world. Isn’t the point that we want to change that world to become something better?”

According to Sandberg, women can’t change the world until they are equally represented in places of power. She says it this way: “Today in the United States and the developed world, women are better off than ever before. But the blunt truth is that men still run the world. While women continue to outpace men in educational achievement, we have ceased making real progress at the top of any industry. . . . This means that when it comes to making the decisions that most affect our world, our voices are not heard equally.”

TM Offers Relief for PTSD, Homelessness of Female Vets

As the number of women in the military increases, the number of returning female vets who end up homeless is also soaring. According to a recent NY Times article by Patricia Leigh Brown, of those veterans staying in homeless shelters, 10 percent were women in 2011, up from 7.5 percent in 2009. In California, where one fourth of our nation’s veterans live, there has been a 50 percent increase in homeless women since 2009.

While homelessness among male veterans often results from PTSD and drug usage, women vets face additional challenges. Sadly, the path of many women from active duty to homelessness starts with military sexual abuse, resulting in severe PTSD and a downward spiral into drug usage, joblessness and homelessness, the article reports. Other issues specific to women increase the chances of homelessness—the higher percentage of women who are single parents, for instance.