mcdonald lives in White Lake, with his wife, Stephanie, their three kids, a dog, many cats, and two ferrets. Stephanie is deeply involved in running the business and website, and they “keep doing a little bit better every year.” mcdonald is a very winning fellow – chatty, engaging, tangential, lively, casual. He is a man who has developed a deep love for plants, and it shows. “Plants are awesome,” he says. They are an “intermediary” between nature and humanity.
Posts filed under Wellness
Freebirth in Ann Arbor: Why Women are Choosing to Birth Outside the System
Pregnancy and childbirth is a time of immense transformation. For some women it is the most beautiful day of their lives, but for so many more, the process of giving birth is a traumatic memory marked by surgery, violation, and a loss of control. In an act of conscious rebellion against this standard, women are choosing to look to the past and choose to birth the way we were always intended to: unmonitored, unmolested, and free. One such woman I talked to, “Dana,” describes her birth as being, “incredibly straightforward without any drama.”
Boost Your Winter Immunity with Plant-Based Foods
As the cold winter season approaches, ensuring a healthy, responsive, and robust immune system becomes even more important. Freezing weather, short days, and reduced sunlight can put stress on our bodies and increase our chances of getting sick. A plant-based diet, full of immune-boosting antioxidants and nutrients that naturally fight inflammation and promote immune response, is an excellent way to make sure you and your family stay as healthy as possible this winter.
Fall Into Fitness — Seven Fun Ways to Ease into Fitness
Do you remember when you were a child and you watched mom or dad rake all the orange, yellow, or brown leaves scattered on the lawn into a pile? I remember how that pile was as high as my waistline (now I can’t even see my waistline), and it was just waiting for me to fall into them. And I did. Nowadays, I think of fall as a great time to refocus on fitness.
Protect & Restore Your Liver Naturally
When it comes to promoting long term health and avoiding chronic illnesses, your liver is of the utmost importance. It helps to modify and neutralize toxins, plays a major role in digestion and absorption, and works to regulate blood sugar around the clock. At this moment in history our livers are working harder than ever before!
Conscious Parenting: Prepping for Baby: Find the Right Doula for You
Imagine knowing all the things, having a supportive partner, and knowing that you don’t have to remember everything. Imagine knowing that someone else has eyes out for your best interests without worrying about ulterior motives. Imagine that someone is watching out for your partner as well! It can feel like such a load off your shoulders to know that there is someone there who is familiar with the process.
Sustainable Health: Taking Wellness One Day at a Time
As a coach in the wellness industry, I am constantly shown the stark truth about what ails most of us humans. We are looking for drastic change, and we want it immediately! We tend to know what it is that we need, but getting there is extremely overwhelming. Rather than suffer from disappointment about not getting “the thing,” many people choose to disengage from the goal all together.
Rhythm: Good for What Ails You
Can you recall a moment with a group of people having the time of your life? What memory pops up first? Is it a sports event when you were all cheering, or dancing at a wedding, or maybe in a club when your favorite tune played? Did your experience include some kind of rhythm, or let’s name it “pulse,” that was pulling you all together? Most likely you weren’t even aware something else might be happening. You just thought you were having fun. If you think you don’t have rhythm, spoiler alert, you do!
Sustainable Health-- Take a Mindful Hike
Are you looking for easy ways to unwind and relax even the middle of your busy days? Do you find yourself feeling worried about yet another disheartening news cycle or overwhelmed with work or personal stress, and yet uncertain about how you will find the peace and calm you long for?
Anne Biris — The Healing Power of Chinese Medicine
Anne Biris is a nationally board certified and State of Michigan licensed acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, massage therapist, and practitioner of Chinese Medicine with offices in Ann Arbor and Dearborn Heights. She holds a Master’s degree in Chinese Medicine and has been practicing for 30 years. She also provides acupuncture on a volunteer basis in the poorest areas of India and Sikkim. Biris likes to fly under the radar, but after much prodding (because Anne Biris is a treasure that readers of CWCJ should know about), s
Community Acupuncture: A Synergy of Healing & Community: A Conversation with Evan Lebow-Wolf, Cheryl Wong & Kiersten DeWitt of Ann Arbor Community Acupuncture
Community acupuncture, on the other hand, offers a sustainable and fiscally sensible solution to treating as many people as efficiently and effectively as possible. Evan Lebow-Wolf, co-founder of Ann Arbor Community Acupuncture (AACA), told me briefly about the difference between community acupuncture and private acupuncture. When I asked him whether he feels like there is anything missing in the community acupuncture approach that is available in private acupuncture sessions, he replied with a firm and resolute “no.”
Namaste, Katie: OUr Fall 2023 Yoga Column
Whether you're a seasoned yogi or getting ready to roll out your mat for the first time, here you'll find a variety of useful tips from local yoga instructor, Katie Hoener.
A Minute to Meditate: Laughter as Self-Care
As busy moms, it’s acceptable to want more time, more help, more space, and the list goes on. An important element to add to your list of more, is self-care. I am reminded of a safety instruction given by flight attendants, once you board a plane, "In the event of an emergency secure yourself, then assist your child." I’m paraphrasing that statement, but the idea is that in order to help someone else, you must be well.
Herbs for Your Garden: Calendula
Calendula is grown as a self-seeding annual in USDA grow zones two through eight. In areas with warm winters (above 25⁰F), it blooms year-round. Calendula thrives in full sun with well-drained soil. I recommend sowing Calendula seed directly into the garden early to mid-spring. It’s ideal to plant the seeds as soon as the soil is workable since germination benefits from cool weather, but don’t stress too much about timing. I’ve had success planting seeds year-round. Calendula is a self-seeding annual, which means seeds dropped by the plants in the fall will lay dormant on the ground all winter and then sprout the next spring. However, it’s not an aggressively spreading plant, so don’t worry about it taking over your garden.
Conscious Parenting: Ele's Place Ann Arbor--A Home for Healing Arts
Ele’s Place Ann Arbor is a healing center that provides peer grief support for children, teens, and their families in Ann Arbor as well as the surrounding southeast Michigan area, free of charge, for as long as a family needs. Ele's Place Ann Arbor is the only nonprofit in our community dedicated solely to helping children and teens work with, and through, grief in a peer-based setting.
Ann Arbor Healers: Indigo Forest and Chronic Pain Reduction
Beth Barbeau is a healer, and a teacher with 40+ years of midwifery and natural family health experience. Barbeau has recently added a new therapeutic device to her robust set of therapeutic options at Indigo Forest, her online and in-person business designed to help people of all ages achieve optimum health.
How Humor Helps Me Over a Hurdle
I’m working once again to lose my post-pregnancy weight…it’s been 25 years since the baby. There have been peaks and valleys, fitness regimens and meal plans. Just when I thought I had things under control, menopause slapped me in the face. I hit a plateau. A brick wall. A stand-off.
Craig Stoller — Healing Through Chiropractic
Dr. Craig Stoller, D.C. has an unassuming office on Stadium, just east of Trader Joe’s. The sign on the door says, “Align Chiropractic.” His logo looks like a mandala. It represents the top vertebrae of the spine, otherwise known as the “atlas.” When you enter the waiting room, you are greeted with a large children’s play area, and above it a giant hand-painted mural. It depicts an idyllic scene of people of all ages and abilities actively enjoying the outdoors in a beautiful park like setting. It represents Stoller’s goal of having all of his patients, no matter what age or ability, enjoy an active, healthy lifestyle.
Sustainable Health: When Food as Medicine Becomes Food as a Threat to Health
In the early 1990’s, when first beginning my foray into nutrition work, the cutting edge was the emergence of the low carb diet. The Atkins Diet was published in 1992 and faced off against the high carb, low fat heart disease reversal program of Dean Ornish. Ornish is a physician who led the public and the medical community toward a plant based, low fat lifestyle approach to preventing and reversing heart disease.
The Practice Beneath the Practice
By Kelly Kempter
My bodywork practice synthesizing Shiatsu and Thai massage serves as a physical manifestation of a deeper spiritual practice. Both Thai massage and Shiatsu are rooted in Buddhist traditions, and I feel honored and enlivened to be a part of these pathways in the modern world. The principles of Insight Meditation offer guidance for my bodywork sessions, allowing a somatization of the path.
In my mat-based bodywork practice, I utilize a mapping of the body-mind-heart founded in Shiatsu and Five Element Theory and apply methods from both Shiatsu and Thai massage. I studied Thai massage twenty years ago at the beginning of my massage therapy training and fell in love with the approach; performing Thai massage on a clothed recipient on a floor mat feels like a beautiful duet of healing touch, a slow, meditative dance akin to Tai Chi. The choreography of it, if you will, awakens a sense of being fully embodied in the practice of touch.
Some years later, when I began studying Five Element Shiatsu as taught by Frances Farmer, I was able to connect with a foundational theory that makes my heart sing and reminds me of deeper truths. Utilizing presence, reverence, and full body engagement along with a growing understanding of Five Element Theory and being in tune with nature (with the seasons and tides in our bodies) the stage is set for healing--I’m all in. I am listening with my whole being to another person’s pain and honoring the life force within which is healthy and whole. Frances Farmer observes, “Your body has the inner wisdom to heal itself, and I am here to listen and learn.”
Both Thai massage and Shiatsu are mat-based therapies founded on a premise of oneness and that the giver is healed as much as the receiver. The therapist opens their senses to what is present and holds it in a loving light. Holding is the essence of what I do. I hold tissue with my body weight. I hold points with my fingers, knees, elbows, or toes. I hold words. I hold the pain of embodiment. I hold emotions, sensations, and thoughts. I stay with what arises, watch transformation occur, and remain curious. In the simplest way, I am listening, witnessing, feeling, and accepting while holding the physical form.
My spiritual journey is the foundation of this incarnation; it is the ground I stand on and guides all aspects of my life. For me, it is easy to see how it is the very bedrock of a practice that involves touch and healing. Although, I do not limit my spirituality to a single tradition; it is a living practice steeped in Insight Meditation. Also called Vipassana, Insight Meditation is one aspect of Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced in Thailand. The teachings urge us to sit in meditation, study the Dharma, move with awareness, cultivate Sangha, pay attention to the stillness, speak with kindness, walk in silence, and watch what arises. The idea is to honor whatever is present, inviting all of it in for a cup of tea—the old wounds, fear and grief, the harmonious heart, mundane plans, rehearsals spawned by anxiety, inner peace, re-playing of scenes laced with shame, the exalted states, and everything in between. Returning to this moment over and over again, in a spiraling dance of unfolding, we come closer and closer to home. When we sit with our resistance, its grip loosens, and we are brought back to wholeness.
Vipassana practice, Thai massage, and Shiatsu are all founded upon a cosmology of non-duality. They are based on the radical premise that there is nothing wrong, nothing to be fixed, that we are already healthy, vibrant, and whole--that our true nature is one of peaceful aliveness. We can only gain access to this wisdom in the present moment. Since the body is always in the present moment, it makes for an easy entry point into both healing and spiritual inquiry. Connected to our wholeness, we observe ties to the natural world; we begin to see that we are not separate from nature, but a manifestation of its elements. Awareness of sensations in our bodies brings us closer to our elemental nature and invites its own sort of healing.
My bodywork practice is a somatic exploration of Insight Meditation. In both practices, upon first glance, there is chaos. There are complaints. There is pain. There is dissatisfaction. When a client walks into the room, they give name to the details of their suffering. Similarly, when we sit down to meditate, our patterns of suffering become apparent. When we touch or are touched with care and attention, the resistance begins to melt. When we stay with sensations, mindfulness creates an opening in which suffering can transform. Over time, the consciousness of what is happening becomes larger and more powerful than the details of our pain. As my Thai massage teacher, Paul Fowler wrote, “In the Thai way of thinking, illness and disease are a natural part of life and although it recognizes that the body is out of balance when these things occur and need to be corrected, there is less tension around illness and disease because they recognize that these things are natural and impermanent.”
For me, both meditation sessions and bodywork sessions integrate a ritualistic start and finish. When a person walks through my door, utilizing Buddhist principles around compassion and sympathetic joy, I open myself to be a kind witness, one who accepts whatever is going on, hearing the details and honoring the suffering. Taking in the fullness of a human being, perhaps I am able to discern which elemental phases are speaking the loudest and what parts of a human are in need of nurturing. Moving over to the mat, the process of setting up the body of both giver and receiver in a relaxed alignment contributes to concentration and enhances energy flow through the system. This is true as well for tending to our posture when we sit in meditation. This pre-session care creates a sacred space and a kind of healing cocoon. With the first touch, I am reminded of my Vipassana teacher, Susan Weir’s words, “Let awareness do the heavy lifting.” I feel deeply into the very essence of a person, beyond the complaints that they walked in with, beyond their name and the person they experience themself to be. I too walk beyond myself as a massage therapist working on tissues. I open my awareness to our joined life force. I listen with an intimacy that unites two beings via a shared experience. There is nothing to do but be present while connecting with a solid, relaxed pressure. There is literally nothing that needs doing, fixing, changing, or even healing. Our wholeness and vibrancy is already present, it is the essence of us. With a courageous presence, when we are able to pull back from doing and engage in the art of non-doing, we connect with a force that is always in a state of balance. This is coming home.
Kelly Kempter is a licensed massage therapist specializing in Thai Massage and Shiatsu in her Kerrytown studio. She seeks to inspire balance in the community through the practice and teaching of bodywork. Visit her online at kaizenhealingarts.com.
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