SWIHA Blog

By Janet Lee, Guest Blogger

February is a month associated with love, so it’s appropriate that February is National Heart Health month. Due to the Valentine’s holiday, February also brings lots of chocolate or sweet, sugary desserts to show others or ourselves how much we are loved. While it’s perfectly fine to enjoy sweets, it’s also beneficial to realize how much sugar we are putting into our bodies. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average American consumes between 150 and 170 pounds of refined sugar a year.

Interestingly, less than 100 years ago, the average American consumed roughly four pounds of sugar a year. Needless to say, that our consumption of sugar has skyrocketed. The World Health Organization (WHO) and American Heart Association states that women should consume only 20 grams of sugar a day or 5 teaspoons. For men, it is 36 grams or 9 teaspoons a day. Children are at 12 grams or 3 teaspoons a day. 1 soda = 40 grams of sugar or 10 teaspoons.

After 18 years of working in the mortgage industry, Casey Grant was stressed, and sick of feeling stressed. She disliked her job because that’s what it felt like – a job. She didn’t enjoy what she was doing, and wanted to find a way to create a good income doing work she loved. Casey’s lifelong passion for health and nutrition sounded like a way out of the mortgage industry...the question was, how?

Casey began to research schools for nutrition education, and Southwest Institute of Healing Arts (SWIHA) immediately resonated with her. Although she lives in Chandler, Arizona, a town close where the main campus of SWIHA is located, Casey decided to enroll in the SWIHA’s online Holistic Wellness Practitioner program because it was convenient for her busy lifestyle, and allowed her to still be available for her family.

The entrepreneurial attitude and atmosphere of SWIHA is what appealed most to Casey. “SWIHA’s mission is to inspire and support people in opening their own businesses, if that is truly their dream. The college is committed to the success of their graduates,” Casey explains. “All my instructors encouraged me to go after my dreams and goals, and they guided and inspired me from an entrepreneurial point of view.”

By Dee McCaffrey, Guest Blogger

One of my natural health heroes, Dr. Ann Wigmore, said “the food you eat can either be the safest and most powerful forms of medicine or the slowest form of poison.” This wisdom is reflected in my book The Science of Skinny, the premise of which is “whole, natural foods are perfect packages from nature uniquely designed to nourish our body” and that “food additives don’t honor how our body is designed; they are catalysts for poor health and should be avoided.”

As a chemist, formerly obese person, and now a nutrition educator, I teach people that whole foods provide powerful nutrients that work synergistically to provide our body’s 75 trillion cells with the necessary elements for building long term health. Nearly every common plant food, and many animal foods, have been scientifically proven to offer one or more therapeutic benefits—from alleviating everyday aches and pains to providing powerful protection against cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and autoimmune diseases.

Like many massage therapists and massage enthusiasts, Ronna Everhart found massage after decades of discomfort and chronic pain. At 12 years old, she chipped her tailbone in an accident. “I broke my bum!” she exclaims with a laugh. Although she is full of laughter and smiles now, most of her life consisted of pain and discomfort. Between the ages of 19 to 24, Ronna gave birth to three children, which really did a number on her low back. She became dependent on over the counter medicine, such as Ibuprofen daily, to alleviate her pain, yet it wasn’t enough. Chiropractors, and even the occasional glass or two of wine, to relax the muscles proved futile as well.

By the age of 30, Ronna had tried almost everything to help her pain: TENS units, decompression, pain clinics, physical therapy, pain creams, shots…the list goes on!

After 32 years of dealing with the after effects of her tail bone injury, which caused chronic arthritis due to the persistent low back pain, Ronna’s life started to become negatively affected in all areas: mind, body and soul. Her finances were suffering from the out of pocket chiropractic costs, in addition to other health related expenses. She reached a point where she was “fed up with doctors, once and for all!”

By Jenna Zizzo

When the word ‘core’ is used in a yoga class, thoughts of six-pack abs often come to mind, a picture of what most people often refer to as the ‘outer core’ or the ‘superficial’ abdominal muscles. While anatomically correct, there’s another core, our ‘Deep Core Line’, which is more of aligned with the purpose in our yoga practice.

A new type of yoga is beginning to sweep the nation. This yoga, called Core Strength Vinyasa, is a unique perspective on the overall practice of yoga. Founded by New York-based yoga teacher Sadie Nardini, Core Strength Vinyasa (CSV) focuses on our ‘Deep Core Line’, allowing us to practice and bring awareness to the core of each yoga pose. The process of CSV is drawing inward, becoming empowered through the poses and learning to move from our deep center – the core of our being!

The Deep Core Line that Sadie refers to in Core Strength Vinyasa is a myofascial line or meridian that begins in the arch of our feet, and travels up our mid-line, through the oh-so-important psoas muscle, into our torso and up and out through our tongue!

Core Strength Vinyasa is its own expression of Hatha yoga, as well as a set of physical and energetic alignment principles, core postures and even core philosophies that teachers or students can use to boost the benefits of any style of yoga. It has been said that Core Strength Vinyasa is one of the most effective yoga practices for creating changes both inside and outside the body.

Thirty years ago, Melanie Albert stopped eating meat. This wasn’t a decision based on politics or personal beliefs about animals. She simply didn’t like the way her body felt after consuming meat. “My body was feeling full when I ate meat and I felt as though I could not digest it,” Melanie says about her longstanding decision to eliminate meat from her diet. Shortly after eliminating meat, Melanie began to focus on intuitive eating; listening to the cues her body was giving her about food and making decisions about what food to consume.

Little did she know that a few years later, nutrition and intuitive eating would be a daily part of her life and her work. After leaving meat behind, she began to eat organic, “way before it was popular in the media,” she says. Although her decision to go organic baffled some of her friends and family, Melanie enjoyed the results too much to listen to the naysayers. In 1995, Melanie started to educate herself about the true power of nutrition.

It was her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis in 1995 that spurred Melanie to focus her attention on food and nutrition. Her mother was given six months to live by allopathic doctors, so Melanie moved to Florida to care for her.

By Jenna Zizzo, Guest Blogger

It’s no secret that yoga and all things holistic are on the rise in America. Once considered esoteric by some, and often perceived as being practiced only by those who fell into the category of “hippie” or “granola,” recent decades have demonstrated how yoga has catapulted into mainstream society, becoming a popular way for people to stay in shape, relax and connect with their higher selves.

It is widely known that the history of yoga dates back to ancient India. While there isn’t any official written proof as to the exact date that yoga began, there are many accounts online and in books about the birth of yoga, and how it came to America from India. However, what is even less documented is the history of yoga teaching.

It’s been written and recorded that one yogi taught another who then brought those teachings to another individual or group, and the tradition and philosophy was passed down from person to person, group to group. From old school yoga masters such as Patanjali and his yoga sutras and B.K.S. Iyengar’s alignment instruction, to contemporary instructors like Tara Stiles and Sean Corn, the influence of yoga in America is an essential part of today’s culture.

How Great Graduate Kelly T. Smith Created a Successful Holistic Wellness Business

Intuition. We all have it, and some of us might be more in tune with it than others, but it’s there. It’s that gut feeling, that little voice inside our heads, the answers that live within our hearts and souls.

As a natural intuitive and trained Life Coach, it makes sense that Kelly T. Smith created a life coaching business that helps clients look inside to reach their fullest potential. A graduate of Southwest Institute of Healing Arts (SWIHA) Associate of Mind-Body Transformational Psychology program online, Kelly combines the many tools she learned in her program into the work she does in her business, Intuitive Life Coaching With Kelly. “I feel my intuitive abilities really came forward because SWIHA was a safe place to honor this side of me,” Kelly says about her journey with SWIHA. “I am a life coach, intuitive and hypnotherapist and I use all these tools together to work with people to reach their fullest potential, discover their spiritual gifts, and move past their limitations to live life to the fullest.”

Kelly says that she found the online program at SWIHA through a series of “synchronistic events.”

By Janet Lee, Guest Blogger

While the holiday season brings happy times and wonderful memories, it can sometimes be challenging when it comes to maintaining a healthy diet. During this busy time of year, most of us have been on the run completing work commitments, eating at the mall while finishing holiday shopping, attending holiday parties with friends while eating plenty of food and drinking a little too much eggnog! It’s quite possible that the only exercise experienced is walking from the couch to the refrigerator, or running from store to store.

If, you are experiencing low energy, headaches, or lack of motivation . . .

or if your pants are fitting a little tighter than a couple months ago . . . it is probably time to begin again with some healthy reminders!

Let’s get back on track and begin some healthy habits in 2015 to help us feel our very best!

Every year, almost half of Americans (45%) make a New Year’s resolution. Of that number, 24% do not succeed in keeping their resolution. What if there was a method that could help us follow through with our New Year’s resolutions and succeed at accomplishing them?

Hypnotherapy is a great tool for clearing away resistance, something that is a common factor when trying to succeed at accomplishing New Year’s resolutions. Linda Bennett, Senior Curriculum Specialist and the Hypnotherapy Program Director for both On Campus and Online Hypnotherapy Programs at Southwest Institute of Healing Arts (SWIHA), provides her students and clients with many tools and guided meditations to help “clear away the clutter.”

However, there are some misconceptions about hypnosis that are not true. Many people think that hypnotherapy is similar to what we see on television or in the movies… the facilitator controlling the subject, trying to put them in a trance by swinging a pendulum in front of their eyes. Although that perception makes for a great movie plot and an entertaining stage show, it’s completely untrue says Linda. When someone is in the state of hypnosis they are still completely in control and will only go along