The first thing I notice about Bogotá, when descending the rickety stairs of the airplane, is the smell: a strange mixture of damp clay, lush green vegetation and diesel smoke. The altitude provides a lightheaded feeling of well-being and forceful palpitations of your abdominal aorta begin somewhere between your sternum and navel.
I am decidedly an empiricist. No, this doesn’t mean that as a child I used to hover over ant hills with a magnifying glass, observing uncanny details about ant anatomy or looking at leaves under a microscope. Well, maybe like all children I did this, but that kind of thing doesn’t interest me anymore. Sadly…
India’s homeopathic hero, R. Sankaran, developed a theory for dosing homeopathic remedies. Homeopathic remedies are substances that are highly diluted. It is thought that the more diluted the remedy the more potent the dose, because of the remedy’s ability to communicate with the body on higher energetic level.
It’s time to talk about everybody’s favourite health topic: menstruation!
My own personal story begins when I made the big switch from pads to tampons after joining the high school swim team and starting a part time job as a lifeguard.
Did you know that women who have a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) can suffer from lack of creativity and a decrease in overall motivation after the organ has been removed?
Resist the urge to play music, to instead settle on silence, the only sound being the bristle of brush strokes on dollarstore canvas board (you buy paint supplies on a student budget, after all). You hope one day to be able to afford Series 3 colours like aquamarine. For now, you work with cobalt blue.
There’s something to be said for good company, sun and sand to bring you out of a dark, rainy slump. Last week was a particularly emotional one for me, which in part is due to my Reiki initiation, which can cause some energetic side effects, and some events happening on the home front.
I can’t really say that I’m a creature of habit. I easily tire of routine and consistency. Maybe it was for this reason that I felt the need to take off from Canada for a few years and travel, why I remain a perpetual student (no two days are the same and we get a 4-month summer of something radically different). The student life serves me well in breaking up the routine.
When I was small I used to sit in a shopping cart, eating almonds off of the pile in the grocery store, while Nonna shopped for food. She would hand me shelled almonds to snack on, but she would buy them in bulk, with their shells, and we’d crack them at home.
A university called Chapman U organizes and program called “Furry Friends for Finals” in which students can pet one of ten puppies stationed outside the library the week before exams as a means to de-stress.