HEALTH AND WELLNESS

                               It was a lovely day in summer afternoon, and 16-years old Lucy has been roller-skating in a public park in New York, U.S.A. suddenly the park seemed deserted, and she decided to leave. As she sat near her family’s minivan removing her skates, a stranger approached her. With the chilling words “I‘ve got a knife! Shut up or I’ll kill you!” he demanded sex, grabbed Lucy, and tried to shove her inside the minivan. She screamed as loud as she could, but that did not stop the attack. “I felt so utterly helpless,” Lucy recalled later. “Like a bug versus giant. But I kept screaming and struggling. Finally, I called out to God, ‘please don’t let this happen tom!” That seemed to startle the attacker, who suddenly released her and fled the scene. As the would-be rapist got into his car, Lucy locked herself in her van, trembling. Grabbing the cell phone, she forced herself to be calm. She called the police and gave an accurate description of the

             Most of the problems are caused by lack of oxygen. Because the atmospheric pressure is lower the higher you go, at 2,000 meters above sea level, a given volume of air contains some 20 percent less oxygen, and at 4,000 meters, air contains 40 percent less oxygen. Lack of oxygen affects most of your bodily functions. Your muscles can do less work, your nervous system can take less stress, and your digestive system cannot handle fat as well. Normally when your body needs more oxygen, you automatically breathe more heavily and fill the need. Then why doesn’t this happen when you arrive at a high altitude? Just how your body controls your rate of breathing is a wonder that is not completely understood. But when you exert yourself, heavy breathing is not triggered simply by lack of oxygen. Rather, the carbon dioxide buildup in the blood produced by the muscle activity seems to be a key factor in making you breathe more. You do breathe more heavily

                              A particularly tragic outcome of alcohol abuse is its effect on the unborn. Alcohol is far worse for the developing fetus than any other abuse drug. When a pregnant woman drinks, her developing child also drinks, and the toxic effect of alcohol is especially devastating at this formative stage of the fetus. Alcohol causes irreversible damage to its central nervous system. Neurons do not form properly. Cells are killed off. Other cells end up located in the wrong place. The result, fetal alcohol syndrome [FAS], is the foremost cause of mental retardation in newborns. Difficulties encountered by FAS children include intellectual impairment, language problems, developmental delay, behavioral dysfunction or deficit, slow growth, hyperactivity, and hearing and sight disorders. Many FAS babies are also born with characteristic facial deformities. In addition, children whose mothers drank even moderate amount of alcohol during pregnanc

                                  When we participate in creative processes we can explore countless numbers of possible patterns before finally settling on an idea. Many of us, however, encounter emotional resistance to the flow of creative possibilities. We demand of our minds an immediate, logical, finished product that stifles new creative exploration. Most of us do not lack ideas. What we lack is a rapid and direct means of getting in touch with those ideas. Is there a magic key for unlocking those secret reservoirs of imaginative power? One magic key describe by Gabriele Rico is a creative process called CLUSTERING. A similar process using patterns is termed “mind mapping” by Tony Buzan. Both techniques use the right brain’s ability to image and synthesize. Clustering, or “mind mapping,” temporarily suspends the normally dominant left brain activity that is logical and orderly. It is a non-linear brain-storming process akin to free association. Invisible i