About 20 years ago, working for National Geographic, and with a grant from the National Institute on Aging, I started identifying and studying the longest-lived people, those who are in what we called the world’s Blue Zones. These are people who have eluded heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and several types of cancer.
My goal, in a sense, was to reverse-engineer longevity. Since only about 20% of the average person’s life span is dictated by genes, I reasoned that if I could find the common denominators among people who’ve achieved the health outcomes we want, I might distill some pretty good lessons for the rest of us to follow. I discovered nine powerful lessons—the power nine—that underpin all five Blue Zones. Here they are:
1. Move naturally.
The world’s longest-lived people don’t pump iron, run marathons, or join gyms. Instead, they live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without thinking about it. They grow gardens and don’t have mechanical conveniences for house and yard work.
2. Find purpose.
The Okinawans call it ikigai and the Nicoyans call it plan de vida; for both it translates to “why I wake up in the morning.” Knowing your sense of purpose is worth up to seven years of extra life expectancy.
3. Downshift.
Even people in the Blue Zones experience stress. Stress leads to chronic inflammation, associated with every major age-related disease. What the world’s longest-lived people have that we don’t are routines to shed that stress. Okinawans take a few moments each day to remember their ancestors, Adventists pray, Ikarians take a nap, and Sardinians do happy hour.
4. Follow the 80% rule.
Hara hachi bu, the Okinawan, 2,500-year-old Confucian mantra said before meals, reminds them to stop eating when their stomachs are 80% full. The 20% gap between not being hungry and feeling full could be the difference between losing weight and gaining it. People in the Blue Zones eat their smallest meal in the late afternoon or early evening, and then they don’t eat any more for the rest of the day.
5. Eat mostly plants.
Beans, including fava, black, soy, and lentils, are the cornerstone of most centenarian diets. Meat—mostly pork—is eaten on average only five times per month. Serving sizes are 3 to 4 ounces, about the size of a deck of cards.
6. Drink wine at 5.
People in all Blue Zones (except Adventists) drink alcohol moderately and regularly. Moderate drinkers outlive non-drinkers. The trick is to drink one to two glasses per day (preferably Sardinian Cannonau wine) with friends and/or with food. And no, you can’t save up all week and have 14 drinks on Saturday.
7. Find belonging.
All but five of the 263 centenarians we interviewed belonged to some faith-based community. Denomination doesn’t seem to matter. Research shows that attending faith-based services four times per month will add four to 14 years of life expectancy.
8. Put loved ones first.
Successful centenarians in the Blue Zones put their families first. This means keeping aging parents and grandparents nearby or in the home. (It lowers disease and mortality rates of children in the home too.) They commit to a life partner (which can add up to three years of life expectancy) and invest in their children with time and love (and they’ll be more likely to care for you when the time comes).
9. Find the right community.
The world’s longest-lived people chose—or were born into—social circles that support healthy behaviors. For example, Okinawans created moais—groups of five friends that committed to each other for life. Research from the Framingham Studies shows that smoking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness are contagious. So the social networks of long-lived people have favorably shaped their health behaviors.
To make it to age 100, you have to have won the genetic lottery. But most of us have the capacity to make it well into our early 90s and largely without chronic disease. As the Adventists demonstrate, the average person’s life expectancy could increase by 10 to 12 years by adopting a Blue Zones lifestyle.
Adapted from The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-Week Plan for a Longer, Better Life (National Geographic/ Dan Buettner/ Pub: 12/7/21).
Original article here
Have you ever gotten into bed at the end of the day and realised that you haven’t spoken out loud to anyone since the day before? Or simply found yourself feeling completely and utterly alone?
“Those who are emotionally lonely will find it difficult to improve things without tackling the root of the problem,” says Dr. Spelman. “Emotional loneliness is not circumstantial but, rather, comes from within.”
But situational loneliness doesn’t just arise in those who relocate alone, as social media editor Sarah discovered when she moved countries with her partner. Sarah left her Sydney home in March 2017 to join her partner in London, where he had arrived a month earlier to start a new job and find the pair a home to live in — although she admits that “didn’t mean it was smooth sailing”.
“It was a really bewildering, lonely time,” she says. “The jump of being plonked into a huge arts school, in just one of hundreds of halls of residence in a sprawling city I didn’t understand, made me retreat into myself and I struggled to make friends in the face of it all.
It’s probably been a long time since you lay on your back in the grass, looked up and wondered, Why is the sky blue? Or since you took the time to consider a question as difficult as, Where does the universe begin, and where does it end?
“I don’t like resting,” I tell her. “I get listless and sad and feel a failure.” She is not surprised. “For some people, rest is almost uncomfortable. It’s almost as if their psyche fights back against it because of the new sensation.” She would never, she says, recommend a three-day silent retreat to a completely frazzled patient. “For someone who is actively burned out, that’s almost traumatic.”
This is no surprise to Dalton-Smith. Analysing data from her quiz during the pandemic, she saw “a huge uptick in the number of people who were experiencing sensory rest deficits”. People confined to the house with small children in particular, she says, were exposed to constant noise and even some adults “irritated each other to death. That non-stop hum of somebody talking in the background causes you to get agitated. That’s what sensory overload does to us.”
We are often told to place ourselves in other people’s shoes – but our empathy is rarely as accurate as we think it is. 
Epley’s team asked pairs of participants, who had not met previously, to discuss questions such as, “If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future or anything else, what would you want to know?”.
All over the world, people are awakening to the fact that we are more than bones and flesh. We sense that there is more to life than what we see. The word “consciousness” is losing its unreachable meaning, and we look for ways to go inside ourselves and find inner peace.
There is so much angst in the air these days that we may all be feeling more sensitive, exhausted or even more despondent than usual. So much so, that I feel a lot of folks are at the end of their tether, overwhelmed by the vast onslaught of confusing emotions and free-floating anxiety in the telluric atmosphere.
On Friday, November 19th, there will be a partial Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio-Taurus.
The one message anger can have for us is that our Soul Core is alerting us to some person, situation or thing that violates our sense of Self, or our core values. As such, anger is then your friend, and an ally in helping you in choosing and activating healthy boundaries. In a climate such as we have now, people’s right to say “NO!” is even being taken away. To someone experiencing physical, mental or sexual abuse, we would be appalled if someone were denied the inherent right to say “NO!, that is does not feel good and I will resist!” This is when anger can give us the courage to stand up for ourselves and by saying “no” we are saying “yes” to what feels right and good for us.
It was powerful beyond time to enter that great living pulsing stony timeless being of light. It was vast beyond my understanding, as it seemed to extend beyond the sky into the stars that night. As I stood in the entrance to the great pyramid giving thanks for being there I learned more in that 1 minute passing through the entrance of the great Pyramid then I had accumulated in my entire life. Everything was shown to me in an instant like a life review and then the slate was cleared empty, awaiting being filled again. I entered the Great Pyramid as pure as a Virgin stripped of everything she once knew herself to be. The empty chalice of me at that moment in timelessness was ready to fill with the gifts of the great pyramid, which were beyond my ability to fully consume.
Everything on earth is defined by a numerical configuration. All life can be reduced and explained by numbers. The currents of these numerical sequences bring into alignment a series of new considerations that will help earth to adjust and balance. Each numerical infusion is tailored to fit the needs of each human. As the brain adjusts to these new energies a lifting occurs allowing the individual to exit the human/animal ratio and be lifted into the human/light equation. Numbers and humans go hand in hand. From the beginning of time known we have been defined by a numerical equation whether age, birth date, weight, or the number of wives and camels we have. Numbers have always seemed to be our not so silent partners.
Gillian Macbeth Louthan is a Visionary, a Seer, born with the gift of knowing. She is a clairvoyant psychic with advanced channeling abilities since an early age. She has been a Metaphysical Teacher, Messenger and world known Trance-Channel, for over 40 years She works with the Councils of Light, Mary Magdalene, Merlin, White Buffalo Calf Woman, Mother Mary, the Pleiadians and many other energies of the Christ Light.
Last year, I met an extremely gifted medium in California: Allie Barkalow. If you don’t know what a medium is, it’s a person who communicates with spirits from the other side. I heard about Allie from my dear friend, Carolyn Miller, who is a psychic and known for her amazing tarot and aura photography readings. Carolyn told me that Allie is one of the best psychics she knows, and I figured if she’s anything like Carolyn I had to meet her.
Moldavite is a member of the tektite group, a glassy mixture of silicon dioxide, aluminum oxide and other metal oxides, with a hardness of 5.5 to 6. Its crystal system is amorphous. The color of most specimens is a deep forest green, though some pieces are pale green and others, especially those from Moravia, are greenish brown. A few rare gem grade pieces are almost an emerald green.
People who hold moldavite for the first time most often experience its energy as warmth or heat, usually felt first in one’s hand and then progressively throughout the body. In some cases, there is an opening of the heart chakra, characterized by strange (though not painful) sensations in the chest, an upwelling of emotion and a flushing of the face. This has happened often enough to have earned a name — the “moldavite flush.” Moldavite’s energies can also cause pulsations in the hand, tingling in the third eye and heart chakras, a feeling of light-headedness or dizziness, and occasionally the sense of being lifted out of one’s body. Most people feel that moldavite excites their energies and speeds their vibrations, especially for the first days or weeks, until they become acclimated to it.