What Happens Inside Your Body When You Get Flu Shot - And How to Boost Your Immune System In Fall/Winter

I got a flu shot today, as I do every year.  You should, too.

Some folks are afraid of side-effects.  The CDC reports that 90+% of the side-effects are rashes or swellings at the injection site.  So let’s all take a deep breath together.  I get a rash if I wear wool.  My husband was stung by a yellow-jacket while gardening last weekend and had a rash and a swelling.  The rashes and swelling with shots of all kinds go down in 24 hours, as his bee sting did.  Not exactly a major medical emergency. 

My sister swears that the one time she got a flu shot, she came down with flu, so therefore the flu shot must have given her flu.  Lots of people think this.  Reality: dead viruses can’t hurt you, and the viruses being injected into you are DEAD.  Sis is falling into the “if two things happen together, one thing must have caused another” fallacy.  Two things happening is a correlation; they happen together.  But correlation is not causality.  I sneezed just as I switched on my TV and the tube blew out, so I was convinced that sneezing caused the blow out.  [I was very young.  Have compassion.]  That’s ridiculous, yes, but so is dead viruses making you sick.

Truth is, there is a danger involved in flu shots, but it’s not the danger Sis is worrying about.  The real danger is that injecting dead viruses into my body gets my body focused on fighting this collection of three dead invaders [the most likely influenza variants to crop up this season] AT THE EXACT SAME TIME that there is a high probability that other viruses and bacteria – the whole soup of bugs that are circulating during the winter “flu season” – are also attacking you.  If the timing is just right, your immune system is focusing on building protection against a future invasion by the three deadly flus and another bug just happens to invade when your protection squad is not paying attention.  It can waltz in without being detected until it’s too late!  Now if you are used to thinking logically, you will ask: what is the mathematical probability that the timing will be exactly right to allow that second bug to invade just when your immune system is focusing on preparing its defense against the deadlier potential threat?  Not very high.  But you roll the dice every year over the span of a long life, and the probability that it will happen eventually gets high.  And unlikely events DO happen.  Sis won the virus jackpot on her very first outing.  But she’s still making a foolish choice. 

So, how about some basic info on how your immune system works?  Sounds good to me!

Your “immune system” is a collection of systems and processes that are all focused on 1) detecting, and then 2) fighting off, invasions of your body.  Your mouth, nose, eyes, lungs, digestive system and urinary/vaginal/anal openings are the most likely entry points, so you have the most defenders there.  Your “detection” defense consists of sentinel B and T cells who are constantly patrolling these high-risk areas, as well as all through the rest of your body, in case some miscreant gets past the border sentinels.  One type of T sentinel, the NK cells, also check your own cells for problems, eliminating most cancers before they are larger than a few cells.  [When they get confused and decide that your own body organ is an invader, you get auto-immune diseases.]  Detection is the weakest part of the system.  Far too many invaders manage to fake out or elude the sentinel B and T’s and establish a beachhead.  If you are a military history fan, you know that the first 24 hours of D-Day were critical.  Once the Allies had a beachhead and could land tanks and artillery, the war’s outcome was not in doubt.  In the same way, you want your sentinel cells to be numerous enough and smart enough to smash all the invaders before they start to settle in and proliferate.  [My programs use hypnotherapy, reiki and other tools to help your sentinels to keep their numbers up AND to be smart about taking out cancer and leaving healthy tissue alone.  Call or email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session.]

When a sentinel cell detects an invader, it alerts the major ground forces, the attack cells.  B sentinels alert their own B attack cells, who inform the T sentinel and attack cells.  At this point, a major reproductive move starts, as your major ground forces attempt to assemble an army large enough to take the invaders out.  BUT – this takes too much time, usually!  If the bug makes a beachhead, you are going to get sick.  If your attack cells can reproduce fast enough, it will be a quick, light illness.  [If they nip it before it even gets started, you won’t even know you were invaded.  Maybe you’re tired for 24 hours but don’t know why.  Now you know why.]  If your attack cells don’t get alerted soon enough or they are vastly outnumbered by the invaders, you’ll be down for the count.  Four days or four weeks sicker than a hound-dog in July. 

Swelling at the site of the injection just means that your sentinel cells noticed that your body has been invaded by the dead flu viruses, it alerted the B and T attack cells, who are starting to mount a defense.  This is a good thing!  Swelling, redness, fever and pain are the “cardinal signs” that your attack cells are fighting off an invasion, and many doctors are now suggesting that adults allow a moderate fever to remain.  [Virus replication is inhibited at higher temperatures.  If you fight your immune system and bring a low-moderate fever down, you are helping the invader and foiling your body’s defense strategy.] 

The sentinels tell the attack cells exactly what to look for.  The attack cells kill all the invading dead viruses AND manufacture memory cells who remember the exact configuration of the proteins that define those invading viruses.  This is why vaccination protected George Washington’s army from being decimated by smallpox, and it protects you and your children from death as well.  Those memory sentinels ID the invaders immediately and marshal a very strong defense from the attack cells.  With a vaccine, you have a massive army on your side in hours instead of the usual days.  Your attack cells have an excellent chance of wiping out the invasion before you even know it’s under way.  That 24 hours of tired and you dodged the measles, meningitis or pertussis bullet. 

It also explains why your baby and child needs as much protection as possible, as soon as possible, because their sentinel cells are not very clever yet.  Those sentinel cells can easily detect and the attack cells can do their thing, and create lifetime immunity [or long-term, as the case may be] memory cells for several diseases at once.  Sure they can.  

You wouldn’t want to be vaccinating your kid against pertussis when they are actively fighting off a measles invasion, but if everyone vaccinates, then there IS no measles virus floating around.  And keeping our herd immunity high is a matter of life and death – literally – for the adults and children with compromised immune systems who lack sufficient sentinels and attack cells and whose B and T’s can’t even handle the invasion of dead viruses and bacteria very well.  To protect them, we all have to make sure that we eradicate the childhood killer diseases, by not allowing them any hosts to take over.  I am old enough to know the terror my parents had to endure, because the killing and crippling diseases had no cure and, most importantly, no prevention.  

I deeply, passionately, don’t want us to return to those dreadful days.  I just returned from a vacation in Alaska and was reminded that the first Iditarod was literally a race against death.  Diphtheria had hit Nome and if treatment wasn’t received in 10 days, the whole town would be infected and most would die.  Death had Nome in its sights.  The serum did arrive in time, everyone was treated and the death rate was low.  But other towns that did not have the Alaska railroad and dedicated teams of dogs just died. 

Can you imagine that?  Because of modern vaccination, we are not a nation of sobbing parents, burying child after child, utterly helpless to prevent death.  Children aren’t growing up without their parents, who also died in droves of what is now preventable through vaccination.

Flu does kill, but not as many as diphtheria, pertussis or measles.  But I want to give my immune system every advantage, so I am building memory cells as I write this, and they will circulate at a high level for 3 months, protecting me for the start of the season.  I hope that you will give your hard-working sentinels the leg up that they need as well.

And what else can you do to help boost the number of sentinels circulating in your major entry points? 

Ø  Sleep.  The more you sleep, the more B and T cells you have.  Forget taking a supplement.  Sleep.

Ø  Reduce stress.  Take breath breaks.  Learn and practice Reiki and/or tapping (EFT).  Meditate.  Get out of your car and take transit, so you can snooze, do stress reduction and read calming philosophical literature or watch cute kitten videos.  I know someone who reads her Bible every day on the bus.  Someone else reiki’s and snoozes for his 2-hours-each-way commute.  Exercise every day.  You can do it.

Stress lowers your number of B and T sentinels, so you lose that precious time to zap the invaders before they get a beachhead.  It lowers the numbers of your B and T attack cells so you have less of an army to throw at the invaders when you finally detect them.  Take one of my serious stress zapping classes. 

And for heaven’s sake, don’t be a selfish schmuck and come to work sick and spread your damn germs to everyone else!  Stay in bed, give your attack team a chance to win the war quickly.  Why do you think you have all those fancy e-gadgets anyway?  If you aren’t allowed to work from home, take 7 hours of intense stress reduction and see how quickly you get better, and how much smarter you are when you DO go back.  My immune system has a lot to deal with during flu season.  I don’t need you adding millions of viral particles into our shared air with every sneeze, no matter how well covered. 

So:  get a flu shot.  Start reducing stress to as low as possible.  You’ll be reducing your chances of illness as well!

And call or email victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com for a FREE Getting Unstuck session to get you started... www.soaringdragon.biz

The Road to Happiness - Right Through Your Bucket List

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPBgbOuU388

All the advantages of living in cities..... really aren't! Fascinating stats!

You know that urban neighborhoods are more ethnically diverse than small surrounding cities (aka suburbs), right?  With a more diverse political spectrum, right?  And big cities are where more and more people are congregating for better quality of life, right?

Turns out all of that is wrong.  Central cities are full of singles, urban neighborhoods are more uniform with respect to ethnicity AND political philosophy, and have the highest levels of economic inequality in the nation.  They are also lonely places where no one except the hipster singles interact outside of their immediate circle of friends.

It all makes sense.  What pulls people outside their homes isn’t just the mating game of the affluent Young Urban Singles that Microsofties are the poster boys/girls for.  There is much more ethnic diversity, political diversity and meeting-your-neighbors in surrounding small cities, because that’s where the child-raising is happening and kids pull you into church and PTA activities. 

One of the stats that runs particularly counter to popular assumptions is that high-density megacity neighborhoods that are multi-cultural are NOT highly interactive.  It turns out that having to navigate a half-dozen different social and cultural norms, and people whose goals, needs and preferred living style are at odds with yours (seniors who want quiet at night and parents of babies who are anything but, comes to mind), along of whom are right on top of you, without adequate soundproofing or privacy, does NOT cause neighbors to reach out and connect, kumbaya.   It creates the stereotypical city culture of everyone living parallel lives.  Parallel lines never cross, you’ll recall.  As someone who has lived in moderate to megacities, yes, indeed. 

So what on Earth am I talking about?  A fascinating library read by Joel Kotkin [The Human City], focused on the kinds of human environments cities and small surrounding cities create.  It turns out that it’s not what I – or maybe you – thought it was.  

Let me explode more barriers that are holding you back from living the life that you want to live!  www.soaringdragon.biz.  Email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session today.   victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com

Are you laughing yet? No? It's OK, I'll come back in 5 minutes......

Online personal ads consistently say “Sense of humor,” and some studies of who gets called and responded to suggest that we do, indeed, care about this characteristic in our potential mates. 

Makes sense, too.  Try this logic chain:

·         Someone with a sense of humor is likely to take the small things lightly.  A genuine sense of humor is inconsistent with dramatics, and

·         Laughing is good for your health and

·         Laughing makes you attractive.

 We are biologically programmed, from earliest neonate to elder, to respond to a smiling face with an answering smile.  If I can get myself honestly laughing on the date, it not only means that I am having a good time, it also means that I will appear more attractive to you.   [Chimpanzees and gorillas know that a human smile means positive intentions, so it must go back at least 15 million years.]

Humor is a real asset in life as well as dating, for all three reasons.  Call up funny videos on You Tube or Facebook.  Flush the cortisol out of your body with short breaks to laugh.  Allow those tense muscles to naturally relax.  Your brain will clear, solutions will pop into consciousness and you’ll actually notice that the sun is shining, or you’ve got some blessed rain, and you’re alive.   You’ll take a deep breath and remember that it is very, very good to be alive, and loved by the universe and probably quite a few people and other animals.  You’ll take another breath and the whole day has shifted on its axis.

Pretty good ROI on 2 minutes of laughing, wouldn’t you say?

Want High Income, Recession-Proof Career, Deep Soul Clearing + Huge Positive Impact on Your Health?

And it all comes from the same FUN activity!

Whatever your career or business and your satisfaction level with it, I am sure that you remember your parents and high school guidance counselors pounding the "You have to go to college" message into you.  You might also recall the disdain all these fine folk expressed, overtly or merely through tone of voice, for the blue-collar workers.  Their jobs, because they work with their hands, were being offshored, but you - with your shiny new BA (or MA) - were a knowledge worker.  YOU were golden.  

Fast forward some decades.  Sure enough, the good-paying blue collar jobs of the Midwest were offshored and the sorta-good-paying factory jobs of the South were taken over by illegal immigrants.  Huge transition from fathers being able to support their families to fathers stuck in permanent unemployment, with no unemployment help, or re-employed at much less $, no benefits.  A world of constant anxiety, no security and no self-esteem.

Sounds like your guidance counselors, parents, pundits, everyone really, was right.  If you want money, security and good health (from lack of stress and from access to medical care and quality food), then you need to go to college.  Case closed.

But......  what about the people who listened to that advice more recently, with college costs having skyrocketed?  Huge education debt that is acting as an economic and personal sea anchor, preventing young people from buying homes, starting families or even moving away from their parents.

Compounded, of course, by the end of that lovely fantasy that knowledge work can't be offshored.  It was always logically true that knowledge work is the easiest to offshore.  No new factories to build.  All you need is a cheap call-center or a wired world where everyone from accountants to radiologists can do their work with a Hindi, Chinese, Vietnamese or Mexican accent.  Not to mention Hungarian.  My own work of deep transformational healing can be done from anywhere on Earth with a high-speed Internet link.  And not just by highly-skilled and experienced healers like me.  There are companies in the Puget Sound area who are hiring minimally-trained health coaches and hypnotists to work in crowded call-center environments at minimum wage!  Obviously, the quality isn't going to be as high as what I do with my academic degrees, certifications and years of experience, but this is exactly what has been happening to most of the knowledge-worker occupations.

So here is the actual reality:  A college degree is no longer the passport to the middle class, a road out of poverty and a road out of just-getting-by, that it used to be.  That equation is dead.  Unless you have a college degree in something immensely crucially essential and in demand, and which pays well, you may be feeding your mind, but you are wasting your money if you go anywhere other than the least expensive public college you can find.  [American Public University, entirely online, is very cost-effective, and I recommend it as one of a handful of quality for-profit colleges.]

Guidance counselors are still playing the "college for all" song.  So are all the "mean well" politicians.  But that is not the road to follow.  If you have someone in your family who is wondering how to get:

* Solid, steady income that cannot be offshored, ever, and which no recession will ever make a dent in AND
* a huge positive impact on your health because you have that steady security, and you can choose to either run your own business or work for a company AND
* the satisfaction of creation with your own two hands, 

.... then, my friend, you need to get them an apprenticeship in one of the eternal trades: plumbing, auto tech, electrician.  There are a few others, like chef and HVAC, that I can highly recommend, as well as craftsman carpentry.

Don't recoil in horror.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Enquiry Into the Value of Work (Matthew Crawford) sounded this alarm some years ago.  In my work with clients, I sound off on the value of creating things with your own two hands, as much as possible throughout the day, as the road to better physical health and to peace of mind.  The anxiety-stilling impact of doing creative work - anything from building a bird house to painting, coloring or crocheting - has been documented in medical studies as well as psychological.  The more you can create over the course of a day, the less tempting baby-back ribs are, the less self-control you have to exert to not eat dessert, the less onerous and more joyful exercise and movement becomes, the less interesting alcohol and tobacco addictions are, and the more "Damn, I'm GOOD!!!!" experiences you have in the course of a day.

Because I will assert to you with no equivocation whatsoever that the clothing you make yourself makes you feel like a queen, the doghouse you create yourself makes you feel as powerful as the Emperor Akbar and the book you write from the heart, or the paint you swirl on a paper or canvas is as sweet to your eyes as a priceless Turner.  

It's as close to the godly act of creation as we mere mortals ever get.  You need that fabulous feeling.  You DESERVE that fabulous feeling.  You can get that fabulous feeling.  

And when your grandkid the plumber arranges for you to never have a 4 hour wait for a stopped drain again, that feeling is priceless, too!  

Start today!

_______________________________________________________________________

Know what else you deserve?  You deserve to have all that procrastinating that you just can't figure out end too.  Every single time you waste time on Facebook instead of making progress toward your deeply felt dreams, you deserve better!  Every single time you decide that you will never succeed at what you want, you deserve better!

Accept my gift of a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch), and discover exactly what has really been holding you back or stopping you from achieving the life you really want.  Visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz, and we'll schedule your free session.  You need more than just "motivation" and inspiration.  You are plenty motivated to get what you want!  You just lack the specific tools to get back the barrier.   And I am very, very good at blockage-demolition!  www.soaringdragon.biz    victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com

Step Forward from Intention to Action!

I just finished an interview on sharewisdom.tv, on Marianne Marlow's show Conscious Conversations. Marianne was my mentor when I was learning hypnotherapy, and now she is starting a new TV show!

My segment (from 20 minutes to 40 minutes of the hour) continued her theme of taking action. We have to step away from the thinking about it phase to the taking action. You don't want to race off a cliff in an excess of enthusiasm, but after you have done serious and analytical as well as intuitive searching for info, you need to put steps in your calendar and start SOMETHING.

[Or call me for a FREE Getting Unstuck session. This is not an offer for a sales pitch. I will get you through your first, starting step - the hardest - on your road to your goal!]

If you enjoy Marianne's content, some more wonderful free content on the same subject of taking action in my YouTube channel humanbio4everyone. Lots of encouragement as well as specific steps! Go for it!

And the funniest part of it is that until 30 minutes before airtime, I thought that it was a radio interview! [I was a last minute addition to the show, so some details fell through the communications cracks.] When I got a checksheet telling me about lighting, backgrounds, etc., several very genteel and ladylike expression fell dulcetly from my lip as I dashed into action. How appropriate for the theme of the show!

Earrings and lipstick, because my mum always said you can walk out the door for a meeting with the Queen with just those two. Eyeshadow because I didn't have time for makeup. No time for my truly spectacular, gorgeous wardrobe. So I had my tv debut in a denim dress and fabulous earrings. A tan in place of professional skin products. My hair all which way from a hair-wash 30 minutes earlier. If my philosophical framework is wrong and there is a humanistic deity in charge of events, all I can is that he, she or it was splitting their sides laughing.

How do you take action?

1) Start with the overall goal and break it down into specific, small, discrete tasks to get you to the first milestone. Forget about the rest, just focus on the first milepost.

2) Choose the easiest task on the list that doesn't depend on an earlier step and do that. Feel yourself moving! Cheer when you get it done!

3) Pick another easy step. Don't agonize over which one. Just one easy one. See you your muscles are unknotting as you are in Action?

Keep moving until you get to the milepost. Celebrate.

Name the next milepost and create steps. You're in motion. Just keep going.

The minute you feel resistance, stop. Meditate and ask your unconscious mind to tell you what it's really about. If the answer doesn't come, call me for your Free Getting Unstuck session and I'll get you moving again. [Not a sales pitch, remember.]

www.soaringdragon.biz 253-203-6676