I want to make some positive suggestions on how to transcend and alleviate the stress of cultural self destruct by enjoying the moment.

It is fabulous to reconnect with old friends after 30 years. Especially when you discover the fantastic things they do, like achieving a living by bringing lots of love into the world. In addition to writing fascinating books on Tantra and Erotic Massage, Kavida Rei organises and runs unique parties, called Sensual Soirées - Parties with Heart...

Abraham Maslow’s model of human needs, showing a ‘motivating hierarchy’ has been a strong influence in several sectors of our culture since the 1950’s.

A cute book I picked up in a second-hand bookshop contains a collection of scraps and oddments about the many strange but interesting objects encountered on ramblings and wanderings in the British Countryside. In a time of water shortages and hose pipe bans, Dew Ponds could be a practical way to ensure a localised supply of water for gardening or livestock as this article by E. Mansell describes.

Rachel Carson wrote a book in the 1960’s called 'Silent Spring', describing how the use of pesticides in our food production was not only destroying wild bird populations but was also a root cause for a whole host of human malaise, including cancer. Today we are told that our diet should contain at least five sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables without any reference to the quality of this food or its authenticity. But really this is not enough to promote health and research shows why.

There are many healing foods available. Nutritional studies into natural healing compounds in fresh food reveal an entire pharmacopoeia just waiting for us. It's worth learning some of these terms for the nutraceutical and botanical aspects of healing foods. Discover which foods contain these so that you can identify and get the foods that will benefit your own unique physiology and healing situation.

There is a tiny bacterium residing in the gut lining of about two-thirds of all adults on the planet, called Helicobacter Pylori. Research strongly  suggests that this bacterium may be central to the cause of 80% of all stomach cancers - yet this dangerous invader is mostly left untreated  until it creates serious problems.

Global pharmaceutical companies control our diets and medicines and governments are bringing in legislation to ban many dietary supplements. What better time to get back to the earth and turn out your medicine cabinets to favour of Mother Nature? This is a great time to source our own foodstuffs and medicines wherever possible.

Natures cold remedies in your kitchen. Colds are the body's escape mechanism. When the whole system is overloaded it crashes. The body stresses out and the immune system drops its threshold. The nose releases toxic wastes in the form of mucous and the body often aches and feels exhausted. Pay attention to what your body is saying because an unchecked cold can become far more serious if you keep it buried. Here are some first-aid tips and recipes to help:

Looking back to Greek literature, Tansy was given by the Gods to Ganymede to make him immortal. In the language of flowers the gift of Tansy means 'Rejected address' - " I am not interested in you". Its strange taste, not unlike the smell of 'mothballs' might have something to do with this. When I made some into a Tansy Cake - I found it unpalatable, more a medicine than a cake.

The French, in terms of diet and disease, have been a statistical enigma. They relish high fat food, consume alcohol regularly and often smoke - the very picture of the World Health Organisation's 'risk group'. High protein, meat  based meals include duck, goose and pork - even cooked in fat as a preference!  Butter, cream, pork fat and wine are regular ingredients - so why do they have such a low rate of heart disease compared to other countries?

The treatment room. A self treatment at the heart of psychoneuro-immunology. Try out this energy treatment for yourself by constructing a special 'healing room' in your own mind.

Clear your head by singing along to the Solfeggio scale. Here's a free vibrational therapy for you to try at home. Most musical instruments can be used for their healing qualities and just the same applies to the human voice, possibly even more so. Just by humming or singing you are setting off frequencies and vibrations inside your body that can shift perception and alter physiology. I found this out during one of my work avoidance breaks.

Doctor Kathy Sykes is presenting us with scientific proof of how acupuncture and therefore other meridian-based interventions might work. In what can only be described as a 'breakthrough experiment', she found evidence of an effect of acupuncture on the brain's limbic system, also known as the mammalian hind brain. Combining on-the-spot acupuncture with an MRI scanner we were able to view the direct effect of acupuncture for ourselves in calming areas of the limbic brain.

Here are thirty things that we can do as individuals to avoid modern disease. Check the list and see how many of these you do already...

Work with electrical fields that surround animals and plants suggests the presence of an energy body. Studies using Kirlian photography show energy fields surrounding physical objects although there is still some debate as to what these actually are. Energy or 'vibrational' medicine is heavily legislated against and machines have been made illegal and confiscated. This field has been overlooked for far too long.

1000 years ago in Europe pre-Christian tribes originally had a Goddess culture - a matriarchy where the earth and nature and their cycles and secrets were revered. In pre-industrial societies illness was not seen as a 'random assault from outside' but as a deeply significant life event  integral to the sufferer's whole being - spiritual, moral, physical and  life course - past, present and future.

We live now in a time of 'paradigm shift' which creates fundamental changes in our assumptions about the world, and even this  contributes to modern stress! Although our physical sciences have  discovered new fields of a quantum energy reality, medical science is lagging far  behind.

Medicine is extremely slow to move from a mechanistic and physical  philosophy to a more energetic model, like the Gaian paradigm that values all life forms as connected. A philosophy of medicine that is over-reliant on logic and limited mainly to drugs and surgery is fundamental flawed. Acts of logic always rely on analysis, that is breaking down a 'whole' into its constituent parts, and examining each minutely. Reductionist approaches fail to see the connectivity and relatedness of all things and the power of the mind itself.