Do you have Issues in Your Tissues? Take the short Issues Quiz to find out! 20?s Personalized results give you ideas and insights about how to feel better and steps you can take to learn more.

Denise LaBarre taught Issues Classes at University of Hawaii, Maui Campus. Level 1 – How to Recognize and Heal the Issues in Your Tissues was for your personal use in your own body. Level 2 – How to Handle Others’ Emotions in the Workplace thought how to hold space for others in your workplace and with family.

This delicious spin on coffee helps with your morning energy. Bulletproof coffee was a fad a while ago but it’s still something to try for an alternative to breakfast, if you are intermittent fasting, or if you just want something different. Recipe included.

Survivor’s guilt can hit anyone, in many situations. It can also be an empathic response in those who simply see the graphic media images and hear the cries of people posting their distress. Here are some thoughts and tips to ease your distress and help others who may be suffering.

Fibromyalgia is the body’s accumulated response to deep emotional trauma that hasn’t been adequately acknowledged by self and others. The range of symptoms are a call for help from a tender part of a person that doesn’t know how to call out any other way. Fibromyalgia patients need to be listened to – and they need to learn to listen to themselves!

Coconut oil is a fabulous high-heat cooking oil and has far more applications for healthy cooking, beauty, and general household use than you may be aware of. Here are many ways to use coconut oil – + recipe for home-made deodorant.

Besides stretching and toning your body, yoga gives you the opportunity to tune inward and listen to what your body is feeling that day and pay attention to your breath in that moment. There are so many benefits.

Sustainability is not a new or radical concept. Throughout human history indigenous humans have realized that we need to respect; and replace what we take and align ourselves with Nature’s built-in ability to maintain balance.

Sleep is a hot topic these days and we know how important sleep is for overall health. This article cuts through the sleep hygiene hype and gives practical tips you can start using tonight to sleep better, longer and awaken more refreshed.

Fresh, locally grown food is your best source for nutrition, plus it’s better for the planet. Visit farmer’s markets in your area, get to know growers. You can grow your own herbs in pots. Anything you do to connect with the growing cycle and the food you eat helps.

Our siblings shape us in deep and powerful ways. We are in the same family to learn and grow – sometimes in reaction to our siblings. A parent’s shadow projections can interfere with and taint sibling dynamics, but when you expose the problem at the source, healing and better relationships are possible.

A highly Sensitive, Perceptive, or Intuitive person may be aware of energy, sound, color – just about anything – in a way most others are not. But it’s not always easy to be such a person or to love one. Here are some insights and tips to understanding and living with hightened sensitivity, however that shows up.

We all want to live in a sustainable world. But how do we take the steps to get there? There are plenty of ways to reduce your consumption footprint, whatever you already to toward this, here are more ways to become more sustainable in your practices, now.

Humans and plants have evolved together.  We are designed to eat what is grown near us, picked and eaten quickly to get the biggest nutritional benefit. When you compare fresh-picked, locally-grown fruits and vegetables with their picked-unripe, gassed-and-warehoused counterparts in big supermarkets there’s no contest! Plus, it’s better for the local economy and the health of the planet. Here’s inspiration to reorient to more locally grown.

How you eat is as important as what you eat.  My goal when I eat is to sit down and take a deep breath before picking up anything.  I appreciate the colors, give thanks to the beings who contributed to the food on my plate, and feel grateful for the whole process.  That sets the stage for good assimilation, and digestion. When I do this, I eat more slowly and I’m giving myself the benefit of better digestion and relaxation.

Massage (bodywork) feels good and meets our basic need for touch. Beyond that, it increases circulation and offers a host of other physical benefits. But, you might ask, with all the options out there, how do I find a great bodyworker? This article gives you the information you need.

A yoga practice connects awareness of the breath with specific poses (asanas), whose energetic effects bring harmony and union to the whole being. That includes body, mind, spirit, and emotions. This article will give you tips and awareness for those times yoga brings up emotional release.

Bathing in clean, hot water is one of the great luxuries of being human. A hot bath relaxes your muscles, hydrates your spirit, and if you add epsom salts and/or baking soda, can give your body a great detoxifying boost. Here’s how to take advantage of this great resource.

Our hips are our biggest joints and a critical portal for energy flow throughout the body. They express joy – or the lack of it. Hips are designed to move in all planes, in all directions and one of the greatest ways they can do this is dancing (appeases the feminine) and sex (satisfies the masculine) in each of us.

Self-care can be a juggling act – balancing the demands of loved ones, work, and a household. What do you do when you see no opening for quiet time? Take a deep breath and start small. Each opening creates another. Here are tips for better sleep, eating, and relaxing.

Whether it’s a new year or a new day, it’s never too late for a new beginning and new beginnings call for a new vision. What’s your fear? What holds you back? This year seems especially powerful for realizing our greatness. The earth and all the beings on it need each of us to step into our greatness and act from the heart.

Depression and sadness can hit any time but many of us are especially susceptible to it during the winter – and that can be a good thing. Here’s how to welcome it for a better holiday season, winter, or any time you’re down.

How do you practice self-love? When you’re juggling many demands on your time – during the holiday season, or any time – how do you give yourself the care and love you need? Here’s how to adjust your perspective so self-care is not always at the bottom of the list.

What if today you were just grateful? Cultivate gratitude by thinking of something you feel grateful for, and then breathe into that feeling to amplify it. It’s a practice that only works when you feel it – in your heart, in your body, with breath. Here’s how…

Do you Breathe Like You Mean it? If you could improve your breathing without changing your schedule at all, would you do it? This article condenses many concepts from Chapter 1 of Issues in Your Tissues and is a great reminder to come back into your body – right now – with your breath.

How do you find a great bodyworker? And when you find that person, How do you get the most out of the experience? This article answers both questions. What to look for, questions to ask, & tips for optimizing your results.

You can create a Present Moment Portal for yourself right now.  After you read this article, close your eyes and simply listen to all the sounds around you, whatever they are. Appreciate that your magnificent body…

Hanging out in wild, natural wilderness is a fantastic way to bring yourself back into natural harmony.  Even a rooftop garden, a cricket you find on the sidewalk, birds, cats, dogs – any little bit of nature, if you pay attention to it – can become a meditation, your portal back to YOU. 

We all need healthy ways to grieve or commemorate loss. Ceremony helps ease grief and helps us move on. Here are Ideas, questions, and an action list for what to do to commemorate a loved one, celebrate a life, or externalize grief and loss.

Caring for your aging body is easier with a loving attitude toward It. Here’s how to flip the script on negative messages about aging, make the most of what your body knows and can do, and celebrate how marvelous it is to be alive in YOUR body.

Whether you are a yoga instructor or have practiced yoga for some time, you have witnessed both tears and laughter as people move and stretch through the postures. Here’s how to help yourself and others breathe into emotions that arise and allow the tears – and laughter – to flow.

If you wrestle with inflammation, turmeric could become your most delicious friend. The healing power of turmeric is big news, and rightly so because it cooking with it is an easy, healthy way to reduce inflammation and improve your overall health.

Whether it’s holding space for growing, healing, or dying, the gesture and dynamics are the same: open arms, invitation, non-judgment, safe boundaries, and Love. Discussion of how to hold healing space well and what happens when it isn’t done well. Patience and love are the key ingredients.

For years we’ve been hearing about the benefits of meditation, but how do build a practice in the midst of a busy life? And how do you quiet your busy mind? This article explains meditation in a new way and gives simple, practical tips you can use today.

Why is magnesium so important? This essential mineral is necessary for 300+ enzyme systems that operate a healthy body and helps with sleep, bowel motility and a host of other bodily functions. Here’s why you want to learn what foods to eat to get it in its most absorbable form.

As adults, many of us have gotten too serious and stopped playing. If you need an invitation to play, laugh, tell jokes, and get silly – this is it! Links to scholarly articles, a TED talk on play, and a nudge to loosen up and act like a kid. It’s all here. Come play with me!

Continues discussion of the Future of Healing Conference held in 2015, hosted by Marc David. Many of the topics covered are still not “in the marketplace” and it’s interesting to see from the future what predictions were accurate. Above all, the conclusion is, we have the power to heal ourselves.

The future of healing will revolve around gut health, human connection, a conscious turn inward to slow down and listen to the body. It also includes a conscious respect for and partnership with the intelligence of natural processes. This is part 1 of a 2-part report on the Future of Healing Conference from 2015.

Building healthy habits takes time and getting help from some who can help hold you accountable is a great way to reinforce a new behavior. You may have to tell your Inner Critic to “chill” . It takes energy to change direction but with small initial changes, it’s actually easy.

I want to share my healing knowledge and experience with you. My many and varied blog posts will help you with your breathing, learn what your hips are trying to tell you (about joy or lack thereof), why the body develops symptoms like those called “fibromyalgia” and a host of other body-related subjects. Please check out all the articles I have on my website.

You are born to love and be loved! Even if your parent(s) didn’t show you the love, support, and understanding you needed, you can give those to yourself now. Love is your birthright and sometimes you come to love most powerfully by experiencing its absence.

How do you get to a positive attitude about your body if you’re not already there? Here’s a body appreciation exercise to help you wherever you’ve bought into any messages that you aren’t beautiful enough or your body isn’t what it’s supposed to be.

A woman’s issues with her husband traces back to issues with her father. This story illustrates how we often choose partners who reflect dynamics with our parents and gives insights about how to understand and heal from old wounds.

Grieving a mother is often rough. I want to share a hug with everyone whose mother has died in the past year, everyone whose mother will die this coming year, and everyone who feels like a motherless child. (You can also substitute mother for father as most of the feelings are the same.)

I rested my hands on his shoulders to listen more closely. I felt crystalline tears stuck in the muscles. This strong man hadn’t cried since he was 16, when his parents divorced. Of course he had unexpressed sadness, anger and fear. This story looks like what freeing that stuck energy looked like.

As you watch the video, feel your heart open and reach toward this sincere, open little being as she connects with her mother’s emotions. This is what unarmored looks like. Babies open our hearts and remind us how to feel!

If you are not aware of the power of essential oils, let me explain why they deserve your attention and could become a valuable healing resource for you. Plants have myriad ways to heal and protect themselves and often those powers reside in their essential oils. A small kit like the one I describe can help with many of life’s occasional and ongoing troubles.

When using a coffee enema, the caffeine from the coffee is preferentially absorbed into this system and goes directly to the liver where it becomes a very strong detoxicant. It cleans your liver, your colon, and resets a number of bodily functions. Here’e how…

The rhythms of our thoughts and feelings reflect the rhythms of life. Go large and think about the cosmos, come in and think about lunch. Breathe in, breathe out. Letting go is as important as building in the big picture. This thought piece tunes you in to your breath, body and wider cycles.

Touch is a powerful human catalyst. Everyone has unexpressed emotion and a spa treatment or massage can provide the opportunity to release it. Many practitioners aren’t trained to handle emotions release in a treatment session so here are tips and pointers for any hands-on professional.

7 Tips for conscious eating. Here are some practices to start building now for those times when your emotions get the best of you and your eating spirals out of your conscious control. The trick is to do these things before you are emotionally triggered to eat.

Sustainability simply means that we are supposed to replace what we take and align ourselves with Nature’s built-in ability to maintain balance. This applies to your body, too. The commercial directive to constantly buy more, do more, and eat more doesn’t work with your body (either.) Thought-provoking discussion and questions…

Too much time in your head and breathing minimally throws you off balance and escalates into stress, tension, and worse: dis-ease. The beautiful thing is that the remedy is easy, portable, and free. Here’s a playful and effective breathing tool that will deepen your breath and bring you back into your body – where you belong

Your body has many cooperative systems to keep the whole working smoothly if you just let them lead. You have to unplug from the external cues from advertising and tune in to your internal guidance system. The awareness from this article will help you do that.

Whether you have cancer, are watching a loved-one going through life-threatening disease, or simply care about our health, this approach to diet and healing is worth a look. You may not need the entire protocol but the commitment to total healing is as powerful as the details.

Are you addicted to sugar? It’s a hard habit to break, but it’s possible with these steps over time. Make gradual changes that you can sustain and build on. Support yourself by having healthy food available, prepared ahead of time. Emotional eating may be part of the problem.

When we face change, it helps to know what a positive outcome looks like.  Positive evolution includes aging well, embracing diversity, and building sustainable agriculture.  That means we need role models for aging well and good parenting.

Notes from the Wisdom 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Denise attended for several years and this was her report in 2015.

Tuning in to natural rhythms brings us back to our very human essence. Are we near an equinox? a solstice? Tonight, look up to see what phase the moon is in. Life and death come in cycles and the more we’re aware of this, the richer our lives become.

Our culture doesn’t want to look at death. We act as if it’s something we can avoid if we don’t think about it… But that leaves us completely unprepared, scared, and impoverished when death inevitably comes knocking. Talking about your own death can be a rewarding experience – Here’s how to get started…

What do you do when you know you’ve behaved badly in a relationship and you want to repair the damage? Taking sister relationships as an example, we explore when things go wrong and how to find forgiveness, apologize and return to love that lies under the hurt.

Life exists in rhythms and patterns: breathe in – breath out, expand-contract. These rhythmic movements ARE life. As you understand this interconnectedness and practice conscious breathing, your health and awareness expand. Her are tips…

Without our conscious knowledge and without any fanfare, the healing made possible by coordinated structure and movement is everywhere. Here’s an exploration of structure in nature with special emphasis on structured water.

Learning about structured water is part of the larger tapestry of understanding and awareness about health and How things work in Nature. Water naturally resets or structures through the hydrological cycle – that humans have disrupted and are learning to repair.

Eating healthy fats is critical for good health. Above all, you want to steer away from hydrogenated oils. The hydrogenation process mixes water with the oil so it won’t spoil. This is great for shelf life, but terrible for your digestive system.

The best health advice – whether dietary or long-term medical – probably comes from one’s body, itself. Modern medical lab tests give you a snapshot of a specific moment in your body’s life – which changes constantly. Your body already has the information you need.

If your parents made you finish everything on your plate or you’ve been dieting much of your life, you learned to eat to external cues. The pattern ends as we unhook from the external cues and tune in to the signals the body naturally gives you.

Our social reliance on sugar in the form of alcohol, processed food, soda, and quick, cheap carbs isn’t healthy. It’s normal only because it has become the norm. The social cost of eating better is worth it. As you crest the hill of sugar addiction, the view gets better.

Not only is it possible, it’s better to cut out sugar during this season of eating.  I gathered with loved-ones, ate plenty, felt fabulous afterward AND lost weight. Here’s the story.

I will write about what I’m learning about – how I am cutting sugar and wheat out of my diet and still living in modern America, and about what I am learning about death and therefore, life.  Always I talk about the body and its emotions.

Finally! a fun and interactive tool to catalyze your exploration into the Issues in Your Tissues.  The Issues Quiz is short - only 20 questions. It [...]

Whatever the cause when you awaken, the important thing is not to let your thoughts take off into worrying about it. That pulls energy up into your head and out of your body – where you need it most to sleep. You can train yourself not to wake up fully and return to sleep.

In our fast-paced lives, it’s normal to feel overloaded or overwhelmed.  With all the things you do and think in a day, where’s the room to reset and recover? This is a reminder, permission, and tips to take care of you, today!

Otters are intelligent, playful, resourceful, affectionate, determined, strong, agile in the water, and beautiful.  They have no natural enemies except man, and they voraciously and joyfully eat anything that tastes good to them. What’s not to love?

Your Smile can make someone’s day. Don’t forget the power a smile has to change your mood or someone else’s. When love shines through your smile, it is a gift. Be more generous with this free, easy way to improve you mood. Try similing right now!

This emotional release guide for professionals in a spa or clinical gives practical tips and awareness for how to handle tears, anger, or other emotions that come up in hands-on sessions. Spontaneous emotions are natural but can disrupt your flow. Here’s how to flow with them.

We all have unwanted emotions leftover from past trauma. We shut away those “monsters” and they accumulate in our “emotional closet” until we shed light on them with love and understanding. There are healthier ways to deal with them. Here’s how:

How can you eat consciously when you’re upset, angry, sad, or lonely? Because we have to eat to live, it can be tricky keeping our needs and our desires in balance. Eating patterns can get tangled up with our emotional needs. Tips to handle emotional eating habits.

Aloha is a feeling, an understanding, and attitude of love and connectedness. Breath is the vehicle. You can bring this Hawaiian awareness of breath as vehicle of love, health and connectedness into your body any time. Read and find out how.