Will this choice add to my lifeforce or will it rob me of my energy?
–Debbie Ford
The Right Questions, HarperCollins, 2004

Am I looking for what’s right or am I looking for what’s wrong?
–Debbie Ford
The Right Questions, HarperCollins, 2004

by ken winston caine

Reliable, detailed monographs on medicinal herbs are available free, online, from the North Carolina Consortium on Natural Medicines.

They come in three flavors:

1. For health professionals.

2. For everyone else.

3. For growers.

You can access any of them.

They are limited to herbs that can be grown in North Carolina — so you won’t find an extensive list of medicinal herbs here. But the information you will find is very thorough and well vetted.

Find them here: (more…)

Will this choice propel me toward an inspiring future or will it keep me stuck in the past?
–Debbie Ford, The Right Questions, HarperCollins, 2004

by ken winston caine

Want to lose 20 pounds in the next 30 days?

Make your diet boring. Boring and simple, says Tim Ferris, best-selling author of The Four-Hour Workweek.

That doesn’t mean no variety or tasteless meals, Ferris explains.

He provides four simple rules for losing weight quickly, while building muscle, and — exercise is NOT one of them. (Click the link below to see all four rules — and the exact diet he is using.)

The rules look nutritionally sound. And they are based on results from scientific studies.

Why make your diet boring? Because it’s easier to follow that way, he says.

“The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat loss, eat the same few meals over and over again,” he writes in a blog post at (more…)

by ken winston caine

The questions you ask and choose to explore shape the outcomes you achieve. The trick is to ask powerful questions.

They cut to the chase. They move you forward quickly and smartly.

Asking powerful questions is at the heart of “coaching” as it was developed by Thomas Leonard. And I’ve been collecting lists of powerful questions, or coaching questions, for 11 years — ever since I was first exposed to Leonard’s approach.

But simply being armed with a mile-long list of powerful questions does not make one a good coach. Or guarantee you magnificent, rapid, sustainable personal success. The good coach and the smart achiever know how to ask the right type of question at exactly the right moment.

Better, I think, to understand what a powerful question is, so that you can instinctively pose one when it is needed, than to have a long list of questions to sort through. (Though a list is valuable.)

So what is a powerful question?

The best explanation I have come across comes not from the world of life coaching or business coaching or corporate coaching, but from pioneers of The World Cafe process, Juanita Brown and David Isaacs.

They write, on their website, that a powerful question has eight defining characteristics: (more…)

by ken winston caine

Naturopath Leslie Taylor maintains an extraordinary database of known information about medicinal herbs on the rain-tree.com website. A nice feature: It includes the scientific (and other) citations.

Much of the information comes from Taylor’s book, The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs.

To look up an herb, go to: (more…)

by ken winston caine

USA Today reports that new parents are leading the fight against our widespread exposure to health-robbing, mutagenic toxins in plastics.

In one of the more comprehensive and serious examinations of the health threats from plastics and plastic food containers, USA Today reporters Elizabeth Weise and Liz Szabo, note in the copyright story, among other things:

• “Parents, activists and many scientists are concerned that if a baby drinks from a bottle made with [plastic chemicals] bisphenol A [BPA] or gums a toy made with phthalates, he or she could suffer serious, even permanent, harm.”

• “In December, the National Toxicology Program, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, concluded that one form of phthalate, called di(2-ethylhexyl), or DEHP, used in intravenous tubing, catheters and other plastic medical equipment, could pose a risk to the proper development of baby boys’ reproductive tracts.”

• “Nearly every American has been exposed. A 2000 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found

(more…)

by ken winston caine

I have just made the most remarkable 3,000-year-old discovery that instantly soothes aching, inflamed muscles and nerves and relieves pain and inflammation.

And can’t believe that it’s taken me all this time. I must have first read about this technique at least 30 years ago and “learned it” again in numerous herbal medicine courses over the years.

The forgotten, ancient medical miracle used thousands of years ago in India and China and in other folk-medicine traditions in more recent centuries?

The ginger compress.

Just a hot, moist pack of ginger placed over acutely inflamed muscles and nerves.

I’d never tried it, having lost faith in herbal compresses years ago when I found that most I experimented with seemed to have no discernible healing power beyond the effect of the moist heat. Not so with the ginger compress. It really works. REALLY works. Fast.

It costs pennies, takes seconds to make. You probably already have the makings on hand in your house if you raid the spice cabinet and improvise a bit. And it instantly draws away the swelling and pain… Even better, the effect is lasting.

I’ll tell you how I made it in a moment. (more…)