Jason Alan Griffin :: The Blog

There’s an adage that goes something like, “If you visit a doctor, you’ll get medicine. Go see a nutritionist and you’ll learn that all of your problems are caused by your diet. If you visit a chiropractor, you’ll find the problem is your skeleton.  Visiting a massage therapist, you’ll be told it’s a muscular problem. A neurologist will find a nerve issue.  A Reiki master will tell you it’s all about your energy. Go see a psychiatrist and it will become clear that it’s all in your mind.” Basically, you can’t really trust anyone who’s set up to make money.  Once someone is getting paid for their information, they immediately become biased. I’m not saying they can’t be trusted at all, but I’m advising you keep in mind that if someone is making a livelihood from giving you specific information, then they’re going to be highly motivated to believe and dispense said information; no matter what. Paula Deen is an example of this.  When she was told she had Type 2 diabet...

My exercising has been sporadic lately. About three weeks ago I stopped my programed workouts because of a series of small injuries. My thumb was sprained, my back was seizing up and the issue that I had been working on to fix and realign my foot/ankle seemed to have transferred up into my knee, causing it to feel unstable, but thankfully, without pain. The ankle pain had finally stopped, but whatever misalignment that was causing it has obviously repositioned itself and has destabilized my knee.  So, I hobbled around for two weeks and spent another week fairly pain free, but still not prepared to get back into it. The knee, as I said, doesn't hurt, but the weird clicking and feeling of instability are off-putting.  I did go back to the studio and try out some of my movements to see how I’d feel the next day, but it wasn’t encouraging; I still had residual pain in my wrist and back and the weird misalignment in my knee. Now, three weeks since the last time I worked out, ...

A year and a half ago, I started practicing breathing reduction, based on the teachings of Konstantine Buteyko. His program included this exercise that you were supposed to do every day. So, for about three weeks, I did it every day. But I soon gave it up because I was struggling to hold a control pause any higher than 8 seconds, and the teachings say that a “healthy person” should be able to easily hold a control pause of at least 20 seconds. Any less than that, they say, is a sign of poor health and an imbalance in your body. I was told that if it weren’t for the fact that I exercised so much, I would have much more disease in my body because of my poor breathing habits. Buteyko taught that an extremely fit and healthy person could easily hold up to forty second control pauses. My ego was riled. I considered myself a healthy person, at least. (and I’d even go so far as to say in excellent health and fitness) but I couldn’t even imagine holding a twenty second control pause, much l...