Christian Goodman

Author at Blue Heron Health News

Hi, I'm Christian Goodman.

I was born in Iceland in 1973 and trained as a therapist. Early in my career I learned something I've never been able to unlearn: most of what shows up in the body starts in the mind, the breath, and the tension we carry without realizing it.

I learned it on myself the hard way.

A few years into my practice, my own blood pressure climbed to 185/129. I was the alternative health expert who couldn't fix his own health. I was eating well. I was exercising. I was taking every supplement on the shelf. And I was terrified — not of dying exactly, but of leaving my wife and children without me. I felt like the carpenter who couldn't build his own house.

What finally pointed me toward an answer wasn't another supplement or another specialist. It was a quiet line of research out of Harvard Medical School — Dr. Herbert Benson's work on how a handful of simple mind/body exercises can reset the brain's blood pressure control center.

The first time I sat down and did them, something in my chest unclenched that I hadn't realized was clenched. I'd been bracing against my own body for years. I refined what I learned over the following months into a daily practice I could teach other people.

Snoring was the other one.

I snored my whole life. As a married man, my wife and I ended up in separate bedrooms — and the resentment that grew in that silence nearly ended our marriage. The breakthrough came one morning over breakfast. My wife — a classical singer turned voice teacher — was listening to me describe my latest dead end when she stopped and said, "That's what I teach my students every day." The very exercises she used to open up her singers' breathing passages were the ones I'd been searching for.

That's how most of my work has been born — in a kitchen, in a marriage, in a quiet moment with someone I love.

Today I've written 13 programs covering everything from blood pressure to vertigo to insomnia to migraines. At the heart of most of them is the same conviction that started me on this path: that the body, given simple tools and a little attention each day, has a remarkable capacity to restore its own balance.

If any of this sounds familiar — the frustration, the shame, the feeling that you've tried everything the normal way and are quietly running out of options — then I wrote these programs for you. I'll take you by the hand and walk you, gently, toward something that feels a little easier.

Warm regards,
Christian


Articles by Christian Goodman
Three-Minute Test Could Save Your Life

Three-Minute Test Could Save Your Life

Your home blood pressure monitor could be even more useful than you thought. You already know that keeping track of your blood pressure is important, but this recent discovery takes it one step further. It can predict with startling accuracy your chances of suffering...
Sleep Apnea Can Cause this Deadly Blood Condition

Sleep Apnea Can Cause this Deadly Blood Condition

You may not have heard of multiple myeloma, but if you suffer from sleep apnea then you really need to know about it. It’s an untreatable type of blood cancer that can be deadly, and a study in the latest edition of the American Journal of Physiology shows that people...
This Heart Beat Irregularity Raises ED Risk 61%

This Heart Beat Irregularity Raises ED Risk 61%

Science is clear that high blood pressure and/or cholesterol are risk factors for ED, but they’re not the only ones. Researchers have just published a study in the Arab Journal of Urology showing that atrial fibrillation is another cardiovascular condition that puts...
Common Meds that Spike Your Blood Pressure

Common Meds that Spike Your Blood Pressure

Pain is a known cause of high blood pressure. The body responds to long-term pain the same way that it responds to sudden injury: it raises your blood pressure. So, it doesn’t help when the meds you’re taking for the pain cause your blood pressure to spike as well....
How Your Time Zone Hurts Your Sleep

How Your Time Zone Hurts Your Sleep

Before clocks were a thing and artificial light hadn’t been invented, the setting sun was our bodie’s biological trigger, the thing that told us it was almost time for bed. Our bodies responded by producing more melatonin to make us drowsy from the moment the sun went...