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

This Fights High Blood Pressure

A diet that contains antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables can improve blood pressure, a review paper published in this month’s Journal of the Indian Academy of Clinical Medicine reports. Although scientists have long understood that consumption of fresh fruits and...

High Blood Pressure, Cancer Linked

Chronic hypertension is well-known for its influence on heart disease. A new research study from King’s College in the UK adds to the growing concern of the hypertension “epidemic” that afflicts approximately 100 million adults in the US alone. According to this...

Medications That Cause Dry Mouth

A reader with a bad breath problem wrote in a few months ago for advice.  Without knowing anything more about him, my first impulse was to offer that perhaps his oral hygiene could use some improvement. After all, the most obvious solution to any malady is 95% of the...

Calcium Channel Blockers and Irritable Bowel

Recently we had a woman write in regarding concerns she had with her prescription medications.  She had talked to her doctor about it, but was frustrated by his lack of interest in her concerns and having given her what she called “the kiss off.” She was concerned...