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

Risk of Falling and Prescription Medications

Everyone with a television set has likely now seen the commercial with the fragile senior citizen lying on the floor of her garden home, just out of reach of the phone, needing help from a fall. Those little rescue buttons are a great asset and several of the older...

High Blood Pressure Diets Myth

One of the first things most people hear after being diagnosed with high blood pressure is, “watch how much salt that you eat.” However, according to new a paper published in the “Journal of the American Medical Association” salt may have less to do with high...

What are these high blood pressure symptoms?

This recent article update seemed to have hit a nerve for some. Mostly because not only are there so many of us out here suffering from, or trying to control high blood pressure, but also because everywhere you turn now the buzzword seems to be ‘Inflammation.’ The...

How to Reduce High Blood Pressure Quickly

Doctors should spend more time discussing ways to reduce inflammation than cutting out salt with their high blood pressure patients, a paper published in this month’s Hypertension notes. The research paper summarizes the research of nearly 100 studies on high blood...