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

Foods to Eat for High Blood Pressure

Move over LDL, there’s a new cholesterol-class in town that should appear on every health conscious person’s radar screen. The AHA recently released the fruits of a massive research review involving 500 heart-health studies from the last 3 decades. The bottom line?...

Ditch This to Reduce Vertigo Symptoms

Regular use of cotton swabs to clean out your ears can contribute to vertigo and dizziness, new research conducted by Henry Ford Hospital concludes. The research, presented at last month’s Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meeting in Chicago, found a direct link between...

Hemochromatosis and ED

I have had a few letters come in during recent months asking about how an overload of iron in the blood can cause certain problems. Some of them ask about blood pressure and some are strictly regarding erectile dysfunction. While women typically aren’t diagnosed with...

Shut Eyes Shuts Down Hypertension

If your out of control hypertension keeps you up at night, you may be making things worse, a study published in the May 20011 issue of Repertory Medicine found. The link between lack of quality sleep and high blood pressure is well known. However, the results of this...