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

Antioxidant helps lower cholesterol

A recent study performed by researchers from University of the Basque Country in Spain, proves that antioxidants help break down triglycerides into smaller units that can be processed more easily by the body. This lowers overall cholesterol level and decreases risk of...

Regular Walking Improves Snoring

According to a research, led by Douglas Bradley, director of the Toronto Research Institute’s Sleep Research Laboratory, regular walking can drastically improve snoring and even sleep apnea. Bradley connected the snoring to gathering of a fluid in the legs when...

Pain in the Morning-Is it the Way I Sleep?

Today I would like to take another question from the files of reader polls: What in the world can cause waves of pain upon waking? This comes up from time to time as people write in about the Stop Snoring and Insomnia programs. However, this question is a bit more...

Depression Worsens Arthritis Pain

According to a brand new study, led by Dr. Tae Kyun Kim at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital’s Joint Reconstruction Center and published in “Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery,” depression plays a major role in how people experience arthritis pain. The...

Sex Raises Risk of Heart Attack

According to this surprising study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, having sex can raise the risk of heart attack. It’s a small percentage, only 3 in a million. Issa Dahabreh, one of the researchers in the study, said that this didn’t mean...