A Big Leap!

Hi! Firstly, thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting the Optimal Health Network and me over these past 18 years. Optimal Health Network is a healing resource to thousands of people.

Now I’ve decided to take a big leap in growing the resources of the Optimal Health Network. I am about to embark on a Wisdom Exchange on Transformational Leadership program in Ecuador. I will join health and wellness experts from five countries to explore behaviors and ideas that inspire greater professional and personal fulfillment through innovative approaches to well-being and positive social impact. As part of the experience, I will teach three classes at the Universidad de Cuenca and give a TED-like talk exploring diverse issues such as how health begins in the gut, spiritual healing, and entrepreneurship. To take this journey, I need your help and support. You can directly participate in making this a reality for me, and for the Optimal Health Network, by entering our FUNDRAISING RAFFLE [fundraiser now finished]. But first, let me give you a little background on how this all came about.

Throughout the world, a remarkable process of merging different ways of knowing and healing is unfolding. One story from my life illustrates what I mean. I spent a morning recently in prayer and study with His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, the head of the 900-year-old Karma Kagyu Lineage and guide to millions of Buddhists around the world. I am not a part of a Buddhist community, but the opportunity arose, and something within told me to join in.

Outside, every crabapple tree opened its pink, white, and red blossoms to a heavy spring rain. Inside, we pulled off our wet raincoats and took our seats. Monks, yoga instructors, professors of medicine, colon hydrotherapists, writers, neuroscientists, stay-at-home moms, security guards, translators, college students, retirees, and researchers prayed and then explored the fascinating conversation between science and spirituality, medicine and meditation.

This evolutionary conversation matters. It matters to all of us.

Twenty years ago, when I found myself in daily and wrenching gut pain, not able to leave my house because of my multiple chemical sensitivities, a medical doctor at the University of Wisconsin Hospital told me that I wasn’t eating according to the USDA food pyramid and that was why I was sick. He told me I needed to see a nutritionist. However, I did not feel that this advice spoke to my needs.

We are all aware of gluten-free foods; they are commonly available in most restaurants and grocery stores. Having celiac disease can be a blessing, a path to one’s own healing as well as a path to planetary healing. For instance, I’ve recently started including cricket flour in my diet (see video below) because it is healthy for my gut; it is gluten-free, tastes great, and is beneficial for the planet. I don’t know if I would so easily be able to choose to eat edible insects without the life experiences of eating different foods like bone broth soup, raw liver, and green vegetable juices, or exploring different healing modalities like the coffee enema, fecal transplants, and essential oil suppositories.


Change is difficult. We are all growing and learning every moment of every day on this beautiful and crazy human journey. And we have a long, long way to go.

Through working with clients and supporting my own body, I am confronted with the need for merging different ways of knowing and healing every day. Again, on a personal note, my daughter fell off a trapeze over three years ago and now hardly ever leaves the house due to tremendous headaches. Since her injury, we've explored both mainstream medicine and alternative therapies to heal her body. Her head pain is greater than ever.

It is from the core of my being that I continue to deepen my knowledge of the healing arts. Just a few days ago, I was gardening. Over the past couple of years, I’ve created a spiritual hermitage for myself, a space to grow in my writing skills, in my relationship to God, in understanding how my history of trauma and abuse are still profoundly affecting my relationship to my body. As I smoothed over the dirt around my newly planted magnolia tree, I found myself standing up, looking to the dry blue spring sky, and saying out loud: I’m ready to take a next step, a step that takes me more fully into helping people. Please help guide me.

A few minutes later, I sprayed the dirt off of my bare knees and came into the house to check my email. The first message I opened was an invitation to join a group of healers on a Wisdom Exchange on Transformational Leadership in Ecuador, the exchange I described above. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I emailed back with a resounding YES! Within 24 hours, I was interviewed by the producer of the documentary which we will be making about healing and seeking. Within a few minutes of talking, he invited me to join the team.

My business goals around this wisdom exchange are to increase the amount of scientific data that supports the reality that health DOES begin in the gut and to build a rich whole body/mind/soul healing library that will focus on spiritual healing, how stored trauma affects your health, and how your microbiome drives your mental and emotional well-being.

This is such a big deal! I ask for your support through this time of tremendous growth and outreach by participating in our FUNDRAISING RAFFLE [fundraiser now finished]. The money raised through the raffle will help to pay my expenses for the trip. Also, please join me on Facebook and Pinterest as I post new photos, healing resources, and stories around this unfolding journey. I would love you to take this trip with me!

In gratitude and healing,
Kristina Amelong

More About the Ecuador Trip

No Regrets Productions in partnership with Spryte Loriano Global is hosting the trip, which will take place June 2 through June 11. The great majority of the people traveling on this trip are transformational leaders, messengers, and teachers who have been recognized for making a difference around the world through their endeavors. During the trip, the entire group will be filmed for a television documentary called Life-List Ecuador: Making a Difference from the Amazon to the Andes.

• Watch Life-List Ecuador Introductory Video
• Read about 2-Day Wisdom Share Event during Trip

Each team will provide empowerment / leadership / motivational training to Ecuadorian teachers and students to support the advancement and transformation of our global society. Participants will speak on stage in front of teachers and/or students, and also work with them one-on-one in workshop settings.

Each participant will receive a 15-minute professionally produced personal film documentary on his or her experience in Ecuador, and will be included in the web/television series. This is certainly a high-value offer for participants, as it highlights them doing meaningful work across the world and puts a spotlight on the unique message that each shares.

During the trip, the entire group will have a number of different experiences, including delivering clean water systems to rural villages, camping overnight at one of the villages after arriving there on horseback, visiting schools, learning about local humanitarian programs, and relaxing and connecting at eco-lodges in the Andes mountains and Amazon rainforest.

Learn more about the team
Kristina will be a part of:

• Vision 2020
• Stephen Dinan: Welcome to the Shift

Learn more about Ecuador:

• What We Owe Ecuador
  By former Rep. William D. Delahunt (D-Mass.)

If you have any questions or just want to talk, please call us at the Optimal Health Network at 608-242-0200.

If you'd rather support the people of the Kichwa community directly by purchasing a water filter, click here to learn more.

Labels: alternative health, celiac disease, Ecuador, entrepreneurship, fundraiser, health begins in the gut, leadership, multiple chemical sensitivities, raffle, spiritual healing

by Kristina Amelong 

(PART 3 of Kristina's personal wellness story entitled "Golden Arches")

Perhaps it was the smell of the cigarette smoke enveloping me, or maybe it was the way the sunshine fell on my Calvin Klein jeans, or possibly it was the voice of Jan, my brother’s best friend’s mom, over the NPR host discussing the recent assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, but for a moment, as we drove away from the home I lived in with my mother and my brother, drove away from the crumpled bicycle, drove away from the fading lilac blossoms, I found myself welling up with a tremendous grief, a grief that wasn’t familiar, a grief that seemed as if it had determined to make itself a home within my body for a very long time.

“Buckle up, Kris.”

I pulled the belt over my waist, clicking it in place just as Prince, my gray cat, sauntered across the road, causing Jan to swerve ever so slightly.

We slipped through a stop sign at Forster and Troy; we passed the PDQ gas station, where a woman in a Green Bay Packers T-shirt put gas in her light blue Lincoln Town Car; we ran a very orange light at Northport and Sherman. We simply kept going forward: passing my McDonald’s, passing Noah’s Ark Pet Center, passing Kappel’s Clock Shop, passing Tenney Park Locks, and passing James Madison Park.

As Jan’s hand found itself on my knee, I found myself thinking back to church on Easter Sunday some time the month before. White lilies graced the altar. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Church was over; I was now looking forward to Easter lunch at my aunt and uncle’s dairy farm.

“Mom, mom, can Kenny and I go with Uncle Neal? He wants to take us to feed the calves, real quick, before lunch,” my brother Jay asked.

My mom opened her black clutch, looking for car keys. “Sure. Make sure you aren’t late.”

“Thanks, mom. We won’t be,” Jay replied, kissing her cheek while stealing a piece of gum from her open clutch.

“Hey, give that back. That’s my last piece!” But he was already out the broad church doors.

After a lingering lunch of ham, homemade bread rolls, green beans with bacon, red Jell-O with mini marshmallows, corn from the cob that had been frozen last summer, lots of butter, fresh milk from the Holstein cows in the barn, and Aunt Ruth’s poppy seed cake, we rearranged the tables in the dining room for our after-meal staple: the euchre tournament.

Mom and all of her sisters had learned to play euchre, once the national trick-taking card game, before they had learned to read. For all of us, there were few greater joys than being good at this game -- the pleasure, the tactics, the courage, the antagonism.

My mom and Jay were partners against my cousin Kenny and me. Mom had dealt. Turned up in front of her on the table lay the ace of spades.

Kenny, being to the left of the dealer, chose to pass his bid.

“Pick it up,” ordered Jay to my mom. “I’ll go alone.”

“Alone? You sure about that?” she teased him.

“Yup. Spades is trump and I’m going alone.”

Kenny led with the ace of diamonds. Jay trumped his ace with the 9 of spades. I had to follow suit with the 10 of diamonds.

“Awesome!” Jay exclaimed as he jumped out of his chair and spun in a circle. Still standing, he slowly, one by one, laid down his remaining four cards, a perfect loner hand: jack of spades, jack of clubs, king of spades, queen of spades. “There ain’t nothing better!”

“Four points for the bad guys,” I glowered mischievously.

After Jay and my mom whomped Kenny and me three games in a row, it was time for my family of three to traverse the roads back to our home in Madison. As the red sun was setting behind the hills of Ithaca, Wisconsin, Jay, my mom, and I entered the mudroom -- also known as the coatroom, as my uncle’s insurance office, as my aunt’s farm office, as the gallery for family photos. As we pulled on our coats and said our good-byes, we also scanned those photos, taking in the history of our extended family yet another time. To the right of the exit door hung a photo of my aunt and uncle’s farm and its surrounding countryside. In the top right corner of the photo was a country graveyard: Neptune Cemetery, just south of the farm land, just south of Ithaca, lying on the northeast corner of Highway 58 and Jaquish Hollow Road.

My mom’s hand reached for the doorknob as Jay pointed to the photo. “Mom, when I die, I want to be buried there.”

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Labels: alternative health, death, diet and lifestyle, grief, religion

by Kristina Amelong 

(PART 2 of Kristina's personal wellness story entitled "Golden Arches")

During that first year at McDonald's, I mastered every station in the grill area: buns, regular grill, quarter pounder grill, and fish filet fryers. Working my 2- to 3-hour shift, a few times per week, I answered a need that I hadn't yet been aware enough to recognize, let alone articulate: I had purpose in my life.

Labels: alternative health, diet and lifestyle, fast food industry, natural healing

by Kristina Amelong 

(PART 1 of Kristina's personal wellness story entitled "Golden Arches")

What is well-being? How do we create well-being within our own lives? What do we need to learn to attend to life’s challenges with a growing vitality?

In her diary, A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer, Audre Lorde writes, "Another secret is to find some particular thing your soul craves for nourishment -- a different religion, a quiet spot, a dance class -- and satisfy it. That satisfaction does not have to be costly or difficult. Only a need that is recognized, articulated, and answered."

My journey of well-being began at McDonald's, the day I turned 16. I showed up drunk that first day, or, more accurately, hung over -- I had been drinking an assortment of stolen liquor since 8 a.m. By 4 p.m., the start of my 3-hour Friday night shift, I boasted a respectable hangover.

My job was buns. My entire focus centered on the hamburger bun, top and bottom -- the same bun found in the Happy Meal. I was to listen for the woman in the blue uniform to call out some number of burgers, always a multiple of two.

"Twelve burgers!"

As I split each white bun in half, I placed the tops face down on one stainless steel tray and the bottoms face up on a separate stainless steel tray. I then put the tray of the bottom buns, lying face up, in the toaster.

The waiting part was the hardest -- standing with nothing to do (which I was quickly trained not to do). This nothingness invariably led my attention to just how deathly ill I felt. At one point, I ran to the bathroom to throw up. Luckily, no one seemed to notice.

Sixty seconds later, the bun buzzer went off. I scrambled to take the stainless steel sheet and its buns out of the toaster, without losing any. Once this was done, the tops went in. Next I placed the perfect amount of mustard, ketchup, onions, and pickles on the bun. Once accomplished, I called out, "Cheese on a dozen?"

The woman in the blue uniform responded, "Eight, please."

Finally, I placed all twelve tops onto the tray of twelve burgers in one elegant move. Done!

Throughout the years, five in all, I delighted in the burgers I flipped, the French fries I brought to a crispy perfection, and the Coca Cola I passed off with a smile. But preparing and serving the food weren't the only skills I learned.

While my time at McDonald's may have contributed to my later chronic illness, in many ways it also helped to save my life:

• I learned how to think and how to work with people
• I learned how to be a part of a team and how to show up
• I learned how to listen, work hard and respond flexibly to new situations
• and, I learned how to improve myself

Now, at 46, I am continually awed at how the skills I learned at McDonald's help me to stay healthy, grow emotionally, and attend to life's challenges. Join me as I share my journey of well-being in continued posts.

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Labels: addictions, alternative health, diet and lifestyle, natural healing

Labels: alternative health, coffee enema, diet and lifestyle, enzymes, exercise, fish oil, health consultations, herbs, inflammation, rest, therapeutic hypothermia