Your Candles Actually Are Good for You

Does keeping the porta-altar near the desk make me healthier?

I find that having a candle burning on my desk helps me to focus. That goes back to when I was 17 or so.

A few years later, I declared myself Pagan, which meant that I could have all the candles that I wanted!

“Homes with candles burning brightly are filled with sexy wood nymphs nightly,” said Al G. Manning, an occult teacher and author most prolific in the 1960s–1980s. (I can’t remember which book that was, Helping Yourself with White Witchcraft?)

In our “witches of Manitou” period, M. and I used to eat dinner regularly by candelight or illuminated by a Victorian kerosene lamp. Were we making ourselves healthier? Who knew?

Meanwhile, with the passage of time, more of the electric lights in our houses went from incadescent bulbs to the curly fluorescent ones to low-wattage LED bulbs. Good for saving energy, but not for your health?

There are some voices in the “health and wellness” crowd saying that melatonin is a powerful antioxident and that most people are not getting enough. Sure you can take melatonin supplements — many people do so to help them sleep, and if you do that, take them earlier in the evening, not just before bed.

But the best way to get melatonin is not through a pill, they say, but through exposure to sunlight and also infrared and near-infrared light. The new energy-efficient light bulbs do not produce as much of that spectrum as the old incadescent bulbs did.

Here is the argument, with quotes from various websites.

Two forms of melatonin exist in the body – circulatory (produced by the pineal gland), and subcellular (produced inside the cells and mitochondria); the majority of melatonin in the body is subcellular.

Or from another site:

Over 50% of [the] sun’s energy is infrared; campfires, fireplace, candles, and incandescent lights also emit infrared light, as do infrared saunas and lasers

Antioxidants can be produced from exposure to the sun!

“As a therapy, being outside in the environment, in nature, and being exposed to sun, is extremely important, probably just as important as eating healthily.”

Infrared light has the ability to penetrate the skull and access the cerebral spinal fluid, a reason why those with Alzheimer’s and dementia especially should get more sun.

My take-away is that sunlight is best, and you need to be out in it as much as possible.

Sunlight exposure also results in the production of serotonin and beta-endorphins, which promote mood enhancement and relaxation, relieve pain, and boost immunity. There is also evidence that vitamin D itself may help regulate the production of both serotonin and melatonin.

And candles, fireplaces, woodstoves, etc. are also good. So light ’em up.

The “Horse Boy” and the Shamans

If you saw the 2009  documentary The Horse Boy, about Rowan, the autistic boy who is helped somewhat by horseback riding and by Mongolian shamans, there is more to the story. (There is also a book, The Horse Boy: A Memoir of Healing, published in 2010.)

Before it was released as a DVD, the local university sponsored a showing of The Horse Boy. I called my friend Hal, whose autistic son is now about nine, and asked him if he was interested in seeing it. This boy too enjoys riding horses and donkeys, which he is able to do at home and on trail rides into the Sangre de Cristo Range.

Hal writes eloquently about life with an autistic son, but my suggestion hit a wall. I brought it up again —  same reaction. So I shut up. I am not the one with the autistic son, he is. Maybe he does not like the idea of magic. Maybe a trip to Mongolia just seems impossible.

Meanwhile, Rowan’s father, Rupert Isaacson, a widely traveled man whose parents came from southern Africa, was himself born in London and now lives with his family in Texas, has kept on taking his son to shamanic healers in Africa and on the Navajo reservation in Arizona.

This is not without controversy. As he writes in the Daily Mail,

So many people thought we were mad, deluded. One friend said: ‘All those shamans. It’s like you’re going to some spiritual supermarket!’

The publication of The Horse Boy was met with a torrent of hate mail accusing us of giving false hope, of abandoning established methods. (In fact, we had continued to follow the orthodox treatments).

But there was one group that did support us: parents. Much of the motivation for telling the story had been my own despair at Rowan’s diagnosis.

If, back then, there had been some story of hope, of autism as an adventure rather than a catastrophe, I would have taken heart sooner, despaired less, and most likely found solutions more quickly.

And the only things that had worked for Rowan in any positive way were the horse riding and the shamans.

The Isaacsons have set up their own therapeutic system, the Horse Boy Method: “We let the children use the horses like a couch, to allow all the physical and emotional discomfort to fall away, and the intellect come to the fore.” I think my friend Hal has developed something similar on his own, although his son goes to special-education classes too.

The Positive Power of Poisons

Via Instapundit, a Popular Mechanics round up on medical possibilities of venoms and poisons.

I can’t say that my 2006 rattlesnake bite had any positive physiological effects, but I can tell you that a sting from the little tan scorpions that we have in southern Colorado (same as this?) can have interesting effects on the central nervous system—once you get past the pain. I understand that some people grind and smoke them, but I have not tried that.

You May Think that You Have a ‘Self’

But maybe you are just the talking part of a large collection of bacteria.

We continue to be colonized every day of our lives. “Surrounding us and infusing us is this cloud of microbes,” said Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University. We end up with different species, but those species generally carry out the same essential chemistry that we need to survive. One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal,” said Dr. Gordon.

Don’t miss the part about the fecal transplants. All these health nuts giving themselves high colonics may be going at it backwards, so to speak.