Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer 
Waking Times

We’ve known for a long while that unresolved emotional trauma can cause lifelong behavioral problems. Most notably, Dr. Gabor Maté has explained how addictions arise in people who’ve suffered wounds in the past, mostly during their childhood years, and how those wounds continue to manifest in negative ways throughout their lives.

While this is not something that can easily be pinned down by medical research, it does make sense intuitively, and the improvements people see in their lives once traumatic experiences are reconciled and put to rest offers sufficient testimony to support this idea.

Regarding physical illness, however, we’ve always presumed a strictly material causality, something which can be singled out and directly linked to the illness, like a germ, or a deficiency. However, this view is being augmented by studies into the idea that emotional trauma can also cause the manifestation of physical illness.

Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer
Waking Times

Among the many pharmaceutical options available for treating mental health issues, antipsychotic medications are some of the most overprescibed. So much so, in fact that in 2015 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report urging lower uses of antipsychotic meds for elderly patients suffering from symptoms of dementia, citing a number of dangerous side effects of this class of drugs.

“They blunt behaviors. They can cause sedation. It increases a patient’s risk for falls. And, if you just want to get to the very basic bottom line, why should someone pay for something that’s not needed?” ~Bradley Williams, geriatric pharmacist, University of Southern California [Source]

Just as is with depression and anxiety, numerous cases demonstrate that dietary changes and other lifestyle changes can often times achieve better results, more safely, than using psychotropic medications.

Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer
Waking Times

Last year, the results of a German study on insect populations foretold of a massive global die-off in many inspect species. Now, scientists are sounding the alarm again following a new study, and warning that we are “on course for ecological Armageddon.”

“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline… We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.” ~Professor Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK

JoAnne Bassett, Contributor
Waking Times

For millennia people from around the world have been using a powerful technique called lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is a dream during which the dreamer is aware of dreaming. During this type of dream, the dreamer may be able to exert some degree of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment. In Eastern traditions, cultivating the dreamer’s ability to be aware that he or she is dreaming is central to both the Tibetan Buddhist practice of dream yoga and the ancient Indian Hindu practice of Yoga Nidra. Now science is catching up to prove the powers of lucid dreaming.

There is a group of plants known as “Oneirogens” (from the Greek oneirosmeaning “dream” and genmeaning “creating”), which produce and also enhance dream-like states of consciousness. These herbs and roots have been used for thousands of years for prophetic divination through dreams, out-of-body experiences, and to consciously awaken you during dream states.

Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer
Waking Times

If one is truly concerned about climate change, and wondering where to begin to reverse the damage being done to our planet, a great place to make changes would be the modern industrial farming and agriculture model. In addition to the harm being done by the overuse of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, overuse of nitrogen fertilizes and runoff from animal feeding lots is causing a unique ecological disaster.

In the Gulf Mexico, scientists have recently announced they have measured the largest oceanic dead zones ever recorded, just off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi at the mouth of the Mississippi River. This seasonal dead zone is an area of water where oxygen levels are too low to support life, due to an extreme water pollution.