Beating Stress With Drums, Yoga and Meditation
Stressless Sunday Offers Alternatives
By Marcia Torrey-Jay, Managing Editor

Ah stress. Who on the Westside doesn’t have to deal with it, living as we do in these final, frantic days of the millennium in one of the biggest, busiest cities on the planet.
Locally, a small enterprise on Washington Blvd. called Private Exercise, decided to take on the stress monster — acknowledged to be responsible for so many of our physical and emotional diseases — at least for one day.
Called Stressless Sunday, the recent event was a gathering of the tribe of alternative and complementary health practitioners from around the area. Participants presented offerings ranging from the familiar, like hatha yoga and biofeedback techniques to more esoteric practices like "Body Harmony," a practice billed as a method for discovering and releasing physical, mental, emotional and spiritual blocks. Other presentations included drumming, meditation and personal rituals; health and self-esteem; something called hands-on semantic therapies; and even cosmetic artistry and meditation, presumably operating from a look good, feel good philosophy.
Ginger LaRoche founder and director of In Yoga in Marina Del Rey, along with one of her teachers, Freddie Brannan, was on hand to provide an introduction to yoga.
"Our philosophy is to teach from the heart, both compassionately and gently," La Roche said. "Yoga is not merely twisting the body into various poses, but more an inward journey undertaken on a daily basis. We use the body as a sounding board, to tell us about ourselves and how we react to the world around us. This is how we discover self awareness and that we have choices. We truly are the creators of our own reality."
La Roche’s studio, In yoga, offers hatha yoga classes for all levels from beginner to advanced on a daily basis, as well as special yoga-related events.
Dr. Cindy Brown, a psychotherapist with a practice in downtown Culver City, presented a brief workshop on making every moment a sacred experience. Brown utilized a combination of Native American ceremonial practices like creating a circle with focal points in the four directions, also representing the elements fire, water, earth and air to create a sacred space for ritual. She makes extensive use of drumming to create an altered consciousness, which she says helps us to tune into our true natures.
Brown recommends daily ritual including prayer and affirmations to focus our intentions for the day. "Create a daily ritual about where you’re coming from and how you want to be in the world," Brown said. Part of the process is to come up with your own "power statement. It should be an ‘I am’ statement," Brown added. Hers is, "I am a free, abundant woman."
"Create a life worth living," exclaims Judith Parker Harris, motivational speaker and author of "Conquer Crisis With Health-Esteem." who was also a participant in the event. The Beverly Hills resident added that "The first step is to free your heart from the emotional prison you’ve created through a lifetime of burying disappointments, heartaches and setbacks." Her solution is to be courageous enough to feel your own thoughts and emotions and to open your heart to all of life’s possibilities. "It can save your life," she says.
Harris, who said she was a co dependant, overachieving workaholic, faced the loss of her advertising agency and numerous personal life failures when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Collaborating with a team of healthcare professionals, she developed techniques to release negative emotions from her body. She says she used diet, meditation, exercise, and a spiritual/therapeutic process that involved lots and lots of writing to get healthy. Symptom-free since 1990, Harris now shares, through her Health-Esteem Workshop, the lessons and a book called "Conquer Crisis with Health Esteem," the methods she learned.
"We need to learn to connect with our body’s natural ability to heal and release stress," she says. "If you don’t think thoughts and emotions are out of control in our country," Harris challenges, "look at the heartbreaking violence in our schools and the accelerating rage on our roads. Thoughts and emotions lie at the heart of the healing process."
"What if it doesn’t get done today," asked Lee Kuntz, Body Harmony practitioner, during his early afternoon workshop. The theory behind Body Harmony, which Kuntz says draws on bodywork methods from around the world, is that while our minds may choose not to remember past traumas, our bodies never forget. This locked in stress and suppressed emotion "compresses our body tissues and musculature, limiting our healing potential and the realization of our dreams," Kuntz claims.
Body Harmony uses a combination of hands-on bodywork, therapy, breathing techniques and other processes to relieve stress and pain while accelerating healing and restore natural body movement, according to Kuntz.
A student of Body Harmony founder Dr. Don McFarland, Kuntz is the cofounder of the Southern California Body Harmony Institute.
Throughout the Sunday afternoon program, other wellness services like back massages, body fat testing and health assessments were offered. Karen Newman offered her new age version of makeup artistry that included meditation and positive affirmations. Some of us need a lot of that when we face the bathroom mirror in the morning.
Dr. Cindy Brown can be reached at 310-917-9701
Lee Kuntz offers more information by calling 310-839-4378
Ginger LaRoche of In Yoga can be reached at 310-306-9644 or on the web at www.inyoga.com.
Judith Parker Harris can be reached over the Internet at www.healthesteem.com, or by calling 1-888-422-1272.
Karen Newman can be reached at 213-650-9954
Private Exercise, the event host, can be reached at 310-915-1191. They offer individual health and fitness training programs in a small gym setting with massage therapy available onsite.

Pictured:
top: Ginger LaRoche, owner of In Yoga
below: Dr. Cindy Brown

Life-Threatening Vaccine Pulled from Market
By Francesca Biller-Safran
Due to a possibility that the ‘rotavirus’ vaccine has caused at least 15 children to get a life-threatening bowel obstruction illness known as intussusception, federal health officials have suspended administering the immunization to the 11,000 babies born each day in the United States, as well as to millions of other children throughout the nation scheduled to receive the immunization in several doses during infancy.
Intussusception causes one portion of the bowel to become enfolded into another portion of the bowel, leading to a dangerous obstruction.
The rotavirus vaccine, approved in August of 1998, is aimed at preventing the most common cause of severe gastroenteritis found in children- an illness resulting in fevers, vomiting and diarrhea lasting between three and nine days. Worldwide, the virus is still a major cause of childhood deaths.
Until the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Federal Drug Administration conclude their investigations as to whether the rotavirus vaccine, in fact, caused the reported cases of intussusception, it has been suspended until at least November, the season when chances of getting the virus is most prevalent. Wyeth Lederle, the vaccine’s manufacturer, is also taking part in the investigation.
According to Barbara Reynolds of the CDC, the "minute there seemed to be a problem, they pulled it immediately."
But some health officials worry that this incident may scare some parents from getting their children usually safe and "much-needed" vaccines. Nationwide, the vaccination rate is at least 90 percent.
Robert Steele, M.D., writes on the subject and says it is "important" to recognize that rotavirus results in 50,000 hospitalizations and ten deaths a year.
"It will be heartbreaking to see this vaccine fall by the wayside should these reports turn out to be significant," said Steele. "But it is obviously more important to make sure vaccines are safe and effective."
In controlled studies, the vaccine prevented at least 50 percent of all rotavirus cases, 70 percent of severe cases and nearly 100 percent of dehydration associated with the illness.
Four out of five children in the U.S. develop some form of rotavirus before age five; one in seven becomes so ill they are seen in emergency rooms and one in every 200,000 dies. The virus also accounts for more than 500,000 doctor visits and 50,000 hospitalizations annually. Monetarily, rotavirus costs $254 million in direct medical costs and more than one billion dollars to society overall.
Some 7,000 infants received the vaccine before FDA approval, and manufacturers estimate that 1.5 million doses of the vaccine have been administered in a three-dose series since approved.
Some children became sick after receiving their first dose, and some after the second or third. Information has been collected in a multi-state investigation involving CDC Epidemic Intelligence Officers assigned to state and local health departments. Preliminary data from two studies show the risk of intussusception may be increased in the two to three weeks following the vaccine.
Federal health officials currently monitor vaccine safety in two ways: the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System looks at reported cases in which parents, doctors and patients can lodge complaints, and the Vaccine Safety Datalink Project looks for adverse vaccine reactions among four West Coast HMO’s. Last year, 11,000 complaints were filed.
Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, says parents are extremely concerned that their children get "too many" vaccines, pointing to the hepatitis B vaccine, which she claims causes an autoimmune response wherein the body’s immune system sees its own tissue as foreign, eventually leading to chronic illnesses.
Today’s American children are actually the healthiest children in history when it comes to being protected against illness and disease. Before a child even gets a chance to learn their A-B-C's, they receive 21 vaccinations - twice as many as a decade ago. Ten new immunizations have been approved in recent years for children under the age of two.
Vaccinations for young children include three shots of hepatitis B, three shots of haemophilus influenzae type B-(HIB), four polio, one varicella (chicken pox), five DTP, two measles-mumps-rubella and three oral rotavirus vaccines.
Just a week before the rotavirus vaccine was suspended, the FDA asked vaccine manufacturers to phase out all vaccines which contain thimerosal, a preservative containing low levels of toxic mercury. In addition, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC have advised doctors to inject rather than orally administer the polio vaccine because oral vaccines contain live viruses.
Further information will become available as to whether the rotavirus vaccine directly caused children to become ill with intussusception and severe side effects as federal health officials continue their investigation. Until then, parents are advised to bring their children in for their other regularly scheduled immunization dates.
For more information on vaccination safety as well as to report possible adverse reactions to vaccinations, check out the following:
The National Vaccine Information Center, 1-800-909-SHOT , www.909shot.com
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov
The National Vaccine Program Office, 404-639-4450
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, www.fda.gov/cber/vaers,
email: vaers@cber.fda.gov
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