Namaste A Yoga Meditation

When I first took up yoga nearly 20 years ago, I was transfixed upon the meaning behind a word I had never heard prior; Namaste.  We are all spiritual beings, filled with the anima, the soul and breath of life that all animals are filled up with.   In the scurry to get projects completed, the car serviced, the kids off to school, pets to the vet, the home cleaned, and figure out how to carve time out to work on our frayed nerves, work out, work in and work on ourselves this is a great word to meditate upon. 

The meaning behind the word Namaste is that the divine in me acknowledges, sees, the divine in you.  When I say Namaste, I am acknowledging your spiritually divine spark, your holiness.  And amid all this chaos, you do have this spark!  The Indian people I worked with used the word as a greeting and a departure. Hello sure pales in comparison. 

I love yoga, and there are many forms, for it’s balancing and healing of the entire system.  Regardless of where you plan to practice, I encourage you to get a Manduka yoga mat.  They are the best, thickest for the knees and joints, easy to clean and last forever.  And now they come in colours!

Types of yoga really run the gamut from Flow or power yoga where you get your heart rate up a bit and flow from one position to the next swiftly, to Iyengar and Anusara where the pace is slow and methodical with high importance placed upon the body structure, stacking the bones and keeping a watchful eye on alignment.  My first teachers were Baron Baptiste,  Iyengar and Vinyasa trained so form was taught.

At the Y, I have become more involved and aware of Iyengar.  At first I felt it was too slow but now I get it.  And the man’s story is fascinating, sickly as a child, he was sent to live with monks in hopes he would find healing.  I highly recommend reading his book, Light On Yoga which is considered the bible of yoga. Here you learn to perfect your form and allow for the healing this brings to your practice.  There is also rope yoga and I am thankful the YMCA offers this!  I have never had such release in my lower back.

Another fabulous book is Baron’s 40 days to Personal Revolution which has great mediation instructions, poses, and deep inspiring thoughts.

Yoga not only tonifies the body, tendons and internal organs but works on the mind.  In yoga, we call it monkey mind, where our thoughts are all over the place.  We learn calm, to live in the parasympathetic responses in our nervous system, the rest and digest.  In our fast-paced world, many of us just stay on a sympathetic nervous system response and wear our systems out.  Think Coronaries.  So we need more calm in our lives.  As we calm, we think clearer.  Yoga helps us grow in compassion not only for others but also for ourselves as we see from day to day our body may be different, balance, stretch or move differently.  I learned which was my stronger side through yoga as well as the myriad ways my life is imbalanced in the day to day life, such as what fingers I use to pull my pants up, or which is my pot scrubbing hand and which is my pot holding hand?  Switch things up, create even strength and balance within yourself.

Anger – One time at work, where we had outsourced to India, I was very frustrated as things were not going well at all.  These folks were put into place with very little learning on something very complicated and add to it the language barrier.  After the run around and feeling my blood boil, I ended my chat session with this exceedingly unhelpful person with ‘Namste’.  In the depth and bile of my anger over not getting something done which should have taken 1 afternoon before but now had required 35 days, I was just done talking.  I had to stop myself and breath.  It would do no good to spew hatred at the machine that put all this in place. Perhaps it wasn’t this individuals fault, who knows their personal story right?  So I just took a slow breath, let it all go and said Namaste.  I was heading my finger on the button to then end the chat session when a message came back to ‘hold on one moment more, I think I can fix this for you.’  And so it was done not in anger, not in pushing my agenda, but simply in letting it go as I acknowledged the holy, the seat of the divine in another very flawed individual as I am equally flawed too.  I ended up after this getting a whole lot of work done faster.  And I shared with my US team what Namaste means as I shared my personal story.  Unfairness, laying off the wrong person, car accidents, loan interest rates going up happen.  Life happens.  The point of it all is to acknowledge the divine in everything which surrounds you.  There you find peace and gain enlightenment.  Namaste.

Vegan Death Threats & Conflicting Thoughts

Plant-Based & NOT Vegan! I have a few conflicting thoughts on veganism after witnessing just how political and polarizing it can get. Someone wished me, my pets, my entire family to die of cancer, and my business to fail, over a discussion about cashew cheese the individual (and later all her Facebook Friends)  misunderstood as dairy. I will be 58 in November. I had never before encountered that much hate and from a fellow vegan and I was just starting this journey. To my knowledge, nobody on earth before had wished me and my entire clan dead by slow-acting cancer. This was in late 2016 and I still carry all that hatred. I feel sorry for any vegetarian that crosses her (their) path.  I wonder about some person who decides to help animals and the planet and their own health by cutting out meat…or perhaps just cutting back. And then they get an earful of hate from this ‘lady’.  Boom, they are back to eating meat and whatever else, screw it!  I want nothing to do with the crazy people, right?  This is exactly how I was feeling at any rate.  The person spewed so many insults I had to block FB and shut down. And then I just wanted to spite eat meat and cheese.  This movement is never about one individual, but about the end goals.  When we get so angry at a person we don’t even know because they had a bite of something, and we make the adult decision to act out that rage, then we become accountable for that ripple effect.

We must come to this table with logic not just ‘I love animals.’  I have clients who still eat meat, greatly reduced, but still, it is a part of their life. I must acknowledge it may always be so as I suggest healthier and kinder ways.  In short, if my job is to help spread the reasons to go plant-based, (health, planet and animal kindness) then I must place myself in some trenches to do this work. My husband is an omnivore by choice and he loves his local honey. On this plane of existence, none of us are perfect and there will be a compromise at some juncture in everyone’s life. Thankfully I had great training at Hippocrates and this greatly helped when encountering the death threats, the unrelenting hate and refusal to acknowledge logic. I endeavor to read labels, do and know my research, think before speaking and act in compassion. This would be compassion for human animals as well as the rest of them we share the planet with. We are overrun as a species, so I made the choice not to bear children. This also saves the planet.  Hippocrates Health Institute trained on the avoidance of all sugar. Eggs contain a protein our bodies do not process well. We were also instructed to avoid any processed foods, bread, alcohol, caffeine, and do good food combining and aim for 80%+ raw food.

While many of us espouse an all-or-nothing approach, and that is absolutely fine, it is compassionate to realize not all of us will be 100% all-in.  I want also to reach these people.  If I can get a daily meat eater to go all organic, to know the farm where the meat comes from, reduce his dependence upon fast food and consider some plant-based or vegetarian meals with no meat at all, that is progress.  When a client has a kindness meal, then more, then an entire day of kindness, then several, I consider this a win.  This individual has grown in awareness, has developed a foothold on the logic that his current way of eating is not planet sustainable, isn’t healthy long-term, and is cruel to the fellow souls he is ingesting and is incorporating change.  Rather than turn people off and alienate them with judgment, it should be about sharing facts and options, with the compassion I was never offered when discussing cashew cheeses.

Veganism is a passionate endeavor but we all must realize that the individuals who come to this lifestyle do so for various reasons.  Some are focused just on animals while others want to save the planet and still others are riddled with Chronic disease and want to reverse those ills, lower their blood pressure and risk of diabetes or more stints in their arteries and live resiliently.  For me it’s about all 3. What the evil vegan wishing me and mine dead didn’t know is that I had already lost my entire family to cancer and yes, the slow way.  Breast for my mother, bone for one brother, Prostate for another, colon for a cousin and breast for an aunt and kidney for my father.  Two of these people died within 12 months of each other right on the heels of me losing my job of 26 years.  It was after losing my employment that I took a year of studies with Hippocrates.

When working with a client, I follow the Hippocrates guidelines and then tweak that towards what my client is willing to do.  I am there to help educate and coach.  I make a lousy judge, I am imperfect myself.

Recently a company I rep for discussed a body butter that had beeswax in it. I was adoring this product and now realize it isn’t vegan. This term can mean many things but essentially espouses to act daily with the purpose and intention of causing no harm to animals, from what we eat, drink, sleep on, wear, use or ride. But veganism also delves into what can be considered exploitation. This issue can get very tricky.  

Exploitation is wrong and all of us encounter it by our fellow humans, such as at work. Big corporations, such as those who sell honey to Costco, kill the bees in the process of stealing the honey.   Below is a great article on honey bees.  I have always espoused supporting local beekeepers because they truly care about the bees and as bees are in decline, somebody should be supporting these folks. Our neighbors are the Zip Code Honey people and run the Texas Honeybee Guild. They take very good care of their bees and while I don’t eat honey, my husband does and buys from them. BlendItUp Bee Free Honey makes a great substitute.   

Exploitation can be so many things.  One is eggs.  I am actually happy to see more families raising hens in their backyard and I once had a harem of hens myself.  I took great care of them and learned so much having them.  I was told growing up that chickens were stupid.  Nope, not at all true.  So if you have hens, are feeding them organic feed, augmenting with calcium and allowing them to live out their days in enjoyment and love even when they stop producing eggs for you, I am not sure that I have a right to complain about that.  One of my vegan friends will on very rare occasions, once a year perhaps,  enjoy such an egg.  I would far better prefer to see this than my neighbors buying eggs from hens that suffered at the hands of factory farming methods.  I know from raising my own, the hens were happy and were not, as someone insisted they were, ‘forced’ to produce eggs.  As a plant-based lifestyle has taken over, I no longer raise them but have compassion for those that make this choice.

What about horseback riding?  Or vegetarianism? There’s so much backlash with the vegan society towards vegetarians when in reality, they are making a huge dent in the cruelty and planet sustainability.  True, there is a big difference between being vegan and being vegetarian but can we not be a bit more kind? People change given the right support and motivation.  I have known several vegetarians go vegan.  And meat eaters go plant-based, on a weekly basis, across the planet.  Is the horse being exploited if he is well cared for and loves being ridden?  My horse loving friend, Laura, told me the story of how her horse Dovey spawned Little Dove, who actually never went through any coaching or training to be ridden.  No, she just lined up at the post and waited for her bit and saddle and off she trotted with her tribe, not one buck.  Wherever human animals and the rest of them cross paths, animals are and should be in a partnership with us; an acknowledgment of respect and kindness.  We learn from them and they from us.

I use the term human animals because I believe so much of the time we humans forget we are just mammals.  Sure, biblically we were called to watch over them and wow we are doing an abysmal job for the most part now,  but this really doesn’t make us ‘better’.  What it makes us is an animal having an assigned task directed by our maker that we are epically failing at, in spite of every advantage to do the job with aplomb.  Am I exploiting my dog expecting him to guard my home?  It’s his job and it goes with his natural instincts but would this be exploitation?  I also adore him, keep him company and we go for walks and play together.  He is living a great life and eating homemade meals with every need catered to. What is exploitation?

Expand the mind – If our ways were that of the 50’s or 60’s, from the way we cared for our livestock and also the amounts ingested on an annual basis, I don’t believe our vegan movement would be so passionate or so large looming.  There would be far less of us.  This cause exists and is growing because our lives, as a species, are out of balance with nature.  We have allowed cruelty, conceit, greed, and arrogance to rule us rather than compassion and wisdom. Wisdom sits at the seat of compassion. Nothing else matters without it. So when I hear someone say they cannot condone horseback riding that a fellow plant-based individual does with their horse because that is exploitation or goes on the attack with local beekeepers, my heart aches.  We have far larger tofu fish to fry, with the big corporations that are the cause of at least 95% of the pain rather than fight amongst ourselves or nitpick everything in a less than educational and loving way.  In a world where nothing will ever be 100% plant-basesd, let’s focus on bringing awareness with kindness and celebrating the wins.   I used to joke that where it says in the bible the meek shall inherit the earth, that we would end up overrun by cockroaches.  Could it possibly be that the meek discussed would be us human animals becoming more like gentle lambs, not eating each other literally, emotionally or spiritually?

Https://grist.org/food/when-i-eat-honey-do-i-hurt-bees/

Fast Food Slow Death

People get emotionally attached to food.  Whale pods are found to have a varied diet based upon what the young were raised to think of as fuel. They hunt and dine according to their teaching.  Like them, we’re taught at a young age what food is.  If you were brought up on slow food, where a garden was grown with care, your parents brought home fresh produce and meals centered around wholesome home cooking that included fresh salads, fruits, and raw or lightly steamed veggies or lucky enough to be raised by hippies that went vegetarian and all organic, man, you have a lucky leg up on the rest of us.  I was lucky enough to discover Seventh Day Adventism as a teen where most eat Old Testament or vegetarian. This is why the SDAs are their own blue zone with folks living triple-digit life spans. If you were raised in an environment where your parents weren’t knowledgeable about what food really is, didn’t cook, relied upon take-out and Wendys, then you’ve probably absorbed those habits as an adult. If you have kids, they have learned from you what food is.  While challenging, these habits can be broken once we begin to realize what we are doing to ourselves and gain some self-respect and self-love and acceptance.

When we think about illnesses, we think in terms of family history and diseases that run in families.  We tend to say ‘Cancer runs in our family’, or Diabetes, or heart disease rather than to acknowledge the truth, and self-empowerment in that truth, that it’s the fuel we feed our bodies that causes the disease. It’s our lifestyle that invites or shuns disease.  In 90-95% of the cases, it isn’t your DNA. DNA, over time, is absolutely affected by generations of poor diet and lifestyle as we propagate our species and when I hear about this stuff I always go back to the bible where, as a kid and later as a teen, I remained flummoxed as to why God would be so mean as to decree the sins of the father should be played out on his children and his children’s children.  Now I believe it was not meanness, but a warning because these things are just simply so, how it all works.  This is where we get terms like ‘She comes from strong stock’.  Our DNA, over time, can weaken as we load up on toxic substances rather than proper care.  You can do yourself and any offspring a big favor by mending ways.

What is fast food?  Fast food is junk food.  It isn’t just what you get at McDonald’s or Jack-In-The-Box, it’s anything junk, overprocessed, rushed into being without the proper care.  Fast food is also obtained at the supermarket which is why as a Plant-Based Lifestyle Coach, I help folks learn to read labels and learn how to best navigate the grocery store. There is no love in this kind of food, just opiates, sugar, grease, and greed.  I will address the various junk/fast foods and why they are considered junk.

GMO’s – Going wild-crafted and organic or raising your own, is the only way to assure you are not digesting pesticides with every bite.  Also, when you buy certified organic foods, this tells you that the product is not genetically modified or GMO.  Nobody should eat Frankenfood. Whatever your personal religious beliefs and this blog is spiritual in many respects but is absolutely not about religion but I have to just say this….There is a grand and great design in how our world and everything in it has fit together.  We are just beginning to unravel just a few of the threads of how one species helps another.  The rainforests we are pummeling daily to make more beef contains a myriad of species we will never know as we cause their direct extinction.  And when we genetically modify what nature has provided us in an attempt to make it better, we create Frankenfood.  We create hens that cannot walk without breaking a leg or having a heart attack or a cow who drags her utters on the ground with milk nature designed for her baby who gets taken away so we can drink her milk. Her body was never designed to contain that much milk at once.  She has to feel bloated and miserable.  I believe it has to be a grave sin to do these things, to nature, to go against mother nature if you will.  When we eat these foods we eat these sins.

PLANTS – When you just buy the typical produce, these fruits, veggies, processed bread, grains and pasta, all have pesticides in them and likely GMOs. When you eat out, unless you are very careful, this is what is served up.

MEAT – If the meats you buy aren’t organic and from a local better-intentioned farmer who truly raises his animals in sunlight on fields of grass etc, you are eating pain, misery, and cannibalism.  Animals in these corporate or factory farms rarely if ever see the light of day.  They are confined and treated horrifically and raised in dark sad environs.  Their feed consists of things they’d dare not touch in natural life.  They call it ‘enriched feed’ and they grind up euthanized dogs, cats, not bothering to remove tags and collars and not caring that euthanasia drugs are in the meat product.  They grind up the tumors, the cancers, the pharmaceutical drugs these pets were one before death.  Also included in ‘Enriched feed are other dead farm animals.  This is how mad cow became a thing.  Cows that would not normally eat their dead, were and were infected.  And this affected people who ate the cows.  We bastardize nature.  A cow would not typically eat another cow or dog or kitty but on these farms they do.

DAIRY – Goat is better, but all cow-derived milk (and cheese) has casein in it.  This is a protein that is carcinogenic and the more stressed the mother cow is, the more casein in the milk.  While taking my Hippocrates training we were told someone bought their own organic dairy cow so they could enjoy the purest milk. Growing up I was told we drank the surplus.  We don’t have a surplus anymore.  What happens is that these mammals are subjugated, their joys and natural proclivities are ignored.  They are regularly impregnated just so humans can take the milk meant for their babies.  The babies are shot in the head or worse if male and if female, they get to grow up to be milk producers too.  It’s hideous.  Oh, and it is true that there’s puss in the milk you’re drinking.  At the rates and volumes of pregnancies and milk pumping, this is very hard work on the mother, on her body, and her udders.  Cows typically live at least 20 years but on these farms, they are lucky to live 5. When you drink their milk, you drink their grief over losing the baby the milk was created for. Got milk? Got grief!

Factory and corporate farmed animals eat genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and pesticide-laden grains and corn.  We subject them to the very same awful (SAD) Standard American Diet that the greed machine encourages all of us to eat too.  Very Soylent Green.  Very unhealthy.  When we eat them, we are ingesting all their suffering, their ill-health, their cancerous tissues, and chronic sadness and disease.

Farm animals are not carnivores by nature and neither were we in the beginning.  All the great religions dovetail with humans being vegetarian. Biologically, we have the intestines of an herbivore. Even very educated people in the world of health and healing will tell me we are omnivores but really, in truth, we are not.  Look at our guts.  Our intestines are not short like a Cheeta’s but nice and long, like a plant-eater.  Yes, like the plant eaters that we really are.  I was raised on the bible.  Biblically, we were to eat manna and when we fell and demanded meat, this was allowed with definitive rules in place.  These rules were there to guide us into cleaner eating.  In other words, if we were fallen and sullen about just eating veggies, then God allowed us to eat not only all the fruits of the fields but certain particular fish and animals that were not water bottom dwellers or pigs whose meat is absolutely as unclean as it is delicious. We were steered away from any land animals that did not chew their own cud and have cloven hooves.  The reasons for the rules were entirely health-based but in today’s polluted world, you can just throw all of that out.

FISH – Whether wild-caught or farm-raised, it’s all bad for you. Greed again, but the reason farmed fish is horrible is due to the massive overcrowding, the putrid waters they swim in, and the doses of pharma drugs pumped into these sad fish to keep them swimming. Wild-caught is bad because, greed and negligence, we have pumped pharmaceuticals and plastic, mercury, and other toxic substances into our waters.  There have been dead and sick pets coming to the forefront lately after well-meaning pet parents have served up Omega fish oils.  My vet just a few months ago tried to get me on fish oils for our Doberman. I said absolutely not and suggested to them plant-based omegas as a far safer option.  I get these looks when I begin talking this way with most veterinarians but when the article came out in my latest Dogs Naturally magazine, I said THERE!!! I AM correct in my thought process here…and motivated by the article kept preaching.  Lastly, good people, we have over-fished our oceans to an alarming point where we are causing the starvation of species that fish IS their food source.  They don’t have another option, polluted and filled with Mercury or not. This is what they eat.  We can do better.

PLANTS – When you go out to eat and order a salad or are asleep when you grab a head of lettuce, you’re most likely getting pesticides, fewer vitamins and minerals and also GMOs.  Go organic here and gain peace of mind and better nutrition.

To help you get and stay on track, as well as learn home remedies and recipes, I adore this Raw Vegan Series by Permachart, set designed with Brian Clement of Hippocrates Health Institute where I took my training. This makes for quick and easy reference for food combining, useful equipment, juicing vs blending, etc.

PROCESSED FOODS – Our bodies were designed for raw foods.  Look at the entire rest of the animal kingdom and own that we are animals too, we are specifically mammals.  The more we heat, blend and otherwise process our foods the less nutrition we end up with.  Soil erosion (thanks Factory Farms) has caused a magnificent loss in minerals.  Most Americans are mineral deficient.  We also tend to be shallow breathers lacking proper oxygen levels and most of us (85%) are chronically dehydrated.  When we cook our foods, we dry them out, kill off natural enzymes and vitamins and deplete oxygen. When you enjoy an organic fresh salad, you are eating oxygen as well as a better bio-available protein source rich in minerals and vitamins.  You will be less thirsty, your body will have more oxygen at a cellular level and you will be better hydrated eating a plant-based raw diet.

When we stray far from our biologically designed diet, we invite trouble.  Everything above applies also to our pets.  If you feel you must eat meat because this is a thing you won’t give up, then it should be done minimally and only organically raised animals. If you must eat junk, such as french-fries, again, make it a minimal part of your life rather than something you’re taking in on a weekly or monthly basis.  If you are willing to go 100% vegan, then yes, do that!  There is a karmic debt when we kill other souls and while I believe plants are alive too, I also realize that nothing here on this plane is ever going to be perfect.  We are trial and error here as we learn to grow in compassion, lose the judgment and rigidity and just be kinder. Eating plants is a kinder choice and healthier for us.  I have actually had death threats over cashew cheese so when I tell you how very political veganism is today, believe me, I have the first-hand experience!  A fellow vegan wished me cancer, my family to die of it, all my pets too and for my business to fail. This was over a cashew cheese that she misunderstood to be a dairy cheese.  I believe when it comes to food, the majority of us have lost our way.  I also believe that one step in the right direction is a step forward indeed.  So if you are reading and sitting on the fence, try one kindness meal then another.  Baby steps.  Rather than an all-or-nothing approach, think of it in terms of this: The more you adhere to a plant-based raw and organic lifestyle, the healthier you will become. You will naturally share this lifestyle with family and friends by example.  Toxins that are stored in your fat cells will finally have a chance to dissipate leaving your immune system refreshed while your arteries unclog themselves.  Don’t you want to be your most resilient?

PurePet Alternative Vets in DFW Area

Hieronymus Rhett Thomas O’Brien Puppy getting his Acupuncture treatment!

Hello! There is absolutely a time and a place for the practice of Western Medicine.  An old friend who was getting his doctorate and was the son of a surgeon used to say, very aptly, that ‘they call it the practice of medicine because that is exactly what we are doing…practicing.’  WM excels in trauma cases and is sometimes the only or the very best option.  Recently our Doberman had a neurological spine injury.  An MRI and Surgery were recommended by one vet and putting him to sleep over quality of life issues by another if there wasn’t swift improvement.  A friend of mine just had spinal surgery performed on her Doxi. Her pup is gradually improving and healing after the surgery.  My neighbor with a Dachshund, in commiserating with me when I was seeking help last June for our Doberboy, Rhett, explained that surgery was recommended but all he could afford were NSAIDs. He took his beloved pup home sans surgery, gave him his pain and anti-inflammatory meds and slowly the dog healed all on his own.  That was a decade ago.  Now elderly, the dog can hop up on furniture and trot up and down stairs with no issues.  And our Rhett is fine now after going from being unable to run, falling down repeatedly trying just to walk and with a badly stumbling gate, to back to normal all with CMT (Canine Massage Therapy) Acupuncture and an Assisi Loop.

When Rhett was a puppy, I began looking for alternative vet options and they seem to be slim. So here is what I know for those in the Dallas area. These are recommended vets whoose first thought is not the pharma reps drugs or surgery but rather a more logical, thoughtful and holistic approach.  And again, I wish to stress here that I am NOT slamming all Western Medicine workers or modalities.  But we have options far older and less invasive.  When faced with potential surgery or a few needles to fix my boy, neither guaranteed to work by the way, it made, to me, the most sense to do the least invasive thing on him and move from there, with patience and attention.  Rhett had to have bloat surgery last Christmas and that was very hard on him, the pain of the very long incision and days of healing enough to where he could sit and then more time to be able to lay down.  The poor guy stood and whined.  He’d bunch up pillows under himself to sort of melt into place to rest.  He was miserable.  But his tummy torsioned and surgery was necessary.  For folks wondering, god yes he was on heavy pain pills but nothing knocks the worst pain out.  So if you are looking at engaging a more holistic vet, from advice on what if any annual shots are recommended to homeopathic and Asian herbs & treatments, here are a few options for you; Patricia Ballard of Alternative Vet Clinic, reached at myqivet@gmail.com works The Colony area and has semi-retired. Those in the Dallas area, I schedule CMT, Canine Massage & Acupressure therapy. Out in the Plano area, Sean at Paws & Claws Animal Hospital. In the White Rock Lake area, East Dallas Vet Clinic has recently added Acupuncture. Lisa Molidor is the DVM that does this work and is terrific to work with! She also makes house calls for acupuncture work. At EDVC I also adore Kevin Gibbs. He has experience that lends him to a unique & detailed perspective on his recommendations and treatments. And, lastly, Spot On Wellness, Dr. Hartai who is just brilliant. There are no other words. He travels and has several places around the metroplex where you can seek out his chiropractic and acupuncture mad-skills.  There is also Dr. Pam with Vitality Pet Care but we tried for 3 years to get an apointment after being told she would see us as we were referred by another vet to her.  Nope.  I ended up doing my own mojo magic with what I know about Kidney disease and my boy and he is fine so far, thank you very much.  I was recently able to secure an appointment with Dr. Ballard with Alternative Vet Clinic who just told me to keep doing what I was doing.  She taught me well.♥  Recommended Reading: Dr. Goldstein Nature Of Animal Healing