Sunday night we had a welcome dinner with all the faculty. We left with plenty of time to spare {or so we thought} and we quickly learned how unorganized things were. Anyways, to make a long story short, we drove around, lost at this resort where the dinner was supposed to be, so we were an hour late. I've heard of island time before but this was a little bit much. We made our fashionably late appearance and the club house we were at was GORGEOUS! I can't wait to go back and go swimming there. I'll have to post some pictures when I get some. So must of the faculty were female and there were only a few males. This must be a Hawaiian thing but the course director, who is male, was the mack daddy - he got kissed on the lips from nearly all the other female instructors. Weird.
Monday brought us to Earl Bakken's private house near Kiholo Bay. We turned off the main road onto basically an unmarked dirt round. His place was absolutely gorgeous! And not to mention his house was right on the ocean. After we talked with him for two hours, we walked down to the beach. The coolest part of this was the sea turtles! Love it! I'll eventually post some pictures when I get them on the computer. It's kind of amazing the things that Earl Bakken has done in his lifetime, not to mention he has been really involved in health care on the big island. It was kind of funny meeting with Earl. We met him on his home office. He has his own personal nurse we basically tends to all of him needs. In the middle of our conversation with us, the nurse comes over, pokes his finger and draws a blood glucose level. She then reached in his shirt pocket, messes with him insulin pump and all Earl said was "Is everything still ok?" His home is 'off the grid.' He has three generators and even distills his own water. Apparently the were doing some generator work while we were there and we briefly lost power twice. Each time, his secretary would come in and update us 'this should last long.' Then the power would come back on and his Ipad would make a noise and he'd tell us 'man, this Ipad makes a lot of noise,' meanwhile the generators are blaring outside and there is a grounds keeper blowing grass clippings which were considerably louder than the little noise his Ipad made - ha! I am really appreciative that I had the opportunity to make Earl Bakken - the things he had accomplished in life is truly incredible.
After we left Earl Bakken's house, the group of us dropped one of us off at his afternoon session with a nautral-pathic (sp?) doctor, the rest of us headed to the Kona Brew Pub for some pizza. While there I got to see my first mongoose - I didn't bother taking a picture of them as they are the ugliest little creatures. We then walked around downtown Kona, had some fantastic guava sherbet and walked down to the ocean.
Monday night, one of our instructors came to our house and taught us about HeartMath which is a relaxation/stress reduction/meditation technique. It was kind of interesting. You are supposed to focus on your heart and deep breathing and it causing our heart rate variability to become synchronized. That sounds kind of hokey, but basically, the better heart rate variability you can achieve, the better your overall health will be. Our instructor referenced fetal heart tones and how we want to see variability during labor and not just a flat rate. So as infant heart rate variability means a healthy baby, the same thing basically applied to adults. We could hook ourselves up these monitors and then start mediating and see if we could get our heart rate to vary. I was very good at this - mainly because I wasn't focusing, but Kathleen was really good a achieving heart rate variability.
This morning (Tuesday) we went to the local hospital to learn about how the integrate alternative medicine techniques into their practices. We started the morning off with Oshibori which is an aromatherapy technique - I can't wait to post pictures of us doing this - ha! More to come - eventually. The hospital was gorgeous! The patient rooms all had doors to the outside and they had beautiful stain glass windows. I seriously can't wait to get the pics off my camera so I can show you all this. They even had a meditation labyrinth which was really cool. We also learned about pet therapy and got to play with one of the dogs. The 'baby security' in the OB department consisted of this talk stone wall. We even got to see 'Uncle Earl' at the hospital today again. The hospital really wasn't like the hospitals back home. The had beautiful flowers all over. I'm sure the year round warm weather contributes to this.
Between the hospital and our evening expressive art therapy class, we wondered around the town of Waimea. We had the BEST ice cream which was locally made. I had the pineapple ice cream which was so fresh and yummy. They also had this Tahitian vanilla which was literally to die for. I will be going back there.
Our class tonight was fun. We learned another mediation technique and also learned about what 'shapes' we are and relate too. My most powerful shape was the triangle which correlated to having visions and achieving goals. We then did some stuff with colors and then put the shapes and cools into our own logo (mom and dad - I used your sun symbol!) We made little tiles with our logos which was neat. We also learned about poetry therapy which was interesting. I'm not much of a poetry person, but everyone is different I guess. We also used Osho cards. I drew the celebration card. I think this is pretty appropriate considering I had a lot of stuff to celebrate in these next few months including graduating and residency match. One of the other students in our group, Sean, drew the schizophrenia card! LOL - seriously, who makes a schizophrenia card?!? That was worth some good laughs at least.
As I write this my roommates are playing Jenga - if you lose we have to eat a big hunk of spam - ha! After all, we are staying in the state which consumes the most Spam so this is an appropriate consequence for being the Jenga loser! I'm looking forward to tomorrow. We are doing Yoga on the lanai {hawaii's lingo for deck} all day with this well known Yoga instructor who even instructors Julia Roberts. Yoga, on the lanai, while whale watching with a famous yoga instructor = awesome! Hope everyone back in MN is staying warm - I hear it's cold up there :) Love you guys and miss you!
~Ashley
{disregard spelling mistakes, I was too tired to proof read this tonight so I'll do it tomorrow}
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