Carnival of Healing #117 -- Special Solstice Edition

Lay-deez annnd gentlemen! The Reiki Digest welcomes the Carnival of Healing for our last edition of 2007.

Today we also celebrate the solstice. Whether this is the shortest day of the year where you are, or the longest, welcome.

Usually we stick to the subject of Reiki here, but this week only, we're widening our focus to the topic of healing in general.

To our regular readers who may be wondering, we'll begin by explaining what the Carnival of Healing is and why it might be of interest. And to our visitors stopping by to check out the Carnival, we'll tell you a little about The Reiki Digest as well.

The Carnival is a weekly collection of blog posts on the topic of healing, organized by About.com's Guide to Holistic Healing, Phylameana Iila Desy, who -- among other things -- practices Reiki. (She also has an even more unusual name than I do!) About.com, now owned by The New York Times, was established in 1996 to help web surfers find their way around cyberspace. Even then, there was more information available online than anyone could possibly absorb, so the 600 or so About.com guides sort through some of it for us. The guides can't do all that work alone, however, so Phylameana set up a weekly blog carnival with guest hosts to sort through a bit of the blogosphere. This week, that's yours truly.

Last week's Carnival of Healing was hosted by Coaching 4 Lesbians and next week it will move on to Lessons from a Recovering DoorMat.

Sorting through anything in cyberspace involves sorting through spam as well, and frankly, some of the submissions to this week's carnival seemed to be little more than that. Not a surprise, since contributors to the Carnival use a handy online form to send in their submissions, and it's up to the guest host, not Phylameana or About.com, to separate the wheat from the chaff. It still requires human eyes, as it were, to humanize the Internet.

To our first-time visitors, welcome and we hope you enjoy the Carnival of Healing. You're the guest of The Reiki Digest, a weekly publication about Reiki. What's that? Our first Carnival contributor, Paula Hirsch, answers that question in The Art of Reiki at Authentic Insight.

Isabella Mori at Change Therapy submitted a link to someone else's video journal, but we prefer a more recent post on the subject of moving forward after bad work experiences, that better showcases Mori's counseling skills.

At The Next 45 Years, Alex Blackwell addresses The Two Things We Want Most.

Next week's Carnival of Healing host, Daylle Deanna Schwartz at Lessons from a Recovering DoorMat, shares a lesson on taking responsibility for our own health in a post titled Beating my High Cholesterol and Thyroid.

No carnival would be complete without food, but at the Carnival of Healing you'll find no cotton candy or fried food. Instead, we have some more nutritious offerings, such as Steve Pavlina's post telling us about why he's been a vegan for the past decade. Also on the menu, FitBuff's Foods High in Fiber, Roger Haeske's Having Trouble Staying Raw, It May Not Be Your Fault at Raw Food Diet, Bodyweight Fitness and Peak Performance Living, and Green Tea and Weight Loss from Stanimir Sotirov at All About Your Body And Spirit.

How about some homemade miso soup to go with that green tea? There's a recipe at our next stop. Real-life carnivals typically include a "Guess Your Age" attraction, but our Carnival features instead A Super Anti-Aging Diet That Will Make You Look 10-20 Years Younger (editor's note: that's not our claim; we're just passing along the headline) from Marcus Ryan at Wrinkle Creams Review. Hmmm. Could it be that healthy eating can do more for your appearance than any wrinkle cream?

There's no substitute for a healthy diet, says Amy Bangs at Skint in London, whose Carnival contribution is Top Ten Health Supplements You Really Don't Need to Buy.

Cindy S at Natural-Wellness takes the numbered list up a notch and adds an exclamation point with 11 Easy Ways to Improve Your Diet!

Doing some last-minute holiday shopping at the Carnival? Weight Loss Dude James D. Brausch offers Five Gifts For Those Losing Weight.

At Lifecrafting, Andrew Michaels offers a dietary solution to headaches in Never Suffer a Headache Again.

If the pain is in your wrist, Lovelyn at Where We Relax offers a post on Self-Massage To Ease Symptoms of Carpal Tunnel.

All statements about health and medicine -- or anything else, for that matter -- in the Carnival of Healing are the responsibility of the authors, as The Reiki Digest does not prescribe, diagnose, or otherwise practice medicine.

That's enough reading to last until next year, and coincidentally, this is the last edition of The Reiki Digest for this year. Happy Holidays to all, and we'll see you again on January 3, 2008.