PAINTING -NEW MEANINGS The older painting gets as an art form, the harder it gets to describe. Is a painting that doubles as a video still a painting? What is a painting that is also a print?

The older painting gets as an art form, the harder it gets to describe. Is a painting that doubles as a video still a painting? What is a painting that is also a print? What about the painting that is a collage, a cartoon, graffiti, or some other form of illustration? Artists have long incorporated objects into paintings on canvas, but what should we call a work if no paint or canvas is involved? Is a painting made with nothing but fabric or putty still a painting? And what kind of a painting takes up not just a whole wall but the space of an entire room?

It used to be so simple: a painting was the mediated result of an artist’s application of wet paint on a flat surface. No more. Having absorbed high culture and low, painting has turned itself out in mixed-media assemblages that include both organic and synthetic materials and occasionally involve photography and digital printing. It has borrowed from commercial illustration and architectural, tattoo, and textile design, and exhibited itself as sculpture or in various combinations of all the above, in both abstraction and representation. At this point, even those distinctions seem quaint.

Ours is the age of the hybrid, the crossover, the many-splendored thing, a time when the combined force of new media, postmodern thought, and human history has made it impossible for artists to worship a single god of painting. Indeed, the practice of this ancient art may owe its continued health to its amazingly elastic nature.

Reassuring though that may be, it only complicates attempts to pinpoint exactly what we now identify as a painting. For an artist like Pat Steir, a painting is simply something that “deals with paint.” Steir is probably best known for large-scale abstract canvases that suggest cascading waterfalls, each the consequence of a calculated system of brushing, dripping, and splattering paint. “Of course,” she notes, “you can do a painting with a pencil, as Cy Twombly has. Then there are Warhol’s urine paintings. Does that mean the image is the painting? No,” she explains, “because we have Ellsworth Kelly, where the image is a color, or Christopher Wool, where the painting is a word.”

Even Robert Storr—a professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and the curator of the 2007 Venice Biennale—trips over his definition. “A painting has to be made of paint or paintlike materials,” says Storr, an artist himself. “But then I think of a photographer like Jeff Wall, who makes images resembling history paintings. Or Sigmar Polke, who manipulates the chemical process in photography in ways akin to what a painter does, but the result is a printed object.” Recalling that Robert Rauschenberg once made paintings out of dirt, Storr concludes, “It’s both the pictorial conventions and the material qualities of an object that make it a painting. For an increasing number of artists, the very game of stretching definitions is the substance of the work.”

Rauschenberg may well be the patron saint of the hybrid form. He is now as famous for claiming to act within the “gap between art and life” as he is for his Combine works, in which he bridged the gulf between painting and object. Last December PaceWildenstein exhibited his “Scenarios,” a suite of totemic, 7-by-10-foot paintings of vaguely thematic photographic images transferred to a plasterlike surface to resemble frescoes. Each bore clear references to his own pictorial history. For example, Key West Rooster (2004) evoked the artist’s silk-screened newspaper transfers of the early 1960s. It made an obvious link with Odalisk(1955–58), the category-defying Combine on which he placed a stuffed rooster atop a paint-slathered wooden box covered in dried grass, photographs, newspaper, and electric lights, and stakes the whole thing to a pillow on a low, rolling platform. (At the end of this year, on the occasion of Rauschenberg’s 80th birthday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will host a retrospective of the Combines that will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the exhibition’s organizer, and later to museums in Stockholm and Paris.) As Steir says, “Rauschenberg found a way to stretch the meaning of painting, and it has been stretching ever since.”

To the Brooklyn-based artist James Esber, “Paintings are unique objects with a strong physical presence that are also in some way illusionistic.” Esber “paints” with Plasticine, a pigmented modeling material that adheres to the wall in low relief and never really dries. That leaves his distorted, photo-based images vulnerable to further alteration by gravity or touch, be it accidental or intentional. It also gives his art the character of sculpture, placing it in that middle ground where the painted constructions of established masters like Elizabeth Murray and Frank Stella also reside. “I try to create things that occupy the space of the gallery and also describe a space that is not present,” Esber says. “But I never talk about my work as sculpture. To me it’s always painting.”

For Fred Tomaselli, Esber’s work “refers to painting without being painting,” though Tomaselli admits to being a “hybrid person” himself. Indeed, for a number of years Tomaselli has embraced the natural world in radiant, highly decorative paintings that make almost no distinction between the illusory and the real, the figurative and the abstract. He has used, among his primary materials, psychoactive drugs—pharmaceutical pills and marijuana—as well as magazine cutouts. Embedded in thick layers of resin, they look exactly as if they were painted. His work, he says, comes out of California surf culture and the vernacular of album-cover illustration, though he also borrows from Indian miniatures and Renaissance painting.

“What’s exciting about painting today is that it borrows from all sources,” says Joe Amrhein, the artist who founded Brooklyn’s Pierogi Gallery, which represents Esber, as well as Jane Fine, Carey Maxon, and Ati Maier. All subscribe to an esthetic involving obsessive, densely layered drawing. “It’s a great way to develop ideas, since it goes right from the hand to the canvas, so it offers that spontaneity. Other mediums don’t.”

David Salle would agree. “I am an unapologetic advocate for painting,” he says. “I don’t think painting and photography are equal, or that one is a flatter version of the other. Painting’s performative aspect will always set it apart from other media and raises the stakes over other forms. That’s why a painting today, no matter what it looks like, is connected to a painting made hundreds of years ago, to a Pontormo for example. Not in a referential way but in a ‘making a thing’ way.”

Nevertheless, it is in the performance of “Unhinged,” a series of vertical diptychs by Joe Zucker, that the line between image and object becomes especially blurred. Zucker paired a sandboxlike container, into which he poured paint of a solid color, with a box of a slightly smaller size that he had sectioned with thin dowels to suggest the shape of a sailboat on water. Into each compartment he poured paint of a complementary color, manipulating its depth and texture by tipping the box as he worked. When he set th
e top of the diptych on the bottom, the frame doubled as its own shipping crate.

“If a painting has a physical presence, it has an ability to transcend its literal meaning,” Zucker says, recalling his early canvas-weave works of the 1960s. “I was making paintings of what I was painting on,” he says. From his mosaic-like, pigment-soaked, cotton-ball paintings of the 1970s (exhibited last year at Gavin Brown’s enterprise) to the “box paintings,” Zucker has continually found ways to blend image into surface.

An emphasis on materials and process is evident today in the wildly different methods of figural artist Dana Schutz and abstractionist Mark Grotjahn. Their expressive, very subjective pictures seem to be trapped in paint, while Karin Davie’s recent neoprene twists are three-dimensional translations of the sweeping gestures of her painting. To create her bright, highly decorative works, the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes paints contrasting geometric patterns on screens and affixes them in imperceptible layers to her canvas.

Michael Bevilacqua incorporates artifacts in his installations of still-life paintings that connect modern old masters like Giorgio Morandi with punk bands like the Ramones, while the ceramicist Betty Woodman, who draws on a variety of art-historical sources, has begun attaching glazed wall pieces to new paintings. Joan Wallace transforms two-dimensional paintings into three-dimensional environments. In one painting, Piece of Cake (for Jack Goldstein) , 2004, she inserted a blue-and-yellow video into a flat blue-and-yellow composition. Jeremy Blake makes intensely-colored videos that play on flat-screen monitors like color-field paintings in motion.

The computer may well be the source of flat paintings in synthetic printer colors that artists like Takashi Murakami, Jeff Elrod, and Inka Essenhigh use, though to very different effect.

Artists have long appropriated the strategies, images, and forms of preceding generations or movements, rephotographing, collaging, upending, adding, or erasing to refresh the old with a new proposition or perspective. “It’s a big inspiration for me, the computer,” says Mary Heilmann, who uses it to design her deceptively decorative abstract paintings. “It’s all narcissistic; I just play around with my own art on it, so it’s kind of autoerotic.” Fabian Marcaccio may have been on to something when he gave the name “paintants” (or “mutant paintings”) to his gelatinous, panoramic environments of paint, objects, and digital images that the edges of their supports rarely contain.

In a similar spirit, but a different world, Matthew Ritchie combines mathematical theory with mythological symbols in an invented creation narrative that extends across his canvases and spills onto the floor in bright vinyl whorls. This month, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (through May 29), Ritchie presents such interactive works as Proposition Player, a kind of dice game in which viewer movements trigger animated derivations of his paintings on projection screens nearby.

“Marcaccio and Ritchie are right down the middle of the road of what we expect painters to do today,” says Dan Cameron, senior curator at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. “That is, to play with painting at its margins, where painting ceases to be painting.”

Ritchie is one of the eight artists in “Remote Viewings: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing,” an exhibition of large-scale abstract painting opening at the Whitney Museum in June. Organized by Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman, it takes special note of the way artists such as Julie Mehretu, Franz Ackermann, and Ati Maier are liberating painting from its conventional frame and expanding its scale to cover a wall or spread over a floor. “Each one of these artists is using abstraction as an element of a larger ambition,” Sussman says of the group, which also includes Steve DiBenedetto, Alexander Ross, Terry Winters, and Carroll Dunham. “They’re interested in spaces in the world that you can’t imagine but that come into being through form.”

Other telling elements of the show, and of this moment, are a certain preference for densely layered, intricate draftsmanship and a shift to what Sussman terms “nonchromophobia,” the artists’ embrace of color and scale in the service of a loose but detectable visual narrative, of the sort found in Lari Pittman’s work. For Sussman, the artists’ use of recurrent ideas sets them apart from James Siena, Yayoi Kusama, Philip Taaffe, and Eli Sudbrack (the artist who is also known as Assume Vivid Astro Focus), whose work incorporates trance-inducing patterning. In the show, Sussman says, “you get lost in the imaginary.”

Coincidentally, Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, is mounting “Extreme Abstraction” in July. But this show, which he is putting together with associate curator Claire Schneider, is not limited to painting. Contemporary work by an array of international artists will fill the institution’s campus, indoors and out, along with selections from its permanent collection by Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Richard Serra, and Sol LeWitt.

“I’m very fascinated by Katharina Grosse’s way of reinventing space through painting,” says Grachos. And as for Polly Apfelbaum’s confabulations of velvet disks, he says, “How can you not think of Pollock?” Another artist in the show, Jennifer Steinkamp, makes large-scale videos—moving pictures of still images or still images of moving objects—that might best be understood as projected paintings.

In a related vein, the Polish artist Dominik Lejman has projected moving silhouettes of distant figures onto patterned canvases that he calls “time-based” paintings. Luxe Gallery in New York recently sold them as editioned works—a not entirely new phenomenon made possible by technology. Last fall, for example, Peres Projects in Los Angeles and New York’s John Connelly Presents took the psychedelic environment that Sudbrack designed for the 2004 Whitney Biennial and divided it into components that were sold in “electronic editions,” which include a certificate of authentication and the design on a CD, in a digital file. The components—which ranged from decals for $2,500, to a floor, ceiling, and walls segment for $15,000—together cost $150,000; the five sculptures cost between $5,000 and $15,000 each.

The Swiss artist Urs Fischer, known mostly for his sculpture, has also made editioned “paintings”—laser prints of untitled landscapes or interiors that achieve a nearly abstract, cracked-mirror effect with uneven bands of red, white, or black that the artist adds by hand, using a fine paintbrush or felt-tipped marker. A laser print on canvas by Rob Wynne, a New York–based conceptualist, is a unique enlargement of the landscape painted on a 19th-century porcelain teacup. “You can’t tell what it is,” Wynne says of the work, which is embroidered with its title, A Scented Mantle of Starlight and Silence(2005). “It looks just like a painting. It is a painting. It isn’t, but it is.”

Rudolf Stingel, a conceptualist to the core, has made a number of paintings on canvas over the past two decades, but he has also presented industrial, sometimes stained, carpets as monumental modernist monochromes that he insists can only be read as paintings—paintings that inherently question what a painting should be.

Stingel’s carpets actually function more as interventions into surrounding architecture, in a manner related to the methods of the French artist Daniel Buren, who has installed his
striped paint
ngs and banners on walls, ceilings, windows, storefronts, and outdoor benches, partly to call attention to their environments, both physical and political. (His current exhibition, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, addresses both the history and structure of Wright’s building.)

Richard Tuttle’s work also calls less attention to itself than its surroundings; Tuttle’s subject is perception itself. He is an illusionist who compels us to see what we might otherwise overlook. If he daubs paint on a piece of wood, for example, and hangs it near the floor, is that a painting or a sculpture?

Elizabeth Murray has been confusing that issue for some time. It’s not new. But, says Storr, who is curating Murray’s career retrospective for New York’s Museum of Modern Art later this year, “she’s the first person to deal directly with the topological surfaces of surrealist painting. She bends and twists and folds her paintings in ways we have never seen before and that no surrealist actually did. Her paintings have wonderful contradictions: the surface will come out and the image will go in, so that what you are looking at comes out from the wall as a volume and not just a surface.”

Laura Hoptman, curator of the 2004 Carnegie International, who also organized the exhibition “Drawing Now” for the Museum of Modern Art in 2002, says, “For me, the painters who are most interesting now are those who take the belief in painting to its logical conclusion—that is, toward a superidealistic abstraction.”

In this regard, she cites the “ugly, moving, little pictures” of Tomma Abts, a German-born painter now based in London, whom Hoptman included in the International. “Her work is uncompromising,” Hoptman says. “It’s profoundly nonobjective. That means you think form and color in combination on a two-dimensional surface can be as meaningful as a story. It took 50 years to sweep away Barnett Newman’s crazy thinking that you could paint God. Now, in times of great existential turmoil, it comes back. That is very interesting.”

However significant abstraction is to curators, representational painting is what is currently driving the market, and most of it is quite traditional. Between the late 1980s and early ’90s, says Matthew Higgs, director of White Columns, New York’s oldest alternative art space, “artists like Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija rethought conceptual practice, and artists like Elizabeth Peyton and Peter Doig rethought traditional painting. Now, I think there is a strain of artists working conceptually with figurative painting.” But, Higgs adds, “there is also a new orthodoxy around representational imagery, and it seems to me, when something becomes orthodox, it’s over.”

Clearly then, when Russell Ferguson, senior curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, chose “The Undiscovered Country” as the title for a recent survey of representational painting at the institution, he had a very different view. “The idea of a complete break with the past—I don’t see much of that right now,” he says. “And I don’t think any of these artists find painting an unproblematic field,” he says of the show, which included Fairfield Porter, Vija Celmins, and younger artists like Edgar Bryan, Mari Eastman, Jochen Klein, and Mamma Andersson. “But they’ve worked through it to get where they want. If people thought it was a conservative show, they didn’t look at it carefully.”

Dan Cameron is one who came away impressed. “But the expanded definition of painting is something we need to take up,” he says. “I like it when Jeff Koons does his inkjet productions and calls them paintings. It takes nerve, but it challenges me to think of painting in a way I hadn’t before.”

So what makes a painting a painting?

“That’s one of the ideas I wanted to explore with this show,” Ferguson says. “But every time you come up with an answer, you can think of something to contradict it.”

Linda Yablonsky is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

SHIFTING ONE'S VIBRATION TO MANIFEST ONES'S DESIRES

Discovering and Correcting Vibrational Discordance

Your thoughts and feelings are not equal to your vibration. They’re merely effects of your vibration, but they get filtered through your beliefs. If your beliefs aren’t aligned with truth, then your inner perception of your vibration will be a distortion of your true vibration, so you won’t perceive yourself accurately. You may think you’re resonating with a certain energetic frequency like abundance, vitality, or love, when the truth is quite different.

How can you become aware of your true vibration if you can’t blindly trust what you’re thinking and feeling?

The solution is that you need to create a feedback loop, whereby you can observe yourself objectively to get a better sense of what you’re actually putting out. This will help you make adjustments to correct inaccuracies in your internal self-image.

Shifting Your Vibration to Manifest Your Desires

February 12th, 2009 by Steve Pavlina

You are not a physical being in a physical universe. You are an energetic/vibrational being in an energetic/vibrational universe. You are both a transmitter and a receiver of energy.

One of your greatest challenges as a human being is learning how to live as a vibrational being in a vibrational universe.

Attracting Compatible Patterns

You don’t attract into your life what you want. You don’t attract what you think about. You don’t attract what you feel. Desires, thoughts, and feelings are all important, but these are more effects than causes.

You attract what you’re signaling.
Think of yourself as a vibrational transmitter. You’re constantly sending out signals that tell the universe who you are in this moment. Those signals will either attract or repel other vibrational beings, events, and experiences.
You naturally attract that which is in harmony with your state of being, and you’ll repel that which is out of sync with your state.
If your energetic self radiates wealth and abundance, your physical reality will reflect wealth and abundance for your physical being.

If your energetic self radiates anger and frustration, your physical reality will reflect that as well.

Since the signals you’re sending out at any given moment tend to be fairly complex, your experience of physical reality will be equally complex.

Once you can accept that your vibrational self attracts compatible patterns, it becomes clear that if you want to experience something different in your life, you must somehow change the signals you’re putting out.

Your Vibrational Hum

Listen to the vibrational hum of your being. Quiet your mind, tune in to your inner being, and listen to the ever-broadcasting radio station that is you. What types of signals are you broadcasting in this moment?

When I tune in for a moment, I can sense some of the signals that are emanating from me. I can feel that I’m radiating happiness and joy. I can sense that I’m sending out signals to attract positive, loving new relationships into my life. I can sense that I’m radiating financial abundance and increase. I can sense that my energy is very mental at the moment because I’m writing this article.

These are all thoughts, however. The true signal I’m emitting isn’t a thought. It’s a frequency. I might describe this frequency in words, but I can never get the words quite right because human language is inadequate to the task. If I try to describe my current signal anyway, I might use the following adjectives: flowing, smiling, happy, peaceful, soaring, white, soft, strong, expanding, warm, mindful, smooth, and energized.

I can also tune into signals from my environment. I can sense that my belly is broadcasting satiety since I just had lunch (a mixed green salad and some olives). I can observe that it’s 49 degrees F outside. I can hear soft music coming from my computer speakers (sound is yet another vibration). I can subtly perceive Erin’s signal transmitting from the next room. I can feel the combined energy of the people reading my articles around the world.

Overall, I can sense that the signals I’m sending out and the signals coming from my environment are in sync. I feel happy, peaceful, and abundant, and my environment reflects that. This is a stable state, one I experience often.

Your energy signature is the summation of all the signals you’re sending out. Your thoughts and feelings aren’t the cause of these signals though; your thoughts and feelings are actually effects of the signals. If you change the signal you’re emitting, your thoughts and feelings will shift as well.

Vibrational Equilibrium

Your vibrational being and your environment will tend to move toward equilibrium over time. If your current life situation appears fairly stable, it’s safe to say that you’re maintaining equilibrium.

For example, if you’re financially broke, and if this is a stable situation that has persisted for some time, then it’s likely that most of the energetic signals you’re exposing yourself to are also vibrating at a similar frequency of broke-ness. This includes the place you live, the people you interact with, your work environment, the events on your calendar, your furniture, and so on. Your being is immersed in a field of these signals, and this encourages you to vibrate at the same level.

If you continue to surround yourself with signals that reinforce your current state, then that state will persist indefinitely. You may be able to get away from it for a while, but you’ll keep coming back to it if that’s your equilibrium.

Shifting Your Vibration

Creating a temporary shift in your vibration is easy. You can create such a change in seconds. Jump around and move your body. Sing your favorite song. Smile for a minute. Hold a yoga pose. Take a cold shower. All of these will change your state. However, this won’t create any sort of lasting change if you return to your old vibration afterwards. If your dominant signal remains unchanged, your equilibrium won’t shift.

In order to shift your equilibrium, you need to break the old equilibrium. This means you must create a lasting disconnect between your current vibration and the environmental vibrations that are compatible with it.

There are basically two ways to do this.

First, you can shift your own vibration long enough to create a lasting disconnect with your current environment. If you start transmitting a new signal, you’ll soon repel whatever in your environment is incompatible with your new signal. You’ll also begin attracting other people, events, and experiences that are compatible with your new signal. Hold the new vibration long enough, and you’ll see your whole physical reality change all around you.

You can apply this approach by visualizing your goals very vividly for at least 20 minutes per day. Visualize in such a way that you can feel strong emotions. An emotional shift indicates that you’re broadcasting a new signal. The longer you can hold this new vibration, the faster your reality will shift.

The second method is to intentionally replace many of your environmental signals with new ones. Then you must hold yourself in that new environment. This will feel uncomfortable at first because you won’t initially be compatible with those new signals. You must allow them to recalibrate your own vibration until you become compatible with them.

You can apply this approach by changing your environmental landscape — physically, socially, and otherwise. For example, stop spending time with your lazy friends, give away your TV, and hang out every day with the most productive people you know. This will feel uncomfortable at first, but eventually you’ll start to integrate those new signals, and your own vibrational pattern will soon shift to come into resonance with these new people.

So to sum up, you can either change the signal you’re emitting, or you can change the signal soup you’re immersed in. Either way can be very effective at creating a lasting change in your vibrational pattern.

Creating What You Desire

To create what you want in your life, you must shift your vibrational pattern such that you’re emitting a signal that’s vibrationally compatible with your goals and desires.

You can identify that new vibration by vividly visualizing your goals until you feel different emotions, and those emotions stabilize at a certain point. Notice how your vibrational inner being feels, not just emotionally but energetically. Then return to your old state, and notice the vibrational difference between the two states. Compare and contrast the old vibration with the new one.

For example, here’s how I’d describe the vibration of being broke and deep in debt, a frequency I emitted for many years: tight, knotted, twisted, chaotic, rough, blurry, red, dark, fast, changing, pressed, and squeezed.

Here’s how I’d describe the vibration of financial abundance: open, free, clear, bluish-white, flowing, smooth, bright, focused, and intense.

Each vibration has a different energy signature. If I temporarily shift my default vibration to a state of feeling broke (just by imagining it as real), I can feel my vibrational self shifting its frequency too. If I held that vibration long enough, I’d soon find that my physical reality followed suit.

Hopefully it’s obvious by now that if you want to shift your vibration, it’s a bad idea to consistently expose yourself to incompatible signals. Watch the TV news about the ongoing financial meltdown and the recession/depression, and notice what happens to your vibration. Then notice what happens to your finances in the long run. If you want to experience financial abundance, this is a very bad time to watch or read mainstream news. This is the perfect time to read high-quality books or articles instead.

Learning to sense and control the vibrational frequencies you’re emitting is powerful stuff. Once you really get this, you can intentionally shift your frequency at will to experience what you desire.

If you want to experience wealth, you can create that. If you want to experience a new relationship, you can create that too. If you want high energy and good health, you can create that as well.

This isn’t to say that it will be easy for you to accomplish all of these things. It takes practice to adjust your vibrational frequency correctly, so be patient with yourself. Rome wasn’t manifested in a day.

MIND POWER BASICS

Let’s get to the basics of Mind Power. All physical reality is made up ofLet’s get to the basics of Mind Power. All physical reality is made up of vibrations of energy. Your thoughts too are vibrations of energy. This is not a concept or theory, but rather the startling new reality that quantum physics now reveals to us. Your thoughts have a powerful influence; they affect what happens to you. To know this is to know something great.

Most of us go through our waking hours taking little notice of our thought processes: how the mind moves, what it fears, what it heeds, what it says to itself, what it brushes aside. For the most part we eat, work, converse, worry, hope, plan, make love, shop, play, all with minimal attention paid to how we think. This is unfortunate, for we are neglecting one of the most important and powerful forces in our life.

Mind Power is directing your thoughts toward a desired outcome. Put simply, what you focus on you attract. Focus on success and you attract success. Focus on fear and failure and you attract failure. Mind Power is understanding these laws and making our thoughts work for us. Your thoughts are the primary creative forces in your life. Use them consciously and use them often and you will awaken to a whole new life of power and opportunity.

A New Life Is But a New Mind

If you want to make changes in your life, you must look to the causes, and the causes are almost always the way you are using your mind — the way you are thinking. You cannot think both negative and positive thoughts at the same time. One or the other will dominate. The mind is a creature of habit, so it becomes each individual’s responsibility to make sure that positive emotions and thoughts constitute the dominating influence in their mind.

In order to change external conditions, you must first change the internal. Most people omit this step. They try to change external conditions by working directly on those conditions. This always proves futile, or at best temporary, unless it is accompanied by a change of thoughts and beliefs.

Awakening to this truth, the way to a better, more successful life becomes crystal clear. Train your conscious mind to think thoughts of success, happiness, health, prosperity, and to weed out negativity such as fear and worry. Keep your conscious mind busy with the expectation of the best, and make sure the thoughts you habitually think are based upon what you want to see happen in your life.

Water takes the shape of whatever container holds it, whether it be in a glass, a vase or a riverbank. Likewise, your mind will create and manifest according to the images you habitually think about in your daily thinking. This is how your destiny is created. A new life is created by new thoughts.

- See more at: http://www.learnmindpower.com/using_mindpower/basics/#sthash.MQvOobwm.dpuf

HOW TO ALIGN VIBRATIONS

How To Align Vibrations

Vibrational alignment, which can occur with objects and with people in the world around you, happens naturally, when you are “in tune” with them. When you make a point to focus on and enjoy a beautiful sunny day, for example, your brain begins to harmonize with the frequency of the earth, and the alpha state of relaxation and enjoyment generally occurs without effort. In the same way that the mind is able to “tune in” to the frequency of the sunny day, it can also align with other occurrences, people and even objects.

The key to achieving vibrational alignment with any person or object is focus. By bringing attention on that object, recreating it in detail in your mind, your brain produces signals that are the same as they would be if you were already in the presence of that person or thing. This is useful to know because the act of visioning can help you turn your thoughts into reality.

Your vibrational energy increases with the level of emotional energy. If you are hoping to attract more joyful outcomes, then you will need to be in joy. If you are feeling negative, chances are you attract more negative outcomes because of the vibrations that you exude. Hence, to align with vibrations require you to be aware of your feelings. You become intent on moving up the scale to feeling positive throughout the day.

Manage Your Vibrations

You magnetize or draw the events, objects and people based on your vibrations. The Law of Attraction simply states that “like attracts like”. In the same way that your mind can seek out vibrational frequencies to tune in to, other people, objects and things are also seeking frequencies to become aligned with. If your thoughts are focused on something other than your deepest desires, whatever the focus of your thoughts is, similar energy will be drawn to you.

The thoughts that occupy your mind are energy. What you focus on expands. The energy that your brain releases into the world reacts with other energy sources that it encounters. When the mind is focused on abundance, abundance is drawn to you. When the mind is focused on lack, however, more lack is likely to result.

There is no detailed program or complex formula for frequency alignment. To align your vibrations with the things that you most desire, allow yourself to become “tapped in, tuned in and turned on” – a phrase that Abraham regularly uses. To change your circumstances, it is impossible to control all external conditions but what you can do is to change your vibrations. And once you gain mastery, you will activate the Law of Attraction in your favor.

Quotes on Vibrations

The following are quotes on Vibrations that came from Abraham:

No one can deny you or grant you anything. It all comes to you by virtue of your vibration.

When you offer a vibration, the Universal forces are working in concert with each other in order to satisfy you. You really are the center of the Universe.

Most people think that they only have the option of responding to the circumstances that surround them. And that’s what makes them attempt the impossible, which is to control the circumstances around them, which only feeds their feeling of frustration and vulnerability, because it doesn’t take very much life experience to discover you can’t control all of those circumstances. But you can control your vibration. And when you control your vibration, you’ve controlled everything that has anything to do with you.

CARRIE MOYER -ARTICLE AND WORK

Carrie Moyer, “Intergalactic Emoji Factory” (2015), acrylic and glitter on canvas, 72 x 96 inches (all images courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York)

When Carrie Moyer and I decided to have a conversation, her recent paintings were already at DC Moore Gallery, where her solo exhibition — now on view — was soon to open. We met there after hours, and over beer and chips, and talked among the works leaning against the walls. There was an odd and disorienting friction to our informal hangout, suddenly set against the backdrop of the well-lit gallery, but Moyer seemed perfectly at ease.

Moyer’s work, too, deals with intervention, but its achievement is that fluidity replaces jarring juxtaposition. In this, it reflects her years of experience as an activist who designed public and street art campaigns with Queer Nation and Dyke Action Machine!. In her paintings, flat planar “cut” shapes are interwoven with translucent passages. Craft materials like glitter are contained within gestures we normally associate with heroic abstraction.

Carrie Moyer (courtesy the artist) (click to enlarge)

The paintings often have symmetrical, overall forms, which are suggestive more than graphic. They are elegant and beautifully constructed, even though they play with the noise and glare of popular visual culture. They seduce us, inviting us to pull them apart, but their construction feels illogical, difficult to tease out of their overall gestalt.

Moyer was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1985 and an MFA from Bard College in 2000. She is currently a Professor at Hunter College. With photographer Sue Schaffner, she co-founded the public art project Dyke Action Machine!, active in New York City between 1991–2008. She has also written extensively about art for Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artforum, among other publications and exhibition catalogs. She was the subject of a solo exhibition at theWorcester Art Museum in 2012, and a traveling exhibition, Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, which originated at the Tang Museum of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, in 2013. She had several exhibitions at Canada Gallery between 2003 and 2011. She is now represented by DC Moore Gallery, New York, where a solo exhibition is on view through March 26, 2016.

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Jennifer Samet: You have said that your parents nurtured an interest in art. Where did you grow up? Were there specific experiences you had with art, or specific works of art, which you consider formative?

Carrie Moyer: I was born in Detroit, where my family has longstanding roots. My grandfather was a policeman during the Detroit riots in the 1960s. But I had countercultural parents who put us in a van when I was nine and drove us out to California with all of our belongings. My family lived all over the Northwest for the next 10 years — California, Oregon, and Washington.

Carrie Moyer, “Cloud Comb for Georgia” (2015), acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

My mother was really interested in art and encouraged my sister and me to become artists. She often took us to the Detroit Institute of Art before we left for the Northwest. Diego Rivera’s gigantic fresco cycle, “Detroit Industries” (1932–33), made a big impression on me. I was exposed to a lot of pictures through books as well. A favorite was a book on the Blaue Reiter that included Alexej Jawlensky’s painting, “Portrait of the Dancer Aleksandr Sakharov” (1909), which I thought of as “my painting.” It is intensely colored, filled with feeling, and the dancer looks very demonic and androgynous.

I wasn’t interested only in visual art; I was also involved in various kinds of dance throughout my childhood. I ended up getting a full scholarship to Bennington College to study modern dance. Because I lived in remote places, I was a bit of an autodidact and had done a lot of research on Martha Graham and the history of modern dance. She taught at Bennington; that was where all her ideas came to fruition.

I had to quit after a year because I was in a serious car accident, and wasn’t able to dance for a while. So making pictures and visual art turned out to be what I did. I studied at Pratt. When I finished school I had that horrible year that most art students have after they graduate, where they wonder, “Can I really do this? Do I want to do this? Nobody is telling me to make a painting anymore.” I’d had a couple of teachers at Pratt who noticed my budding feminism and helped me get an internship at Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. It was the first time I was around artists who were also activists, and it was exciting.

JS: Yes, you became involved with agitprop work and co-founded Dyke Action Machine! Can you tell me about that work?

CM: The late 1980s and early 1990s were when the AIDS crisis was coming into public consciousness, and it sparked queer activism. Suddenly what was happening out in the world and on the street felt more urgent than what could happen in the privacy of the studio. I come from a lower-middle-class family and, after Pratt, I struggled with questions like “What is art going to do in the world? How is it going to help someone or change something?” Painting felt irrelevant to me in that moment; I considered whether it was an elitist occupation.

Dyke Action Machine!, “Lesbian Americans: Don’t Sell Out” (1998), 4/C offset poster, 24 x 36 inches, 5,000-piece campaign wheat pasted in New York City, June 1998

I began working in advertising agencies as a graphic designer and gave up my studio. All my “art” energy got channeled into queer civil-rights activism. Dyke Action Machine!, the public art collaboration I started with photographer Sue Schaffner in 1991, was an offshoot of Queer Nation. We were interested in the work of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and other forms of conceptual art that played with language and public address.

Many of our activist friends worked in the advertising business and used their skills to make graphics about the AIDS epidemic. Gran Fury, and the group that came up with the “SILENCE = DEATH” logo were huge inspirations.   Sue and I wanted make posters that took on the double invisibility lesbians faced in both the straight and gay worlds. At the time, queer activism also focused on making gay people more visible to the public at large — “outing” celebrities was a tactic for a while. Dyke Action Machine! did its part by creating poster campaigns that were wheat-pasted throughout the city from 1991 to 2004.

JS: Eventually you got back to painting. Did your graphic work affect your painting?

CM: Yes, when I returned to painting I was thinking as an agitprop maker. The romance of painting still felt very suspect. I was thinking about the history of 20th-century political graphics, from Constructivism to Atelier Populaire, the group that created the posters during the May 1968 protests in Paris. I wanted to set up a dialogue between historically loaded images of Lenin or Mao and painterly gestures. In retrospect, the paintings presented a struggle between intuition and a set of signs. It was a way of backing into painting and feeling like it had validity or agency.

That didactic approach — hard-edged, opaque shapes coexisting with instances of pouring — was part of my work for a long time. It was almost like a cliché about how the two sides of your brain work: left side/right side, or mind/body. It set up a false dichotomy that has morphed over the years. Now I think of them all as gestures that act on each other, rather than an either/or.

arrie Moyer, “Cloud 9” (2016), acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72 x 60 inches (click to enlarge)

JS: Your discussion of the graphic shapes reminds me that you use collages as a preparatory stage in your process. How and why did you start using collage this way?

CM: In the early 2000s I started using small collages as a starting point for the paintings. At one point the collages were only black-and-white, and then I started to use Color-Aid paper. I sit around and basically draw with a blade, building up a pile shapes that I put together. I use collage to figure out spatial relationships and composition. The color just operates as a way of separating things.

JS: You have spoken about acrylic paint being a more “lowbrow” medium. What do you mean by this?

CM: When I went to art school, we were taught using oil paint; that was “real” painting. No one used acrylic. So when I returned to painting, I wanted to use a material that didn’t have a lot of baggage attached to it. I wasn’t thinking about Helen Frankenthaler or anything. I was just thinking — this is not going to be reminding me of history every time I make a mark. Also, it has a universe of associations outside of itself.

In the book Chromophobia (1997), David Batchelor discusses how oil paint is made to do one thing only and that is to make oil paintings. On the other hand, acrylic or plastic is part of everything. It’s part of furniture, phones, make-up, everything — it’s a really different thing. It’s populist and commercial. It’s plastic paint, and it can be dazzling!

I was thinking about how the issue of taste operates in modernist art. Younger artists might look at Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1974–79) and think, “That is so cool.” But people from my generation get a stomachache when they go into that room at the Brooklyn Museum. For feminist artists of my generation, it’s even more complicated and challenging. The project was way ahead of its time in many ways — it pulls craft into the mix and counters every idea about taste attached to High Modernism.

Carrie Moyer, “Meat Cloud” (2001), acrylic, glitter on linen, 72 x 84 inches

In my work, there’s a playful relationship to some of the most traditional and clichéd imagery of painting, such as landscape, flowers and female figures. It sneaks in there in humorous ways. When it shows up in the work, I embrace it: yeah, those are boobs in there.

I’m also interested in breaking conditions that are supposed to go with certain kinds of painting. For example, a flat, Greenbergian abstraction would never include shadows. Tacky! The space in a Hans Hofmann painting is made through color. I like to have illusionistic space and flatness in the same painting. Somehow this goes back to working as a designer in the advent of the desktop computer. In the old days, before people designed everything on a Mac, nothing had a “drop shadow.” The drop shadow is an invention of Microsoft. It is a sign for fake space.

JS: You’ve told a story about a teacher at Pratt saying that you paint holes because you are a woman. Is embracing cliché a way of reacting against those kinds of statements?

CM: People still use this terminology, this idea of what a man would paint or what a woman would paint. They say something looks feminine or masculine. Those are platitudes that exist around content or process, and it’s something I’ve played with for a long time.

I studied feminist art from the 1970s, but there weren’t many painters to look to. Painting was part of feminist discourse by virtue of its absence. It was too embedded in the patriarchal history of Western art. So how could you touch on that in painting? How does feminist content show up? Would you be coyly suggestive like Georgia O’Keeffe was?

Stieglitz turned O’Keeffe’s work into cliché about femininity as she was making it. Who knows what Georgia O’Keeffe was thinking when she made those paintings. But they are crazy sexy paintings. She used very restrained, neat little academic strokes to build up a picture. There is a funny friction between the repressed way that it is painted, and the voluptuous image created through extreme cropping.

Carrie Moyer, “Vieni Qui Bella” (2016), acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72 x 84 inches

JS: How do you think your painting relates to your activist work?

CM: I don’t claim these paintings as activist work. What is political about my painting, if we can even say that, is that it is experiential. They are abstractions based on my own history, even though they address the history of 20th-century painting, or at least certain parts of it.

I’m also positing ideas about pleasure — both pleasure for me, and pleasure for the viewer. This feels decadent right now, because it is not about the work being a commodity, it’s about the pleasurable experience of looking. Hopefully the paintings operate at degrees, meaning people who aren’t involved with the history of painting can get something out of it. I’m not interested in intellectual opacity or “enlightening” the viewer. I’m going for beauty, seduction, and play — a physical experience, an optical experience.

However, my first audience, the one I’m thinking about in the studio, is always other painters and people involved in the history of painting. What dialogue am I in with painters from the past? I think about painting in terms of the politics of who is making it, and when it gets made. For instance, isn’t it interesting that we are living in this moment when there are a lot of prominent women abstract painters? This is very unusual.

JS: Do you have any theories about why that is?

CM: For me, it’s about considering the very familiar language of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism and whether it constitutes a “male gesture.” It is about how we work around that, and reinvent it, and own it. There are all sorts of interesting inventions because of it.

Carrie Moyer, “Candy Cap” (2016), acrylic, glitter, and Flashe on canvas, 72 x 96 inches

I recently wrote an essay on Louise Fishman, who is the subject of a big retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art this spring. When she began painting in the 1950s, she was really into Franz Kline and the big, gestural Expressionist paintings that became signifiers for the male artist. For young artists, finding your “people,” intellectual role models, mentors, is about self-definition. It’s political, how you see yourself in the world. When I was in art school, mine was Elizabeth Murray.

JS: You mentioned being a dancer. Do you think dance is related in any way to your work or process?

CM: Dance is totally related to process. It is a part of what happens in the studio. The process becomes a kind of choreographed set of actions that are chemical and physical.   You start to evaluate what might happen by using a certain amount of water, by pouring at a certain height or angle.

The physicality — an idea about a joy based in the body — is what interests me. Pouring is time-based, being aware of when the surface is going to dry or close down. You could paint for a few weeks, or a few days, to set everything up for that moment. That is how these paintings go. The longer I keep working in this manner, the more I realize it is about anticipation, about creating the conditions for something to happen.

Carrie Moyer, “The Green Lantern” (2015), acrylic and glitter on canvas, 72 x 60 inches (click to enlarge)

A paradox of getting older is that I am less interested in explaining the meaning of work. When I was younger, I always used to hate it when one of my teachers, or an older artist would say, “I don’t have anything to say about that painting.” It always felt like a copout. But now the culture of the art world has swung in the other direction, in which every aspect of art needs a rationale.

Museums are striving to be hubs for the community, and with that, trying to ensure people are not intimidated by art. A solution is to offer three-paragraph wall labels about every piece. Art is being proffered as a commodity that is fun and social, but it’s no longer something that is left just to work on the viewer. And that is the most important part of what we do.

The amazing thing that happens in the studio is that you give yourself permission to invent something. You can work with something you can’t necessarily explain, and can use that space of un-knowing as a generative place. How do you make something you haven’t seen before? This takes a very long time. It feels so precarious, but also really amazing.

Right now I have more trust in the gut than the intellect. Something that people don’t often talk about is how much fun we’re having in our studios. People might wonder, “Why are you spending all your time alone, doing this?” Well, it’s because it’s really fun! Mostly, our culture treats leisure or work like this toggle switch: I am at my job or not at my job. Being in the studio is a whole other kind of engagement. There aren’t any parameters unless you create them. Your job is to batten down all your judgment so you are free to do something.

Exercise and Bone Health...

Bone weakening is a common problem associated with aging. In most people, sometime during your 30s, your bone mass will begin to gradually decline. For women, that bone loss can significantly speed up during the first 10 years after menopause.

This is the period when osteoporosis often develops, provided you're not doing anything to counteract it, that is. Those with osteoporosis are at increased risk of height loss, fractures of the hips, wrists, and vertebrae, and chronic pain.

Many are under the mistaken impression that a prescription drug combined with megadose calcium supplements is the answer to strong and healthy bones. But bisphosphonate drugs like Fosamax, Actonel, or Boniva are associated with serious side effects—including an increased risk of bone fracture!

One important strategy for maintaining healthy bones is to eat the right kind of foods. A diet full of processed foods will produce biochemical and metabolic conditions in your body that will decrease your bone density, so avoiding processed foods is definitely the first step in the right direction.

Certain nutrients, including omega-3 fat, calcium, vitamin D, K2, and magnesium, are also critical for strong bones—as is exercise, especially weight-bearing exercises and Whole Body Vibrational Training using a Power Plate.

Exercise Naturally Builds Stronger Bones

Your bones are constantly being rebuilt in a dynamic process involving the removal of old bone through osteoclasts and regeneration of new, healthy bone by osteoblasts. Load-bearing exercise works to build stronger bones by stimulating cells responsible for the synthesis and mineralization of bone (osteoblasts).

Weight-bearing exercise is actually one of the most effective remedies against osteoporosis, because as you put more tension on your muscles it puts more pressure on your bones, which then respond by continuously creating fresh, new bone.

A good weight-bearing exercise to incorporate into your routine (depending on your current level of fitness, of course) is a walking lunge, as it helps build bone density in your hips, even without any additional weights. Running and jumping are also effective, as is weight training.1 As recently discussed in the New York Times:2

"Sprinting and hopping are the most obvious and well-studied examples of high-impact exercises. In one recent study,3 women ages 25 to 50 who leaped like fleas at least 10 times in a row, twice per day for four months, significantly increased the density of their hipbones.

In another, more elaborate experiment from 2006,4 women who hopped and also lifted weights improved the density of their spines by about two percent compared to a control group, especially if the weight training targeted both the upper body and the legs. Women whose weight training focused only on the legs did not gain as much density in their spines."

The Power Plate—A Valuable Tool for Prevention and Treatment of Brittle Bones

Acceleration Training, a.k.a. Whole Body Vibrational Training (WBVT) using a Power Plate is another safe, natural way to improve bone strength and density, thereby warding off osteoporosis. Best of all, it's gentle enough even for the disabled and elderly, who may not be able to engage in exercises like leaping, hopping, sprinting, or weight lifting.

The Power Plate platform vibrates in three planes: vertical, horizontal, and sagittal, meaning front to back. (There is equipment out there that only moves in two planes but the three plane movement devices seem superior.)

These micro-accelerations force your muscles to accommodate, resulting in dramatic improvement in strength, power, flexibility, balance, tone, and leanness. Research supporting the use of WBVT for the prevention and treatment of brittle bones include but is not limited to the following:

• In one six-month long study,5 published in 2004, WBVT was found to produce a significant increase in hip area bone density in postmenopausal women, while conventional training was only able to slow the rate of deterioration.
• More recently, a 2013 study6 found that postmenopausal women who used a vibration platform for five minutes, three times a week for six months, increased their lumbar spine bone density by two percent. The control group, which did not engage in WBVT, lost about 0.5 percent of theirs in that same timeframe.

Your Bones Need More Than Just Calcium

Besides exercise, your diet can quite literally "make or break" your bones. But while conventional recommendations focus on boosting your calcium intake, there are compelling reasons to ignore such advice. Your bones are actually composed of at least a dozen different minerals, and if you focus on calcium alone, you actually run the risk ofweakening your bones and increasing your risk of osteoporosis.

There's an excellent book called The Calcium Lie, written by Dr. Robert Thompson, that explains why this is so. Interestingly, Dr. Thompson proposes that one of the best practical alternatives in terms of supplementation is to use natural, unprocessed salts, such as Himalayan salt, as they are one of the best sources of a very wide variety of trace minerals.

Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue has also authored a comprehensive book on the topic of calcium, titled: Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox: How a Little Known Vitamin Could Save Your Life. Six of the most important nutrients, and their ratios, you'll want to pay particular attention to are:

Calcium	Vitamin D	Vitamin K2
Magnesium	Sodium	Potassium

In a nutshell, calcium, vitamin D, vitamin K2, and magnesium work synergistically together to promote strong, healthy bones, and your sodium to potassium ratio also plays an important role in maintaining your bone mass. Getting sufficient amounts of omega-3 fat is yet another factor for building healthy bone. I recommend krill oil, as I believe it's a superior source of omega-3s.

Vitamin K2 is a particularly critical component here, because the biological role of vitamin K2 is to help move calcium into the proper areas in your body, such as your bones and teeth. It also helps remove calcium from areas where it shouldn't be, such as in your arteries and soft tissues.

Paying attention to your vitamin K2 intake becomes even more important if you're taking large doses of oral vitamin D3, as your body will create more vitamin K2-dependent proteins when you take vitamin D. These K2-dependent proteins are what helps move the calcium around in your body, but you need vitamin K2 to activate those proteins. If they're not activated, the calcium in your body will not be properly distributed and can lead to weaker bones and hardened arteries—the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve.

So, it's important to maintain the proper balance between all of these nutrients: calcium, vitamin D, and K2, andmagnesium. Vitamin K2 deficiency is actually what produces the symptoms of vitamin D toxicity, which includes inappropriate calcification that can lead to hardening of your arteries. And if you have too much calcium and not enough magnesium, your muscles will tend to go into spasm. This has consequences for your heart in particular. An appropriate ratio of calcium to magnesium is thought to be 1:1.

Eat Your Way to Strong, Healthy Bones

Lack of balance between these four nutrients (calcium, vitamins D and K2, and magnesium) is why calcium supplements have become associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke. One of the best ways to ensure you're getting enough of all of them is to get regular sun exposure to optimize your vitamin D levels, and to eat a diet rich in fresh, raw whole foods, which will also maximize a wide variety of other natural minerals. This way, your body will have the raw materials it needs to do what it was designed to do. Below are some suggestions for foods that provide these bone-building nutrients (with the exception of vitamin D):

• Calcium: raw milk from pasture-raised cows, leafy green vegetables, the pith of citrus fruits, carob, and sesame seeds. Homemade bone broth is another excellent source. Simply simmer leftover bones over low heat for an entire day to extract the calcium from the bones. Make sure to add a few tablespoons of vinegar. You can use this broth for soups, stews, or drink it straight. The "skin" that forms on the top is the best part as it also contains other valuable nutrients, such as sulfur, along with healthful fats.
• Magnesium: Industrial agriculture has massively depleted most soils of beneficial minerals like magnesium, so this is one instance where a supplement may be warranted, especially since most people are deficient. It is the only mineral that I personally supplement with. That said, if you find biologically-grown organic foods (grown on soil treated with mineral fertilizers), you may still be able to get a lot of your magnesium from your food.
Chlorophyll has a magnesium atom in its center, allowing the plant to utilize the energy from the sun. Seaweed and green leafy vegetables like spinach and Swiss chard can be excellent sources of magnesium, as are some beans, nuts, and seeds, like pumpkin, sunflower, and sesame seeds, and raw organic cacao. Avocados also contain magnesium. If you opt for a supplement, I recommend using magnesium threonate. It's a newer type of magnesium supplement with superior ability to penetrate the mitochondrial membrane.
• Vitamin K2: Grass-fed organic animal products (i.e. eggs, butter, and dairy), goose liver pâté, certain cheeses such as Brie and Gouda (which provide about 75 mcg of K2 per ounce), and certain fermented foods. You can obtain most or all the K2 you'll need (about 200 micrograms) by eating 15 grams of natto daily, which is half an ounce. If you don't like natto, you can also get plenty of vitamin K2 from your fermented vegetables, provided you ferment your own using the proper starter culture. Please note that while vitamin K2 is produced by bacteria, not every strain of bacteria makes K2. For example, certain types of cheeses, such as those mentioned above, are very high in K2, and others are not. It really depends on the specific bacteria.
• Trace minerals: Himalayan Crystal Salt, which contains all 84 elements found in your body, or other natural, unprocessed salt (NOT regular table salt!).

Mind Your Sodium-Potassium Levels as Well

Two additional nutrients that play an important role are sodium and potassium—you want the optimal ratio between these two in order to maintain your bone mass. If you eat a diet loaded with processed foods, there's a good chance your potassium to sodium ratio is far from optimal, as processed foods are notoriously low in potassium while being high in sodium. Consider this: our ancient ancestors got about 11,000 mg of potassium a day, and about 700 mg of sodium.7 This equates to a potassium-over-sodium factor of nearly 16. Compare that to today's modern diet where daily potassium consumption averages about 2,500 mg (the RDA is 4,700 mg/day), along with 4,000 mg of sodium.

An imbalanced sodium to potassium ratio can contribute to a number of diseases, including osteoporosis. To ensure you get these two important nutrients in more appropriate ratios, simply replace processed foods with whole, unprocessed foods, ideally organically grown to ensure optimal nutrient content. This type of diet will naturally provide much larger amounts of potassium in relation to sodium, which is optimal for your bone health, and your overall health. If you find it difficult to eat the recommended amount of vegetables, give vegetable juicing a try. I would not recommend taking a potassium supplement; rather it is best to get it in your foods, primarily vegetables.

You CAN Strengthen Your Bones Safely and Naturally

Maintaining strong healthy bones really is within your power. Brittle bones aren't necessarily a fate that has to befall you just because you're getting older. Proper diet, regular sun exposure, and weight bearing exercise can both prevent and treat weakening bones. Whole Body Vibrational Training using a Power Plate is an excellent choice especially for the elderly, but will naturally work for all ages. To sum up some of the most important points discussed above, the following guidelines can help you maintain, or increase your bone strength safely and naturally, without the use of drugs that might cause you even further harm:

• Avoid processed foods and soda, which can increase bone damage by depleting your bones of calcium. By ditching processed foods, you're also automatically eliminating a major source of refined sugars and processed fructose, which drive insulin resistance. It will also provide you with a more appropriate potassium to sodium ratio, which is important for maintaining bone mass.
• Increase your consumption of raw, fresh vegetables, ideally organic. If you find it difficult to eat the recommended amount of vegetables you need daily, you can try vegetable juicing.
• Optimize your vitamin D levels, ideally from appropriate sun exposure or a vitamin D3 supplement. Vitamin D builds your bone density by helping your body absorb calcium. If you use an oral supplement, make sure you're using vitamin D3 (not D2), and that you're also increasing your vitamin K2 intake.
• Consider making your own fermented vegetables using a special vitamin K2-producing starter culture, or supplementing with vitamin K2 if you're not getting enough from food alone. Vitamin K2 serves as the biological "glue" that helps plug the calcium into your bone matrix. Also remember to balance your calcium and magnesium (1:1 ratio).
• Maintain a healthy balance between omega-6 and omega-3 fats in your diet by taking a high-quality animal-based omega-3 supplement like krill oil, an reducing your consumption of processed omega-6, found in processed foods and vegetable oils.
• Get regular exercise. Ideally, your fitness program should be comprehensive, providing the necessary weight-bearing activities for bone health while also improving your cardiovascular fitness and fat-burning capabilities with high-intensity exercises. For a more complete, in-depth explanation of my Peak Fitness regimen, please review my previous article, "The Major Exercise Mistake I Made for Over 30 Years." Implementing Peak Fitness-- with its array of weight-bearing exercises for bone health and Peak Exercises for disease prevention, fat loss, and more -- may be one of the best lifestyle changes you could ever make.