The problem is that with all of these specialized techniques to learn and master, many potentially great bloggers end up getting discouraged with their results and giving up before they even have a chance to get started! The majority of new bloggers are being taught all of these different things but end up missing the most important part of being a good blogger — providing valuable content.

Providing your readers with something that they find valuable is the most important traffic building technique that there is, was, and ever has been.

What is value?

What constitutes ‘value’ will vary depending on who you ask, but for simplicity sake let’s say that ‘creating valuable content’ means giving your visitors something that helps them or is useful to them in some way. Depending on your field this could mean a lot of different things, but no matter what your niche is, this definition of ‘creating valuable content’ still applies.

This idea is often lost, especially with new bloggers who are getting into it to make money, lured by the classic internet marketing promises of instant fame and fortune online. The internet marketing and ‘make money online’ niche is especially bad for this. People get this idea in their head that they can make a ton of money online (which is true), but they forget that in order to get the traffic, trust, and respect that is needed to make it online you have to provide something of value.

If you don’t provide your viewers with something that they can use, find helpful, or learn from, you’re not going to get anything in return. If you don’t provide any value, why would anyone recommend you to their friends? Why would anyone want to share your link on their facebook or twitter feed if they didn’t find your post or website useful? They won’t.

Valuable content trumps SEO, link building, social networking, and all the rest

Creating valuable content is a far more powerful blogging technique than SEO, link building, social networking, email marketing, and all the other widely promoted blogging tactics — combined.

Yes, it’s true. If you write exceptionally good blog posts that are full of value to your readers they will do all the link building, social networking, and email marketing for you. You won’t have to worry about building links when hundreds of people are already sharing your content on their blogs and websites because they found it so valuable that they just had to share it.

When people find something really helpful or valuable, they naturally want to share it with everyone they know! This makes your job as a blogger so much easier when you don’t have to crawl the internet searching for opportunities to drop links on other websites and forums because you’ve already got hundreds of minions out there doing it for you.

The same goes for social networking, email marketing and all of the other methods taught to internet marketing noobs — valuable content will drive other people to do the grunt work of sharing and spreading your pages for you, so you can focus on creating even better content for your next post instead of spending all that time building links. So, creating valuable content actually makes it easier for you to make even more valuable content — it’s like a great cycle of valuable content creation!

How to create valuable content

So how do you create valuable content on your blog? I want to answer this question in a way that will apply to all bloggers, no matter what their blog is about. To do this, I’m going to take it to the roots of blogging itself and why it has become so popular in the first place.

People read blogs because they want assistance in solving their problems or doing things they don’t have much experience with. So, essentially they go to blogs to learn stuff. Your job as a blogger is to teach them that stuff, if you don’t know the stuff any better than they do, you probably won’t be able to teach them much.

To be able to teach people stuff, you have to know more about it, or have a better understanding, or a different perspective than they do. It requires knowledge and intelligence. So, to create valuable content you’re going to have to know something about whatever you’re writing about. This is what made blogs so popular in the first place, because people who know stuff could share it with people who don’t know that stuff. What a great idea! — Until a bajillion people flooded the internet trying to make money by writing about things they don’t know anything about with the sole aim of making money, getting clicks, making sales, collecting email addresses, etc.

So if you’re going to be a successful blogger you have to create valuable content, and to create valuable content you have to be able to help someone do something or teach them something useful, and to do that you have to know more about that particular subject than they do, or at least offer a different perspective. What this means is that to create truly valuable content you’ll have to be blogging about something that you’re good at, not just something you want to make money writing about.

Post frequency

As long as your posts are valuable, your post frequency doesn’t matter much. It’s far better to have one really great post that thousands of people shared with their friends and will remember for years every time the subject comes up than it is to have 100 posts that nobody cares about.

Think about it. Remember your top 10 blog articles that you’ve ever read — your 10 favorites. Did you care how many posts they wrote that week? No, you probably just appreciated the post because it was highly valuable to you in some way. Maybe it helped you shed some emotional baggage you were carrying around with you, or maybe it gave you this great idea to tweak your blog and you got a 40% traffic increase just by doing one thing you learned in that post. It doesn’t matter how many posts that author made that week, it was the value contained in the post that made you remember it, go back to it, and share it with your friends.

Timeless content

You want to write content that will keep people coming back for years and years, not content they will read and then forget about it later that week and never return to your site. To create content like that, it has to be timeless. If  you want to keep people coming back to your articles and sending you referrals for years into the future, your content will have to not be bound by time. Try writing about things that will still be useful in the future, or even better, write about things that will be more popular in the future than they are in the present.

The most useful articles cover all aspects of whatever the topic is. They contain all the related information right there in the post, not scattered all over in posts that have been limited to 500 words. This might mean that your articles tend to get a bit longer and they may take more time to write — so what. If it means that article will keep bringing you constant traffic for years into the future isn’t it worth it to put a little more effort into making sure your article is the best it can be and the most useful, too? Of course it is! All of my most popular articles have been well over 1500 words, some of them reaching 5 or 6 thousand words — the only complaints I got went something like this “Hey, really good article but it’s too long! I bookmarked it and I’ll read the rest later.” A complaint like that means that it’s working, you want people to bookmark your pages and come back later! That’s a good thing!

Breaking your article up with subheadings, like I did in this article, will make a long article easier to read and it looks better on your page. It also helps people skim your article for the information they are looking for — increasing the chance that they will find the value in your page that they are looking for.

Conclusion

By constantly creating highly valuable content on your blog you will increase your traffic in the long run over and over again. You will not have to spend nearly as much time doing the boring side of blogging. Things like link building, social networking, SEO, collecting emails, and all the rest will largely be taken care of by all the visitors your great content attracts. This doesn’t mean you can just ignore SEO or link building, but having great content to back you up will lighten your load substantially.

I started a 30 day trial of the Lose The Back Pain system from the Healthy Back Institute on June 24th of this year — that’s over 30 days ago, so one might assume that the 30 day trial is now over… but it isn’t.

I had to abort my 30 day trial of the Lose The Back Pain System a couple weeks ago when my grandfather passed away and I had family from out of town staying in the spare room, which happens to be the only place that I have enough room to do the stretches and exercises required by the program.

I was able to start doing the exercises and stretches again starting last night, but I will soon be interrupted again when I go to the Shambhala Music Festival in a little over a week. I will continue doing the stretches until that time, and if possible, I will continue doing whatever stretches and exercises I can while at the festival, but I doubt I will get around to doing much for stretching once I’m actually at the festival.

Completing the 30 day trial isn’t absolutely necessary though, because I plan to continue using the system until it works, even if it takes 6 months, or a year.

The first 2 weeks of ‘Lose The Back Pain’

During the first two weeks that I did the Lose The Back Pain corrective exercises, I had fairly positive results over all. Most of those days went by with less pain than normal, and my back would only get sore after doing something to set it off — something like carrying heavy objects, lifting things, pushing heavy objects, bending over for extended periods of time, or sitting on bad chairs/couches. For the most part the pain was minimal until something aggravated it.

Almost every day I would still have a pretty sore back by the end of the day, especially after 12 hour shifts at work, but the pain was less intense and didn’t last as long as before I had started doing the exercises.

There were a couple of days where the pain was stronger than usual, though. I’m not sure exactly why, but there were 2 days that I can remember specifically that I thought I felt worse than I did before starting the exercises. On those days I went a bit easier when doing the corrective stretches and exercises for that day. It seemed to help, because the next day would be much better.

Stopping the corrective exercises

As I mentioned above, my grandfather passed away and I had some family from out of town come to stay in the spare bedroom that I do my stretches in. This caused me to stop doing the corrective exercises for a while.

At first it didn’t seem to make much of a difference, my back felt about the same as usual, but this last week has been horrific. The last 5 days have been some of the worst days for back pain that I can remember in the whole 5 years I have been struggling with it. The first of the last 5 days was a 12 hour shift at work doing some pretty heavy lifting all night long for 12 hours — by the end of the shift my back hurt quite a bit, but I expected that since I had been doing so much work.

The next day I woke up and I was quite stiff and my back was sore. I don’t usually wake up with too much back pain, it usually gets worse as the day goes on and is worst at the end of the day. I knew I was off to a bad start for that day, but I went in to work anyway and worked my shift. The entire day I was really sore, I had lots of sciatic pain and also general lower back pain/ache.

I had the next 2 days off, those two days were not as bad as the first two, but they were also quite painful. I did very little to aggravate it during these two days, because I knew how sore it had been during the previous two and I didn’t want to have to repeat it.

Yesterday I had to work again and it was one of the most painful days I’ve had in a long time. I was incredibly sore after work. I am now able to do the corrective exercises again, because the guests have now gone home, so I did them lightly last night. Surprisingly, doing the stretches didn’t seem to make it hurt any more at all, it actually hurt less to do the stretches last night than it did when I first started doing them back in June! My back was still very sore, but doing the stretches didn’t seem to aggravate it at all. I found that really weird — I was expecting that doing the stretches would be extremely painful.

When I went to bed, my back was really sore and when I woke up this morning it was still really sore. The last 2 days have not been the usual sciatic type of pain though, it’s been more of an ache in my lower back and right leg and not the tingly and ‘pinching’ feeling that I usually get. Maybe that’s why it seems to hurt more than usual, because it hurts in a different way than I’ve gotten used to.

When I got up to go to work this morning, I took 600mg of Ibuprofen, which I don’t normally do. I almost always avoid pharmaceuticals, especially stuff like Ibuprofen and Tylenol. They’re unhealthy and they don’t usually do very much for me, but I was in pretty bad pain so I decided to give them a try. By noon today I was too sore to stay for the rest of the shift — I told my supervisor I had to go see a chiropractor or someone to help with the pain, and I clocked out early.

Making appointments

On my way out of work one of my co-workers recommended a good massage therapist to me. I’ve only been to a massage therapist once, and it wasn’t that great of an experience, but the therapist I saw actually shared an office with the chiropractor I was seeing at the time who was also not very good.

Because of my experience with that particular chiropractor I said I would never go to another chiropractor again because I’m sure he actually made my back weaker instead of helping to fix the problems.

The massage therapist that my coworker recommended sounds pretty good so I went ahead and booked a 90 minute session with her for this coming Friday, I’m looking forward to that for sure!

I also was going to try and see a chiropractor today for a quick fix of the pain, but I was unable to find one that had any open bookings for today. I did come across something kind of synchronistic while looking for a new chiropractor though — over the last few days I’ve been looking into Qigong (chi kung, chi gong), and I found an 8 week course coming up in September that I am planning to register for. It’s being taught by a Dr. Orchard. While looking through the chiropractor section of the phone book I found ‘Dr. Orchard’s Holistic Health and Chiropractic’. When I looked at the address I recognized it as a clinic that had been recommended to me several years ago when I first injured my back and was seeing the ‘not so good’ chiropractor.

I did a little internet searching and found out that the Dr. Orchard that teaches Qigong and the Dr. Orchard who owns the clinic are the same guy. I decided that since I can’t get in anywhere to see a chiropractor today, I might as well go see Dr. Orchard whenever I can get in. I made a first time appointment with Dr. Orchard in August after I get back from the Shambhala Music Festival. Yeah, it’s a ways away still but I think the synchronicity was there to point me in the right direction, so I’m looking forward to meeting Dr. Orchard and seeing what he can do for me. It will also give me a bit of a chance to ask him a few things about his upcoming Qigong classes.

Proteolytic Enzymes

I also decided to take up the Healthy Back Institute on their offer of a free bottle of Heal-n-Soothe proteolytic enzyme formula for pain relief. I’ve read a lot of good things about enzyme treatments for pain and inflammation and since I’ve been in so much pain over the last few days, I decided it’s time to give Heal-n-Soothe a try.

I also was convinced to add a Freedom Back to my order, the freedom back is a ‘back orthodic’ that helps you keep a good posture when sitting in any chair. It was $49, so I thought I’d give it a try… what the hell, why not?

I’m really looking forward to the package arriving so I can start taking the enzyme formula, I think it will help me a lot more than the Ibuprofen I took today, that’s for sure!

I also stopped in at the health food store today to see if they had anything other than MSM and glucosomine to offer me for pain relief. As soon as I walked in there was a big stand of some ‘natural’ pain relief mixture. It’s called ‘Curamin’ and it was on sale for $35 a bottle. When I checked the ingredients list I right away put the bottle back on the shelf when I read that the first ingredient was “DLPA (dl Phenylalanine)” . Phenylalanine is pretty bad stuff and it’s what makes the artificial sweetener aspartame so bad for you. The other ingredients are Boswellia Extract, Curcumin Extract, and Nattokinase.

I ended up buying a bottle of Curamin, despite the fact that it has phenylalanine in it. I figured that I’m not going to be taking it regularly and that if it helped beat the pain even just for today that it was probably worth the $35, so I bought it. I took one capsule so far — I can’t tell if it did anything or not because I also took MSM, Ibuprofen, and a magnesium supplement today.

The girl at the health store recommended that I try a magnesium/malic acid solution that they sold. She said that a lot of people use it to help with nerve and muscle pain, so I bought a bottle of that while I was there as well. I sure hope that at least one of these things works! I don’t want to be in pain anymore!

Continuing the Lose The Back Pain system

As soon as I am finished writing this post, I am going to do the corrective exercises again and hope that tomorrow I feel better than I do today. I will be taking the magnesium solution as well as MSM each day, and when the Heal-n-Soothe arrives I will start taking that as recommended. I will try not to take too much of the Curamin stuff because I don’t like ingesting phenylalanine, but if it hurts as much as it did today I will probably try taking more of that. The bottle does say ‘Stop Pain Now! – Guaranteed. Experience relief like never before”.

I will continue to do the Lose The Back Pain corrective stretches and exercises and use the Nubax Trio for spinal decompression whenever I can. I’ll do periodic progress reports as I go, and if I come across any miracle cures or new discoveries I’ll be sure to write about them.

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For more information on the Lose The Back Pain system, the Freedom Back, or Heal-n-Soothe, you can visit the healthy back institute which is where I got those three products. The Healthy Back Institute is the overall best back pain and sciatica information resource that I’ve found to date. Click here to visit the Healthy Back Institute.

Hate-mail

Writing about controversial topics will inevitably get you some hate-mail and negative comments, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The hate-mailers and negative commentators actually attract more exposure for your blog posts by encouraging discussion between other commentators who will often message their friends and invite them to join in on the heated debate that is your comment thread.

Dealing with hate-mail is easy. Delete it.

If you feel like reading some of the hate mail you receive, do so with a sense of humor and don’t take anything too personally. Getting upset about hate-mail is a waste of time and gets you thinking negatively. Don’t fall for it! It’s a distraction from what you should really be focusing on.

Don’t get caught up in flame wars in your comment threads or on forums. Flame wars are never a good way to spend your time, they will rarely change anybody’s mind about anything, and they will only eventually lead to you looking stupid for being involved in such a silly internet bickering match. Spend your time writing good articles and doing research, not combatting tards.

No matter how controversial a stance you take, there will always be people who agree with you, too. It’s these people who are important to you as a blogger, they might become loyal fans or subscribers because they feel that what you said in your article was in line with their views on the subject, they may even be very pleased to have found someone who shares a similar point of view. These people will also carry on your flame wars and comment threads for you, so you can focus on producing another awesome article instead of engaging in pointless bickering.

Controversy encourages discussion

Encouraging discussion on your blog is important, and replying to comments and emails is a great way to build a relationship with your readers, but when the comments turn into arguments and flame wars it’s always best to steer clear. Taking part in flame wars is potentially risky business because it could lead to you wasting a ton of time on pointless tasks like replying to trolls, or worse, the trolls could make you look foolish on your own website! You don’t want that, now do you? So my advice is to steer clear of internet flame wars all together, even on your own website.

That said, getting other people to comment and/or talk about your posts on other websites and blogs is one of the best strategies for a blogger trying to attract a loyal readership and lots of traffic. Writing about things that people tend to have strong opinions about is a good way to get the discussion going, but it’s not all butterflies and rainbows.

To take on controversial topics you have to be willing to face people who are strongly opposed to your views, and you have to be prepared to lose some friends once in a while, too. But you’ll also gain a ton of new friends by writing about controversial topics, so I guess it kind of balances out in a way.

It’s kind of fun to watch my facebook and twitter friends lists go up and down each day, depending on what I’ve been posting about, but the effects of controversial blog posts extend beyond the confines of the interweb, too. I have had many real life friends get upset about things I’ve written about on my websites over the years, and I’ve even lost a few of them permanently because of things I’ve said or done online. This is something that new bloggers should be prepared for, and something that experienced bloggers are all too familiar with.

The alternative path

The mainstream lifestyle has always seemed weird to me, I intuitively knew something wasn’t right from a very young age. I’ve always been interested in ‘alternative’ type information and subjects.

On my journey I seem to have been discovering one piece of the puzzle after another, and the ‘alternative path’ makes more and more sense as each piece of the puzzle is fitted in with the rest — in the beginning the individual pieces don’t always make a whole lot of sense, but eventually everything comes together and a bigger picture can be seen.

Because I’ve gone into so many ‘controversial’ areas of information so far in my life I am fairly used to having people disagree with me — sometimes violently. Last summer I was kicked by a random girl at a party for talking about reptilians – haha. But, if you want to blog about controversial issues, you’re going to have to be ready for that kind of opposition from time to time.

Once you start realizing some of the ‘alternative path’ puzzle pieces, you begin to see that the world has been set up intentionally to lead us astray. And it’s been constructed in such a way that it does a very good job at keeping people from the truth. I’m not saying I know the truth, but I’m certainly much closer to it than most. For most people, many of these truths are so far off from what they have been told to believe, that they simply deny them and label it ‘crazy conspiracy theory’ or something similar.

On the surface many of these alternative topics may seem like crazy conspiracy theories, but that’s only because the rest of the puzzle pieces haven’t yet been fitted together to allow the bigger picture to be seen, only then will the puzzle make any sense to the casual observer.

When I was young I was always interested in things like UFOs and ghosts. I’d read tons of books on paranormal things, and liked to think about things that were ‘outside’ of the boring old every day reality. In high school I became interested in less common religious philosophies like the pagan and wiccan religious beliefs, but I soon realized that they were just older versions of the same mind-prison religions of today’s main-stream, and so I basically rejected those as well, opting for my own ever changing belief system as opposed to any organized or ‘official’ religion.

I also became interested in cannabis, and started to realize the amazing potential of the great healing herb. As I learned more and more about cannabis, I started to wonder why it was kept illegal when it was so good. I began to notice that there was a ‘force’ keeping it illegal not because it was bad or dangerous, but because it could bring down the giant pharmaceutical, medical, plastic, pulp & paper, and oil industries all by itself. One single plant could tear down the worlds most corrupted and evil institutions! That’s why it’s been kept illegal!

I started to realize that there was some sort of ‘conspiracy’ if you will, to keep people from waking up to the truth about cannabis, and so I started looking deeper into the who and why of the ‘conspiracy’. I became interested in alternative health topics because they made more sense and are more trustworthy than the ‘science’ behind big pharma and their pill pushing ‘doctors’, many of whom, for the amount of time they spent in school, know virtually nothing about health at all!

I started to adopt a more natural lifestyle which continues to this day. I’m constantly making changes and tweaks to my lifestyle that bring me into better alignment with truth, love, and power. This brings with it far more health and happiness than I’ve ever experienced in the past, and it’s all because of my ‘alternative’ life choices and beliefs.

On my journey I have researched many areas that most people would consider to be controversial, this is why it’s so easy for me to write blog posts that touch on controversial topics without even realizing that what I’m writing about is controversial to begin with! Sometimes I am surprised at the comments I get from people who just can’t seem to understand where I have come up with such a crazy idea when the post is about something that I feel is (or should be) common knowledge and not controversial in the least. I guess I’ve just been so absorbed in my own reality that it seems normal to me, but yet it seems so far from reality to those who subscribe to the mainstream view of things.

This makes it easy for me to create controversy with my blog posts. You will notice a lot more controversy on this website as we move forward, I have tons of stuff I want to write about but have been ‘holding off’ for what feels like the right time to touch on some of the subjects.

If you become a regular reader of my blog, be prepared to read things that you will not agree with, things that will be at odds with your belief system and things that will make you think ‘outside of the box’. In truth, a lot of the times you won’t be ‘outside of the box’ but just in a newer, slightly bigger box from which you will eventually escape — just to find yourself in yet another bigger box. This seems to be the general pattern I have noticed, but eventually we’ll get out of all these boxes and be able to see the bigger picture as a whole — no more boxes to climb out of.

Ultimately, that is my goal with this website. To help people become more conscious and to start thinking outside of their boxes. It’s a long process, but it’s one that must be completed for the betterment of all humanity.

Please now take the time to subscribe to my newsletter so that you can stay up to date on all of my articles. The newsletter comes out every 2 weeks or so and includes new thoughts and articles that I haven’t posted on the website (exclusive subscribers only content), and a list of all of the posts I’ve made since the last issue of the newsletter. It’s a great way to stay up to date and ensure you don’t miss any of my ‘controversial’ posts.

Have a great day!

You can witness the controversy here for yourself:
My Facebook Profile
Why not add me to twitter while you’re at it?

Since the status caused such a reaction without much prodding on my part (other than setting my status I didn’t do much to provoke the reaction), I decided that it called for an entire blog post about the risks versus the benefits of sun exposure, since it seems so many people have fallen for the ‘anti-exposure’ propaganda.

The truth about sun exposure that most people suffer deficiencies and simply spending more time in the sun with exposed skin will greatly reduce the chance of many different diseases, including cancer.

‘WHAT!??
But the sun CAUSES cancer! Don’t you listen to the scientists and the doctors!?
What about Melanoma!? The sun causes that, doesn’t it?’

Don’t be stupid

The sun is required for all life on this planet as far as we can tell. Pretty much all of our energy comes from the sun, when you follow the energy trail back to it’s origin — plants basically take the suns energy and turn it into trees through many complex processes, they form branches, leaves, and flowers, pretty much ‘out of thin air’, so to speak.

Even the worlds oil addiction is really fueled by the sun. Crude oil was made over millions of years by tiny plants and animals called plankton, so even oil comes from the sun.

Without the sun, we would not exist here on planet earth. The sun is the giver of life, not the great cancer that we are told it is by the media and the companies that want to sell sun-block, tanning solutions, medications,  and other ‘sun protection’ products.

Melanoma

According to the world’s most trusted natural health expert, Dr. Mercola, there is little to no evidence that the sun causes melanoma without sunburn. Put quite simply, if you avoid getting sunburns you don’t have to worry about melanoma.

Click here to read Dr. Mercola’s report on the benefits of sun exposure.

Our bodies let us know when we should get out of the sun. If you’re in the sun for too long you begin to feel sick and you start to overheat. Your skin starts to burn if it’s overexposed to the UV rays that the sun puts out. When you reach the point of feeling sick, overheating, or getting a sunburn, it’s obviously time to cover up or get out of the sun.

If you don’t listen to your body when it tells you to get out of the sun, then yes, you might end up with heat stroke or melanoma, but that’s not the sun’s fault — it’s your fault for not listening to your body!

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin, it’s a hormone that is created in the body when the skin is exposed to direct sunlight, and it plays a critical role in maintaining vibrant health.

Vitamin D plays an important role in so many instances that it’s probably the single most important ‘health hack’ that can make the biggest improvement in the way you feel.

Here is only a brief list of things that Vitamin D is known to protect against:

• many types of cancer
• depression
• arthritis
• multiple sclerosis
• every single auto immune disease
• all forms of the flu
• asthma
• crohn’s disease
• diabetes
• inflammation
• hypertension
• heart disease
• schizophrenia
• myopathy
• rickets
• psoriasis
• osteoperosis
• bacterial infection
• and many more…

Due to the astonishing number of benefits, Vitamin D is the most bang for your buck when it comes to nutrients and it’s absolutely critical that you get enough Vitamin D if you want to be super-healthy and have a strong immune system.

For in depth details on how optimizing your Vitamin D will drastically improve your health, check out the massive amount of information available at Dr. Mercola’s website. He is such a big advocate of Vitamin D optimization that he has dedicated an entire website to it, click here to check out Dr. Mercola’s Vitamin D website.

How much sun?

Although the world is slowly starting to realize the importance of Vitamin D, most people are actually experiencing a Vitamin D deficiency.

Most white skinned people require about 10-20 minutes of direct sunlight per day, and not just on the face and arms either. As much of the body as possible should be in direct sunlight for that 10-20 minutes. The skin should never be allowed to burn, though. Once the skin turns the lightest shade of pink it has produced as much Vitamin D as possible for that day, and it should then be covered. Dark pigmented skin takes 3-6 times longer to produce the maximum amount of Vitamin D.

It’s interesting to note that the more antioxidants you have in your body, the more you are protected from sunburns, so make sure you are getting lots of antioxidants in your diet so that you can produce enough Vitamin D without getting sunburns! If you have ‘sensitive skin’ you might want to start getting out in the early morning or late evening when the sun isn’t as strong, that way you can avoid sunburns.

A person should have between 50 ng/ml and 70 ng/ml of vitamin D, and the only way to know how much vitamin D is needed is to test the blood. Any doctor should be able to do a simple blood test to determine your vitamin D levels.

Vitamin D supplements

Vitamin D supplements are commonly found next to the generic multi-vitamins and other supplements at drug stores, grocery stores, and health food stores, but many of these Vitamin D supplements have little to no effect because they can’t be absorbed properly by the body.

Finding a good Vitamin D supplement means finding a supplement that has a high quality source of vitamin D3 that has been formulated for optimum absorption by the body. Once again, the best source that I have found for quality Vitamin D is Dr. Mercola. Dr. Mercola has found a quality source of Vitamin D that comes in a spritz bottle for easy administration. The sprays are 1000 IU per spritz and the Vitamin D molecule has been shrunk using nanotechnology so that it is more readily absorbed into the bloodstream.

Click here to learn more about supplementing Vitamin D.

Indoor tanning

Another option for Vitamin D is indoor tanning with the use of a safe tanning bed or UVB tanning light. I’ve never used this method for getting Vitamin D, but I am thinking of getting one of these handy indoor stand up tanning lights from … you guessed it.. Dr. Mercola.

Cancer is caused by stupidity

Before you get upset about this statement let me say that I am not saying that people who get cancer are stupid. Modern stupidity is the cause of most cancer in our world today.

Filling our bodies with chemicals and toxins is a leading cause of most cancer, and filling our bodies with chemicals and toxins is also stupid. Most people don’t know just how toxic nearly every mainstream household item is.

Here’s just a short list of things that are full of nasty chemicals that you probably have around the house:

• Processed foods
• Mattresses
• Pharmaceutical drugs & prescriptions
• Most Shampoos & Conditioners
• Many health & beauty products (creams, lotions, makeup)
• Tap water (chlorine, fluoride)
• Most deodorant & cologne
• Ink (computers, newspapers, magazines, fliers)
• Cleaning supplies
• Chemical fertilizers (used on most commercial produce)
• Cigarettes
• Pesticides & herbicides (found on non organic foods)
• Hair dye
• Oil products
• Most plastics
• Carpets, lino, paints & other building supplies
• Fluorescent light bulbs (energy efficient bulbs)

These are only a few things that are full of cancer causing chemicals. All of the above things are also ‘stupid’ and have natural alternatives, it’s just that our ‘modern’ society is so hooked on some of these products that it’s become nearly impossible to avoid some of these products.

Choosing unnatural, non organic, or GMO products when there are natural, organic, or whole food options available is stupid — and it causes cancer! (not to mention a whole bunch of other disease). So it seems stupidity causes cancer, not the sun!

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Check out Dr. Mercola’s newest book, The Total Health Breakthrough by clicking here. I bought a copy a while ago and have almost finished reading the entire eBook and all 5 reports. It’s worth all the pennies.

Well it turns out that I’ve been meaning to write some articles about Remote Viewing for a while now, and since I recently received that comment requesting an article with more info about it, it seems like a good time to write one. So here it is.

How I discovered Remote Viewing

I guess it seems logical to start this article by explaining how my journey into remote viewing got started in the first place.

Four years ago I was completely oblivious to what remote viewing was — I had never even heard of it. Then one day a good friend of mine who was in a phase of listening to Coast 2 Coast AM on a regular basis came to me and said:

“I heard about this really cool thing called Remote Viewing on C2C last night! This guy was talking about this psychic skill that was developed by the US Army Intelligence and CIA to spy on the Russians during the Cold War. He’s no longer involved with the military and is teaching this stuff full time, he says he can teach it to almost anyone. He does workshops but he also sells a set of DVDs that are supposed to be able to help you learn to do it at home. . . You’re the only other person I can think of who might actually be interested,  I was thinking that maybe we could split on the cost of the DVDs and try learning it! What do you think?”

Well of course this peaked my interest and I had to look into it a little deeper — It turns out I looked into it a lot deeper. The conversation with my friend sparked a 2 and a half year obsession with learning and trying to master the art of Remote Viewing.

My friend and I placed our order for Ed Dames’ Learn RV complete DVD set. This cost us a little over $400.00 and we waited in excitement for its arrival.

The DVD set took longer than expected to arrive, and we started getting a little worried that we had been ripped off or scammed somehow — considering the type of product we had ordered we already had some subconscious doubts about it, Ed Dames makes some pretty outrageous claims sometimes and if you do a google search of his name it can leave someone with the impression that Ed Dames is somewhat of a ‘shady’ character, to say the least.

After a couple months of waiting for the DVDs to arrive, my friend who’s credit card we used to order the set decided to call the company and see what the deal was and why the DVDs hadn’t arrived yet. From what she told me, dealing with the people on the phone was somewhat of a hassle and after ending the call she felt like we had potentially been suckered and ripped off.

Shortly after this, the DVDs arrived. We were relieved to finally get the package and to know that we hadn’t been swindled. We didn’t think that George Noory would bring thieves on to his show to rip people off. Not all of the guests on the show are believable or trustworthy but we expected that if we ordered something from a guest on Coast 2 Coast AM that we would at least get the product. We were glad to have the package arrive after waiting and worrying about it for such a long time.

This wasn’t the end of the complications when dealing with Ed Dames’ company though. When my friend received her credit card bill she noticed that she has been charged for 2 copies and not just one. After going through the trouble of phoning the company again and dealing with their customer service, she was refunded the amount for the 2nd copy on her credit card and finally we were done dealing with the complications that surrounded us getting ahold of the LearnRV DVD set.

What is Remote Viewing

Most people have no idea what remote viewing is and have never heard of it and the few people who have heard of it usually have a false idea of what it actually is and how it is done.

Remote Viewing is certainly not what most people think when you mention the word ‘psychic’. It’s actually a highly structured set of ‘protocols’ that you can learn to go through to access information in your subconscious, unconscious, or ‘universal mind’.

Remote viewers have the ability to perceive people, places, and events regardless of time or space limitations. The only tools required are a pen and some paper and a relaxed, non distracting place to conduct the session. A remote viewer simply probes his mind for basic perceptions and writes down what he or she finds on the paper. Following the protocols, a remote viewer will list colors, textures, tastes, smells, sounds, dimensions, feelings, and emotions through a structured process that must be practiced so frequently that it becomes a robotic process with no ‘thinking’ at all.

It was developed by the military, so you can imagine this is no new-agey spiritual crystal ball type stuff. When the military spends millions of dollars funding a program like the Remote Viewing program they want real measurable results. They wanted to see a step by step process that could be duplicated and trained to military type guys, not new agers and hippies.

They wanted a system that worked and produced real documented results — and that’s what they got. They brought in guys like Pat Price and Ingo Swann, some of the best known modern day ‘psychics’ to study what they would do to get their intuitions. They picked their brains and observed their methods to try to figure out just what was going on with these guys and how they could duplicate their results. This is how they eventually came to develop the remote viewing protocols that are being taught to people today.

The protocols and instructions for carrying out a remote viewing session must be installed in the brain in a way that the viewer doesn’t have to think about the process while doing it. The goal is to get to the point where you can just record the perceptions in the proper place on the page without consciously thinking about where to put each bit of info. Once a viewer has reached this level they will begin to see drastic improvements in the quality of their sessions. I know I improved significantly when I finally reached the point of unconscious competence in regards to following the RV protocols.

Obsessively studying Remote Viewing

Once I finally had copies of the LearnRV DVDs in my hands I immediately started studying and practicing everything that was covered in the videos. At first it seemed a bit confusing and very silly.

At the start of the program I just couldn’t understand how the protocols could even work and it seemed to me like it was just a clever ploy to sucker people into giving up their money to learn something that would just lead them in circles, never amounting to any real skill or improvement — then I had my first ‘hit’.

That means that I had my first taste of success with remote viewing. I had used apparently ‘psychic’ abilities to draw a picture of the unknown target that I was supposed to be ‘viewing’ in my remote viewing session.

After experiencing a successful session for myself first hand, I knew there was something to it and started obsessively studying and practicing the remote viewing protocols.

Eventually I had bought and read every book on the subject that I could find — dozens of books over several months. I also purchased several home-study courses and DVD sets, including some rare ones that are not in production anymore. I spent thousands of dollars on all of the resources that I devoured.

I also attended some live workshops hosted by Paul Elder, and they were by far the most powerful experiences I had with RV. The workshops were great and they really speed up the learning curve for newbies. There’s just something about being in a room full of like minded people and sharing experiences together. It’s almost like a ‘group mind’ is formed and everyone can use each others skill to their advantage when you’re in a group setting like a workshop.

At the workshops I was far more advanced than the rest of the attendees, but that was because I had already devoured almost all of the information available about RV and I had been practicing every day. Many times during the workshops the instructor would actually pass questions on to me instead of answering them himself, or he would ask for my advice on certain questions. The knowledge gap between me and the rest of the attendees was obvious to everyone — most of them had never learned anything about Remote Viewing before they attended the workshops.

I had consistently good sessions throughout the workshops that I attended and my success level seemed noticeably higher . Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that they were held in Masonic Lodges? I’m not sure…

For about 2 years I did daily practice sessions, sometimes I even did 2 or more sessions in a day when I was feeling motivated. Considering that a full RV session can take anywhere from 30-60 minutes, that adds up to a lot of time invested in developing the skill! I still feel that it was a worthwhile venture, and I don’t regret any of the money or time I spent on it.

My first ‘hit’

It was fairly early in my learning curve when I first experienced what it was like to have Remote Viewing work for me. I think I was somewhere in the 2nd DVD when I did the practice target pictured below.

I can honestly say I didn’t cheat and there was no ‘front-loading’ for this target. When I started doing it I had no idea what the target was, all I had was the target reference numbers ’4082-6885′. I did my session, as you can see I was still using the preformatted LearnRV practice sheets, and this was what I came up with for my site template:

I didn’t think much of it. It looked like most of the other Site Templates I had constructed on previous sessions and I didn’t really have any logical guesses or ideas about what I had drawn or what I was supposed to have ‘viewed’.

I nearly fell off my chair when I opened up the target and discovered what it was. I was actually so excited about it I woke up my sister to show her the session! I had to show someone because I hardly even believed it myself!

This is what the target was:

If that’s not a close enough match to make you wonder if there really is something to Remote Viewing, then I don’t know what is.

After this session I couldn’t help but obsess over getting similar results out of my RV sessions. It’s what inspired me to keep working at it day after day, month after month, trying to obtain the same level of accuracy. Unfortunately that session was pretty much ‘beginners luck’, and results like that were few and far between.

Obviously I continued to get results that were good enough to keep me going every day with all of the practice targets, but I never used the skill for anything ‘useful’ other than entertainment and education.

How Remote Viewing can be used

There are several ways that remote viewing can be made useful in real life situations such as locating missing children or trying to win the lottery. There are also a lot of philosophical and spiritual applications for the skill as well, the problem is always that you never know which sessions to trust and which are completely inaccurate unless you have some sort of feedback at the end of the viewings.

It’s widely admitted that even the best remote viewers only hit about 80% of the time, and that’s when they’re at their best. Most people have a much lower hit rate than that. It’s that fact that limits how remote viewing is used in ‘real life’ situations. RV is usually used in conjunction with other information sources when doing things like looking for missed children or solving crimes. To base an investigation solely on information collected with remote viewing would be a silly mistake, but to include advanced teams of remote viewers in investigations has often proved to be beneficial in the past.

There are now a lot of new people learning about remote viewing, and so many people are finding new and interesting ways to apply this cool technology. I’ve heard of people using it to analyze dreams, go to mars (I did this myself — twice!), learn philosophical secrets, win the lotto, get health tips, get promotions or new jobs, find their soul mate, and so many other things it would be impossible to list them all.

What I learned from Remote Viewing

I recommend remote viewing to people and think it was a really valuable experience for many reasons. The most valuable thing I got out of learning how to do remote viewings was the improved ability to connect with other levels of the mind and the self.

Knowing for yourself that remote viewing is real and is available to anyone dedicated enough to learn it opens your mind to all sorts of new possibilities. It makes you wonder ‘what else can I do?’ . Experiencing it for myself gave me a soothing feeling of connectedness with the universe. I felt connected to higher levels of myself, and like different parts of me were finally working together when in the past they were each trying to do their own thing.

Remote viewing is a whole brain process. The protocols keep the left brain satisfied and busy while allowing the right side of the brain, the intuitive side, to communicate information and feelings without having the left brain interfere and start making assumptions and taking guesses at what it all means. Learning to remote view feels good because it exercises the whole brain at once, not one side or the other.

I also met a lot of really interesting people by attending the workshops and meeting other remote viewers online as well, so that was also a really great part of the experience.

Where to learn more about Remote Viewing

By far the best way to start learning remote viewing is to attend a weekend workshop or two hosted by someone who’s well respected within the RV community. Live workshops greatly speed up the learning curve and are incredibly valuable. Workshops can be expensive, but they are always worth it in the long run. I highly recommend attending live events whenever you’re learning a new skill of any kind.

Unfortunately, attending workshops isn’t always an option for people. The next best thing is reading books, signing up for online training, and obtaining home-study courses and DVD sets. I learned most of what I know about remote viewing before I ever attended any workshops by completely submerging myself in remote viewing home-study courses and books. It’s definitely possible to learn to do this stuff at home without going to a live event. For me, the live workshops were added experience after I had already learned and had been practicing the skill for nearly 2 years.

Since I have gone over so many home study courses and so much information about remote viewing I feel I am in a position where I can confidently recommend some of the most valuable learning resources for newbies. So here is a quick list of some of my favorite resources.

Top 5 Remote Viewing Books

Here is a list my top 5 remote viewing books. There are so many good remote viewing books out there now that it’s hard to choose which are the best, but these are the 5 that really stuck out to me.

• The Complete Users Manual for Coordinate Remote Viewing
  This book is hands down the best resource for learning remote viewing. If you had to choose only one source to get your remote viewing information, I would recommend it be this book. I recommend this particular book over all of the other books, DVDs, and home study courses. This book is a must have for every remote viewer.
• The Seventh Sense
  The Seventh Sense is another really good book that can help a new remote viewer get a better grasp of the protocols and how to apply remote viewing in real world situations. I like the practical tips that the author shares, and he has a good writing style. I wish this book was longer and went into more detail, but it’s definitely worth a read.
• Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook
  This book was written by one of the most famous and well respected of the original military remote viewers. The author was well known for his incredible remote viewing skill and his ability to make highly accurate and detailed sketches of his targets. If you want to learn from the best, this is the book for you.
• The Science and Theory of Non-Physical Perception
  Another really great book by one of the most respected remote viewers in the world. A worthwhile book to check out and add to your collection of remote viewing resources.
• Limitless Mind
  A book written by one of the men behind the government funded research program at Stanford Research Institute. Russel Targ helped organize many of the original experiments and was really one of the pioneers of the early Remote Viewing research programs. In this book Russel writes about his experiences with remote viewing and how he believes it may aid in a transformation of human consciousness.

Best Remote Viewing home study courses, DVDs, and websites

• The Acadamy of Remote Viewing and Remote Influencing
  ARVARI offers a complete home study course on remote viewing. This is a very good learning set and covers a lot of information in great detail. Everything you need is included with the package, and the price isn’t too steep either for everything that’s included in the package.
• The Farsight Institute
  Free resources to help you learn remote viewing. Lots of good stuff on this website if you look around..
• David Morehouse Remote Viewing
  David Morehouse is the author of my highest recommended remote viewing book. He offers training services as well, and a home study course too. I haven’t tried his home study course, but his book is absolutely fantastic. Really, all you need to do is read his book and practice practice practice, but I’m sure his home study course is really great as well.
• Remote Viewing Instructional Services
  The website of Paul H. Smith, one of the original military remote viewers. Paul now offers training in remote viewing and is regarded as one of the best instructors available.
• The Monroe Institute
  The workshops I attended were technically Monroe Institute workshops, and I find a lot of the stuff that goes on at the Monroe Institute to be really interesting. I’d like to take a trip there sometime and see what it’s all about, but for now I just browse their website.

Remote Viewing Enhancements

When I attended the first remote viewing workshop I was introduced to a new technology that I was not aware of at the time. It was called hemi-sync and it’s a form of binuaral beats. Different frequencies that effect the way your brain works. It induces a state of whole brain thinking.

You can learn more about hemi-sync by going to their website. Click here to do that. I highly recommend the entire Gateway Voyage series, it’s a real neat experience.

An alternative to hemi-sync, and often regarded as even better by the people who try it, are Paraliminals. I just tried my first Paraliminal this week and I must say that I’m very impressed. I didn’t try the remote viewing or intuition ones yet, but I did try the memory booster one and I thought it was quite interesting. It’s definitely worth checking them out.

For more information about Paraliminals, you can visit their website by clicking here.

What not to buy

Although I started learning remote viewing with Ed Dames’ LearnRV DVDs, I would not suggest that anyone buy anything from Ed Dames for several reasons.

Not only was it a pain in the ass to order and get the DVDs through his website — it took an incredibly long time for them to arrive and they charged us for the DVDs twice. After we got all of that stuff sorted out, Ed Dames added to the bad experience when banned me from his forums for asking a simple question about a comment he made on one of the DVDs about “reptilian brain stuff”. When I asked him what he meant when he said that, he got extremely angry and banned me from his website and then sent me an email saying that I was lucky he didn’t sick a ‘mind maggot’ on me… Whatever that was supposed to mean.

It’s not that his system doesn’t work or that his information is wrong, it’s that the guy is a dick. That’s just my experience though, there are many people who really like learning from Ed. I’m only sharing my experience with him so that you may avoid a similar experience yourself, or at least be forewarned.

Cheers!

Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve been inspired to learn a bit more about remote viewing, and maybe even give it a try yourself!

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The remote viewing workshops I attended were hosted by Paul Elder. The workshops were a lot of fun! Paul’s a great guy — if he’s ever in your city, I recommend you check out one of his workshops.

I told him I’d throw a shout out to him on here for being a great teacher! Thanks again Paul! Click here to visit Paul Elder’s website.