How to naturally clean your respiratory system in 3 days

As many of you may know, I'm absolutely prone to getting sinus infections, bronchitis, pneumonia... any type of respiratory infection. My current sinus infection is my fourth one this year and I refuse to go to the doctor for another blast of antibiotics.

On a natural remedy search, I recently found an article in wesupportorganic.com about a 3-day lung cleanse. Since sinuses are a part of the respiratory system, I assumed it would work the same.

- Two days prior to the cleanse, abstain from eating any type of dairy. Casein, the natural protein in dairy products can promote the formation of mucus. Many health professionals, such as Dr. Weil, advise abstaining for more than two months!

- The night before the cleanse, drink a cup of herbal tea before going to bed. This will release toxins in the intestines.

- Drink 2 squeezed lemons in 300ml of water before breakfast. Lemons are packed with vitamin C, an immune-boosting antioxidant. I like to eat something right away to diffuse the acidity in my empty stomach.

- Drink 300ml of grapefruit juice or pineapple juice. These have more vitamin C and other natural antioxidants that help clear your lungs.

- Drink 300ml of carrot juice. This will alkalize your blood during the cleanse.

- Drink 400ml of juice rich in potassium during lunch. Potassium acts as a tonic for cleaning.

- Drink 400ml of cranberry juice before bed. The phenols in it helps break down infections. I chose to buy a large bottle of organic cranberry juice (NOT FROM CONCENTRATE) to use as my potassium-rich juice and before-bedtime juice.

- Go on a run, take a walk, practice some vinyasa flow to get some cardiovascular exercise in there. Nothing too crazy, especially if you are trying to heal your body.

- Take a hot shower and breathe in the steam.

-Before bed every night, drop 5-10 drops of eucalyptus essential oil into a pot of hot water and breathe it in until it cools. I like to use my humidifier for 10 minutes.

- (optional) I drink a cup of ayurvedic tea every day: lemon, ginger, turmeric, and honey.

You'll notice that this cleanse includes A LOT of liquid. No worries, take your time drinking. I chose to do this on my days off work so I wouldn't have to worry about a schedule.

I'm currently on Day 3 and it really works! Last night I was able to breath through both nostrils, which I haven't experienced in a month. Unfortunately, this means I'll probably have to taking dairy out of my diet forever.

Another helpful resource I found to heal chronic sinus infections naturally is on howstuffworks.com.

Did the cleanse work for you? Post a comment and let me know!

An Exploration into the Possibilities of the Human Wanderer

I recently stumbled upon a piece posted by Jordan of Spirit Science (http://thespiritscience.net/author/patchman/). It is a beautiful rendition of Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot, a philosophical vision into humanity's future. I highly advise to watch in HD.

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game--none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band's, or even your species' might be owed to a restless few--drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.

Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas..."

Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds--promising untold opportunities--beckon.

Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting...

How Milllennials Are Changing International Travel

By AMANDA MACHADO / JUN 18 2014, 4:53 PM ET

The author in Argentina's Patagonia region (Kevin Parine)

In the summer of 2012, at age 24, I left home to travel the world. In just over a year, I backpacked through South America, South Asia, Western Europe, and the western United States. I hiked the Inca Trail, skied the Alps, hitchhiked through Patagonia, and trekked through the Himalayas. I worked at hostels, stayed at a Buddhist monastery, and gardened at an English women’s retreat center in exchange for meals and a place to sleep. And while I learned many things on the trip, what was most surprising was how many people my age were traveling just like me.

In the United States, the Boston Consulting Group reports, the millennial generation, defined as those between the ages of 16 and 34, is more interested than older generations in traveling abroad as much as possible—by a 23-percentage-point margin. The United Nations estimates that 20 percent of all international tourists, or nearly 200 million travelers, are young people, and that this demographic generates more than $180 billion in annual tourism revenue, an increase of nearly 30 percent since 2007. The UN attributes that growth both to rising incomes in emerging markets and a commitment by youth in advanced economies to “continue traveling despite economic uncertainty.” We are now the fastest-growing age segment in terms of the money we spend on travel, according to American Express Business Insights.

Not only that, but we’re redefining the very meaning of international travel, foregoing standard vacations in favor of extended, meaningful experiences. The World Youth Student and Educational (WYSE) Travel Confederation, which recently surveyed more than 34,000 people from 137 countries, found that young travelers are not as interested in “the traditional sun, sea and sand holidays” as previous generations are. They are spending less time in “major gateway cities” and instead exploring more remote destinations, staying in hostels instead of hotels, and choosing long-term backpacking trips instead of two-week jaunts. The study showed an increase from 2007 in young travelers taking trips (like mine) for longer than two months, with the average trip lasting 58 days.

This kind of travel did not come naturally to me. I grew up middle class in Florida in a family where “traveling” generally meant driving two hours to the nicest nearby beach. I got a passport when I was 16 so I could visit my extended family in Ecuador, and by the time I entered college, that family reunion was still the only time I had ever been overseas. Until I discovered the backpacking scene, I always considered travel to be something reserved for the wealthy, or at least for people with far more experience abroad than I had.

But with easy access to social media and budget-travel tools like Airbnb, Couchsurfing, Skyscanner, and Lonely Planet message boards, I soon realized that long-term travel wasn’t nearly as expensive or difficult as I had imagined. I funded my 15-month trip on a little more than $16,000 (that’s luxurious: many backpackers I met spent half as much in the same amount of time). I saved more than half the money from a part-time job in high school, and the rest came from two years of work after college. And while there’s little data on the economic backgrounds of backpackers, the people I met during my trip—waiters, teachers, seasonal workers, flight attendants, carpenters—gave me the sense that people of diverse means had done the same.

In the case of American millennials, many of us also feel like there’s little reason to wait until our golden years to see the world. Our generation has arguably been hit hardest by the recession, and grown skeptical of the best-laid retirement plans. According to the Center for Retirement Research, less than a third of private-sector workers in the U.S. had defined-benefit coverage for retirement in 2010, down from 44 percent in 1995 and 88 percent in 1983. Since 1985, the number of companies offering pensions has fallen from 112,000 to 23,000. The Pew Research Center has reported that only 6 percent of millennials expect to receive the kinds of Social Security benefits that today’s retirees enjoy. Half don’t believe there will be money remaining in the Social Security system by the time they retire, and an additional 39 percent think these benefits will be significantly reduced. Under these circumstances, it makes sense that we’d travel now, instead of saving travel for a future that is in no way guaranteed. 

Faced with a lack of reliable, long-term employment options, a number of millennials are also using travel to take a break from job-searching and reevaluate what to do next. In 2013, at every education level, millennials aged 25 to 32 confronted  a higher unemployment rate than those facing older generations, and an overall unemployment rate of more than 8 percent. Both of my traveling partners, Kevin Parine and Chelin Lauer, considered going abroad after finding limited job opportunities in their area of study. Parine graduated with a degree in geology but decided to travel after struggling to find work in his field. Lauer graduated with a degree in biology and ended up moving to South Korea to work as a science and English teacher, and then travel whenever she had the chance.

“Teaching English in Korea was the highest-paying job I could find after graduating,” Lauer, 26, says. “But the flipside to a bad job market is that it gave me a chance to explore something I probably would have never done otherwise.”

But even those lucky enough to find jobs may be tempted to travel by their dissatisfaction with the way the United States approaches work. While corporate profits have increased by 20 percent in the past two decades and productivity has surged, income has stagnated, suggesting people are working more and getting paid less. Forty percent of professional men and 15 percent of professional women work more than 50 hours per week, and the United States is one of only nine countries around the world that doesn’t require employers to offer paid annual leave. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that only 30 percent of American employees feel engaged at work, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. A Harris survey found that 73 percent of older workers said they never landed in the job they dreamed of when they were younger. 

“We’re looking at the corporate world as it is now, and this yester-year of people spending all their life working at a job they often hated, retiring, and that’s it, and we’re disillusioned with that,” says Jessie Goldstein, 26, who recently completed a five-month road trip across the United States. After finishing a master’s degree in sustainable development and getting admitted into Ph.D. programs, she decided to take the trip to figure out whether more graduate school was the right choice for her. “If I’m going to continue putting that much of my life into something, and that much effort, it better be something I’m really passionate about,” she explains.

Studies indicate that millennials advocate strongly for work-life balance, and have few qualms about leaving jobs that don’t meet their expectations. A 2012 Net Impact survey found that young workers are more concerned with finding happiness and fulfillment at the office than workers of past generations. The study found that 88 percent saw a “positive culture” as essential to their dream job, and that 86 percent felt the same way about work they found “interesting.” Fifty-eight percent said they would stomach a 15-percent pay cut to work for an organization “with values like my own.”

Travel creates time to reflect on these priorities and decide how our career choices can accommodate them. We understand that bumming around in our twenties for too long is irresponsible, but we also find it irrational to work unfulfilling jobs only to feel legitimate. And if we have the financial resources to pause, travel, and reassess, then why not take advantage of that privilege?

Young hikers in the Himalayas (Sam Hawley/Flickr)

But while long-term travel and gap years have been popular for years in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, the idea is still relatively new in the United States—and not yet widely accepted.

“If you were to ask older people. ‘Is this a good idea, should I go do this?’ the answer perceived is ‘no,’” says Randall Bourquin, 25, who spent six months last year backpacking through South and Central America. “People think that there’s too much opportunity cost, or that it’s going to cause a speed bump in your career.”

Yet according to the WYSE Travel Confederation’s report, many young travelers use their extended trips not only for leisure, but also as a form of job training: 22 percent of respondents wanted to learn a language during their travels, 15 percent wanted to gain more work experience, and 15 percent wanted to study—all increases since 2007.

These skills can translate into a competitive advantage in the workplace. Elizabeth Harper, 25, discovered her career interests while backpacking in Southeast Asia. Traveling gave her time to read for pleasure, and she ended up leafing through books passed around in hostels about atrocities that had occurred in the countries she was visiting. She eventually graduated with a master’s degree in international human-rights law and has since worked on human-rights issues for the United Nations and the International Commission of Jurists. Bourquin leveraged his trip into a sports-marketing job at Univision. My travels helped me obtain a summer job with Global Glimpse, an organization that takes disadvantaged students on educational trips through Nicaragua.

As a daughter of immigrants, the American Dream has played an ever-present role in my career decisions. After seeing how few options my mother had as a woman who spent a large part of her childhood in poverty, I wanted to do everything she never had the opportunity to accomplish. Growing up, that meant graduating from a prestigious university and getting a respectable job. But gradually I realized my standard definition of the American Dream was incomplete: It was not only about obtaining education and a good job, but also about focusing on how my career choices contributed to my overall well-being. It was about gaining experiences outside my career, like travel, that would have otherwise been unavailable to me.

For me and many others millennials, this was the opportunity we worked hard to achieve: the opportunity to have options—to have time to reflect, and to experience the world in a way many generations before us never could.

**This article is a repost from the Atlantic at: http://m.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/how-millennials-are-changing-international-travel/373007/#disqus_thread**

The Best Way to Find Your Future is to Travel Back Into Your Past

The marshlands of the outskirts of the M'nong village, Banh Mi Tuoi

They call me Viet-kieu: a Vietnamese person living in another country. Never in my entire life have I straggled between such a cultural divide. I bare my skin to the sunshine as the Vietnamese girls hide in full covered gear. I speak to my elders in casual tone as other Vietnamese bow in utter respect. I speak in tongues as I watch my fellow Vietnamese converse so eloquently. I am a Viet-kieu.

My father has always been a man of few words... Or so I believed. Being back in the place of his early life brings a flood of memory and a lifetime that has been carefully washed away for 32 years. No longer are we in the Vietnam that he once knew. No longer is poverty so intense and oppression so real that escape seems to be the only way of existence. We are in the new Saigon.

A bustling metropole, Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City) is the business capital of the once impoverished and war torn country. Young and old walk the streets in business suits. Not a small space is wasted in a city that boasts a population of about 9 million. It is a crowded place. Too crowded. This is where my mother lived as a child. This is where my father moved to escape Ho Chi Minh's regime. The first day we arrived, our friend provided us with a humble 5 story townhouse in a gated neighborhood (quite a hookup I might add). My father's sisters arrived to greet us at the house. There have been only two other times before I've ever seen my father cry. Seeing his sisters has hasn't seen for 32 years was the third. The fourth was seeing his parent's gravesite. It was the first time he had seen his mother's grave.

 The first time my dad has seen his sisters in 32 years.

Incense sticks are burned at graves to offer during prayer. 

In my father's family there are 6 children. Three of which are passed due to disease. You see, many people complain about the exaggerated price of health care in our country. In a place where liver disease is sure death, a life debt really doesn't seem that bad. Combining the dead siblings and live ones, I have 17 cousins on that side of the family. Most of them also have children. These family members are people I've only just met and learned about. Slowly since being here my father has opened up about his past: opened up about his hatred for communists and  never believed to move back to Vietnam.

He grew up in a nha quay-- the countryside house. This is where he was born until about the teenage years when he moved to Saigon to work on cars and sell black market gas. Back then, everything was sold in the black market. He slept on a friend's rickshaw cart at night and worked on motors in the day as a teenager and young adult. After the withdrawal of US army and the fall of southern Vietnam in 1975, life was hard in the south. Everyone was under the tyrannical rule of a merciless campaign. The north did not forgive the south for siding with the Americans. In those years, you could buy your ticket onto a boat illegally smuggled out of Vietnam (much like the coyotes of Mexico). Hundreds of thousands of people took risk of open waters to escape. These people are now known as the Vietnames boat people.  My father tried twice. The first time landed him in prison. The second time he succeeded.

A small portion of the many family members on my dad's side.

But success is never a sure way out. He paid about $800 then for a spot with 80 other people on a 39-foot boat. Out in the open waters towards Thailand they headed with nothing but fruit to eat. They were robbed twice by sea pirates--the first time they took all of their belongings, the second they took young girls to rape.

Luckily, the captain coyote knew how to navigate open water bearing the stars in mind. Being out in the open ocean for 4 days doesn't seen that bad until you realize you are crammed with no shade in tropical heat. On the 5th day a European boat found them and pulled them towards shore. The vessel unlatched them before getting too close so that the Thai government could not put blame them for dropping off a bunch of refugees onto their borders. As they got closer to land, my father and his boat crew purposefully sunk the ship and swam to shore. They had to sink the ship in order to ensure that the Thais couldn't force them back out to the ocean. Civilians gathered and got them to a Thai refugee camp as they arrived on shore. There my father stayed for 2 months. He was then transferred to a Singapore refugee camp for another 2 months. After that, he was transferred again to another refugee camp on Indonesia where he learned English for a US visa for 8 months. His cousin in Texas essentially sponsored him to be relocated and for permission for visa. Since then, he has worked in the states doing various job and building a family.

So you could say that the American Dream really does exist.

Who knew that 22 years of a bicultural, bilingual life could shut out such an important understanding. I find that as I get older and my Vietnamese gets better, my parents' English gets better which creates much more ease in understanding.

The first couple weeks have been a blur of family reunions, after gravesite visits, after dinner parties galore.  The next couple weeks are going to be sightseeing and adventures.  I am writing this in the lobby of a luxurious hotel on the Mekong Delta town of Can Tho.  We spent the last couple of days in the hillside old Parisian capital town of Dalat visiting hilltribes and riding on elephants. Vietnam has become the easiest foreign country I've ever travelled in.  Aside from having the lavish expenditure of my parents' pocketbook, I am easily able to communicate with the locals.  Getting around has never been so easy. I find that every day adds more into my broken Vietnamese vocabulary which has given me the ambition to become a teacher guide for an educational Vietnam exchange program.  The best way to find your future is really to travel back into your past.

Peace, love, and good vibes to all my fellow dreamers out there,

J.

Off to the motherland!

Hey friends! So once again, I am off traveling (it's a drug, really).  But this time, it will be a soul-searching experiment of my past, present, and future.  I am going on a 7 week journey with my parents (and some on my own) to the motherland of Vietnam--where my destiny was shaped by the Vietnam War (or the American War as the Vietnamese call it).  This will be my parents' first time being back since they left and took refuge in the United States in 1985.  In the next 7 weeks, we will be visiting old homes, relatives long forgotten, and the beautiful ecology of Southeast Asia.  So get ready to experience another journey of self-discovery (round 3!...or 4.... or 5....)

Since traveling to Southeast Asia 3 times, I've learned to pack extremely light while still having my travel toys.

Southeast Asia Light Packing List!

• Essential good traveler/explorer items (**Keep in mind that these might get pricey to buy if you have none of these but they are great to have if you are ever planning to travel again**)
• Reusable water bottle
• Steripen or some way to sterilize water (so you don't have to buy water bottles every day... REDUCE PLASTIC FOOTPRINT YAY!!)
• Daypack (I love the REI Flash 18 because it packs so well in my big pack)
• Internal frame pack (40-60 liters)
• Mosquito net
• 1 Travel towel (sarong works well too)
• Headlamp (better to have and not need than need and not have)
• Small utility chord
• Combination padlock
• Money belt (to hold passport, credit card, and money)
• Compression sacks (it packs your clothes down so much!!)
• Shoes (I am bringing my Chacos because they are great sandals that are durable and usable for hikes too)
• Clothing 
• 2 tanktops/ 2 shirts
• 1 pair of shorts
• 1skirt
• 1 legging
• 4 underwear
• 1 bra
• 1 bathing suit
• 1 sweatshirt
• 1 lightweight shell (for those tropical storms)
• Toiletries
• Limited amount of makeup, and hair ties
• Toothbrush, toothpaste, floss
• Razor
• Conditioner, soap
• Essential oil (great for mosquito repellent!)
• Girly items (I use the Diva Cup--great for travel and reusable!)
• Medicinal
• DRAMAMINE (If you are like me, I eat this stuff like candy when traveling because of my horrible ability to get vertigo)
• PEPTO BISMOL (Great for the travel tummy)
• Allergy meds, ibuprofen, emergen-c, etc.
• Earpugs (you never know...)
• Sunscreen
• Things to keep you occupied while waiting for the train, bus, plane, boat, etc.
• Mp3 player
• Book
• Journal
• Other things that are fun! But totally not necessary
• Climbing shoes, harness, and chalk bag (Southeast Asia has some of the best climbing in the world!)
• Travel hammock
• Sleep sack
• Fire poi set (if you do that)
• Camera and camera accessories (I am bringing my Canon T2i, 15-85mm lens, and charger)

All of this will fit in my pack as a carry-on item.  Feel free to play around and see what you are willing to give up for space! Remember, you can always stock up on more items while there.  I suggest buying any pharmaceuticals back home (they have different FDA regulations).   Other great items to bring for travel are a deck of cards, some small art supplies, travel guitar/ukulele, OR ANYTHING YOU'RE PASSIONATE ABOUT!  Bring the gift of talent to share!

Peace, love, and good vibes to all my fellow dreamers out there,

J.