Author: Dr. Jane

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Customer or Consumer: The Choice is Ours

I don’t remember when being called a consumer rubbed me the wrong way, but it certainly started soon after we started raising organic beef.

Working in nature has a way of clarifying life. Our cattle consume grass to make magnificent meat. Our chickens consume bugs to produce orange egg yolks. Earthworms consume debris to produce rich soil. These are all processes we agies understand. But to apply this concept to people buying and selling goods lowers the value of human life.

According to the Etymology Online Dictionary, using the term “consumer” started in the 15th century as, “one who squanders or wastes, one who uses up goods or articles, one who destroys the exchangeable value of a commodity by using it. This, my friend, is not a compliment. By 1890, the United States adopted its use as “consumer goods,” and by 1919, our government tracked the Consumer Price Index.

So, what were we before 1890? People were customers. The 1828 Websters Dictionary describes us as, “One who frequents any place of sale for the sake of purchasing goods.” It is a subtle but important distinction. A store owner developed a relationship with his or her customers. In this bond, people exchanged goods and services for mutual benefit. A lumber mill owner knew his customers and saw the home they built with his enterprise. A farmer knew his customers and saw how healthy and strong his neighbors became as a result of his toil. The business owner/customer bond benefited entire communities because people focused on a higher good.

The word customer encourages people to create, to connect, to build. The word consumer does the opposite. In 2012, Northwestern University studied people in four scenarios, which used the word consumer or focused on being a consumer. The outcome demonstrated that materialistic cues triggered increased selfishness and decreased trust in the groups, which the authors tied to negative personal and social consequences in our society.

You don’t have to look far to see this play out in our communities. Low trust, competitiveness with resources, and selfishness plague our culture, a trend that can be traced from the 1800s. But we are not victims. Those of us who create food can also create a culture where humans return to their highest good by simply calling our clientele…customers. 

Until next time,

Dr. Jane

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Books Relaunch

As some of you know, I pulled my books off the market a few years back. I was disgusted with big box corporations not caring. I was tired of commercialism. I needed a rest from Corona tragedies. On top of that, in 2023, I had my back rebuilt with my stem cells after an accident.

Good news! In 2025, I am relaunching my Living Tale Series to help families heal and spend time offline together (thelivingtale.com). And I’m making My Big, Unbreakable Life book and workbook available again. It’s time to slow down, sit down, and read a book.

The best part of these relaunches is I am doing my best to use local small businesses when I can to print and distribute my books. I’m still doing my research and connecting with people, so I’ll keep you posted.

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Raising Your Hope

I wrote this article in 2018 after reading several books on Victorious Eschatology. I lost friends for even entertaining the idea of a hopeful future. It’s amazing how entrenched doom is in our mindsets.

Expectations are funny things.

With them, we either live life or circle the wagons. Most people I talk with are in some state of circling their wagons. Political, ecological, and financial news regularly stops people in their tracks.

Don’t dream too big, become too strong, or feel too confident is the subtle message of life nowadays. Life is too unstable for such nonsense. Small lives and fear is a better alternative. Seriously?

Over the past ten years, I have grown weary of doom. I devoted an entire chapter in my recent book, How to Live a Big, Unbreakable Life showing how doom predictions failed to be accurate over and over, not just in our time, but going back to Christopher Columbus.

The problem with doom is that it creates hopelessness in people. We give up caring for ourselves, planning for the future, or loving our neighbor when we live on the edge of disaster.

Certainly, I am not talking about localized calamities like hurricanes or earthquakes. I am talking about worldwide catastrophe, the extinction of humanity. You can’t build your big, unbreakable life if you are always waiting for the end of it.

 I’ve been studying this topic for 4-5 years and learned some startling truths:

  • Up to the 1500s, people considered the Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ fulfilled. One of the oldest copies of the Bible, the Syriac, did not include it for this reason.
  • The word translated “world” in world ending statements in Revelation, is not the Greek word for entire world, but is the word for land, or inhabited area.
  • This means there are no future global catastrophic statements in the Bible.
  • New heavens and new earth is a phrase used by Hebrew and Middle Eastern writers to refer to new systems or agreements. It is not to be taken as literal, but refers to a new covenant.

There is much more to this, and I refer you to authors who write on what’s called Victorious Eschatology for more information, which detail nearly two thousand years of understanding on this topic. Many scholars are pulling back the confusion on this topic.

The thing I have learned while studying this from both religious and atheistic sources is that worldwide doom is a modern preoccupation. We are convinced the world or civilization is going to end. Several hundred years ago, people were focused on invention and discovery, not destruction. That’s how we got the likes of Newton and Locke: Thinkers and discoverers that advanced humanity by leaps and bounds through truth and hope.

But some European writers and thinkers of the Romantic period (1800s) could not see past the effects of cruel Napoleon, the colonists establishing statehood, and the bloody French Revolution. The world appeared to be going to hell in a handbasket. Economists, theologians, politicians, and poets alike shifted from optimism to doom in this time.

Lord Byron contemplated the world ending with no sun in his poem Darkness (1816), Thomas Robert Malthus predicted worldwide starvation without population control (1826), Darwin saw nothing but survival of the fittest (1839), John Nelson Darby disregarded 1700 years of understanding by declaring the Book of Revelation a future event (1833), and Karl Marx created the perfect government to wield such pessimism (1847).

Unfortunately, schools and universities picked up these thoughts and have taught them as harbingers of inevitable doom instead of harbingers of how poorly people think when they lose their hope.

Hope, pure and simple, is the expectation of good. We cannot expect good when we are full of gloom based on the observations of people who had no hope. Read that again. Hopeless people always come to faulty conclusions. We need to stop basing our hope on their lack of it. Nearly 200 years shows that

  • Byron was wrong
  • Malthus was wrong
  • Darwin was wrong
  • Darby was wrong
  • Marx was wrong

Raise your hope by reading the thinkers from history who were positive about life on earth and contributed good things to it. That is how you increase your hope. That is how you create a better future. And that is how you fuel your dreams to make improvements on earth while you are alive.

Dr. Jane

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The Problem with Forgiveness

I originally wrote this article just before the 2016 elections, but it is just as timely now.

This fall has been hard on a lot of people, including me, due to the recent elections. Between loosed lipped acquaintances and social media rants my list of offenses has grown long.

The negativity feels out of control. Some of my friends have left social media because of the rudeness of others. I’ve heard of family members who stopped talking because one person voted for “the wrong candidate.” I came close to disconnecting from people too, until I realized this is the world I live in. Isolation is not a healthy option.

I looked at my lengthy list of people who had offended me in the past months and saw that I had two responses. I could either destroy people with my words or destroy my list with forgiveness. I chose the later.

The problem with forgiveness is that most people don’t understand what it means, so, they don’t see it as an attractive option in ending conflict. Most people think when they forgive they are saying what a person did is all right. Far from that, forgiveness is not a declaration of innocence on the other people’s actions; they are still accountable for their actions. Instead, it means to give back, or to let go. It means the hurt or offended person is ready to heal.

Forgiveness gives power to the one who is hurt. When we are injured we feel powerless and vulnerable to attack, so all we see is our pain. Once we choose to forgive, we regain the power to heal because forgiveness calms our emotions so that we can become the answer to our own problems. On the front end, this process does not make sense. We long for revenge or the last word, but I experienced deep healing and peace after forgiving some people who deeply wounded me during my childhood. Instead of staying stuck in my pain, forgiveness gave me the ability to heal and grow and get them out of my heart.

The other problem with forgiveness is that we think it is weak. We think negative emotions and destructive words are powerful. Truth is, rage, bitterness, jealousy, and resentment actually weaken us as they destroy us and those we love in the end. We are designed to be powerful and powerful people can create solutions that inspire, reconcile, and release peace. 

I have not mastered the art of forgiveness. Far from it, I am married, I have children, I am on social media, so forgiveness is a daily choice for me. Remember the trend is your friend. I am better at forgiving in 2016 than I was in 2010 or 1973. The more I choose forgiveness, the more I understand that I don’t need to destroy people. I need to dismantle the fear that comes with conflict. Forgiveness restores our ability to do this, so that we choose love and not fear in the middle of disagreement. It’s a powerful choice.

Dr. Jane

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Can Red Light Really Heal?

For about five years I’ve heard off and on about light therapy. I didn’t pay much attention to it because my healing repertoire was full. Recently a business client asked if I would look into it and I was amazed by what I learned.

The short answer is absolutely yes; red light does heal. It’s really sad that it took several hours of research to discover this though.

Light being beneficial is a no brainer when you stop and think about it. God put a wonderful star called the Sun in just the right position to nourish not only plant life but also human life. Remember studying prisms in school? It broke white light into the seven colors that we see after rainstorms. Turns out we need these colors to live healthfully.

NASA sent red lights up with past projects to help plants grow in space. The red wavelengths are great for photosynthesis. Later, they applied the same wavelengths to people and found it is also great for helping humans heal.

So like plants, we too have photochemical reactions. The most commonly know are that blue light will help babies get rid of bilirubin when they are yellow and that vitamin D3 production starts in our skin after we’re in the sun. Fascinating, but there is so much more!

LeAnne Vernier, engineer and light therapy researcher, calls the Sun a multivitamin. Each wavelength of color gives you something that you need.

What has recently been discovered about red light is that scientists and physicians alike are using it to heal many things like broken bones, nerve pain, chronic fatigue, dementia, traumatic brain injury, obesity, and macular degeneration.

The reason it can stimulate such healing in many different tissues is that it stops oxidative stress, the killer of so many good things in our body. Red light affects our body’s powerhouses, the mitochondria. When red light shines from a LED (light emitting diode) into a cell, photons move NO (nitric oxide) off a key enzyme, which allows oxygen back on. When this happens, the mitochondria can then make ATP (energy) again.

When a cell can make energy it can do what it is supposed to do. If it is a bone cell it will heal a break, if it is a brain cell it will help you think, if it is a fibroblast it will make collagen to repair skin or tendons, and so on. The result is quicker healing while pain and swelling go away.

One of the unintended consequences for red LED use was weight loss. When this light hits fat cells, pores open in the cell membrane and triglycerides (the contents of a fat cell) flow out. The result is a raisin looking fat cell. Coupled with hydration and exercise, red LED can lead to inches of pain free weight loss. Anti-aging and tanning spas have been using this technology for years now with some impressive results.

Coupling this new info with what I know about a body brought about some interesting observations. Our body often stores heavy metals, petrochemicals, and pesticides in fat cells. This was first noticed by the hippie generation as they lost weight in mid-life and had new acid trips because old PCP was liberated from their fat cells. I see red light sessions as a good way to detox our bodies while enjoying the benefits of losing weight.

To date, the research I have read has not discovered any negative effects of red light exposure. The only warning I found comes with LEDs that emit near-infra red light, which can damage your eyes at certain wavelengths.

The difference between regular red LEDs and ones that emit near-infrared wavelengths is the depth the light will travel into your body. Near-infrared will pass through bone and cartilage; red light will go through skin. Some researchers are using near-infrared helmets to help patients with dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

I am so convinced with the red LED research that I have agreed to help a local tanning salon’s clients with their follow-up by offering health-coaching sessions with their weight loss packages. It is such a wonderful way to help people take back ownership of their lives. I’ll have more details in the coming weeks, but in the meantime you can contact Sun Splashed Tanning in Billings, MT with your questions.

Personally, I have used the far-infrared wraps (which are like a hot sauna) and the red LED sessions and enjoyed the benefits of weight loss and improved wellbeing from both.

I encourage you to look into this new technology. With so many people researching its applications worldwide, you are bound to find encouragement with whatever you are facing in your health.

Dr. Jane

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I am back

Welcome to Dr. Jane!

The world has changed a lot in the past few years. I lost some loved ones and some friends. I closed my coaching business and stopped writing. It was important to take a break re-evaluate what was really important and what was really happening in these crazy times, so I focused on God, family and our ranch.

In this quiet place, I learned to create and kept my peace despite fake news, fake fear, and real oppression. When I would talk to people around me, so many said they felt stuck in bad circumstances because of the tyranny around them. Others were carrying emotional wounds from losing a job or a loved one. And still others were sick and suffering.

I’ve decided to write and speak again to help people rebuild their peace and their lives. Also, I want to build a community of people who have had enough of having their lives broken and want to live whole, despite the catastrophic times we live in.

To those of you who know me and missed me, thank you for your patience. Thank you for keeping in touch some of you. Sorry it took so long to return.

Let’s get to healing and living again. The future is what we make of it! Who’s in?

Dr. Jane