Lisa Niver's Blog: We Said Go Travel, page 60

The Hidden Wonders of Your Lungs with Dr. Jonathan Reisman

Congratulations to my friend, Jonathan Reisman, on his book, The Unseen Body, which publishes today, Nov 9, 2021!

We met in India during Allahabad Kumbh Mela when according to Wikipedia: “An estimated 120 million people visited Maha Kumbh Mela in 2013 in Allahabad over a two-month period including over 30 million on a single day, on 10 February 2013.”

[image error] I am honored to share this excerpt from his book, The Unseen Body, “Lungs,” with permission from his publisher, Flatiron Books:

Early on in anatomy lab, as I was first getting elbow deep in my cadaver’s abdominal fat and neck deep in the Latin names of body parts, I decided to visit a slaughterhouse. I wanted to learn more about how cuts of beef compare to human muscles. I found a kosher slaughterhouse in central New Jersey, deep in the state’s industrial heart, and I called up the owner.

After expressing surprise at my request and asking a few questions to convince himself that I was not “some crazy vegan or something,” he agreed to let me visit on the next slaughtering day. And while I had muscles on the mind, the theme of my visit would turn out to be all about lungs.

On a crisp autumn morning, I drove along the New Jersey Turnpike past oil refineries, gas stations, and tractor-trailers to the slaughterhouse.

When I opened the heavy metal door to the building, I could hear the rattling of chains, the booming sounds of chain saws, and a chorus of cattle mooing. The scent of barnyard hung in the cold air as I walked through the front office toward the dreadful sounds coming from beyond.

The slaughtering had already begun. I saw rabbis with long gray beards and thigh-high rubber boots standing around a large wooden table, examining mounds of shiny flesh. Workers, primarily Black and Hispanic, wielded huge motorized butchering saws and moved hanging quarter-cows along tracks in the ceiling. Each steer was led into the building from the outside lot through a narrow chute leading directly onto the slaughtering platform. Chains were then fastened to its back legs and used to slowly lift the animal off the ground. Just as the front hooves left the concrete floor, a long, final moo built in volume and echoed off the grimy industrial walls.

With one swift slice of the rabbi’s knife to the animal’s neck, a slick of blood hit the floor with a loud splash, and the animal was dead before the echoes of that last moo had finally faded.

I walked among the hanging slabs of beef and saw quarter-cadavers, recognizing the same orthopedics of muscle and bone that I had seen in anatomy lab. Underneath our skins, humans and cattle are both glistening red outlined in white, strung like puppets by the names of a dead language.

The rabbi actually doing the slaughtering seemed less busy than the others—in between animals, he mostly stood around cleaning the blood off his long knife. His beard was neatly cropped, and his yarmulke held tightly to his short brown hair. I asked him about what the other rabbis were doing.

He explained that Jewish traditional dietary law, or kashrut, provides a guide to the proper dissection of meat and diagnosis of its cleanliness.

I knew the basic rules of kashrut: keep milk and meat separate, and avoid shellfish and pork. But there is another criterion that is less well known, he explained: severe pneumonia during an animal’s life can make an animal no longer kosher.

[image error] Dr. Jonathan Reisman, photo by Olaf Starorypinski

In healthy animals and humans, as the lungs expand and contract with each breath, they slide freely against the pleura, a layer of membrane surrounding the lungs and lining the inner side of the chest wall. But when the two surfaces are inflamed by a bad bout of pneumonia, they stick together like an unlubricated piston in its shaft. As the pneumonia heals, a scar forms at the spot where the lung got stuck—a band of white fibrous tissue attaching the two surfaces. The shochets—those trained in kashrut’s version of a USDA inspection—were carefully examining the animals’ lungs and looking for these telltale signs of pneumonia. Called adhesions, these scars were the footprint of past disease, and each was a potential degradation of kashrut. According to Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, the number and size of these adhesions determine the grade of kosher, with the highest level called glatt, meaning “smooth,” a description of the surface of an animal’s lungs that are free of the roughened scars.

Most important, the shochets must determine whether there is a hole hidden within a scar that reaches straight through the lung. As a carcass hung freshly killed and cut open, a shochet slid the lungs out of the chest cavity. He walked back over to the examining table, his hand grasping the trachea as two fleshy lungs dangled below. He placed an air hose into the animal’s trachea and inflated the lungs with a rush of air. They doubled in size like two large loaves of bread rising abruptly. The shochet then cupped his hands around one of the scar tufts on the lung and filled his hands with water, being careful not to let any drain out. If there was a hole within the scar, air from inside the lungs would bubble up through the water, as when a mechanic investigates a flat tire for the puncture site. Such a hole from the outside into the body’s inside proves the animal is not intact and therefore its entire body is not kosher, with bubbles as the definitive diagnostic criteria.

Kashrut’s concept of cleanliness and health seemed to rely on the sanctity of a barrier between the inside of the body and the outside world. Maintaining cleanliness means keeping the outside out, much as people in many cultures remove their shoes before entering a house or a place of worship.

When animals or humans breathe in air and atmospheric schmutz, they enter our lungs and whoosh all the way down to the alveoli—but this is not truly inside the body. The air in the lungs is still continuous with the external atmosphere. The real threshold of the physical self is the lining of those deep alveoli, and a hole connecting the inside of the lungs to the pleura is a way for the dirt of the outside world to get in, truly inside, the body, and once that sacred barrier has been breached, innocence and purity are soiled.

For the kosher postmortem inspection of an animal, the lungs have a unique primacy—they hold the singular key to the purity of every part of an animal’s body, even its rump roast. In the past, shochets examined eighteen different body parts to make a determination of kashrut, looking for defects of all kinds, but experience over centuries showed that the lungs offered by far the most bang for the buck [Shulchan Aruch]. A large enough proportion of all defects found were in the lungs, obviating the practicality of examining the other seventeen body parts, except in special circumstances.

It made anatomical sense: as the organ standing guard at the body’s entrance and suffering the microbial blows of an outside world teeming with infection, the lungs serve as a proxy. The kosher version of dissection exalts the lungs above all other organs, and when they show signs of disease, the animal’s entire body is considered unfit for human consumption.

Excerpted THE UNSEEN BODY: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy by Jonathan Reisman. Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan Reisman. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.  

More about Jonathan Reisman and his organization: I wrote about him in 2013 for Huffington Post:

New Jersey Hero among Us: Dr. Jonathan Reisman

COVID relief with Jonathan’s organization WHEN:

Covid Relief to India through WHEN: World Health and Education Network

“The Bodies that Guard our Secrets” in The New York Times, Sunday Review section. April 26, 2014. Kosher meat and the diagnosis of cancer meet in this medical student’s trip to a slaughterhouse.

Buy your copy of The Unseen Body

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New Jersey Hero among Us: Dr. Jonathan ReismanThe post a...

New Jersey Hero among Us: Dr. Jonathan Reisman

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Are You Looking for Luxury & Adventure “Frommer’s Ins...

Are You Looking for Luxury & Adventure “Frommer’s Instagram” Style?

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What HAPPENS in Vegas? EVERYTHING!

Are you wondering where can you drive a bulldozer? Land in the Grand Canyon by Helicopter? Climb a wall? Take a gondola ride and imagine you are in Venice? [image error]

In Vegas, if you can dream it, it can probably happen! During the IPW 2021 conference, I had some amazing adventures. See them below and at this video playlist!

BULLDOZER DRIVING at Dig This

I absolutely LOVED my experience at Dig This Las Vegas Sept 19, 2021! I drove a bulldozer AND an excavator! Do you want to Drive Heavy Machinery? This is the place to make your bucket list dream come true. My instructors, Mae and Dave, were AMAZING! They only supervise two people at a time but only one person is getting information at a time. It is very step-by-step and personalized. The machinery is climate controlled which was great! I highly recommend DIG THIS for your birthday, anniversary or any reason you are in Vegas. Next time I am going to CRUSH A CAR!

Land in the Grand Canyon with Papillon Helicopters

I went on the Papillon Grand Celebration tour! “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to land on the floor of the Grand Canyon? Our Papillon Grand Celebration tour is a Grand Canyon helicopter landing tour that includes breathtaking views of the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon West and a 3,200-foot descent onto a private plateau of the Grand Canyon’s floor. After landing, you’ll even get to enjoy champagne and a light picnic overlooking the Colorado River. This Grand Canyon helicopter tour from Las Vegas is the crown jewel of our tour selection. Truly a sightseeing experience unlike any other!”

Go on a Gondola Ride: Venice in Vegas at The Venetian Resort

My gondola ride reminded me of my time in Venice, Italy. I enjoyed the gondolier singing and the gorgeous colors at sunset. We picked an outdoor ride but you can also choose indoor! We floated beneath bridges and listened to the songs. If you cannot leave the country, you can feel like you are in Italy by going to Vegas.

Rock Climbing Wall at Canyon Ranch at The Venetian Resort

Ready for a 40 feet climbing wall? Thank you to Mike at Canyon Ranch at The Venetian Resort for my adrenaline filled experience. This is one of the largest if not THE LARGEST indoor climbing wall at a hotel. I LOVED IT!!

Flyover Las Vegas: Experience The Real Wild West.

Thank you to Flyover Las Vegas for a “immersive flight-ride experience” right on the strip of Las Vegas. I love 3D and 4D movies and this felt like another level up. There are no googles or 3D glasses. This seat feels like a ride at the theme park and moves so far over the edge—you cannot wear your flip flops! They might fall off onto someone’s head! There is a basket for your belongings so they do not topple! This ride has six degrees of motion.

Allegiant Stadium

Thank you Allegiant Stadium and IPW! I loved my tour Sept 19, 2021. I loved seeing the Al Davis Memorial Torch, the private suites and clubs including Champions Club, Twitch Lounge, Modelo Cantina Club, the Hall of Fame photos, trophies and of course the field.I cannot wait to see a concert and a game here!

In past Vegas trips, I have driven fast cars, cooked with famous chefs and donned chain mail to scuba dive at Shark Reef!Christina Tosi from Milk Bar taught us to make cake truffles at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas March 2018.

My Five Star Luxury Dreams Came

Dream Racing

When you go to Las Vegas, you can make all your dreams come true. Have you always wanted an authentic driving experience on a race track at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway with luxury vehicles, professional instructors & simulators? I drove over 120mph in a Lamborghini Huracán GT with world famous driver Cédric Sbirrazzuoli as my instructor! I absolutely LOVED it! I cannot wait to go again! Thank you to the entire team at Dream Racing who made me feel so comfortable and ready to get behind the wheel! Thank you Cedric, Ashley, Steve and Enrico! “Dream Racing is the five-star driving experience at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and features the world’s largest and fastest selection of Supercars and the only one where you can get behind the wheel of a real Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche or Lotus Race Car. No matter which package you choose, we promise to deliver you a once in a lifetime exotic car racing experience. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to try your hand at racing these exotic cars.”

[image error] Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay

Who gets to wear a full suit of chain mail and dive with sharks in the desert? I did it and if you are a certified diver you can too! This is a very unique and different experience at Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef. Thank you to Jack, Theresa, Stacy, Trisha, The Life Support Team of the Aquarium, Mandalay Bay and MGM for this amazing adventure for my 50 things before I am 50 project! I LOVED IT! I sat on the bottom of the tank with many types of sharks swimming by and sang myself HAPPY BIRTHDAY! “Shark Reef aquarium is the home of over 2,000 animals including the saw fish, giant rays, endangered green sea turtles, piranha, jellyfish and the rare golden crocodile. This unique exhibit gives you the chance to dive with a higher concentration of exotic sharks than you’d ever find in the wild.”

Lisa Niver at Shark Reef Aquarium

Are You Looking for Luxury & Adventure “Frommer’s Instagram” Style?

I loved going behind the scenes at the Bellagio FountainsI will be back in Las Vegas for the Scuba show DEMA in November. I wonder what I will do NEXT??

Vegas IPW 2021 articles:

Luxury Las Vegas: My Stay at The Venetian Resort

Thank you IPW 2021 Resorts World Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas? EVERYTHING

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Prepare Your Pandemic Pivot with Ken Lindner’s 8C’sThe po...

Prepare Your Pandemic Pivot with Ken Lindner’s 8C’s

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Find love, positivity, and purpose to elevate your life....

Find love, positivity, and purpose to elevate your life. | November 16, 2021#AspireHigher #AltruisticLove #KenLindner #Happiness #Motivational #PersonalTransformation #Success #SelfEsteem #Relationships #PersonalGrowth pic.twitter.com/Hj3p1Z3tE0

— Ken Lindner | Author (@kenlindnerPLCP) October 24, 2021

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Aspire Higher Especially during the COVID coaster

By Ken Lindner, author of Aspire Higher [image error]

The choices that you make can profoundly change your life! The state of your life, your feelings of self-worth and self-esteem, your self-image and your confidence that you can truly effect positive change in your life are direct reflections of the positive and beneficial or the negative and/or self-sabotaging choices that you have made. Think of it this way: Choices are like train tracks. Trains go where the tracks take them and the path of your life goes according to the positive or poor life choices that you make.

The FANTASTIC NEWS is that starting today, no matter where you are in your life, you can  jump-start it and elevate your feelings of self-esteem and self-worth, your self-image, and your optimism by making positive and constructive life choices each and every chance that you get!

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As an ardent student of decision-making since college and having counseled thousands of individuals over the past 38 years to make tens of thousands of positive life and career choices, I have time-and-time-again observed the following:

1. Your positive life choices can make you feel good/or great about yourself and your life; they can inspire and instill empowering feelings within you of confidence, mastery, and healthy self-love, and at some point, when you have a sufficient amount of these potent feelings, they can trigger your desire to respect, have compassion and empathy for, and sincerely care about and support others. The underlying concept here is that if you feel really good or great about who you are, how you conduct your life, and how well your life is going, these highly potent, positive feelings will organically lead you to want to elevate the lives of others by helping, enhancing, and supporting them. And, the beautiful by-product of elevating others, is that your life, your happiness, and your fulfillment, along with your feelings of self-esteem and your self-image will be elevated as well.

2. There are things in life you can’t control, but you can control your choices, emotions, responses, and actions. Taking constructive control of the things that you can control through your positive life choice-making is confidence-building, masterful, empowering, and elating. All of these are nurturing and wonderful feelings, assets, and blessings.

Find love, positivity, and purpose to elevate your life. | November 16, 2021#AspireHigher #AltruisticLove #KenLindner #Happiness #Motivational #PersonalTransformation #Success #SelfEsteem #Relationships #PersonalGrowth pic.twitter.com/Hj3p1Z3tE0

— Ken Lindner | Author (@kenlindnerPLCP) October 24, 2021

3A. Your constructive, wise, and beneficial life choices will positively reinforce and lead you to make more and more positive life choices in the future because you truly enjoy the sweet fruits of successfully elevating your life, your well-being, your self-image, and your confidence that you can effect tangible, positive change in your life. Every time you make a positive life choice and enjoy its beneficial results, you are motivated to make more positive life choices, because you love the empowering feeling of being able to make your life far better than it was. Essentially, the success and positive feelings derived from making great choices organically create a hunger within you to experience more success and the empowering and elating feelings that sustained success brings, by making more positive life choices whenever you have the opportunity.

3B. Your negative, self-defeating, and/or self-sabotaging life choices will make you feel badly about yourself as you see the quality of your life start/continue to spiral downward with each poor choice that you make. You also begin to lose confidence that you can make any positive life choices that will elevate you and the state of your life. As a result, you feel great anxiety, demoralized, and hopeless about your lot in life, as well as emotionally and psychologically mired in a debilitating life-funk with no apparent means to escape. And the more you, your feelings of self-esteem, your confidence, and your hope to enjoy a better life spiral downward, the less you feel that you can have or deserve a better life through the choices that you make. So a virulent, vicious cycle is started as you continue to make more and more poor/self-destructive life choices.

Additionally, the “negativity bias,” which is our proclivity to see and be effected by negative things much more than positive ones, which looms in all of us to varying degrees, will exacerbate an already negative frame of mind and feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness.

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3C. What you can glean from the above is that making positive, enhancing, and psyche- and life-elevating choices positively reinforce and naturally lead you to make more life-enhancing choices; whereas negative and self-defeating life choices make you feel badly about yourself and that you’re a “loser” or a “victim“ who is impotent to raise the quality of your choice-making and incapable of ever being their best self and attaining their most treasured goals and dreams. As a result, you continue make bad decisions and self-sabotaging choices, as you lack the core-confidence that you can raise the quality of your life.

4. In my book, “ASPIRE HIGHER”, I discuss the all-important concept of being a “solutionary.”  What this means is that when you’re faced with finding a constructive solution to a problem or challenge, you not only find a solution that benefits you, but one that also enhances others. When you make life choices and decisions that elevate others as well as yourself, this process continues to raise your feelings of self-esteem and self-worth, along with your self-image and confidence that you can do amazing things for others—such as endeavoring to understand where they’re coming from, who they truly are, and why they act as they do. Doing this can gift you and the world with beautiful fruits such as mutual respect, compassion, and empathy for others, as well as civility and peace among all people, groups, religions, and countries. It is these positive, caring, and loving life choices that will elevate your life and the lives of others, as well as radiantly illuminate our golden path to world peace.

5. With all of the rampant violence, negativity, distrust, division, racism, vitriol, and Covid-related challenges and losses in the world, debilitating feelings of fear, anxiety, depression, alienation, and feeling emotionally and psychologically “stuck” are pervasive. We all at times feel as if we need to turn to a more positive, uplifting, and inspiring page in our life’s book, and with great optimism and fervor for enjoying far brighter days ahead, jump-start our lives. Additionally, many of us perceive that we are forever shackled to our past, our lot in life, and to an unappealing or demoralizing future. I CAN TELL YOU THAT THIS IS NOT THE CASE! Or put in another, more poetic way, “Be tired, mired, and so uninspired—no more!”

STARTING TODAY, make each and every choice that you are blessed to be presented with—-be it big or small— a positive, constructive, and beneficial one. Baby-step, by baby-step, positive choice, by positive choice, your confidence, spirit, optimism, feelings of self-esteem and self-worth, and your self-image will begin to elevate. All of which will give you the highly empowering motivation to continue to make positive life choices for yourself, for those you love, and for others—whether you know them or not, without any expected payback to you, karmic or otherwise. Making the conscious choice to perform unconditional kind, supportive, and/or loving acts is pure, soul-nourishing “Altruistic Love.” It is the highest of all loves and the most heart and soul nourishing, empowering, and elevating love. It is an everybody-wins-big-time love to be embraced and practiced.

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You can immediately jump-start and begin to dramatically improve your life, your self-image, and your ability to live your very best and highest life, by beginning today to zestfully seize each and every opportunity to make a choice or decision that you’re presented with, and make it a positive, constructive, and enhancing one for you, those you love, and for others. These choices will light-up your life, heart, and soul, as well as the lives, hearts, and souls of those you love and others whom you elevate by your thoughtfulness, kindness, caring, and love.

Thank you for taking the time to read my essay. I’m deeply grateful, and may all of your choices be positive and loving ones.

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Do you want to Choreograph your Career by Consistently implementing Conscious, Constructive, success-evoking Choices, made with Cognitive Clarity? Learn more about Ken Lindner’s book, Career Choreography: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Finding the Right Job and Achieving Huge Success and Happiness in my article for Thrive Global: “Prepare Your Pandemic Pivot with Ken Lindner’s 8C’s“

Prepare Your Pandemic Pivot with Ken Lindner’s 8C’s

Ken Lindner graduated Harvard University, Magna Cum Laude, and from Cornell Law School. Ken’s college honors thesis was devoted to decision-making and he has been an ardent student of the dynamics of the positive life choice since then. Besides “ASPIRE HIGHER”, he has written 5 other books. To learn more, please go to positivelifechoicepsychology.com

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Meet Ken Lindner at Stephen Wise Temple

Tuesday, December 7 at 7:30 p.m.

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Thank you IPW Anaheim 2019! #travel #IPW19The post appea...

Thank you IPW Anaheim 2019! #travel #IPW19

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