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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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24 Jun 2019
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Healthy Eating, Self-Care and You

 

If you are interested in maintaining your physical health without neglecting your mental health as you age, then self-care should be a critical aspect of your daily life. However, it can be difficult to know where to start. Changing your diet is one of the most effective changes you can make in your everyday routine that will prove to have a lasting impact, both in the immediate short-term and across the years and decades to come.

Here are some ways you can begin to change your eating habits, ideas for maintaining a healthy eating routine in the long run, and cooking ideas to keep it entertaining for yourself.

Start with small alterations to your existing habits

Changing your habits is all about making small alterations to your current schedule that eventually add up to an entirely new routine. While you may know that following a whole-food plant-based diet consisting of mostly vegetables is one of the best ways to ensure your overall health, it can be difficult to jump in without getting accustomed to your new habits. To begin, try swapping out one meal a day with healthier food. Be sure to use minimal amounts of sugar and salt, or none at all. As you get used to this routine, add another healthy meal, and so on until your entire routine is that much better for you.

Adjusting your portion sizes

The size of the portions you consume are almost as important as the quality of the food you consume. Many people in Western cultures are accustomed to almost comically large portions focused on providing good value for their money, where they have enough food to eat past feeling full.

As you begin your healthy eating journey, new portion sizes may seem small by comparison. Eating healthier, smaller portions will help you feel full for longer, without the uncomfortable, overindulged feelings that accompany eating too much. Although there are many ways to get started, you can easily take control of your portion sizes by signing up for a service that delivers fresh food to your home. Not only will you receive great food, but you also won’t have to find the time to take that trip to the local market after work.

Establish a culinary routine you will maintain

The specific time you eat your largest meal of the day doesn’t really matter, nor does the frequency at which you consume meals. While there is a small amount of evidence to suggest that several smaller meals throughout the day may be slightly better for your system than the traditional three square meals a day, what is far more important is that you establish a routine you are likely to maintain over a long period of time. Regularity, maintenance, and your own dedication to your diet are what will ultimately help you to become a healthier person.

Broaden your picture of self-care

Adjusting your eating habits can help you feel fitter, sleep better, and have an overall effect on your mood. But food is only one part of the self-care puzzle. It’s also important to have a healthy way to deal with stress. There is a strong correlation between chronic stress at work and substance abuse, so it’s crucial to find healthy coping mechanisms to deal with feelings of being overwhelmed.

Exercising is one of the best ways to battle stress, and it has been repeatedly shown to help as a natural mood booster. If pain or soreness contribute to a lack of exercise, look for ways to lessen the pain and reduce inflammation. For example, CBD is a great supplement to consider to help you get moving and recover more quickly from a workout, and research points to this being a solid option to reduce inflammation. If a workout session isn’t possible to squeeze in, whether due to your schedule or physical condition, a simple meditation routine can do wonders for your mood, and they’re easy to do at home. Simply set aside part of a room that doesn’t see a lot of foot traffic, clear it of electronics, add a mat and a few pieces of calming decor, and follow a guided practice. Even five or 10 minutes can give you a mental health boost.

Self-care is ultimately about finding a way to deal with the stresses of daily life. Healthy eating, used alongside exercise and a regular routine, can significantly help you feel physically and mentally better each day.

Author, Ascension Lifestyle Contributor:

Stephanie Haywood of mylifeboost.com.

Photo Credit: iStock

03 Jun 2019
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Why Nutritional Psychiatry is the Future of Mental Health Treatment

A lack of essential nutrients is known to contribute to the onset of poor mental health in people suffering from anxiety and depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and ADHD. Nutritional psychiatry is a growing discipline that focuses on the use of food and supplements to provide these essential nutrients as part of an integrated or alternative treatment for mental health disorders.

But nutritional approaches for these debilitating conditions are not widely accepted by mainstream medicine. Treatment options tend to be limited to official National Institute for Care Excellence (NICE) guidelineswhich recommend talking therapies and antidepressants.

Use of Antidepressants

Antidepressant use has more than doubled in recent years. In England 64.7m prescriptions were issued for antidepressants in 2016 at a cost of £266.6m. This is an increase of 3.7m on the number of items prescribed in 2015 and more than double than the 31m issued in 2006.

A recent Oxford University study found that antidepressants were more effective in treating depression than placebo. The study was led by Dr Andrea Cipriani who claimed that depression is under treated. Cipriani maintains that antidepressants are effective and a further 1m prescriptions should be issued to people in the UK.

This approach suggests that poor mental health caused by social conditions is viewed as easily treated by simply dispensing drugs. But antidepressants are shunned by people whom they could help because of the social stigma associated with mental ill-health which leads to discrimination and exclusion.

More worrying is the increase in the use of antidepressants by children and young people. In Scotland, 5,572 children under 18 were prescribed antidepressants for anxiety and depression in 2016. This figure has more than doubled since 2009/2010.

But according to British psychopharmacologist Professor David Healy, 29 clinical trials of antidepressant use in young people found no benefits at all. These trials revealed that instead of relieving symptoms of anxiety and depression, antidepressants caused children and young people to feel suicidal.

Healy also challenges their safety and effectiveness in adults. He believes that antidepressants are over-prescribed and that there is little evidence that they are safe for long-term use. Antidepressants are said to create dependency, have unpleasant side effects and cannot be relied upon to always relieve symptoms.

 

Nutrition and Poor Mental Health

In developed countries such as the UK people eat a greater variety of foodstuffs than ever before – but it doesn’t follow that they are well nourished. In fact, many people do not eat enough nutrients that are essential for good brain health, opting for a diet of heavily processed food containing artificial additives and sugar.

The link between poor mental health and nutritional deficiencies has long been recognised by nutritionists working in the complementary health sector. However, psychiatrists are only now becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of using nutritional approaches to mental health, calling for their peers to support and research this new field of treatment.

It is now known that many mental health conditions are caused by inflammation in the brain which ultimately causes our brain cells to die. This inflammatory response starts in our gut and is associated with a lack of nutrients from our food such as magnesium, omega-3 fatty acids, probiotics, vitamins and minerals that are all essential for the optimum functioning of our bodies.

Recent research has shown that food supplements such as zinc, magnesium, omega 3, and vitamins B and D3 can help improve people’s mood, relieve anxiety and depression and improve the mental capacity of people with Alzheimer’s.

Magnesium is one of most important minerals for optimal health, yet many people are lacking in it. One study found that a daily magnesium citrate supplement led to a significant improvement in depression and anxiety, regardless of age, gender or severity of depression. Improvement did not continue when the supplement was stopped.

Omega-3 fatty acids are another nutrient that is critical for the development and function of the central nervous system – and a lack has been associated with low mood, cognitive decline and poor comprehension.

The role of probiotics – the beneficial live bacteria in your digestive system – in improving mental health has also been explored by psychiatrists and nutritionists, who found that taking them daily was associated with a significant reduction in depression and anxiety. Vitamin B complex and zinc are other supplements found to reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression.

 

Hope for the Future?

These over-the-counter” supplements are widely available in supermarkets, chemists and online health food stores, although the cost and quality may vary. For people who have not responded to prescription drugs or who cannot tolerate the side effects, nutritional intervention can offer hope for the future.

There is currently much debate over the effectiveness of antidepressants. The use of food supplements offer an alternative approach that has the potential to make a significant difference to the mental health of all age groups.

The emerging scientific evidence suggests that there should be a bigger role for nutritional psychiatry in mental health within conventional health services. If the burden of mental ill health is to be reduced, GPs and psychiatrists need to be aware of the connection between food, inflammation and mental illness.

Medical education has traditionally excluded nutritional knowledge and its association with disease. This has led to a situation where very few doctors in the UK have a proper understanding of the importance of nutrition. Nutritional interventions are thought to have little evidence to support their use to prevent or maintain well-being and so are left to dietitians, rather than doctors, to advise on.

But as the evidence mounts up, it is time for medical education to take nutrition seriously so that GPs and psychiatrists of the future know as much about its role in good health as they do about anatomy and physiology. The state of our mental health could depend on it.

 

 

About the Author: Joyce Cavaye

Joyce Cavaye is a senior Lecturer in Health, Well-Being and Social Care at The Open University.

**This article was originally feature at The Conversation and is re-posted here under a creative commons license.

03 Jun 2019
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Meeting The Darkness: dealing with your feelings about climate change

The photographer Paul Nicklen said he wanted to show people what a starving polar bear really looked like. Sealegacy/Caters News

How do we be present to the suffering caused by climate change – and not let it overwhelm us, but rather move through it to a place of hope and empowerment?

It sometimes feels like an unrelenting onslaught. News story after news story about the horrors climate change is wreaking upon us. Floods, fires, cities filled with smoke, a melting Arctic and more and more new refugee crises. And of course most of these stories end with the virtual inevitability of worse times ahead.

What we don’t know is how much worse it will get, and when we will turn the corner towards sanity. These are the massive uncertainties that can weigh on us and cause us to disengage from that precious gift of this one life we have been given.

Uncertainty is one of the places we human beings are most uncomfortable. When faced with not knowing, we often settle on a negative outcome just to have a story to tell ourselves that will bring some comfort of certainty in our own minds. Like when your family member is late for dinner and you convince yourself they’ve had a car accident instead of the more obvious possibility that they were simply delayed. We detest uncertainty. It makes us uncomfortable. And yet learning to live with uncertainty is one of the life skills that is most called for at this time.

All of this challenging news about the state of our climate, our planet, and what it might mean for human civilization can indeed be overwhelming. Many people are now entering into a state of eco-grief. In psychological literature the term “solastalgia” has been coined to refer to the distress caused by environmental decline. It is derived from the notion of nostalgia for the comfort of home — the effects of witnessing the place you identify as home being threatened or destroyed. Therapists and clergy are now developing practices to help people cope with this new a new category of psychological stress.

And indeed there is much to grieve about. Luckily, grief is something we humans know quite a lot about. While the scale of ecological grief is new, grief itself is very well known terrain. And while climate grief is different in scale and focus than individual grief at a loss, they look quite similar in terms of process.

The key takeaway is that the difficult work of facing the reality cannot be avoided. Yes there will be denial, anger and forms of bargaining as outlined in the seminal work by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on death and dying. But what we know most about grief is that it is a healthy, necessary and healing process to cope with loss. The extent to which one avoids or subverts grief is the extent to which one delays the potential for healing.

And so we must sit with it.

We must acknowledge our feelings about the reality of an increasingly unstable climate and the innumerable repercussions it will have on the human and nonhuman worlds. We must let ourselves meet this darkness face to face, so that we can move through it rather than be weighed down by it.

And, conversely, we must remember how much we also have to be joyful for. Those that move through grief often talk about coming out the other side to a new kind of aliveness. A deeper joy and appreciation of what is. Rooting in gratitude can create the safe container we need to let ourselves feel our grief without becoming mired in it. A daily practice of naming what you are grateful for can give us a reservoir of love and appreciation that both enhances the joy of life and gives us the strength to be present with the darkness.

So, how to deal with your feelings of climate grief?

First, offer gratitude for what you do have. The relationships in your life, the abundance around you, clean water and clean air. And we — each of us reading this on a computer or smartphone — we each have so much. We have more than most any other cohort of humans have ever had. Consider a daily gratitude practice or keeping a gratitude journal. Go for walk in nature and re-root your system by soaking in the outstanding beauty of the amazing world we now inhabit.

Second, feel your feelings. Let yourself be sad, or confused, or angry. Talk to a friend and share your feelings. Grief needs to be heard and witnessed. Watch a movie and cry your eyes out. Journal about it. Shout into the wind. Let it out. Let it come through you and be released. All of these things will help you along the difficult healing journey.

Third, get comfortable with uncertainty. Humanity is on a roller coaster the likes of which we have never seen. Change is the only certainty. Of course our wisest selves have always known that certainty and control are illusions. Now, we are invited to practice that eternal spiritual skill of living in the present and accepting the unknowable nature of the future. Surely there is a gift in that.

And lastly, know that your grief — reaching into the darkness and actually feeling it — is a natural and healthy response to life in these times. In fact is a valuable contribution to the collective emotional work that is needed now.

You are not alone with these feelings.

Part of the work of saving the world is grieving for the parts of it that we may lose or which we have already lost. Let yourself be transformed by your grief, the way compost enriches the soil, to make fertile ground for the new life — however that may look.

This is the first of a series of articles exploring Climate Hope. Please send me a message or email to let me know what you think. We’re all in this together.

About the Author: Karen Mahon in Opinion | April 18th 2019
[email protected]

https://www.nationalobserver.com

 

03 Jun 2019
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Your Cells Are Listening: How Talking To Your Body Can Help You Heal

Your Cells are Listening

Every part of your body has its own consciousness or its own soul.

These transformative words, spoken by indigenous medicine women, began my journey within to discover the extraordinary healing capacity of the human body.

When this perspective was introduced to me, I was suffering from a severe chronic pain disorder. I suddenly imagined incorporating this concept into my meditation routine.

I thought, can my body hear me… can I talk to it to gain its cooperation in healing this condition?

The Path to Freedom

That night, after reaching a state of deep calm through meditation, I inwardly engaged my body in a heartfelt conversation, with hope, but having no idea what to expect. After about one hour of this focused communication, something amazing happened.

My tissues began to respond. Connective tissue pulled and stretched apart layers of scar tissue. Nerves fired and my calf muscles began to perform flexion and extension exercises independently of my conscious control.

As this response continued, one of my calf muscles that had become paralyzed by the neuropathic condition — diagnosed as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy — came back to life as electric-like jolts shot through the area.

My heart pounded as I realized that the path to my freedom from this condition had finally begun.

Guidelines for Dynamic Healing

With a background in acupuncture and Oriental medicine, I knew too well how prevalent chronic pain is in this country and I wondered what the implications of this phenomenon could mean to so many others who were suffering.

As I continued to make progress with my condition, I organized my approach into a system that I could teach to clients and shifted my professional focus to hypnotherapy.

When instructing my clients, I explain that a regular meditation practice is necessary to train the brain to enter alpha and theta brain wave states. While in these states, communication between the conscious mind and the physical body is dramatically enhanced.

I have found that when communicating, there are three key steps to gaining the cooperation of the body:

  • Approach your body with genuine compassion, understanding that it is made up of conscious cells who experience emotions.
  • Build trust by engaging your body in mental conversations about your desire for the two of you to cooperate and overcome the ailment.
  • Allow changes in the conversation by using different thoughts and words that elicit spontaneous elevated emotions.

From my experience, the above guidelines are necessary to achieve dynamic healing responses in the body.

The Force of human Intention

I recently came across a very similar set of factors that were discovered by researcher Cleve Backster, who spent 36 years studying biocommunication in plant, animal and human cells. He referred to these factors as real intent, attunement, and spontaneity.

Backster, formerly an interrogation specialist for the CIA, wrote about the defining moment which led him to his real work in this world, in his book Primary Perception.

This moment occurred one February morning in 1966 when he decided to monitor the Dracaena plant in his lab utilizing polygraph equipment.

He attached the electrodes to a leaf and began to think about ways that he might induce a surge in electrical activity in the plant. In humans this surge in electrical activity is associated with intense emotions.

He suddenly imagined burning the electroded leaf. The same instant this idea entered his mind, the polygraph pen shot to the top of the chart showing an extreme reaction on the part of the plant.Amazed, he walked to his secretary’s desk to retrieve a set of matches while pondering the possibility that this plant was somehow detecting the force of human intention.

Can Plants become Attuned to their Primary Care Takers?

When he returned with the matches, the plant was still showing the same high level reaction which would interfere with tracking additional changes on the chart. Backster decided to “remove the threat” by returning the matches to the desk.

At this point, the chart displayed a downward trend as the plant apparently began to calm down. When Backster attempted to repeat the same results by pretending that he was going to burn the plant, there was no reaction. The plant seemed to sense the difference between real and artificial intent.

He eventually discovered that plants become attuned to their primary care takers, responding to both their positive and negative emotions and to their return after being away for a time. Chart findings also showed that plants prioritize the emotions of their primary care takers over the emotions of others nearby.

Signs of Consciousness

Backster later expanded his research to include testing human cells for signs of consciousness.

He collected white blood cells from human donors, electroded them in a test tube and then recorded the cells’ reactions as the donors experienced different emotional states. He found that spontaneous emotions were necessary in order to elicit an electrical reaction in the cells.

For instance, if a donor forced herself to feel an emotion, the cells would not respond. However, when she received a distressing phone call from her daughter, the cells reacted significantly.

He noted that distance seemed to be irrelevant in these experiments. For example, a donor left his electroded cells behind in the lab, then kept a detailed log of any stressful emotions experienced on his trip home to another state, such as missing a turn on the freeway, standing in a long line at the airport, and the take-off of his plane.

Later, his logged incidents compared with the chart recording showed strong correlations between the timing of the stressful events and the electrical reactions in his cells. The chart became quiet again when he arrived home and went to sleep.

Raw Creative Healing Ability

These experiments were conducted while using equipment that screened out electromagnetic radiation — the usual energies used for information transmission. The cells behaved as if the screens weren’t there, suggesting that this communication is carried by a field still unidentified by conventional science.

Some scientists believe that the further development of quantum physics may help guide us to understand this field that communicates emotional intent between living things. Quantum Entanglement is a process where two particles of matter which have interacted with each other, still behave as if they are connected after being separated by many miles.

When an energetic change is made to the properties (position, momentum and rotational spin) of one of the particles, the properties of the other distant particle will change at the same instant.

This scientific phenomenon and the research of Cleve Backster, point to the Eastern concept of oneness — the view that all of nature is interdependent. Ancient cultures understood this interconnection as a living universal energy field that sustains life while guiding the evolution of consciousness throughout the universe.

The meditation techniques involved in my practice bring the mind into attunement with this field. Energy from this field is then focused into a physical healing event through clear intention — delivered by means of a conversation that evokes spontaneous emotions — and attunes the physical body to the conscious mind.

This method which I call Antara (Sanskrit for within), enables one to experience the raw creative healing ability generated by an alliance of the mind and body with this living universal energy field.

Source:  antarahealingarts

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