Full Width Blog

20 Apr 2018
Comments: 0

Healthy Living: 4 Things to Practice Every Day

Staying healthy doesn’t require several hours at the gym or counting calories at every meal. There are various ways you can achieve overall wellness by incorporating a few simple steps into your daily routine. Here are some of the best head-to-toe health strategies for everyday life.

Drink plenty of water. Modern society has created endless options for buyers. The problem with this is that we may not always make the best decision when it comes to what we consume. This is especially important to remember when we decide what to drink each day. In order to prevent dehydration, the general rule is to drink at least eight cups of water each day. Aside from keeping you hydrated, drinking this amount of water also gets rid of wastes, regulates body temperature, guards sensitive tissues from harm, and lubricates and protects joints.

If you aren’t yet drinking eight cups of water daily, make it a part of your new routine. One easy way to get started is to carry around a reusable water bottle and set a goal to fill it up as many times as needed throughout the day.
Get enough sleep. If you find yourself jittery at night, try taking a moment to clear your mind and breathe. When you incorporate deep breaths before bedtime, this eases you into relaxing, which inevitably makes you more likely to fall asleep. If you experience restlessness frequently at night, you may want to consider the underlying cause. Are you stressed about upcoming projects? Have you been fighting with a friend recently? Whatever the cause may be, acknowledge it and find a way to calm your mind. Getting an adequate amount of rest helps to fight off illness, strengthens cognition, improves decision-making capabilities, and offers many more important health benefits.

Eat well. If you fill your body with junk food, it’s likely you’re going to experience its many aftereffects like feeling sluggish and having less desire to move. According to many dieticians, when it comes to food, the best thing to do is to eat “clean.” This means staying away from processed foods and opting for whole foods like fresh vegetables and fruits. Set a goal for yourself each day to eat a rainbow of colors. This will help to maximize your nutrient intake.
Walk as much as you can and stay active. Have you ever heard of the “move it or lose it” expression? If you think about it within the context of health, it’s pretty accurate. When we don’t move and exercise regularly, the major muscle groups in our bodies have no chance of getting stronger. Our bones also weaken, and it becomes harder to manage weight and blood pressure.

Both walking and taking the stairs are two painless ways to incorporate more activity into your life. Another way to add more walking or movement is to find a job that helps with your health goals—like becoming a dog walker. This particular job has considerable health benefits. It requires exercise, allows you to spend time with dogs, and gives you the opportunity to get fresh air every day. In addition, according to several studies, walking dogs regularly lowers your risks for high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. It also allows you to benefit from the feel-good brain chemicals that you get when you pet a dog. Bottom line: The more you move, the better.
The most important takeaway here is to care for your body. You only live once, and you should be as healthy and happy as possible. These tips will help you to achieve both.

About the Author: Julie Morris

Ms. Morris is a life and career coach who strives to help others live the best lives that they can. She believes she can relate to clients who feel run over by life because of her own experiences. She spent years in an unfulfilling career in finance before deciding to help people in other ways.

Photo credit: Pixabay

16 Mar 2018
Comments: 0

Break Up with the Past and Start Living in the Present

While some people try to escape from the past, others don’t want to let go. Nonetheless, both types carry the burden of their past, not being able to focus on the present and the fleeting moments of happiness.

Your past is a part of you – your past experiences have shaped you into the person you are now and you shouldn’t reject them. However, you shouldn’t hold on to your past either because it will make you blind to the present opportunities.

Reliving your past experiences and immersing yourself in memories will be a source of great personal dissatisfaction, too. You may have certain regrets over the mistakes you made in the past. You may feel nostalgic about the way your life once was. This will always prevent you from moving on, embracing change and taking the opportunities that come your way.

Thus, you need to learn to free yourself from the chains of your past and recognise the happiness of the present.

Accept your current position

When people are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives, they tend to make excuses. In the attempt to feel better about themselves, they rationalise their situation despite the fact that deep down, they know what the problem is. Whether they’re afraid to change their lives or believe that they are helpless and cannot take control, they turn to the past when things were better and simpler. Not only does this contribute to their misery, but it also keeps them stagnant, trapped in the past and oblivious to the present.

Thus, you need to stop turning to the past for happiness and find it in the present. In order to achieve this, you need to take an objective look at yourself and your current position and accept yourself for who you are. This way, you’ll be able to finally make the decision to let go and move on. Only then will you be able to fully present and aware of your present experiences.

Forgive yourself and others

At some point in our lives, we’ve all been hurt. We’ve made wrong decisions that affected our lives negatively. We’ve opened up to someone, felt vulnerable and were neglected, overlooked or turned down. However, by holding on to your pain, you will keep experiencing it over and over again. It will bring negativity to your life, which will make you sceptical, distrustful and too harsh on yourself.

Fortunately, there’s a solution – forgiveness. You need to forgive yourself for the mistakes you’ve made and learn from them instead. You should also forgive the people who hurt you, too. Try to put yourself in their shoes and see the entire situation from their perspective. Acceptance and forgiveness will set you free and let you enjoy the present moment.

Express your feelings

If you keep trying to suppress your feelings, they will eventually come to the surface of your consciousness. Whether you’ve had a traumatic experience or simply cannot let go of the past, talking to someone can help you move on. You may even realise that you’ve been overreacting and that everything is actually much simpler, less serious.

In addition, another person, such as your friend or a counsellor, may help you take a look at your life from another perspective. Professional therapy methods, such as the accredited hypnotherapy approach, may help you overcome the challenges in your life that are rooted in your subconscious. Hypnotherapy can also help you change your negative thought patterns that keep leading you back to the past.

Surround yourself with the right people

The people around you have a major impact on your life. They should inspire you, motivate you and make you feel loved and good about yourself. Those who keep dragging you down and criticising you for every step you make or who were once in your life, but left you when you needed them the most aren’t worthy of your love.

You shouldn’t waste your energy on the wrong people, but surround yourself with individuals who will push you to go forward, inspire you to take risks and motivate you to improve yourself. Those who were once your friends should be left in the past as part of wonderful, but past experiences.

Practice mindfulness

Mindful meditation is one of the most effective ways of shifting your focus to the present moment. This practice will teach you to embrace the present and maintain a state of gentle awareness throughout your life. Mindfulness will also help you embrace your thoughts and feelings as they are instead of letting them overwhelm you. Of course, you will need some time to become mindful, but with regular practice, you’ll learn to live in the present.

Focusing on your past will prevent you from recognising the happiness and joy hidden in the present moments. So, learn to leave the past behind and open your eyes and heart to the world around you.

28 Feb 2018
Comments: 0

Life In the Middle Ages: Facing the Feisty Fifties

I see my folks are gettin’ on

And I watch their bodies change

I know they see the same in me

And it makes us both feel strange

No matter how you tell yourself

It’s what we all go through

Those lines are pretty hard to take

When they’re staring back at you.

~ Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt

I got my period on Valentine’s Day. Talk about a literal red-letter day! Never have I been so unabashedly joy-filled at the sight of blood. For the first time, I truly appreciate a euphemism both girls and women have used for generations to refer to their Moontime: “my friend.”

Perhaps I should explain that I am not thirteen. I’m not 37. I’m 50, and this is my first cycle in five months. Menopause swooped in without warning last fall and I dried up like the Sahara. To suddenly bleed after a week in which I did, in fact, feel premenstrual is confirmation that my body’s still experimenting with this shift. It’s not a done deal. There’s yet time to adjust to the idea of being a Crone — and being eligible for membership in AARP (you’ve got to be kidding!)

Embracing the “F” Word

Now that the largest cohort in history is graying en masse, someone turns 50 approximately every eight seconds. Even this formidable fleet can’t stem the tide of aging jokes, however. At 50, the good-natured ribbing begins in earnest. My friend Faith, who celebrated her 50^th just weeks before me, recalled a card she received when she turned 40: “I’m going to have to say the ‘F’ word: forty! Forty! Forty!”

We lamented that the greeting card industry doesn’t seem to think we have a sense of humor a decade later. Why isn’t there a card for 50-year-olds that reads, “I’m at the age where I can freely use the ‘F’ word: fifty, fifty, fifty!!”

My parents, who do not perceive themselves as “old” in their eighties, sent me a hilarious Dr. Seuss parody of “Thing One” and “Thing Two” called, “It’s a Fifty Thing!” The birthday card included lines such as, “Thing Fifty can groove to the latest CD. (And with bifocal lenses, Thing Fifty can see!)”

Hm. It’s one “thing” to major in gerontology and enjoy working with elders in your twenties; quite a different matter when you’re on the cusp of joining a collective that’s marginalized in Western society and rendered virtually invisible.

I remember my mom telling me with pride about a man at the Department of Motor Vehicles flirting with her when she retook her driver’s test at age 65. I was 35 at the time, and even then, wondered aloud in my public speaking class “how much longer” men would continue to flirt with me.

From the vantage point of an additional fifteen years, I find my 30-something fear rather quaint.

Redefining Wrinkles and “Cool”

The fifties promise to be an intriguing balance of living in an aging body while possessing a certain ineffable wisdom and spirit we hadn’t accessed in our younger years. Although the twenty-somethings and teens I meet today often seem wise far beyond where my generation was at their age, due no doubt to the rapid evolution of humanity as a whole, there is much to be said for the joie de vivre that accrues with vintage.

Wrinkles signify ripeness. There’s a reason the honorific, “sage” is usually conferred on an elder.

I met an 83-year-old woman with close-cropped silver hair streaked fuchsia, wearing peace sign earrings. I commented that it was so cool to see “a woman of her maturity” thus attired, to which she replied, “Oh, I wasn’t cool when I was young!”

Reconciling body image with spiritual awareness is, paradoxically, only an issue if one chooses to focus on the physical. When the body becomes background — as it often is de facto in youth, with parts that are well oiled, shapely, firm, and thus, easier to “ignore” — our essence shines forth, and that’s what people see when they read the story in our eyes.

A Bountiful Harvest

Fifty is a time to harvest our joy — and acknowledge evidence of our mortality. While several of my contemporaries have already matched wits with serious illness, and a few have transitioned to the other side of life, I’ve also watched three dear friends meet and marry their life partners in their fifties. As I’ve been casting my soul mate net for a while now, this is heartening news.

Life in the Middle Ages can be bountiful, as Oprah Winfrey, our ultimate generational role model for accomplished aging, said of her 50^th birthday: “All these years I’ve been taking lessons from life experiences and feeling like I was growing into myself. Finally, I feel grown. More like myself than I’ve ever been. If it’s true what Maya Angelou says, that the fifties represent everything you were meant to be, all I can say is, watch out.”

Riley Mackenzie* embodies Angelou’s decree. In her fifties, she studied the subtleties of Argentine Tango, became a serious ceramics artist, and swung from a high trapeze. Now 68, she’s just back from a leisurely road trip around the periphery of the U.S. with her husband of almost, yes, 50 years. She’s also reinventing her marketing business with a partner, another vital woman in her late fifties. Mackenzie says emphatically, “It’s the most fun I could ever imagine having!”

Hot Flashes…of Inspiration

Age, like everything else in life, is a matter of perspective. Six months before my milestone birthday, I fell into conversation with a lively older gentleman as we waited to cross the street. He was searching his pockets for his eyeglasses, and, after I helped him find them, we walked together for a few minutes. He told me he was 100 years old, and regaled me with tales of his life. As we reached a parting of the ways, he turned to me and asked, quite seriously, “So tell me, young lady, have you graduated from college yet?”

Now, that’s the ultimate tonic for the “chronologically gifted”!

As I sit in a local teahouse, sipping rooibos and savoring my feminine cycle along with some exquisite chocolate mousse, I’m tickled by these words from The Reconnections website, on meeting the beloved: “I saw a license plate the other day, on a car belonging to a woman aged 50 plus: ‘Give me chocolate, and no one gets hurt.’ I thought that one was pretty neat until I saw a better one: ‘I’m over 50 and I’m still hot — except now, it comes in flashes.'”

How true. Flashes of insight. Flashes of inspiration. Flashes of unmitigated delight at just how extraordinary life on this beautiful blue-green planet can be. One author refers to the second half-century as “Jubilee Time.”

I’m ready to party. Considering how many playmates I’ll have in the galactic sandbox, it’s destined to be an unsurpassed blast. Bring it on: fifty! Fifty! Fifty!

* name changed to honor her privacy

About the Author:

Amara Rose can pluck a graying hair from her scalp at 25 mph; driving any faster, she waits for a red light. To see what she’s done with her first half-century, visit LiveYourLight.com. Offer her dark chocolate and you open the doorway to friendship.

13 Feb 2018
Comments: 0

The 4 Functions of Life

Photo By Spencer Watson

Four Ways We Can Control Our Health & Balance

Many of us remain unaware of the essential processes of life until some devastating dysfunction or disease demands our attention. These essential processes include respiration, consumption, movement, and mental activity. These four functions work in unison to help avoid dysfunction and disease by regulating the body and keeping it in balance. Typically, imbalances begin as barely perceptible, but gradually increase from poor movement, shallow breathing, rushed eating, and negative thinking, all of which increases the imbalance, and eventually causing pain, structural misalignment, and disease. People these days need to reconnect with the natural principles of life through the interrelationship of respiration, ingestion, movement, and mental activity. These principles, promoted widely by the practice of Sotai, perfectly reflect the philosophy of Natural Mobility to re-establish an effortlessly natural relationship with our environment. Below is a list of the 4 functions of life

1) A long Breath Leads to a Long Life.

Respiration is the most vital function of life. We cannot survive for more than a few minutes without breathing! Deep diaphragmatic breathing is a key to good health; the healthier a person is, the deeper their breath is. Abdominal massage and diaphragmatic breathing before bed is a good way to relax the nervous system and prepare it for rest.

2) Its Not Just What You Eat, But How You Eat.

Diet is something that is unique to each person, and it should be taken as a personal responsibility to learn what foods agree with you, or what dietary system you find works best for your digestive system. The more important thing than what we eat, but how well the food is chewed and digested. If one is thinking about stressful things at mealtime, or watching something distracting, or eating on the move, it will affect digestion. Ingestion should be deliberate, there should be a mental preparation for eating, you should pay attention to your food at mealtime to that your body can prepare for what you are trying to digest.

3) Natural Movement Principles

Efficiency and balance in movement is key. The movement practice of Natural Mobility is its main focal point. The idea is to aim for ease and effortless movements, discovering the most efficient movement patterns to replace your imbalanced movement habits. The aim of movement therapy and mobility training is to release the abnormal tension and facilitate the recovery of functional and structural integrity. This is accomplished by learning to relax the body, breathe into your movements, and move in congruent ways rather than forcing things.

4) Mindfulness and Productive Thinking

Mindfulness and positive thinking may not be as obviously necessary as breathing, but it is equally important. If you are being mindful, you are focused in the moment, whereas negative thinking requires your thoughts to be fixated on a past that cannot be changed, or a future that has not yet happened. It is vital to deliberately focus our thoughts on the things that we love and cherish that are right in front of us, and be fully involved in our moment, our movement, our breathing. Our thoughts determine our circumstances, and we should be fixated on where we are, or where we want to go, not what we don’t want or what we fear.

Movement is life. Whether in his healing arts, martial arts, or movement training, Alex was always drawn to systems that involved deep personal development practice. He has observed that self-care is a key component in the healing process, as is refining our daily movement patterns. Subtle movement inefficiencies in daily life, such as how he sit, stand, walk, reach for things, lift things, walk up stairs, hold our pen, even the way we breathe can cumulatively lead to weakness and distortions that eventually lay the foundation for injuries and chronic tension & pain. These habitual patterns are often what leads to the deterioration of our bodies, or a plateau in performance.

Visit Alex online at: naturalmobility.net