How is your winter holiday unfolding? If you’ve participated enthusiastically in the bacchanal this year, it’s not too late to hop on a little holiday health recovery.
This year, I tried something that felt a little like swimming against the current – improving my level of fitness through the early winter and holidays. I always have a special place in my heart for people who take Kripalu nutrition programs like Detox, Mindful Table/Nutrition & Cooking Immersion, or Integrative Weight Loss between Thanksgiving and the winter holidays – something about it seems brilliantly counterintuitive, but people who do take these programs later say their holidays are more mindful, less stressful and less filled with candy and rich food & drink.
My holiday fitness plan involved a “Get Fit” program at my local community center that met twice weekly until last week. Calisthenics! Running and skipping and lifting weights was the order of the day, and while I may or may not have lost a little weight (while partaking in holiday cheer), I certainly feel stronger, have more energy and feel better. I recommend launching health and fitness right before or in the middle of the holidays if that appeals to you in the least. Just keep your expectations in check. I find it manages the stress of the season, and I just feel good doing it.
Holiday health recovery ideas:
- Focus on moving more. Take a walk with someone in your family or a friend, or put on your favorite music and have a disco break.
- Begin your sugar sabbatical (too soon? OK, you can wait till the New Year).
- Add good food with an extra vegetable or two.
- Drinking a bit more good clean warm water can move things in a good direction.
- Treat yourself to daily morning warm oil massage. The Ayurveda abhyanga oil massage calms and feeds frazzled nerves and is a great way to begin your recovery.
As the holiday season winds down, remember to savor the magic of this special time of year. This is the week to take stock of your hits and misses in the game that was 2016, and visioning and dreaming the year to come. May your 2017 be filled with health, happiness, and basking in the brilliant light of your own true self.
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Not MDMA (though I do understand that when used skillfully, it can be a healer). I’m talking about life. Transcendent moments are our birthright. Moments of everyday ecstasy and wonder.
Everyday ecstasy is why I do yoga. It’s why I meditate and why I enjoy/suffer through the ups and downs of these long-term contemplative practices as my body ages, coming back over and over and over again. To taste that nectar of a momentary unitive state. The sweetness, the soma that is our birthright. Mind-body practices like yoga build resilience, in part because of how good a moment of unitive consciousness feels.
It’s why I’m studying plant spirit healing and plant initiations. I learn about how plants heal through (in addition to the regular study of plant medicine) non-ordinary conscious connection. My apprenticeship in plant spirits taught me how to listen deeply to plants and nature. To find and follow the golden thread that connects us.
Mindful Transcending
One definition of mindfulness is focusing on something (almost anything) to the point of complete absorption. We fall into deep wonder with whatever we are focusing on, allowing ourselves a moment of ecstatic clarity. When we practice mindfulness or communion with a moment, it gives us the ability to transcend. We can transcend the muddy muck of the day and see things in a different light. Transcending is excellent for supporting healthy behavior change. And it’s fun.
Ken Wilber says altered states become permanent traits through repetition and integration. I have journeyed in alchemical divinations and I have journeyed with the breath and music, with shaman and with plants. Each route is sweet and lovely and challenging and took me face to face with the wonder of this one wackily precious and miraculous life. No polluting drugs are necessary, and that’s a bit of a secret. You have everything you need to transcend right inside your own sweet little body. In fact, I find as I get older that I’m so sensitive to substances in general, that it’s just easier to go au natural.
Plant Spirit Healing
My shamanic study with plant spirit healing has been key to a certain awakening. Through this work, I’ve gotten to know a number of plants personally. To me, Tulsi is a red-haired woman with flowing green robes, a sister I go shopping with at the celestial power object store. To me, she is the full pantheon of goddesses of the yoga tradition. Yes, she’s Durga AND Lakshmi AND Kali and everyone else wrapped into one beautiful mega-goddess that if we give half a chance, might just save the entire planet, or show us the way. St. John’s Wort is golden light. If light could be a food, it would be St. John’s Wort for me. I can use the nourishment of this ally, particularly in the dark months of winter. Please be advised that what each of these plants is for me is not what they will be for you. I am not recommending them for all. This type of experience, however, getting to know a plant on a personal energetic level, bestows a different type of healing. It is a type of healing much needed today: earth-centric energy healing.
If this sounds a little “out there” to you, yes it is a bit. For many of you, sensation seekers and those who already talk to plants, for example, it’s not at all. There is a growing body of science to support the healing power of everyday ecstasy.
Later this year I will be offering an opportunity for you take a taste – to experience this work more deeply and see for yourself how it supports health and healing…stay tuned.
Happy Holidays and remember to fall into reverie whenever you get the chance!
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That would be now.
Regardless of where you stood on Tuesday’s election, it’s been a raw and wild ride. Change is certain. I hear many people say they’re scared. In the days leading up to the election, I was anxious. But now, not so much. By Wednesday I’d whipped right by fear and had gone straight to anger. Anger at those who didn’t vote. Anger that instead of traveling around this wonderful and really hurting country on a leisurely 2-year listening tour, Hilary chose to make tens of millions of dollars giving private speeches after she left the state department. I’m pretty mad. I’m even mad at Trump for the way he chose to run, and really pissed that it worked. I’m disappointed in everyone! Exhale, exhale, exhale. OK.
So now what?
It’s an excellent time to get strong – to get physically stronger. Start slow or not so slow, but if you wish you were in better physical shape, now is a really good time to take a step – look to your community center, or a gym or yoga or pilates studio. I recently joined a twice-weekly ‘get fit’ challenge and it’s impressive in what it’s doing to me, and I doing things and working at an intensity I simply would never ever do on my own. It’s a good thing.
It a wonderful time to get clear on who you are and what you mission in this gorgeous life might be. To that end, you might read my friend, mentor, colleague’s excellent book The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope. He asks some good questions that I hope help you frame out what your dharma might be. You can also work with plants – they’ll give you the score if you ask them.
Plants can offer healing self care. Herbalists would say it’s a wonderful time for nervines – rose, skullcap, tulsi to name just a few – these are plants that sooth and feed the nerves. Abhyanga oil massage is another nerve soother – I’ve been dipping myself in oil daily just because so many people are so upset, and the news is upset, and as I mentioned I’m pretty mad myself.
Something is on the way, I know not what. So, if you are scared and traumatized by Tuesday’s election. Rest, eat and cry. Get a massage or seven. That’s OK. But as soon as you are ready, there’s plenty to do and plenty to be.
No matter who you voted for last week, it’s time to get active, personally, collectively. May all be blessed.
Be well.
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What if your dreams are as important and as real as your waking life? What if your dreams are alive?
Leading psychologists actually say they are. Dr. Stephen Aizenstat (as well as many great yogis and thinkers such as the Dalai Lama and Eckart Tolle) says that you can awaken to your dreams, be deeply informed by them, and even change the outer world through your dreams.
This blows my nutritional biochemist’s mind! I want to learn more, hear what he has to say and explore it in my own dream life.
Sing it with me people – you know the tune:
Row, row, row your boat,
gently down the stream.
Merrily merrily merrily, merrily,
Life Is But A Dream!
Are you interested in awakening to your own dream life? I’ll be teaching with Dr. Aizenstat and the great yoga scholar, Stephen Cope, the last weekend of April at Kripalu – Yoga and the Global Dream Initiative.
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Can awakening and tending our dreams help us be creative enough to solve our greatest global issues? And if anyone can and should get involved with constructive dreaming, isn’t it those seekers of transcendence, the yogis? Can dreams help yogis save the planet? Stephen Aizenstat, Chancellor of Pacifica Graduate Institute, thinks so and I have to agree.
I’ve always been a pretty good sleeper (well, until menopause but that’s another story). For most of my life, I’ve slept the dream-free sleep of the dead. Close eyes, relax, zzzz, open eyes, off we go. However, as I’ve journeyed through life with a sleeping partner who truly struggles (he’s inspired by my ability to go offline so quickly and completely), I’ve become more curious as to what is happening during sleep consciousness, and if I am as dream-free as I think. So just what are dreams and why do we have them?
It’s great to be human. For so many reasons. One is that we can change our consciousness. We can go through our day be our beloved distractable selves, but then we can slow down, shift and drop into a meditative state – we can and do change our state of consciousness. Waking, sleeping, dreaming, meditating. While just what dreams are and why we dream is still a bit of a mystery, those of you who join us end of April for Yoga & The Global Dream Initiative, will be in the know after a weekend with some of the nation’s foremost thinkers on dreaming, yoga and consciousness.
I am endlessly curious as to what helps us realize who we truly are, and what gives us the clarity and courage to move toward that life. When I met Dr. Stephen Aizenstat at Pacifica last year, and heard him speak about the possibilities that waking up to our own dream consciousness has for our own and global healing, it was a “this is it!” aha for me. I have been concerned with how challenged we are with the global environmental crisis, and how even the most engaged vacillate between despair and delusion. Might this be a practical way for us to shift from despair to creative action? Don’t you want to find out?
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Much gratitude to those of you who answered my reader survey over the past month. It is deeply inspiring to learn about who we are, to hear what you value, the aspects of lifestyle that can be challenging for you, and how I do and can support you. I’ve contacted the lucky winner of books – yeah. Our path forward is clear, thanks to the results of the survey.
I’ll share the results of the reader survey in two charts. The first focuses on who we are as a group. 45 of you responded to the survey (great for first-time-out), and 97.78% (or 44) who responded were women. We scale a wide age range, and 2/3 of us are over 50. This feels right to me; I have been focused on integrative health through our lifespan and while that’s interesting to women in their 20’s, as life progresses interest in just how we live well, feel well, and be well throughout the journey tends to intensify. My life’s work is offering insight and mentoring to those interested in lifestyle as a spiritual path to wholeness. Seems we have found each other.
Next we asked what areas of lifestyle you find most challenging. Now, survey design aside (the 4 areas I chose do overlap, particularly when you get into resiliency, stress management, rest and relaxation), but I found the results interesting and informative. Here’s a summary chart:
When I look at how you listed your first, and your first two areas of greatest challenge, physical activity ends up on top. I hear you on that – maintaining an active lifestyle in today’s screen-centric sedentary culture can be a challenge for sure. It is for me, and I love to move! It’s a practice! I will be focusing on what science says about the role of physical activity in health and happiness over the next months, and giving you lots of ideas to weave it in. As we go through life, the type of physical activity that works for us changes, and our needs evolve. We’ll be talking about that, too.
The dance of stress and eating, which shared a second-overall-but important place on your priorities list, again give a nod to the way these two areas of lifestyle interact. I have been fascinated lately with the neurobiological science of the reward system and epigenetics (how our choices and thoughts influence gene expression, which ultimately determines how well we function for the rest of our lives), and just what stress does to our ability to eat well and feel well (so, our ability to be well).
Again, thanks for your input, and I hope you find knowing a little more about other readers of this blog and newsletter interesting and perhaps even, like me, the whole community feels more like a community.
Be well.
Annie
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