There is a concept in yoga called the witness that is our ability to step back from a situation – to not react but to pause, relax and breathe so that we can align a response from a deeper more intentional level. It is a handy yet challenging practice.
Here is an exercise from my book for accessing your witness. It only takes a few minutes.
A Body-Based Relaxation: Accessing the Witness
Benefits: Stress management, aid to meditation. A tool for developing insight.
Contraindications: If you are unable to lie on the floor, this exercise may be done in a bed or in any position in which you can fully relax.
Instructions: Lie down on the floor in a place where you will not be disturbed for the period of this exercise. Close your eyes, breathe, and relax. Take a few breaths just to soften into the floor.
Imagine yourself floating above your body, looking down at yourself. Invite yourself to view this body with ahimsa (compassion, non-violence), or as if this body belonged to a beloved sister, brother, or friend.
What would you wish for this beloved being’s process of self-care?
What feelings do you wish for this person to have about her caring for herself? How might these feelings change his or her life?
From your work with identifying barriers and triggers (previous exercises in Every Bite Is Divine), what would you say to this beloved being’s work on that particular issue?
Bring awareness back into your physical body, stretch gently, and journal on any insights that came from this experience.
This excerpt is from Every Bite Is Divine: The balanced approach to enjoying eating, feeling healthy and happy, and getting to a weight that’s natural for you by Annie B. Kay MS, RD, RYT, and can be found in chapter four, on pg 71-2.
Here is my recent post from Thrive, the Kripalu blog. It’s on the importance of the side dishes in helping to serve all the nutritional needs of the hearts and mouths you may be feeding this year.
Enjoy your pre-holiday frenzy, if you are in one. This is the big holiday for me this year, and I am hosting!
Blessings!
Martha Rose Shulman is in the zone. She’s been there for a long time. Author of my favorite Mediterranean cookbook, I love her entries on the NY Times Well blog.
Here’s her latest, You’re Going to Need a Bigger Bowl, on veggie rich one-bowlers.
I remember Martha Rose from a panel on cooking for the media eons ago at Simmons College when I was getting my Masters at BU (in Nutrition Communications). She was sassy and funny and stylish. Rock on, Martha Rose!
… And escape the self-defeating diet-binge cycle for good
- Cultivate an attitude of gratitude: Remind yourself of the people and things that make you feel grateful.
- Develop your compassion: Try to be kind to yourself and others.
- Get outraged to get motivated: check out www.aboutface.org to see just how soul-destroying advertising can be.
- Reward yourself: Develop a list of non-food rewards and honor yourself liberally.
- Empower yourself: Remember each of us is responsible for the life experience we create.
- Celebrate you body right now: What is beautiful about it? What is your best feature? Let how you feel about your best feature inform the areas you don’t feel so good about.
- Trust yourself: You know who you are and what to do to let your truest self shine.
- Be a flexible gatekeeper: can you eat and care for yourself in a loving way that allows for everyday health and occasional healthy splurges?
- Cultivate positive thoughts: when you notice a judging or negative thought, can you turn it around and make it a positive one?
- Nurture yourself: What can you feed your body and your soul and your spirit to let it grow.
- Relax: Take one-minute or even a five-breath pause though the day to center yourself and release tension.
- Nice n’easy: Make small easy changes, and over time you’ll see big results.
- Be yourself: Avoid adopting habits that you just don’t like to do – you can find enough things you enjoy to make the difference
- Connect: Cultivate positive relationships with family and friends.
- Celebrate your uniqueness: There has never been another being just like you, and there never will be again.
- Develop your strengths: what do you feel passionate about? How can you bring more of it into your life?
Do you ever feel like there’s so much wrong in the world, yet we’re on the verge of something extraordinary?
Then you have a friend in Foster Gamble, and you might consider joining his club at Thrive. In the movie available for viewing on the site, Gamble draws on everything from free energy, alien intervention, corporate conspiracy, and more to present a case for why we aren’t thriving as we could be in this world, and what we might do to move things along.
Go, Foster. Regardless of if the whole thesis is as well-researched and valid as presented or not, it’s great food for thought. I’m inspired – reaffirmed in my mission to decrease the suffering so many feel with regard to eating in this complex and toxic food environment, and with their own bodies. I think Thrive may help you too in finding, or in reaffirming, part of your own life mission.
My recent Examiner.com post. First in a series on probiotics and prebiotics.
