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balance the nervous system: go outside and be in nature
Being in nature boosts sattva (balance and harmony). Take time every day to go outside and immerse yourself in nature to remind yourself that you are part of, not separate from, the natural world. Feel the sun on your face. Listen to the birds sing. Take in a beautiful view. Most importantly, take a break from technology and give your senses a break. Save the music, podcast, and conversation for another time so you can just be in nature without distraction. As an added benefit, take screen breaks throughout the day and look out the window.
balance your nervois system: Rest
Pain can often affect sleep, and lack of sleep can increase pain. Sleep is essential for the body to process and remove waste products, to boost the immune system, and to heal. It is also the time when we consolidate information and memories, so sleep is essential for learning. Make sleep a priority and develop a bedtime routine that supports sleep:
balance your nervous system: practice self-care
Self-care gets a bad wrap these days. I think it is because it's become something we do when we’ve reached the end of the line. At that point, a bubble bath, a hike, or a pedicure seems like putting a bandaid on a gushing wound. Rather than wait until we are at our breaking point, what if we could think about self-care as a preventative practice? Why wait until we are reaching burnout to prioritize our health and wellness?
I want to reclaim self-care by thinking of wellness as a daily practice. When we can build an infrastructure for our lives, we will have support to sustain us and hold us up through difficult times. If we ignore our health and all of the warning signs of imbalance and wait until it is an emergency before we try to take care of ourselves, it won’t really work, which is why that massage we get once a year when we’ve hit our limit doesn’t magically make us feel any less burned out.
Balance your nervous system: establish rhythm
Everything in our lives is governed by rhythm. Our hearts beat in a rhythm. We breathe in a rhythm. Even our nervous system has a rhythm. We are also guided by the rhythm of the sun and the moon which create day and night and seasons. Aligning with the rhythm of our lives with the rhythms of nature supports balance and gives the nervous system a sense of safety.
Balance your nervous System: Breathe
Do you ever notice it is harder to breathe when you are anxious? When the nervous system is on high alert, the breath usually becomes short and shallow. When the alarm is high, we often start to breathe through our mouths. You can shift from sympathetic nervous system mode to parasympathetic nervous system mode by breathing.
Balance your Nervous SYstem: Grounding
When we are grounded, we have more capacity to weather storms in our life without being knocked over. Here are some simple strategies to promote grounding:
Balance your life, balance your nervous system
Persistent pain that lasts after the tissue has healed means the nervous system needs to heal. Balance your life; balance your nervous system.
Understanding pain
Pain is your nervous system’s response to the perception of threat. The first step to reducing pain is understanding it. Explaining pain reduces the perception of threat, which reduces pain. As pain comes down, function improves. The next step is to figure out your triggers, and build up your toolbox to help you manage those triggers. As you balance your life, you will start to balance your pain.
Food is Medicine: Part 1 - Digestive FIre
All of Life is a Fire Ceremony
In ancient yogic texts, the first word of a text is the most important word. The first word of the Rig Veda, one of the oldest spiritual texts in the world, is agni, which means fire, and the first chapter is devoted to rituals to honor the god of fire. My teachers frequently say, “All of life is a fire ceremony,” and Ayurvedic practices center around tending to the digestive fire. This is because without fire, we would not be able to transform the food we eat into the energy we need to sustain our lives. Keeping the digestive fire strong is key to maintaining health and to recovering from illness and injury. In fact, almost every disorder or disease begins in the gastrointestinal tract and can be treated, in full or in part, by tending the digestive fire and using food as medicine.
10 Pairs of opposites
Ayurveda is an elemental science and provides elegant guidance in finding balance. Each element has specific qualities (e.g. heavy or light, cold or hot, dry or oily), called gunas. Understanding the gunas can help us identify early signs of imbalance by recognizing when a particular quality is too high or too low. We find balance by applying this law of the universe: Like facilities like and opposites bring balance. By developing practicing self-awareness without judgement, we can sense what we need to stay balanced and develop the discernment needed to make choices that will be balancing, nourishing, and supportive.
Come to Your Senses
The sensory organs are the gateway to the nervous system. They connect our outer and inner worlds by sending information about our interaction with our environment to our brain, which then perceives and interprets that information. When the sensory channels are clear, we can perceive things clearly, which helps us to make choices that are nourishing and balancing.
Creating an Altar for abundance & Prosperity
Creating an altar for abundance and prosperity using the principles of Vastu Shastra.
Root Causes
The classical Ayurvedic texts explain that health is a state of balance. My treatment style aims to be both preventative and responsive to current imbalances, and to treat the root causes, not just the symptoms. I take a three-pronged approach to wholeness and wellness:
PREVENTION, EARLY INTERVENTION, AND TREATMENT.
I use an integrative, holistic process for evaluation and treatment, looking at the state of all of the tissues, the digestive fire, and the nervous system to bring your whole system into balance and facilitate optimum conditions for healing.
everything is connected
The most powerful medicine is often the simplest. Ayurveda looks at the context and asks, "What in the environment is creating the conditions for this imbalance to thrive?" For me, the answer is in the question. When I ask myself what sharks are in my waters, the answer is anything in my environment that disconnects me from my inner wisdom and from the wisdom of the natural world. When I think about solving every problem, it feels overwhelming. But when I think about connecting to the rhythm of my heart and the rhythm of nature, it seems quite simple.
the birthday of the world
I recently listened to an On Being episode featuring Rachel Naomi Remen in which she tells the Hebrew story of “the birthday of the world.” I'd like to share her story with you, and I encourage you to listen to the full episode:
tapas: The friction that happens when an old habit and a new habit rub up against each other
Tapas is the fire of transformation that sparks positive change. It is the commitment and discipline we need to break free of habits, or samskaras, even when it is difficult or uncomfortable. We experience tapas when we choose to stay with challenge and not back away.
Small Changes over time
Yoga Sutra 1.14: Practice that is done for a long time without a break, and with sincere devotion, becomes a firmly rooted, stable, and solid foundation.
