A safe harbor where beliefs are respected and kindness prevails.

The Building Blocks of Health & Fitness

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DaveOur bodies are amazing. Do you realize within each of us lays the body’s innate ability to heal itself?

All we have to do is simply nurture our bodies with a few easy steps, and our bodies will do the rest.

I first learned of these 6 Foundational principles for Health at “The CHEK Institute” during holistic lifestyle courses, and thoroughly encourage anyone interested in a deeper understanding to do the same.

“First Things First” as my Dad always said, so let us start at the top.

Paradigms – Did you know that your mind is actually designed to create your results in life?

Most of us walk around thinking we are a slave to circumstance, but in reality once you learn the process, creating what you want in life becomes almost second nature.

We will focus our attentions to health and wellness, but understand this works with every part of your life.

Step 1. Decide what it is you want your health and fitness to feel and look like.

Step 2. Visualize with deep emotional attachment already having this health and fitness

Step 3. Daily Affirmations with joyful emotions of what it feels like to already have this health and wellness.

Step 4. Live as if you already have this health and fitness.

This will set up a vibration in your body that will radiate out to the universe. You are literally telling the universal consciousness or God what it is you want in life. “Ask and you shall receive.” Things, circumstances, people, ideas, will then begin to flow to you.

“God helps those who help themselves.” It is your job to look, listen, feel, and be open to these opportunities. When they present themselves, don’t hesitate, act upon them. Take that step that is being offered to you, or you know you should do! It will lead you to the next step and the next, until you reach your goal. You are being given the help you have asked for, you must take the opportunity being given.

Breath – the Diaphragmatic Breath is so important to the health of the body and mind. Find time each day to sit in a quiet place, and breathe through the nose. Allow the stomach to fill, and the chest to expand and rise. Hold a slight pause at the top, and then exhale through the nose, with a additional pause at the bottom. Throughout this exercise it is important to quiet your thoughts. Follow your breath in and out, and feel the breath move through your body.

This will begin to retrain your brain how to breathe diaphragmatically. The more you practice, the easier breathing becomes. This relaxed breathing allows the body to move into a parasympathetic state, and in doing so inhibits stress and the damage stress has on the body. As you become more comfortable with diaphramatic breathing you can begin to integrate the process into your everyday life.

Water, water, water. You know where I’m going with this already, don’t you? My gosh look at yourself, where would you be without water. Water is critical to every body function down to the cellular level.

The noticable effects of dehydration begin as soon as 2% body weight is lost. I weight 168 lbs so 2% is 3.36 lbs of water. That’s just over a quart, and believe it or not that is not a lot.

The quick and easy fix is to begin your day with at least 16 ounce of water and possibly up to a quart. Then spread it out throughout the day. Eight ounces every hour or so, (that’s easy.) Bring a quart water bottle with you or even two.

Here’s another tip. Drink 8 -16 ounces of water 30 minutes before each meal. This helps in digestion and will satiate your appetite so you won’t over eat.

One of the many benefits of water is detoxification. Your skin will look much healthier when you are not overburdened with toxins and dehydrated. Guys might not care about looking like the Marlboro Man but I bet every woman does!

By the way coffee (a diuretic), alcohol, sugar, (including all those sodas, diet or not), will have a similar aging effect, on the skin and body. I’m just sayin.

Food is medicine. It can promote healing or lead to illness and disease. What you eat is critical to your health. Eat the bad kind of foods, or too much of even the good kind, and you are setting yourself up for health challenges. It’s all about giving the body what it NEEDS, not what you want.

I tell all my clients, when it comes to food “Go back to the Old Time Farm.”

All the food you consume should be free from synthetic hormones, antibiotics, synthetic industrialized fertilizers, herbicides, rodenticides, and fungicides. They should not be GMO (Genetically Modified). Animals and fowl should be free range grass-fed, or wild game. Fish should be wild caught, not farm raised. Stay clear of all preservatives, additives, natural flavors (very deceiving) or artificial flavor. All are foreign to your gut, and your liver (the poor thing has to filter it all as best it can) and will build up over time causing issues, and intolerances. The long term effects of GMO foods are unkown at his time, but science is already seeing noticeable health issues.

Exercise. Come on, get out and move that body. “Move it or lose it” is so true. Exercise comes in all forms, from gentle modalities such as Tia Chi and Chi Gong, to high intensity workouts, and everything in between.

It is important to remember that how you begin and what you chose for exercise depends on your overall health and condition. It is recommend you consult your doctor first before starting any exercise program. Once done, I would suggest seeking out a qualified personal trainer to guide you. Postural correction, stretching and exercise selection along with all its variables must be designed for you and your needs, not what everyone else is doing. Following the crowd can often lead to disapointing results, and injury.

As dad would say, “If you’re going to do it, do it right.”

Sleep. Who doesn’t love to sleep? Why then are so many of us suffering from not getting enough quality sleep? We always suffer for it the next day.

Sleep is critical for our bodies because it is during our sleep that the body repairs and rebuilds. Remember I mentioned that our bodies have the innate ability to heal themselves? Well, much of this healing occurs during our sleep. So if you are not getting quality sleep, you are robbing the body of precious healing time.

For starters getting to bed by 10 pm and waking at 6am will help. In general terms 10pm to 2am (during non REM cycles) the body is repairing and rebuilding tissue growth, muscles and organs. Then from 2am to 6am (during REM cycles) the body shifts over to brain function. So give your body the rest it needs and it will give you the health you deserve. Paul Chek; How to Eat Move and Be Healthy; The Chek Institute, 2003.

Life is about expressing our passions and living to our full potential. Creating real health and fitness in our lives will give us the vehicle to do this.

I wish for all of you Vibrant Health!

Published March 2013

Sources

Paul Chek; The 6 Foundational Principles for Health; The Holistic Lifestyle Coach 1, 2; Paul Chek, 2003.

Bob Proctor; The goal Achiever; Life Success Productions; 2003.

Roshi Philip Kapleau; The three Pillars Of Zen; Anchor Books; 1989.

Dr. F. Batmanghelidj; Your Body’s Many Cries for Water; Global Health Solutions;1995.

Paul Chek; How to Eat Move and Be Healthy; The Chek Institute, 2003

 

Your Higher Self

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RobbieOver the last decade or two, the term “higher self” has become more and more popular. I have been working on a definition of what the higher self is for close to 40 years now, and I would like to share with you what I believe it is and a simple technique to access it.

I think of it as an electromagnetic field that is part of all your bodies. It could be called your soul body. By “all your bodies,” I mean your physical, emotional, and mental bodies, along with your soul body. These bodies each work independently of each other and yet, as part of your whole being, have an affect on each other. Various cultural influences may have taught us that one of these bodies is more important than the other, but in fact, they are all important. For instance, if your mother was a professor, she might have taught you that the mind, or the mental body, was most important…more important than your emotions or your physical activities. If you came from a family of athletes, it is possible you might have been taught to “stuff” your emotions and develop your physical body. And if your family was particularly passionate, your mental and physical abilities might have been ignored. There are a variety of religions that teach that the spiritual body or soul body is the only one that matters, and that the others, the more material ones, are to be “overcome” by spiritual practices. None of these approaches is to be judged as right or wrong…they just are what they are.

Think of the three bodies as a car and your higher self or soul body as a GPS guidance system that adjusts to conditions around you as your drive (your day) unfolds. It is sending and receiving sort of radio signals at all times, whether you are aware of it or not. The quality of those signals depends on how well integrated it is with your other bodies. When in alignment and when acknowledged, the higher self can connect you to all sorts of higher forms of knowledge that are outside your particular experience but that are always available to you. Those thoughts might be experienced as “intuition.” I believe it can be your direct connection to divine energies that are available to you. When you are saved from some kind of disaster by being in the right place at the right time, you might call that divine intervention, but I would call it being connected to your higher self and listening to it…even without your conscious awareness. Divine energies cannot interfere with your free will, so only by listing to your “divine radio station” can there be divine intervention.

Getting back to the other bodies, let me try to explain them and how to tune into each one, making this grand alignment possible for you. First let us start with the easiest one to identify, the physical body. That means the bones and muscles and blood running through our veins. If we are in physical pain, we know it can really affect our temperament. Conversely, if we have just had a great work-out and our body is fully “awake,” that state of physical being can put us in a great mood, open and ready to face any challenges and to appreciate any good things that might come our way. The process to isolate and experience the physical body is a simple one. Just sit or stand in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed and ask your physical body how it feels at the moment. Does it want to move? Is it tense? Is it relaxed and flexible? Try to identify just your physical self, separate from any emotions you might attach to how you feel physically. It is how you feel physically, not emotionally. Ask how the physical body feels and what it needs… then just listen for a moment.

Next let us tackle trying to feel our emotional body as separate from our physical body. Sit or stand quietly a minute to identify the state of your emotional body. It may be frightened or happy, unhappy or joyful…or it may feel likely a combination of many feelings. I feel it is wise to “tune in” and ask several times during the day because the emotional body can shift very quickly, more quickly than the other bodies. You may learn some interesting things about yourself and your life. For instance, if you have a weekly office meeting, what is your emotional state right before you go into the meeting? Are you excited and eager to share ideas or progress on a project, or are you uncomfortable as if you are about to go into battle?

The third body is the mental, and that is a bit hard for most of us to separate from the emotional. By mental, I mean how your brain and your whole nervous system is working at the moment. Many years ago I learned about the biorhythm system, as it was the “system de jour.” You can research it on Wikipedia and decide for yourself if it is valid, but by using that system and noting when my “mental cycle” was above or below par, I learned to observe that there was quite a bit of variance in my ability to think. Some days I was “sharper” than others and some days I was just plain dull. Some days I had many brilliant ideas in a row and could problem solve at breakneck speed, while other days I made mistakes with the most simple mathematical calculations. The process to identify the condition of your mental body is the same as the others. Sit or stand quietly where you won’t be disturbed, ask to experience the state of your mental body at this point in time and then ask what it needs.

The final step in this process, after you have asked each body how it is functioning and what it needs today, is to ask to bring the bodies into focus with each other and then invite in the higher self, the soul body, to integrate with them all. I usually feel a deep sense of relaxation with this final step, and I just enjoy it for a moment.

This technique allows you to use all your senses to move through the day with the most accurate picture of what is going on around you. Think of it as like when you go to the eye doctor and he flips various lenses in front of your eye to get the sharpest image. This works the same way. If all your “bodies” have been acknowledged as part of the whole team, each part being as important as the others, and you have asked them to cooperate with each other, and you have asked for your higher self to flow into the other bodies, you’ve got it! It may take some time in the beginning, but eventually, you can just remember this process and it can happen in just a few seconds, in any environment. It is a simple task that promises great rewards!

Staying Fluffy

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ReginaYou are part of a hurry-up, rush-around world where too often good manners and courteous behavior take a back seat to rudeness and instant gratification. You can choose to allow the actions of other people to negatively impact you. Or you can refuse to let other people’s behavior ruffle your fur by choosing to stay fluffy.

As children, my sister and I had a pet rabbit named Honey Bunny, a tiny ball of soft, fluffy white fur. She was cute, cuddly, and consistently calm. When I encounter a tense circumstance, or want to keep from being sucked into other people’s negativity, I repeat “fluffy bunny, fluffy bunny, fluffy bunny” over and over in my head.

It really works. I let go of any frustration or resentment and cannot stay annoyed when I concentrate on a cute little bunny rabbit.

One day I was walking back from a neighborhood shop when I witnessed a driver stopped in the middle of the intersection, talking on the phone while presumably waiting to turn left. After the light turned red she proceeded into the intersection. Although there were signs indicating U-turns were illegal, she chose to do it anyway. Her SUV was too large to make it on the first attempt, so she had to back up and move forward repeatedly.

Drivers at the green light laid on their horns, while many of the pedestrians who were forced to wait on the sidewalk screamed at her. The woman gestured through her windshield with a rude hand signal, continued chatting on the phone, and maneuvered into the illegal turn to take a parking space in front of a certain store.

Throughout this incident I stood on the sidewalk, a silent witness to how the actions of one person inconvenienced and angered dozens of others. No matter how the woman behaved, or how those impacted by the woman reacted, I was determined not to allow the circumstance to ruin my good mood. I was focused on staying fluffy.

On another occasion, I was experiencing greater pain than usual from two previous back surgeries. I decided to consult an orthopedic specialist to see if anything could be done to alleviate the pain.

The specialist entered the room without introducing himself and quickly asked what was wrong. As I began recounting the history of my back surgeries, as I had with other doctors, he interrupted me. “Do not talk to a physician that way,” he said. “Wait until you are asked specific questions and then answer as quickly as possible. We are busy people.”

I politely cut the examination short and left. No matter how shocking or arrogant the physician’s behavior was, I was determined to stay fluffy.

Occasionally you will encounter people like the woman in the SUV or the physician who are unconcerned with how their actions negatively impact other people. You can ask yourself, “How does angrily ego-reacting to the rude, but not physically threatening, behavior of another person really benefit me?”

How other people choose to behave is their choice. You have the same choice.

Yes, you can be led by hurt feelings or wounded pride to impulsively fire something back, and there are many situations when it is appropriate and important to stand up for what is right. Yet, when you egotistically call people on their own self-centered behavior, it is not likely they will say, “Wow! Thank you so much. You have allowed me to see how badly I acted.”

Rarely, if ever, do situations like this turn out the way our ego wants. Few of us appreciate being told when we have behaved badly. Many times we already realize our behavior is inappropriate. Even if we are embarrassed and ashamed, instead of stopping to question and assume responsibility for our behavior, we may instead allow our wounded egocentric pride to shoot the messenger.

Remaining positive and peaceful under stressful circumstances requires bringing a different level of awareness to the situation than that which creates it in the first place. I learned it is necessary to have a plan, something to focus on to keep my ego from becoming caught up in nerve-racking situations or other people’s self-absorbed behavior.

Next time you encounter someone who is rude, find yourself stuck in a traffic jam, or discover that someone has backed into your parked car, refuse to add any negative energy to an already uncomfortable occurrence. You cannot change an incident after it happens. You do not have the power to change other people or make them see things about their behavior they are not willing to accept for themselves. Instead, focus on behaving in a way you are proud to remember by imagining something peaceful and calm that helps you stay fluffy!

How other people choose to behave is their choice. You have the same choice.

Take a Mind Breath

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HivelyWhat does taking a MIND BREATH mean? The way I define taking a mind breath is to bring yourself back to center. A mind breath allows us to calm, clear and release difficulties in the present moment. When we are following this practice we are able to surrender to joy, peace, contentment and courage. This is the miracle of equanimity, the balance that allows us to live and handle wisely all of life’s moments. It is impossible for our mind to hold pain, life difficulties and joy at the same time.

We can make things difficult for ourselves by being hesitant or uncertain. When we earnestly set our mind on getting in touch with our own breath and following it as far as it can take us, we will enter the stage of liberating insight, leading to the mind itself. Ultimately, pure knowing will stand out on its own. That’s when we reach an attainment trustworthy and sure. In other words, if we let the breath follow its own nature, and the mind its own nature, the results of taking a -mind breath- practice will without a doubt be all that we hope for.

When does one use MIND BREATH in life? This is a simple answer, everyday and through out the day. Before I even step one foot on the floor when I awaken in the morning, I inhale deeply and exhale slowly; I do this practice five times. This practice allows us to release all the toxins and mind chatter so we can create space for our mind to hold goodness as we start our day. I can feel your mind wheels turning. I know some are thinking, “my life is in crisis, I just lost my job, my boss doesn’t like me, the economy is not good, I have an illness and I am late with bills, my spouse just left me, I feel no one cares.” I can tell you your breath cares and so does your mind. Learning how to use your mind and breath together through difficulties has scientific proof that we can lower our cortisol levels (this is our flight/fight response) and raise our serotonin levels (this is our joy, contentment, feel good and wise response).

I could list pages of life difficulties. I know I have my share too. These are real life problems and most of the time they can be ego based. Last week as I was going through old boxes and junk in the attic, I became extremely overwhelmed. Do you know the emotion I am talking about? Thinking something should be easier and then realizing it is just one huge mess. We all have these experiences from day to day. Life is difficult but learning how to use MIND BREATH brings insight that comes solely through daily faithful practice.

How do you take a MIND BREATH in daily life? Most of us, by and large, like getting results but don’t like laying the groundwork to learn a new skill. We are creatures of habit, aren’t we? We may want nothing but goodness and ease (who doesn’t) but if we haven’t prepared the groundwork, we will not have change. When we feel stressors or difficulties in our day, we need to stop, pay attention and begin with cleansing breaths by engaging our mind.

As you practice you will make adjustments that will serve you well. Knowing how to adjust the breath so that it eases the mind and soothes the body does require practice. Learning how to breathe so that you feel free and refreshed in breath and mind is the hope of your personal exploration into this practice. The truth with this practice is that it can be practiced anywhere, at anytime and anyplace. There is no right or wrong. We naturally settle into what benefits us. We just have to start somewhere and begin without judgment..

My hope is that this practice of MIND BREATH will be helpful in your day to day experiences and you will come to see the great benefits that come from keeping the breath in mind. Always remember practice makes progress not perfection.

AN EXERCISE IN MIND BREATH PRACTICE

Getting Started:

  • Lie flat on your back and close your eyes. You may also do this practice sitting or standing. I do this practice before getting out of bed each morning. Ahhhh!
  • Place your right hand on your abdomen and keep your left hand resting at your side.
  • Relax your whole body, your face, neck, shoulders, back, arms and legs.
  • Inhale deeply through the nose and feel your abdomen rise and expand.
  • When you’ve inhaled fully, pause for a moment and then exhale fully through your nose.
  • As you exhale, feel your abdomen contract. Let yourself go, imagine your whole body going limp.
  • Repeat the breath; take 10-20 deep breaths in total.
  • When you are finished, roll on your right side and rest for a few moments before pushing up to a seated position.

What to Consider:

  • Pause during inhalation and exhalations keeping the throat soft and relaxing the entire body
  • Keep your breath smooth and regular throughout the exercise
  • The exhalation should take twice as long as the inhalation
  • If you become distracted and your mind starts to wander away from your breath (and it will) notice this and let it go. You will now start focusing on your breath and belly again.

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