Nanci

The holiday period spanning Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve is a special time in North America when we gather our loved ones and celebrate abundance, community, and renewal. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that this six-week period has a concerning side effect: It accounts for most of our country’s weight problem. Understanding this fact, and why it happens, gives us powerful insights into why we gain weight—and how to prevent it.

It’s a fact: We eat too much during the holidays.

In a recent study, scientists set out to answer a simple question: How does a person’s body weight change over the course of the year? To find out, they used internet-connected scales to collect daily body weight data from nearly 3,000 volunteers in the United States, Germany, and Japan. After crunching the data, a striking pattern emerged: No matter where you live, or what you celebrate, holidays are likely your period of greatest weight gain.

In the United States, our ascent begins at Thanksgiving when we enjoy our iconic feast and well-meaning relatives inundate us with delectable treats. Yet we don’t reach our peak weight until we’ve danced with the sugar-plum fairies of Christmas and the New Year. After the New Year, many of us dutifully step into our jogging shoes and try to work off the extra flab, but on average we lose less than half of it. Each holiday season, our weight ratchets up a little bit, gradually bringing us closer to obesity. More than half of our annual weight gain comes from just 12 percent of the year.

In Germany, the situation is similar, minus Thanksgiving. Most annual weight gain occurs around Christmas and the New Year, with a smaller bump around Easter. Could it be that our bodies simply want to gain weight in winter, perhaps as a way of guarding against the winter famines our ancestors faced? Maybe our weight gain has nothing to do with the holidays after all? The data from Japan put this idea to rest. In Japan, the largest weight gain doesn’t occur in winter but in spring. This gain coincides with the Golden Week, a holiday period in April and May during which Japanese people celebrate nature, children, and their national constitution. Our conclusion is inescapable: Holidays themselves are making us fat.

The brain’s role in cravings

Superficially, the explanation for this is no great mystery: During the holidays, we simply eat and drink too much, and some of those excess calories get shunted to our love handles. But to really understand why this happens and empower ourselves to fight back, we need to dig deeper. We need to take a detour to the brain, the organ that generates all behaviors, including eating.

Craving trigger no. 1: food composition

The human brain is the product of millions of years of survival in the face of scarcity, and it has a number of hard-wired tricks up its sleeve that helped us stay alive in the world of our distant ancestors. One of these is an important function called reward, which mostly whirrs away below our conscious awareness. Here’s how it works in a nutshell. Every human brain is wired with specific motivations that drive us to seek the things that are good for us, including physical comfort, sex, social interaction, water, and of course, food. But not just any kind of food: The brain has no instinctive love for celery sticks or Brussels sprouts; it wants richsources of fat, starch, sugar, and protein that would have met the rigorous demands of ancient life, and the more concentrated, the better. In everyday experience, we feel cravings as we smell a glazed ham emerging from the oven or see a slice of pecan pie obscured by a generous dollop of whipped cream. This craving, along with the enjoyment we feel as we eat delicious foods, is the conscious manifestation of reward.

Craving trigger no. 2: food proximity

But reward isn’t solely triggered by a food’s composition. The human brain is fundamentally opportunistic and always on the lookout for a good deal. In other words, it wants to get you the most benefit for the least sacrifice (for more on this effect, see Brian Wansink’s book Mindless Eating). Food within arm’s reach fires up your motivation to eat, even if you’ve already eaten more calories than you need. By the time our brains throw the emergency brake to limit the metabolic damage of a feast like Christmas dinner, we’ve already eaten far too much.

Craving trigger no. 3: sensory-specific satiety

The story doesn’t end there. Another textbook brain function, called habituation, also chips in to drive up our food intake. Habituation is one of the oldest and most basic functions of the nervous system, and it simply makes us respond less and less to a specific stimulus the more we encounter it. For example, if you see a new billboard on your way to work, you might glance at it, but after a week it becomes part of the background and you stop paying attention. Food works the same way, thanks to a property called sensory-specific satiety. What this means is that your feeling of fullness (satiety) is specific to the particular foods you ate. You may be completely sated by what you’ve already eaten but still be ready and willing to eat something that tastes different. So while your “first stomach” may be full of ham and sweet potatoes, your “second stomach” still has room for apple pie, vanilla ice cream, and maybe a Christmas cookie or three. That’s because your second stomach isn’t in your abdomen—it’s in your brain. If your only option were more ham and sweet potatoes rather than pie, you probably wouldn’t eat them.

In practice, what this means is that we eat more total food as the variety in a meal increases. Some people call this the “buffet effect,” and chances are, your personal experience confirms that this name is apt.

Craving trigger no. 4: the satiety system

As if that weren’t enough, another brain system jumps into the holiday fray to help us pack on the pounds: the satiety system. Located in the brain stem where your brain meets your spinal cord, the satiety system receives information from your digestive tract about the food you’ve eaten at a meal and uses it to determine your feeling of fullness. Although fullness may feel like a simple physical sensation in your stomach, it’s actually your brain’s interpretation of complex food-related signals coming from several parts of your gut.

As sophisticated as this system is, it’s surprisingly inaccurate in one key way: the amount of fullness you feel doesn’t correspond very closely to the number of calories you’ve eaten. In particular, the more calorie-dense the food—in other words, the less water and fiber it contains—the less fullness you get out of it, per calorie. So a bowl of oatmeal that’s bulky with water and fiber will deliver much more fullness than the same number of calories of white flour crackers, meaning that you may need to eat twice as many calories of crackers to feel full. Since Christmas dinner and Aunt Sally’s famous egg nog are especially calorie-dense, we tend to eat more calories than usual before we reach that feeling of fullness that tells us to stop eating.

Together, the instinctive functions of your brain conspire to parlay the abundance of the holidays into an extra layer of body fat, as insurance against a future scarcity that never arrives.

This might seem grim, but understanding the problem empowers us to eat better this year. If more than half of our annual weight gain comes from only 12 percent of the year in the United States, then just a little vigilance will go a long way toward keeping us feeling good. And if we know why we eat too much during that period, we can do something about it. Here are four tips that will help you work with your brain’s instincts to make this your healthiest holiday ever.

1. Be mindful of your food environment.

If the reward trigger—such as the sight or smell of cookies—isn’t present in your immediate surroundings, it won’t make you crave, and you won’t have to fight yourself to avoid eating it. The most effective way to do this is to purge your home and work environments of tempting foods that don’t support a healthy weight. If a friend brings over a pie, say thanks, eat a small piece, and find another home for the rest.

2. Create small effort barriers to eating.

Small effort barriers, like having to open a cupboard, unscrew a jar, peel an orange, or shell nuts, make food a less attractive “deal” to the brain and help reduce your intake of unnecessary calories. If you have to work a little bit to snack, chances are you’ll only do it when you’re genuinely hungry.

3. Simplify.

The fewer types of food that are available at a meal, the fewer calories you’ll eat overall. Consider cutting out appetizers, or only offering one option and keeping it light. Rather than providing the riot of dishes that normally defines holiday feasts, pick a few traditional items and stick with them. Instead of serving three different desserts, choose only one.

4. Lighten up.

Serve lighter versions of your favorite dishes, snacks, desserts, and drinks. For foods that you prepare, the easiest way to do this is to use less fat, sugar, and white flour in your cooking and stick with ingredients that are minimally processed. For foods that you buy already prepared, look for lighter options that you still like. When it comes to alcoholic drinks, which are inherently high in calories, wine is the best option because it delivers fewer calories per serving than beer or cocktails. And you might want to lay off the egg nog.

If you follow these four simple tips, chances are you and your family will enjoy the holidays as much as ever, without the long-term consequences.

Blog by Dr. Stephan J. Guyenet via mindbodygreen.com

Photo by heysigmund.com

Intuition is your most powerful resource available to you in this world of rapid-fire information, surface level relationships maintained by our fingertips through the spill of social media, and a struggling economy that makes us all want to hide our money in a vault so it won’t disappear.

Whether we’re beginning a relationship with the words: “She’s the one; I just know it,” taking a risk in business with “I just know, in my gut,” or responding to crisis with “I could just tell something wasn’t right,” intuition has a long been guiding us in the right direction when all other clues were absent or pointing us in the wrong direction.

Emerson called it “the divine impulse.” I simply call it, “Your Vibes.”

Today’s question is no longer, “does it exist?” We know it does. The real and relevant question is now, more importantly “So how does it work?”

Your sixth sense, your “vibes,” works best off a solid foundation of knowledge. It begins by noticing what is happening all around you right now. When was the last time you took a moment to really look around, wherever you were at the moment, to just feel with your Spirit? Take a second and do it right now. Reach out with your energy and feel the electricity buzzing in the room, the residual energy of people that have been in this space with you today or the day before, the pulse of life, knowledge and wisdom all around you in so many forms.

The more we connect with the world in this intimate and intuitive way, the more we begin to understand what that energy is giving us in return.

By simply becoming more attentive to the world around us we can be far more guided about what is happening just beneath the surface.

Intuition guides us toward making good decisions, though they are sometimes not the decisions we expected to make. But that is the whole point of tuning into our intuition in the first place. To be able to make the best decisions possible. So when our intuition alerts us to the need to make a change, It’s important to embrace that alert gladly. After all, it’s only serving to protect you.

Next, when thinking about increasing the effectiveness of our intuition, it’s important to remember that tuning into your vibes requires a clear and organized mind. Intuition is a subtle and fleeting insight that can be easily lost under a mountain of unfinished business, or swept away in the drama of disorder. Is it time to catch up with old matters, finish unfinished business, and clear your mental desk? The more you procrastinate, the greater your loss when it comes to tapping into your intuitive reserves.

Finally, your vibes are a physical, as much as a psychic sense. Your physical body relays messages as if it were a radio, broadcasting to your mind. Your gut feelings, your subtle vibes and your heart-based instincts are all messages relayed to your mind from you r intuition, through the vehicle of your body.

And just like any radio tower, if you don’t maintain it, it doesn’t work as well. Hangovers, stress, illness and injury impair your ability to access your intuition as do sleep deprivation, poor diet and under-exercising. The more junked up the system, the less likely it is that the important messages will make it through.

So, if these are all the things that get in the way, what are the things that help?

A quiet moment where you take it slow and give yourself a break is the first step in connecting with your intuition. Doing nothing doesn’t mean nothing’s getting done. In fact, those brief moments where you listen in on your internal guide are the moments where you have the opportunity to make profound and essential course corrections. And, the longer you wait in between check-in’s, the further off course you might get before you notice something going wrong.

Have you ever noticed that when one of your senses is taken away or under-stimulated, the others turn up the volume? For example, if you sit with your eyes closed for a few minutes and then your cat jumps up on your lap, sometimes you can feel the echo of the pressure on your skin, long after the cat has gone along its way. When vision was turned down, touch was turned up. The same is true for your sixth sense: intuition. When you take a moment out of your day to meditate or turn down the volume on your over-stimulated sense, intuition gets turned up and you are able to hear and feel things you might otherwise have missed.

The dictionary defines intuition as “immediate cognition,” which requires the paying of acute attention. The word literally means, “inner teacher.” Get into the habit of listening to your “inner teacher” and expecting it to guide you.

When you expect something you create an energetic vacuum which the Universe seeks to fill. A case in point is two guys driving into town; one expects to find a parking space, the other doesn’t. They both turn out right

Above all, have the courage to trust your vibes. Every great leader has been willing to play the fool. Disney was considered “a nut.” The Wright brothers were called “daft.” Edison was “eccentric,” at best. Progressive thinkers have always challenged conventional wisdom as they blaze a trail to the top. Now, it’s your turn.

10 things you can do to activate your intuitive “vibes” in your world.

1. Write down your goals. Intuition supports clear intentions. Keep your goals clearly posted and review them every day.

2. Visualize your success. Imagine exactly what you want to happen in your life. Intuition supports your vision. Sharpen your visualization skills by sharing your vision with others and observe if they can see your dreams as well as you.

3. Get enough sleep. Your vibes shut down when you are fatigued.

4. Keep a little notebook or tape recorder and record your gut feelings, ah-ha moments, and bright ideas as they arise. Do not edit, censor, or dismiss anything. You will soon see it all counts.

5. Sound it out. Find sympathetic friends who will listen to your intuitive hunches. Sharing a gut feeling is the best way to validate your intuition and gain confidence in listening to your higher awareness.

6. Take time out for reflection. Intuition lies just beneath our conscious awareness and rises to the surface during quiet moments. Rushing through the day prevents your inner voice from speaking out. Schedule regular periods of 5 to 10 minutes throughout the week to do nothing but sit and ponder.

7. Leave the job at your desk. Sometimes the best way to activate your intuitive and creative muscles is to walk away from a problem and let the answers incubate on their own. Do something stimulating and fun on your evenings and weekends. By allowing this side of your brain to take over while giving your work side a rest brings new perspectives and ideas that can take you to a new level of solution.

8. Ask for help. Have the wisdom to be open to receiving help in all ways, and do not hesitate to seek guidance the minute you need it. Being open to guidance is the starting gun to an intuitive life and separates the ordinary from the extraordinary in today’s working world.

9. Keep your office clean and organized. Your sixth sense thrives on order, not chaos. A clear desk leaves the clear mind needed for tuning into your vibes.

10. Acknowledge your intuitive successes openly and comfortably. Share your vibes positively, regarding them as a natural asset designed to help you succeed and not as something to wrestle with or question. Recognize they are a reflection of your higher power, and put them to use every day.

The bottom line is, if you want to succeed in a changing world and have a great time along the way, utilize and trust to the fullest your greatest natural tool: your “vibes.”

-Blog by Sonia Choquette

Photo by Ng Byrne
 
 

“Ultimately, self-compassion is a series of choices, a moment by moment conscious turning away from that which will harm your spirit toward that which will nourish and sustain you.

It is choosing, in any particular situation, and over and over again whether you’ll treat yourself well, or beat yourself up, whether you’ll deny yourself, or treat yourself as lovingly as you’d treat your child or your most precious friend.

Self-compassion means looking at yourself with kindness, with a conscious awareness of your sufferings, and in time, with a deep appreciation for the way you have transformed them.”

~ Daphne Rose Kingma 

See Mystic Mamma for an ever flowing resource of wisdom and inspiration, continually weaving a web of spiritual memory gems.

Your alarm goes off, you hit the snooze button one too many times, roll out of bed (eventually), and immediately connect to your digital devices. You rush through your morning, barely stopping to breathe, and then head off to work.

If you can relate, you might notice that when the day starts on a hectic note, the same vibes reverberate into the rest of the day, creating multiple experiences of physical or mental unease and discomfort.

If you are not one of these people, you might recognize how important it is to start your day with ease, care, and attention in order to move a little bit more smoothly throughout the day. You may notice how reactions soften and how it feels more accessible to take clear, appropriate action in ways that are more truthful to your values and yourself.

Most of us are probably interested in having a really great day—or at least a really nice morning—as often as possible, right?

Mindful morning practices are important for everyone and anyone, not because we all need to live like or become zen masters but because it’s a way to be nice to ourselves.

When we are thoughtful, it’s more natural to extend that kindness to others. Especially if we rarely take time for ourselves in the morning, it can be a powerful shift to begin each day with affection and appreciation for our minds, bodies, and the day ahead.

When we do begin the day in this way, with a mindful approach to ourselves and the opportunities ahead, we learn to pay more attention to ourselves and others throughout the entire day. How we start the morning is an extension into the remainder of the day. If we want to have a smooth 24 hours, it is only natural that it starts the moment we wake up.

The first sutra in the philosophical teachings of yoga translates to “now is the practice of yoga,” which goes far beyond flowing through a series of stretches, backbends, and so on. Simple enough, yet how often do we allow ourselves to be in the now, to witness and observe openly without judgment or cloudy vision? We can apply the same principles to how we wake up in the morning and begin the first few moments of being awake, aware, and alive.

Here are seven very simple ideas inspired by the mindfulness practices of yoga philosophy to incorporate into your morning routine and begin the day on a mindful note:

1. When you wake up, place a hand on your heart, chest, or belly.

Say hello to yourself and give thanks that you have woken up to another unique human experience.

2. Envision your day.

In yoga, it is important to practice paying attention to the present moment. You can keep your hands at your heart or in a mudra in order to anchor your awareness to the moment while you visualize how you want your day to unfold.

3. Practice yoga.

Whether in bed, on a mat, or in whatever space you have, take a few simple stretches to open up your body and prepare for the day. Even if it’s just a simple twist on your back in bed, or postures for the arms sitting upright at the edge of the bed—like gomukhasana or garudasana—or just a big, good morning stretch with the arms overhead when you stand up, all of these are a way of taking time for yourself and your body, for however long you have time to do so.

4. Drink water and chew your food.

Whether it’s good old H2O or hot water with lemon, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Enjoy breakfast without distraction if and when possible. If you do have to check email at your desk during breakfast, at the very least take a few pauses to chew thoroughly, taste your nourishing food, and breathe calmly.

5. Choose food for breakfast that will fuel you up instead of drag you down.

Whether you eat within one hour of waking up like some theories suggest or simply wait until you are hungry, listen to your body and respond accordingly. Eat enough to hold you over until lunch, and take it easy on pounding caffeine to avoid potential oncoming energy crashes later on. Opt for fresh ingredients that you can pronounce, and do your best to avoid excess sugar.

6. If possible, wait a while before plugging into cyberspace.

Consider meditating, journaling, or stretching before going down the interweb rabbit hole, and enjoy being with yourself, doing things for yourself in your own way and on your own time, with only yourself to answer to. Even if it’s just deep breaths before getting out of bed, take those precious moments to be with yourself, just as you are.

Peace, love, and mindful mornings.

Blog by Sasha Nelson

Intense cravings for junk food seem to be an almost daily occurrence for many of us. Sometimes I even catch myself salivating, Pavlov style, when I sit down to watch TV or listen to music — activities I normally would have grabbed a bag of popcorn for during high school.

But after dealing with said cravings one learns they carry with them a caveat — Giving in to the cravings doesn’t make them go away, does it? Why is that?

Science now has the answer, stating that the reason we get cravings is that our body is in need of minerals that do come from junk food but would be much healthier from other, more whole, foods.

Hunger vs. Craving

Hunger and craving are two very different bodily reactions.

Hunger is a very utilitarian, necessary function of the body. It lets you know it’s time to eat because your body needs fuel.

Cravings, on the other hand, are a different beast entirely. They serve not so much to tell your body it needs fuel but to tell your body it needs specific chemicals, one of which is opioids. This is the reason we often crave foods high in sugar and fat; these foods release opioids into our bloodstream and provide us with feelings of pleasure and even mild euphoria in some cases.

And that’s why so many of us love…

Chocolate

Chocolate is the most widely craved food in the world. It’s also actually linked to a nutrient many of us are deficient in: magnesium.

Some estimates state as many as 80 percent of Americans are lacking in this mineral. The symptoms of a magnesium deficiency? Anxiety, irritability and even insomnia.

This is why you might feel better and more relaxed after eating a chocolate bar. But did you know you can actually get magnesium from healthier sources?

Dark leafy greens, for example, are an excellent source of magnesium, as are seeds, nuts, fish, beans and molasses.

So what other commonly craved foods can be replaced with wholesome ones?

High-Sugar Foods

Love fuzzy peaches? Me too, I’ll admit.

It’s no surprise that sugary foods are among the most highly craved in the world. Deficiencies in five nutrients could be to blame if you find yourself craving them. Chromium, sulfur and tryptophan are among them, the latter being a serotonin (happy brain chemical) regulator.

Due to the amount of mineral deficiencies a sugar craving might suggest, you probably want to look at revitalizing your diet to restore your body’s mineral balance.

Carb Cravings

Another common type of craving comes up for things like pasta and bread. This can signal a deficiency in nitrogen, which can result in overall malnourishment. As such, if you find yourself craving lots of carbs, consider adding seafood to your diet, as fish contain a lot of the mineral.

Oily and Fatty Cravings

If you crave foods like fries, cheese and the like with high oil and fat content, it could be indicative of a calcium deficiency. Consider instead drinking raw milk or eating turnip greens and broccoli.

Salty Food Cravings

When you find yourself reaching for that bag of chips or popcorn (like I often do), reach instead for fish, nuts and seeds. These are healthy ways to gain the chloride or silicon your body is telling you it wants.

Blog by DavidWolfe.com

Photo by Gene Hanson

Radical, sudden, emotional, excruciating, higher centered, painful, ecstatic TRANSFORMATION. And, it’s all about LOVE.

July is a 2 Act Play. In the first act, the first two weeks, you are likely to get a tour of your emotions, fears and all the attachments that are in the way of this transformation. The second act begins on the 16th and brings love, compassion and a higher emotional centered energy to everything, anchoring this TRANSFORMATION through beauty and love.

We could also say that this month is all about love; transforming fear into power through love, transforming doubt into confidence through love, transforming old emotional wounds into great wisdom through love. It is an opportunity for us all to learn our lessons through the tough love of spirit and to finally begin to love and cherish ourselves deeply and unconditionally.

Much of what has happened in the world is because of fear: fear of the unknown, fear of death, fear of entrapment, fear of abandonment, fear of what we may feel, fear of what we night not feel, fear of what we may lose, fear of losing control, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of being seen, and many others.

We have reached a point in our evolution where it is time to break out of the cocoon of fear and allow ourselves to soar with new wings from a place of love. This will not happen overnight, but we have a chance this month at a good start.

So the first couple of weeks may not be an easy time. You may have to revisit your emotional psyche and do a bit of clearing. You may feel triggered, impatient, reactive, emotional, cranky, irritated, out of sorts, discouraged, overwhelmed, defensive, mistrusting, and have a general feeling that nothing is working in your life. There is a pressure to transform something, but the clarity is not there yet. This too shall pass. Meet this time with discipline around your practices and self-care. Focusing on how you can better support yourself and who you are is key to your own personal transformation. Set strong intentions to be affected only by the positives around you and don’t take other people’s negativity and reactions personally.

When fear comes up, as it will, examine it and see it to be the illusion that it is. Especially fear of “what could happen” is not grounded in anything real. It is imagined and fabricated from a library of past events that should really cease to run the show. Your instinctive center as well as the first chakra hold all of your survival information that often triggers fear. It is important that you work with your instinctive center this month and bring it into present time so it is not triggered by old programs and past karmic experiences.

So in these first two weeks you get a chance at “karmic clean-up” and completions. Completions are an important factor in allowing transformation. To the extent that you are holding on to how something “should have been or should have happened”, you have not completed that experience for yourself and therefore holding yourself back from your own evolution and getting in the way of your own transformation. Forgive and move on. Focus on completion, letting go, and bringing yourself into the present. If everyone could simply focus on eliminating fear by being present and acknowledging love, we could truly change the world.

Remember that whatever it is you feed, that is what will grow. So feed the love, not the fear.

The second half of the month brings with it the higher emotional center. This is the energy of love, connection, agape, a huge open heart and an experience of essence connection. It is the same influence that we had in the 1960’s that initiated the incredible creativity and revolution in music, art, relationships, community and radical innovative ideas. The higher emotional center is the fuel that will feed a new version of creative revolution more focused on spirit and with a greater sense of maturity and purpose.

During this time, you may feel yourself greatly inspired to do something radical and outside your comfort zone. It is a time to connect with others, to feed your creativity, to come up with new ideas and to fall in love with yourself, your life and everything around you.

How the month shows up:

YOU PERSONALLY

Radical personal transformation is possible. Start with taking care of yourself, loving yourself, giving yourself the time and space for emotional assimilation, clearing, healing, and allowing yourself to prioritize your life according to what matters the most to you. Give yourself permission to be irritated and cranky as long as it does not affect others. Be careful of impatience and judgment and always move yourself to a place of compassion and forgiveness.

You have the opportunity this month to end up not recognizing yourself (in a good way). Things could be that different. Transformation can happen suddenly with a huge change in your life that may appear to be challenging at first. This could bring up blame, judgment and possibly even anger. Trust in spirit that whatever you are drawing towards you as an experience is somehow integral to the big picture of your life unfolding in the right way.

Make sure this month to take time for yourself in the area of self-care. How can you best support your own priorities? How can you take better care of yourself as your own most valuable possession? Remember to have compassion and forgiveness and to be in love with yourself.

RELATIONSHIPS

This is a trying month for relationships in the first half and a beautiful month for relationships in the second half. As you focus on your own emotional needs and self-care in the first half, it will become very apparent who does not support you and who does. Don’t take it personally. It may be time to move on.

Important relationships that have been somewhat stagnant have an opportunity to rekindle some creativity and inspiration as long as they don’t get mired in blame, resentment and misunderstandings. Transformation is most radical in the relationship with yourself that that of course will influence all your relationships.

Because of the need for completion of karmic cycles as well as letting go of the past, many relationships will be affected. Some will go by the wayside and some will go through deep transformation into something new. Radical transformation can include sudden changes in relationships, some beginning and some ending.

It is important this month to be emotionally open, to process and heal old relationship wounds, and to take full responsibility for your part on the karmic wheel of relationship lessons. Get to the place of complete acceptance and love. It will serve you well.

HEALTH AND THE PHYSICAL BODY

We mentioned the self-care piece which is integral to the month. If you practice it, your health and well-being will improve. Put yourself first this month through self-love and miracles can happen. Love your body and your body will love you.

The physical body wants to move. It is a good month to take up dancing, running, sports, aerobics and other ways to move the body.

Well-being this month includes the movement of energy. You may be inspired to take road trip or have a change of scene, do some travel and be stimulated by other environments and information. Shake it up, change it up, change your routines, be available for something to change and transform.

ENVIRONMENT

There is a pressure to transform everything including environments. Completion and clearing of what represents the old is important. What are you holding on to? What is your motivation for doing so? Examine your environment with new eyes and be ruthless about making change. Anything that is old energy or a “someday I will do something with this” needs to be either let go of, completed or revitalized.

Work with the energy of love and make sure you love your environment. If you don’t, it will be difficult to feel supported by it. If there are things that irritate you, ask yourself why? What are you putting up with that does not resonate with you? What can you transform? If you share your environment, where can you be accommodating, less resistant and more accepting without completely compromising yourself?

As to nature and the greater planetary environment, look for events that will cause the greatest transformation. These may be sudden and radical and could even be devastating. But they also create the opportunity to bring communities together on a foundation of love and compassion in order to experience a higher emotionally centered time through it all. In this way the fear that may be generated through an experience beyond our control can be transformed into power through love.

BUSINESS/PARTNERSHIPS/PROJECTS

Your personal transformation will inform what happens in your business, and with your projects and partnerships. If you put yourself first as we are suggesting, whatever needs change will go through a transformation. Watch irritability and impatience as energy that has been on hold for a time is suddenly ready to move. Focus on connecting with the higher purpose of a project and a higher vibration that is possible in all business and partnerships.

Priorities and motivation play a big part in what goes through transformation this month. Be in love with your work. Be in love with your partners. Be in love with your business. Be in love with your service. If you are not, you should be putting your energy into something where you can be.

DATES AND TIME FRAMES

July 1-7: A testy time where you could be irritated by the smallest things. Don’t try and solve everything or figure everything out. Not everything is your problem. Patience, compassion and trust in right timing is the theme for this week. Slow down, relax, be in your heart. The rest will take care of itself.

Examine your fears as they come up, release them, and put some energy into the practical organization of your life, especially your self-care as a priority.

July 4: New Moon is Monday, July 4, at 5:00 AM Mountain Daylight Time (MDT). This is an emotional moon and in keeping with the themes for the month, use it to focus on your self-care, your personal needs and healing your heart. How do you heal your heart? You love yourself, you cherish who you are and you treat yourself like you would treat the most valuable thing in your life. Pay attention to beauty and allow the higher emotional center to be activated in you through the beauty you see in your life and all around you.

You can be greatly inspired during this time, or you can get mired in your judgments, cynicism, and all the nasty negative feelings you have been holding on to for so long, maybe even lifetimes. It is time to move on from all of it, to put yourself first, to forgive others and to allow the transformation that wants to happen to begin to unfold. Spend some time in and around water today if you can, and use it to nurture and feed something new and unique to you that wants to grow and emerge.

Be patient with others, accommodate them in your life, but take care of yourself first.

July 8-15: This time frame easily lends itself to depression, anxiety, looking at the negatives, feeling unworthy, discouraged, despairing and lethargic. Don’t resist the emotions but at the same time do not indulge. It will not serve you.

Put good boundaries around your allotted time for whining and complaining, and then get over it. You probably all have a lot going on in your life that can use some attention. Prioritize and nurture what you value most. Instead of just holding on and waiting for this time to be over, use it wisely. Take every reaction, every fear, every negative emotion and transform it into something else through love.

July 16-22: Finally, we have come into a time where everything seems to open up including our hearts. All the lessons this week are about how to live with one foot in both worlds, the world of magic, spirit, higher centered energy of love and a connection to all; and the world of the mundane where you take care of your basic needs and responsibilities, clean up after yourself and make sure all your security needs are met.

One minute you are cleaning the refrigerator with you focus simply on the task, and the next minute you are inspired by the magic of creation all around you. During great transformation, there may be times when you simply do not recognize yourself or your surroundings. You may be driving down a very familiar road but if your mind goes to a higher state, you may no longer recognize the road.

These experiences are designed to expand consciousness and transform energies. Welcome them instead of being fearful. Be inspired during this time by the possibilities. Look forward.

July 19: Full Moon is Tuesday, July 19, at 4:57PM Mountain Daylight Time (MDT). Work with the earth during this full moon. It is a time to ground and anchor new truth, new personal practices, new intentions, new resolutions, new relationships and new ideas. If you are still operating out of old structures, they may take the opportunity to self-destruct.

In fact, this full moon could bring in a time of witnessing the self-destruction of old outdated structures. On the other hand, it can also bring in a new frequency of energy that invites us all to play in that higher emotional center. Focus on love!

June 23-31:  A time of being in love. It is a time to do whatever you can to focus on love, loving yourself, loving the process, loving the lessons, loving the support, loving spirit, loving your environment, loving your creativity, loving your work and service, loving the magic of life, and to just be in love with everything. This is a higher centered time of emotional revolution, of seeing things differently, of having a new unique experience of your life, of access to more power, bliss and inspiration and to really feel like you are setting your life on a satisfying path.

If you are not there yet, have patience. Perhaps there is something that need to be completed first in order to free you up for transformation or perhaps there is still fear. Just keep working at it, chipping away at the armor of attachment and falling more deeply in love with yourself and others.

Have a great month!

Lena

Blog by thepowerpath.com

Photo provided by Sterling hospitals

This is Pralhad Jani, a man who lives in India as a sadhu, meaning ‘good man’ or ‘holy man’. He is said to have not taken any food or water since 1940! He claims to live solely on the power of the sun, putting the modern understanding of the nutritional requirements for health to the ultimate test.

Prahlad left home at the age of 7 to live in the wild and find his purpose. After four years on a deep spiritual journey, at age 11 he had an intense awakening and no longer required any food or drink. He needs only to lie in the sun and pull Prana (essential life force) from its massive energy. He is now 85 and continues to live alone in the forest, connected in a fascinating sense to the wild world that is his home. He awakes each day at the auspicious time of 4am and spends most of his time in deep meditation. His life is one of complete and absolute devotion.

Twice he has been under medical observation to test his claims. He was placed in a sealed room with a sealed toilet; once for 10 days and another time for 15. Though he has lived nearly his entire life as a hermit, he agreed to these tests as an understanding of how his body copes under his unique conditions could save the lives of others. Each time he took no food or water and passed zero stool or urine.

The testing was met with praise and skepticism, some seeing issues with the tests. He was given 100ml of water a day to gargle and clean his mouth, as well as being allowed to bathe. For some people this showed a flaw in what was meant to be an absolute test, suggesting he may have swallowed some of the water.

This seed of doubt in our society is understandable, given the current status of our collective perception. The fact-based education that we receive has given us a certain scientific understanding of the human function, and life in general. This understanding in many ways has been a very enlightening and beautiful thing, but in some ways it has been blinding.

In the Shiva Sutras it is stated “knowledge is bondage”. In other words; knowledge is attachment, ignorance is bliss. This man is free from a modern perception of what his body needs, he is of the absolute conviction that he thrives on light and energy, and thus he simply does.

In addition to the doubt cast on Prahlad’s way of living, there has also been supporting scientific evidence brought about by this time in observation. At the beginning of his testing he showed decreased levels of appetite related hormones, which did not increase throughout the experiment. His physiological need for food is significantly lower than others, proving that his body is extremely adapted to a life of extreme fasting, at the very least. In addition, his body showed to be producing urine, yet not excreting any. This was very puzzling for doctors and further study is planned to see how his body is using the urine, which builds up in his bladder but does not leave the body.

Regardless of the finer scientific details, it is agreed upon by both sides that this man has lived a very extreme life of devotion and isolation, taking little to no food and water for over 7 decades.

Beings like Prahlad take our perceptions of ourselves and the world we live in and turn them upside down, which is something we greatly need! We have gone from a life where imagination and reality are in union, to one where they are distinctly separate. It is through the infinite perception that the practical, functional advances in our abilities and nature take place.

– Jordan Ross Dore
 
 

Heart-2-Heart Holistic focuses on working together with clients to achieve their health goals and regain a sense of balance through the mind/body/spirit connection. It all comes down to one thing. You are the key to feeling your best! Terra will assist with the helping hands and support to get you there together.

Some of the services provided are:
Aromatherapy/Lymphatic drainage massage, Chakra balancing/boosting, Nutrition, Reflexology, Reiki, as well as more bodywork and various in-depth intuitive treatments that work on the energetic level.

Terra has studied the Holistic Health and Divine Connections Training programs offered through Transformational Arts College of Spiritual Training in Toronto, On, Canada.

Website: www.heart-2-heartholistic.com
Facebook: Heart2Heart Holistic
Instagram: @heart2heartholistic
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YOUTUBE: Heart-2-Heart Holistic

-Good body work out

When you do yoga in the sand, your body has to work a whole lot harder.

This is because sand isn’t a stable surface–it moves and shifts underneath you, and you constantly need to make small adjustments to maintain each pose. This causes you to use more of the muscles in your legs, feet, core, and arms, including many muscles that you might not normally use.

-Balance

Along with building muscle, sand can also greatly improve your overall balance.

This is, again, because of the uneven and ever-changing nature of the surface itself. Once you get the hang of it though, you might find the sand a better means of support for your body, since you can learn to contour it to your movements. Over time, you’ll be really digging into those balance poses and finding a stability you didn’t know you had.

And, because it’s also a much softer and more shock-absorbent surface than a wooden or cement floor, sand can be gentler on your knees and joints–major bonus.

-Clears your mind and heart

The warmth of the sand, sound of the waves, smell of the ocean, and the gentleness of the wind can all help bring you to a calmer, more peaceful place.

-Breath of fresh air

One of the most important aspects of yoga is remembering to just breathe. This helps give your muscles the oxygen they need to be at their best, and it helps channel your inner calm.

When you combine the practice of breathing more deeply and fully with the crisp, fresh air at the beach, you’ll be cleaning out your lungs, bringing more oxygen to your body, and improving your overall energy.

-Sunshine!

It’s a fact that most people don’t get enough vitamin D, a deficiency which could lead to health problems over time. The good news is that your body produces vitamin D when your skin is exposed to sunlight–another perfect excuse to hit the beach for some yoga!