Meditation Archives - Healthy Happy Life Secrets

3 Evolved Yoga Side Benefits From Traditional Yoga

A little heartfelt yoga love spread to a mat never hurts!

Yoga side benefits and bends are great for stretching your mind and body. And fall is a good time to bring back out your mat.

National Yoga Month is in autumn. And that’s the season when I first started attending yoga classes regularly for the first time at 35. It was mostly all women. Rarely did you see a male in class. And when you did, it was an older male (wise fella!).

Yoga wasn’t seen as a physical activity or as a form of mind meditation. It was considered stretching or relaxation class.

Today, yoga is widespread in the western world and has evolved into mainstream classes. There are male teachers and school-age kids in some classes. And that’s partly due to the yoga side benefits that we now know and I’m sharing below.

…And maybe just the encouragement and inspiration you need.

And, we know yoga is good for overall health at any age. When we work on our physical fitness in a yoga pose, we’re also doing our mind and Universe a world of good. We’ve leaped years into our awareness for our good planet.

We’re more united. And that’s fitting because Yoga means “union.”

…Oh, how far we’ve come…

“Oh, the places you’ll go!” – Dr. Seuss

Evolved Yoga Wellness

Yoga took years to get mass appeal, but the benefits came just in time for our wellness needs. Our evolving culture is a heavy virtual world vs real life. It’s 80/20 for many of us these days, that was once 80/20 real life vs. virtual world.

And, yoga is one way to bridge the divide, and get back to our healthy lives.

Primary yoga benefits are for physical, mental, wellness, and developing mind-body intentions. Evolved poses today are still based on textbook, timeless, and traditional yoga poses usually named after an animal or things in nature.

But today, there seems to be less focus on variation and more on intensity under the categories of Restorative, Vinyasa, and Hatha yoga.

It’s less about inversions, and more about restoring and getting deep. And that makes me happy because that helps to get us back to balance.

What happened to hot yoga?

It was trendy but heat revvs up the heated engines and that’s not good for relaxation and balanced Pitta. Plus the body goes into mild shock, so drinking a sip of water can be momentary trauma. I would hear students in their near inversion poses around me come crashing to the floor sometimes.

So we’ve wised up in our classes as you can actually get hurt. But that’s how we learn what not to do that makes us grow. 🌱

Today the yoga stretches are deeper and more deeply described by instructors who are more knowledgable on the widely adopted subject.

Someday, medical and physical fitness practitioners may be required to take yoga classes to get certified. And that POV would help our longevity and prevention as a whole. We would focus more on building up isolated muscles and joints that protect our aging human bones.

But that’s just my early yoga trend predictions based on 15 years of observation.

Our culture is becoming more science research and healthy knowledgeable on extending life, but that hasn’t exactly caught up in our Western world ways yet.

As we do more yoga, we will gain deeper knowledge that will empower us to stretch the core mind and body to greater depths. We live in times like no other, and nothing is impossible.

Timeless Yoga Side Benefits

And Yoga has always been a personal journey and adjusting to your body. That’s timeless and traditional.

Traditional yoga has always been about building strength, flexibility, and balance at the core.

We still use the same tools: our bodies and a mat. And the same timeless props as when I started: a strap, blocks, a blanket and a bolster.

I like the simplicity. Our bodies are the complicated piece.

And application for our bodies’ needs is where we can make the deepest impact to our personal lives.

You can use blocks for additional development in core and arm muscle strength. You can use two blocks to do dips. Blocks are like human lego blocks. There are unlimited yoga block poses for beginners.

Blocks and yoga are tools for everyday health. And these are 3 evolved yoga side benefits today where you can bridge timeless traditional yoga benefits:

1.Yoga for personal empowerment

Strength can be in Chaturanga as a bicep push up move which is great for men and women to build tone in the biceps.

I did daily push ups and saw no muscle tone gain. But holding a Chaturanga, lowering and rocking back and forth on the mat got me back to feeling arm strong and empowered (while my muscle looked more svelte, in case you’re worried you’ll build Popeye arms that won’t happen for women!).

In building personal strength, yoga can help you feel challenged and renewed. You can feel successful when you reach new heights like in a Crane Pose, or feeling stealthy (strong and wealthy 😉) like when you get closer to the floor in a Lunging Lizard Pose, and you then remove the block and crouch down lower. This reminds me of a crouching tiger pose in the wild. 🐯

And if yoga is new to you, it’s like crunching smaller into a ball to fit in a tight space, but you’re actually doing stretching good to your body that’s unraveling beyond limits. 🧶

You can do this with a simple seated stretch forward to reach your toes. As you try longer, you will stretch further. And as you do it more often you’ll find your flexibility improves.

So yoga empowers you to do better and challenge yourself at your own pace.

You feel accomplished, and gaining confidence with each move and that helps your body and mind. And your strength transcends into your balance poses where you can hold the poses longer, and this slows us down in our needed busy lives.

2. Yoga for disconnecting

Yoga is a great practice to purposefully disconnect from technology attached to our hip. No devices belong on your mat. It’s a no device zone. 😊

A few short years ago, we learned a new way of working: WFH 2020 (or smart work as some countries call it). Today or sometime this week, maybe sit on your yoga mat and meditate on what you gained over the past few years. It’s smart to process what you learned about yourself.

Most of us were and are on our devices just a little too much. And 80/20 was skewed toward digital, especially in 2020. We all had our reasons whether it was social media connection, doing work, or digital escape. Some of us took vacations online. And we took our phones to sleep that never slept.

But when you’re on your yoga mat, you should have the intention to disconnect. Get off the grid. If you attend classes, you leave them in your car or lockers. Because a vibrating phone in a class would be a faux pas. That’s a good reminder to stay disconnected.

That yoga time block is your appointment to connect with yourself, the Universe, and your body-mind. You gain physical health yoga side benefits as you feel and listen to your body’s kinks and tightness. And when you come out, you feel renewed and refreshed.

3. Yoga Therapy for Change In Us So We Can Better Change The World

We go into yoga with an intention to come out with a personal growth change, being taller and wiser. These days with the generation swap in younger teachers than when I started, most of us are familiar with mantras and now being intentional is just part of the yoga practice.

One intention can be we step up to embrace change. We start with ourselves and how we show up, and let that intersect with what gift our world needs from us.

We can learn more about who we are and are becoming, so we can step into our awareness and make life impact sooner. And sometimes that comes out as a transformative identity like as a butterfly from our formative caterpillar years. 🦋

Late bloomers and those who seek personal growth often look forward to the benefits that comes with irreversible change. And with the yoga side benefits that could be an intention.

Diverse Yoga Side Benefits and Moves

When I started out in yoga, the world was so diverse. And these days, it’s less of a melting pot. Everywhere metropolitan you go, we all have our devices.

America used to be so different than our mothership UK. We were worlds apart in culture.

But today, it’s globally aligned in ways such as food.

UK and its big city London was about fish and chips and pub food. And now it’s a global food haven with many diverse ingredient influences.

But it had to grow into that identity. And these days, it’s funny to watch The Great British Baking Show use popular in America movie references for openers. It’s not dry humor, it’s just humor. For Cake Week, this is my version of cake celebration.

While I’m waiting on the oven, I’m on my mat.

I’m step hopping or hinging forward. I windmill my arms, and heel-to-toe move across the mat until the timer goes off. ⏲️

And this is something you can do in the short minutes you get a break!

Hatha yoga is a great way to start especially for balanced moves if you’re a beginner. You learn new poses and incorporate the sun and the moon in your morning or sunset yoga.

Namaste Dei

Enjoy your autumn. I like to start with a bowl of carrot ginger soup to comfort the soul and invigorate the spirit within! 🥕

Healthy Peach Profiteroles Recipe (Crushing Life’s Bruised Pride)

Print Recipe Healthy Peach Profiteroles Recipe 🍑

Healthy peach profiteroles are a way to crush life’s bruising blows. And sometimes that can be our own pride that’s crushed.

my healthy profiterole sweet joy to crush pride daily — Tasty party plate of healthy profiteroles with Greek yogurt, chocolate, and strawberries for daily joy 😋

Along with healthy peach profiteroles, below I share some encouragement so you can use daily joy like peaches to crush pride feelings and life’s negative situations.

Life doesn’t have to be peachy. But can be filled with divine peaches.

First off, we all remember how tough things got when we were starting out.

We didn’t know what joy meant. A joy ride had a different meaning than today’s joy in life’s ride. And we didn’t know the power magnitude in pride’s grip (…and maybe that’s something we need to learn about).

Especially if it feels heavy today.

…Like the world is against us and we’re pushed up against a wall sometimes. But, that’s part of the process in our growing, and gaining wisdom in our individual life journeys…

Wisdom that’s deeper in us and that starts in our minds, and then permeates into our bodies in the mind-body connection.

Wisdom is a choice and its growth is fed one choice at a time.

In wisdom, we know we’re empowered and have much more of a say in what happens to us than our circumstances. And we can speed up our growth by removing the inner rocks and blocks that stand in our way.

With time and more experiences, we often forget former trials that we’ve passed. But we want to bring them back to remembrance for today’s joy and to acknowledge how far we’ve come.

Today, smoother sailing and small pebbles in those same areas can become our new normal if we allow in the better perspectives, attitudes, and higher thinking ways, and make them our new habits.

It’s a daily journey because in any moment our subconscious minds can send us a trigger that sends a message wave of we’re not happy where we’re at, and if we let that permeate, then that’s our reality.

Often it’s ourselves we’re upset with, but our ego pride protects us from believing that we could be holding ourselves back.

That’s when we can refer back to allowing in higher thinking ways.

We can outsmart our ancestral wiring that was built during non-modern B.C. times (before Christ). 😊

And robots today don’t have this ego feature, but they do have other malfunctions. And in both ego and robot interactions we have, we want to apply our higher thinking wisdom for better outcomes.

Healthy Peach Profiteroles 🍑

Print Recipe

Healthy Peach Profiteroles

Course Dessert

Cuisine American, French

Ingredients

1 cup flour (combine bread and all purpose flour recommended)
1 tbsp butter (a small amount will do you for the lighter effect)
1/4 cup milk or nut milk
1-2 eggs (thick, smooth, and pipeable batter)
1 ripe peach
thick plain yogurt or Greek yogurt

Instructions

Cook flour, butter, and milk.
Let cool and add egg. If the batter isn't thick enough then add an additional egg.
Bake on 350°F for about 30-35 minutes.
Optional: brush a whisked egg (egg wash) for additional shine before baking.
Fill with yogurt and decorate with peach bits.

The culprit is our pride (that healthy peach profiteroles can remind you to be self-aware). And pride can be from high Pitta that peach profiteroles will help to you cool off).

Pride is the boulder we need to grow out of to remove. And most of the time all we need to do is the opposite and be humble, overriding what our helmet-protected heads tell us to do.

We can use kindness and healthy as a north star guide to help pull us up and out.

In metro city area culture, often these are countercultural moves and secondary priorities. I grew up in the most powerful city in the nation that’s always on the news. And being prideful is heightened, and appears as an invisible status symbol in the air…

I grew up believing that being perfect was an advantage in every way, and then over time re-learned that perfection got in the way of progress. Because perfection puffs up pride to get everything perfect when nothing is perfect.

I saw the damage toll in others who didn’t have the awareness to make changes.

And in my own wisdom and awareness, I saw striving for perfection as destruction in prioritizing results over relationships, health and personal growth. It robbed me of joy, peace, and progress.

And maybe for you it’s the same, or it’s some other pride-driven belief you were fed.

In modern society, we hail getting ahead which is good when it’s healthy, but when it’s sabotaging yourself or hurting others, that’s when it’s no longer working.

At the least, ego pride protects us from being vulnerable and crushed by the elements around us.

We defend by sticking up to rights and our feeling right. The problem is this divides us from others. And we rob ourselves of an opportunity for happiness and compassion for others.

Instead, we want to use humility and joy to crush pride.

The better news is we can witness our patterns and beliefs, and change them. For the previous few weeks, I shared my night, morning, and pool meditation ways that helped me in my journey, and they were all awake meditation moments allowing thoughts in (feeling the thoughts out).

…And I’m sure it was in those silent meditation moments that allowed for my breakthroughs leaving behind old, retired patterns that no longer served me. They were replaced by the loving thoughts.

And we all can do this throughout our day, one thought and action at a time.

Over time, we learn to react and say less like we did in our immature years. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

We walk away so we don’t energize negative thoughts. We change our thoughts, so that our feelings stay loving and calm. We gain joy to crush pride. And we can stay aware of our joyful thoughts that make us feel good in the moment and/or we look forward to in the future.

This helps us stay at peace, calm, and without unnecessary stress that we know causes health deterioration. We can use joy to crush pride, stress, and anxiety in one fell-swoop.

In peace, we see other people’s perspectives other than our own. We stay open, and remove any stubbornness that puts a rock between our happiness.

And when we do this at the start of the day as our daily attitude and habit, our life improves and we’re no longer stuck in those areas we want to grow that may seem non-related.

But everything is related…

When we remove the boulders we don’t need to carry inside, our life and situations gets better!

Crush Pride Morning Prescription

We expect days when we wake up on the wrong side of the bed or everything goes off. We have a few go-to places ready to change our sails into better seas and into a good mood.

And the best ways are in our minds, so we get to a place of joy to crush pride.

Part of pride is our ego fooling us into believing that we need to make our lives complicated and bigger because we’re not feeling happy or we’re not enough, when we have everything that is enough.

So to combat, we don’t accumulate more than we need (that can be coming from a Kapha imbalance).

We decide to shut off those unhappy beliefs, and wake up to simple encouraging messages, inspirations, and passions where we feel gratitude and appreciation for having life today.

We wipe off our clinging unhealthy ego pride that wants to get the better of us by staying aware.

We don’t let our moods and what others say or do change our joyful tune.

Joy is a medicine. And it’s naturally infectious. 🎉

Have a great week and hope you find a few minutes to enjoy peach profiteroles you make.

…Oh, and in the upcoming weeks, I share an update with you about one healthy habit I’ve adopted this year that maybe you’re interested in or thinking of starting.

And I have a super cool Ayurvedic series that will help us all starting off with some relief for the Vata autumn season. You can signup at the top of the site to receive notifications to my weekly blog articles when they come fresh off the press. 😊

Better Morning Meditation Thoughts

morning meditation is made better with homemade orange-ade... orange you glad? — Homemade orange juice is a healthy OJ option without refined sugar, a plastic bottle, or wasting any part of the orange that attracts fly critters… this could be your new way – o-range you glad!? 🧡

Morning meditation thoughts matter! And, if you tuned in last week, I gave a calming idea for night meditation to doze off to. To keep the balance this week, I have a morning meditation routine idea to empower and inspire your healthy mindset and emotional well-being.

The morning meditation begins when you have those first few awakened thoughts… and maybe your body hasn’t caught up yet. Like, we haven’t stretched our wings yet, even though we know the early bird catches the worm. 🐦‍⬛

We can blame that on our morning head that often comes with messed up bed head hair. If you don’t have those assets, then consider yourself blessed in the morning. 🧢

But if you do (that’s most of us), then changing attitude is the way up. We know what’s up from down even if we can’t yet think or speak logically.

…And considering some of us (Kaphas) are naturally Sleepyheads or (Vatas) inconsistently wake up feeling tired or awake with no rhyme or reason.

…Tired or not, you want to rewrite the negative thoughts especially if you woke up on the wrong side of the pillow.

And in my early meditation years wayback in the time machine when Y2K was in our sights, meditating was thinking thoughts and seeing how those thoughts feel. ❣️ …decades later, that’s still how I meditate.

The goal is to come out with better ideas to implement solutions and workout my creativity genes… and not so much focusing on stress-reduction and wellness that meditation today has primarily become.

…And btw, that Pitta and Kapha minds are naturally better at this than the Vata minds.

…And epic ideas also lead to less stress if you wanna look at it that way in attitude. 😉

Your Attitude

Because attitude is everything!… it’s a choice, not a feeling.

You decide that you do X or Y that have very different decisions. And if you choose the first choice, there is X consequence (and choosing Y has the Y consequence). Different consequences and results is what you have to live with mid-week and in your night meditation. So it snow balls with compounding effects.

Beginning with the end in mind (…thank you, Steven Covey!), focus on your outcome consequence so you can show your mind at the moment how different life can be by your thought choice, especially in those groggy early morning moments.

The best choice is always the positive and loving responses in any meditation method you choose.

Even if the situations you faced in your past life weigh heavy, today you rewrite what wasn’t right and that you aspire your future to be. And that gives you a new today and future.

You have everything you need to be happy.

And your attitude will steer your decisions and outlook that determine your future.

Choose to restore your thoughts starting with morning meditation.

Do it consistently every time as best you can. We’re all imperfect. Don’t you wish everyone in your life with expectations would say (and mean) these 6 magic words: just do the best you can. That should take the pressure off.

Say that to yourself as your deepest critic.

Come out peaceful.

Then develop a better mindset belief today that creates better habits.

Consider that even if you don’t know what that is, you believe it so because you’ve consistently pulled a rabbit out of the hat in those areas, so today is no different. Believe in yourself.

As part of our morning meditation routine, we can change our beliefs starting with ourselves.

You can do this with positive messages you listen to, uplifting music, and quote inspirations.

You won’t hold onto a positive and a negative belief for the same idea at the exact same time (as our brains won’t allow the confusion), so we have a small time gap to make a choice.

In the gap, make the positive up-choice easy.

And we delay our lesser knee-jerk thoughts and responses. And if we need to take action like write an email or message back to someone, we wait until we can re-write with the positive emotional undertone.

We can’t take back our words ever, and when they’re written (especially). These days on the whole, we’ve become a kinder more sensitive society, so we’ve been trained to be more thoughtful.

And re-wording to a positive narrative helps us receive kind back in kind.

Lessons are a Learning Opportunity

And if self-control in any shade is a struggle today, think of the X and Y consequences I mentioned earlier.

Fast action thinks there’s one consequence, but that choice is a gamble…

Remember times when acting fast backfired, and if a timeout would’ve been called, that second thought would’ve given a better play (consequence).

Slowing down the ball play in your life, you may have discovered this. And in mine, I accidentally missed a work beat to a problem at hand and learned it was ok, and: leave a problem long enough, it solves itself.

That sounds reactive, and not proactive for productivity. But choosing to not do anything until you know what next step to do is the wiser decision with a better outcome.

Offering a quick fix can require cleanup.

So stick to your inner wisdom.

Don’t be in such a hurry to put fires out (unless there’s a real fire 🔥).

Make your stamp of approval mean something aligned with your thoughts… and maybe ones you’ve noodled out in morning meditation…

Let your session permeate the day as the theme of the day.

Listen and weigh your thoughts as a learning opportunity. Build on permeating better thoughts one day at a time. 💭

Night Meditation for Healthy Mindset Growth

Night Meditation for Healthy Mindset Growth with these starry night and dreamy cloud pop tarts may be what you need. Recipe below.Print Recipe

star and cloud jam pop tarts. — Night meditation inspiration with starry clouds and pop tart food inspiration bites ⭐️ ☁️ Recipe below…

Growing up, we learned wrong ideas that didn’t help us (that wasn’t our fault)… and today we can rewrite those thoughts with starry night meditation ⭐️ (…I have a bright mind reset idea below).

It’s good for us to know where all the muck began in childhood. If our caretakers or parents were part of the Lost Generation or older Baby Boomer generation, we know they didn’t have the self-aware knowledge we have today.

…They didn’t grow up with vulnerability as an acceptable way of life, so their lack of evolvement in those passed on areas is not their fault. Weakness used to be frowned upon and taking unacceptable initative and action (that’s acceptable today) would have been seen as scandals and drama back then.

Often growing up in those zeitgeists, people stayed close-minded and endured to their mental health demise. And what hurt mental health in individuals back then would still hurt today, but now we have society awareness and acceptance to be grateful for. 💝

And maybe your parents, grandparents, and caretakers still live with that mindset that they won’t shake off.

One book example that shares how trauma affects a family’s history is Maya Angelou’s Why the Caged Bird Sings. There we get an inside glimpse at understanding how toxicity can impact a person and influence others. .

So, we know where it comes from in passing generations, but that doesn’t help us navigate our next steps in our own complicated mind mess baggage.

In our today lives, we can only be in charge of our awareness. And in doing so, we forgive others and we don’t let those old ways infect us. We live our new normal way because life is meant to be joyful and rewarding even with the bumps.

And for today’s generation, we know that holding onto personal trauma in any form is self-destructive (and sabotaging at the least). It hurts us and in the relationships we have by what we intentionally and unintentionally do.

Unintentional damage can be done at any moment. Until we confront and restore what’s not working well… oh, and even better finding out the wound root cause… that’s when we lift our hovering clouds. And that gives us new life. Bringing light to darkness is the way out.

We work on healing our old brain that doesn’t forget or quit even after we’ve long moved on.

And if you didn’t have a perfect childhood (...yes, that’s most of us) or if you did live in one you want to relive, you’re still living in an imperfect world around you.

The imperfect reality is freeing because then you know that you lost something in translation that can be uncovered (inside you ❤️), once you breakthrough, that will make life even better in the mind-body connection. And then when you’re sensitized, you can get in the healthy habit of restoring your mind-body every time you feel your thoughts are off.

If you haven’t discovered your hidden sides hindering you from your best, this week is your time to explore. Put down the usual tasks or at least a few hours.

Making self-discovery a priority in your life saves you time from making the same mistakes. You improve your quality of life without having to spend a dime.

And with an inward deep-dive plunge, you can do this anywhere on this planet. Everybody has access.

🗝️ Reminder: you only get to do this life once and the sooner you uncover the hidden spots created by wounds, the more you get to live free for the rest of your life.

…So often we seek ways to gain external freedom away from our current life or work life, and for a better future, and we ignore what’s closest to us that’s also the most impactful… our mind freedom that we can change at any moment if we wanted to and know how.

And if we want to and don’t quite know how, night meditation is one of, if not the BEST time. 🕦

Because as you’re about to drift off or when you’re tired, you get closer to the Theta relaxed brain waves. Your conscious mind is less active… and your automatic and subconscious brain is more receptive. And we want to influence our back office brains as much as possible. 😉

So… to mind reset with night meditation:

Start with witnessing your thoughts and note when you felt inferior or less than during the day. Some call this the Impostor.

On any day, by midday, chances are you’ve come across self-sabotage thoughts already. And by night, you can scan for the thoughts in retrospect that you had in the day.

Think of what you have to gain if the worst did happen… maybe it’s more time on your hands or you allow space for new opportunities to come in as closed doors are shut.

…That’s mind freeing. Doze off with those positive and meditative-worthy thoughts. Get into your night meditation jam as a healthy habit that calms you to sleep.

And you can let that night meditation be your every night where you re-write your thoughts one day at a time. ✨

Healthy Pop Tarts

Course Breakfast

Cuisine American

Ingredients

Flour
Water
Light butter
Light sugar

Instructions

Make your pastry dough. use light ingredients (low sugar and butter) for a lighter pastry.
Roll our pastry dough to about 1/4 inch to 1/3 inch thick.
Use cookie cutters to cut out shapes. Cut out two per pop tart.
Add filling like raspberry jam or crushed fruit.
Add the second cut out dough pieces to the top and for "a filling sandwich." Use a fork to imprint and clamp down around the edges.
Bake at 350°F for about 25 minutes or until golden brown.
Prepare your glaze. Mix fresh raspberry and a 'lil jam to make more smooth consistency. Get your raspberry jam on! When pop tarts are cool, smear glaze on tops and add a mint leaf or your favorite green zhugh element.

If you like these, I invite you to check out the healthy whole wheat raspberry pop tarts and peach profiteroles

Pool Meditation Idea For Ego Daily Calm

Pool meditation is underrated. And so is sea salt therapy.

Pink Himalayan sea salt therapy for cooling.

One of the intentions of Meditation is to quiet the mind that’s always running. And that’s how I came to discover pool meditation.

In any meditation, the peace is in the silence. And I have a pool meditation idea that worked for me… and I’m passing on to you in case you want to give it a try!

BTW, I am the first to admit I’m not a good half-conscious meditator. I prefer to silence my mind awake fully conscious and eyes open. And whatever works for you, works!

Specifically isolating the mind’s ego is a good goal for your meditation 🎯

…Because we’re stuck with our ego for life, and good or bad, whether we’re meditating or not.

And our ego is a good part of why life goes back to the way it was after the recent meditation effect gradually wears off. Even if that’s just ennui (boredom) that the ego can turn into woes-me.

When we go back to our lives from peace and meditation, the ego snaps right back into active mode. And it wants to be right (not necessarily happy).

So it’s a great idea to enhance the calming meditation effects and have it last longer.

I tried this for the first time years ago when I was practicing how to be conscious of the mind-body connection.

…Long before my first meditation experiences (when photos were fuzzy and taken from snap cameras 😉). Like traditional meditation, we could sit still in a chair or Indian-style sitting position on the floor.

And today for any of us, ongoing calm can be the day and every day when focused and engaged in the moment (that’s part of our modern day self-awareness movement).

And long before my first meditation experience, I stepped into this calm discovery decades ago in an indoor swimming pool… 💭

In one temporary corporate job I held many moons ago, there were two great job benefits. The first one was leaving at 5 pm that was not a common occurrence in any modern work in the Western world. You probably know what I’m talkin’ about!

And the second benefit (and first ever perk for me) was use of the indoor pool attached to the conference center I worked in.

That summer, every weekday at 5 pm on the dot I got excited about my day change. I jumped into my swimsut and I transformed into my meditation calm.

The first few minutes in the pool cooled me off (both in mind and body). And the longer I stayed in, the more calm I felt. Even on the drive home I could feel the stress of the world melt away.

pool meditation with a rainbow decorated unicorn float is always fun!

I still felt alive when I got home, that’s not the usual feeling from an exhausting work day around work people. And on some days I had a second job to go to. I had caught my second wind in the pool environment.

I didn’t need any special breathing techniques or calming meditation narration. The pool created a naturally calming effect on the Pitta summer side of things that’s heightened in the heat.

When you step into a cooling pool, it does your body good. Your body recognizes the environment as healing. Yes, it’s a healing pool of water. And our bodies are mostly water, so it’s natural osmosis.

You cool down with the shimmering body of blue water around you, and take yourself out of the usual dry earth we’re mostly around. Your mind can travel a million miles away from your life.

So it’s also an escape. 💭

And that’s how calming pool meditation can be for you where you dip your toes in this tranquil setting. You slip away from the earthly troubles and enter a new realm. Not to mention the blue ripple color is mesmerizing, serene, and good for eye-open meditators like me (…and maybe you too 👀).

You get a part two in your day like you’re starting a new day in the same day. And sometimes a start over if the first half wasn’t so good or relaxing.

Some cool pool meditation tips:

Sit by the pool steps to start with so your body is partially in the water. Then gradually enter the pool water. For indoor pool meditation, I like to hang along the pool’s edge like I’m reading a book, but I’m actually reading the calm in myself. I’m just chillin’ and forgetful of time. 😊

You not only cool and calm from stress, you work on letting go of those negative thoughts that your ego feeds you non-stop throughout the 9-5 day. So you do yourself healthy good.

Also, pool meditation only works well in a quiet pool setting. Not an outdoor pool with splish splashing kids playing or a pool class with instructor and a headset.

You’d be better off under the shade of a tree or in a cool spot inside, but it won’t be the same as an inside pool. Hotels usually have these indoor pools that are almost always quiet.

…Then when you get back home, capture the way you felt.

This is an amazing power and tool that you have control over. You don’t have to wait until the next free day or moments you have. You just reset yourself in that pool calm place in your imagination.

Your body may even cool down just from the thought. That’s the healthy power of the mind-body. 🌱

You may even want to have a blue wavy color or pool photo in front of you as a reminder. Visual cues are so powerful to empower you. 🎉

In contrast, a bright photo or retro Barbie colors in front of you invigorates, that can just heat things up in your mind. Bright red is even more alarming than the color of hot chili peppers and fire trucks (but BLUE is a soothing color in all shades).

…If you’re a bit Kapha minded these days, maybe that’s what you need! 💕

We had a neon pink light outside the meditation room that looks like a photo developing room (…maybe you remember those where the negatives 🎞️turned to positives 📸?). And from this room, we came out as transformed half-asleep meditated beings 😉

You may never have this glowing experience that I had, BUT you can do your own meditation wherever you are… or test pool meditation and see if that’s your meditation jam. 🧘🏻‍♀️

And from there you can get your creative personal essence back in case you’re having a creative mental block or dry spell season of ideas… or searching for your life’s purpose. And this is just one of many techniques that can get your cool-calm-and collected swag back as a first step. 😎

Here’s one dessert you can enjoy.

Tropical Fruit Pavlova

A refreshing pavlova with tropical fruits in the heat is easy to prepare and a dessert you can enjoy for days and share with others!

Course Dessert

Cuisine American

Ingredients

Tropical fruits, chopped
Meringue
coconut, canned

Instructions

Whip egg whites to make meringue base.
Bake in 200°F oven until it feels solid and formed (like packed snow).
Decorate with fruit (dragonfruit, pineapple, passion fruit, and guava)
Pipe coconut cream (flesh of coconut)