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10 Breathing Exercises, Better Sleep, and Healthy Habit Tips

 

Without needing breathing exercises, we forget how automatic and important breathing is. Sometimes our breathing pattern or air changes wake us up to get back to our healthy breath awareness in this moment. Our breathing can easily remind us of our precious moments and the finite time we have on earth.

And in healthy reminders, I wanted to breathe some good tips your way!

…Breathing is everything life. It’s how the earth began:

“God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7)

With climate change, wildfires, and spring green pollen allergy dust in the air at high levels (over 10), many of us are affected from the lungs and neck up.

I suspected allergies was affecting my sleep as I was clocking in about the same amount of hours from night to morning and not feeling as rested. 

I had been documenting a healthy 8 hours of sleep time on my Apple Watch and tracker.

I noticed my body runs best when I have 5 hours of restful sleep that’s also tracked.) And choosing a life with less stress and more balance, 7 hours is a good enough rhythm.

And something for you to clock in because stress and sleep is related.

Observe Your Sleep

While tracking a few nights for awareness, I observed I was getting less restful sleep and more light sleep. Hmmm… I thought, I wonder why that is?

All things being equal, I wanted to test the hypothesis that I had shallow breathing at night.

It dawned on me that my deep rest (restful sleep) may have been lessened by the shallower breathing or less air going into my lungs, as I breathed through my slightly congested nose.

Btw, breathing in air through your nose is a much better way than through your mouth as it is known to help increase memory. You have a filter in your nose that you don’t in your mouth. You can Google that if you want scientific-backed evidence.

These are 10 breathing exercises and habit tips for healthy living: Continue reading “10 Breathing Exercises, Better Sleep, and Healthy Habit Tips”

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Shower Thoughts For Self-Care and Creative Day

Shower thoughts often give us new and creative ideas because in the shower we’re relaxed and that’s good daily self-care.

Sometimes that brings a smile and a laugh to our day.

Bring on the feel-good water sprinkle! 🚿

self-care and shower thoughts

We can wash away our anxious thoughts temporarily.

And, you can get the dual benefit of self-care and shower thoughts from your  shower experiences. This article is how to embrace and bring more shower thoughts alive!

A shower can be both a sauna and steamy therapeutic experience more powerful than taking a walk outside.

You can turn showers into a productive ritual in your mindfulness where you’re focused in the moment.

Mindfulness is full of physical and mental health benefits in the mind-body connection you may not have known about.

When you feel good, that shows up as good happy feelings, but also as healthy in and on your body. In other words, your skin radiates too when you’re feeling good.

Plus, when you get shower clean, you’re washing away bacteria on your skin accumulated from sweat and dirt and maybe why you got in the shower as a daily ritual in the first place.

Another benefit to a shower is you can check in with your internal body thermostat temperature.

If your body feels warm when it’s cold outside, that could indicate an irritated Pitta emotional state for your season (or until your situation changes).

If you’re cold when it’s warm outside, then you could be feeling worried or anxious in Vata or depressed or tired in Kapha, as examples.

Your body leaves clues and you want your shower temperature to be a reminder and one solution to what you’re positively feeling and hoping to achieve this season.

With the right water temperature hitting your skin, you feel good, so that relaxes you all-around to allow good thoughts and creative ideas to come into your mind more easily.

Your brain feels safe and free from defense fight-or-flight mode. So then you can safely let your guard down in room seclusion.

Your spirit alignment can also come alive as you get deeper into your heart’s desires. These ideas also help you manifest your want to a life of purpose.

When relaxed, here are 3 things you can do productively:

1.You can get your best ideas in the shower when you least expect them. You can come up with new ideas while performing self-care practices.

When allowing in shower thoughts, you can get creative and adventuresome ideas for your projects, next trip, food and daily plans, and even solutions to problems you haven’t solved.

A-ha solutions can appear when you’ve forgotten you had a dilemma but were reminded at the moment. With time and space, your brain is seeking a different angle, perception, or perspective that allows these memories to pop up.

2.You can reset your daily intentions in the shower. You can change  you style approach in a situation using self-care and shower thoughts.

If you’re trying to stop knee-jerk reactions or blurting out often, you could exert self-control by thinking the word “jerk” is not what you want to be, and maybe that helps you change your patterns for the better.

Sometimes we lean into being hard on ourselves for our good, so we can get over the hump of missing the mark.

3.You can pray in the shower and get loving thoughts in return, similar to ideas but they can be more focused on growing yourself and handling relationships in your life.

You can get mental self-care and shower thoughts.

You can exchange critical-judgmental thoughts for open suggestions from your mind and what others have given. That’s a good way to cool off the Pitta mind.

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5 Yoga Tree Pose Life Metaphors

yoga-tree-pose-metaphor with rainbow eucalytus tree

We can use a yoga Tree Pose today and these days as a reminder and metaphor for our lives, and the trees that have impacted our lives.

Firstly, what is so special about trees that have meaning in our lives?

The obvious being that trees are growing, living creatures just like us humans with unique features. We know trees are alive because they bloom, shed leaves, and pollen (not their greatest spring dominant feature).

Trees can grow from a mere seed that fits in your hand to a super strong tree you can climb (similar to a growing person from an egg to an adult).

The appearance and rings on a tree can show age, as our human bodies and features do the same thing.

When I was growing up, we purposefully remembered trees on National Arbor Day. Usually, the celebration included the installment of a new baby plant at school. The remembrance of the special day has been crowded out by other hashtag events but you can do your appreciation just by looking out the window at the trees near you, or by getting in a yoga Tree Pose.

These days, we celebrate yoga days more than we do trees it seems, but luckily there is a standing pose that represents trees in yoga. We can appreciate trees from a personal growth perspective.

Trees are a metaphor for our lives.

In Tree, remind yourself of these 5 areas:

1.Growth and direction. You can change your yoga Tree Pose at any point. You can lift your right bended-knee leg to rest on your left shin, or you can lift your right leg higher to form a number “4” formation with your right foot rested on your left thigh (looking like a flamingo).

You can take your wide arms and open them to the sky, have them go straight up parallel to your ears, or bring them to heart center with prayer hands.

Your tree can go in any direction of your choosing. As you balance one leg, you can build up strength and notice one leg is usually stronger than the other.

2.Grounded. You can feel grounded with your feet planted on the floor, like a tree with a stump firmly rooted in the earth. When you’re not sent from busy task to task, you can gain clarity about your life and deliberate actions you take. You’re not wishy-washy, tossed to and from. You’re steadfast and purposeful like a tree.

3.Learning. A tree is also a symbol of knowledge. From trees, we make paper that we can bind together to make books that expand our minds.

The more branches we develop, the more we can become useful to the world. Animals can use our tree and we can impact the community around us like moss growing on trees.

As you grow older, you can become wiser and stronger as you’ve experienced situations to increase your know-how.

4.Being alive! If you feel a sensation in any of your parts, you can take that as a positive sign you’re alive. Your automatic breath is no longer a gift you take for granted, if you become consciously aware of your inhale and exhale.

In yoga, we do a lot of breathwork. The inhale is often when we’re facing up or lifting up, and exhale when we’re grounding down. The breath is a little different than when lifting weights in a gym. So don’t get confused. And you can pause at anytime and do 4-7-8 breathing.

Trees and plants don’t get confused. They play a sustainable role for us by giving off carbon dioxide. Without them, we would not have a life in our ecosystem.

5.Uniqueness. The more you practice your various yoga Tree Pose styles, the better your tree can enliven yourself as you let your roots develop into hybrid trees. You can have properties like a flexible and resilient palm, a durable evergreen, or a hardy cactus. You could have overlapping properties in your versatility and personality. Continue reading “5 Yoga Tree Pose Life Metaphors”

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Ideas for Healthier Lunches, Picnics, and School

Ideas for healthier lunches is always on the agenda year-round.

Ideas for healthier school lunches make kids and adults happy with a balanced plate of veggies, fruit, protein, dairy, and carbs.

The time we take for lunch is often hurried and goes by in a blink of an eye.  There are ideas for healthier lunches that you may have forgotten to try in your busyness.

We learn to speed through lunch when we’re old enough to learn. Lunches can be an afterthought when we’re hungry, running in between activities.

I would encourage the idea that lunch is the most important meal of the day (one I don’t recommend skipping or skimping on) when you need the extra energy to carry out your day!

If you like and can eat carbs or pasta, this is a meal where you can get the most efficiency out of your carbs.

You need and burn the energy in a working or working out afternoon. If you focus on carbs for your dinner meal, as you age, this can slow you down.

That’s why I like the idea of the plant-based dinner. But that doesn’t always fill you up during the day when you need the energy boost to keep you going like carbs can.

Growing up you have a memory about your overall childhood lunches.

My public-school lunches were both memorable… and not.

They were a special time that I could sit and spend time with my friends, and that probably helped me appreciate just sitting around with others socializing and chatting.

The cafeteria food I ate though was a different story… I wish we had ideas for healthier lunches. Continue reading “Ideas for Healthier Lunches, Picnics, and School”

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Fear and Phobia Is Not Permanent

fear and phobia

When I was younger I wore contact lenses. For the first few weeks, I had a subconscious fear and phobia, and I struggled to get the soft contact on my eyeball.

When I would try, my eye would blink and my eyelashes would keep the contact out of my eye.

No-contact was what I should have called the daily event that seemed like taking half an hour every day.

Years later, I realized that the reason I couldn’t get the contacts in my eyes was that I had a subconscious fear of the contact (lens) making contact with my eye. 

So the blinking was not controlled by me but a body reaction to what my mind was telling my eye (mind-body connection in full swing).  

From this puzzling event, I recalled that years before as a child, my eyes would sting when I tried to open them in the pool water.

Some kids could open their eyes completely underwater (I noticed with my underwater goggled protected eyes wide open).

A-ha!… with that, I made the connection to my fear… the goggles acted as eye protection and a contact lens was an intruder like the chlorinated pool water, at least in my subconscious mind (that does most of the thinking).

Knowing that insight, allowed problem-solving consciousness to emerge.

With daily practice, I consistently calmed my mind disabling my protective shell in my brain and re-writing the new story narrative to my fear and phobia that had the bold headline: “contacts are safe.”

Then that mind message was reinforced daily as I went to a 20/20 daily vision world from a framed eyeglass world.

Those subconscious positive reinforcing thoughts cut down the time to insert a contact within seconds.

Wouldn’t that be great if we could reprogram our negative thinking minds in nanoseconds?

Making visible, hidden fears through your actions

Inserting contact lenses can be a frustrating experience for many in the beginning (like it was for me).

Similarly, for so many other starting out defeats, a hidden fear or phobia can be preventing the outcome from happening.

There’s a deeper root cause for your fears.

When you can find the reasons and ways to reprogram your subconscious mind, then you can get over your fear and phobia.

Insecurity is one of those subconscious fears that can show up regularly with a knee-jerk reaction from a fear-based thought.

Another is jealousy or criticism especially if you’ve been wounded or have reason to doubt.

And these get worse if you’re Vata imbalanced. If you’re naturally Vata dominant, anxiety is your natural way that can trigger fear.

Any non-loving thought is fear-based because it comes from the brain’s ego, and if left unattended, can spin wildly out of control.

We can rewrite those subconscious fear thoughts and shadow work can be the way.

Also, others can notice from the words, actions, and reactions that happen, but the person with the ego is often blind…

It’s natural and invisible to the person unless they witness and catch the self-defeating and manipulating thoughts.

So that’s why we all have to be careful and stay aware of our own egos.

At any weak moment, a humble spirit can turn into a prideful act.

The simple act of someone cutting you off on the road can change your calm state to a riled-up one. And that can show up in a myriad of undesirable outward expressions that are unhelpful to everyone involved.

Getting off your chest is healthy and productive after you have a chance to cool down in self-control and you have calmly thought about potential solutions.

Then when you are tested, or you’re cut off the road, you get to decide which road to take.

Choosing the higher road means letting go and that can seem weak to the ego-mind, but self-control is empowered strength.

If you’re conflicted or when you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything yet. Review so you can learn and have discernment next time.

Remember that tidbit of wisdom next time when you hesitate.

Because you can be certain you will be reminded again until the lesson is learned. Life is patient with us.

How To Change Your Deep Rooted Fear and Phobia

Fear and phobia is rooted in the small places we can operate from in limitation and sometimes ugliness.

We all can act saintly-kind if we choose, and the act allows good sides to birth. Love serves all.

With practice over time, ideally, we can even learn to let undesired “meant to protect you” entering thoughts just pass through without putting energy into them.

We don’t have to accept our thoughts as current truth such as an isolated traumatic experience.

We can just reject those non-helpful thoughts that don’t apply to our current situation and send them back to where they came from.

And we can connect the dots to our self-awareness for the next time. We can recognize our self-destructive patterns and question them.

Because when you realize and accept every thought isn’t yours, that’s when you can learn how to optimize and transform your life if you decide.

Maybe you do realize, but you haven’t accepted yet. Because to accept means you give up a part of your control.

Say Goodbye to Your Past Fear and Phobia!

Before my younger contact lens years, I had fear and phobia about the dark, lightning, thunder, and the deep waters just to name a few things.

They came from news stories I heard, scary movies I watched, and almost physically drowning in my backyard lake at 9 years old.

But first I had to get calm and lose the worry.

I conquered the drowning fear eventually by learning how to swim.

When you lose your deep fear, any surface panicking fear and phobia, you can learn to float as you become light and buoyant. And if you can float either on your back or your front, you can learn to swim and save yourself.

That summer I was able to enroll in swim lessons but didn’t successfully learn how to float.

Then one day I was in the shallow end of a neighborhood pool, and I was calm and tried to float. Something clicked and I learned how to float on my belly and my back in the pool water.

It wasn’t pretty as I just laid there like a piece of driftwood letting my feet slowly float from the bottom of the pool.

But that day gave me confidence as I repeated floating again and again until I unintentionally could convince and remind myself (and my mind) that I knew how to float.

Fast forward to my young adulthood… most of my childhood phobias had disappeared or I had learned to swim out of them.

I still had fear and worry about so many real-life situations.

One was I had learned to grow scared of sharing.

I didn’t grow in share vulnerability times so that re-enforced my being a private person.

Writing blog posts like this and sharing on the internet was not something I would have ever done back then.

But instead of letting the fear get to me and grow in me, I slowly one-small step at a time turned those moves into action and transformation.

Since I faced my fear, I got over the hump to the other side and then I could replace my old fears.

But I learned to lean on faith to gradually change my Vata ways and worried thinking.

When I had the realization opportunity to cross the bridge into knowing there’s a divine source inside you decades later, there was an exchange into believing in more than my ability only.

There was new weightlessness like the thick clouds had lifted. I wasn’t the sole source for my success and I stopped believing in luck as coincidence without meaning.

I became a Believer that applied deeper insight to life, which did the heavy lifting to transform fear. In faith you know there’s another better life coming. 

…What if this life were just a test?

And if you’re still wondering what this life is about, testing the waters in your quiet, thoughtful life is a good way to discover. What if there was more, and you were missing out? 

This is an individual question, but when you seek, you will find.

“You become what you think about all day long.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson 

How Faith Can Play a Solution Role

To take one step further, gaining faith can transform your beliefs and mental health, and especially if you have an anxiety disorder or a traumatic stress disorder.

When you believe that all things are possible in a larger context, then you can believe that fear is beyond you and your power.

Fear can feel like an uncontrollable problem. If you can problem-solve with from within then you have a powerful way.

Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking was a classic book published in the 1950s.

He was a motivational thinker so ahead of his time because he was already suggesting meditation and mind-body correlation in his works.

There’s a 10-step practical process in the book’s chapter “Power to Solve Personal Problems.”

It includes: believe for every problem there is an answer, pray about your problems, trust in your insight and intuition, and do creative spiritual thinking for amazing power answers.

If Mr. Peale were still alive today, he would be a great forward-thinking influencer with much to say.

 

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