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! 🚿
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.
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”
Back to school healthy lunch ideas is always a good idea year-round. Like protein nuggets made with chicken (easy recipe below)… and that you can sub with chick peas for falafel nuggets like these:
And if you’re making lunches for an active agenda where you need lots of protein, chicken (nuggets) could be your efficient energy source. And included below are the steps… plus more ideas for healthy lunch ideas! Because lunch is still one of the most important meals of the day (so it shouldn’t be an afterthought).
When I was in highschool, I ate with the same Lunch Bunch (we called ourselves) everyday.
Until the school year ended… and then we hoped for the same lunch schedule the next school year. That didn’t always work out and brought in some anxiety the first week. You had to make new friends.
But lunch was comfort. It’s something I never skipped because I liked food (still do!) and needed the energy to get through the afternoon. Even though I didn’t have a prepared lunch, I had my menu choices in the school cafeteria.
School-bought lunches were for the most part served edible for younger tastes even if it was a cardboard-like cheese and sauce pizza or mystery meat chicken nuggets. And forgettable wimpy fries (…did those come from real potatoes?). This still blows my mind what is allowed to be fed in public schools.
Taking a McDonald’s field trip for a Happy Meal would’ve been healthier (and a tastier treat!).
I know in high school, I often opted for a soft, warm pretzel with yellow mustard for lunch over a “real meal.” It was at least warm (where sometimes the cafeteria food were served still a bit frozen).
In my teenage mind, a pretzel was a step up in gourmet junk food. And adding mustard was my “vegetable” to tie me over until dinner.
Back then, cafeteria lunch was not to Jamie Oliver’s standards.
School lunches weren’t consistent.
And today they’re still not…
…Maybe that’s why I chose a career in hotel catering management and restaurant food planning after my schooling. 💭
And that’s when I experientially learned there were much better food options. Now I know better.
And you know better.
So preparing your own back to school healthy lunch options is the better plan.
For growing and active individuals, carbs such as pasta early in the day helps provide that needed energy.
That way for dinner you can tone down on the carbs, or serve lesser complex carbs like rice or light bread that’s easier to digest later in the day. They’re okay on a BRAT (bread, rice, apple, toast) or a low FODMAP diet.
And then not be hungry to enjoy a plant-based dinner. That may have been missed earlier in the day.
And when you make your own lunches, you know exactly what you’re getting. These are some ideas of what you could make:
Back to School Healthy Lunch Ideas and Sides (Snacks):
Chickpeas, rice (good with slivered almonds), and cumin
Chicken, curry, and cucumbers
Chickpea, red lentil, spinach, veggie or whole-grain pasta
Tofu or chickpeas, spinach, and quinoa
Baked potato with tomato salsa
Sprouted Bread Gourmet Sandwich:
Salmon, avocado, and cayenne pepper
Smoky tuna melt with a slice of cheese, and turmeric
Prosciutto and brie
Tomato, mozzarella, basil with a drizzle of balsamic
Instead of accompanying lunch with fries or chips, how about a healthy side?…
Hummus.
Olives – green and black.
Pickles (or cornichons if you want to get fancy!)
Edamame.
Almonds.
Apples. Choose a variety.
Bell peppers.
Carrots.
Cheese and crackers.
Cherry Tomatoes.
Cucumbers.
Currants or raisins.
Beverage Ideas:
Lemon juice water (lemonade without sugar)
Sun or homemade iced tea
Sparkling water (check sugar content as they range)
A fun way to zhugh up a drink is to add some orange, lemon, or lime zest. You can make a batch, store in a cup with a lid in your refrigerator, and that way you have some available when you need to add a final touch.
And those beverages go well with chicken nuggets for back to school healthy lunch ideas.
Easy Chicken Nuggets Recipe
If you’re at home, rinse off a few raw chicken breasts with cool water. Pat dry. Add a little EVOO, salt, and pepper ontop the chicken. Add Panko bread crumbs ontop if you want to make breaded chicken nuggets.
Then bake your chicken breasts on 350°F/180°C oven for no less than 50-55 minutes in a glass baking pan (I’d suggest). Make sure you cook the chicken all the way through (no pink inside) to a safe 165°F/75°C.
After cooled, cut up chicken into strips or cube chunks. Store in the refrigerator for up to 3 days, and then when it’s time for a meal, heat up (medium heat) a portion on a stove-top with a skillet. Sautee or brown the chicken to your liking. Great with a salad, rice, or pasta.
Delish and simple… and then you have several meals for you and those you feed!
Easy Baked Protein Nuggets - Chicken or Chick peas Healthy Lunch
This is a versatile protein meal that you can make with chick peas or chicken. It's an easy to make meal that just needs baking time but very little preparation.
Course lunch
Cuisine American
Prep Time 5 minutesminutes
Cook Time 5 hourshours55 minutesminutes
Author Brandy @ Healthy Happy Life Secrets
Instructions
Prepare the chicken: Rinse off a few raw chicken breasts with cool water. Pat dry. Add a little drizzle of EVOO, salt, and pepper ontop the chicken. Or for breaded protein nuggets, lightly coat with olive oil.
Add Panko bread crumbs ontop if you want to make breaded chicken nuggets. The Panko will stick to the olive oil.
Then bake your chicken breasts on 350°F/180°C oven for no less than 50-55 minutes in a glass baking pan or similar so the chicken doesn't dry out too much. Make sure you cook the chicken all the way through (no pink inside) to a safe consumption measurement that's 165°F/75°C. If you're substituting chick peas (instead of chicken), you can cook chick peas or mash canned/already cooked chick peas and make round nugget shapes, and bake for about 15-20 minutes.
After cooled, cut up chicken into strips or cube chunks. Tip: Adults cook the chicken and the kids make the nuggets after cooked.
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.
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.
Barre class can be a metaphor for what we need to grow ourselves. When you think of a row of ballerinas with their arabesques, port de bras, and extended swan necks, you can be reminded of control and grace–what we all need in life for better performance and balance.
You can also grow strong. When you have control over your body in a certain position, your muscles are flexing to build strength.
Don’t be fooled with thin and dainty ballerinas as they have very strong legs (and toes)! They’re usually slender, have Vata-like bodies where they are aware of every body position from the waist down to the crown of their heads and through their fingertips.
To get in perfect positions, they have concentrated mind-body awareness. If they lose focus then they could soon fall or be out of alignment.
If you aspire to have ballerina moves, that usually requires hours of imperfect practice. A Nutcracker play ballerina has paid their dues.
To start, you can make your life easy and see how the barre concept feels especially if you’re new, by trying a mild, less-strenuous workout in a barre class.
You usually start off standing along a bar as your equipment. And if you’re doing this from home, you can use a chair. It’s that simple!
One of the first things you want to think of is extended height. That requires stamina and strong legs and specifically upper leg strength in your quadricep muscles (quads) that could give you the endurance you need.
That’s not something you develop overnight, but you may be naturally more built out in that area. That’s the opposite of someone who wants to try-out for America’s Ninja Warrior show. There you see athletic men and women alike on the show who have demonstrated strong upper body strength. We’re all given different strengths in comparison.
And ballerinas are athletes, with strong quads. Like everyone else, you can develop your legs in other ways every day. Like, climbing stairs or doing squats in place. And say you want to take an outdoor 20 plus mile bike ride, having strong upper leg muscles will help give you the extra strength and extra oomph to push you over the hills.
A great way to develop your quads is by following a barre class.
If you take a class, that can be just as effective through video, you can lose your inhibition. You’re focused on your screen and mimicking the instructor and not thinking how silly you look with self-consciousness and awkward body movements (that we all have).
Your body doesn’t care how ridiculous you can look to move its joints, muscles, and all the parts gluing your butterfly parts together. It’s just happy you’re moving and that’s what you can positively focus on.
Similar to learning foundational yoga poses for a yoga class, you can learn and focus your attention on ballet positions for a barre class.
You can even find that you’ve known or been doing some of the French named barre positions for years without knowing how that they would be practical in your barre class now.
What I love most about barre class:
I do think barre is a Vata-designed workout. ♥ ♥
A Vata person’s middle name is Variety.
Choosing to take a barre class is a variety from the norm while the type of exercise is growing in popularity. The crux of the class can be ballet moves, but most barre classes incorporate moving to the floor for pilates and yoga poses.
You just never know what kind of journey your barre instructor can take you on and how intense the workout is until you get a sense of the instructor’s style.
If that unknown element of what-happens-next appeals to you, then you may have a ‘lil more Vata in you than you think (we all have some trace).
If in your recreational time, you still like to know every move you’ll be taking and that’s expected, then you could be more Pitta/Kapha dominant or falling into those stronger imbalances.
In any case, life is full of surprises so taking a barre class can help you become flexible.
By the way, do you know what your main dosha is?
If you want to know the reverse, what is not happening the way you want, then you can take the balance restoration, Body Balance Quiz, to find out what you can do to get back to yourself.
If you pay attention and learn to get in awareness of your natural body tendencies, then you can lean into your ways and not be so hard on yourself. We can wonder why we’re different in some ways from our friends and people we admire.
Doshas may be one insightful clue and a more fun way (leaning into your natural strengths) to follow in life.
Be encouraged, many others share your mind-body type. You just have to find your peeps. They’re out there!
But back to barre… whether you’re a natural Vata body-mind type or not, you get a mix of a heart-pumping workout with very few breaks to catch your breath, unlike these peeps just standing around. …sorry, Easter is in a couple weeks, so I couldn’t resist the reference!
One class I went to regularly for a season had exercises where you moved from one end of the room to the other, mimicking a Nutcracker Toy Solder.
Repeating the movement takes body coordination and also self-discipline, as you’re trying to look cookie-cutter mechanical. Concentration is good mind-body health (and can help a Vata-sporadic brain get back in line).
Making even-movements is a talent that I don’t have today (maybe you do and could consider trying-out for the Rockettes!), but whatever the case you still can have your best-attempt version.
In that one class, we learned how to march across a room with our stiff arm and leg movements, and afterward we each picked up a stability ball for an even more energizing workout.
We transformed from gliding Ballerinas to marching Toy Soldiers to Downward-Facing Dogs. …Phew! I was tired.
So next time you’re wondering if you should give barre a try, here are few surprise benefits that can help sway you:
-Increasing mind-body awareness
-Developing grace and better performance
-Building strength and resilience
-Finding self-discipline and self-control (that leads to bigger and better things!)
And if you can’t dance, barre is a good alternative to say Zumba, as you’ll still be on your toes and you may just become a ‘lil more aware which is the right, left foot 😊
