Flexibility

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Many Eastern traditions help you to become more flexible. Some literally. Some figuratively. Yoga works muscles and helps you move your energy so that you can bend more easily. Tai Chi is a slow form of martial art that teaches you to respond to force with flexible, unexpected movements. It also trains you to keep your balance. Mindfulness meditation is a practice that trains you to be more aware and open to events, people and experiences as they happen so you are able to respond to opportunities and challenges quickly.

We practice these means of becoming flexible for a variety of reasons including wellness, personal growth and a way of being more authentically ourselves. As it turns out, the ability to be flexible also described by Seth Godin, marketing guru, as maneuverability, is one of the critical qualities of success in business.

As we watch industries like publishing and television slowly (or no so slowly) declining, I think about what might be different if the people running the biggest of the companies in these industries had been more flexible.

3 Retreat And Learning Centers To Support Your Spiritual Growth

Sometimes you just need to get away to recharge, relax and get inspired. Here are 3 wonderful places to go that are a few hour drive from the New York, Boston and Philadelphia areas. Note that Omega is not open in the winter.

Omega Institute

Located in upstate New York, this beautiful, camp-like setting offers a wide range of workshops for spiritual and personal growth and self improvement. Well-known names in Buddhism, intuition, meditation, yoga and other topics teach workshops lasting from a few days to a week. There are a variety of accommodations from tents to private rooms. During the winter, they move to Costa Rica and occasionally offer New York City events.

Kripalu

Kripalu is located in the Bershire Mountains within hundreds of acres of beautiful land. The main residential building was previously a monestary and has a sparse and institutional look. A new building with many private rooms was designed as an example of sustainable architecture, but also has an institutional feel. There is a wealth of courses for spiritual, personal and physical growth. Kripalu has a strong offering in physical activities like kayaking, yoga, biking, and hiking in addition to it’s wide variety of other other courses. It also has a strong program in nutritional counseling.

New Age Health Spa

Although the educational programs are not nearly as well developed as those as Omega or Kripalu, New Age is a different type of retreat. With a number of classes scheduled throughout the day from meditation to yoga to Nia dance, you can take in as little or as much activity as you like. The setting in the Catskills feels small, although it is surrounded by woods and opportunities for hiking. An exquisite building with a cathedral roof and giant windows where yoga and meditation are offered looks out on fields with deer and it is attached to a building with an indoor pool and hot tub with a large picture window and beautiful view. This is truly more of a retreat than a learning center. The word “spa” can be misleading as this is not a luxurious place but a simple spot with open or active time where a guest makes of it what she wants.

3 Tactics For Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions Inspired By The Shawshank Redemption

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I’ve always been inspired by the movie, The Shawshank Redemption. When a man is incarcerated in a seemingly inescapable prison for the rest of his life, he escapes through sheer determination, focus and a great plan. The fact that it will take a very long time to implement the plan does not phase him, and chipping away, literally at stone, in small pieces day after day, year after year, he builds a tunnel through which he escapes.

When I look back just 5 or 10 years and think, “if only I had started working on this or that” assiduously at that time, I would have accomplished so much by now. In past years my resolutions were a list of 5-10 general goals and the same resolutions appeared year after year. Lose 20 pounds. Start a meditation practice. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Start an online business. Over the past couple of years I did things differently based on what I learned from Tim Robbins’ character, Andy.

1. Pick a goal, perhaps only one goal and focus on it with laser-like determination. Adding extra resolutions with the idea that maybe at least one of them will work out does not improve your odds. You lose focus.

2. Make a plan. Do you want to lose weight? What steps will you follow? How will you change your eating habits next week, next month, by 6 months from now. What are the interim goals for losing weight and when will you hit them. By the third quarter of next year you can’t expect to lost that 20 pounds if you are not well on your way before then. Know the incremental steps. Do you want to establish a meditation practice? What will you commit to now? Do you need to take a class? Spell out the details and the timeline.

3. Visualize the prize. What will happen when you reach your goal? How will you look? What will be different about your life? Knowing that will focus and planning you can actually achieve something will help you with the motivation you need to continue working toward the goal.

5 Social Media Health Sites to Help You Take Control In 2010

The internet has afforded us the ability of more control over what we consume and what we produce. Want to become a writer, musician, movie maker? You don’t have to wait for a publisher or producer to dub you one. You can create your own content on a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Scribd, YouTube, or a thousand other spots on the web.

If you want to consume specific news and information you don’t have to wait for the New York Times to report on this subject. You can find it by searching those terms on search engines and in social media and then ask that the subjects of interest to you be delivered through Google alerts or RSS feeds.

So now that you get that the gatekeepers are gone, you can take control of your own health by studying the news and information available on the internet, by joining communities and by searching for a type of complementary medicine that might just be the solution to help you deal with a chronic health problem.

Here are a few websites that can help you take control of your health.

Patients Like Me
This site helps you connect with other people who have health conditions to learn what works for them.

Cure Together
Another site where people connect over discussions of diseases and options for healing.

Health Guru
Focusing on pregnancy, sexual health, college health, and health news, as well as individual illnesses, this relatively new site is a resource for health information.

Organized Wisdom
Winner of a PC magazine award as one of the top sites of 2008, this site describes itself as a personalized guided search tool for health topics.

American Well
Is your doctor the gatekeeper? Use this site to contact doctors over the web for healp with medical questions or problems.

Reiki Enters The Mainstream

Cover of Reiki: A Comprehensive Guide

Reiki is a spiritual healing practice. It is performed on a fully clothed person and has no harmful effects.

Thanks to Mehmet Oz, the cardiologist made famous by Oprah, Reiki is about to be introduced to a mainstream audience. Oz, whose wife is a Reiki practitioner, will be interviewing Pamela Miles in his show in January 2010. Miles is an author and has been a Reiki practitioner since 1986.

Pamela Miles describes Reiki as “applied mediation.” She has worked on patients during heart surgery and has helped patients suffering from HIV.

The Simplest, Most Difficult, Most Productive Thing You Can Do Every Day

Mindfulness meditation is a simple practice, easy to learn but not so easy to maintain. The instructions can be written in a couple of sentences. So why is it so difficult to do?

The mind isn’t wired to be still so you need to train it. Without consistent practice, the effect of meditating will be diminished or lost. It’s no different from any exercise. You wouldn’t expect to go to the gym every day for a year for half an hour, then stop for a month and feel the same way you did when you exercised daily. Your body doesn’t automatically generate the positive physical effects unless you are keeping it up.

I find it easier to go to the gym and do the physical work than to stop everything I’m doing, sit down and attend to my thoughts. Unless I realize that those days and periods of time when I have the discipline to do it are the ones where I’m most centered, most calm, most intuitive and most creative. That’s what motivates me to sit.

And yes, it is ironic to say that sitting quietly, doing nothing is productive, but there are few things I would rather produce than a connected, more alive state of being.

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Reduce Stress With These 5 Foods

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In a previous post about how to live a better life, I mentioned the fact that food can be used as medicine. Here, a list of 5 stress busting superfoods– fish, chocolate, spinach, oatmeal and orange juice can help you keep your cool.

The blog post provides references to the research. But there are two caveats not mentioned. Fish that is farmed will likely high mercury level, so the benefit applies only to wild fish, especially if you want to make fish a regular part of your diet. Chocolate should dark chocolate with a high concentration of cacao.

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Mindfulness Meditation Is NOT About Clearing Your Mind

I often hear people define meditation as a clearing of the mind. Although that may happen during the course of practicing, it is not the point.

Mindfulness is about paying attention. When you practice it, sitting quietly, the process is to notice what’s on your mind. I sit in the morning when my thoughts tend to be (but not always are) quieter. As soon as I sit down I recognize what’s going on up there. This morning I was thinking about a project I am working on with someone. There have been a lot of frustrations but I finally figured out the source of some technical problems we have been experiencing. My mind started spinning conversations I would have with him about it and conversations I would have about his boss about it. Emotions followed. I went over the events of the last few months in my mind.

Mindfulness meditation calls for my noticing the content and direction of these thoughts. “I am thinking about the issues about this project and I’m reliving the problems and creating conversations in my head about it.” Then I direct myself to focus back on my breath because that is a way of paying attention to what is happening right now. Those project thoughts come back. I take a look at them again and characterize them to myself as if “I” the observer is taking notes about the “I” that is the thinker. Then I gently direct my focus to my breath, rinse and repeat.

What I don’t do is try to block the thoughts or make them disappear. I am not actively trying to clear my mind. I am paying attention to it, noting what it’s doing, but not letting it run off spinning conversations and eliciting emotions while the observer part of me goes along for the ride.

So, it’s actually the opposite of clearing the mind. Clearing the mind is an act of denial and rejection of ones thoughts. Mindfulness is an act of attending them.

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Five Steps To A Better Life

An important article in Ode Magazine proposes that integrative medicine can lead the way to a healthier, more satisfying life.

The ways that this practice works is:
1. Prevention
Once you have a diagnosis or an unexplained illness, the personal and financial costs are high. Prevention requires, first that we believe that we can take actions that prevent disease and that as many integrative practitioners believe, 75% to 90% of diseases are preventable.

2. Food as medicine
One of the most powerful ways of changing your quality of life is to adjust your intake of food.

3. Lifestyle as treatment
Recognizing that stress is a major cause of disease means that the ways that we need to be vigilant about reducing and relieving stress and we need to embrace lifestyle changes that make us feel good, like having a supportive circle of friends.

4. Complementary medicine in concert with traditional medicine

If we need to address physical ailments, integrative approaches in combination with traditional approaches should be considered. For examples, if mindfulness meditation can help reduce pain, it is better than taking medications that are either addictive or have detrimental side effects.

5. Treating the whole person, not just the ailment

Integrative medicine recognizes that symptoms do not simply spontaneously generated. By considering the whole person, including life situation and diet, integrative medical practitioners address the cause.

Can Yoga Help You Lose Weight?

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In his blog today, Andrew Weil reflects on a study that indicated a connection between yoga and a lower BMI. Researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found that yoga helped practitioners maintain a lower weight than a control group. Rather than this being a matter of calories, the study determined that it was mindful eating that made the difference.

I started practicing yoga about 2 1/2 years ago and my personal experience is in keeping with those findings. Before I started taking yoga classes, I was a couch potato. I was over 20 pounds heavier than I am today. My goal in taking yoga was simply to start to feel better physically. But what happened after a few sessions was that I started to . . . well, the only way I can explain it is to say that I started to feel my body. As a result of this new awareness, I was finally able to hunker down and do what was necessary to lose weight. It was easier to avoid foods that were unhealthy because it didn’t feel right to eat them.

I think that mindfulness was certainly part of it, but it was more than mindfulness of what I ate. It was also mindfulness of my body. And that awareness made it possible to maintain a healthier weight.

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