Mindfulness

 

I am always talking about how simple things can be the most impactful, and yet I can be guilty of not following my own advice.  A couple of weeks ago I had an incredibly busy week, and I neglected not only my own biological needs … like sleep, water and food, but I was so busy that I neglected those of my plants as well.  Those of you who have been to my home know that I am a plant lover, and I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 houseplants.  Well, after that irresponsible week … a few of my little friends were looking incredibly sad.  Since then I have devoted myself once more to really caring for these wonderful beings that provide me with such consistent joy.  It occurred to me that there is a magical type of inherent wisdom in each of them, if only I were paying closer attention.

Here are some simple things we can learn from our plant friends:

 

Sunlight

We all need sunlight to thrive.  Some of us are sunbathers who like being out on the river tubing all summer, and others of us prefer the filtered variety, sun rays finding their way through the trees and onto our skin as we are out for an early morning run.  Either way, just like plants need sunshine for photosynthesis, our bodies need it to synthesize vitamin D for our immune systems, to help build stronger bones, and to make feel good neurotransmitters like dopamine. Sunlight also structures the water surrounding our cells and is largely responsible for maintaining our cellular batteries, the mitochondria. Vitamin D deficiency contributes to a higher risk of cancer, and recent studies show that three out of four Americans are deficient in vitamin D.  So, like plants, we all need a little smart sunscreen-free sun exposure every day.

 

Fresh air

When my plants need a perk up, I put them on the outside patio for a day or two to get some fresh air.  The fresh air always brightens them up.  I get the same effects by getting outside and taking a walk in the greenbelt, or even just sitting out on the patio reading.  The fresh air produced by photosynthesis is great for our lungs!  If I need to be inside, I normally keep my windows open, with the ceiling fans on to simulate a soft breeze.

 

Water

Plants and humans need water.  But … what my plants have taught me is that not all water is the same.  During a recent construction project on my building, all of my outdoor plants had an extended pajama party at my boyfriend’s house with his plants.  There they drank collected rainwater instead of the filtered tap water they get at my place.  Upon their return, they expressed grave disappointment at having to drink the chloramine-infused water at Mama’s.  Humans are no different.  Structured water, for example, provides more bio-available hydration to our cells than water that has been mechanically filtered or treated.   These processes change the molecular structure of the water so that it is no longer the most beneficial to our cellular matrix.  In the absence of structured water, alkaline water is more healthful to humans than standard tap water as the optimal PH level for best functioning is slightly alkaline.

Food

Like me, my plants like food.  Like me, the best recipe is being mindful of moderation and seasonality.  My natural tendency is to go overboard with fertilizer or compost tea, much like I personally do with chocolate and macadamia nuts. Overdosing on our favorite foods, while ephemerally satisfying, is not in our best interests.  The dose makes the poison. Optimally, my plants and I enjoy our food pleasures in moderation, paying special attention to seasonal cycles and nutrient density.

 

Music

In this family, we like a few hours per day of medium-volume music.

There are a few theories as to why and how plants respond to music, whether it’s due to the sound frequency activating growth genes or resonance at the molecular level. I won’t pretend to fully understand this, but I know my plants love their Sonic Bloom “Whistling Songs to Grow By”. They grow better when I play it for them in the morning, just for an hour or two. Studies have shown that plants grow best with this music but not necessarily if it’s played continuously.  They need silence and quiet time just like we do.  I follow a similar program:  I listen to playful music at the gym and mystical music while I massage.  The rest of the time, I enjoy quiet time, which gives my nervous system time to relax.

Patience

Perhaps the most wonderful thing plants can teach us is the need for patience.  My indoor plants generally grow continuously, but the progress is slow and it can’t be rushed with more water or fertilizer.  Cultivating the sense of calm necessary to simply allow them to grow, at their own pace, has proven to be a wonderful antidote to today’s instant-gratification culture.  I am reminded of this continually in my running and weight lifting:  real progress is slow and requires patience.  As far as the outside plant crew, their growth cycle is not linear, but dependent on the season.  They may flower beautifully for just a day or two and not again until the following year.  They die back as it gets colder, and sometimes require a drastic (and scary) pruning just before or after the cold season.  They flourish again when the conditions are right, but in the meanwhile there is not much to do but wait.  Sometimes, like humans, plants get an infection and require nursing back to health.  Most of the time, my plants want a gentle nurse, willing to wash every leaf with organic soap and water, sometimes multiple times, rather than simply treating with an aggressive chemical.  The real healing is not an overnight process.

Those of us lucky enough to be able to share our lives with plants have respect and awe for these magnificent beings.  They have much to tell us, if we are only listening.

 

 

RESOURCES:

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/you-need-sun-10-healthy-tips-to-get-it.html

https://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/what-is-vitamin-d

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/08/tk-ways-fresh-air-impacts_0_n_5648164.html

https://draxe.com/structured-water/

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/01/29/dr-pollack-on-structured-water.aspx

https://owlcation.com/stem/The-Effect-of-Music-on-Plant-Growth-and-Pests

Throughout the pages of this blog I have often referred to very simple ways in which we can positively impact our health:  practicing good sleep hygiene (link), getting adequate sunlight and water, allowing our bodies movement (link) throughout the day.  Breathing is another simple yet immensely powerful aspect of our health which is often overlooked.  Since breathing is automatic, many of us forget that we can control our breathing by focusing our attention to it.  Today’s stress-riddled world of constant stimulation has largely sped up our breathing patterns, so most of us actually need to re-train ourselves to breathe properly.  Breath control practices ranging from Pranayama, the ancient yogic practice, to the more recent (and vigorous) Wim Hof Method have become mainstream …. but just because we are familiar with the concepts doesn’t mean we always remember to practice proper breathing on a daily basis. If I consciously remind myself to breathe deeply and slowly – whether it be during an exceptionally challenging exercise or before presenting at a networking event – the benefits are always immediately obvious.  Devoting the time to a full breath meditation practice can have profound effects on our physical, mental and spiritual health.  It can help us rid ourselves of years of trauma and deeply rooted fears.  For many people this is a lifelong journey.  However, the rest of us can reap the benefits of a beginner practice!  Simply focusing on our breath for a few moments is a quick way to alter our mind-body state.

 

On a purely physical level, the breath is clearly important.  There is a direct correlation between breathing and the autonomic nervous system.  Potential threats ramp up our sympathetic nervous system (the “fight or flight” response), causing physiological changes such as increased heart rate and faster, shallower breathing.  These threats can take the form of cellphone alerts, email pings, stressful traffic conditions ..all constants in our everyday lives, which increasingly impact our breathing.  The average person tends to breathe 14-20 breaths per minute, whereas the ideal for maximum benefits is 5-6 breaths per minute.  That’s a significant disparity!  However, multiple studies have shown that the correlation between breathing and the nervous system works in the opposite direction as well.  By slowing down our breathing, we can stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, or the rest and digest mechanism. When our breathing is calm and peaceful, our bodies and minds are calm and peaceful.  When our breath is agitated and disturbed, so are our bodies and minds.

If we just pay attention and allow ourselves something so simple as fuller deeper breaths, we can lower our stress levels.  One variation of a basic deep breathing practice would go like this:

With a straight spine and open chest (shoulders back), take a deep breath in through the nose to the count of 4.  Make sure that your belly expands as much as or more than your chest.  Diaphragmatic breathing allows for greater oxygen transfer to the lower lobes of the lungs, increases blood flow to the lungs and stimulates the lymphatic system.  Hold this breath for a count of 7, then exhale fully and audibly through the mouth to a count of 8, contracting your abdomen to push all of the air out.  Repeat for one minute.

If we want to take it a step further, we can take some time out of the day to actually meditate on the breath.  There are many ways to do this.  My mentor gave me a fantastic book on the breath: “The Miracle of the Breath: Mastering Fear, Healing Illness, and Experiencing the Divine”, by Andy Caponigro.  The author has five different meditations on the breath, including invigorating ones designed for energy and expansion.  This book really spoke to me, but a quick google search for breath meditation will bring up many others, one of which might appeal to you more.  (There’s even an app for that!)

Here is Caponigro’s basic beginner breath meditation:

Sit up straight with a pillow under your hips, so they are slightly elevated.  This will keep your spine straight.  Place your hands in your lap, palms up, with the thumbs touching.  Now simply pay attention to your breath, without forcibly trying to relax or calm your mind.  If your mind wanders, just return your attention to the breath.  The author suggests thinking of your mind as a person and the breath as a canoe – so the key is to always keep your mind balanced on your “canoe”.  Allow yourself to become fully absorbed in watching your breath, and try to stay in this state for 45 minutes if possible (or 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night).

This is just the first step in this author’s profound healing paradigm, but I find it is often enough for beginners to embark on a relationship with the breath.  Paying attention to very simple basics is often all that is needed to get our bodies back in a balanced state.

 

RESOURCES:

http://www.yogajournal.com/yoga-101/science-breathing

https://psychcentral.com/lib/learning-deep-breathing/

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/deep-breathing/

I have been talking for two weeks about body image.  Here is my final installment on this series:  body image and exercise, what is the relationship?  How do these two concepts inform each other in your life?  For most people the relationship can get complicated.  As children, it’s easy:  exercise starts out as play.  It’s normally something we do naturally for fun, like chasing each other around, playing soccer or basketball, swimming in the summer, wrestling with siblings or climbing trees.  However, at some point in our lives, most of us start to worry about our body image.  This is the point where exercise can cease to become play and instead become work:  an obligatory hour spent in the gym trying to make our bodies look different than they do.  Even women who love exercise can manage to make it a chore by feeling intense guilt if they miss just one workout.  But what if by working on developing a more positive body image, our approach to exercise started to shift?  The less we worry about how our bodies look, the less exercise has to be work and the more it can once again be play.  Once exercise is fun again, we organically begin to incorporate more of it into our lives and our bodies and minds naturally begin to feel better.  However, it takes a little reframing of our focus in order to get there.

 

My relationship with exercise is long and problematic, or at least it used to be.  During my school age years, I spent summers in Panama with my grandmother.  Being a good Latina, she showed her love with food.  When I came back to the U.S. at the end of that first summer, all of a sudden, to the outside world I was fat.  My mother, seeing how upset I was at this realization, tried to be helpful.  She set me up with a yellow leotard with a cute gray belt and a Betamax copy of that now iconic Jane Fonda Workout.  This was the beginning of my life as an exercise junkie.  I was determined to make my body look different than the current unacceptable state it was in.  I was nine years old.

 

It took the next twenty years for me to realize that exercise is necessary for good health (not a “good body”), yet it does not have to be a chore.  There are a few ways we can arrive at this point, but they all involve making exercise about anything else but gaining or losing weight.  The first way to reframe exercise is to make it about performance.  Martial arts and team sports are great for this.  However, my first “a-ha” moment with exercise and performance came when I started running.  I didn’t become a runner until I was about thirty, so it was always about milestones, not about losing weight.  I would get excited for my morning runs because it was always an opportunity to improve my speed, distance or perceived effort.  When I started racing, I learned about goal-setting, planning and training tricks until I felt like a real athlete, conditioning myself to perform.  Running was about putting in effort and reaping rewards, and it had nothing to do with what my body looked like or how much I weighed.

 

When I injured my foot, running could no longer be about performance, at least for a while.  When I could run again, I was slow.  I couldn’t do long distances until I built my base back up, so running then became about a sort of meditative mindful time to myself.  I started running without my watch or runkeeper sometimes, just running by feel.  The freedom I felt not having to keep a certain pace was unbelievable, and I gave myself permission to stop and just feel the sun for a minute or take photos of flowers or cool cloud formations.  Making exercise about quiet time to unplug can also be accomplished by taking a hike in the greenbelt or even a walk around the neighborhood.  Yoga is another great way to find that mind-body connection, and there are so many different types that you can make it as vigorous or mellow as you want.  Again, these activities remind us that movement can be about enjoyment of a little mental downtime rather than how we look.

 

Exercise can also be about a sense of community and connectedness with others.  I was part of a bootcamp for a few years, and the group of women I met there were an integral part of my life. It was easy for all of us to show up for a 6:30am workout when we knew that all of our friends would be there.  I have heard this about CrossFit and other group training situations as well – you form a support network for one another that can extend far beyond the walls of the gym.  This concept works for just two people, too!  I had a running partner for a few years and together we trained much better than we would have individually, plus we had the benefit of “talk therapy” three times per week.

Finally, exercise can just be straight up FUN.  I haven’t tried it, but I have heard Zumba is so fun you forget you are doing exercise.  My mother swears by her Jazzercise.  I will admit I find lifting weights fun, provided I only do this once or twice a week and I listen to my “guilty pleasures” playlist (reserved exclusively for the gym).  However, my favorite fun workout is barre.  I was never the ballerina type growing up, and I got kicked out of modern dance class at the age of twenty-two for being an unconvincing snowflake.  Enjoying barre now is my chance to reframe those early disappointments.  I get to channel my inner ballerina and be graceful and strong and precise in my movements.  I just have fun with it because I can.  Plus it’s an incredibly hard workout, which always puts me in a great mood. I love going to classes, but when I’m on a budget I get the DVDs from the library and do it at home. The added bonus is that, whereas in class I have to pretend to be in my own world, at home I really can be.  My boyfriend even made me a ballet barre out of PVC pipe, so now it’s EXTRA fun to do it at home!*

The truth is our bodies function better when we move them, so developing a way to make exercise feel more like play again is key to getting in the movement we need.  I have suggested a few ways to do so, but the bottom line is to make the focus of our exercise activity anything EXCEPT gaining or losing weight.  This ALONE is not normally a good enough motivator to make regular exercise sustainable.  The 2.0:  if we can manage to be at peace with our body image, we won’t be putting pressure on ourselves to exercise to gain or lose weight in the first place.. exercise can instead just be a pleasurable part of our healthy lifestyles.

 

*the ballet barre is easy to make, and cheap!  http://www.toroidalsnark.net/barre.html