So I know you want to get better, you want to improve. You want to get healthier. Maybe even a little bit happier. Perhaps you want to get stronger - in mind, body, and spirit. Well perfect, cause that’s what we try to look at each week.
Thanks for showing up, not for me, but for yourself. The first step in any journey is showing up. Before you can improve in any walk of life, you have to SHOW UP!
Am I right?
Speaking of showing up, I had another chance to be featured as guest speaker for an online event. Check it out here if you like!
The live showing should be on Sunday the 19th - so tomorrow, if you’re reading this on Saturday, the day I send out this newsletter
We talked about what it means to love yourself, nurture your soul, and then we also jumped around a bit to other topics unexpectedly, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate the energy and advice I had to give on video ;) (Free to attend)
WHAT THE HECK DO YOU WANT IN LIFE?
DO YOU EVEN KNOW? WHY OR WHY NOT?
Those deeper level questions are just a taste of what this event is all about this season of December, and I’m a huge fan of diving into those discussions so I want to make sure you have the chance to hear from other speakers just like me and DO please let me know what you think if you choose to tune in to my talk or any others!
Do me a quick favor by liking this post, sending to a friend, or consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Throughout 2021, this newsletter has helped me reach hundreds of more people more directly and I’m very thankful for you being here. Let’s see how many people we can reach in 2022 shall we! :) Thank you!
Make sure you are subscribed and encourage your friends to subscribe to. My whole goal here is to actually help people live their best lives possible.
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In 2022, I actually think there’s a lot we have to gain. For one thing, the world of mindfulness has just surged through the pandemic and more and more people are learning to embrace mindfulness and make it part of their everyday routine.
Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is the founder of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR).
Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
In my opinion, the human path of self-actualization is pretty-well designed to promote an increase to consciousness, understanding, and inner peace and wisdom. We see this in many a spiritual teachers and notable monks and mindfulness professionals, but we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the opportunities we have to embrace mindfulness in our own lives too. It’s something we all - as humans - deserve to enjoy and stand to benefit from.
Audio listening: Mindfulness and Meditation made easy.
One thing you can do is to simply start your day on the right foot. Just 3 components with 5-min each, and you have 15-min in a daily practice to focus on self-care, aligned consciousness and cultivating deeper sense of self along the way. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee talks about this a lot in the UK about starting your day with 3 Ms:
Movement - anything from yoga, stretching, walking, some light work with weights
Mindfulness - setting your mind right for peace, can use breath work during this time too, quieting the chaos inside your mind and any worries you may have
Mindset - preparing yourself for your day ahead, believing in yourself, repeating your daily mantra for self-love and contributing to filling up your personal cup, as well as giving yourself the motivation and determination that you know you can take on the day.
5-min each, just 15-min each morning and you can start your day off in the right direction. If there’s anything you can do for yourself that I think can be a much greater foundation for your healthier, happier, more fit future I think mindfulness in a morning routine would be the place to start.
Mindset actually does matter quite a lot.
For us to leap into the unknown beautification of our world, we have to use our imagination caps and transform our thinking, feeling, and perception to prepare for the likes of which we can only imagine. We cannot see the actualized benefits until much later, so we have to plan and prepare ourselves for a better life before we get there. We actually do have to work on ourselves and find out what’s holding ourselves back and then push through those (commonly) areas of doubt, self-limiting beliefs, and more.
I recently wrote on this more as it relates to diabetes, which is a topic I just think so many times public health FAILS to address properly. The pathway for support is clear to me, but we often want to coddle folks and force feed them to believe they can have their cake and eat it to. In addition, we could do a HECK of a lot better educating them through prevention before they ever suffer the ill effects we’ve come all too commonly familiar with.
If we tackle the morning, how can we set ourselves up for success at night?
Well, here’s this neat trick for your brain where you give it something novel (or new), something to inspire it and entice it, like a new beautiful painting to look at each day, reading a new quote each evening to ground yourself and be a sanctuary for your soul.
Reset Your Room Before Bed (You’ll Wake Up Happier)
You can even reset your entire bedroom in the evening, clean the clutter, move some furniture around and you’ll likely reset any stagnant energies you were feeling in the room before and when you awake in the morning, the novel environment will give you something to smirk at and appreciate.
Laughing and loving ourselves for little moments like this can be super helpful for our hearts and minds too.
Soothe your soul with little tricks like this and think about making little games out of life like this each day and you’ll be surprised how much fun you’ll have along the way. ;)
And if you needed any more reason to highlight the health benefits of sleep - here’s this week’s recommended reading / listening all about SLEEP, which it feels like I’ve probably talked about the most in this newsletter above all other topics!
A couple takeaways for you among many others.
Non-REM sleep makes you feel rested and has a function for memory consolidation, which is another reason why sleeping is better than studying a few more hours before the deadline.
Lacking sleep will make you feel more frustrated and impulsive, which will hurt your patience for learning something new or tackling difficult tasks.
On Another Note: Real Talk.
This week I felt motivated to write a note about human dignity, freedom, ambivalence, confusion and chaos, mis-informed non-consent, adjuvants, autoimmune disease, and aluminum in teenagers …. buuuuuut I decided to hold back and not throw any rocks into the pond this week.
If you’d actually like to hear more of these rich, bold, authentic ideas and opinions with a genuine investigative reporting kind of style, let me know in the comments below. I don’t have all the answers in life, but I do have a crazy brain that works well to synthesize data and information from ideas and experiences around the world, in literature and research, and tie it all back to aspects of the human experience.
I’m only here to serve. Like, I really don’t know what purpose life has other than for us to learn how to serve one another, how to love one another and support our shared pursuits in this world. That’s why I’m showing up and that’s why I’m writing.
Whatever I can do to help, let me know.
And don’t forget, you have to believe it to be it. You have to believe you deserve the chance to live your best life possible for you to be able to live in it.
You deserve it because you’re worth it.
As a human, cherish your wins, push through your losses and endeavor to improve.
Wishing you the best this week and every week in life. Peace and Blessings,
If you missed last week’s post you can check it out below.
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