Embody Mental Health

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Posts Tagged ‘mind’

Life: One Day at a Time

January 4th, 2010

“ There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi

A common mantra within addiction recovery it seems that it is an applicable phrase to anyone wishing to better themselves and make their life more profound and centered in every lived day. Now is the time for New Year’s Resolutions of grand proportions and many if not most of us tend to fall off the wagon of our hopes and aspirations fairly quickly following the turn over of a new year. We set high expectations of ourselves and what we need to accomplish and when we falter for a moment we give up and fall. New Year’s declarations seem to imply an all or nothing follow through but what if we gave ourselves permission to falter without judgement and found the courage to continue forward despite weaknesses?

Everything and anything is overwhelming when we look past this moment, this hour, this day in our life. It is great to have goals but if we don’t enact a liveable now, always planning for a better tomorrow, we are easily distracted and taken off track today. What if you lived now and only now–letting go of past and future–and just breathed in the moment and released out the tensions of what was or what should be. Yogic philosophy becomes an excellent tool in remembering to be in the moment.

Yoga begins with breath. Its essence is breath and everything from mindset to movement stems off of our ability to be centered in our body and breathing in sequence with motion and life. What a great metaphor and symobilic realization of living life one day at a time. Breath, when recognized, is the most present-centered action anyone can do. What is more integral and visceral in the living experience than breathing? What is a more powerful tool of self awareness and self-regulation than breath? For me little else comes close to being viscerally and poigniantly ”in the now” than breath.

So as we all move forward into our resolutions and affirmations for 2010 maybe finding a way and a moment in each day to come back to breath, to awareness of self–body, mind, soul–in the now can help us enact whatever we have resolved to do today. And move forward taking each moment and each experience one day at a time. Mantras are mantras for a reason–one day at a time is something that is simple to understand and difficult to enact but possible for all. I plan to work much harder on my own present-moment living this year. I have a serious issue of my own living in past and future and losing the present in the process. .Rachel over at Suburban Yogini wrote in a comment that she is planning on making this her year of mindfulness. I, in turn, wish to focus this year on present-centered living….one day at a time.

Posted in creative therapies, life musings, spirituality, yoga | Tags: addiction, addiction recovery, body, breath, expectations, judgement, mantras, mind, mindfulness, new year, one day at a time, philosophy, present-centered, recovery, soul, yoga |

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Minding The Skin We're In : Loving Self Inside and Out

December 30th, 2009

There are some people who eat an orange but don’t really eat it. They eat their sorrow, fear, anger, past, and future. They are not really present, with body and mind united.

Thich Naht Hanh

Mindfulness, as I described in the prior post, can be applied to eating and for some this can be in a life-saving kind of way. Those that suffer from body dysmorphia and issues such as overeating, bulimia, and anorexia have trouble with self-love that is so intense, intimate, and palpable that it invades them from every angle both inside and outside of their physical beings. I have heard people with disordered eating describe a feeling of being detached from their bodies, disconnected from their physical and emotional selves, and a genuine viewpoint of food as “the enemy”.

This kind of disordered eating and contorted life view goes beyond just the everyday guilt over indulging in too much chocolate or sigh of remorse when reading a scale that reveals two more pounds in our weight. Eating when tied with eating disorders becomes inextricably linked with emotion–eating for pain, eating to hide pain, stretching the body’s physical limitations for survival to a masochistic extent becomes more than a preoccupation and turns into a life-threatening compulsion.

The problem with eating when it is tied to emotions, much like any addictive behavior, is that the satisfaction found in food is only temporary and the pseudo-healing only superficial. After deprivation, purging, or over-consumption a person is left not only with the original pains below the surface but also new pangs of guilt and shame. It becomes a vicious cycle and obliterates any chance at eating for enjoyment or looking at food as other than a substance to be despised and obsessed over.

So, as it seems I always find, a discussion about food leads back to issues of trauma, issues of the mind/body connection, and a desperate need for a present-centered perspective on life. To be present in the moment means, at least for one second, to force oneself to shed the pain of the past and focus on where the pain is in the present. In focusing on pain and it’s origins in the present moment there is a way to find the root of unhealthy habits, behaviors and compulsions. If we can focus on how food is making us feel in the moment, as we eat it, there is a way to break that cycle of pain and betrayal within ourselves and with our relationship with food and find what the real pain is below the surface.

Mindfulness, breathwork, and a yogic mindset bring a body/mind connection into work with disordered eating and with any person who might find food or other addictive behaviors as a mask they use to hide from themselves and their inner pain. Through this practice mindfulness and mind/body attunement becomes a gateway to learning the self better. I had a client tell me that she yearned to be a yogi for years of addiction because of the freedom it seemed to hold but after achieving a yogic life she still found an inability to connect with it in a soulful way. Sometimes we have to start with baby steps, the yoga breath, the quiet mind, the present moment and one day at a time to get to a place where a yogic mindset can be fully appreciated.

Whether we are dealing with traumas, addiction, or just emotional pain of any kind there is a struggle to find inner peace and sometimes a feeling of ambiguity in how to get there. Sometimes it begins with small steps of self acceptance, self-reflection, and an ability to eat an orange for the sweetness of its juicy flesh and not for fear, anger, sadness, or any other emotional cause.

Posted in creative therapies, life musings, spirituality, trauma, yoga | Tags: addiction, addictive, anorexia, behavior, body, body dysmorphia, body image, bulimia, disordered eating, food, guilt, inside and out, loving, mind, mind/body, overeating, pain, present moment, present-centered, same, self, thich naht hanh, trauma, unhealthy, yoga |

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Post Operative Black and Blues: A Jarring Reminder of the Necessity for Holistic Health

October 31st, 2009

“The body never lies.”

Martha Graham (famous dancer/choreographer)

Practice what you preach…it is essential, no? It is a bit of a duh, if I do say so myself. Well I just had a moment of sorts over the last 72 hours—a long harsh moment of reality thrust upon me, necessarily and with excellent timing (in the script of my life this is just where I would put such a revelation). It was a moment—call it a “duh” or an “aha” or an “epiphany” if you will—that reminded me of the importance, non-optional and crucial nature, of holistic living in my own life.

I talk about it with passion until I’m breathless and I vocalize it to anyone who will listen—a complimentary medicine and holistic approach to life is vital for full mind, body, and soul healing. And although I work towards my own holistic health in baby steps I am not quite the vibrant enactor as I am the vocalize—I am a bit sluggish, sometimes even a bit resistant for all of the reasons I know that people are.

I am stagnant in my old ways of thinking and living. I am full of negative learned behaviors cultivated with great art over the years. I am sluggishly lazy about making the alterations in full that would be necessary for living a truly clean, green , and healthfully mean life. It is a scary prospect—to so drastically change our life patterns. Yet at the same time to do so is so logical and such a small concession in the grander scheme of things—taking into account a longer, healthier, and less painful existence on all levels.

This week has shown me, that like the diabetic person that has not option of whether to take care of their body and their diet as they must do what is necessary or suffer serious, even life threatening consequences, I too must look at my holistic health from a more serious perspective. Every move I make, or don’t, every substance, hormone, and edible thing I put in my body affects the state of it.

I have (as much as I have been trying to ignore the severity of it for some time) a very serious and chronic illness which only becomes more pervasive and debilitating with time. I am in a crucial stage of “change” or “be changed for the worse”. I am on the precipice of a life and a body that could go either way and I have to treat the care of this bodily casing as if it were a life or death situation—it is at least the life or death of my womb that is at stake (not to mention the surrounding organs that are often ravaged by endometriosis like the bladder, bowel, appendix, among others–two out of the three I already have scar tissue on from fusing of organ to organ , by endometriosis growth, prior to my first surgery).

I can no longer say, “Tomorrow I will live better,” or, “Just one more bagel can’t hurt,” or, “I’m just too tired for yoga today.” I have to effect a lifestyle commiserate with the seriousness of my health, the necessity for self-care as a priority, and an active holistic approach to healing that I know to be so vital. I can no longer sit on the sidelines of my body and wait to see what happens. Proactive is the only way.

It is hard, we all know, to shift so drastically the things that inhabit our daily lives, routines, and ways of being. I know mine is somewhat of an extreme example of how everything we do, consume, imbibe and how it affects our internal and external health, but in some ways this drastic perspective on living is something we should all work harder to enact—and no one knows better than I how much of a struggle it is to do that.

But I know, too, that my every moment and lifestyle decision affects me holistically so I must live taking my whole self into account. I know that when I have steak, dairy, soda, and white bread my cramps worsen. I know that and I ignore it quite often.

My body gives me all the signals I need of how to care for it and thus far I have been very capricious with this precious and delicate physicality that I have. But I can’t be a sideline player in the game of me versus endometriosis. I have been reminded and reinvigorated by the knowledge that this illness will get worse—how fast and how much is really up to me, every day, and in the choices I make.

We have much of the control over our living, but so often we don’t enact proactive (w)holistic health because it seems too hard or too much. Well, I can say from experience that the alternative, what can happen when we don’t care for this precious container for our mind and our soul, is much worse than working hard to live well.

I hope that this–my life, my body, my situation–can be a reminder to everyone of how precious this life is and how precious these bodies are we have been given. We owe it to ourselves to take the best care possible of it before something (and something can happen to anyone) happens that makes us realize it is too late to effect changes and damage has been done. I, myself, am at my own precipice, facing my own “duh” moment and I have big changes to make to create a life not just of forethought and promises of change, but a life of making that change—I am the one who loses if I don’t. Life is not a sidelines game and our bodies are vital in the holistic care of ourselves—body, mind, and soul.

Daily yoga, clean eating, and beginning active courses of acupuncture will be my first steps to getting my body to a better place to fight the internal enemy that waits, biding it’s time to eat away at me, from the inside out. I can create a defensive line that can really save or at least preserve my internals for a longer time, not to do that would be dangerously capricious. I no longer want to be dangerously capricious.

This blog, this move, this timing of beginning yoga school soon and actively working towards a more yogic, meditative, healthier lifestyle seems (as I said above) to be almost a scripted path I am on. What a more perfect time for me to be forced to take seriously the severity and vital nature of this life path I am treading on and the life health I am preaching to others. “Practice what you preach!” my life is yelling at me from every angle imaginable–or beware the consequences.

I prefer to listen to what I have been given and make the necessary changes to myself and my lifestyle that have been a long time coming and necessary to have a long time yet to come. Endometriosis may be the internal enemy but I would rather to be fighting against the enemy, not aiding its troops with my every action. I know for everyone effecting changes of any kind is a huge undertaking and no easy task–change is hard. But change will come whether you enact it or something else does. Proactive living is much more empowering. I hope to finally be able to say, with no wavering, or equivocating, that I truly, holistically, practice what I preach. I must, my body tells me so.

“The body is your temple. Keep it pure and clean for the soul to reside in.”

B.K.S. Iyengar, Yoga: The Path To Holistic Health

Posted in chronic illness | Tags: acupuncture, acupuncture for endometriosis, black and blue, body, chronic illness, clean eating, disease, empowering, endometriosis, endometriosis diet, epiphany, fight, healing, healthy, holistic health, lazy, mind, post-operative, practice what you preach, proactive, self-care, soul, stagnant, surgery, yoga, yoga for endometriosis, yogic |

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Welcome!

I am a trauma therapist and survivor of trauma. I believe in the potential in all of us not just to survive but thrive in living. I am yoga practitioner and teacher, writer and reader, animal lover and animal-assisted therapist. I believe for every challenge the world hands us we are also given a solution; sometimes subtle and other times clearly shown. The hope of this site is to bring a tiny piece of hope to anyone searching for it and maybe light a spark that will continue to burn in each person's recovery from pain and return to the truest part of the self.

Embody Mental Health, is not a medical or psychiatric organization. The information contained on this site is solely for the purpose of providing general information, resources, & discussion about issues of mental health, wellness, & healing. Your own treatment of any issues of mental health, illness, and recovery process therein should incorporate the guidance of trained mental health/medical professionals.