Category: Spirit

  • How to Tap Your Life Force Energy

    How to Tap Your Life Force Energy

    We are so tired.  So tired that we can’t think when we want to, move how we want to, or get up and go the way we feel we need to.  Our brains, bodies, and our willpower are all burnt out. This article explains how to tap into your life energy and overcome fatigue.

    Jenny told me that, now that she is off of Wellbutrin, she doesn’t understand why she is still tired. She recalled that she has struggled with this fatigue her entire adult life. The thing is that Jenny is totally functional. She gets up, works at a high pressure finance job, takes care of her bills, and appears totally put together, but still this cloud envelops her.

    Jenny’s fatigue doesn’t surprise me.

    Why should she be feeling energized?

    What is energy?

    The Hindu term Shakti derives from the Sanskrit, “to be able”. It refers to the primal life force energy. It has, necessarily, a feminine essence.

    Have you felt it?

    Have you ever felt so enlivened by an experience that your heart was racing, your eyes wild, and tingles ran up your body?

    Have you ever been so in your flow that you forgot to eat or pee?

    Have you ever greeted your day with a small smile in the corner of your mouth as you felt the mystery of what might unfold?

    Have you ever felt head over heels in love?

    Have you ever felt so connected to and seen by others around you that you wanted to cry just from the feeling of it?

    This is shakti.

    And she’s always in there. All the time, waiting to be accessed.

    But we have forsaken her.

    We have locked her up at the command of our productivity-oriented systems, and we pretend she never existed.

    We go to our jobs, we check off the to do list, we contribute our small but significant part to planetary death and destruction, we turn a blind eye to all that might provoke too much feeling.

    And then we wonder why we are tired!

    Why would you not be tired, Jenny?

    What are you doing to connect to or to cultivate your shakti? What in your life really turns you on? If your answer is nothing, then perhaps your soul is saying no and you are calling that fatigue.

    What is fatigue?

    Fatigue lends itself perfectly to the multiple narrative model of medicine. Psychiatry views fatigue as a brain-based imbalance or deficiency likely responsive to a stimulant or noradgrenergic antidepressant.

    Functional medicine views it as potentially stemming from hypothyroidism, B12 deficiency or poor methylation, adrenal fatigue, or general mitochondrial dysfunction where low nutrient supply and abundant toxicant exposure impairs our energy-making cellular centers.

    While I believe passionately in healing the body first to clarify matters of spirit, I think it’s important to search for the meaning of fatigue rather than accepting it at face value.

    I know that I have never once yawned in my NYC office. Literally never. But that you would think I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome the second I buckle in for the drive to Whole Foods. Well, I know that we are not meant to procure our food from a commercial space (particularly one that is increasingly greenwashed selling more and more conventional food). I also know that the domestic space challenges my ego and sense of identity. Then my disdain for the experience is compounded by the self-conscious guilt around my ingratitude for the fact that I even have the opportunity and wherewithal to even choose to patronize this establishment! In this bundle of neurosis and primal disconnection from Earth energy, it’s no wonder that my soul says no.

    When I see that simple context, I cease to take on the pathology and to blame my body for the fatigue.

    Context is everything.

    How to tap your life force energy

    So, how can we cultivate that life force energy in order to dissolve fatigue?

    Dance

    Plain and simple. Turn on some music, make it loud, and move. Even for 5 minutes a day. Get past the weirdness of it, the awkwardness, and just feel it in your body. In fact, I have one patient who continued to struggle with fatigue after medication taper, who also had a history of having had her thyroid removed for falsely perceiving it as a time bomb for death. Now, after many years of psychiatric medication and general toxicant exposure, she had plenty of reason to be struggling with mitochondrial dysfunction. After thyroid removal, the replacement of hormones can be an inexact and frustrating process, giving her another reason to have chronic fatigue. How do you explain a resurgence of found energy, like a geyser unlocked, after I pushed her to return to a tap class – a form of dance that she had loved but lost. Quite simply, dance class healed her because it gave her the keys to the shakti palace.

    Kundalini

    Kundalini yoga is a shakti practice. It is, by design, focused on the divine feminine within all of us. This practice is a hard as it is sweet. As powerful as it is subtle. The source of energy that we are looking to cultivate, comes from way down in the creative center – literally and figuratively – of the womb. Start with this 3 minute practice for raising the divine feminine from the dead. Or simply press your left nostril shut with your left pointer finger and then breath long and deep out of your right nostril for 5 minutes. See what happens.

    Sensuality

    Femininity is feeling. Have you ever lit a candle for absolutely no reason? It seems indulgent and silly. But once you get past that, it may give you a feeling of nurturance inside. Whether it’s baths, essential oils, dance, love making, or self-pleasuring, we need to reunite with our body’s built with desire compass and a deep need to be cared for and luxuriated over. We need to learn how to turn ourselves on, as Mama Gena maps out in her epic bestseller, Pussy: A Reclamation.

    Giving

    When you feel totally bereft, the last thing you want to do is give. It might break you right? You need every ounce and morsel of everything you’ve got simply to get by, right? Wrong. Our Vital Mind Reset Community Leader, Shauna, was on the verge of homelessness, struggling through every day of her recovery, and she would be the first to tell you that volunteering at a local food pantry may very well have saved her life. Giving fills us up with shakti because we were wired to love each other, to help each other, and to receive in return the energy we put out.

    Connecting

    Find community. It’s not optional. Isolation is killing us, literally. When we feel a part of a tribe, when we see reflected back to us the many eyes of our peers, we are lifted by their collective life force energy. Our sisters show us our best self, remind us what it is to feel unconditionally seen, and it helps us to fill our cracked places with gold.

    Make room for radical, unexpected shifts in your energy. This is rarely a linear process of reclamation. Heal your body first (including a total elimination of addictive foods and drinks like wheat, dairy, processed sugar, alcohol, and yes, coffee, for one month), and then, when you feel tired, ask, what am I saying no to. And then give your mind, body, and spirit, something to say yesto. Watch the energy flow.

  • The Compassionate Way to Health & Fitness

    The Compassionate Way to Health & Fitness

    Lots of us would like a better body, an amazing workout habit, and a diet that celebrities would die for.

    OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but most of us definitely have an ideal when it comes to fitness. We want to be super healthy, and we strive for it. Maybe we strive and then fail and feel bad about it, but we strive.

    What would it be like to not strive for these fitness goals?

    What would it be like if we removed the striving, and found compassion instead?

    The Problem with Striving

    When we strive for a fitness ideal (which is usually what we do), there are a few fundamental problems to be aware of:

    1. The ideal is one we will never meet. Even if we do great at our goal, it won’t be what we pictured. For example, I ran several marathons and an ultramarathon because of ideals I had in my head, and completed them … and they weren’t at all what I pictured. They were still worthwhile, but not at all what my fantasy was.
    2. You have a good likelihood of failing at some point, not meeting your ideal, and then feeling bad about yourself for failing.
    3. You don’t hit the ideal right away — most ideals are several months, if not years, in the future. So for the first few days, first few weeks … you will just do the activity but not hit any ideal. This is likely not fun. You might set ideals for each day (“go for a run today!”) but even then, you’ll go for the run and it won’t be what you fantasized it would be.
    4. Once you reach the goal you’re striving for, you’re not content. You just find another goal to strive for. And another. Until you’re dead, having never been satisfied.

    What we don’t realize is that there’s nothing to strive for. We’re already in the perfect place: a moment that is filled with beauty and wonder, a life that is filled with untapped love and compassion, a goodness in ourselves underlying everything we do. We’re already in the ideal moment, but we take it for granted and fantasize about something else instead.

    We can just stop striving. Just find joy in this present moment, without needing the crutch of our fantasies.

    The Compassionate Way

    So if we stop striving for health and fitness ideals, does that mean we just lie on the couch, stuffing our faces with potato chips and slurping soda all day? Umm, yuck. And no.

    What we can do is 1) realize joy in who we are, where we are, and our intricate connection to the wonderful people all around us, and find contentment right now; and 2) in that moment of joy and contentment, we can act out of love.

    What are some acts of love that we can do, in this moment of joy and appreciation for what is right here in front of us?

    1. Appreciating the gift of our bodies, we take care of them. The bodies we have are incredible, wonders of nature, and we take them for granted. We abuse them by being sedentary, taking drugs, eating junk food, not taking care of them. Instead, an act of appreciation for our bodies is to care for them. Exercise, walk, eat well, floss, meditate.
    2. Appreciating the gift of life, we explore the outdoors. There is so much to notice and explore, to behold with absolute wonder, that it’s a waste to be online or on our phones all day. Instead, it’s an act of love to get outside and move our beautiful bodies.
    3. Appreciating the gift of food, we nourish our bodies. Instead of abusing ourselves by putting junk in our bodies (just to satisfy cravings of comfort), we can find joy in the nourishment of our bodies with gorgeous, healthy, delicious food. And appreciate that the fresh food we’re feeding ourselves with is a gift, grown from the earth by people we don’t know who support our lives, a miracle not to be taken for granted.
    4. Appreciating this moment, we meditate. This moment is filled with brilliance, and yet we often ignore it. Instead, we can sit and meditate, to practice paying full and loving attention. We can do yoga, moving while we meditate. We can meditate as we go for a run, lift a barbell, ride a bike, swim in the ocean, walk in a sunny park.

    There is no need for striving for fitness and health ideals. Instead, we can let go of those ideals and appreciate what’s right in front of us. And in gratitude, act with love and compassion to take care of ourselves and pay attention to the moment we’re in.

     

    Originally posted at Zen Habits

  • 10 Budget-Friendly Ways to Cultivate Love

    10 Budget-Friendly Ways to Cultivate Love

    Originally published on LifeSpa by on

    Cultivate LoveTake some time and reflect on what you are doing to achieve the goal of becoming an incredibly powerful source of love, whether you spend it solo or with a partner.

    1. Start the morning with yoga.

    The sun salutation is a complete Ayurvedic exercise also known as Surya Namaskara. This series of postures simultaneously integrates the whole physiology including mind, body, and breath. It strengthens and stretches all the major muscle groups, lubricates the joints, conditions the spine, massages the internal organs and increases blood flow and circulation. (1)

    >>> Learn how to do sun salutations here.

    1. Write a love letter and tap into your anandamaya kosha (the bliss sheath).

    Write a letter to someone you love fully, completely, someone you trust with all your heart. Tell them all the ways that you love and appreciate them. While writing it, know that they will never read this letter. It is for your eyes only. As you write it, become aware of how you feel.

    You will see that as you write this letter, you will actually feel loved, appreciated, cared for, and even important. All the things we so desperately think we need from someone else to make us feel good, we actually experience all by ourselves when we give love freely, without any concern that the other person will love us back.

    1. Infuse your food with love.

    Always prepare, cook and eat your food with love, even if time is short. Infuse your food with a positive emotional charge.

    If the mind is over-stimulated, stressed, or distracted (rajasic) while cooking and/or eating, the food will be charged with stress and hurry. If the mind is depressed or withdrawn (tamasic) while eating, the food will be negatively charged. If one is cooking and/or eating in a relaxed, calm (sattvic) manner, the food will be positively charged.

    1. Relax and dine.

    Valentine’s weekend (and any other time for that matter), relax and dine. No eating on the run or in front of the TV. If the thought of cooking triggers you to stress or rush, order takeout from your favorite restaurant, set a beautiful table, light a candle and enjoy a relaxing royal meal that you didn’t have to cook.

    Sit at the table after the meal to relax and digest over a cup of herbal tea and some good contemplation or conversation.

    1. Eat with your fingers.

    Eating with your hands means you can’t read, check email, text, or answer the phone. With food all over your fingers, you are stuck doing one thing at a time, and this is the time to eat. Eating with the fingers allows all the senses to be stimulated and involved in the process of eating.

    Eating with your hands also allows the many thousands of microbes on the food to get acquainted with the many thousands of microbes on your fingers. Our hands feel the world around us, attaching to microbes found on most everything we touch. (2) As all these microbes are ingested, they act as your evolutionary eyes of change.

    1. Take a walk.

    After your meal, take a walk breathing through the nose to drive more prana (life force) into the body. Slow, deep, abdominal and nose breathing (nasal breathing) has been shown to activate the parasympathetic nervous system (famously known for the “rest and digest” relaxation response), which is responsible for bodily restoration and rejuvenation.New studies are linking deep breathing to numerous and profound health benefits. (3)

    Taking a 15-minute walk after meals has been shown to lower after-meal blood sugarlevels. (5,6,7)

    Studies have also shown that taking a walk shortly after a meal supports healthy weight loss compared to not walking or waiting an hour after the meal. (8,9)

    1. Prep a bath for a loved one or yourself and add a few drops of aromatherapy.
    • For those with a primarily pitta dosha: sandalwood, marjoram, or benzoin resin oil (which is vanilla-scented) are best.
    • For those with a primarily kapha dosha: marjoram, frankincense, rose, or ylang-ylang essential oils are best.
    • For those with a primarily vata dosha: sweet orange, geranium rose, jasmine, ylang ylang, or frankincense are best.
    1. Give a massage to your partner or yourself.

    Massage (abhyanga) releases the infamous oxytocin bonding hormone. (10,11) Oxytocin has been studied to increase when one feels trust and/or empathy. It is the giving hormone, released during acts of appreciation, gratitude, emotional connections and giving touch.

    The sense of touch has also been linked to healing. The laying on of hands has been described in many traditions as a form of energetic healing. While the mechanism for this form of healing has yet to be fully understood, much has been written about the healing power of touch.

    >>> Learn how to perform abhyanga here.

    1. Breathe.

    Breathing, called Pranayama in Sanskrit, is a balancing way to start and end each day. Follow this breathing technique for 5-10 minutes at least once per day, and ideally twice per day. You can do the breathing practices anytime of the day that works best for you.

    The aim of breathing meditation techniques to pump prana and oxygen into the brain, allowing for greater stillness and a deeper experience of calm. (4)

    1. Prepare an ojas tonic before bed.

    Ojas (OH-jas) is considered to be the most refined by-product of digestion, said to reside in the heart. Ayurveda considers ojas to be an essence of nature and a cosmic substance that directly influences our experience of life.

    A plentiful reserve of ojas is reflected in the luster of the eyes, radiance of the skin (that glow so detectable in babies and pregnant women), potent fertility, tenacious immunity, strong digestion and clarity of mind.

    Certain herbs in Ayurveda are also prized as great ojas-builders. Traditionally, a concoction of these herbs, including Ashwagandha and Shatavari, were blended with ojas-building foods like dates, almonds, coconut, saffron, ghee, honey and cardamom in a milk base. This mixture was warmed and taken before bed as a sleep aid and an ojas-builder to boot.

    Originally published on LifeSpa Cultivate Loveby on

  • Feeling “Burned-Out”? Here’s help from a survivor.

    Burned outBurn-out is the mortal enemy of Vitality. If you’re suffering from burn-out, your life is out of balance by definition.  Burn-out is much more than a cliché’, or something to take foolish pride in which demonstrates your commitment, dedication and persistence to a cause. It’s a state of physical, psychological and mental exhaustion, and a warning signal of lifestyle choices that need attention immediately. Your health, along with your relationships and psychological well being, are threatened.  It may seem like burn-out “just happens” to us, but the reality is that it comes from a combination of factors and environmental conditions, each of which is unique to our own situation, which creates a potent brew.  The good news is that we can change this trajectory. There are things that we can do to combat burn-out and get our lives back into balance.

    Tchiki Davis, M.A.,Ph.D, is a University of Berkeley graduate and expert on well-being technology and self-described burn-out “survivor”. She’s reflected and written about her own personal experience of burn-out as a Ph.D. student at Berkeley. Like many who find themselves burned-out, her reasons for this condition were not fully apparent as they were occurring, she was just really, really busy achieving her goals. In her case, she was not only writing her Doctoral dissertation, she was also getting another advanced degree in a different field, and fund raising for her new start-up business all at the same time.  Here are some of the signals and lessons she’s learned about how to spot the path to burn-out and some suggestions on what to do about it:

    1. Your personality may be a risk factor: You see yourself as highly motivated and persistent. You take great pride in showing off your dedicated work ethic to your co-workers and superiors. You “live to work”, working long hours and regularly miss out on non-work time with family and friends. If this is you, you may be at risk of burn-out.
    • What to do: Apply your hyper-focused planning skills to your own life and schedule in some recurring non-work time with friends and family to help achieve better balance.
    1. Social comparison is a risk factor: If you believe you are surrounded by people who are amazing at the same thing you’re supposedly amazing at, you’re likely doing an internal comparison and working harder and harder to demonstrate your own mastery.
    • What to do: If you can work in an environment where everyone has mastery of different skills, or more defined responsibilities, you will be less likely to fall into this comparison trap.
    1. Local culture can be a risk factor: If you find yourself in a local culture, such as a business or university, where everyone is expected to be, or known to be, a star you’re at risk of feeling pressure from outside forces that you must work harder and harder to keep up with the pack.
    • What to do: Recognize that no one has the right to diminish you or make you feel inferior. We all have certain gifts, knowledge and skills that may be different and better than others. Be aware and acknowledge that everyone can grow and change, and practice self acceptance and self compassion.
    1. Broader culture can be a risk factor: Davis uses the example of Silicon Valley, home to some of the most successful technology companies and smartest individuals in the world, to demonstrate how an entire community can set the bar of success unreasonably high. It may be inspiring and invigorating, but it may also lead to burn-out if you feel you’re not keeping up.
    • What to do: Set boundaries for yourself. Take control of the situation and decide how many hours are acceptable to you in order for you to maintain a work-life balance. Ask yourself where the deal breakers are. Then be assertive about protecting those boundaries.

     

    Dr. Davis also has some advice for reversing burnout, but warns that burn-out doesn’t happen overnight and it isn’t resolved immediately. It may take chunks of time to reset your well being. But the sooner that you acknowledge that you’re heading down this dangerous road, the sooner you can get your life closer to balance.

    The original article by Dr. Davis can be found here on LinkedIn.

     

  • Change Your Life in 12 Minutes a Day

    Change Your Life in 12 Minutes a Day

    Change-Your-Life-in-12-Minutes-a-Day400You’d probably think I was running an infomercial if I told you about a simple intervention that:

    • Reverses memory loss
    • Increases energy levels
    • Improves sleep quality
    • Up regulates positive genes
    • Down regulates inflammatory genes
    • Reduces stress in patient and caregiver
    • Improves psychological and spiritual well being
    • Activates significant anatomical areas of the brain
    • Increases telomerase, the rejuvenating enzyme that slows cell aging, by 43%, the largest increase ever recorded
    • No side effects, no cost

    …especially if I told you that the intervention takes 12 minutes of your 1440 minute day.

    Can you imagine the media attention this treatment would garner?

    What if I told you this is already in the published literature? If you’ve been following my journey, you’ve probably heard a bit about mainstream media’s advertising chokehold and why you might not be hearing about this treatment on the 6 o’clock news.

    Since 2003, Dharma Singh Khalsa, MD and his team have been carrying out research on a kundalini yoga meditation called Kirtan Kriya. One of the foundational exercises of this ancient practice, I think of it like the magnum of kundalini. Feeling stuck? Feeling desparate? Feeling sick? Give this medicine 40 days.

    In published trials catalogued here, they demonstrate changes in brain perfusion, decreases in inflammatory gene expression, and dramatic increase in telomerase (a longevity enzyme) that correlates with subjective sense of wellbeing, energy, sleep, memory, and even a 65% improvement in depression scales.

    Beyond symptom resolution

    In my practice, I want more than just symptom suppression for my patients. I want transformation. For many, the portal to transformation is a meditative practice. After years of following the literature on mindfulness meditation, all I was left with was a sense of frustration and guilt that I could never commit to “watching my thoughts”. It wasn’t until I began with 3 minutes of a kundalini yoga meditation that it stuck. My monkey mind had found the perfect hammock to chill out in.

    Kundalini yoga is a one-stop shop for mental, physical, and spiritual transformation. It has literally turned me from a neurotic, controlling, agro workaholic into someone who experiences grace, bliss, and a trust in the process so deep that I no longer even relate to “stress”. It is, in a word, profound. In fact,  Dr. Dharma Singh Khalsa states that these parameters are improved in as little as 8 weeks of daily practice:

    Spiritual well-being involves 4 characteristics that enable you to achieve peace of mind.

    1. Patience: leads to persistence of a regular yoga and meditation practice, which brings with it the development of personal empowerment. When you develop patience you have the ability to slow down and enjoy life more because you’re in the “flow” and can let the Universe work for you.
    2. Acceptance: brings self-acknowledgment and self-appreciation. It also gives tolerance, which allows one to see the faults in themselves and others but yet to look beyond these faults and accept others and themselves as they are. This leads to forgiveness, which releases anger, which is toxic to brain, immune, and cellular function. It also conveys a higher state of mental awareness.
    3. Compassion: conveys kindness, which leads to empathy, which emboldens healthy feelings and communication. Compassion also fosters clarity and commitment and the courage to be yourself without fear and pass to the next level of spiritual growth, which is surrender.
    4. Surrender: Surrender to the stretch is said in yoga practice. In this case the stretch that we’re surrendering to is our soul; our spirit. When you surrender to your soul, you gain the strength to sacrifice and to serve others and give to them without thought of reward for yourself. This is called seva in yoga and brings with it a sense of true happiness and serenity. Serenity gives peace of mind and a sense of universal love where the One is seen everywhere. This is the ultimate in brain longevity and is what many people call enlightenment or illumination.

    How does chanting do this?

    We try to understand these non-linear effects, and we may touch on some aspects of their mechanism, but we undoubtedly fall short of capturing the web-like effects of these natural interventions. The best understanding around how Kirtan Kriya works its psychophysicospirutal magic includes these attributes:

    Chanting these sounds in this order is thought to stimulate meridian points in the palate that reflex to the hypothalamus and pituitary the master gland.

    Dense nerve endings in the fingertips and tongue are highly represented in the brain.

    As evidenced by brain scanning, different areas of the brain including the occipital lobe are activated by different parts of this simple meditation.

    I bet you want in on the details?

    Here’s how you do it

    I love the track by Nirinjin Kaur called Kirtan Kriya. It takes you through the meditation’s parts and you just follow along. Here are the components, from alzheimersprevention.org

    1. l-form-concentrationRepeat the Saa Taa Naa Maa sounds (or mantra) while sitting with your spine straight. Your focus of concentration is the L form (see illustration), while your eyes are closed. With each syllable, imagine the sound flowing in through the top of your head and out the middle of your forehead (your third eye point).
    2. For two minutes, sing in your normal voice.
    3. For the next two minutes, sing in a whisper.
    4. For the next four minutes, say the sound silently to yourself.
    5. Then reverse the order, whispering for two minutes, and then out loud for two minutes, for a total of twelve minutes.
    6. To come out of the exercise, inhale very deeply, stretch your hands above your head, and then bring them down slowly in a sweeping motion as you exhale.

    The mudras, or finger positions, are very important in this kriya (see illustration below).

    • On Saa, touch the index fingers of each hand to your thumbs.
    • On Taa, touch your middle fingers to your thumbs.
    • On Naa, touch your ring fingers to your thumbs.
    • On Maa, touch your little fingers to your thumbs.

    fingerpositions

    Some of my patients find that after the first practice, they inexplicably cry with a feeling of poignancy. What is it that is unlocked by these sounds? By the stillness. Only direct experience can answer that question with a wordless sense of remembrance for something we have forgotten. There’s a road back to your soul and it is paved with these ancient technologies.

    The post Change Your Life in 12 Minutes a Day appeared first on Kelly Brogan MD.

  • reFemme: 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, Your Power On, and Your Femininity Radiating

    reFemme: 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, Your Power On, and Your Femininity Radiating

    To do lists. Email. Facebook. Appointments. Commutes. Packing lunch. Making that call. Hustling for that deadline. Ignoring the elephant of your sexless marriage, looming in the corner of the room. Feeling inadequate. Feeling like it’s too much. Like you don’t care. But also like you can’t stop caring. The frenzy of productivity and functionality. The busy. Is this what it’s really all about? Until we die?

    This is it?

    We know there’s more than this, and we feel that something is missing. Call it joy, call it connection, call it purpose. Hey, call it magic.

    Somehow, we are disconnected from all of the sources of that more primal experience – ourselves, each other, and the planet. From the simplicity of life.

    There is a level of wrongness to life on this planet right now that we have to almost laugh about to keep from crying. We distract ourselves with TV, cocktails, sports, and adult coloring books.

    What’s gotten us here?

    We have given the reins to our intellect. We fell in love with our minds, with the promise of expansion, growth, and accelerated evolution that led us down a path away from our essential selves.

    Each of us has a yin/yang of energetic forces within, often described as masculine and feminine polarities. The active embodiment of both allows our highest power to manifest. We are moving through the culmination of an unconscious identification – on the part of men, women, and society – with the unbalanced masculine principal.

    Personally, professionally, nationally, and planetarily, we have all bought into the mindset that tells us we are here to dominate, to win, to master, to fix. That includes our bodies, nature, and each other. Every man and woman for themselves. It’s the American way. I even identified as a feminist in this mindset. To me, feminism meant righteousness, entitlement, and more technology and science devoted to US. It meant The Pill, elective C-sections, and the HPV vaccine. The problem is that the more you live in this energy, the deeper you invest in it, the more you perpetuate everything about life and the world that you can’t stand. You become a part of the problem – one that can never be solved by applying more science and more technology to its own failures and limitations.

    Suffering: The portal to your next chapter

    We are taught that suffering is bad and to be avoided at all costs. Like it or not, we know better. We know that growth and personal evolution comes from moving through, and integrating hardship.

    When it all comes crashing down – a new diagnosis, a job loss, a death – we see that we were never really in control, and were never really sufficiently distracted to begin with. Pain and fear become the walls of our self-made prison.

    It’s all in that suspension before giving up, when you realize that you still have a choice to engage with grace. That choice is called surrender. From there, we actually choose to accept what has been thrown in our path, we are forced to surrender to the reality that we are only here for the ride. We are dancing with the unfoldment, and we suffer more if we insist that reality should be different than it is. If we feel into this truth, and allow pain and struggle to move through us, then our lives explode with possibility, synchronicities, and life force energy like an untapped geyser.

    This is the transformational process I’m all about. I consider it my business to usher women across this threshold, to help them see that they can walk through the fire. It’s crazy beautiful on the other side.

    Take it from me. I used to be uptight, controlling, hypercritical, and generally agro. I fought and scratched my way to the top. I had palpitations, was tired, hungry and irritable all the time, and I pooped about once a week.

    Then life delivered me one unexpected challenge after another – health, deaths, losses, relationships, and it became pretty clear that my old tactics of controlling the narrative were coming up short. Time and again, my mind was caught with its pants down – what the hell do I do? The consummate planner and prepper, I began to understand that I was playing a very different game than I thought I was. For this game, I needed a critical ingredient – trust.

    I was given the gift of an autoimmune disease – Hashimoto’s thyroiditis – the natural healing of which showed me that I hadn’t learned the whole story in medical school. They never told me diet could reverse a chronic disease?!

    And of course, at around the same time, I began to lose some faith in medicine that I had invested a religious level of commitment. It was shaken. It began to be poked at from multiple different angles. I came across books that began to undermine my belief in the science of psychiatry that I had “mastered” up until that point. I began to question some of the more fundamental elements of medicine around germ theory and the importance of suppressing and managing symptoms.

    I let the house of cards crumble. I felt scared and even hopeless that I had been taught and told a pile of lies about how to feel “good.” I had been told that my annoying body could be medicated into cooperation and that if I just kept my life in working order, I would feel ok. Wrong. There’s more to the story and the truth is a portal to an experience of realness, vitality, and freedom you might think is the stuff of movies.

    Now, I don’t experience stress. Literally. Nothing tweaks me on an existentially level. An Irish/Italian big-mouth, I still have lots of opinions, but I’ve learned to hold them gently and to remain curious and open. I feel like a million bucks, and I love life. I sometimes, literally, weep from the sheer beauty of it. Me. The formerly hardened atheist, feelin’ the love.

    This is what I want for every woman on the planet today. Come. Into. Alignment. Feel free. Feel clear. Just feel alive.

    The work of transformation

    I take women off of meds. I watch them get clear and get real.

    First we heal their bodies.

    Through this experiential process, they are reminded of a deep truth – my body has the capacity to heal if I get out of the way and choose to support it, to speak to it in a language it understands, i.e., whole foods, clean air, water, sunlight, rest. Once my patients see that these healing tools were under their nose the entire time, they realize their own agency in their health experience. They begin to take back what they gave away.Their minds are freed.

    This is where it gets fun.

    I have patients who leave their husbands, up and move to Europe, adopt babies, and become spiritual teachers and healers. They look at, confront, and integrate all that stuff that seemed way too scary to acknowledge when they were in the old mindset.

    We’re not in Kansas anymore, and the truth is that all we had to do was click our heels to get home.

    Once you open this Pandora’s box, you might find that it’s a wild and wonderful place, richer and deeper than you thought possible when you were just skimming the surface, afraid of the other shoe dropping on your tenuously constructed house of cards.

    Here’s what I need you to do if you feel a Yes inside to these ideas.

    1. Remember: what we used to know

    Imagine someone who is vibrantly healthy. Do you picture her medicine cabinet filled with prescription drugs? Do you see her groping for her morning coffee to kick start the day and “unwinding” every night with a glass of wine – or three? Do you suppose she eats Fruit Loops for breakfast and Pizza Hut for dinner?

    Probably not.

    Most of us have a sense of what true health is but have lost the roadmap along the way. We know that food matters, but we’ve been inundated by manipulative, mixed messages.

    Here’s the thing. We need the nudge to snap out of it. We need to remember what we have forgotten. This is called, waking up. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that we can’t outsmart nature. It makes some deep sense that just when we get arrogant with our technology, science, and medicine, we’re probably in for a rude awakening (remember doctors prescribing cigarettes, DDT is good for me, and thalidomide?).

    “When we know better, we do better,” as Maya Angelou said. But in order to do better, we need to know.

    So get informed of the fuller picture. Find sources you trust to ferret out the truth. Sources that understand that science’s most laudable application is in the reflection of the unimaginable elegance, awesomeness, and sophistication of the natural world and our incredibly complex bodily organism.

    Allow yourself to get pulled back to the Continuum – what your body, mind, and spirit expect after several million years of evolutionary history. It’s really only arguably the past maybe 150 years (but certainly no longer than the past several thousand) that we have largely deviated from what indigenous folks have been doing and continue to do in certain pockets of the world for those millions of years.

    What happens when a baby is born surgically in a hospital, fed formula, vaccinated, thrown a bunch of antibiotics, put in a quiet crib down the hall by itself to cry it out living in an environment full of industrial chemicals and fluoridated water and all the rest of this cataclysmic nightmare, you put that experience up against the continuum expectation that that baby had, you understand why the body is constantly seeking what it’s missing.

    And part of that Continuum Concept is this little voice inside that something just isn’t right. It’s a little feeling most of us carry around that something is just off. We’re missing something, we’re longing for something, or we’re wanting something that we just don’t have.

    I think many of us, when we learn about indigenous tribes in South America or Africa, for example, we have this sense that they have a life experience that may seem difficult relative to our hot showers and sewer systems, but there’s something almost magical that we have no access to that they get to indulge in every day.

    And we, of course, know now through scientific exploration that they enjoy a state of health and freedom from chronic disease that we can barely conceive of.

    That’s why I love what’s happening in science today and all of the literature that I follow. It’s so profound that it really just echoes this ancient wisdom. It’s like science is finally catching up or attempting to catch up with the validation of what people have known through their own evolutionary wisdom for literally millions of years.

    2. Renew: your body

    The incredible thing is that you can trash your body for decades, and you can still get a pass. I’m living proof, and so are my patients who heal, in months, the damage they’ve wrought over years. The body wants to be well and the most powerful way to heal is through your diet. Food is information. It sends signals to your brain through your gut, eases your hormones, and chills out your immune system. It truly is the magic pill you’ve been looking for. A month of dietary change is the most worthwhile challenge you will ever put yourself up to. I can almost guarantee it. In A Mind of Your Own, I walk you through a month-long healing plan that gets you breathing, moving, sleeping, detoxing, and loving whole food. Begin again.

    3. Rediscover: the tools to bring you home

    It turns out that coming into fuller alignment with the potential richness of your human experience – endless energy, vital body, clear mind, deep emotions, and of course, a fiery libido – may just be a matter of using some ancient technology to touch down into that space of soul-connection. You know that “oneness” everyone is always parroting seemingly pseudospiritual nonsense about? Well, it’s real, and it’s the only thing that is real. We are all connected like drops of water in the ocean, and the sooner you really feel that, the less afraid you’ll be of life.

    There are lots of ways that women can work to cultivate that feeling of merging. I’ve watched as plant medicines like ayahuasca have ridden a zeitgeist of desire for consciousness expansion. You could meet a shaman lover to take you to places you never knew were inside yourself. You could make music with a spontaneously collected cohort. You can use my favorite toolkit – kundalini yoga – to tour the recesses of your bodymind and move through stored trauma and emotion as you release fear and feel radiant joy. Seriously, it does that. You could walk in nature for an hour or two. No phones, no pen, no books. Just walking and taking it in.

    4. Reclaim: a life led by you

    When you can begin to come from this space of awe, gratitude, and beauty, you’ll stop making decisions the old fashioned way. You’ll just wait and sit patiently until it becomes clear, and then you’ll know what to do.

    My heartthrob, Alan Watts, uses the example of a heron looking out over the water. If it is searching for a fish, darting its head here and there and all around trying to catch the moment of one in it’s sightline, this is the Mind. If, however, it sits easy and calm, and takes in the entirety of the landscape, it will easily zoom in on a ripple in the water when one arises, channel its energy and capture the fish. This is Intuition. It is a powerful gift.

    Stress melts away when you operate from this space. My patients tell me the feeling that grows inside them is “I got this…it’s going to be fine.” But you have to guard this lifestyle pretty fiercely. You have to resist criticism, derision, and your uncle who says, shouldn’t you be taking your meds? when you push his buttons. When your husband gets “freaked out” because you have an emotional release or feel rage, you have to be clear that this is the new deal. Let it move through.

    In this way, reclaiming can be as simple as Just. Do. You.

    One of the most powerful and healing concepts is that of vibrational resonance. If you stick to what you know, honor it, and continue the work of trusting the process, you will change the world by simply waking up every day. Science confirms this.

    5. Release: the ties that bind

    We hold onto people, places, and things like holding onto a rock when we are floating through space. They are illusory securities and our only task, every day, is to watch where we are gripping and let go. Let go over and over and over again.

    The best antidote to this is the feeling of gratitude. I remember my skepticism when I first read the data from Heartmath Institute about gratitude’s potential to bring the heart, lungs, and brain into electrical resonance or “coherence.” But it turns out that there’s something powerful about this feeling. Try it. Focus on your heart, choose a soothing color and imagine it misting out from your heart onto the elements of your life you are most grateful for. The roof over your head, your two legs, your children’s sticky hands, your iPhone. Just feel it.

    The new medicine: Feminine Medicine

    You’re going to begin to hear these concepts and ideas all around you like an echo chamber. You’re going to begin to see the world – politics, economics, and medicine – aching for the feminine principal. In fact, medicine, real medicine, is already going there.

    No longer are there false boundaries between body parts and areas. No longer is the mind separate from the body. No longer can we war against germs because they’re in us. Medications and hospital care are killing us. We are up the wrong creek, a creek we needed to travel, but now we’ve got to redirect.

    We have to work with our ecology, with our perceptions and beliefs, and we have to reconnect to each other and to nature. The non-incidental poetry in that is that we are ourselves best off if we think about each other as being fundamentally connected and ourselves as being fundamentally connected to nature.

    The establishment feels this upsurge and they are throwing grenades from their bunkers. Desperate to protect their monied ties to industry, even the American Academy of Pediatrics is coming out with gems like, “we have to stop referring to breastfeeding as natural.” You’ve gotta love it. The more absurd their claims, the stronger the Truth stands in its regal realness.

    Women are the natural ambassadors for this new story of Interbeing, as Charles Eisenstein refers to it. Perhaps because we have thicker corpus callosum that allows us to inhabit the intuitive and the rational with facility. Perhaps because we are responsible for moving nature through our bodies into our babies. Perhaps because we cycle with the moon. Perhaps because our primal power, our Adi Shakti is not to be messed with, and will always rise up from the ash with a fearless resonance that brings everything into proper alignment. But we need men with us on this path. We need their feminine principal awake and alive, and we’ve got to walk together into this transition. We also need you on the path. You comin’?

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