"Just breathe, Mom"

The winter holidays can be a pretty stressful time.  We see family and friends in greater numbers and frequency.  Our normal routines are disrupted as we try to fit in as many holiday activities as we can.  Many of us feel a sense of time urgency as we struggle to get it all "done" before some important date or event.

Often, the result is that we become overextended, under-rested and emotionally frazzled.  Yet each of us has a built in stress reduction technology that is available 24/7/365.  It requires no batteries, plugs or special adapters. Best of all, it is free and easy to use.  It is our breath.

When I pay attention, I see that reminders about the importance of breathing abound.  One of my professors in the counseling program at Oakland University told our class that one of the best things we could ever do is to teach our clients how to breathe.  My yoga and meditation teachers are always offering new ways to make direct contact with the breath, and I pass these reminders along to my students.  A while back I was sharing a frustration with my adult daughter and she looked at me and said, "Just breathe, Mom."  She is so wise.

The way we breathe can alter our physiology and improve our mood.  A few moments of slow and deep breathing can stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system and calm us down.  It can short circuit a "fight or flight" stress reaction and halt the release of stress hormones into our bodies. It can decrease our serum cholesterol and lower our blood pressure, among other things.  And, as this article from NPR describes, your calming breath can even change the expression of genes, altering the activity of the cells in your brain.

Contact me if you'd like to know more about how to use your breath to improve your health.  The Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction classes that I offer are a great place to learn to harness the power of your own breath.

In the meanwhile, if the stress of the holidays starts to diminish the quality of your life, just take my daughter's advice and "Just breathe."

The Woods and Wellness

Do you have a special spot where you feel more connected to yourself and the world around you, present in a timeless sort of way? For me, it is in the forest.

There are woods near both my house and the family summer cottage. I go there to commune with nature and recharge my inner resources. Whether it is walking with my dog and taking it in step by step or standing still to listen to the wind move through the branches and leaves, the forest has a profound and beneficial effect on how I experience life. Even a short stroll helps me to relax, listen deeply to my inner wisdom and rejoin the day with a different perspective.

In The Healing Power of Forests (ScienceDaily, July 26, 2010), we learn that forests, as well as other green spaces, can improve our immune system, reduce stress, mitigate anger and aggressiveness and increase our level of happiness.

When you consider the considerable personal and societal costs of illness, getting out in nature on a regular basis seems a deceptively simple alternative.

Want to feel good? Practice Yoga!

     I remember when I first started to do yoga - I didn't really know what I was doing and I felt clumsy doing it.  I was in a period of my life where I was desperately unhappy and I didn't know why. 

    Yet when I was done with the yoga class, I felt really good.  My body felt like it had done something beneficial.  But there was something else - I felt emotionally uplifted, lighter in mood, more open to life.  I felt happy for quite a while afterwards.  My yoga students have reported similar experiences to me over the years.

    I have always wondered what it is about yoga that makes us feel this way.  Now, an article from Science Daily, New Study Finds New Connection Between Yoga and Mood , explains how yoga works its magic upon us.  A study done at the Boston University School of Medicine indicates that yoga increases the levels of GABA, a brain compound that when found in low levels is associated  with depression and anxiety.  With higher levels of GABA, we feel less depression and anxiety so we feel happier.

   So if you are feeling out of sorts, you might want to give yoga a try.  There are no pills to take, and it might be habit forming.   Yoga might just be the right medicine for you.

Who's Driving the Bus?

I don't know about you, but from time to time I realize that my life is driving me, that I am not in the driver's seat. When I start feeling overwhelmed with too many things to do and I don't feel like doing any of them, when I can't get "enough" done each day and feel tired most of the time, I know it is time to pay attention.

We were talking about this in the MBSR class the other night. One of the students said she was having a hard time practicing meditation because she didn't have any time. Her "To Do" list had her running all day long and when she got home from work, there was more to do. She looked and sounded exhausted. Practicing was just another thing she "had to do."

As we talked, I suggested she bring mindful awareness to the things on her list each day. Asking questions like: Did each of the tasks need to be done that day? Did it need to be done at all? According to who? What would happen if it wasn't done?

I then suggested that she consider the model used by Franklin Covey Co. as a basis for their planner systems:
Discover what is most important in your life, plan to do the things that support those values, and then let those values drive your actions.

I know from my own experience that if I'm not paying attention, my planner can get filled up with all the things that others want me to do, from work to friends and family. If I am not aware, I overschedule myself and underestimate how long things take to do. The result is that there is no time left for what I want to do, let alone time to relax and rejuvenate.

My advice to her was the advice I give myself. If you take the time to meditate each day, you will bring greater awareness to what is truly important to you and how you spend your time each day. You will make more conscious choices that can lead to greater balance between doing and non-doing, working and playing, between the obligations you accept and taking the time to follow your heart's desire.

So if you ask yourself each day, "Who's driving the bus?" and the answer isn't you, it's time to put yourself back in the driver's seat of your life.

This month, I am featuring a letter written by one of my prior students. Written to a dear friend, she shares her impressions of the 8-week MBSR class and describes her experiences in a way that I never could. I hope you will enjoy her letter, and that it inspires you take the class. The next session begins Thursday, January 21 in Rochester.

Dear Sue-
How's everything with you? I am looking forward to seeing you again soon and want to tell you about something I have been doing that you may be interested in.

I have one week to go in my "Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction" class I'm taking in Rochester, and I keep thinking you would enjoy it as much and find it as beneficial as I have. It will be offered again in the New Year, and I thought maybe we could take it together. I would find it helpful to go through it again.

Here is the scoop. It's an 8-week class from 6:30 to about 8:30 pm one night a week. Our class has been on Mondays, but I don't know about the next one. We do mindfulness based practices including body scan meditation, seated meditation, walking meditation and yoga. One Saturday during those 8 weeks there is a "retreat" from 9 am to 3 pm that is silent (except for the instructors directions) and includes all of the forms of meditation. The retreat was amazing - I don't remember when I've felt so relaxed and at peace. The cost is $300 for those 8 weeks and the retreat, and it's well worth it.

I've found the classes and retreat relaxing, but it takes time to quiet the mind enough to meditate. The instructor is Linda Bowers, a former GM manager who decided to leave the hectic corporate life after she became acquainted with mindfulness. She was on the fast track at GM and left to raise her kids and change her life. She's studied at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness, founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn who has written many books and is the guru of mindfulness based stress reduction and pain relief. I was attracted to this class because I watched a television special many years ago called "Healing and the Mind" with Bill Moyers that featured Jon Kabat-Zinn. When I saw that Linda trained with him, I figured it would be pretty cool.

There's some interpersonal communication training, assertiveness training, and mind-body connection info related to health and diet, too. All in all, I've found it to be so good for me, expecially after the difficult summer I've had. It's kind of amazing that I was drawn to the class at just the right time.

Anyway, here's Linda's website : http://www.awakeninghealth.net/

Let me know if you are interested in attending the next 8-week session with me. We are alike in many ways, and I think you would "get" what's going on in these sessions. I would love to share it with you.

Love,
Sarah

Is stress making you sick?

Have you ever wondered what it is about being stressed that makes you feel sick? In the classes I teach, we talk about how the events of our lives and the way we think about them can unleash a torrent of stress hormones and throw our bodies into disequilibrium. When this imbalance becomes chronic, we can feel sick and even develop illness.

In The Balance Within - The Science Connecting Health and Emotion (2001), Esther Sternberg, MD, a respected rheumatologist and neuroscientist, explains recent insights into the mind-body connection and how chronic psycholgical and physical stresses (sleep deprivation, divorce, and social isolation, for instance) make people ill by negatively affecting their immune and hormonal responses. She then describes the research that shows how belief can heal.

I just listened to her 2007 interview on "Speaking of Faith" on NPR, where she presents these ideas in language we can all understand. Through anecdotes about her own experiences with stress and inflammatory arthritis, she explains how stress makes us sick and belief can make us well. She suggests that much like the computer that has locked up from too many emails and too many programs running, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to "go offline and reboot."

If you are curious about the connections between health and emotion, or you want to learn more about going "offline," I invite you to listen to this facinating broadcast by clicking here.

What is your ratio?

I just finished reading "The Science of Happiness-Barbara Fredrickson On Cultivating Positive Emotions" by Angela Winter. This interview was published in one of my favorite magazines, The Sun, back in May (ok, I'm a bit behind in my reading) and it really hit home for me.

Ms. Fredrickson's thesis is that if we can cultivate positive emotions, our lives will be happier and healthier. Positive emotions come and go and most of us want them because they give us pleasure and help us to move forward. Yet most of us do little to cultivate them, we just let them come and go, and frequently don't even notice them with a great deal of consciousness.

Her research has found that when we pay attention to the positive events in our lives, we experience more positive emotions. When we experience more positive emotions, we have fewer physical symptoms, we sleep better, we are more open to all that life brings us and more able to deal with it in a healthy way. The tipping point between negativity in life and a positive outlook, according to the data she and others collected is a ratio of about 3:1. When one brings awareness to three positive events for every one negative event, the attitude begins to shift towards the positive. She suggests a healthy ratio would be 5 or 6:1 to put yourself on solidly positive ground.

We don't control many of the events that happen in our lives, or how others treat us. What we can do is choose how to relate to it, and where to focus our attention and energies. It is easy to get stuck on all the difficulties of life - they are constantly pointed to on radio and TV, in print, and in our daily conversations with each other. For many of us, it is our default state.

Instead, allow yourself to see the entirety of your world and your experiences and you will find that there are a lot of positive ones in the mix. You can notice the car that cuts you off in traffic, and you can also notice that your favorite song is on the radio, that the sun is shining and that you are healthy and prosperous enough to be riding around in a car in the first place.

If you pay attention, you will find that there is truly a lot more that is right with you and the world than is wrong. You only need to take the time and energy to notice it, and to be healthier and happier as a result.