Creative Health Tip February 8 2010 Breathing to enhance your mood

Today's tip comes under the heading of incredibly powerful but almost too simple to be true practices. Did you know you could change your mood by changing your breathing?

No doubt you already know that you tend to breathe shallowly when you are stressed, and that deep breathing will help you feel less stressed, more energized and relaxed both physically and mentally.

Here is a quick and easy way to help transform your mood from depressed, fearful or angry to happy and grateful.

The right hemisphere of the brain shows the most activity when you are feeling anger, fear, or depression. When you are feeling happiness and appreciation, this most often appears as left hemisphere brain activity.

Breathing through one nostril activates the opposite side of the brain: breathing through the left nostril activates the right hemisphere of the brain, and breathing through the right nostril activates the left hemisphere.

The next time you are feeling negative emotions like anger, fear, or resentment, and you want to improve your mood to one of happiness, and gratitude (which, of course, will improve your health!), close off your left nostril and inhale through only the right nostril to activate the left brain hemisphere associated with those positive emotions. By activating the left side of the brain, you activate positive emotions and feelings, too! You may enhance the practice by imagining that you are inhaling joy, appreciation, or love with each breath you take in.

You may exhale either through your nose or your mouth, but be careful to inhale only thorough the right nostril for eight to ten breaths. I suggest that you not imagine you are exhaling the anger or depression you are transforming because that will only bring your attention back to it. Don't even think of what you are trying to transform or release, just pay attention to the joy and love you are bringing in.

After eight to ten breaths through the right nostril, release the closed nostril and take a couple balancing breaths, inhaling through both nostrils and exhaling through the mouth.

Consider one cycle of this practice to be eight to ten right-nostril breaths followed by two or three balancing breaths. It may take a few cycles to change your mood, but if you stay with it for at least five minutes, I guarantee you will see improvement, and you'll certainly feel better for it!

Creative Health Tip February 1 2010 Listen to your body

I have a question for you today. Are you running on autopilot or are you paying attention?

The reason I ask is because very frequently, because we all live busy lives, we don't pay attention to what we're doing for ourselves.

We're busy doing our jobs, or we're busy taking care of our family, and we just let ourselves disappear in the shuffle. That, however, is when illness creeps in.

So, you need to pay attention to yourself. Here's a great way to do that:

When you go to bed at night, or at some time during the day if you have twenty minutes that you can sit and put your feet up and relax, I want you to check in with your body. Listen to your body!

Start at your feet, or start at your head, and go right up the whole body, check in, feel how you're feet are feeling, feel how your ankles are feeling, feel how your calves and shins are feeling, check in with your knees and see how they're doing.

"Hey, knees, how's it going? You feeling OK today?"

When you find a spot that is not feeling OK, it's achy, it's tense, it hurts, it's in pain, here's the trick: Give it love.

Do you remember when you were a little kid, or when you had little children, and somebody got hurt, they got a "boo-boo" and they went to mommy, and mommy kissed it and made it all better? The reason it got all better is because mommy gave it love.

You can to that for yourself! If you feel a tension, a pain, and ache, or anything, just stop and give it love. I will bet you that if you do this every day for the next three weeks, you will notice a huge difference (improvement!) in how you're feeling.

Avoid genetically-modified foods with these NON-GMO Shopping Guides

These printable guides, compiled by the Center For Food Safety, help you avoid foods made with genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).

To learn more about the risks associated with GMOs, visit the Center For Food Safety website at www.centerforfoodsafety.org

The guides are organized by food group, and list the brands of foods stated by the processor to be free of genetically-modified ingredients as well as the brands that may contain GMOs. I printed my guide and keep it in the car so it's handy when I go shopping. Of course, I buy organic as much as possible, but the guides are very handy when organic products are not available.


This booklet is small print, eight pages
http://truefoodnow.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/web_new-ge-booklet.pdf


This booklet is large print, sixteen pages
http://www.responsibletechnology.org/DocumentFiles/144.pdf