Doing Yoga. Why bother? Time stands still.

Doing Yoga.  Why bother?  Time stands still.

So, how’s it going this week with my year of total health?  Things are well.  It is winter here, our worst in half a century, so that takes its toll on you.  It is true that laughter is the best medicine.  This video is a John Cleese visiting a laughter clinic in a prison in India.  Watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEfjVnYkqM

So, in the middle of the winter, it is very important to practice laughter, in whatever way you can.  Right now, I am directing a comedy, so that really makes me laugh to work with students on relieving stress.  It boosts your immune system and raises your serotonin levels.  Laughter is how I am making it through this long winter.

Yoga is also helping me.  I am now doing yoga four times per week.  Bikram yoga at the Funky Buddha Yoga Hothouse.  The name just makes you laugh. Yoga is laughter for the body in a different way.  It is so good for you, it can heal all sorts of diseases and this is probably because it alters your mind, not just your body.   All exercise does that, but yoga takes it a step further, using meditative body practices.  Here’s a Yoga Journal article that shows these benefits clearly:

http://www.yogajournal.com/health/1634

I think my favorite benefit is that it lowers both blood sugar and LDL cholesterol, plus it gets rid of cortisol.  Yummy!  If you don’t do yoga, start.  You can start small.  There are hundreds of great short videos on the web for 10 minute yoga, 20 minute and on and at all different levels.   If you enjoy community, join a studio or go to class at a community center.  That’s what I’m doing because I can tend to isolate and I want to be around people.  I’ve even gotten some students from Calvin involved in going to Funky Buddha!  And even at 6 am!!!  The power of yoga is real.  Once you do it, you know.

Usually I enter yoga cold, tired, stressed, with pain somewhere in my body.  Usually I leave warm, awake, calm and pain free.  If this is what it can do for me, just imagine what it could do for you.  It is also a practice, like meditation or learning a musical instrument or any other skill.  It takes a lifetime to learn and every body does it differently.  There is just total acceptance of your “soft animal body” as Mary Oliver says.  Nobody is there to judge.  Instead of correcting you, the instructor gently eases you into a better position.  No forcing.  And because it is slow, there is time.

I love that time stands still for the 75 minutes I’m in yoga.

This week, yoga went really well.  Laughter went really well.  My whole foods diet is going OK.  I ate a bit of sugar, but I am going to get it back on track this week.  We are beginning a Lenten cleanse on March 5, that will clean out my whole system.  I’ll talk about that next week.  I have to say that my fasting day (when I do my 18 hour fast) is one of my favorite days of the week.  I feel tons better after it.  More focused generally, so I will write about that one of these days too.

What’s not going so great?  Well, there’s the sugar cravings which I SWEAR never leave me.  And if it’s not sugar, it’s simple carbs.  Tortilla chips, rice chips, whatever.  I do better if they’re not around and yet I just really do crave them. 

Loneliness isn’t going so great for me.  I have been feeling very lonely.  And that makes me sad.  So, again, it’s a good thing I am directing a comedy.  Emotional health is difficult to keep when you feel isolated.  That’s something I need to figure out even more and I will write about it soon, as I am reading a new book about emotional health right now with the new studies on drugs that have been coming out…the drugs that really don’t seem to work for anxiety and depression.

This coming week I have the goal of keeping myself away from sugar and simple carbs which tend to make me just totally crash and feel even more stressed.  Whole foods health this week.  And then I will keep you posted on how that goes.  The rest of my list I am keeping fairly well, minus a few things that I will write about as I am discovering that I don’t really enjoy them (bee pollen being number one). 

Sanitas!!

Loving and the Body

This week in health…I had begun to write my update and entry for this week when I went to my church this morning and heard my pastor Jack Roeda give a sermon on the metaphor of the Church as the Body of Christ – one of the oldest and worn out metaphors used in everyday church functioning.  But leave it to Jack to make it new.  He asked this question: 

“What does your relationship to your body signify about the relationship of Christ to the church?”

This is an interesting question because there are, on a day to day basis, so many things that we find wrong with our bodies from pockets of unwanted fat to blemishes to aches and pains, etc.  So, what does this say?  I have met very few people in my life who are satisfied with the bodies that they have.  We always seem to be either in a diet or binge mode and to find any sort of a happy balance is difficult for the majority of people.  I know it is for me.  There are many days when I can barely look at myself in a mirror, or when I see other people or images of women (most of them completely unattainable except by photoshop), I find myself constantly comparing.  And I wonder, constantly, why I cannot just be happy with who I am?  In fact, I daily pray for this acceptance and try to breathe my way through moments when I just find myself despicable. 

What does MY relationship to my body signify about the relationship of Christ to the church?  Well, it signifies much dysfunction….perhaps a functioning dysfunctionality is the right way of putting it.  We go on, we survive, despite set-backs, pains, twinges, creaks, breaks, falls, and so on.  We go on.  We do the best we can.  Christ’s church is the same.  It has a self-image problem, and every part seems to suffer some breakdown at one point or another, just like us.

So, we find that the body, which should be whole and healthy, has many issues.  It really is an interesting, provocative question that Pastor Jack asked this morning and I would love to hear people’s thoughts on it.  The scripture passage is from I Corinthians 12:12-31. 

This week I did fine, OK, but just fine and OK.  It was Valentine’s day and despite the fact that I claim to be above all that Cupid true love cards and chocolate and flowers crap, I find myself lonely many times.  Loneliness doesn’t usually promote good health.  So, while I got a lot of work done, I just missed having company.  I didn’t really overeat or drink or anything like that, and I persisted in my good habits of exercise, yoga, eating lots of veggies and making sure I was sticking to my 52 pieces of health advice, but emotionally it was a downer. 

How do we get through such times as these?  And it seems so small, so petty that I should be concerned with my own loneliness when there are people suffering so much pain in this world.  And yet we know that loneliness, leading to profound depression, is right now and will be a growing cause of human mortality. 

Here’s how I get through it.  

First, I recognize that when I have a bad day, it is probably something I can learn from, and that I should find a way to reflect on it and use what I can to make the next time I encounter a bad day better.  

Second, I recognize that, in many ways, I just need to make it through.  You cannot get better unless you get through, so no matter how bad the news is or how awful the person treated you or how awful you treated someone else, or how much guilt you are carrying around, you have to get through and probably, most likely, the next time will be easier.  Many Psychologists believe that, while they should offer compassionate listening and advice to people, there is the fact that you do have to get through it and you cannot be blanketed and coddled at every step of the way in life.  

So, I recognize those two things.  Then I make sure I practice contemplative prayer and I try to reach out to a friend.  And I feel better.

Managing stress is one of the key ways to improve health and we all need to find ways to do it better.  I’m working on it.  If I have any new breakthroughs I’ll let you know.

What did go well this week?  

I practiced prayer every day, I ate pretty well, I spent a good deal of time with friends and even made a new one.  

My favorite thing this week was casting a show – Midsummer Night’s Dream  and enjoying watching the gifts of my students unfold before me.  There’s another way to use that metaphor of the body – a cast for a play is a body and it really does need ALL its parts – the brain and the eyes, the nose and the lips, the intestines and the bowels, the skin and the hair, the toes and the spleen….all of it.  Whenever I cast a show, I hope that the actors will understand that I am not just throwing any role at them, but choosing them for the gifts of who they are, and perhaps also trying to teach them a new direction that their body, their gifts could move in.  I am trying to apply my ideas and my living of a total health year to all areas of my life, including my work habits and the way I practice my creative gifts.  So, I went into this show, and into this casting, with an open heart.  I made sure I went in rested and stretched, and I reminded myself to always love each person I encountered.  This sense of being intentional to every person went OK.  I always miss a few steps and make some mistakes and I am still learning this process of making theatre with actors and designers and technicians.  My goal now is to value each and every person…to know them all by name and to check in on their work as often as I am able.  I want love to be at the center of my body’s health and the center of my work’s health.  As Jack ended his sermon on the body this morning, he ended also with this idea of love.  If love is not at the center of who you are, of the acts that you do, you can be the most creatively gifted member of the human race, but if love is not there with the creativity, you have nothing.

And with that thought, I actually am working on memorizing a poem that is about a humble love of the self.  It is another Mary Oliver poem this month.  And I will end my blog here:

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Water Water everywhere! (oh wait, that's snow!)

Ahhh!  Maybe you can tell I am behind since I am writing this on Sunday rather than on Wednesday.  Well, I need to post on the weekends instead since I am likely to have a bit more time for leisure and thoughts about health when I’m not constantly running to and from work. 

So, over the past ten days, what has gone well with my total health year?

Well, first of all, I have really been true to keeping my Sabbath, EXCEPT with shoveling snow!  That is serious work, and it must be done, so I am out there slogging through usually on Sunday afternoons or evenings.  It’s OK, and I count it as part of my exercise and I listen to music and sing out loud, so everything’s good in the world. 

Also, I have been doing well with staying away from the sugars this past week, after my birthday treat of a beautiful cupcake purchased at Sweet Bliss in Chicago.  Otherwise, I’ve been steering clear from the white stuff, cooking healthy, eating green smoothies nearly every day, and just feeling pretty good. 

What hasn’t been going well, I dropped my contemplative prayer practice for a few days because I was so busy, but it’s back on track now.  Wow did I feel the absence of that in my life all of a sudden.  I couldn’t figure out why I was feeling so stressed all of a sudden, and then I realized I hadn’t taken that 20-30 minutes of meditative contemplation each day, so the second I began doing it again, the inflammation of my life was relieved a bit.

Inflammation is a serious problem because of the western industrialized diet, because of environmental stressors, and because of the lack of meditative practice.  I would encourage you to make this contemplation a part of your life.  If you need a good place to start, Lent is just about upon us and my friend from church, David Muyskens, has written a beautiful book about starting a contemplative practice.  It’s called 40 Days to a Closer Walk with God:  The Practice of Centering Prayer. He has another book too, but I think this first one is the best.  Here’s a link to it.  Available in paperback and for kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/Forty-Days-Closer-Walk-God/dp/0835899047/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391986631&sr=1-2&keywords=david+muyskens

One other element I wanted to write about this week is drinking water.  Many people I know lately have been trying to give up sodas or pop, cokes, whatever you wish to call it in whatever region you live.  Water is the best replacement for these and if you can give up anything that is making your life unhealthy, it would be cigarettes and sodas (diet or regular).  They are just so bad for you and are just chemical upon chemical.  After I gave up diet soda, I had one about three months later and it just tasted so awful.  Try sparking water or unsweetened caffeine free teas like Rooibos red tea which is naturally sweet.  You will be able to do this and it will help you in your life. 

How much water should you drink?  This has been up for and under considerable debate over the past five years.  For starters, you should always begin your day with eight to ten ounces of water to replenish the fluids lost during sleep.  Then, you should always consume as much water as you sweat out when you exercise.  For me, that’s about 16 ounces of water per hour of exercise, unless it’s hot and that might take me up to the need for 20 to 24 ounces.  While there is some debate as to whether drinking a ton of water is good for you, water cannot hurt you unless you practice water loading which can really hurt you because it depletes the electrolytes from your body.  Water loading is a bad idea.  Body builders do it along with a low-carb diet for some days in order to get that “hard & lean” look.  It’s an unsafe practice and can lead to heart failure.  I am not kidding.  Your heart needs electrolytes to function well and if you deplete the salts, magnesium and potassium from your system, you could cause the muscle of your heart to fail.  So, how much water?  Well…it is certainly safe to drink your body weight in ounces of water.  I weigh 138 pounds, so I can drink 138 ounces of water per day safely.  I could even go higher in high heat and exercise conditions, but it is probably not necessary.  The great Kenyan runners don’t even drink when they run long distances, but then they drink tons of bush tea (red Rooibos tea with milk) after and through the evening hours.  Here is a good article I found on drinking water…or drinking fluids generally.  It is linked up from the Mayo clinic’s site and the science in the article is accurate:

http://experiencelife.com/article/all-about-hydration/

My advice this week, drink plenty of water.  Get into a contemplative practice.  Those are two easy places to begin to work toward total health.

Cheers!