Life Journey Blend – Strength In Transition

When you are facing a challenge in your life journey, often it takes strength and will power to continue on that journey when those challenges occur.

A blend of essential oils that will enhance, support, and allow you to retain the focus on your life journey, regardless of the challenges you are facing is:

Black Pepper (Piper nigrum)

Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens)

Thyme (Thymus vulgaris, ct linalool)

Each of these oils has physical healing properties, as well as an emotional profile.  For this blend it was about the emotional profile.

Black Pepper

Physically this essential oil is well known for it’s warming properties, allowing for it’s use in the warming of muscles and joints to allow for more freedom of movement, it’s use in fevers (a homeopathic quality, like cures like) and for it’s ability to break up blockages and remove them, such as an expectorant, anticatarrhal and a digestive.

This ability to break up and remove blockages allows Black Pepper to stimulate the individual to see the blockages that are holding them back in their journey through life, to loosen those blockages and give you direction in your journey.  The warming properties also allow you to gather warm and confidence in yourself, and your ability to undertake the direction you have chosen on this journey.

Cypress

Physically this essential oil is well known for it’s calming and anti-spasmodic effects, allowing for it’s use in areas of respiratory conditions and nervous conditions.

This calming and anti-spasmodic effect allows for the individual who is jumping from one idea to another, rapidly going through change, to make the transition from one state to another, or from one path to another, with more calmness and ease. The Cypress in this blend protects and supports you on the rapid change that is unfolding in your Life Journey, allowing you to transition into the next area with ease and without a draining of energy that comes with rapid change and jumping from idea to idea.

Thyme

Physically this essential oil is well known for it’s anti-inflammatory effects, allowing for it’s use in many inflammatory conditions, including respiratory, urinary and skin related inflammations.

This anti-inflammatory aspect allows for the individual to remove the anger from their emotion, and dig into their own strength to follow their Life Journey.  Thyme encourages you to be balanced, courageous, calm and supportive while also ensuring there is focus and decisive action being undertaken.  This allows you to be strong in your decisions, to ensure you strengthen your will power to remain on your chosen path.

These essential oils combined allow you to transition into change, with ease, will power and strength, while remaining firmly focused on your chosen Life Journey.

Strength In Transition

For more information on the use of essential oils, refer to my website, http://www.SandraVenables.com

International Yoga Day

This year a new recognition day was established and it was for Yoga.

There are many differing types of yoga as I have recently discovered when I started doing Kum Nye Tibetian Yoga.

In a recent email from Huffington Post, I found some of these less conventional types of yoga raised a smile in me, and wanted to share them with you too.  I loved the idea of eating and yoga, and taking along your pet dog with you, amongst the more quirky types of yoga.

There is also another good post that shows you 7 simple yoga poses, includes great videos of the technique too, to undertake throughout your day. So no need to go to a yoga class at all!  Go enjoy your yoga and set your body up for the day

Gratitudes Daily

My Daily Gratitude Journal is growing – every day, 10 more, every day, more joy!

– Sandra Venables

As many of you know, I write out at least 10 things every day that I am grateful for having in my life, or having seen, or experienced during my day.

Initially, when I start,  the pen can sit poised for several moments as it can take time to put into place those things that I  have been grateful for experiencing during the day.  Interestingly, by the end of the 10, there comes a waterfall of many different things that I am extremely grateful for experiencing and I want to continue writing and writing!

It’s the beginning that seems to be the momental part for most people in any Life Journey, whether it’s beginning to write down what you are grateful for in your life, or whether it’s something more life changing such as losing weight or beginning a health journey.  The first step is usually the hardest – such a well quoted sentence, by so many too!  Try googling this phrase and everyone and their father is quoted as saying this within a sentence!  There are lots of photos of steps too, so I wanted to share my Life Journey series instead.

Taking the steps

What lead me to speak more about gratitudes today though, was a link sent through to me on email, truly an inspiring video that helps you see what there is to be grateful for on a daily basis. It doesn’t need to be big, earth shattering things, it can be something as simple as turning on the tap this morning and drinkable water flowed – how grateful would you be for that experience if you had never had a tap, let alone a tap that flowed clean, drinkable water – there are millions in the world today that do not have this luxury!

Watch this video with an open heart and an open mind, and your ability to begin your gratitudes at the end of any given day will be so easy that you will be writing out many more every night!

“The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on or blame. The gift of life is yours; it is an amazing journey; and you alone are responsible for the quality of it” Dan Zadra

More mindfulness

A couple of days ago I mentioned that Mindfulness Meditation was talked about a lot.  Well, it’s been upfront and personal again today.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the Universe was stalking me about meditation!!

 

I was listening to a wonderful podcast by The Wellness Guys this morning and the discussion was about mindful mediation, their guest was Dr Elise Bialylew.  Dr Elise runs a campaign in May every year (this year I heard about it too late to join), called Mindful in May.  Essentially people register to do mindful meditation every day for a month (and are given a course to follow, instructions on ‘how to’ and a journal to record your meditations), in doing so, they also undertake to fundraise for Charity Water.

 

Did you know it only takes $30 to provide clean water for one person?  Did you know that 1 in 9 people in the world do not  have access to clean water?

 

If you’re interested in joining, it appears that the registration date has been extended. It costs you $25 to register, and for that you receive an online course in mindful meditation.

 

Meditation Moon

Benefits of Meditation

I recently went to a seminar where we discussed the methods of meditation and how to meditate.  I’ve always wanted to meditate and have wondered on the how often. We stepped through some techniques that I will share with you at the end of this blog.

This idea of meditation in my daily life lead me to investigate further on the benefits of meditation.  Often within the media we are now being told that meditation is beneficial to mind and body. As I believe in the power of the body to ‘unmake what it has already made’, and I also believe in the power of ‘nature to promote self healing’ I wanted to be able to provide evidence of this beneficial technique as it supports the body helping itself.

I have found many studies that are emerging which highlight the benefits of meditation and I wish to share two of them with you as well as guide you in some understanding of how to meditate.

In 2011 a study was published that showed meditation reducing the unpleasantness of pain by 57% and pain intensity by 40% (compared to morphine that reduces pain intensity by 25%), Zeidan et al (2011).  In this study the participants were trained in the art of mindfulness meditation (Shamatha or focused attention) over a period of 4 days.  I enjoyed reading in the study that one volunteer was dismissed from the study for falling asleep during meditation – this happens!! By the way, don’t think you are alone if you’re meditating and fall asleep, meditation is indeed a skill and one that needs to be practiced regularly.  The study went on to discover that through meditation areas of the brain that self-regulated pain were activated. This supports my motto that it’s your body that does the healing, not an artificial medium.  Interestingly, for this study, the volunteers were only trained for 20 minutes per day, over 4 days, and the training was specific to the clinical setting (i.e., they were required to listen to the noise of a MRI scanner during their training). This indicates that you don’t have to have been practicing meditation for a long period of time before you can benefit from the skill. Obviously, the more you practice, the more you develop the skill, and probably the more effectively you can utilize meditation in your self-healing regime.

What I’ve also found is an explanation for why meditation works so well in assisting our body in self-healing. The example I’ll tell you about highlights the benefits of utilizing meditation in conjunction with attempting to lower blood pressure and how well this can occur when utilized regularly.  Essentially, when the relaxation response occurs within meditation, the body produces a substance called nitric oxide, the basic outcome of this is the dilation, or relaxation, of the blood vessel walls, allowing more space for the blood to flow, result = lower blood pressure!  To find out more about the relaxation response, ABC (2008), and it’s multitude of benefits due to the release of nitric oxide, read the article by Kantor (2005)

If you are going to venture into the realm of daily meditation, I would suggest the following as skills and techniques to develop:

1. Focus – can use a candle, an aroma, or a thought to bring in focus
2. Breathing – control your breathing, take 7 deep breaths, in and out, focus on the breath going inspiring and expiring, it’s coming from your spirit, follow your breath through your body, keeping still
3. Bliss – keeping perfectly still for 20 minutes (no, don’t have a timer on!), close your eyes, feel your senses withdraw from yourself, keep in silence, keeping so still you may feel numb, with the numbness you will be withdrawn from your senses enabling you to hold this position
4. Light – the state you arrive at after this time
5. Breathing – focus on your breathing again to come back to the current time

For your position, initially you can lie on the floor, or sit up straight with your feet flat on the floor and your palms on your thighs. Find a position that will be comfortable for you and that you feel you can sustain perfectly still for 20 minutes.

So many people appear to believe that meditation can be achieved in a 5 minute power down time. That’s not my aim, I’m looking at 20 minutes a day to enhance my wellbeing.

Enjoy your meditation routines.

ABC News, (2008), Easy Ways to Take the Edge Off, http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7392433 viewed 26 March 2013

Kantor, M, (2005), Nitric Oxide: The New Hero of Human Biology, Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200502/nitric-oxide-the-new-hero-human-biology, viewed 26 March 2013

Zeidan, F, Martucci, K, Kraft, R, Gordon, N, et al, (2011), Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation, Journal of Neuroscience, 31:14, 5540-5548, http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/14/5540.short, viewed 26 March 2013