The Art of Being Your Own Best Friend

Here’s an article entitled “The Art of Being Your Own Best Friend” you may enjoy. Highly recommended!

Are you hard on yourself at times?  Is it difficult for you to make time for exercise, healthy food, or nurturing your spiritual life? Do you take time for yourself to do the things you love to do – those things that feed your soul?  What would your life be like if you treated yourself like your own best friend?

Contents:

• Sharpening Your Saw
• Perpetual Stress
• Being Your Own Best Friend
• How Would Your Life Look and Feel?
• Looking In All the Wrong Places
• Being Your Own Best Friend in the Realm of Your Mind
• Being Your Own Best Friend in Your Relationship with Your Body
• Being Your Own Best Friend in Your Spiritual Life
• What Stops Us From Being Our Own Best Friend?
• Common Beliefs That Get In The Way
• Not Good Enough?
• But I Don’t Have Time!
• Rewriting Your Belief Software
• Self-Care is the Best Health Care
• Making it OK to Have Fun
• It’s Possible!
• How to Practice Being Your Own Best Friend

Click here to read the remainder of the article, or download the pdf file.
(the full article is 6.5  pages printed)

Ten Minutes to Relaxation and Flexibility

Would you like to have a simple ten-minute program to help you relax while you gain body awareness and flexibility? This gentle workout is based on Somatic Technique, which has come down the line from Moshe Feldenkrais. It combines breathing and relatively easy movements for the front, back and side of your body.

Click here: Ten Minutes to Relaxation and Flexibility for a PDF file which you can view online, or download for your personal use.  Read on if  you would like find out why this approach can be so helpful.

How Does it work?
There are a few basic reasons why muscles become chronically tight.

1. Anxiety or worry – what we usually call “stress”
2. A loss of communication between the brain and the muscles
3. A combination of 1 and 2
4. A deficiency or imbalance of minerals like Magnesium and/or Calcium
5. Blockage of flow in the lymphatic vessels
6. Blockage of flow in related acupuncture meridians
7. Blockage of energy from an “interference field” (stemming from an old scar,  injury site or hidden infection. The interference source isn’t usually painful itself, and is often some distance away -  seemingly unrelated).

This simple routine works mainly with #2, but also helps with #1.  It helps loosen tense muscles in four ways:

1. It relaxes your mind by bringing your focus into the present moment
2. It activates your diaphragm in breathing, which places your nervous system into relaxation mode (parasympathetic)
3. Diaphragmatic breathing also calms the “fight-or-flight” part of the nervous system (sympathetic)
4. It strengthens communication between your muscles and brain. Why is this important? If this link is weak, the subconscious mind takes over and places the muscles into default mode, which unfortunately, is “tight!”

Click here to view the exercise pageTen Minutes to Relaxation and Flexibility.

To learn more about brain-muscle communication, please see Somatic Technique.