Friday, February 1, 2008

February 2008 Christine's Corner

February is here at last and love is in the air! Valentine’s Day speaks to the passion and love between us, one of our most romantic holidays. It’s easy for us to gaze with wonder into the eyes of our beloved, to look lovingly into the eyes of our parents and children. It’s also a time for us to look with love and compassion within our own hearts.

For some of us, it is easy to look within and to wholly and fully embrace what we find there. We find ourselves to be enjoyable, interesting, and even entertaining individuals. We laugh at our own mistakes, delight in our life’s journey, and love not only our lives but also who we are in the core of our souls. For others it is easier to send the love they have inside to others. They may feel unworthy of truly saying and feeling that they love themselves, or perhaps they feel it is an act of selfishness to fully and completely love themselves.

Loving oneself is not only the greatest gift you can give yourself; it also has an enormous impact on your health. In previous issues of CoSozo’s newsletter we’ve spoken about the impact of your thoughts and feelings in creating the experiences of your life. It is best described from a cellular level by Dr. Bruce Lipton (2005) in The Biology of Beliefs. These concepts are also photographically displayed in the crystalline forms in Dr. Masaru Emoto’s incredible books on the messages we can gain from water crystals (Messages from Water; The Hidden Messages in Water; Water Crystal Healing: Music & Images to Restore Your Well Being). Each of these books reveals profound information regarding the impact of your thoughts and beliefs on even the molecular level.

Imagine that your body is a petri dish of living cells and those cells are directly influenced by your feelings and thoughts. It is not a difficult exercise to imagine that if your feelings are ones of resentment, fear, anger or apathy your cells will multiply and live in a distinctly different environment than if your feelings about yourself are ones of love and tenderness. Loving yourself creates a different internal environment for your organs and all of the cells that make up your body.

Loving yourself also enables us to see those things and choices in life that can enrich our general health and state of well-being. We make time to rest, to eat well, and to exercise. We establish proper boundaries for ourselves in the balance we maintain between our work lives and our personal lives. We get routine health checks to make sure that we are doing all we can do to maintain a healthy life and lifestyle. By all means, if you are late getting to the doctor this year or have had an unusually busy couple of weeks at work, that doesn’t mean you don’t love yourself. The degree to which we accept and love ourselves can only truly be assessed and considered on a personal basis.

When we are in a space in our lives of deep self love and caring, we often will focus more on the food that we eat and nourish ourselves with. Nutrition, as I’ve written of in previous CoSozo articles, plays a paramount role in the condition of our health. Sustaining yourself on a diet of fast food, junk food, and soft drinks creates a very different internal environment for our body than does a diet of fruits, vegetables, and organic foods. The foods that we eat on a daily basis can mean the difference between health and disease.

For most of my life, I had an enormous sweet tooth. I’ve always teased that I got it genetically from my mother. At one point in my life, I cut out all sugar entirely, and even anything that was sweet whether it was pineapple or sugar substitutes. Really, at the time I almost had a little meltdown about it. Just like that, I changed my entire diet and the thought of what I would possibly eat now that all of my mainstays were no longer on the allowed list was unbearable. To my amazement, it really turned out to be very easy and now my taste has been forever changed. I no longer have a sweet tooth. Not that I don’t occasionally have something sweet, but I don’t craves sweets anymore and to be honest, now I just can’t eat that many sweet things. I used to wake up in the morning and crave something with syrup or sugar instantly, and now it’s rare that I really want to start the day with something like that. It’s an incredible process to train your tastes to desire alternative foods to the ones you have been choosing. And the impact on your health is amazing, it certainly has been very beneficial in my own life.

Organic foods are becoming more and more popular these days. I think as our awareness as a society is rising, our choices regarding what we are willing to put into our bodies are also changing. Even a decade ago, there was little information being actively distributed about the impacts of pesticides and other chemicals on our bodies and our health. Whether you eat organically or whether you just strive to eat better balanced meals, each choice that you make toward establishing better practices of self-care helps to establish stronger health in your body and in your lifestyle.

Part of what I’ve discovered in my own journey is that there is a tremendous impact to your well-being just by how fully you can be present in your experiences. Just a small shift in your awareness can bring benefit. For instance, I sit down to eat a nourishing dinner with my family, eating it quickly and somewhat absentmindedly so I can make my next event. Or, consider that I sit down to eat that same dinner with my family and bring my attention to the gifts and benefits my body will gain from how lovingly it was prepared, to feeling the experience of the foods actually nourishing my body. In those two examples, given what we know about the impact of our thoughts and emotions on creating our experiences, it’s so easy to see how my body will actually be able to absorb more of the nutrients and elements it needs just by shifting my focus. One small shift, such tremendous gains! You can read more about mindful eating in this month’s article called “Mindful Eating Promotes Balance.”

I think part of our journey in life is to learn how to better know ourselves and love ourselves. To be certain, throughout the journey of our lives, as we grow wiser as a result of our experiences and level of awareness, love can mean different things to us in different parts of that journey. Whether that love is the love that you develop and hold for yourself or exchange with another person, love is the most powerful emotion in this world. And just like that shift I spoke of earlier, love is an emotion that has many different levels. Just when you think that you cannot possibly love or be loved to a greater degree, one day you realize that somehow a shift has occurred and that the love that you’re experiencing is far greater and deeper than before. One of the many marvelous miracles of the universe in which we live!

So during this month of love, shift your focus every now and then and see how your experience of the moment changes. Eat nutritious foods slowly and with appreciation for your body and how it supports you in your life. Take an opportunity to engage in events that bring you greater happiness and joy. Delight your loved ones with a surprise—give more hugs, smile and laugh more, tell them what a difference they make in your life. And challenge yourself to bring more of your awareness and your feelings of self-love to your existence and experiences. Loving yourself deeply often requires expanding our level of consciousness, but the rewards to your every day life experiences are innumerable.

~posted by Christine, 9:38 AM