The Body Doesn't Lie (24 page)

Surprising Spices

You can help the action of the Release process by adding in a bit of peaceful movement. Let’s consider what positive motion looks like on the Release program.

If you’ve been doing your Tibetan Rites every morning, you’ve likely found that you can do more repetitions or hold the poses for a longer time by now. I’m not going to ask you to step it up or add any additional
strenuous
exercise during Release. Why? Because if you challenge yourself, you’ll trigger your stress response, even if you don’t intend to. Vigorous exercise increases the level of oxidative stress and inflammation in the body, and it can be especially taxing during a time of cleansing. So try not to do any intense exercise above and beyond your current level of fitness. Instead, simply keep your body moving in the course of your day, to encourage bloodflow and discourage your lymphatic system from becoming static. In this stage, for additional exercise, I recommend adding fifteen-minutes walks and gentle or restorative yoga.

A fifteen-minute walk won’t increase inflammation but will have a drastic impact on your overall health. Squeeze as many of these short walks into your day as possible. I recommend three a day, one after each meal. A study published in the journal
Diabetes Care
found that a brief walk directly following a meal can help your body absorb the inevitable blood sugar spike from the meal and significantly improve your glycemic control. Indeed, the three walks—instead of just one, for forty-five minutes—were more effective at lowering glucose peaks after meals.
²⁰
This is particularly important because those increases in post-meal glucose are one of most highly predictive risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
²¹
I love this approach because (a) you can do it anywhere on earth, at any time; (b) you can easily create a well-entrenched habit (after every meal, I walk!); (c) you’ll see and interact more with your neighbors throughout the day (and we know how important social support is to overall health and vitality). I’ve also started to get my patients hooked on Jawbone, a diet- and exercise-tracking device that you can use to track steps walked, blood pressure, food intake, and even the number of hours of quality sleep you get.

You may be very disciplined and love to work out, hard. Taking it easy may not come naturally to you. But please don’t worry that you’re not burning calories or building muscle this week. This stage isn’t about that; it’s about healing from your pain. It’s also about changing your automatic stress response from one that’s highly reactive to one that’s more relaxed, steady, contemplative, and
not
quick to react.

If you’re really eager to add more activity, do some gentle yoga. When you stretch and lengthen your body, when you hold a pose a bit longer than is entirely comfortable, you’ll automatically activate your stress response. But here’s the genius of yoga, the Adaptive Response at work: While you’re challenging yourself, and thus engaging your sympathetic nervous system, you’re also breathing deeply and deliberately, staying focused, and staying present in your body. In other words, you’re actively engaging and training your parasympathetic nervous system to counterbalance your sympathetic nervous system. In this way, yoga strengthens the “cool” response of the parasympathetic system, training your brain to stop automatically sending your sympathetic nervous system into overdrive. It teaches you to approach any hectic or stressful experience in a calm, attentive state. And it also makes you feel fantastic.

Now let’s move on to the Release work that can be the most challenging of all: emotion. If you’ve been carrying around a burden that has created pain in your life, it’s time to let it go.

Quick Body Scan for Habitual Offenders

You’ve emptied your literal cupboards; now it’s time to throw open your emotional cupboards and see what’s lurking in there, what thoughts and feelings are healthy and serving you, and what’s not healthy, not serving you, and needs to be released. Now is the time to release all accumulated slights, pains, traumas—
whatever
is poisoning you—so that you can let go and move on.

Emotion work is probably the most important, and most challenging, of the entire Release week. I recommend that you space out the following activities over the week; don’t do them all in one day. Release is an on-going process, one that may never be fully completed: Much like weeding a garden, you need to keep releasing, week after week, in order to access the luscious, life-sustaining harvest underneath the overgrowth. And if you keep facing your pain, you’ll learn that it won’t kill you. Simply put, the process of releasing gets better, easier.

This exercise is an eye-opener that helps people finally make the connection between where they are and where they want to be. Give yourself an hour or so to do this audit revision and let it really sink in. The results will be worth it.

Get out your Time Audit from the Reflect stage and take a good hard look. Scan through the hours. Are there areas you can see where you know you’ve been killing time, not moving ahead? Are you spending too much of your life doing things that make you unhappy? Highlight all the hours in the audit spent doing tasks that
didn’t
make you happy.

Now, here’s the tricky part: Be honest. In your notebook, write out a reason that you do each of those particular unrewarding activities: Why do you think you’re doing each?

Is it because you haven’t found your passion yet? Something to drive you? Here’s an example: Say you’re afraid of being rude to your boring, nosy neighbor, so you drop everything when she stops by to chat. What if you were working on a project that consumed you—would you be more likely to say, “Sorry, can’t talk now,” or would you still feel beholden to be “nice” and continue a time-wasting conversation?

Perhaps you’re still on that consumption track—you’re consuming instead of producing. Do you think your life has value, that you’re making a contribution to the world? Are you feeling powerless and lost? Or are you totally directed and know exactly why you’re here and what your place is in the world—and those activities are part of “paying your dues” to get there? Where are these activities taking you?

Most of us in pain are running away in some fashion, trying to escape and therefore filling our lives with distractions. If this is case with you, it’s time to let it go. Let it
all
go. Let go of the guilt. The regret. The self-torture. Each coulda-shoulda-woulda that keeps you from getting on with things and just moving forward. The huge, heavy baggage from former friends or lovers, or a less-than-supportive family. All of that, at this moment, exists only in your mind.

To support your letting go, take out a blank sheet of paper to supplement your Time Audit—and create a new schedule. Include all the stuff you did that you
enjoyed
—spending time with friends, reading a great book, exercising, cooking a delicious meal with fresh foods, even spending a lazy Sunday in bed. All the things that, when you did them, made you feel joy and satisfaction—even if they took only fifteen minutes.

Now, those spaces where you put crap television or endless web surfing or junk food binges or cocktail hours . . . those you scour. Wipe them clean. Pretend they’re not even a possibility. Selectively take out unfulfilling tasks as well—those that you didn’t
have
to do but did anyway.

In their place, write in the few things a week that you know would make a huge difference to your mental health. Walk at five thirty each morning with the dog? Put it in there. Meditation before bed? A session with your journal and a cup of coffee after the kids head for school?

Now look at this new schedule: This is where you
really
were. This is where your brain and your heart were while your body killed time. This is your true life.

Rather than waste your life in a dream world, zoned out from the things that really matter to you, start to think about your revised Time Audit as reflecting the true, real, actual events in your life—and the crossed-off events as mere hiccups that you’d like to soon forget. Switching your mind’s orientation from “I’d love to do this” to “I
do
this” is a huge leap forward in terms of making something happen.

Make copies of this new schedule and hang it up throughout your house and your workplace. Tape a copy to your bathroom mirror, so you can read it during your Morning Glory ritual. Stick a copy in your purse or pocket. Stuff it into the visor in your car. Have this reminder around you all the time:
This
is my life. I may get distracted every once in a while, but this—
this
is where I really am. And then fake it ’til you make it!

Okay, I realize that simply walking away from unfulfilling activities is tricky. Those time-wasters that you
didn’t
transfer over from your original Time Audit onto your ideal-world schedule are likely harmful, time-wasting
habits.
When we’re hiding from our pain, running from it, we find lots of nice diversions to keep us from addressing it. While everyone needs a way to blow off steam and relax, sometimes these diversions can turn into addictions. It’s not just drugs and alcohol we need to worry about: Many activities can be addictive, and can have equally devastating effects on otherwise productive lives.

How can you tell when your harmless distraction has turned the corner? According to the Stanton Peele Addiction Center in New Jersey, an addiction has five distinctive characteristics:
²²

1. You use it to erase negative feelings (such as pain, anxiety, or despair).
   
2. Using it detracts from other areas of your life (your job, friendships, or other interests).
   
3. It props up your wobbly self-image (you feel better when you use it; worse when you don’t).
   
4. You organize your life around it (embedding it in firm routines).
   
5. You ultimately don’t enjoy it; it becomes less and less enjoyable with time (yet you can’t imagine not doing it).
   

What do you think—is there anything in your life that qualifies? Everything from smoking and gambling, to online shopping or porn, to fatty foods and Internet use, to smart phones and social media, to tracking political news—any of these can be an addictive “substance.” You’ll know you’re ready to quit when you start to feel as though the benefit of the addiction isn’t worth the shame, the hassle, the money, or the time you’re wasting. The most successful “quitters” follow a very specific pattern:

1. They experience a building unhappiness and disillusionment.
   
2. They have a blinding epiphany: Eureka! This is bad for me! And I don’t have to do it anymore!
   
3. They deliberately change their pattern to break the harmful habit.
   
4. They change their whole self-image to that of a person who doesn’t do that addiction.
   
5. They tackle each relapse head-on and don’t let it drag them back into Negative Feedback.
   

If you’re ready, make a deliberate plan to break the chains of each harmful habit. If you’ve got multiple habits to work on, you can’t transform them all in a day—but you can
plan
your transformation. The most important tool at your disposal: your attitude. No one can do this but you; no one
will
do this but you. You have to show up and be there for yourself—no one else can do the hard work for you.

If your addictions include any kind of chemical substance—prescription drugs, street drugs, alcohol, tobacco—you need some extra help. Your life could depend upon it. Please reach out to your family doctor and just say those words: “I need help.”

With major changes in the offing in your eating habits, your food shopping, and how you spend your discretionary time, you’ve got challenges ahead. Why not call in reinforcements? Regardless of the habit or addictive behavior, we could
all
use a bit of help. Sometimes just reaching out for a hand can help you wipe away some of the shame and self-blame. It’s likely that your friend can empathize with you. That empathetic connection is therapeutic in and of itself.

Here’s an idea: Gather the list of foods you’re trying to release and, instead of going out for dinner with a friend, invite her over. Tell her you have no time for hors d’oeuvres and alcohol; you need help. Can she come over while you’re going through your kitchen to get rid of foods that increase heat, tiredness, inflammation, pain? Or help you gather up all your old, unwanted clothes, books, and other household items—the stuff that you think is “too good to throw out” but that drags down your energy. It’s time to let it all go. Your friend could help you box it all up and drive it to Goodwill with you, and then take you for a nice green smoothie afterward.