The Body Doesn't Lie (29 page)
Read The Body Doesn't Lie Online
Authors: Vicky Vlachonis
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Pain Management, #Healing, #Medical, #Allied Health Services, #Massage Therapy
Can’t Find Organic Almond Milk? Make Your Own!
One of the frustrating parts about being an almond milk lover is seeing how some companies can take something so healthy and turn it bad by adding tons of sugar. I am lucky to have access to fresh unsweetened almond milk, but if you don’t, try this at home:
Buy 2 to 3 pounds of raw organic almonds. (Always buy organic—the flavor is better, and you don’t have to worry about the chemicals!) Soak the almonds overnight in filtered water, filling the bowl until the water is about 2 inches higher than the almonds. Soaking releases the enzymes, so it is a very important step. In the morning, pour the entire mixture (almonds and water) into a food processor or strong blender (like a Vitamix, the ultimate health tool!). Begin slow, making sure the top of the blender is secure. Turn up to high slowly, then leave on for about 2 to 3 minutes. (When you are done, scoop out the top foam for the best cappuccino of your life!)
Take a glass Ball jar (or similar) and put a tea strainer over the top. (You can also use a cheesecloth, but I like the ritual and simplicity of the strainer.) Pour the mixture in slowly, and keep turning around the mush with a spoon—the milk will drop into the glass jar. Sometimes I add water to the soaked almonds to get the right consistency. Just keep doing the straining until you have about 32 ounces—enough for 2 days! (Once it’s completed, I don’t keep more than 2 days.)
This wonder elixir is way more than a milk. I use almond milk in soups, tea, and just drink a small glass to balance my blood sugar if I am ever tempted by the wrong foods. You might add a little organic vanilla extract or cinnamon for added sweetness. Pour it into your green smoothies for a creamy texture and a nice change.
Almonds rock!
The Positive Feedback To-Go Plan
If you feel that you don’t have time to do the entire plan—not yet anyway—keep these ten points in mind and you won’t fall any further into Negative Feedback.
- Increase intake of fluids to eight to ten glasses a day.
- Improve sleep by changing an uncomfortable mattress or pillow and increasing ventilation in your bedroom (opening a bedroom or bathroom window to allow fresh air to circulate).
- Take a power nap. Steal time for yourself by setting aside thirty minutes each day for breathing/meditation.
- Take regular walks and avoid sitting in one position for too long.
- For any injuries or pain, think of the acronym RICE: rest, ice, compression, elevate. Apply an ice pack for twenty minutes three times a day to the injury; avoid applying ice directly to the skin. Wrap a sprain or a twist with an Ace bandage, or wear compression stockings, to contain inflammation.
- Relax by taking a hot bath with lavender and Epsom salts two or three evenings a week.
- Increase protein intake by eating organic red meats such as turkey (not smoked), grass-fed beef, lamb, or veal a few times a week.
- Lower your carbohydrate intake by switching to brown rice and/or quinoa with meals.
- Increase egg-white omelet consumption and include goat’s-milk cheese in your diet on a weekly basis.
- Have health-promoting snacks available at the office, including baby figs, walnuts, almonds, goji berries, blueberries, raspberries, and goat’s-milk yogurt. A spoonful of honey and a sprinkle of cinnamon may be added if wished. (Snacks should be taken at approximately 11:00 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. daily.)
If you are still not sure, consider exploring a food sensitivity blood test, done by a lab. These tests are not covered by insurance and are still very controversial; many have conflicting findings. Talk to your doctor or allergist for more information. (They are likely to advise a food elimination test!)
Again, just as with pain, try to see this as a helpful outcome that’s yielding priceless information. Remember what happened to me when I ignored my physical symptoms from Granny’s cakes and pies: I suffered with eczema and bloatedness . Your body will allow itself to be ignored for just so long. Better to know now than when you have to go under for surgery.
Now that your diet is running on all cylinders, I’m eager for you to stretch yourself a bit and reach for a new physical challenge that connects with you on a deeper level. Let’s move on to the motion component of your Radiate week.
You’ve spent two weeks taking it easy (exertion-wise)—doing the Tibetan Rites, going for short walks, and/or doing gentle yoga—in order to let your sympathetic nervous system relax and your inflammation ratchet down a few notches. Hopefully by now you can feel a difference in your body—perhaps a bit less pain? Are your joints feeling stronger? Do you notice any differences when you get out of bed?
If your pains
are
decreasing and you
are
feeling more energetic from the Positive Feedback changes you’ve made, it’s time to consider what’s next for you physically. Remember, the basic tenet of Adaptive Response is
challenge
, so you need to be pushing yourself a bit more all the time to continue to derive the biggest benefit.
For some of you, challenge may take the form of an extra three cycles of Tibetan Rites; for others, perhaps you’ll extend your morning walk to thirty minutes or shoot for 10,000 steps a day. But for others of you—particularly the women who’ve missed their sweaty workouts—once you’ve reached your twenty-one repetitions of the Tibetan Rites, start thinking about other ways you can move your body through space in a way that will also send your soul aloft.
If you’re a runner, how long has it been since you did a run for charity—and really gave your all to the fundraising effort? Perhaps you’ve done a 5K here and there but haven’t really paid attention to the cause. Or perhaps you’ve done lots of smaller races, but what you’ve really wanted to try was a triathlon. For any particular disorder or disability, you can find a run, walk, or other kind of race organized for fundraising. One I find particularly inspiring is Team in Training, from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. If you sign up for one of their races, you have access to a wonderful mentor program, with coaches, training regimens, workout partners, and other varied supports—but the organization requires you to raise several thousand dollars to participate. The investment of physical and mental time makes this endeavor all-consuming—and life-changing.
Or perhaps you like to take the occasional walk in the woods. How about trying a multiday backpacking trip? You could chart out a couple days on the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail and cover considerable ground using just your own two feet. Or gather a group of women to go to Machu Picchu and climb on the ruins. Anything that speaks to your soul and challenges your body is an appropriate task for motion work in the Radiate stage. The goal is to pick an activity that will help you do the following:
Work toward a physical goal:
Setting a physical target several months in advance will make it easier for you to stick with the Positive Feedback program. The longer you can maintain new habits, the more likely they are to stick.
Look forward to a future, extraordinary event:
Research has found that anticipation of a future fun event often brings us more happiness than the event itself!
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Transfer that accomplishment to other big goals:
Working toward something that’s just outside your comfort zone will help the Adaptive Response strengthen not just your body, but also your
will.
You’ll see that you’re capable of so much—you just need to believe in yourself.
Bring your mind into your body:
You gain a feeling of wholeness and integration when you’re working toward a goal you love with your heart and your head.
Whatever activity you choose, I hope that you experience an endorphin rush again, and fall in love with it. You knew that rush as a child, and you likely experienced it often as a young adult. You deserve to feel it again. That rush comes not only from pushing yourself physically, but also from achieving a goal that two weeks earlier might not have seemed possible.
Now, in the Radiate stage, is your time to shine. I’d love for you to make it a habit to radiate positive emotion and become an expressive outlet for your life story. What’s your passion? What’s your story? How will you tell it to everyone you meet?
One of the most vivid memories I have from childhood is seeing Mom in a yoga handstand for several minutes every day. I used to marvel at her strength and focus. When I was about six years old, my favorite game was to dress up (simultaneously) as a nurse and a flight attendant. I’d gather up my toy suitcase and one of my dolls and proclaim, “I’m a nurse today, and I’m traveling to America to heal this patient.” I love this memory because in many ways I’ve taken the best of both parents’ life work—Dad traveling, coaching people on how to use their bodies; Mom sharing all she knew about nutrition, meditation, and yoga—and I’ve combined those facets into a practice that allows me to help people all over the world.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve gravitated toward people who were equally passionate about their work. I love dropping my boys off at school so that I can get a chance to talk briefly with their teachers. Teachers are such inspiring people: Their main purpose, their whole job, is to employ different techniques to bring the best out of people. When teachers love what they do, it’s their passion, their gift—and that passion helps them do even better by their students.
The core of teaching is helping others, and I really believe that that’s the most radiant work we can do. When you love something as much as most helping professionals love their work, you don’t do it for the money. You want to share your positive intention and good energy with everybody around you. When you’re doing radiant work, you don’t wake up and go to work and say, “Oh God, I’ve got to teach these twenty-five kids today,
again.”
When you do radiant work, you do it with passion and love.
So the primary work of the emotion component of the Radiate stage is answering the question, “What is that thing bigger than yourself that you can (and want to) pour your heart and soul into?” Ultimately, I’d like you to be able to say this meditation to yourself:
I do wonderful work in a wonderful way for which I receive wonderful pay.
One of my patients, a thirty-five-year-old woman named Zoe, had gone down the negative path of not feeling appreciated by husband and kids. She was casting about for something to make her feel alive again—and that something looked very much like an affair.
She’d just had a baby within the past year, and somewhere, deep down, I believe she was afraid she was losing her beauty. She talked to me about a guy she knew from the neighborhood, about wanting to find a lover so that she could lose herself and feel sexy again. Zoe thought her husband didn’t want her anymore; he was content with her being the mother of his kids, nothing more.
Thankfully, we had this discussion before she acted on her thoughts and actually started an affair. As we talked, she thought about how an affair would devastate her family, and she realized that she herself would only get hurt and emotionally involved, which would lead to tears and pain. So she decided to go back to what
really
was missing in her life, which was her passion: being a buyer for a department store. She realized that her passion, her job, her office, her team were where she felt safe and grounded. She loved being a mom, but she also loved being an independent woman who had her own time to go to the gym, her own money, and no one to tell her what to do. Doing her Radiant Deep Dive, she realized that she’d fallen into the trap of being lonely at home. Made aware of her feelings through our discussions, she realized what had happened in time to channel this drive in a positive way, instead of in a way that might have destroyed her marriage.
To do your Deep Dive, take out your Time Audit—both your original and your revised versions. And then sit down, close your eyes, and think of the happiest day of your life
as a child.
Try to recreate it mentally in as much detail as possible to answer these questions:
- Where are you?
- Who is with you?
- What time of day is it? Time of year?
- What are you wearing?
- What are you doing?
- Are you excited because of what you’re doing, or who you’re with, or for some other reason?
- If you could do this activity right now, where would you be?
- Who would you be with?
- If money were no object, where would you be standing right now?
- What would you have done today if you didn’t have to conduct your ordinary routine?
- Where would you be going tomorrow?
Open your eyes and just sit for a moment; be still. Take a deep breath, all the way in and out. Now look at your revised Time Audit, the one you created with the activities in your ideal day. Do the activities on this sheet reflect the vision you just summoned in your head? How can you merge your childhood best day with your current best day? What would it take to get there?
I do this Deep Dive with my patients because even when people talk about how they’d like to spend their days as adults, they don’t tend to give credence to childhood dreams—when, in fact, that’s where our deepest passions lie waiting for us. Spend some time developing that Time Audit for your childhood best day, and you just may discover your true passion.
Sometimes when people get done with these exercises, they’re still not quite sure what should come next. Maybe you’ve completed the first two phases—reflected on your past and released your emotional pain—but you’re still asking yourself, What now? Where do I go from here?
These huge questions can take you a lifetime to answer, but there’s help: Researchers are looking into how we humans can create satisfying lives for ourselves. Dr. Martin Seligman, author of
Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness
, is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer in the field of positive psychology.
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Positive psychology encourages us to zero in on and expand the things that give us joy and contentment, rather than trying to eradicate the things that hurt us. In his work, he has identified three ways through which we can develop our path to happiness:
