sacred sleep therapy

My husband was quite unhappy with our daughter’s explanation that her teenage biorhythms prevented her from being able to sleep before midnight, resulting in about 6 hours of sleep on school nights.  I need my 8 hours of sleep, or something close to it.  I simply don’t function well with much less, while my husband does ok when he works late a few nights in a row.  

We all have different sleep needs and different biorhythms our culture suffers from sleep deprivation in general.  Due to cultural pressures and false role models we simply try to stuff too much into a 24 hour day, and our mental and physical wellbeing suffer.  Sleep is not a waste of time even though it consumes about a third of your life.  Sleep is actually productive even though passive. Sleep is therapy, physical and mental. Physically, it is during sleep that our cells heal and regenerate.  Mentally, we digest in our subconscious what we experienced during the day.  

Arianna Huffington, founder and editor of the Huffington Post, researched and wrote theThe Sleep Revolution “after collapsing from exhaustion” a few years ago. Huffington writes: “Sleep is a time of intense neurological activity—a rich time of renewal, memory consolidation, brain and neurochemical cleansing, and cognitive maintenance. Properly appraised, our sleeping time is as valuable a commodity as the time we are awake. In fact, getting the right amount of sleep enhances the quality of every minute we spend with our eyes open. Here are links to her sleep-quality questionnaire, and to her 12 tips for better sleep.  How do you fare?  

Sleep is restoration time, make it sacred.  Make your bedroom your sanctuary that feels peaceful and protected, quiet and calm.  No TVs and tablets, but rather tisane and fresh air, a good book, and a mechanical alarm clock so you can leave your phone outside.

how to bring awareness

Keeping a detailed written record for a few weeks is a great tool for gaining clarity in a particular area. 

One example of the usefulness of this method is in monitoring your spending - to understand how you spend your money, see your highest spending categories (you spend the most on what you value the most - see a previous post on voting with your $), or simply to budget better. I have kept detailed financial records for decades, now in Quickbooks, but in the beginning (and before there was Excel) in a handwritten spreadsheet. Checks and credit card expenses are easy to track, but to track those elusive cash expenses I keep small pieces of scrap paper in my car and note one for each cash expense until I log it.  At the end of the year my Quickbooks records are  also a terrific tax tool.  But that is not where I was going with this.  We think we know where and how we spend our money.  But do we really?  In our household we spend no money at all on sports events (no interest), and relatively little on clothing (a lot of 2nd hand shop shopping).  After the mortgage our highest spending categories are healthcare,  groceries, and for the time being college expenses (#1 just finished, #2 is starting). Hence, after a roof over my head my health and wellbeing come first, and next is our children’s education.

Many years ago, when I took a course in non-violent communication during my graduate studies, I kept a journal of undesirable dialogues, which I used for analyzing what went wrong and how I could have handled the conversation the non-violent way instead.

Another application of this method is keeping journal of what you eat and drink to understand better what you put into your body and recognize its effects – how you feel in your stomach, your mental clarity, your energy level, how your skin looks, or perhaps your weight.  After a while patterns come into awareness, such as feeling sleepy after certain foods, or feeling light in your stomach after others. For a while I drank a green smoothie every day and noticed how my skin noticeably cleared up after about a month.

Bringing awareness to something that we often do on auto-pilot, whether eating, spending money, talking, or something else (you could monitor how you spend your time to know how much goes into household chores, commuting, spending time with friends, what have you) opens the door to implement changes for the better.

my kind of healthy food

My kind of healthy food has to taste delicious not virtuous.  My kind of healthy food needs to feature interesting vegetable combinations instead of steamed vegetables.  My kind of healthy food includes meat, fish and dairy (in moderation) - the more variety the better - in combination with the entire spectrum of all that’s available.  My kind of healthy food incorporates tasty sauces, and copious amounts of clever spice and herb combinations.  My kind of healthy food features interesting textures - crispy, roasted, stringy, smooth, firm, chewy, and gooey.  My kind of healthy food is fresh and vibrant and beautifully colored, a feast for the eyes. My kind of healthy food is inspired by cooking styles from all over the world and is exciting.  

Comedian JP Sears, who makes good fun of those who preach an ultra-healthy and spiritual lifestyle, made a hilarious video on cucumber pizza - raw cucumber slices spread on a round pizza sheet, covered with raw cucumber sauce, and sprinkled with raw cucumber shreds.  Where did we pick up the belief that fried, carby and cheesy party foods are rewarding and fun and delicious because bad, while healthy food is boring, bland and virtuous?  Sounds religious.

No cucumber pizza for me!

own it!

Cooking can be fun, cooking can be meditative, cooking is empowering, cooking brings you in touch with your body, cooking connects you with your cultural heritage and to the Earth. What’s not to love about cooking your own food?

Your body exists in a very tight and intimate relationship with the quality and type of food you eat.   It may sound dramatic, but food can heal, and food can kill – literally.  When you cook your own food you take responsibility for your health and wellbeing because you pick the ingredients and put them lovingly and imaginatively together in a soul and body nourishing creation.  

 Own it!  Take charge! Cook!  Enjoy!

tending your inner life

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari mentions that we have lost our ability to dream, and with it the realization of how important dreaming is to the integration between inner and outer life. We forget to dream, literally and figuratively.  

Dreaming while asleep is the mind’s way of processing what hit your mind during the day and you haven’t had a chance to digest on a mental level yet.  Our fast paced life doesn’t encourage inner life self-care and training ourselves to remember our dreams and pondering their meaning. You might keep a dream journal by your bed and write down what dream shreds you remember as soon as you wake up in the morning – a lot of dreaming happens during the lighter morning hour sleep just before you wake up.  If you tend to wake up in the middle of the night you could keep a journal in the bathroom and write down your dream bits. Dream journaling sends a message to your subconscious to remember your dreams, and with time you’ll remember more and more so you can work with the messages.

Dreaming in the other sense is imagining what you might want - to do, to be, to have.  Wouldn’t it be nice if…...? Ohh, I’d love to do……………..It’s creative visualization, and that is a way to manifest what you want (as long as you actually know what you want – not what you don’t want).  This too often gets drummed out of us as a waste of time in this oh so material world that is often oh so rational. But if you can dream it you can manifest it.

Dreaming is good for you because it brings your internal dialogue into awareness.  

food as a portal

Food is an amazing portal in so many ways.   One of the games at our children’s birthday parties was to blindfold them and offer them small bites to taste.  Then they had to guess what they’d eaten.  This got them to shift from identifying the food by sight to concentrating on taste, texture, and smell.

 In the most basic way, food as the provider of energy, is an existential requirement.  But our relationship with food would be limited and limiting, and so much less meaningful, if we saw it as nothing but fuel.  Even our pets appreciate diversity in their diet, and no gorilla eats the same thing every day.

 From a basic biochemical aspect, mineral rich and nutritious food promotes cell growth and cell regeneration.  Watch a wound close much faster if you eat superior foods, or your skin clearing visibly when you drink a green smoothie every day.  It’s a direct relationship between inputs and outputs.    

 All food comes from the earth.  Food is thus our direct connection to nature.   When we have a sustainable relationship with the environment, it’s easy to grow beautiful, tasty and nutritious food without depleting the environment.  Healthy food is the basis for good energy, good digestion, good mental health and a vigorous body. When the soil your carrot, apple or grain comes from, is healthy and mineral rich, you in turn will be thriving.

Food contributes to celebration.  It connects us to our cultural heritage, something those who celebrate Passover or Easter surely appreciate this weekend.  Through the special holiday dishes from our traditions we celebrate and enact the culture and geography we come from.   The stories behind Harozet or Easter lamb are what fills the dishes with depth and meaning, not the ingredients themselves, and participating in such traditions ties us to the web of life.

Cooking together and sharing a meal is a great way to connect with friends and family.  Food simply tastes better when shared, and the experience surrounding a shared meal is wonderful.

Food can be indulgent and imparts a deeper connection to our senses.  You can derive so much pleasure from the different tastes, textures, colors, temperatures, sights (Instagram!) and smells of food.  

 Food in its many ways is a connection to and celebration of life!

be nice to yourself

How’s your relationship with yourself?  Do you take good care of yourself?  Do you love yourself?   Or perhaps you haven’t given it much thought.

Last night I watched this delightful episode of Queer Eye (love those guys) S03E01 in which they helped Jody to see her inner beauty by transforming her outer self.  They said something like, “When you recognize your inner beauty, it reflects on the outside.”  I just made that up but it’s the gist of what they said.  Jody truly shone and sparkled after they helped her to express her inner beauty without making her into someone she is not.  The transformation was so subtle yet so powerful.

Taking care of yourself means appreciating your inner beauty, your inner worth,  loving yourself, and expressing that love through the attention you pay yourself.  Selfcare can take many forms, or all of them:  

·     More sleep, because you know you can’t run on empty, and sleep heals mentally and physically.

·     Eating nutritious food, because you know that food can heal.

·     Wearing clothes that make you shine, because you feel good when they reflect your inner self. 

·     Moving your body, because you love your body and want to take good care of it so it looks and feels its best.

·     Maintaining a healthy weight, because the best weight for your body type is a good base for your health in general.

·     More me-time, for time to just do what you love to do.

·     More reflection time, because when your inner life remains uninspected and ignored a part of you remains unreconciled. 

Many women are selfless, taking good care of all others in their inner and outer circle, but forgetting themselves along the way.  Many guys were raised to ignore their inner life and to disregard their physical appearance beyond the exercise part.  Where on the spectrum do you fall? How nice are you to yourself?

reboot time

After a bit of soul searching (guilt?) I gave my daughter off from school yesterday.  She was dragging for various reasons, had a test ahead of her, and a big first event  at her accepted college coming up, and I just knew that she couldn’t give her best without some R&R.   That same morning I received my daily Note from the Universe, Mike Dooley’s awesome, witty, wise and humorous emails I find in my in-box (I always wonder how he has been able to come up with them for all these years…).  It read, “What if it was your downtime, your lounging-in-bed-too-long time, your walkabout time, and your blow-Friday-off time, that made possible your greatest achievements?  Would they still make you feel guilty?  Or would you allow yourself to enjoy them?”  It was a confirmation that I had made the right decision.   

 We need in between downtime, not the big vacation time, but instead boring time, nothing time, rest time, decompression time, staring-in-the-air time, sleep time, meditation time, a walk in the woods, a day off, or doing-something-creative time.  This time serves as a germination period, time to collect yourself, time to reboot. It settles down the mental dust, reshuffles our outlook on priorities, and gives us back our energy. 

 Nature has its wintertime to begin the growth cycle from scratch again each spring. We can’t wait that long, and we can’t take off that long (although it sure sounds enticing). And please enjoy that down time before you get worn down, that way you can truly savor it instead of nursing your cold in bed feeling lousy. Here an earlier post along those lines.

it made me smile

Usually I don't work with music.  However, due to various background noises the other day I switched my Pandora baroque music track on  - and had to smile spontaneously.  Not having listened to baroque music in in quite a while I had forgotten how healing those frequencies are.

 Brooke Nelson wrote in Reader's Digest that classical music lowers blood pressure, opens you up emotionally and fosters social relations, can help you fall asleep, decreases pain, boosts intelligence and improves memory, relieves anxiety, and increases productivity.  Wow! What's not to smile about with a long benefits list like that.

Brain World Magazine explains that baroque music's characteristic 60-beats-per-minute pattern is the magic ingredients because it activates both sides of the brain equally. No wonder they play this soothing music in the Port Authority bus terminal in NYC. It calms you instantly.

on spiritual healing

Mainstream healing means going to your doc, telling her what's ailing you, and getting meds, tests, or procedures - all invasive, physically, biochemically and emotionally.  

At present, our understanding of the healing process is shifting because our grasp of consciousness is deepening.  So many people already resort to alternative therapies, either to compliment conventional treatment, because they are at the end of the rope and conventional treatment hasn't helped, or even exclusively because it's gentle, without side effects, non-invasive, and relatively inexpensive.

If spiritual is simply defined as nonphysical or of the mind, then spiritual healing is healing without physical implements or methods, only  using the mind or consciousness.  Hence acupuncture, homeopathy or healing with essential oils, while acting on the body's energetic system, would not be considered spiritual healing, while prayer or healing through intention would be.  Here is a website with a very helpful attempt at sorting out the different energy healing modalities.

 Last fall I had the opportunity to do some writing and coordination work for Dena Barnett for her upcoming documentary Spiritual Healing: A New Frontier, a film that explores this vast field, which is still as yet little understood scientifically within our contemporary context, although it is the oldest healing modality.  Spiritual healing, just like all the other energy healing modalities, can potentiate the healing process initiated by conventional medicine, it can also stand on its own as a treatment method. And sometimes it is more effective than conventional medicine in the many instances when Western medicine is unable to help.    The UK is on the forefront of accepting spiritual healing as a proper therapy, and it is available upon request and covered through their national healthcare system. Exciting times ahead!