Category: Balance

Heart Health Awareness

2/12/2024

February 2024
By Lorraine Alexander

NONDIRECTIVE MEDITATION IMPROVES HEART HEALTH ❤️

Here's a great point of interest for this month's topic. Did you know that nondirective meditation benefits heart health in multiple ways? We share five fascinating medical studies that you won't want to miss!

Improve heart rate variability (HRV). Medical studies show nondirective meditation improves vagal nerve activity with increased Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Good HRV means a longer span between steady heartbeats and recovery with greater ease.

Improve vagal tone. The vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve, the longest nerve of the human body. It is responsible for our heart, lungs, and digestion. This system has two branches: the sympathetic response responsible for "fight or flight," and the parasympathetic response responsible for "rest and digestion." Nondirective meditation engages the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic relaxation response, at the same time, the sympathetic stress response lessens.

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Recalibrate Your Stress Response: Bounce Back with Ease

1/9/2024

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January 2024
By Lorraine Alexander

A few months ago, I happened on the book The Stress Prescription by Elissa Epel, PhD, the co-author of The Telomere Effect, a New York Times best-seller that discovers how stress influences our clock-on-aging. With a generous 4.7 Amazon review, I found The Stress Prescription to be a worthwhile read.

Here's a brief overview:
The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease, by Elissa Epel, PhD
Professor, Psychiatry, UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, School of Medicine
Reading this book, I found it remarkably user-friendly, and learned new insights on stress. Open the book to almost any page and indulge in bits of wisdom. The point made most helpful, was learning that traumatic life experiences create a new stress threshold or baseline; this threshold dictates how well or how poorly we cope with stress.

Epel explains thoroughly how stress uniquely affects each of us. The goal is to work toward lowering our baseline to a healthy standard of relaxation. We facilitate this process through daily self-care and mind-body wellness.

Additionally, she suggests that we retrain our brains to think differently about potentially stressful situations and outcomes by using acceptance and mindful techniques. Otherwise, our thoughts can turn to negative rumination.

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Life is a Balancing Act

11/1/2022

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By Lorraine Alexander

At a very young age, I learned one of life’s toughest lessons: No matter how well life seems to be going, you can count on a few curveballs coming just around the corner.

Most often we are not prepared for life's surprises, then suddenly, we find ourselves knocked off balance. Regaining balance can take more effort than one might expect—and that’s where resilience comes in. I learned one difficult lesson extraordinarily well, the more I focused on self-care the easier it was to regain my balance.

Think of life from an athlete’s perspective. The more consistent the training, the easier the recovery. The primary difference is that you are training for resilience.

Developing resilience naturally.
Balance isn’t something we learn from a best-selling book; it’s cultivated through daily practice. The formula is simple. Take care of the body, mind, and spirit, and you’ll feel balanced and become resilient in the process. Know that cultivating 'self-awareness' is the key ingredient. Awareness allows us to read subtle cues.

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Chasing Harmony: Raising the Human Spirit through Meditation

7/20/2016

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Image: Chasing Harmony: Raising the Human Spirit Through Mediation

"Nature will not let us stay in any one place for too long. She will let us stay just long enough to gather the experience necessary to the unfolding and advancement of the soul. This is a wise provision, for should we stay there too long, we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible. Nature demands change in order that we may advance.” – Ernest Holmes

After the hustle bustle of three connecting flights and two hours in traffic, I finally arrived home. It felt like someone poured a bucket of stress over me.

Hazmat protocol 101: stress cleanup

I’ll admit the hectic pace of travel, coupled with a three-day intensive training was rigorous, even for me. It took me awhile to shake it off, but finally, I regained my balance, my harmony, my groove. On occasion, life just seems to have it’s own way of challenging us to the extreme.

As a long-time meditator, I was reminded of how well meditation combats fatigue, stress, and feelings of being challenged. During my trip, my meditations were surface - not nearly as deep as usual, which was an indication that I was out of sorts and under stress. But once I returned home, and had time to get back into my routine, I returned to those deep meditations quickly. And with those deeper, more profound meditations, I found my peaceful, happy, content feelings returned. The stress had finally melted away.

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Heart Health Awareness

NONDIRECTIVE MEDITATION IMPROVES HEART HEALTH ❤️

Recalibrate Your Stress Response: Bounce Back with Ease

Life is a Balancing Act

Chasing Harmony: Raising the Human Spirit through Meditation

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