Pranayama: Breathing to Calm your Mind and Heal Your Body

Photo by jhoc

Ayurveda and Yoga both recommend that we spend time each day practicing some simple breathing exercises (pranayama) for peace of mind and increased immunity.

One of the most popular and effective exercises is something called Nadi Shodhana, or alternate nostril breathing, a simple technique that controls the flow of vital energy (prana) to the brain and has a very calming and balancing effect.

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Simple Acts of Calm: Softening the Senses

Our senses are for acquiring knowledge from the outside world. That knowledge is then filtered by the discriminative powers of our  intelligence. But when our senses are constantly receiving incoming information without a break we get mental indigestion due to the mind being too full to digest and process information healthily. 

 

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5 Ways to Make Your Day More Peaceful

Photo by DillonH

We’re all too busy to fit everything we want to into our day. Over-committed and over-stressed, we rush from one task to the next with little thought for our own well being. And yet, we all want to be calm, peaceful and happy. Here are five ways to show yourself a little love and squeeze some peace into your busy day. 

 

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Are Breathing Exercises for Anxiety a Waste of Time?

Photo by Xanetia

Anyone who’s suffered from anxiety knows that it’s an all encompassing feeling that makes you want to run if you're out, or stay in if you're not. Then in addition to what it does to your mind, there are the very real physical symptoms of a pounding heart, gasping for air, sweating, shaking, and even feeling like you might pass out.

When you experience the full force of a panic attack and you are looking for help, you want something that feels like it respects and matches the scale of your anxiety. Anxiety is a big issue, so you want a big solution. Something that sounds like it can match that force, that life altering awful experience. Something that isn't new age, or old hat.

And that's way many anxiety sufferers don't want to try breathing exercises for anxiety relief. It sounds too simple and too small for such a big problem. I know, I've been there...

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Five Ways to Reduce Stress and Feel More Relaxed

Photo by PDXdj

Have you ever said that you've had enough of stress, that you will react differently next time, that you hate it when you lose it? We've probably all felt that we've handled stress badly at one time or another. We hate the feeling of snapping at loved ones, being impatient with other drivers, or just plain over reacting and feeling embarrassed afterwards.

So how can you help yourself make a genuine and lasting change with how you deal with stress? These five quick tips might help... 

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21 Reasons to Practice Regular Meditation

 

Beneath the buzz and hum of a busy mind lies a place of calm, creative intelligence, a place you can tap into any time you choose if you are willing to sit still and close your eyes for just 10 minutes a day.

More than 600 research studies have now been conducted into meditation, here's a list of 21 benefits they have found :

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How Understanding Anxiety Can Help You Find Relief

Everyone suffers from anxiety occasionally, but when anxiety takes over your life it’s a very different experience to a spell of short-term anxiety that’s related to a specific event. Ayurveda offers some useful insights into how anxiety manifests and what you can do to help yourself control it.


According to Ayurveda, anxiety comes from aggravation of vata dosha. One of the key attributes of vata is movement, vata is always moving and its movement is by nature erratic rather than flowing, you can see this in a vata type person, they have a restlessness about their head and eyes.

Ayurveda teaches that like increases like, when you move around a lot you aggravate vata by increasing it's own movement, that aggravation in turn affects your nervous system and your mind.… Continue

Lessons from Harry Potter on EFT & Facing Your Fears

 

When your brain becomes overwhelmed by anxious thoughts, your ability to reason and use your creative intelligence shuts down. Fear is like a cold fog that spreads throughout your entire thinking, taking away your light and resources as it goes.

Thinking of fear in this way reminds me of the dementors in the Harry Potter stories. Harry had to learn to deal with them by strongly nurturing a positive thought that could then turn into the charm that repels them. He couldn’t ignore them or busy himself with other things - he had to face up and fight back in a very specific and focused way.

I think we can learn a great deal from this. Facing our fears requires courage and it requires specific action if we are to regain control of our mind and begin to feel calm and useful again.

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No News is Good News

When I first started learning about computers in 6th form it was all about flow charts and binary (yes I'm that old) our teacher was about half a step ahead of us and was fond of using wise sayings to help us learn how to get a simple line of code to run. Her favourite was "garbage in, garbage out", she didn't teach me much about computers but her pet saying stayed with me and these days I like to use it when helping people work with stress.

Stress in - stress out. This quick post looks at one of the main ways we take stress in: the media and how to replace negative stressful input with inspiration and motivation so that we can output positivity instead of garbage. Thanks Mrs Patello.

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Are You Caught up in the Addiction Epidemic?

Some thought provoking reading landed in my inbox this week about issues with addiction and pain relief medication.

First, I received news about Demerol due to Michael Jackson's use of the drug. I read how a Long Island anaesthesiologist and pain management specialist told Fox News that "Demerol has a tremendous amount of side effects" and "provides euphoria [which] basically makes the patient not care about their pain anymore."

The report went on to state that: Demerol acts on the central nervous system, tricking the brain by replacing the feeling of pain with a “high.” People who take Demerol for chronic pain often become addicted to the drug and require more and more of it to get the same effect. [emphasis mine]

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