If you consider your body as a bank account, that when you are born is in surplus, and the currency is Energy. This bank account has a cap on the maximum amount of energy over the course of your lifetime but the withdrawals that you make have a significant impact on quality of life, and these withdrawals can be counteracted by investments back into the body bank account.
The body is the physical machine that carries you around all day long every day. When this machine is plugged in all day, resources are constantly being downloaded and so energy is being used up.
Withdrawals of energy from your physical bank account include those natural functions like urinating, defecating, for women – giving birth/menstruating, and then the less automatic functions that withdraw energy from the physical body are sex (particularly the ejaculation/orgasm), most physical exercise that leaves you red faced, over-eating (especially meat that requires an immense amount of energy to digest), over-sleeping, holding your breath.
The mental faculties that withdraw energy are thinking which include planning, reasoning, worrying, hoping, general mental busy-ness and emotional ups and downs, over-exerting, investing in outcomes that impose time lined pressures.
All these activities reduce the amount of energy in our bodies which becomes a fertile ground for disease as the worst case scenario, milder symptoms that are the warning against disease, and as generally not feeling inspired, energised or vital as the basic day to day symptoms.
These activities might appease the mind, because it is a function of what you are doing, and what you want to be doing, what you are used to doing your whole adult life, and so feel comfortable, familiar and therefore are unquestioned…they give a certain amount of energy back to the bodybank account because what is wanted has been received, but for the most part the result is still a deficit.
If the return you are getting on your investment is headaches, constipation (not defecating atleast once a day is medically constipated), tired, heavy, lethargic, aches and pains, depression, anxiety and worry, generally ill at ease, then your investment is not working for you. If you are managing your investment with pills, drugs, or recreational avoidance techniques, then your investment is not working for you.
Most of us are managing our symptoms rather than changing our habits to get rid of the symptoms entirely.
What investment can you make into your health and vitality?
What to change for your health: what you eat, how you eat, and how much, how you breathe, how you exercise, what exercise is giving/taking away from you, what you think and how you think, when you relax and how you relax.
Physical choices for health and wellbeing: eat lightly. A vast subject but as a first point of changing some habits, start to eat less meat a week, practice eating for your physical hunger rather than delicious taste sensation, eat a smaller meal at night and earlier in the evening, avoid stimulating ingredients at night like garlic, chilli, tomatoes, fried foods, so that sleep is enhanced. Get to bed and asleep before the second wind hits, learn to relax both body and mind properly, learn to rejuvenate your body by breathing properly.
Exercising properly is about rejuvenating and repairing your body with exercise. Exercise that leaves you red faced and gasping for air is not healthy and is not serving you. Moderate your exercise to a pace and challenge that will increase your energy levels rather than deplete you further. Because most of us are living on adrenalin highs, our exercise choice becomes a factor of that adrenalin high and so it has to be harder or faster to keep the body operating at the levels you are living at.
Stop wasting energy on mindless running around, practice the art of doing nothing, stop thinking, stop worrying, stop your mind when you need to allow it to rest and repair, make choices that allow your body to operate like a well oiled top quality machine. Learning to relax properly, where body and mind shut down entirely is a great rejuvenator to body, mind, emotions and Spirit.
Everything you choose has to be in balance with your other choices. If you choose a hard and fast lifestyle then your exercise choice needs to be slower, more replenishing. Often what creates the balance is the choice that feels counterintuitive.
“When you feel skew, mostly, that is when you are straight” This is a mantra for a yoga teacher observing students in class…we have become so out of alignment with ourselves that we have lost touch of what being in balance is, normal and comfortable for us are just a sign of adjusting well to be out of synch. Often to get back to balance we have to go through a process of unlearning what we think we know, take the crooked uncomfortable path, to find the straight and narrow…the path that keeps us hooked into the magic of the Universe, plugged into the flow of life. That is balance, that is aligning with the nature of things.
Kerry and the Haum of Yoga team
www.haumofyoga.co.za
084 800 4444
