The hectic urban scape of tri-state living, from its environmental, spiritual, and financial toxicity plays a significant role in determining our picture of wellness. These components are especially relevant in inhibiting us from utilizing the first and fundamental component towards optimal health—listening.
Some modalities, or ways of practicing health and wellness, refer to what I call, “listening", as consciousness, or mindfulness. Whatever phrase is most appropriately indicative of pointing you towards the path of complete attention, use it. Listening is not a luxury afforded to an elite few. Although our culture perpetuates an unhealthy “push propaganda,” we all have the option and opportunity to practice this life saving and life giving tactic, and are equally important enough to be heard. You matter. Listening is a building block towards complete empowerment, soul connection, and wholistic health; yet how many of us actually do it?
Our bodies and spirits are directly connected and perpetually sends us messages through distress [disease] and discomfort as a result of imbalances. Often these transient or chronic signals we experience are a result of negative exposure, over stimulation, under nourishment, and other factors which are preventable. Far too often, our focus--what we consciously choose to “listen to” or observe, is the central trigger. What we feed our mind can be public enemy #1. How do we begin to reverse these trends? Easy! First, simply stop.
Stop for a moment. We can all afford a moment, even some of us believe that the creator of the universe took a day trip after working all week. Ask yourself the following four questions over a series of days at the same time daily:
1. How am I really feeling? List aches, pains, energy levels. Be sure to write if you are experiencing hunger, irritability, etc.
2. How am I breathing? Is your breathing easy? Shallow? Labored? Do you tend to hold your breath unconsciously for long periods of time, especially when working?
3. What do I spend most of my day, [consciously] thinking about? Are this things, good, healthy, or even helpful? Why or why not?
4. What have I been eating? Are these things that I actually crave? Why or why not?
Give yourself ample opportunity to answer each question thougtfully. Be patient and honest with yourself. If you don’t know, simply write, “I don’t know.” IT IS OK NOT TO KNOW. Take this time to identify your “normal,” or normative state. It is different for each of us, but very important for realizing when we are in a state of distress or to identify if we are experiencing signals of imbalance. It may seem odd at first, but these practices, which can soon come naturally, can make a difference. Try it out, and let’s continue our conversation next week. Until then, Be Well.
Love & Light,
Sheika
Monday, May 18, 2015
Love & Light - Introductions
Personal experience and academic work in health and healing has offered me the opportunity to learn and experience varied modalities and perspectives on the body. There is a fantastic advantage we share in living in global digital age, within a society which can often teeter the delicate balance of creating hysteria, hypochondria and massive, instantaneous miseducation, and empowering individuality to create their own health and beauty schematic. Our regiment for optimal health is as unique as our fingerprints, and deserves balanced consideration. I invite each of you to begin, or for some of you, enhance a self-engagement in collaboratively creating and pedagogy of care tailor-made to create your best self.
In America where intiatives are created as bridges, to gap issues of care access for evidenced health inequalities, these efforts often fall short in a failure to perform triage care to systems within our healthcare system, which will forever perpetuate fallacy unless the culture of “segmented selves” or disease and disability is challenged. The allopathic, American health system, although technologically sophisticated will be forever suspended in a state of sophomoric experimentalism, and poor outcomes of morbidity and practical efficacy. It is both promising and sad that in nearly five-hundred years of existence we are just recently at a stage in medical training that our future doctors are taught how to engage patients effectively and efficiently in a land that had the opportunity to divine from Native American and African practices, beginning to shed its arrogance and become inclusive of popular complementary practice. Allopathic medicine’s traditional counterparts, however, each share a similarity of viewing that body and its psycho-spiritual animations as a whole. Much like fashion, music, and even food; medicine, health, healing, and wellness is a culture. We have self, and community responsibility to begin to assist in altering its landscape to help reverse the systemic disparities which affect us all.
In many ways, our “whole selves” is a product of genetic, environmental, socio-economic, and cultural factors which determine our current state of being, whether “normative,” or imbalanced [i.e. “disease”.] Yet regardless of our place on this spectrum we are equally empowered to initiate and retain a personal pedagogy of care to outwit these odds. You are invited on a weekly journey of multi-cultural wholisitic self-improvement and awareness through thought and physical exercises, food and cooking demonstrations, complimentary medical practices in a friendly, conversational. Judgement free space. We will work cooperatively to create your individualized regiments. Please. share your thoughts, questions, testimonies, and even recipes, and I will share the expert advice of cohorts, practitioners, and friends, as we explore, learn, and heal together and have a great time in the process. I am looking forward to reading and seeing your responses. In the meantime, Be Well.
Love & Light,
Sheika
In America where intiatives are created as bridges, to gap issues of care access for evidenced health inequalities, these efforts often fall short in a failure to perform triage care to systems within our healthcare system, which will forever perpetuate fallacy unless the culture of “segmented selves” or disease and disability is challenged. The allopathic, American health system, although technologically sophisticated will be forever suspended in a state of sophomoric experimentalism, and poor outcomes of morbidity and practical efficacy. It is both promising and sad that in nearly five-hundred years of existence we are just recently at a stage in medical training that our future doctors are taught how to engage patients effectively and efficiently in a land that had the opportunity to divine from Native American and African practices, beginning to shed its arrogance and become inclusive of popular complementary practice. Allopathic medicine’s traditional counterparts, however, each share a similarity of viewing that body and its psycho-spiritual animations as a whole. Much like fashion, music, and even food; medicine, health, healing, and wellness is a culture. We have self, and community responsibility to begin to assist in altering its landscape to help reverse the systemic disparities which affect us all.
In many ways, our “whole selves” is a product of genetic, environmental, socio-economic, and cultural factors which determine our current state of being, whether “normative,” or imbalanced [i.e. “disease”.] Yet regardless of our place on this spectrum we are equally empowered to initiate and retain a personal pedagogy of care to outwit these odds. You are invited on a weekly journey of multi-cultural wholisitic self-improvement and awareness through thought and physical exercises, food and cooking demonstrations, complimentary medical practices in a friendly, conversational. Judgement free space. We will work cooperatively to create your individualized regiments. Please. share your thoughts, questions, testimonies, and even recipes, and I will share the expert advice of cohorts, practitioners, and friends, as we explore, learn, and heal together and have a great time in the process. I am looking forward to reading and seeing your responses. In the meantime, Be Well.
Love & Light,
Sheika
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