New Season, True You

Autumn Rituals to Help You Feel Your Best

This season, instead of adding more to your to-do list, what if you focused on a few simple rituals that help you feel more grounded, energized, and resilient?

How was your summer? What changes and growth did you experience in the last few months? Can you drop into that settled and grounded feeling that Autumn offers us?

One of the things that I have learned is that my body is my resiliency. When I am feeling strong and healthy in my body, my emotional capacity to meet my daily and deeper challenges expands exponentially.

Here are some fall rituals that I share with you in hopes to help your own health and resiliency.

• Eat well

  Set aside some extra time this month to make at least one nourishing meal for yourself everyday. Learn how to make at least one new dish or learn a new cooking technique each week.

If you’ve been finding yourself too busy to cook at home and you’ve been going out to eat a lot, a great way to transition back into healthier eating is to make a healthy homemade dish for one of your three meals a day at home the first week. The second week you can make two healthy dishes at home and the third week you can make three dishes at home per day, giving yourself the opportunity to grab something quick a couple of times a week. The fourth week, you can learn how to eat healthier when you do eat out.

A nice thing to focus on is to find ways to make an old favorite or prepackaged meal healthier. You can look at what ingredients are in something you purchase prepackaged and learn how to make a similar dish. You can take an old favorite and make it healthier. If you want help or guidance on how to do these things, please reach out to me. Menu hacking and planning are some of my favorite services that I offer.

A great trick for us busy people is to make a larger quantity of food than what you will eat in one meal and then saving the rest for later meals. I like to make a soup and put very little seasoning in it so I can season it differently and have a different soup each time. Similar for vegetables and proteins that I cook I’ll make a meal out of them and then save the components of the meal to be put together with other things added to make it creative and new without having to make the entire meal each time.

I also like to dedicate one or two hours a week to prep time. You can chop and grate A variety of vegetables and keep them in your fridge for your own salad, omelette and stirfry bar. They usually last throughout the week. I make a big batch of soup with anything left over in my fridge at the end of the week. Sunday is my self-care day so I usually do that on Sunday. Whatever is your easiest day is a good soup and salad prep day. 

Don’t be afraid to use your freezer. It’s a great way to recycle ingredients or meals for a later date. For something quick to heat up, that is still nutritious and delicious.

• Sleep well 

  Fall is a great time to work on improving the quality of your sleep. It is a time that the shortening days naturally foster the ability to get more hours of quality shuteye

Keep it consistent. Choose a realistic time for you to wake up every morning. Go to bed at the same time every night. If you are struggling with consistency, choose to focus on one or the other to start. I find that some days I need more sleep than others. So I always make sure to wake up at the same time. Sometimes I go to bed a little earlier, but I try to keep my latest bedtime consistent so that I’m not risking a huge sleep deficiency by the time I get up on my regular schedule.

Get checked for sleep apnea and other sleep disorders if you are regularly finding yourself exhausted or feeling significantly deficient in sleep. I had undiagnosed sleep apnea for many years and wish I had known to check it earlier. Proper diagnosis and treatment can make a fabulous difference and the quality of sleep.

Keeping a journal to process your day can help you sleep better. This is a good activity for unwinding at the end of the day. For some of us, journaling about when and how we slept can help us see patterns and feel motivated to keep improving our sleep hygiene. If this adds anxiety or shame about your sleep schedule, skip it.

Be kind to yourself. Feelings of guilt and shame around sleep are counterproductive. For many years, those around me were unhappy with my sleep patterns - their reactions added to feelings of guilt around my sleep. As I learned to let go of these feelings and listen to my body, the quality of my sleep improved.

Sleep in quiet darkness and wake to light. This can be tricky for those of us living in an urban environment. A good hack I found was having blackout curtains with sheers in between them. I found that the bunched shears between the blackout curtains when they were extended over the windows gave me enough darkness to keep the street lamps from disturbing my sleep. In the morning, the sunlight coming in through the sheers was enough to wake me up. Once I awoke, I would open the blackout curtains wide and let all the sunlight in. 

Give yourself enough time to wake up gently. Gentle stretches, movement and breathing exercises can help you transition more gracefully into your day. In our Sleep Well class, I teach specific exercises for before and after to sleep as well as healthy sleep positions to improve sleep. 

Here are some other things to think about and work on incorporating into your Autumn routine.

• Move well

• Learn something new

• Share your stories

• Allow for quiet time

Feeling Whole

Being kind, listening and welcoming your body parts home

In A world of AI, it’s when we listen to our Body Intelligence that we can find a sense of wholeness and ease again

I often have students come into class or a private session saying

• I’ve got a bad knee

• I have a bad hip

• My shoulders have been really bugging me lately

I too have used this type of language towards my body parts as if they were somehow being unkind to me. Separate from myself. Then I remember that all of my body parts are all part of me. I am one being and my knee or hip or shoulder is not something other.

When there is pain, it means that something is out of sorts. It’s a way of our body talking to us and telling us something needs to change. Something needs attention. Working through many years of severe pain, I learned how to Listen and respond in a way that can help bring about healing and reduce my suffering. When I have days that I feel some pain, I can definitely slip into the fear that it will return to some place that I have already journeyed from.

Thankfully, my body is generally now free of any pain other than a small messages in my left hamstring insertion that I have from an injury I’m still working through. It talks to me when I lift too heavy at the gym. I listen. As I’m trying to continue to heal, sometimes I overdo it.

How did I work through this pain? I studied a LOT of various techniques. I reach into that bag of goodies when helping my students. The basic tenet for all my work is the same… Release areas of tension, strengthen areas not engaging, create safety, listen, breathe and acknowledge that when there is a physical reaction, there is an emotional response and when there is an emotional reaction, there is a physical response. They are two sides of the same coin.

Our emotional responses can create physical tension patterns that affect or ability to move freely and can put us into misalignments that are counterproductive to our happiness and throw our nervous system out of whack. When there is excessive tension in muscles, it often puts pressure on nerves, making us feel unsettled, anxious, irritable or in actual pain. It also reduces blood flow and thereby nutrient delivery as well as toxin clearance through the lymphatics.

In this way, these areas become cut off from the rest of us in a way. When we restore the balance in the muscles and surrounding tissues, these body parts can become reintegrated into our whole. When we experience this, it is often the feeling of not having a body. By this I mean all is quiet and the nervous system is calm. Everything is working together with ease and as such there is very little making us notice our body parts. We get to move in the world whole - without feeling all our separate parts. Have you had this feeling? It is a joyful thing. To be whole, to be silent, to be one, to be very alive and very relaxed at the same time. How would you describe the feeling?