For An Appointment With Kitty:
(206) 842-6936
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
The Tao of Health
Conscious Connections
Summer Health Tips
Seasonal health tips for Summer - the 'Fire' season.
The Simple Joy of Creativity
“Those who flow as life flows ... know they need no other force.”
— Lao Tzu
In this current climate of economic and financial turbulence, where people are losing money and their sense of security, this is a good time to examine how to be creative so new things can grow where others have diminished.
Consider your body and mind as the field from which creativity emerges: when well tended and cared for, a satisfying yield is likely. And like balanced soil is necessary to create a crop, a balanced body and mind is the ground from which creativity flows.
Creativity flows along a broad spectrum: from focusing your intention—to allowing unintended insights to bubble-up intuitively—to perhaps a serendipitous set of events which presents an unexpected opportunity.
Being Alive is Creative
Each of us is the em-body-ment of creativity because that’s what being alive is: new cells are constantly being created; new breaths always coming; new thoughts constantly popping into awareness.
So regardless of what you do, or don’t do, you’re always in a creative moment.
Your personal creativity shapes the creative flow to suit your desires when you focus your attention and intention on what you want to emerge in your life.
This personal effort, mixed with a touch of serendipity, enables new and interesting things to emerge that weren’t there before. The result: a feeling of satisfaction and inspiration.
When we’re being and feeling creative, even if the tenor of the times is discouraging or challenging, we can still feel joy and sense purpose in our life.
Easy Ways to Feel Creativity
It’s important to experience creativity.
By becoming more familiar with it, and encouraging and nurturing it, you can have more of it in your life. And you don’t have to travel far to find it: It’s in your neighborhood; right under your nose.
Nature is a wonderful place to observe creativity-in-progress:
1. Watch a seed opening and sprouting over several days.
2. Watch clouds form and glide across the sky.
3. Watch leaves sail down from tree boughs.
Look around … when you’re open to creativity … you’ll encounter it in the most common places … because Life is creativity.
Be Creative
We’re alive … so we’re creative. We create sound when we speak or sing. We create air flow changes as we move through space, especially if we are running or riding a bicycle. We create lots of things just by our mere existence.
Then there are all the activities which we consider creative: painting, playing music, sculpting—all the arts are in this category.
Once you become aware of the creativity all around and in you, then you can choose how you want to engage with it. Explore it, expound upon it—allow your personal creativity to shine throughout your life. It’s meant to be that way.
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)—(206)-842-6936—to learn more about creating the life you want to live.
Kitty offers consultations—in-person, online, and via telephone—for you to better understand the process for creating and maintaining a feeling of health and well-being.
Five Steps To Creating The Life You Want To Live
1. Recognize what’s important. So many of the strains and stresses we struggle to cope with come from overspending our limited physical, mental and financial resources. Ask yourself: If buying all of the things we buy is so satisfying, then why are there so many garage and yard sales going on?
2. Breathe Deeply. Slow, deep breathing calms the mind and enables your personal creativity to flow into awareness where it can become what you want in your life.
3. Simplify how you go about things. Once you know how to create calmness in your life, reassess what you need and want. Make “satisfying your needs” your top priority; then decide how much of your energy you want to spend on those things you want. It’s important to distinguish clearly between needs and wants.
4. Clarify the direction you want to go in. After recognizing what’s most important to you, use the simple power of conscious breathing to create the clarity that enables you to …
5. Begin creating the rest of your life …
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)—(206)-842-6936—to learn more about creating the life you want to live.
Kitty offers consultations—in-person, online, and via telephone—for you to better understand the process for creating and maintaining a feeling of health and well-being.
Summer Solstice: Being in Rhythm With the Season
Summer Solstice marks the time of year when the sun is closest to the earth, when days are long and temperatures rising.
From our Western, astronomical point-of-view, June 21st marks the first day of Summer. And since we’re cultivating an understanding of ‘seasonal energy’ or ‘Chi,’ now is a good time to point out that ‘energetically’ — as Eastern thinking goes — the Summer Solstice marks the mid-point of Summer rather than its beginning.
Whether or not this idea seems a bit unusual, just for the sake of exploration let’s consider what it might mean if Summer Solstice does mark the midpoint of Summer rather than its beginning.
What difference would it make in your life: besides being just a day on the calendar reminding us to wash the deck furniture and get ready for vacation?
Seasons Affect Your Organ-ization
We all know that each season of the year has its own unique characteristics and requirements.
In our minds, we know we need to change our wardrobes; that different kinds of events find their way onto our schedules; and (to some extent) we change our diet and the food we eat. At the same time, your body is making its own adjustments.
According to the 5 Element Theory used in Oriental Medicine, the major organ systems in your body also change with the seasons. Each season a specific organ system goes into ‘energetic overdrive”: Heart in Summer; Spleen/Pancreas in late-Summer; Lungs in Autumn; Kidneys in Winter; and Liver in Spring.
Getting Organ-ized
If you’re trying to manage your health in accordance with these natural rhythms, then finding out that Summer Solstice marks the midpoint of Summer, rather than its beginning, could be a problem.
It means that right now we’re way further into the ‘Fire’ energy of Summer then you thought, and you probably have not been making the necessary ‘lifestyle’ adjustments your body needs to stay ‘balanced in Summer. These adjustments are needed to offset the stresses Summer places on the Heart, and by association, the Kidneys.
And when we add another consideration to the equation — the unfolding effects of climate change and how that seems to be associated with the seasonal energy changing even earlier than in previous years — this information takes on a ‘Darwinian’ dimension. It shows you how you can ‘adapt’ to global changes in a healthy way.
Knowing Is Technology
Did the ancient Chinese think and act ‘seasonally’? Of course they did; they had to. They didn’t have any choice. They had no on-demand electrical lighting, no refrigeration for their food, or air-conditioning to keep cool in Summer. When it was dark, it was dark; when it was cold, it was cold. Knowing how to be in synch with the energetics of the season was their technology.
In the 21st century we have astounding technologies which enable us to disregard natural cycles and their rhythms. And to the extent we’ve lost that rhythm, to that extent we’re out of balance. And when you’re out of balance you stumble, and too much stumbling leads to falling down.
Increasingly that’s what’s happening to the general level of health these days; it’s falling down.
Uplifting Health
The message I want to end on is an uplifting one. Today we can enjoy the benefits of both Western and Eastern technology: the technical accomplishments of Western science and the intuitive ‘knowing’ of Oriental Medicine.
As we see it at BIOM, the goal of healthy living is reached when we balance both approaches and thereby live a balanced life.
Happy Summer.