Giving the Gift of Wellness

During this hectic holiday season, wouldn’t it be amazing to have time to take baths, spend time in nature, get regular massages and cook delicious, nourishing meals that take half a day to prepare? But who has the time for that!?! Enter wellness gift ideas that encourage others to take time to care for themselves in order to be well, live well and feel well. Here are some ideas that inspire movement and progress for others along their own personal wellness journey.

Gift giving feels good. When you create a moment of joy for another person it doubles the warm and fuzzy feelings for you both. Now, if it is not financially feasible to give gifts that cost money, there are many gifts that you can create on your own or time you can spend that doesn’t cost a thing! If you feel like you have the means and the desire to give others the gift of improving their health, wellness and overall quality of life, here is list of some ideas to offer the gift of health and wellness this holiday season.

When you think of wellness, think of all the elements that make up a balanced, healthy, content life. Wellness comprises of relaxation, healthy movement and exercise, healthy eating, sufficient sleep, personal fulfillment and connecting with nature. Each area contains potential practices that encourage overall good health in mind and body. The following is a short list of ideas within each wellness area to spark your creative giving spirit!

1.    Gifts for relaxation.

Giving a gift certificate for massage, infrared saunas or other healthy body work offers an amazing gift of cleansing, detoxing, relaxation and greater health and wellness. Candles, bath salts and essential oil diffusers with pure essential oils are also wonderful gifts that encourage inner peace, calm and relaxation. Just be sure to read ingredients and look for pure essential oils in both the candles and bath salts so as to not give out toxic chemicals!

2.    Gifts for healthy movement.

Giving a gift of a yoga class series, dance classes, barre classes or a health club membership encourages healthy movement. If there is another activity that you know the person either already does and enjoys or has expressed interest in doing, this is a wonderful way to give the gift of health and wellness. Fitness trackers and personal training sessions also encourage healthy movement to feel well in body and mind. Health and fitness gear such as a yoga mat, new shoes or clothing are also great gifts.

3.    Gifts for healthy eating.

The gift of a healthy dinner subscription such as Sun Basket or a subscription to a monthly local produce delivery of fresh healthy food is an amazing gift to give. You can also create a homemade basket that includes healthy food items to make a favorite dish, meal or beverage along with the recipe or cookbook makes a fantastic gift. You might put together some ingredients in a basket like herbs, nourishing broths, sea salts, olive oils and vinegars, cacao, chia seeds, walnuts, matcha, or find a beautiful healthy cookbook. Teas, preferably organic, are also wonderful gifts that are healthy and delicious! Kitchen items that encourage healthy eating are also great gifts, like a high powered blender (Vitamix is my favorite!- but any are great!!), salad spinner or bowl, Instapot, tea pot with a nice strainer, stainless steel or glass water bottle with or without an infuser for herbs, spices and fruits. When you give a gift that encourages healthy eating, you are giving the greatest health insurance policy that exists!

4.    Gifts for healthy sleep.

The gift of sleep may be a challenging gift to give, but you can give items that encourage the possibility of rest and restoration! Sleep masks, sound machines, guided relaxations, relaxing music, binaural frequency sounds, a cozy blanket, pj’s or slippers encourage making sleep a priority and more available.  A gift certificate for restorative yoga or meditation also help to make rest and sleep more available and there’s always teas and tinctures that can help you get more zzz’s.

5.    Give gifts for personal fulfillment.

Gifts that encourage a sense of fulfillment are super valuable. Items that encourage self-reflection, mindfulness and living more intentionally bring value and increased wellness to life. Gifts like adult coloring books, sketch pads, gratitude journals, blank journals, art supplies, music, gift certificates for a fun creative class, books, or other items that you know the person on your list would love goes a lot further for fulfillment than a new shirt or a tie! When you encourage someone to explore, be creative, learn something new or learn more about a passion they may have, you encourage their continued personal growth and evolution. What an amazing gift to share!

6.    Give the gift of nature.

Nature is healing. Spending time in nature is tremendously therapeutic. Giving something as simple and beautiful as a plant, flower, bulb or even seeds to begin to sow in the early spring creates an opportunity to connect with nature each and every day. Gardening items or items that encourage being outdoors such as a hammock, bench or wind chimes encourage spending time in nature. If you are thinking a little larger, you might give the gift of a trip to the mountains, some outdoor adventure or the beach. Encouraging the opportunity to connect with nature is a wonderful gift to give.

This is a short list and it is intended to help spark some ideas that also allow for a personalized approach to giving. Finding “that just right thing” brings you a sense of pleasure and fulfillment. There may be other ideas you have that help to encourage others to live well, feel well and be well. I’d love to hear how you are sharing the gift of wellness to others this holiday season!

Creating Your OWN Personalized Emotional Cravings Protocol

When you are working to heal emotional eating, having a personalized approach is most effective. The three step cravings protocol that I recommend, Pause, Reflect, Release, is helpful for most as a guideline. However, what you do within each phase will help you make it your own. When you have a personalized approach, it feels more authentic and doable and is far more likely to be sustainable.

When you find the tools that work for you, you want to practice them consistently. Awareness builds with effort and consistency. Self-awareness will continue to grow as you become more and more comfortable understanding and accepting your internal emotional world. I emphasize the acceptance process as it is absolutely vital to healing. When you understand the inner workings of your own mind, you create a tremendous capacity to heal, grow and accept yourself and others without judgment.

As you continue to more effectively manage your emotional food cravings, you create a sense of mastery which inevitably increases your experience of internal emotional comfort. When you no longer fear your feelings but instead understand, embrace and deeply accept them, you are essentially understanding, embracing and deeply accepting yourself.

The process of making peace with food is the process of making peace with yourself. With emotional, stress and disordered eating, it is never actually about the food, it is more about a limited acceptance of yourself and a limited ability to connect with yourself in a meaningful way. When you place conditions in order to accept yourself completely, you leave yourself open to creating negative cognitions about yourself such as feeling not good enough, inadequate or as though you have to be perfect.

These negative cognitions are not useful, generally untrue and hold you back from knowing yourself and caring for yourself. When you are not caring for yourself and believing the negative cognitions as if they are true, you will most likely lack motivation. As you become more emotionally aware you build confidence, you are able to believe in yourself and your capability to feel strong and healthy. Releasing the old negative cognitions and subsequent thought patterns is essential.

As you work with your own personal emotional cravings protocol, you will feel empowered in the moment, you get to choose how to manage a specific emotional craving. As you build your determination to use your protocol consistently, you will strengthen your mindset and make the best choice possible in the moment.

When you think about the three specific steps, Pause, Reflect, Release and creating a personalized protocol that works for you, it is helpful to know the specific element of each that you find to be useful.

Within the Pause phase, what helps you Pause? Do you prefer to set a timer for 1-5 minutes in the moment of awareness that you are mindlessly or emotionally eating? What is helpful next? Have a glass of water and wait for the timer to go off? Do a deep breathing exercise? Determining the specifics of your pause that work for you will help you personalize each step into a useful, actionable tool for managing your food cravings. Once you establish the technique that works best for you, use it consistently in order to effectively utilize the Pause phase.

During the Reflection phase, what works most effectively for you to Reflect on your emotional experience? What proactive element can you incorporate to make this Reflection time useful and effective? Is it helpful for you to talk about your emotion? Do you prefer to write in a journal? Does taking a walk and pondering your emotions help? Do you need to take some space away from the emotion first and practice mindfulness or relaxation and then take time to reflect?

Find what reflective process works for you and helps you identify the why behind your emotion. Once you Reflect you can take time to make a choice on how to respond to the specific emotion. If something needs to be done, decide when you will take action on it.

As you move into the Release phase, determine what helps you Release and let go of emotions that are no longer serving you. Does deep breathing help you? You can breathe in and imagine peace and contentment flowing in, and breathe out, imagining all that is not serving you mentally, emotionally and physically releasing. Does journaling support your releasing process? Does mindfulness and/or visualization help?

To visualize the Release, you can imagine your emotions on a cloud—drifting away in the sky—or your emotions releasing with the imagery of leaves floating past you on a river. Whatever helps you internalize the experience of letting go, that is what will be most effective for you to do during this phase of Release.

Take time to write down your process and know it may be different for different emotional experiences. Write down what you will do to create a personalized Pause, Reflect and Release. Have these steps nearby so you can access them in times that it may not initially come naturally for you. The rest is practice and time, time and practice. Practice is the only way to integrate the process and make it work for you within your life.  

Did you come up with a creative Pause Reflect and Release? Let me know! I’d love to hear how you are implementing these tools. How are they working for you? Need support? Know that I am here to help support you along your journey to making peace with food as well as with yourself.

Understanding and Releasing Emotions Driving Your Emotional Cravings

Becoming emotionally aware is a process. If you have been avoiding uncomfortable emotions for a long time, it will take dedicated time and an internal commitment to healing to become emotionally aware. It is absolutely worth the hard work to get to the other side!

Imagine living in a space where you are not ruled by your emotions and you have the ability to make a choice on how to respond to them. Imagine not living in reactivity to—or avoidance of—your emotions. Imagine instead, living in a space of empowerment and confidence with yourself as well as with food.

When I first learned about mindfulness and how to connect to present moment awareness, it impacted me in a BIG way. I tend towards anxiety and have had several stress related health struggles. When I discovered how much of the anxiety I experienced was self-created due to my over-connection with my anxiety-provoking thoughts I was shocked. Up until this awareness, I believed that because I thought it, it must be, or at least could be true! 

Through mindfulness and the awareness of connecting to the present moment, I learned that I could choose to respond to thoughts and the emotions they create in a different way. When I began focusing on learning to become aware of my thoughts and if possible, change my thoughts (or at least change my response to my thoughts), my whole life changed for the better.

Delving deeper into the inner workings of my mind through mindfulness, I discovered that many of the emotions I was unconsciously avoiding were self-created from believing the negative thoughts. Yikes! There are some emotions that we experience that are caused by our own thoughts and other emotions caused by legitimate external circumstances. Being able to recognize the difference and make a choice on how to respond is where your power lies.

Within the process of becoming mindfully aware, you learn to work with the Pause when you find yourself attempting to distract yourself away from an emotion. You then can move into a space of Reflection: why is it there? In the space of Reflection you can begin to discern the difference: is the emotion self-created or not? Is the emotion a response to a thought or a true potential problem? Is there something you can do about this thought or emotion? Once you Reflect and discern the why behind and driving your emotional experience, you can make a choice about how to respond.

Your choice might be to take action, especially if the emotion has been created by an external influence. If the feeling is internally created by a negative thought pattern or if you have attempted to manage or cope with the feeling to no avail, you can choose to Release it, to let it go.

Letting the emotion go is such a powerful aspect of emotional awareness because it creates a deeper sense of self-control and self-respect. You get to choose. While this may feel difficult at first, it is a practice. When you mind attempts to focus on the emotion, you can have a grounding statement to say to yourself, such as “In this moment I choose to let this thought go.” Or you might visualize the thoughts and emotions as leaves floating down a river, or as clouds floating by in the sky.

When you Release an emotion, such as worry, you Release the discomfort this emotion creates internally. Worry can create an internal experience of increased heart rate, agitation, fear of what may go wrong with no supported evidence that it may actually happen. This state of mental discomfort can trigger further internal and physical discomfort such as muscular tension, nail biting and other physical harm.

These internal tensions created by the emotion can be linked to many other physical ailments including neck, shoulder and back pain, stomach upset, IBS, TMJ, difficulty sleeping, inability to concentrate and fatigue (just to name a few). The action of Releasing the emotion, which may seem simple but is definitely NOT easy, can completely shift your internal experience. The process of Releasing is a practice and takes time, effort and dedication to the practice.

The process of Releasing an emotion invites internal freedom like no other because YOU get to choose. When you are Releasing, you are not avoiding your feelings, and you are not just trying to cope with them—but you are allowing yourself to understand them and use them to enhance your life. Through emotional awareness and Releasing unfounded discomfort, you build Inner Strength, confidence and empowerment.

This nonjudgmental approach creates freedom as you can choose your thoughts, and therefore choose how to respond to them. This freedom and awareness inevitably creates more acceptance of emotions, self-compassion and self-awareness.

As you continue to practice the three steps to managing emotional food cravings, Pause, Reflect, Release, you will find how this formula can enhance many areas of your life. When you begin to practice, let me know how it works for you! I’d love to hear your experience and I am here to support you along your path to healing, self-acceptance and self-compassion.