Last month, I wrote about the fact that most of us are probably stressed even if we don’t think we are. I wanted to follow on from that this month with a perfect example of what can happen to you if you don’t address your underlying stress factors using myself as an example.
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If I asked you, “are you stressed?”, how many of you will say “not me”? When I was a lawyer, I wouldn’t think I was stressed out because it was just part and parcel with what I did – I had to handle client demands, I had to put up with micromanagement from my bosses, I had to learn and apply areas of law that were not my specialty area, and I had to learn how to manage people. It was the only life I knew and therefore I just had to put up with it. I knew no other alternative.
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This month I’m going to change the focus on health slightly from the physical to the emotional/mental side of things. As a massage therapist and energy healer, I really believe that health needs to be looked at from a holistic perspective and it is only then that we can start to make changes to our lives for the better. If we are to look at our lives currently, the majority of us can split it into three components – work, home/personal/family and social. I bet that for many of you, work takes up a good chunk of your day, and the other two components battle it out to share the little portion that is left. Given that we spend a lot of our lives working, it is important to actually be in a job that you like, you have a passion for, and that makes your heart sing. If you…
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Ahhhh breathing… it’s something that is so subtle to our systems and yet is one of the most important aspects of our physical being that we completely take for granted. Take a moment now to notice your breath – are you breathing from your chest or above, or are you breathing from your belly? Most of us breathe from the chest and up. Unfortunately, that’s not how we are designed to breathe. The diaphragm The main muscle of respiration in the body is actually your diaphragm (as a side note, isn’t it funny that the diaphragm’s shape is very similar to the shape of the lungs). So, during inhalation, the diaphragm contracts (i.e flattens out) and pushes down on the abdomen, and during exhalation, it relaxes and the pressure is taken off the abdomen. This means that it’s your belly that should be the main mover during breathing as opposed…
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