When I first met Stacy teaching a Thai yoga massage course I took a few years back, I knew that her gentle, grounding presence was a gift to anyone who works with her.   I was fascinated by her journey from an office worker in chronic pain herself to a holistic healer practicing Thai and Shaitsu massage.  When I asked her what drew her into the work, she explained to me that it was all about happiness!

Stacy’s practice is primarily geared to supporting women’s journeys into health and wellness so I was glad when she could fit me into her busy practice.   It’s no surprise that she works using the powerful Eastern modalities Thai yoga massage, Shiatsu and Reiki.  When I asked her how she got into this work, she sounded like an old Zen master telling me that moving from an “office worker’s body to a massage practioner’s body [was] the difference between distraction verses integration of mind, spirit and body.   Receiving and giving massage has reconnected me to my personal happiness.”

And her work feels that grounded.   Working from her home studio gives her the time to share a cup of tea and find out what’s really going on in your body.   Before I even got onto her mat, I had a firm sense of comfort and groundedness that only deepened through the work.   Many of the positions felt like a very gentle form of yoga (no wonder Thai massage is called “lazy man’s yoga”) as she twists and turns, opening the body with ease and grace.

She is deeply focused on bringing the mind and body into alignment.  She told me, “Often the mind disconnects from what the body is feeling, pretending that the body can take care of itself.  Through the act of receiving massage, a client can gently become aware of messages from their body; the strained muscles, and emotional holding.”

While her clients span a wide range, she does seem to attract a lot of busy professional women as well as women returning to health and wellness.   I would encourage you to experience her caring, compassionate touch.  And, as a special offer to friends of MindBodyExperience, Stacy is offering $10’s off a 90 minute massage through the end of the month.  Make sure to mention the offer when you call her.

You can find out more about Stacy and book and appointment at www.stacymathies.massagetherapy.com

“Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ~Mary Oliver

At the end of February, MindbodyExperience’s free e-course “Everyday Shavasana” launched offering people around the world the opportunity to find peace and ease in their daily lives.  It has already gotten off to an amazing start with people all around the U.S. and as far away as France joining in.  One participant told me that she finds “the exercises to be amazing.  They’re the perfect length to easily fit into my busy day.”  Check out the five reasons you might want to explore more ease and peace in your life now!

1. Less stress equals better health. The Mayo Clinic has a strong focus on the relationship between stress and poor health.   When our bodies are stressed, we send them into overdrive.  Adrenaline and a whole host of neurochemicals that support our super charged reaction flood our bodies.  This is a great thing to happen if a tiger is chasing you or you are rescuing someone from a burning building but not so great on your average day.  The amount of wear and tear on your body when you stay in a stressed out mode is tremendous.  When your stress rate decreases all kinds of health benefits occur from more regular heart rate, deeper sleep and a more well functioning immune system.

2. More creativity. –  Just about everything that folks do these days, from working to parenting, requires a lot of creativity.  A recent study at Ohio State University shows that under stress it’s pretty difficult to get the creative juices flowing.  Our brains are designed to focus in om threats and be prepared for action when we are stressed.  This makes it much harder to operate in a complex environment where creativity is required.  Is there anywhere in  your life where you are feeling stressed and needing options?  Perhaps bring more creativity to it would help.

3. Weight loss. There seems to be a clear connection to stress and weight gain.  Even setting aside all that “stress-eating” there are biological responses to stress that make losing weight more difficult.  The fight or flight response in our bodies increases cortisol (as well as other chemicals) which can slow your metabolism, increase cravings, alter your blood sugar and increase the amount of abdominal fat we store. (The least healthy place to store it!)   Decreasing your stress levels makes losing weight much more possible.

4. Better sex! How likely are you to feel in the mood for love when you are worrying about paying the house payment and what’s going on with work, as well as all your other stresses?  Stress dampens the sex drive and draws us away from our partners.  The catch 22 to this is that sex also seems to decrease stress.  So if you decrease your stress you can feel more frisky for more sex which will further decrease your stress.  Sounds like everyone’s a winner there!

5. Increased happiness! If the sex doesn’t convince you to explore a life of ease and peace, perhaps the fact that a recent Gallup study found that people in states with the lowest stress levels also tend to report the happiest residents.  Of course, if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.  When we are living in stress our focus narrows, our capacity to see the good things shrinks and we seem to always be looking for danger.  Not much fun in that, is there?

Of course, I should note that there is good stress.  That’s the stress or challenge that you feel when you are enjoying pushing yourself to learn or grow.  This is a type of stress that we often choose to go into and feel like we have more control of.  When you start in a place of ease and peace, you have more capacity to expand in those situations as well!

Rick Foster and Greg Hicks became two of my favorite authors with their first book, How We Choose to Be Happy.  In that book, they layed out the nine basic choices that happy people consistently make.  And I can attest, the more I make those choices, the easier I find it to be happy.   A group of doctors, finding that their healthiest patients used the same strategies, worked with Foster and Hicks (with the help of Dr. Jen Seda) to create the Brilliant Health Program being offered by numerous hospitals around the country, which is the basis for their new book, Happiness and Health.

You might be surprised to find out that neither health nor happiness has much to do with what folks have traditionally believed will bring them joyful lives.  Money, fame, position and even respect didn’t make it very high on the list.  Want to know what did make it on the list?

The characteristics that they found true for the happiest and healthiest people they encountered on six continents were:

1. Intention – Make a choice that you are going to be happy and set your course in that direction.  Many people simply know that they don’t want to be sick without deciding what they do want.  Have you chosen to live a life that’s healthy and vital?

2. Accountability – Do you believe that your health just happens to you?  That you have no control?  Clearly the evidence in your life points to the contrary.  When you eat too much you feel bloated.  When you drink too much you get drunk.  When you don’t exercise you can get depressed, stressed and out of shape.  The choices that we make everyday affect our health. When you decide to take control of your choices you can step into greater health and vitality.

3. Identification – Setting your intention towards health is great.  Now, decide what that looks like, feels like and sounds like.  Give it color and texture.  And rehearse it in your mind. Imagine how great it feels to be healthy.  Both intention and identification are stages that can really benefit from work with the unconscious mind although the authors don’t explore that here.

4. Centrality – Do the things that you love first!  It’s as simple as that.  We often save the things that make us feel great as rewards.  But these things actually energize us and make us feel wonderful.  Start in that feeling and the rest can flow more smoothly.

5. Recasting – When obstacles come up, you can choose to get stuck in them, letting them convince you that you are really a victim, or you can choose to learn something and create an opportunity.  I’m amazed by how many health nonprofits have been started by people who have used their own health challenges as a starting point to share with others.  What challenges have you had that could still learn from?

6. Options – The healthiest people have the greatest capacity to see options in front of them!  Getting locked into all or nothing thinking doesn’t leave much room for anything but disaster.  You might say, “I can only eat healthy food or junk.” How about all the options in between or even healthy food that tastes like junk?  Consider the spectrum of options and stress can diminish and you can feel better about moving forward.

7. Appreciation – Wherever you are, however you feel, value your body in this moment.  If you knee is hurting, your lungs are still moving air in and out of your body, your heart is still beating, so much good is still going on.  We tend to focus only on the pain but that reinforces the pain.  Consider thanking your body for all it’s doing for you and ask it what it might like now.

8. Giving – Humans, by nature, are social creatures.  We are designed to feel good about giving to others and receiving.  There are distinct neurological advantages to these processes.   Ask yourself are you freely giving (with no strings attached, no expectations) and are you allowing yourself to receive freely?  Some people actually feel guilty about receiving.  Others feel angry if they give to someone that doesn’t reciprocate.  Pay attention to your relationship to giving.  The more freely it flows, the better your health will be.

9. Telling the truth – As humans are social creatures, we seem to be biologically programmed to feel distress when we lie.  Lie detectors actually work by picking up the signals of this distress such as increased blood pressure, heart rate and perspiration. Making a commitment to telling the truth to others and to ourselves actually improves our health and decreases our stress.  This doesn’t mean you need to be mean, just honest.

These seem like logical and easy steps.  Of course, we all have deeply held patterns of behavior that makes changing some of these things difficult.  Hicks and Foster’s work would be significantly strengthened by using many of the tools available to make shifts in the unconscious mind where about 90% of change actually happens.  As you delve into creating more health in your life consider using tools such as hypnotherapy, integrative coaching or other approaches that allow these changes to happen easily and naturally at the unconscious level.

For more information, please visit The Brilliant Health website at www.choosingbrillianthealth.com

In a city full of yoga divas, it can be hard to find a humble, spirit-filled guide to lead you deeper into the body and the mind.   Recently, I have been fortunate to find such a teacher in Chad Stose.

In a comfortable yoga studio in the Mission, Chad gathers together folks eager to experience his special style of anusara-inspired yoga.   As I join the class, chatting up my neighbors as I tend to do, one of the regulars to the class tells me he comes as much for the sermons as the practice.   It doesn’t take long to understand that Chad is truly one of San Francisco’s yoga treasures.

The first thing I notice about Chad is that he makes it a point to know every person in the room’s name.  It’s a rare treat to feel so welcomed to a class.   In this class, Chad offers a meditation of embracing the whole of who we are, just where we are – body, mind and spirit.  He asks folks if they liked the bully at school?  Of course, no one did.  Then he asks if we are surprised when we bully our bodies and they respond with resistance?  Eyes widen and we laugh a bit at ourselves knowing that many of us like to push our bodies to go deeper even when they are not ready.

The class starts in a pace that is so much slower than the usual flow classes I’m hooked on that I was convinced that this would be a breeze.   Ten minutes into the class I know that’s not true.  The guidance and insight that he offered in this very intentional class focused on deep awareness of the body and allowed my hill climbing San Francisco hamstrings to release more than I imagined possible.

Wanting more, I was inspired to follow him out of the city (a major feat for me) into the mountains of Guernville for a weekend retreat.  In the retreat, Chad’s sense of spirit carried me through hour after hour of practice, as he encouraged us to let our practice be playful, imperfect and utterly human.  My body continued to open with the help of Chad’s gentle sense of humor and his amazing attention to detail.  His focus on small adjustments that create enormous change brought new life into old postures and allowed me to experience them fresh.

Chad is an amazing teacher and guide to deepening your relationship to your body and opening to spirit.  His own spiritual path allows him to speak with integrity out of his experience and bring greater depths to the work.  When you’re ready to make time for a great mind body experience please check out one of his classes.  I’m sure you’ll find me there.  You can find his complete schedule on www.chadstose.com

Welcome to the first of many podcasts in my free e-course, “Everyday Shavasana.”  This recording gently guides the conscious and the unconscious mind to find greater clarity in your life as it introduces the themes of the first week of the practice.  

The rest of the podcasts will only be available for those folks who sign up for this free e-course so they can easily be delivered into your email box.  (Just the links, not the full files.)

The podcast is available here:

Breathing Deep and Sinking In: Finding Clarity on the Path to Everyday Shavasana

You can also find out more about the full course by clicking here.

If you are ready to experience greater peace and ease in your life, please sign up for this free e-course now.  The self-paced meditations and exercises are delivered right to your email box and most take less than 10 minutes to complete.

Most people I work with start off having a lot easier time knowing what they don’t want.  Chances are they are sitting on a great big pile of it.  Maybe they don’t want to feel all the stress that they feel in their office.  Or they don’t want to be upset with their kids so often.  Maybe this describes you as well.

Starting in a place of what we don’t want is sort of like swatting at flies.  You are happy to swing any old direction as long as they get out of the way.  When you can get clear about what you do want,  you can focus your actions so they lead you not only away from what’s bugging you but also towards what would really make you happy.   For those of you who aren’t sure how to get there, here are five basic strategies to get you started.

#1 Be still and listen to your Inner Guide

As the Buddhist say, we are suffering from an epidemic of monkey mind.   Slowing down for just a few minutes a day can help you have a sense of inner stillness.  I have even been known to have clients schedule a minute a day of meditation just so they can get started.  You surely can make one minute a day of time for yourself.

#2 Let your creativity guide you

While the mind gets caught up in wanting to do the right thing or please everybody, the creative longings in you will often reveal more than you imagine.  Take out a box of crayons or finger paints and simply start to draw what’s really important to you in your life right now.   The starting point is simply the question of what do you really want.  And since this art is just for you, you can have permission to create in a perfection free zone.

#3 Start listening to your body

Even when you have no words for what you want in your life, the body speaks volumes.  Start paying attention to how you are experiencing your body.  Are full of energy when you wake up in the morning?  Do you need four cups of coffee just to make it through the day?  Start asking yourself what your body is longing for and see where this takes you.

#4 Listen to your friends (sometimes)

The people who know us best often have great insight into what we really want even when we aren’t sure.   Ask your friends what they would wish for you if they could help you decrease stress and create ease in your life.  You might be surprised by what you hear. The key is to take any suggestions graciously remembering you can always let go of anything that doesn’t ring true for you.

#5 Start making a list

The mere act of writing can often free up space to get to what’s really important to us.  Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, recommends that people write continuously to get there ideas out even if they have to write, “Can’t think of anything to say.”  You will before you know it.  If you’ve never done this before start out by setting a timer and writing for 7 minutes straight on the question, “What do I want to create ease and peace in my life?”

These five strategies can assist you in finding more clarity on your path to greater ease and peace.  Once you have an idea, engaging the unconscious mind so that it’s easier to do this is a snap.

If you would like sign up for the free e-course “Everyday Shavasana: Finding Ease and Peace in Your Daily Life,”  please click here!

People seem to think that life coaching is mysterious.  Coaches can rarely explain with much clarity what exactly they are doing.   So when I’m asked what I do, I let folks know that I work to integrate the conscious and unconscious mind in a five step process I call the Integrative Life Path.  You can use it with just about any problem that you might encounter.

Step 1: Get Clarity

Do you know what you want?  Many clients come to me knowing only what they don’t want.  They don’t want to smoke, to be overweight, to be alone.  There are lots of different alternatives to any of these.  Which one do you prefer?

For example, you may know that you don’t want to be single.  Okay, good start.  But who do you want to be with?  A nice arsonist perhaps or someone with very poor social skills and bad hygiene?  Start identifying what you want so that you can head the right direction towards them.

Step 2: Build a New Image of Yourself

Deep and lasting change (and most often rapid) happens when you decide that it’s not just your behaviors that you want to change but your understanding of yourself.   Most people start change efforts working on individual behaviors.  To me, that’s like saying that you wish there were no mosquitos in the swamp.  You can either try to kill all the mosquitos (shift in behavior) or you can choose to become a meadow where mosquitos don’t live (shift in identity).

And while engaging the unconscious mind is important in every step, it is crucial at this step.  These images that we hold of ourselves are deep and often run in the background.  We have become so used to them that we don’t even know they are there.  The most rapid way to change this is through hypnosis or other processes that access the unconscious mind.

Step 3: Clear out the obstacles.

Change is easy when you are not weighed down.  Think of how easy it is to change directions when you are running with nothing in your hands.  And then imagine when you are late for your plane, running with three suitcases, wearing a suit that’s too tight for you and trying to type a text on your phone.  When we can let go of the things that weigh us down – the old hurts, stories, experiences – we can begin to move with ease.

Lots of brave folks accomplish this in therapy or with some sort of intensely painful body work like rolfing that unlocks past hurts and resets you to neutral. Fortunately, we know more about the way that the brain organizes experience than ever before.  We can now discharge emotions without having to relive them.   I don’t know about you but I am satisfied with having felt the pain the first time through.  I don’t need to do it again.

Step 4: Change Your Behavior

You might think this is what I told you not to worry about in step 2.  Actually, I don’t work to change behaviors until all the other stuff is out of the way.  In part because once we get here many of the behaviors have already shifted on their own.  If I used to try not to eat chocolate and now I have an image of myself as a person who makes responsible eating choices, loves his body and enjoys feeling great, I won’t have to struggle with the chocolate as much.  In fact, I’ll be able to eat enough to enjoy without pigging out on it.

There are behaviors that are useful to add in here.  This is the point at which you decide what you could learn that would assist you in reaching your goal.  For example, someone might decide that they want to have better relationships but aren’t yet very skilled at communicating.  Learning new ways to talk as well as listen to others could be very valuable in moving them towards their goal.  Sometimes this is hard to do on your own so feel free to get a coach’s perspective or ask some people who have already done what you want to accomplish.

Step 5: Measure Your Results and Adjust

The true test of any change effort is how well it works.  Knowing that you are always receiving feedback about how your change efforts are going, it’s easy to adjust your direction until you have it just right.   The best way to do this is to pick a few ways that you can track your accomplishment.  More is fine but make sure you always have at least two so you don’t get hung up on one number.

When clients decide to get healthier, they often want to start with a weight goal as their number to reach.  This is fine as one measurement but I help them pick some other metrics that they can also measure like how energetic they felt or how well they slept.  Change can take time but there is almost always a way that we see improvement if we let ourselves.

So what about the unconscious?

This process is deceptively simple.  People (not my clients, of course) will often want to do these five steps in their heads and then wonder why not much has changed.  When you know that 90% of change happens at the unconscious level, you quickly realize that leaving out the unconscious components of change is just plain silly.  Would you go to work wearing only 10% of your clothes or try to drive your car with only 10% of the steering wheel?   We are designed in such a magnificent way so that we don’t have to expend conscious energy on most of what we do.  We simply let the programs in our unconscious take care of our actions.  In order to change our lives, we have to change our programs.

The easiest way to shift your unconscious patterns is with a trained hypnotherapist.  However, there are also lots of great CDs available that can guide you through the unconscious change processes.

No matter how you structure your path to change, it’s always easier with a supportive friend or professional guide like a coach.  Seek someone out from the very beginning who can help keep you on track and enjoying your journey towards an even greater you!

In the West, we have adopted a feast (literally) or famine mentality to health.  We seem to either eat whatever we want to, whenever we want to or we starve ourselves to lose it all.   After experiencing both the life of luxury in his father’s palace and then the life of an ascetic starving himself away, Buddha came to what he called the Middle Way.   Nowhere is a middle way more needed than in our relationship to diet and health.

As a life coach, I am very familiar with helping people make change in their lives.  And I know that the feast or famine approach doesn’t work.  Neither does relying on the authority of whatever latest health guru has published a diet suggesting you eat nothing but watermelon or everything but bacon.   As Dr. Dean Ornish has found repeatedly in studies funded by the National Institute of Health, Mutual of Omaha Insurance and other scientific bodies, we can decrease our weight and increase our health so that we feel more energetic, more flexible and stronger when we have the right tools and support.

Since so many clients, colleagues and friends are constantly struggling with weight loss, I have written this series to provide tools to help readers live in a place of abundant health.  Even if you have a hard time believing them at first, try them on.   You will probably find they are helpful in the end.

#1: Weight loss is too small a goal to sustain you.

If all you want to do is lose weight, you are only focusing on the negative in your life.  You look at the extra fat around your weights or on your hips and measure each and every day to see if any of it goes away.   And too often, the measure of your worth becomes the number on the scale.  Weight loss is a part of a bigger, more joyful goal to experience abundant health.  When we focus on the increased energy as well as greater strength and flexibility that comes when we experience abundant health each step of the journey becomes more alive for us.

#2 – Start Where You Are.

It doesn’t make any difference if you are the perfect weight for you or ten times the perfect weight for you, you are a unique gift to yourself and those around you.   Waiting until you reach your ideal weight to fall in love with yourself, to let yourself see your own beauty and worth, does no service to anyone.  Not only does it slow your weight loss down by increasing depression rates as well as whole slew of neurochemicals that make it harder to lose weight, it also dampens your energy to make the changes you need to get where you want to go.  In your life, which has been more sustaining: love or hate?  Hate holds us down, keeps us from expressing the fullness of ourselves and stops us from reaching our goals.  It doesn’t matter if we are hating ourselves or someone else we blame for making us overweight.   Loving ourselves just makes more sense.

#3 – You can choose to lose weight and experience abundant health.

We all can.  For many of us, somewhere along the road, we have got it in our heads that we are victims.  That other people have power over us and that we really don’t have control.  So we give up our sense of authority to other people who have the answers.   But you know your body better than anyone else.   When you start to pay attention to what you are eating, how you are feeling and the choices that you are making throughout the day (attention not judgment) you can move towards abundant health and weight loss.  I suggest that you remind yourself at the beginning of the day and before every mean, “I can choose to lose weight and experience abundant health.”  Sometimes you are going to choose to have a piece of chocolate cake and that’s fine too.  Just understand that you have the power to choose any option you would like in this moment.

#4 – Small changes make a big difference.

Sometimes we fall into a trap that psychologists call “all or nothing thinking.”  We think that if we are not perfect in our efforts to lose weight and get healthy, than we might as well give up.  But even small changes make a big difference.   For example, consensus among doctors seems to be that calories really do make a difference in weight loss.   To lose weight we either have to eat less calories (which doesn’t have to mean eating less food) or burn more.  3500 calories equals one pound.  If we simply decease our calories by 100 per day or increase our exercise just a little bit, we would lose 10 pounds in a year without very little effort at all.

#5 – Deprivation doesn’t work.

Starving yourself or trying to force yourself to exercise doesn’t work.  We think it does because most of us have tried some crash diet where we lost weight for a while and then we gained it back.  We have blamed our will power rather than the overall strategy.  While we can all force ourselves to do something for a little while, overtime this is an exhausting strategy that fails for almost everyone.  Finding ways to enjoy what you eat and creating an exercise plan that fits what you like to do is the only way that any of us can sustain lasting change

#6 – You are the expert on your own body.

Diets often fail because they don’t fit our bodies.  They suggest foods we hate or exercise programs we don’t want to do.  More importantly, they give away our authority to someone else.  We become the passive recipients of someone else’s understanding of us.   Of course, there is some great information that is true for most people but when you start paying attention to yourself you will be able to create an abundantly healthy lifestyle that is tailored just for you.   For example, only you know how you feel after eating a particular type of food.  When you start paying attention to your energy levels after eating you will know what feeds your body and your spirit and be able to adjust your eating accordingly.

This is only a beginning but try these concepts on for a bit.  The more you believe them the easier it will be to reach your goal of abundant health and weight loss.  As always, I look forward to your ideas, stories and suggestions!

A few weeks ago, my friend Bill invited me to a workshop led by Jean Elvin.  Now Bill is 75 years old and one of the most vital, healthy people I know so when he suggests something I take it seriously.  The workshop was an introduction to the Feldenkrais Method focusing on neck, arms and shoulders at City College and what a treat!

Jean led the group of 20 or so people through a series of very gentle motions while laying on a mat.  For a yoga junkie like me I was skeptical that I would get too much out of it since it wasn’t a very “active” form of movement.  But I poured myself into the movements and wouldn’t you know, by the end of the class I felt I had been in an advanced yoga class.  My neck and shoulders felt so open and relaxed.

When I looked this method up on our old friend google to find out a bit more, I discovered that a physicist named Moshe Feldenkrais developed this series of movements to rehabilitate a serious knee injury in lieu of surgery.  I was excited to find that this system is really about bringing deeper connection between the mind and body.  In fact, Feldenkrais said, “What I’m after is not just more flexible bodies, but more flexible minds.”

In a group setting, the Feldenkrais method has been designed to offer verbal instructions to assist you in noticing old patterns that your body has gotten stuck in.  Perhaps you are walking around with your shoulders in a weird position all day long and all you notice is neck pain.  The gentle movements the method offers allows you to reset your system back to a neutral place.  In individual sessions, the practioner works with clients on a low table manually adjusting the body to raise awareness.

For folks who are looking for a gentle way to connect deeply to their bodies and to relax their minds, I’m convinced that this a great path to go down.  To make it easier for people to approach this work, Jean teaches classes at San Francisco City College where 14 weeks of this amazing method are only $45.  You can also see her privately.  Check out her website www.sweetagility.com for more information!

Life is full of difficult choices. We often try to make these choices from a purely intellectual place in spite of our own deepest intuition. For many, our inner guide has been listened to so infrequently that we can barely hear it. This simple, yet powerful guided meditation allows you to reconnect to that wisdom. It’s particularly useful if you have something that you’ve been wrestling with.

Enjoy!

You can watch it youtube here or download the podcast and listen to it anytime you like!