 Blog Author: Emilia Wheaton Blog Editor: Kristen Kennedy Smith Ayurvedic tradition calls us to honor our physical bodies by undertaking our daily health and hygiene routines with a sense of reverence and intentionality. Pampering ourselves, instead of briefly splashing some water on our face and running a toothbrush across our teeth, allows us to present our best self to the day. Ayurvedic traditions such as oil massage, dry brushing, and henna hair dying, just to name a few, promote self-care at its deepest core level of honoring the physical body our soul inhabits. Without focusing on superficial qualifiers of beauty, we can instead focus on letting out inner beauty shine by fortifying the health of our skin, mouth, and hair. When we feel our outer shell has been polished, we can put our best foot forward and promote within ourselves a sense of pride and vitality. No matter your daily beauty routine (and especially if you are very low maintenance like myself), I’m sure you can relate to the feeling of being prepared to greet the day once you have spent some time admiring your hair while brushing, or trimming and painting your nails, or simply washing your face and putting on a daily lotion. Whatever makes us feel ready for the day lets us step out of the house with exuberance.
Here are some ancient Ayurvedic methods of self-care you could adopt as part of your daily routine to care for your mind, body and soul: Dry Brushing Dry brushing is exactly how it sounds: sloughing off the dry skin which is stimulating for our Kapha energy. Dry brushing is best done in the morning, right before you shower. Swipe a gentle brush (like a soft loofah) over your skin, always brushing toward your heart. Over joints and your belly, make circular strokes. Brushing our skin can give us more lustrous skin, reduce the effects of stress on the body, improve lymphatic circulation, and improve our metabolism. Plus, it feels pretty great! Warm Oil Massage A traditional Ayurvedic oil massage, or abhyanga in sanskrit, can reduce our anxiety and clear toxins from the body. Oil massages also promote nervous system health and proper circulation, plus...can you think of a better way to show your body some love first thing in the morning? Spending about fifteen minutes after the shower consciously and intentionally massaging your skin, focusing on nourishing each layer of tissue. Traditionally, each Dosha calls for a type of oil to pacify an imbalance in your doshic constitution. Try sesame oil for Vata, sunflower or coconut oil for Pitta and for Kapha try almond or corn oil. A morning massage will warm and lubricate your body for the day ahead. Oil Pulling Oil pull is the mouthwash of Ayurveda. Swishing about a tablespoon of coconut oil in our mouth is a way to maintain oral health and detoxify our mouths. Bacterias enter our body through our mouth and sinuses, so it is important to keep these areas clean to reduce our risk of infection or disease. Oil pulling reacts like a magnet to bacteria, so when you spit it down the drain you rid your body of potential toxins. The ultimate goal should be to swish the oil around in your mouth, without swallowing, for 15-20 minutes. But start out small and aim for 5 minutes until you can work up to a longer period of time. Chemical-free alternatives to hair dying Ayurveda promotes natural hair dye in the form of henna or indigo dyes as a substitute for harsh chemicals that come in contact with our scalp and hair. Henna and indigo can be used to darken brunette locks or to dramatically redden blonde hair. Using a combination of indigo and henna results in more complex, deep shades. Switching to a natural dye such as henna enhances the nutrition of our hair and skin rather than stripping our hair of its vitality. Yoga and Breathwork I know, I know, I’m playing the old yoga card again as the cure-all, but it really is the most powerful way to strengthen our bodies and, paired with breathwork, to calm our minds. As the sister science of Ayurveda, it is only natural that yoga goes hand in hand with Ayurvedic practices. Synchronizing our body’s movements to our breath aligns our mind to our movement. With practice and consistency, this conscious alignment allows us to go throughout our day fully present and conscious of how we flow within our surroundings. As if we need more reasons to start our days with yoga and breathwork, a physical benefit of yoga early in the morning is the jumpstart of the body’s circulation and metabolism. Ayurvedic wisdom has been passed down over centuries. It is tried and true, as many millions are practicing Ayurvedic traditions everyday, sometimes without even being aware of it. Out of the shower, we might take extra care to massage lotion into our skin simply because it feels nice to pamper ourselves even just for a few moments. We use commercial mouthwashes to do the job of an oil pull and exfoliate with loofahs in the shower. These common habits did not appear by themselves but trickled down from ancient Ayurvedic wisdom. We can honor Ayurvedic traditions by holding them sacred and special, in turn devoting time to feel sacred and special within our own physical bodies. I invite you to take some time for yourself to truly care for and honor the skin you live in by incorporating one or more of these Ayurvedic methods of self-care into your daily life.
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 Blog Author: Emilia Wheaton Blog Editor: Kristen Kennedy Smith Our inner truth is our intended form, our soul’s signature. Our inner truth is heavily associated with the throat chakra--the chakra which governs our self-expression and our creative identity. When we live our truth, life feels good, our work and our passions melt together and it just feels right. However, the influence of societal norms, the goals and expectations of others, or our own urge to please those around us ahead of ourselves, draws us farther away from the person we came here to be. When we were children, we found peace and joy easily; we lived our truth until we were met with resistance and began to shift in the ways we show up to the world to “fit in.” This prescribed version of ourselves now has to struggle to find its way back to who we truly are at our core by reconciling who we were taught to be versus who we deeply feel we were meant to be.
Do you resonate with this? Do you ever feel that your life as you live it isn’t exactly what your subconscious expected or wished for? Do you ever find yourself yearning for something different or distracted thinking of something else? When we experience stress and dissatisfaction in our daily lives, we are not aligned with our inner truth. When we feel ourselves resisting or resenting our realities, we can take this as a clue--a puzzle piece--which, if we pay attention to the clue along the way, we can use to slowly build the life that does align with our inner truth. Think of those who you admire: the dream followers and the powerful strong-willed folks who have built a life for themselves which they feel represents their truest self. They did not simply stumble into this “perfect” life; they noticed lots of puzzle pieces scattered along the way and had the bold courage to slip them into their pockets and intuitively align them to form the masterpiece they were meant to embody. Each of us can do this, too. All we must do is follow the path of least resistance, pursue what feels right to us as individuals and graciously ignore what is expected of us. As we continuously choose the puzzle pieces which call out to us, intrigue us, bring comfort, inspire us, uplift us, and feel right to us, we may find that they seem to fit together nicely. This effortless meld of interests and inspirations comes to affirm our inner truth. I believe that the consistent choice of what our inner truth longs for brings us closer and closer to contentment and fulfillment. We will rest easy and carry ourselves proudly when we know that we are being true to ourselves, not to the urges of our family or the expectations of others. We have this one conscious lifetime to create an experience we enjoy and feel fulfilled by. The beauty of inner truth is that it is not a mysterious, hidden, undiscoverable aspect of ourselves. It resides within each of us and only requires our own intuitive, honest ear to listen close and reveal what our soul wishes for us. We can uncover our inner truth by simply listening to ourselves and having the courage to make a potentially unpopular choice. Think of the classic example: daughter raised by doctors and lawyers is, spoken or unspoken, expected to follow her family’s example and devote herself to an acceptably impressive profession. So the daughter attends the prestigious school and earns good grades in her courses as she feels obligated to do but she never feels truly inspired or motivated by her studies. She is surrounded by students who are captivated in class, who eat, sleep and breathe organic chemistry, ethics, philosophy, who dream of becoming renowned professionals. She doesn’t resonate with their passions and begins to feel inferior. To destress from the demanding courseload that disinterests her, she bakes in her free time. She starts small with recipes on the back of bags of flour then branches out to attempt to duplicate the confections of the local bakery. She begins to skip some classes because she is so enthralled in her kitchen. Because baking is often on her mind, she begins to meet others interested in baking and they start sharing recipes. Eventually, she has a community of passionate bakers who raise her up and she feels a sense of belonging and empowerment. She knows her family will be disappointed that she does not wish to follow their dreams but she knows this is what she is meant to do. We all can follow this example and embolden ourselves by taking baby steps, collecting puzzle pieces along the way, to bring us closer and closer to our truth. When we honor our inner truth we feel rewarded by the sense of contentment. Seeking our soul’s purpose doesn’t need to be as epic and daunting as it initially sounds; take baby steps that intuitively feel right and you will lead yourself down the path you were meant to take. Starting today, and just for today, notice one puzzle piece, one instance, one moment in time when you feel content. This may be your clue to connect to your inner truth!  Blog Author: Emilia Wheaton Blog Editor: Kristen Kennedy Smith With driven Pitta and airy Vata my dominant doshas, I am someone who has five to-do lists scattered around the house, written in my phone, scrambled in my head and there is NEVER enough time or organization required to complete them. Mix in our fast-paced and über productive culture, and it’s not only the pressure I put on myself to complete tasks but a societal expectation I feel to cram it all in and get it done. Examining this tendency of mine (and presumably of many, many others), I came to realize that this frantic drive to do wasn’t serving me; stressful doggedness to finish to-do lists resulted in low-quality outcomes and not a lot of fun or time for creative expression.
Fed up with my stressed-out self, I realized it was time to find my flow state and allow necessities and pleasures to weave into my days a bit more seamlessly. I’d heard the term passed around lightly though never really had taken the time to delve into finding a true meaning or discovering how I may find myself in flow. Based on what I had been experiencing, I could tell this stressed-out state was NOT flow state but exactly the opposite. When we are in flow things feel easy, time passes smoothly, and we are relaxed even when we are focused. Flow feels like riding a safe current in the direction you wish to go, not desperately treading water or struggling to swim upstream. Though we don’t need to be in a complete meditative state to exist in flow, we must incorporate some of the attributes of meditation to keep ourselves clear of distraction or stress. We need to be conscious and fully present to allow ourselves to be completely engaged in what we are doing. In flow, we are not preoccupied about doing something else or worried about the future. We can look up to our favorite artists and envision them creating the masterpieces which invoke feeling and meaning; John Lennon didn’t write “Imagine” while he was pressed for time, distracted and with his head in the clouds. Great art is undoubtedly a product of flow, the output of our minds in their most relaxed, creative, flowing states. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could grocery shop, clean the house, study, or pay our bills while in flow state? I believe that, with a bit of conscious practice, we can incorporate this flow state into our daily lives, making it a habitual manner in which we move about our worlds. Granted, it’s easier said than done and, like any new practice, can truly require a sense of patient determination as we gently remind our minds to shift gears back into our flow state. This does not mean, however, to bully ourselves when we find ourselves out of our flow but to extend patience and understanding while we release ourselves from the stress and anxiety we are accustomed to experiencing. Return to the ocean current analogy: when we are used to treading water with a slight sense of desperation it can be a little foreign-feeling, a little disconcerting, to let the current whisk us away. Perhaps we first need to give ourselves space to release some pent-up stress from activities that aren’t in alignment with our priorities or true self. It is time to release pressure from ourselves; flow has no pressure, but is where we naturally feel we should be. If you are someone who enjoys journaling, or you are feeling the inspiration to start, I invite you to respond to the following prompts:
 Blog Author: Emilia Wheaton Blog Editor: Kristen Kennedy Smith Our outer world has a tendency to mimic and mirror our internal world; the peace or havoc we hold inside is transferable to those around us and--on a macro scale--to the collective energy force of the world. It’s likely that you’ve felt this energy transfer before… Can you think of a time when you've walked into a room and the energy in the room was just decidedly low? No words were shared, body language wasn’t telling, but you could just tell that something was off. Or, think of an occasion where you were in a crummy mood, maybe tired from a long day at work, but your mood completely flipped when a friend’s exuberant joy overcame your grouchiness. These are instances where energy was infectious and transferable, but an accumulation of all these instances summize the collective energy of the world.
If we leave our emotional boundaries open during times of global panic and insecurity, as we are finding ourselves right now during a pandemic outbreak, we open the gates for anxiety, stress, fear, anger, grief, distrust--all the negative junk--to pass unfiltered into our hearts and minds. What if we flipped the script, and not only managed to block out all those low vibrations but to raise our collective vibration by spilling out our own positivity, optimism and peace? Using ourselves as a mirror, we can reflect bliss upon the world, transforming the current chaos to calm. In this model of ourselves as mirrors, self-care becomes care for all humanity. The peace we cultivate within ourselves becomes the peace we are able to share with our neighbors, our families, our communities, our world. Though, fear not reader, this task is not yours and yours alone; it is the responsibility of each one of us to be stewards of our inner selves in order to begin a global chain-reaction that pushes us all toward peace and contentment. What are some ways each one of us can generate and spread peace? POSITIVITY. A little dose of optimism does wonder for the soul. Every morning as I am getting out of bed I tell myself with conviction that “today is a good day to have a good day.” Initiating each day with a positive outlook, with the expectation that the day brings goodness, primes my mind and prepares me to see the best in each moment of the day. Try infusing your day with a bit more positivity; when you’re given the chance to react with negativity or positivity, choose positivity. BREATHE IN, BREATHE OUT. Breathwork has the ability to slow our stress response by changing the course of the automatic functions of our hearts, digestion, brain and immune system to a self-induced state of calm. The best part of conscious breath? It’s totally free and so so simple. We don’t need to be master meditators to simply breathe in slowly and deeply for six seconds, to hold our breath for a moment longer and to release just as slowly as we inhaled, for six seconds. Repeating this ten times over alters our body’s response to stress. We can then take matters into our own hands and begin to consciously replace panic with peace, to replace anxiety for an analysis of what can realistically be done to improve our current situation. And that brings us to our next bright idea… BE CHOOSY. As a young girl, my aunt imparted some wisdom I still hold dear. She told me “When you are worried about something, ask yourself this: Is there anything I can do to make it better or different? If yes, go for it. If not, let it go.” Okay. Yes, easier said than done, but I still practice this when I feel my anxiety flare up and thoughts of worry fill my mind. So we’re all worried about this viral pandemic, right? Can we fix it? Can we rewind history and quarantine the very first case before it spread to the masses? Nope. Let what cannot be changed go and begin focusing on what practical things you can do. Once you’ve taken those actions to follow public health recommendations and to extend care for your loved ones, consider your job well done and move on to release any heavy anxieties. KINDNESS. Now, it’s my own opinion that kindness really can improve just about any situation. Offering kindness in whatever ways you best know how, is an infectious energy transfer that can shift the moods of anyone we come in contact with. Hold the door open, give a compliment, wave at people on the street, give your seat up for a woman with children, send your mom a nice text, make your partner coffee, listen, smile. Even if the kindness goes unnoticed, our hearts are fuller for having consciously chosen kindness. Filling our own hearts allows the potential of filling the hearts of others. Using these tools, as well as any other feel-good practices you live by contributes to living consciously and giving due attention to our internal peace will in turn foster a sense of collective peace. With a positive outlook, intentional breathing, kindness, and a practice of distinguishing between what is within our control and what remains outside our means, we are able to cultivate and spread high vibrations all around. Put in the work for yourself and for our global energy circuits. We need your drop in the ocean. It does not go unnoticed.  Blog Author: Emilia Wheaton Blog Editor: Kristen Kennedy Smith What does it feel like to feel a sense of empowerment?
Bring your imagination to a massively attended, yet intimate performance of your favorite musician. You feel the collective excitement; the base vibration syncs to your steady, strong heartbeat; you are hyper focused and fully present in the magic happening around you; the lights draw your eyes in to your idol pouring their soul out through the tips of their fingers stroking their instrument and their light is audible in their voice; your senses are simultaneously fixated on the explosion of stimulus of the performance and on your body’s hyper-sensitive perception of the whole spectacle. Your most-trusted friend reaches from within her own bubble of mesmerization and breaks you from your trance...she taps you on your shoulder and, without hesitation, you support yourself on a pair of shoulders and you begin floating. You are crowd surfing. To me, this sensation of crowd surfing is the closest analogy to be made for feeling dramatically empowered. If you’ve never crowd surfed--I urge you to take the opportunity, should it present itself--you can imagine the paradox of instability as you surf outside your comfort zone and the blissful surrender of trust you place in the myriad of hands that support your safe voyage through the crowd. You independently took the spontaneous risk to jump into the hands of strangers, though those strangers’ hands came through for you out of a basal human sense of right when confronted with the responsibility of supporting another fellow human. This is at the base of empowerment; to feel empowered is to feel a deep trust in ourselves, in our environment, in our support systems, and at a certain level, a trust in fate that all will be well and as we wish it to be. This firm trust is the basis in which we can step outside our comfort zone, to feel empowered to take a risk, to attempt a far-reaching goal. Reaching a sense of empowerment, as an individual, requires some help from others, from our society, and from ourselves. Empowering another is a virtuous and entirely cost-free service we can offer to others. Much like kindness or respect, we do not lose something of our own to lift up those around us. On a micro level, a mother may empower her shy young daughter to ask the store-clerk a question by encouraging her to speak for herself in small, safe situations. Meanwhile, empowerment on the macro level requires social change and the virtuous devotion of lawmakers to level the playing field and put in place little “boosts” for groups that do not enjoy equity amongst those most powerful of our society. Empowering another may be as simple as offering a genuine compliment of that person’s strengths or abilities or of instilling a sense of trust that all will be well. A certain sense of confidence must be achieved in order for one to feel empowered toward achieving a goal. Reflect on a time YOU felt deeply empowered: What was your goal? Why did you feel capable of pursuing that goal? How did you talk yourself up in your head? Who around you helped you feel powerful? What systemic social attributes worked in your favor to urge you just a little closer toward completing your goal? Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could harness this empowerment each time we feel weak or unsure? The truth is, WE CAN. Employ the strategies you use to lift yourself up, to boost your confidence, to expand your vision just over the hill of our comfort zone, and then offer those around you these same empowering gestures. Can you be a cheerleader for yourself, for your best friend, for your mother, for your coworker, for your community, for our world? Yup. You can. Prop yourself up on a pair of shoulders and let yourself surf. When you reach solid ground again, take a huge deep breath and revel in the thrill for a moment, then offer the same gift to those around you. Let empowerment be a circle that feeds you and allows you to feed others. Rock on with your bad self, Emilia |
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