Wonders from 2013 - winter experience at Lake Superior

Each and every season is my favourite.  We are very fortunate in Ontario to have contrasted seasons. It's cold in the winter, but you know it's going to be really hot in the summer.  Snowing today? It's likely going to be sunny tomorrow, or the day after.  That's what I recently experienced in Northern Ontario.  It was -25 C, every thing was white, frozen and beautiful.   The sky was big - something difficult to explain: when you come from Europe, the sky feels bigger here.  The ice was shining, snow was calming, and the air rejuvenating.  We flew to Thunder Bay and did day trips and short snow shoe hikes, then back into a comfortable hotel.  La belle vie, quoi!  Have a look!  Wishing you a happy happy 2014! Bonne année, et bonne santé!

To see more pictures from this album, click here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/106620807809567446689/albums/5960791290559619489

Thursday off but on to many good things

It’s my day off of the clinic, but on to many good things.  Pilates in the morning with kwpilates.com.  Awesome way to start the day!  I’m always learning subtle ways to move and feel my body.  Today the sitting cross-legged, spine straight & elongated, arms open as a T and pushing with hands as if against walls felt really good for my fingers.  I never thought my hands would become such an important aspect of all I do.  A few errands and I am off to my monthly osteopathy treatment.  Then back home, giving Shiatsu to my dear friend whose sister is in palliative care.  And a couple more Shiatsu treatments to two siblings, 23 and 19 year-old.  When the sister was 16, she was getting very depleted by a serious Crohn’s issue, and we started regular Shiatsu back then.  Wow, it's been three years already!  Things are much better and she de-stresses bi-weekly with Shiatsu.  And finally I went to my teacher’s Tai-Chi class.  Semi-private lesson on the new form I am learning.  Awesome way to end the day!

A nice Wednesday

Yesterday was a typical Wednesday. At the clinic. A man thanked me for his wife. Her debilitating digestive symptoms and anxiety subsided after Shiatsu. She was finally able to enjoy a good night sleep. For him, walking has improved significantly, and he sleeps now (leg pain was keeping him awake). After getting twice a week of forceful low back adjustments for sciatica elsewhere, a gentle route with a combination of Acupuncture and Shiatsu finally made him feel better, focusing on his piriformis muscle, IT band and sacroiliac joint.  His energy is so much better. Then a 26 year old who overdid it at the gym. Her high school job was in a funeral home, then she became a funeral home director. Now she is a fire fighter. Very humbling for me. At her age I was far from having the maturity and people’s awareness required in such positions. A lady in her seventeen's jumped all over the table when I told her I passed my exam for the acupuncture college. I am glad we were actually not doing acupuncture that day! Teaching Tai-Chi that evening. Awesome group, mid thirties to mid eighties. We’re starting nice spine and body loosening QiGong. After a couple of years of practice, they’re much more flexible and enjoy better coordination and balance. Neat!

Geared for the Climb of Life

So far in this series, I’ve shared these climbing lessons:

·      Plan your breaks

·      Allow some falls - you can count on your safety rope

Today I’d like to speak about two more topics

• good climbing practices aka preventative care
• falling with a good rope aka fall-back scenarios

Day after day, I am experiencing how being a regular Tai-Chi practitioner immensely contributes to my prevention and wellness program. I do a number of things right, and a few poorly.

I’ll start with the poorly done ones – precisely the places where I believe Tai-Chi is my safety rope, and makes up for my shortcomings.

From old wisdom, including my practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), I know that I should go to bed by 10 pm.  But I don’t.  TCM says you should get 7 - 8 hours of sleep a night. I usually don’t. I am chronically sleep-deprived. Though I binge on sleeping during week-ends and vacation, TCM makes it clear that you need good quality sleep every night, and you can’t “make up for it another time.” Let’s just say I have plenty of room for improvement in this area.

Luckily, I still have tons of energy, and I rarely get colds (touch wood.) On that note though, I am currently getting over a nasty one, my first bad cold in three years. I wondered what temporarily weakened my immune defence and could find no obvious connection. Wait a minute, actually a few days before the cold started I learnt something that really moved me and made me quite sad (I wrote  about it, http://15min2health.blogspot.ca/2013/02/no-ordinary-day.html).  In TCM, immunity comes from the Lungs, and the emotion affecting the Lungs is sadness. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Still, on average, it’s digestion that is my weak spot (some might see that as a positive, as it keeps me from gaining weight), but my diet is well-tuned to my health and energy needs.

Most important of all - and yes, TCM together with modern neurosciences agree this is very important - I delightfully enjoy life!

The question is, what should your health safety rope look like?

To be honest…I don’t know.

In TCM, we customize lifestyle and diet to a person’s type, constitution, and health condition. In Tai-Chi, everyone moves and stands differently depending on their temperament and body type. But in both TCM and Tai-Chi, there are inner principles that provide wise guidelines and are amazing for their applicability and effectiveness in everyday life.

I tried to think of my inner principles, the ones that define who I am and what I do.  Beyond the details of a diet or exercise regimen, what are my core life guidelines?

This is what I came up with. Here is my life in ten keywords:

Intention, loving, peaceful, natural, nurturing, laughing, warming, resting, moving, learning. And last but not least, there is even an eleventh keyword: breathing! (Eleven was my lucky number when I played basket-ball as a teen).

Puzzled?

At this point our rock climbing story is over, as I will be posting a sequel on the above keywords and other stories. But I’ll be moving my writing over to my blog. If you’d like to get a notice as to when I’m posting new writing, please subscribe to my blog at http://15min2health.blogspot.ca

Or find me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/patricia.beretta.1

If, however, you would like to continue receiving my writing in email format, let me know and only then will I send you more emails, avec grand plaisir!

Sincèrement, et bonne santé!

Patricia

Life’s Safety Rope

Having a good rope and using it properly is something you do when you climb.

Not because you sign a disclaimer at the climbing gym. Not because a regulation says you should.  But because it’s your life.

Obviously,  you want to act safely, whether climbing or just living your daily life. I bet you always fasten your seat belt before driving, even if your schedule is terribly busy, or you’re going through a crisis, or even if you are so depressed that life becomes flavourless.  It’s second nature to buckle up when you get in the car, and similarly, you tie that rope properly before climbing.

Climbers use ropes for a reason: when it gets too hard, they have something to fall back on. In French,  we say “prendre un vol” rather than “fall”.  “Prendre un vol” translates as “take a fly”. It’s something like the English “go flying”. In one sense, it looks like you’ve lost control. But if you look at the face of the climbing champion in this video, you’ll see a big smile at the moment of “son vol”. The sensation can be exhilarating, a feeling of complete freedom.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93vLLh5rAiM, starting on the video counter at 1:12:00. His flying moment comes at 1:16:40. )

Did you notice in that spectacular climb how many times he rests? When he stops moving forward, even when he hangs face down, he is resting his arm muscles.

The rope is there, making a fall look like flying. The same goes with health.

The thing is, we tend to forget that we have this safety back-up. So we often follow poor health practices in our daily life, not tying the rope well or not bothering to invest in a good quality rope.  Falling from poor health practices is generally a slow-motion process. So slow, in fact, that we may fool ourselves into believing we can ignore it.

Yet life goes on, one climb at a time. And it can be so much fun! Next time I’ll speak about health safety practices, the ones we should all prepare for our own care.

Stay tuned - we are actually getting to the top of this climbing story!

Sincèrement, et bonne santé!

Patricia