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

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Sincèrement, et bonne santé!

Patricia