Stepping Into Your Wellness Journey

My journey of Yoga and her sister science of Ayurveda has been a beautiful expansion of wellness in my life. But not always an easy road. Several years ago I was studying a course in positive thinking, I was so frustrated by how difficult it was for me. I had this conversation with myself "I do not have enough time in my day to do all this positive thinking!" Wait a second... "If there isn't mental time for positive thoughts what AM I spending all my mental time doing?" This ah-ha moment pushed me to a new place in my wellness journey as I began to look at how I spent my days, thoughts and emotional energy. 

There are many things that we do in the same manner everyday. How you drink your coffee, walk your dog, drive your kids to school, the thoughts you think, the way you feel about your life.  Remember the first time you drove to your home or office? You followed directions or a gps, you focused, maybe made a wrong turn. Now you can get there with out even thinking, maybe sometimes it feels as if you just blinked and arrived. This is an incredible example of the power of the brain and the way that neural pathways work. The more often a thought travels through the brain the faster and easier it goes, the more times you complete an action the more your neural network wires along that pathway making that action increasingly automatic. This is excellent for conquering life's more mundane tasks of driving to work or putting away the dishes and was an essential survival skill for remembering herd migration paths or gathering edible plants; but not so helpful if we have created pathways of negative or defeatist thoughts. Many of the actions in our life become mindless habits, you arrive to work with out remembering the drive, did you lock the door, turn off the coffee? you don't recall. Our own brain is often the biggest obstacle when we want to make shifts in our lifestyle. The choices we have made before, whether they are unhealthy habits, negative thinking, mindless time wasting activities, even our emotional relationships can be habitual. So we take a vacation, have a getaway, go for spa day to disrupt the typical patterns, but as you've probably noticed the effects wear off quickly when you get back into your regular routine. What's possible is to live your spa day as your spa lifestyle, to shift your mind and by extension your habits to healthful positive state.

If you have decided to shift your life in the direction of wellness, maybe recently or you've been on the path for a while, its an excellent practice to look at all the daily habits you've created. Where are all the spaces in your day that run on auto pilot? Make a list. Once we identify the spaces that are ready for a shift we can gradually begin to exchange those habits for wellness rituals. Remove the mindlessness and replace it with mindful, healthful and positive actions: your everyday rituals. After all how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.