Wellness

Wellness is the pursuit of the best health possible through fit body, balanced mind and peaceful spirit.

• Increase self esteem, self worth, optimism and confidence
• Help forget your own physical or emotional pain
• Help decrease stress and acts as a stress release
• Improve immune response
• Decrease feelings of depression and self doubt
• Increase sense of balance and over all well being

Whoa! I hear you exclaim, that's a pretty tall order.
Lets break it down into more manageable pieces.

I'm going to change the order a bit here too.

Firstly, I think that until we can decrease the stress in our lives and find something that works as a stress release for us we are unable to focus on the other things as it all becomes too overwhelming and just another list of things we can't quite find time to get to.

So lets look at stress.
What is it?
Anything that poses a challenge or a threat to our well-being is a stress.
Stress is your body's way of responding to any kind of demand. Now we need to understand there is good stress as well as bad.
Our bodies react by releasing chemicals into the blood when there is a new demand on it.
These chemicals either give us more energy and strength, which can be a good thing if their stress is caused by physical danger, or a bad thing, if their stress is in response to something emotional and there is no outlet for this extra energy and strength.
So basically good stress is when we have a demand on us and our body produces the chemicals to help us deal with this demand. A bad stress is when we peceive a demand and the chemicals are released, but we have no way of using these chemicals and so they build up in our system.
An example of bad stress is worrying. We think something bad 'might' happen and so our body releases chemicals to help us deal with the actual situation, but it hasn't 'actually' happened, we have just imagined it might happen, and so there is nowhere for these chemicals to go and so our body gets stressed.
Some common stresses today are survival stress, internal stress, enviromental stress & work stress. To read more about these go to http://www.mtstcil.org/skills/stress-definition-1.html

People under large amounts of stress can become tired, sick, and unable to concentrate or think clearly. Sometimes, they even suffer mental breakdowns.

We need to find ways to release this stress.

Great tips for looking good in family photos

"Knowing how to take a fabulous photo will be the difference between great memories and memories where you wish you were cropped out of the frame," says image consultant and author Clare Maxfield ( www.claremaxfield.com.au). Put her tips into action this Christmas.

For the face:

• Stick your tongue to the roof of your mouth as you smile. It reduces the double-chin effect.

• Keep your chin down for a flattering line. Tilting your head up in excitement puts you at risk of nostril-cam.

• Say cheese! This is not as silly as it sounds. It opens your mouth into a natural smile. If you don’t want to be in the photo, get out!

There are lots more tips in the full article.
To read more click on the link in the article header.

Enjoy:)

All human pain is caused by words...

....as is all joy according to a Yogic sage.
"We create words to define our experiences and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure....I'm lonely...I'm a failure....I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while , then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words." This is from Eat, Pray,Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

When I read this I thought YES!!! This is so true. but if we stop talking our thoughts take over for us with more words and often these are more compelling as we can hear them more clearly when we aren't talking. This is one of the reasons people try to stay busy as much as possible, they are trying to escape this incessant thoughts or words.

But the only way to stop these incessant thoughts is to listen to them and refute them. Give them your full atttention for a few minutes and then senf them away. They remind me of small children when Mum is talking with friends, they tug on mum's dress going "Mun, mum, mum, mum,..." over and over again until Mum gives them a moment of her undivided attention, addresses what they need and sends them off to play. We need to do this with our thoughts.

1. Stop and listen to them
2. Address them and the issues. ie I'm a failure... Am I really? Is EVERYTHING I do a failure?
3. Say to the thought, NO!~I may fail at some things, but so does everyone, it's part of being human. I am okay!
4. Send them on their way. ie Ok I've heard you now & we know you are exagerating so off you go.

To do this we need to stop every now and then and be quite and still firstly to hear our thoughts and then to deal with them.

If we do this we will find our words start to bring us joy instead of pain.

Often finding time and a place for quite reflection is hard so if you want to set up a healing or quite place look at my "Healing Art" images and add one to your room so that you can sit and contemplate a beautiful nature scene while you give time to your thoughts and dealing with them.

If you want to know more please leave a comment or contact me.

Special Moments

We all have special moments and special occassions in our lives that we like to remember, be they wedding anniversarys, birthdays or something else. We also like to help others celebrate and remember these special times and so I have decided to start a special service whereby I can add writing of your choice to an image.
You choose an image you like or you think the person you are buying for would like and then tell me what you would like written on the image. It can be as simple as "Celebrating the wedding of ..... and..... on the xX/xx/xxxx." Or it can be a poem or words of meaning to you or them. Often people chose one of the sunset images for this but any image can be used. I can still organize this in time for Christmas if you would like it as a gift.
Please email me details of what you would like on image & I will do it at no extra cost.
My email is jules@juliaharwood.com
Looking forward to hearing from you.

What's your word?

I am currently reading "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert and I found a particular passage got me thinking. In it her Italian friend says we each have a word that describes who we are in our life at the moment.
Let me start with an excerpt from the book.
"Don't you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn - what is the word of the street." If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever the majority thought might be - that is the word of the city. And if your personal word doesn't match that of the city, then you really don't belong there.
It went on to say Rome's word is "Sex", The Vatican's word is "Power", New York's "achieve", Los Angeles is "Succeed"
So what is your word?

Card Gnome - Pink roses Wedding card greeting card

Card Gnome - Pink roses Wedding card greeting card

20% off all white tees for Christmas!!

Need a gift for Christmas, 20% off all white apparel. Get in quick to get delivery for Chrissy.