Create a Healing Place

What is a Healing Place?

To me a healing place is somewhere you can go to take time out. A place of quite or soothing music. A place you can be on your own. A place that is nurturing to the body, mind and spirit.

I am fortunate, my healing place is the beach. I have a beautiful beach down the road which except during holiday season is deserted. I walk down on the white sand and it massages my feet, the wind gently blows my hair as the suns rays warm my skin. I look out across the vast ocean and know that all is well in the world. I am at peace.

Surviving Christmas

Hi,

I wanted to introduce you all to Kimberley.
She runs the Centre for Authentic Self Development.

If you are like me, you would like to be your authentic self always, but often spending time with family over the holiday season makes that seem impossible. So often we try to be who our families want us to be, or what we percieve they want us to be, or we fall into the age old patterns that were part of our growing up.

These are some of the tips Kimberley emailed me to coping with the holiday season.
1. Take time to remember why your celebrating in the first place. (It would be very lonely if family weren't there)

Gaze at the Moon

I have reacently heard that a good way to inprove the health of your eyes is to stare at the moon. Who would have thought moon gazing is actually good for you. Apparently if you gaze at the moon for 5 mins each night it will improve the health of your eyes. It is also recommended as helpful for floaters in your eyes.

20% off for Christmas

Christmas gifts for all ages

Christmas is nearly here and people are finishing their Christmas shp. Ususaly it's the hard to buy for that are left till last. I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day and they had a young man, 25, on and he was saying that as he lived in a unit, he didn't have room for lots of stuff and it was difficult to know what to do with things people gave him. I was interested to hear this as it was also a comment I had heard from a lot of people in the older demographic who had downsized, so what do you get them????
Some ideas that came out of the discussion were

• Art - it could be hung on the wall and was something good to remember people by.
• Experiences - Something that they could do that they might not otherwise think of or have the funds for.
• Dining out vouchers - giving them time they could spend with their loved one.

One thing that a couple had received was a weekend away, nice gift, but out of the price range of a lot of people. He said it was great to get in touch with nature and have some time to de-stress, which is fantastic if you can manage the time off. But what do you do for those you know can't get time off or can't leave the kids, how can you give them a gift that will help them?

One answer is "Healing Art". Art that goes on the wall, so doesn't take up floor space and that gives them the healing gift of nature without them having to even leave home.

Studies have shown that spending time looking at images of nature helps you to de-stress and gives you a greater sense of community, so you are then more likely to make time for your family and friends whereas otherwise it may not have been a priority.

So if you are interested in experiences I would recommend Red Balloon or if you would like Healing Art then check out Red Bubble.

My site on Red Bubble is http://juliakharwood.redbubble.com so you can check out my healing art, but there are also lots of other great artists on there too. They also sell gift vouchers.

Remember at the end of it all if you are feeling stressed and worn out, give yourself a gift by allowing yourself some time out in nature, even if its sitting outside with a cuppa or if your stuck in the office, have a look at some nature images on your computer and allow nature to work her magic!!!

Wellness Continued

This is part two of Wellness. To recap;

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

Step 4 follows on from number 3.
Increase self esteem, self worth, optimism and confidence. As we decrease depression & self doubt we also increase self worth and optimism.
What is self Esteem?
Your self-esteem is the way you look at yourself. If you have good self-esteem it means that you like yourself and you believe that you are as 'OK' as everyone else.

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.