The recent article by NPR, Flattening The 'Mummy Tummy' With 1 Exercise, 10 Minutes A Day, starts off with a sensational, grabbing title. A click bait title that we wouldn't expect from a trusted news source like NPR. But it certainly got your attention, especially if you recently had a baby and now are feeling a little weak around the core. And since this is NPR this should be safer than something random you pull off the internet, right? Well, yes and no.
With addiction, deep fractures are drawn between our mind and our body, our needs and our habits, our emotions and our actions, and in the relationships that we have to ourselves and to others. Yoga, on the other hand, is connection.
It's a great time to pay attention to how stress is affecting you. Common stressors include work, family, money, children, illness and more. Stress can impact both your body and your mind causing symptoms such as muscular pain, irritability, fatigue, and headaches. Here's how we can help...
According to CDC data, 32% of women delivering a baby did so via C-section in 2015. Some of these are elective (planned) & others unplanned or emergent. If you are one of the 32%, what can you expect following a C-section?
Do you feel like your insurance coverage gets more confusing each year? That’s probably because it does! It seems like each year there is another rule or exception to your plan but the cost keeps going up. Here at Jade, we are often asked, “how much will this cost?” The answer isn’t as easy at it seems.
The start of the new year is full of energy and resolve to get into healthier habits. The problem with new year’s resolutions is that there is a tendency to make big declarations and huge commitments that can be unrealistic. At Jade, we encourage you to channel the momentum in the air instead to recommit to yourself, and join us in an effort to be more present.
After the end of Daylight Savings Time, most of us are well aware that we have entered a quieter time of year. In Chinese medicine, the winter is considered to be a more yin time. Every day has a balance of yin and yang, but in the winter, yin is more prominent. Yin is dark, nutritive, and restful, while yang is light, energetic, and active. As the winter is more yin in general, it calls for a calmer lifestyle.
Headaches are a pain, literally and figuratively. They sneak up on you, slowly making you crankier and crankier, ruining your day. Headaches are attributed to many different causes; often we say “I’m stressed” or “I need to drink more water” or even “I didn’t get enough sleep.” But did you know many headaches can be tied to our posture and muscle tightness in our neck?
Recent research on stress physiology supports the long standing notion that living “out of balance” or under the long-term influence of stress changes our chemical composition. These changes increase the occurrence of inflammation triggering proteins in the blood and generating markers that MDs see as pathogenic like LDLs (a.k.a. bad cholesterol).
In our modern lives it seems that stress is unavoidable. A friend recently called this internal chatter her “unwelcome roommate”. This unwelcome roommate decided to move right on in and take over your mental space without asking and without being considerate of how you’ve been living. This roommate makes judgments, thrives on emotions, makes demands and imposes opinion. Sound familiar?
Sources of stress can appear endless. Our new normal state of always being available and “on-call” is stressful, but leave your phone at home and the mind goes crazy with what it could be missing or that friends, family and even work can get worried that they can’t get in touch with you right away. The truth is, stress is unavoidable.
Many of us look forward to those warm summer months all year long. Vacations and getaways, outdoors activities and warm summer nights....ah yes, summer is here. It is important, however, to keep our bodies balanced when the heat rises and become aware of the internal signs our body transmits when it is out of balance.
Recently I found myself in a space where my life had become much more chaotic. Work, personal and family life were all taking up a lot of time. Don't get me wrong, none of these individual things were negative, but I failed to create a balance with them. Line this up with the changing of the season and I was feeling a little out of sorts. Oh, and did I mention I hadn't practiced yoga in two weeks? Ugh, yes, it's true. As a teacher this isn't an easy thing to admit, but, it is honest. All of these things combined brought out my less-then-stellar personality traits that emerge when I'm out of balance:
It is OK to feel this way, after all, it's a part of me. However, it is not OK to dwell in them. It is our duty to ourselves and those around us to notice when we feel these things and check in and ask ourselves: "Am I doing the things I love that balance and ground me?". If the answer is "No", then it's time to create some space. We all have our reasons (or excuses) for losing touch with our yoga practice and sometimes getting back to it can be daunting, but let me remind you right now why you should make space for a yoga class today:
Lastly, surround yourselves with people that know (and love) that you practice yoga and can check in with you when they notice you are out of balance. During this dreaded yoga-less space that I had, my boyfriend looked at me and reminded me that I needed to prioritize my practice and schedule it in to my day. 2 weeks later I feel back to normal - grounded and focused. If you look at my schedule, I have blocked out time to practice every week that I'm not allowed to change. So, find a loved one or friend to have your chaturanga-ripped-yoga-back to bring you back to your mat when they notice you've fallen off the namaste wagon and I'll see you on that mat!
Bonus: Here is a Spring Cleaning yoga sequence you can do at home to tie you over until you make it to class:
Modern technology has created a lot of flexibility in workspaces. The traditional 9-5 is morphing, with more people working remotely from wherever they are. That might mean creating space at home or having a moveable setup for use in a coffee shop or conference room. Being fluid with workspaces helps people escape the problem of being stuck in a cubicle all day, but it has downsides too.
It means your “office” may be anything from a couch to an Uber. Plus, the line between work and home is becoming blurry. When we used to be able to power down at the end of the day, we now have 24-hour access to emails and texts, and often use phones and tablets for our entertainment well into the night.
If you answer is “not great,” you aren’t alone. An increase in driving, computer work, and phone use is upping the daily physical stress for a lot of us. As an acupuncturist, I see patients with a variety of issues, but one part of the body that continually frustrates people is their tight neck. Our physical therapists see this a lot too. We even joke that “text neck” is becoming an epidemic.
Symptoms mentioned include tension and discomfort, pops and cracks in the spine, head-forward posture, knots, and muscle spasms. The neck is a common storage place for mental and emotional strain: Some of us literally wear our stress with our shoulders creeping closer to our ears as energy demands mount.
Step one is to be mindful about how we hold ourselves. Step two is integrating positive habits to minimize the damage.
In terms of acupuncture, any kind of pain is considered stagnation, or blockage, in the free flow of blood and energy through the body. Solving pain conditions requires unblocking “stuck” regions of the body and keeping it unblocked. To do that, we insert small needles into the affected area, unblocking the channels and promoting relaxation of muscles, improved blood flow, and reduction of inflammation, all easing the pain.
