holistic

Holistic Remedies to Say “So Long” to Tension Headaches

Originally published on YogaToday.com.

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Tension headaches getting in the way of your day?

Let’s hone in on the root cause to make it go away. We’ve all experienced that tinge of a headache coming on mid-afternoon while working on a deadline, when the baby is crying, or when our phones are endlessly buzzing. Taking a few minutes to identify the source can solve this riddle in a holistic way.

Try this quick yoga class designed specifically to relieve and prevent tension headaches! Your first two weeks are always free on YogaToday.

Lifestyle Choices

1. Hydrate with quality water. Dehydration is often the root cause of headaches. Surveys show that 60-75% of Americans do not drink enough water. Learn to love water.

2. Movement. Exercise, dance, pilates, or yoga. Do what you love to release endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers.

3. Sleep. Quality sleep is the key to life. Stay away from digital devices for at least 30 minutes before bedtime. Create a cool dark room. Add a sleep mask and ear plugs to successfully go down for the night.

4. Keep caffeine to a minimum. Everyone is different. Find a sweet spot that works. Avoid it after mid-day. Be sure to read labels and know that options such as green tea also contain caffeine. Still craving a warm cuppa in the morning? Try a pretty turmeric latte instead: turmeric has been known to alleviate inflammation and headaches.

5. Eat your greens. Tension headaches may fool us into reaching for a cheeseburger because a) we may think we are hungry when we simply need to hydrate, and 2) because “stress-eating” is a thing! Reach for greens instead. They are high in folate as well as magnesium-rich, which at suggested levels in the body have both been shown to reduce symptoms such as headaches.

Keep Stress in Check

1. Are your shoulders reaching for your ears? This is a sure sign of stress. This tension in the neck and shoulders can lead to headaches.  Try this 15-minute Neck Release class with Mona Godfrey. This is a perfect practice to incorporate into the workday while seated at a desk.

2. Drop into one minute of conscious breath. The 4-7-8 Breath, also known as the Relaxing Breath, taught by Dr. Andrew Weil is a great go-to. Then take it to the next level with a pranayama class (yogic breathing technique) to decrease overall stress and anxiety as well as those pesky headaches.

3. Commit to a digital detox 1x per week. Let’s be honest. Our phones ultimately stress us out whether alerting us to endless emails or social media hits. Try a 12- hour detox during waking hours one day per week such as 8 a.m – 8 p.m. on Sundays. Let your nerves chill out.

Self-Care

Long hot Epson salt baths are beautiful, but time-wise, not always realistic for our modern day lifestyles, right? Schedule one for the weekend, but otherwise, every day self-care looks a lot more like the following:

1. Take ten minutes before starting the day. Salute the sun rising with this Classical Surya Namaskar yoga class to move forward in a fresh, empowered and relaxed way.

2. Set healthy boundaries. Saying “yes” to every request from others is a hard habit to break. Learning not to over-schedule our days is a vital component of self-care.

3. Discipline creates freedom. Take a few minutes toward the end of the day to schedule out the following day. Set an alert in your calendar. A little structure goes a long way toward taking care of needs, so that we can better take care of everything else. These few minutes of discipline can likely free up precious moments that add up to a lot more fun.

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Three Yoga Poses to Mitigate Tension Headaches by Relaxing the Neck and Shoulders

Experiment with these yoga poses to find relief today.

1. Balasana • Child’s Pose

Discover a few variations in this two-minute instruction and use the one that feels most supportive. Dropping the chin slightly toward the chest offers a gentle stretch for the back of the neck.

2. Simple Seated Twist

This pose relieves tightness in the back by rotating the torso. It includes the option of a gentle neck stretch.

Sit in a cross-legged position. Use blankets beneath the knees for support if needed so that the lower back can lengthen, sitting up tall. Inhale and elongate the spine, including all the way up through the crown of the head. Shoulders stay neutral, down away from the ears. Exhale and twist to the right from the navel up, placing the right hand behind the right thigh while the left remains in front. If it’s ok on the neck, gently look over the right shoulder. Repeat on the left side.

3. Adho Mukha Svanasana • Downward Facing Dog Pose

Deeply stretch the back, shoulders neck, (and legs) as Adi Amar lends her expertise in maximizing this pose. This pose allows for full body tension release.

The key is to find a daily combination of small steps offered above that suits our daily routine. Start with one. Commit to that one step for the next two weeks. Calendar it into your day. Every two weeks add in a new step. This might look like adding a second serving of greens to one meal every day or one-minute of conscious breathing. This way, each step eventually becomes a habit. Soon you are on your way to naturally relieving tension headaches, feeling more fully expressed throughout each day.

Try this quick yoga class designed specifically to relieve and prevent tension headaches! Your first two weeks are always free on YogaToday.

Water is Life III

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As a life long outdoor adventurer, I continually zoom in further on the environment and our intimate connections with the elements - earth, air, fire, water.

But the microscope must also be able to zoom out to see and understand the scope of the big picture. Everything is connected. 

When we begin to pay attention to the details of our lives, breathing deep into the unfamiliar cavities of our physical, mental and emotional realms, we can begin to see that the veil is thin and all realms of our health and well-being are inextricably linked.

This third installment of Water is Life focuses on freedom. 

The people living in Cancer Alley deserve freedom from what they are experiencing. The people living at Standing Rock deserve the same freedom. The people now fighting for their clean waters and clean lands in Canada deserve their freedom, too. 

This is our birthright.

No human should have clean air, clean water, clean soil, or clean food stripped from life. When these basic elements are threatened, we are deprived of our physical, mental and emotional freedom. Without these basics components being clean, it is impossible to have strong capable bodies, clear minds, and thoroughly processed emotions. All of these elements are connected. This is holistic health.

Why Water?

Water is a reoccurring theme. It keeps reappearing, so I keep paying attention. In seeking solutions to solve problems, I had to return to the water to become whole again. With this learning, I returned to myself. Without returning to the self, we are unable to support and serve others.

The great outdoors became my passion once I escaped the hot, humid, inland, muggy, buggy lands of South Louisiana. I loved the ocean when we were lucky enough to make an annual trip to the Gulf or Atlantic coasts of Florida. But where I grew up there was no ocean in sight. We once tried to go directly south to the Louisiana coast. As kids, much to our dismay, there were no squeaky-clean white sandy beaches with beautiful blue-green ocean waters.

Hardly. The nature of the mouth of the Mississippi River, laden with chemical plants, does not offer clean air, water or soil.

Moving to Wyoming opened my eyes to the pristine beauty that exists in lesser known parts of my own country. Living, breathing and experiencing other lands and cultures on an intimate basis has allowed new-to-me elements to become permanently woven into my physical and psychological fabric. A trip is a super introduction. Living in different places long term allows for integration.

Living at the ocean in Southern California, I tapped into a more familiar realm. Reclaiming the feminine left behind in the alpha-driven mountains was something I had no idea I needed. When the masculine was the driver to make things happen, achieve, succeed, and survive for so long, the feminine was all but forgotten. 

This constant lean into the masculine eventually wreaked havoc on my personal health and well being. The ocean, over time, taught me something I had never deeply learned in the first place - to receive. That one is still a challenge as a self-made individual. Sometimes I still have to force myself to receive a compliment or any gift, and say thank you with zero guilt. 

The ocean also retaught me to embrace trusting my intuition as I did at 22. Trust my gut. Trust the “knowing” of my right-brain dominant, creative, intuitive, and expressive self. While smashed in today's left-brain dominant modern society, she occasionally peeked her head above ground moving me to where I needed to be with all the ease and grace she could muster. Our world is thankfully now beginning to see the itsy bitsy tiny beginnings of reclaiming the feminine. I cannot wait to see what happens as 2019 continues to unfold.

Physical Realm

We have nothing without what Mother Earth naturally provides. Organic goodness, rich in the exact medicines we need, both internally and externally.

As we love our birthplaces and remain grateful for all they gave to us, home is now multiple places. With this experience, we gain greater understanding of the contrast, the pluses, the minuses, and begin to further embrace that there is no one "right" way. With this beginner mindset in place, we become more open, we learn, we thrive.

Tapping into different physical realms gave way to tapping into deeper emotional realms.

Emotional Realm

While I love where I was born, I felt suffocated by way too many expectations regarding how to BE. I felt oppressed by societal norms. I was judged and now twice disowned for not following most of the rules and regs. I couldn’t breathe within the suffocating confines of religion. I did not agree with the constant criticism of others. I could not stand the blatant patriarchal ways that continue to dominate within work and life. As a female, I was asked to be quiet, be good, behave, be nice, set good examples, smile, and obey. Oh wait… Don’t disappear, but don’t shine too bright either. Beyond confused by constant contradictions offered as to how to be seen and heard, it's a wonder any of us made our own way in the world. And, respect. How the f*ck to kindly ask for, much less command, some respect? Without being labeled as “crazy” or a “total bitch”. Yep, we’ve all heard it all. 

This truly insane conditioning lives deep in our bones and deep in our cells. It is ancestral. Generations of living in submission, lowering our voices, behaving as expected, following the rules. 

Don't forget to smile. 

Patterns

Patterns create pathways. Within our minds, actual neural pathways. 

These patterns guide our thoughts. 

Thoughts trigger our choices.

…which trigger our behaviors

…which trigger our experiences

…which release emotional responses

Emotional responses that we become addicted to whether positive or negative.

Another way of creating an understanding of this phenomenon is rooted in the psychology of yoga.

Samskaras. Subtle impressions of past actions. 

The intention behind these actions that we perform with full awareness are the ones that make the greatest impressions on our minds. 

It is the intention behind that action that gives power to that action. 

Essentially, samskaras are the impression or impact of the action we take with full awareness of its goals. Each time we repeat the action, it leaves an impression in our minds. With repetition of the action, the impression becomes stronger until the action becomes a habit. Once a habit, it is not something you remain consciously aware of as it is now a pattern, a new neural pathway created within the mind. You no longer have to set an intention or goal around it. It's now a part of your being, part of what you do, part of who you are.

When "habit patterns" become so ingrained that our body chemistry is altered, they are called "addictions" - positive or negative. At this point, we have no recollection of the beginnings of the patterns. Our mental world is fully under the influence of these impressions on our mind, inextricably woven into our personalities and how we perceive the world.

Positive or negative, we humans move towards what is familiar, what is ingrained, those old familiar patterns, what we were raised with rather than something that is new and unknown.

SO...

Mental Realm

If we want to create a future that’s different from what already exists, we have to step into the unknown. We must try something new. We must shift and change our thoughts.

We have 70,000 thoughts every single day and 90% of them are the exact same thoughts we had the day prior.

So how do we change our thoughts?

We find new ways to pay attention to our thoughts.

We slow down.

We pay attention to the breath .

We link breath with movement.

We stop. We sit still.

We unplug.

We pay attention.

We notice.

We notice the thoughts.

We notice whether a thought is positive or negative.

We shift the thought toward positive.

Over and over.

A practice.

A practice that can be practiced any time, anywhere.

Practice and all is coming. - Sri K. Pattabhi Jois

In doing this, we are creating a brand new feedback loop.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It’s quite a process. 

It can take time.

But with commitment and absolute consistency, transformation happens. 

Sometimes with the pleasant surprise of rapid evolution.

Fighting for folks to discover modalities to train their brains and find freedom is woven deep into my holistic health practices. There is no denying that everything is connected. Improving one realm of life more often than not improves most of the others.

No one - no one - is "successful" within all realms. We learn to take charge and take action. We also learn to be receptive and go with the flow. In this day and age, we have a lot to learn from the feminine, from water. Water is life.