The Power Of Walking Our Personal Paths On This Planet & A Summer Refresher Drink Recipe!

The Native Americans use the term Medicine Path to describe our personal path on this planet; the gifts we have to offer to all life on this planet. What a strong message this sends: when we do what we are personally meant to be doing on our life walk it is healing to our body, mind, and spirit and healing medicine to those we share our gifts with. Each of us has a purpose, a story to tell, a gift to share with the world to make this place a better place for all. When we listen, truly listen to our heart-spirit, we know our special gift(s) to share. 

Are you connected with your purpose here, the gift you need to be sharing with others?

In my young teenage years I knew I wanted to be a health teacher. Going to RN school, right after high school, seemed to me a great place to start (When I look at my life in retrospect... I was not consciously thinking this out at the time!).  Nursing school taught me that our medical field works to decrease and cover the symptoms of ill health but really does very little, if anything, to get to the root cause of ill health and heal it. Health Education was my answer to get on prevention end and help people understand what causes disease, what promotes healthy bodies, and how to best make that happen in their lives. The road of life led me to my own practice, supporting other's desire to return to health is my medicine walk on this earth.

Finding your path in life means creating space to listen, truly listen to your heart and spirit talking to you:

• take walks in nature, relax and listen to what comes up without creating actual thoughts
• speak positive words about yourself and the world around you, your words create your reality and ripple out to the reality of the whole universe
• practice some form of mind-body-spirit activity, daily, that leads you back to you: yoga, tai chi, qigong, meditation, prayer...
• surround yourself with positive people, positive media, positive energy... positive food for mind-body-spirit
• eat whole foods so your body cells vibrate at their highest nutritional frequency
• discover what makes you happy and color your world happy!

All of these actions help you, your whole being, vibrate at your highest life force energy frequency. This is your medicine path in the making!

In my quest to do the best I can with what I do... I have devised a questionnaire for new clients to determine if I am the right choice for them on their healing path.  This questionnaire also helps me to determine if a client is the right fit for me and what I have to offer. The right fit, on both sides, creates happy clients who desire to be successful in this healing walk with me! We work together to color each other's worlds happy!

Summer Citrus Cooling Drink

• 1 lime
• 2 cups water
• 6 or so ice cubes
• optional: fresh herbs from the garden: mint, basil, tarragon, cilantro are all good choices; use one or two at a time

1. Wash off the lime and quarter it, put in blender (yes, skins & all as the skin contains amazing anti-oxidants... anti-cancer properties!)
2. add water & ice cubes
3. blend into a frenzy
4. pour into tall sipping glasses, add herbs, and enjoy (wide mouth pint canning jars work well)
5. PS add a touch of whole food sweetener if too tart for your taste buds but go very easy as sugar is not a cell enhancing food

I have made this with fresh lemons, oranges, peach & nectarines, berries, etc. Use your imagination and let the seasonal fruit offerings guide your choices.

5 Shocking Ways Yoga Causes You To Lose Weight

updated 8/3/22

10-18-2024 Update: this link is no longer active to the Sivana Spirit blog. I am working on getting the article contents back from the company and I will post it here.

Yoga is an awesome healing tool!

I confess, I did not write the title to my article published on the international Yoga blog: Sivana Spirit.

Had I written the title, I would not have used the work "shocking" as Yoga's affects no longer shock me. I am not certain they ever did. I do know, had I been asked 20 years ago when I started doing Yoga postures, I would not have expected all the benefits Yoga has brought into my life. (Notice I put postures in italics up there. I have been doing Yoga meditation, guided visualizations, and mindfulness work since I was 26. I sincerely had no idea this was Yoga. When I started doing postures, I thought like so many others do, that the postures were Yoga. I have learned a lot!)

But these Yoga revelations have not been "shocking." They have been smooth and silky, warm and fuzzy, and oh so stealth in sneaking into my life.

To read more about these "shocking" Yoga weight loss impacts and benefits, click here. 

Yoga truly is an easy and amazing tool for health and healing. Maybe this fact is the shocker in a culture that prefers more difficult answers. 

Yoga tones the vagus nerve… this is a huge factor in creating awareness of what triggers you to do the things you do & react the way you react. You become a calmer, more peaceful person, able to stop - reflect - and chose healthy choices as opposed to knee jerk reacting into emotional outbursts and choices that do not serve your highest good or healing energy.

Namaste good people.

Yoga Supports these things in Your Life (photos added 7/17/19)

PS  More Yoga LOVE from me to you: 

http://www.paulayoumellrn.com/blog/2014/05/27/it-all-starts-with-you

http://www.paulayoumellrn.com/blog/2013/11/18/why-i-love-yoga-and-other-thoughts-on-whole-food-whole-health-healing

http://www.paulayoumellrn.com/blog/2014/06/06/building-muscle-building-vitality

It All Starts With You!

I am going to begin this post with the same message I begin my workshops with: "Everything I say (write) comes from a space of love... loving support.  No words out of my mouth are critical of anything or anyone.  We all have to start from the space we are in; the current life space we are in and the space we make choices from." Change starts with you and it is all about you making the choices in your life that are good, right, correct for your health and healing.  No one else can make those choices for you.

I was recently peeking at a book on yoga, diet, and change: The Yoga of Eating: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self.  The book introduction read like this: The Yoga of Eating is a practical and inspiring manual that offers original insights on the physical and spiritual functions of sugar, fat, meat, and other foods; fasting, dieting, processing, willpower, and the deeper principles of self-nurture. This book appeals to a higher authority—your own body—and shows how to access and trust the wisdom your body has to offer.  

I remember writing a post about yoga's impact on our food and lifestyle choices...

I always look at the reviews, positive and negative.  I like to get an idea of what people thought about the book.  One of the level 1 reviews made this comment: "I was expecting diet plans, recipes, etc. to plan a yoga diet - nothing here."

As a health coach who wants to instill the philosophy of self-responsibility around their health, I have always suggested that individuals make their own daily menu plans.  Make these plans based upon the principles of whole food eating and tossing in a bit of local and seasonal flair!

As a health coach, I find that to create meal plans for clients is:

1. Hard to do as it is time consuming task and what I might tell someone to eat may not be anything they ever intend to eat, ever! So time is spent putting together 3 meal a day plans that might get a glance and not be used, ever. This is because the suggested foods do not appeal to the person using it. This is time not well spent for me or my client.

2. Does not teach self-responsibility, making your change your own. If I create your meal plans, what happens when you are sick of them (assuming you even use them)? When you get sick of them, you go right back to life as it was before we crossed paths AND back to the same meals and eating habits that caused the problem(s) in the first place. When you work to create your own new plan, it is your plan. You can own the changes you created in your life and your new lifestyle choices.

3. What I might suggest for food is not necessarily things you like, things that are local (growing in your own food shed), or foods that are seasonal for you.

On a global scale, local and seasonal eating helps to create sustainable communities around our food and is much gentler on the earth. (No cross country or cross ocean transportation of food and all that goes along with this... there is so much more on the social, environmental, and political issues around food and the human consumption of that food. This is another blog post OR watch some movies and read some books on the politics of food!)

Instead of meal plans that sound good to me and my eating habits,  take the principals of whole food eating and make your own plans based around local, seasonal, and whole foods.  You will then be making lifestyle changes that will stay with you for life!

These meal plans will nourish your body cells, heal disease, balance body weight, and help you to feel fantastic!

Does life get better than this?

Whole Food Learning Resources: