Life IS A Symphony

Life is a symphony meant to flow in harmony with self and all life on this planet.

When we live in this harmony with nature (we are nature) the music of the universe becomes the dance of life.

So many of us work against this flow, thinking we are wiser than the laws of nature; perhaps that we are above the laws of nature.

I invite you to do this:

1. Sit or lie down in a comfortable position,
2. Close your eyes,
3. Take 10 slow, deep belly breaths (breathing from the belly makes the diaphragm drop down and allows your lungs to fully expand, your breath of life!),
4. Envision yourself in the flow of life, all things in harmony,
5. Allow this vision to stay with you as you continue to deep breathe,
6. Start at your head and visualize each and every body organ & body part, one by one, until you reach your toes; visualize them alive with love, life force energy, that glowing white light,
7. Finish up with 10 more slow deep breaths.
8. Slowly bring yourself back to the present moment.

Your body, mind, and spirit should feel refreshed and alive, ready to meet the day's challenges with peace.

Anytime you arrive at a snag in your day, pause for just a moment, deep breathe and visualize the white light running from the center of your head to your toes. This is a quickie mindfulness meditation to bring calm and patience to the moment.

Remember your body is an amazing healing organism, part of the harmony of the universe. Allowing yourself to be in this harmony creates a healing effect in each and every body cell.

Healing Blessings, Paula

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.

RACK-ing Up Great Health!

I recently created the above image and idea I am calling R-A-C-K-ing up Health to remind people how easy the return to vibrant health is. When we follow life's plan, the natural laws of the earth and universe, our health flows freely.

I was thinking about this very concept as I was picking black raspberries at my Mom & Dad's home on Saturday morning. I began picking them planning to take them to my home and share the bounty. My kids were gone for the weekend so instead the hand to mouth experience began.

By the time I left my parent's home I bet I had picked and eaten, sharing with my good buddy Basil of course, a quart of these juicy delicacies. That is some powerful and colorful nutrition based upon the stains on my hands, face, tongue, lips, and teeth!  (The picture below is Basil and I on a little north country Hornbeck canoeing excursion.)

The thoughts of vibrant, live food kept passing through my mind and how much nutrition and life force energy our bodies receive when we pick and eat food immediately. Ah yes, the grace of local food, raised by ourselves or a conscious thinking farmer, brought to our tables within a short time frame to fill our body cells with nutrition and our entire being with chi energy.

When we pick plant based food from its life source, its source of life force energy, that plant based food begins to die.  The longer the time span between plucking or pulling the food from its source, the less nutrition and life force energy remain available to nourish your body. Grow, pick, and buy local for the most cell enhancing nutrition and life force energy infusion you can gift your body with.

To find local farmers here in Northern NY State: www.gardenshare.org

To find local farmers wherever you are: www.localharvest.org

Jump down below those gorgeous berries for a bit more life enhancing advice and a yummy, iced coffee recipe.

Eating fresh food is but one way we can enhance our life force energy and cellular health. Try these natural habits for increasing your vibrancy:

• deep breathing in a relaxed and peaceful way
• yoga
• meditation
• walks in the woods and time spent in nature (remember, you are nature)
• laugh
• acupuncture and energy healing methods
• take a swim in an Adirondack lake
• love with your whole heart

Added July 16th...

• Fun Loving Spontaneity increases Life Force Energy. See the words of wisdom, below, from Shelby Connelly, Five Elements Living, Colton, NY

Ingredients for spontaneity:

• The ability to let go:  Take a deep breath and jump. The chores and routine will await your return.
• Knowing life is short:  No one ever lays on their death bed wishing they had worked more.
• A friend to push you off the edge:   Every women needs a "Thelma" to her "Louise". Oh girls just wanna have fuu-un! (Cindy Lauper is my hero.)

Namaste'

Get Mesmerized by the Marvels of Your Body

I am inviting you to embrace the miracle of your body. 

I am always looking for ways to inspire and motivate clients and students in my classes to want to make healing changes in their lives, healing changes that will last a lifetime. I want you to realize that you can change any lifestyle habit into a powerful healthy and healing choice if you truly desire to do so.

I love explaining to people the impact food and lifestyle habits have on cellular health. When we realize the intrinsic effects we have on our own health we often are more inclined to do things differently, more healthful choices.

The miracle of the human body has always fascinated me. I remember watching my first birth as a nursing student. I was awestruck and in love with everything about it. 32 years later I still feel that way about the creative power of living beings. We have an egg that gets fertilized by a sperm creating a 1 cell being. This one cell goes on to split and divide millions and millions of times to create:

• every cell, tissue, organ, and organ system in this new human life,

• the placenta,

• the amniotic sac and fluid, and

• the umbilical cord!

Sometimes that one cell does a completely crazy thing and splits in half in the early process and creates 2 human beings and all of the above extras (yes, identical twins!). This can happen, in very rare instances, to create identical quadruplets and more!

This whole process is amazing, miraculous, a true breath taking and awe inspiring feat of biology. Relax and close your eyes. I want you to immerse yourself in the magnificence of this. Now I want you to think about all the other processes your marvelous body does every day:

• digestion and elimination

• immune responses 24-7

• sensory input and  neuro- analyzation so you can feel, smell, hear, see, and taste

• detoxification of everything that comes into your body

• movement of nutrients, innate chemicals, lymph fluid, oxygen and gasses throughout your body

• filtering the blood to create urinary waste

• manufacturing and delivering feel good hormones to the brain

• movement of your body about your life

• manufacturing and delivering hundreds and hundreds of enzymes, hormones, and other biological chemicals to every cell of your body (when and where needed)

Truly, this list could go on forever. What I want to impress upon you is the amazingness, awesomeness, the marvel of your entire being.

Circulatory System

Digestive Tract, Gut!

Skeletal System

The Heart

When we are truly mesmerized at the extraordinary  being we humans are (all beings on this planet are extraordinary but I want to focus on humans to turn you onto caring for you!) we are more inclined to want to better care for ourselves and make the commitment to lifestyle changes that will prevent and heal disease.

Knowing what a miracle each and every bodily process is... don't you just want to take whole food and whole health care of you? Your body will shape shift into this healthy, vibrant being... I promise!

Mind, Body, Spirit

Please share your thoughts and feelings on the Marvel of the Human Body, the Marvel of You and how this inspires you to take better care... the best care of you!

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