5 Travel Tips For Wellness

Every year we leave our homes numerous times to visit family and friends and we check our health at the departure gate, not just our bags. This Thanksgiving bring your health and your eating regime with you so that you return from the holiday actually feeling rested.

1. Keep Drinking

Just because you are not in your office cubicle with your special office water bottle does not mean that you need to stop drinking all together.  Think of every long conversation or road trip as an opportunity to keep a glass of water or a water bottle near by. You don’t need to drink coffee or tea whenever you sit down, replace your extra holiday beverages with water and fight the bloated, fatigued, headachy feeling that comes from dehydration.

2. Stay Regular

The best test for wellness while traveling is definitely the bowels. They are an incredibly sensitive system in the body. If you have a tendency towards constipation drink one or two glass of warm or room temperature water immediately upon waking and then follow it with a hot beverage like herbal tea or hot water with a little lemon juice and honey. Hydrating first thing in the morning will replenish the inevitable dehydration that comes from sleeping and keep bowels moving. Avocados, prunes, beets, sweet potatoes, and walnuts are much safer and tastier than traveling with a laxative.  If you know you have a tendency towards loose stools avoid overly spicy foods, greasy foods and cold raw foods.  Those are too much for a travel weary stomach.

3. Sip and Savor

If you set your self up to avoid all the tasty treats of the season you will fail, be miserable or do both. Instead think about high quality ingredients. Instead of sitting yourself in front of a bowl of cheap candy, bring expensive organic chocolate with caramel and sea salt to share. It will make you slow down and savor it and everyone will love you. Look for the desserts that you know will taste best and if it doesn’t taste as good as you thought it would don’t finish it to be polite. If anyone says anything remind people you are on a diet and look for tastier calories elsewhere. In terms of alcohol, stay away from the cheap stuff. The taste won’t satisfy you and you’ll end up drinking too much. Also be careful of drinking alcohol because you are thirsty. Be well hydrated before drinking time begins and then you will be able to control your desire for taste, not hydration. Limit beverages to one or two in a long night and that way you will enjoy every allotted sip.

4. Be Gentle on the Road

Let’s face it on Wednesday most of us will hit the road to visit those we call most dear. Everyone will be worrying about all the work they didn’t finish at the office and stressing about their unreasonable holiday diet. We are all in the same boat. So when someone cuts you off on the New Jersey Turnpike instead of throwing out some age old phrase or mannerism you could remind yourself that the other driver is very excited about going to their home away from home. You both are full of love for your loved ones and even though you were scared for a moment you are both safe. The best place to practice mindfulness is on the road. Try to think loving thoughts of all the other drivers when you get gridlocked on the Mass Pike this year and then find something good on the radio.

5. Remember to Rest

We all set excellent expectations of long cat naps and late sleepy mornings on Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, but by the time Thursday rolls around we are up at 5am to baste the turkey and up until 3am Friday morning reminiscing. Even though you are around the ones you love stay mindful of sleep cues. If you get overtired and grouchy you might start a fight you regret or end up convincing yourself you can’t stand your family. If you are going to stay up late, make sure it isn’t drastically different than your usual schedule and plan to nap the next day because the body likes to rise at the usual hour regardless of bedtime.

 

Duration & Frequency: G-Y-N Post #3

Apparently everyone does want to talk about periods. I am getting great feedback and lots of questions about what is healthy and what needs some work. I hope that you are feeling empowered either by knowing that you have a healthy cycle or that you too can improve your health.

 

Frequency

This is easy. The body loves to be between 28-30 days. But what is actually involved in that counting? Let’s do some math here. Say you begin bleeding on November 1st. That is day one. You experience a temperature rise on Day 14, ovulation day. And you bleed again on November 29th. That is a 28-day cycle. You don’t count the 29th for the month, because you will count it next month. You do count all days of bleeding.

Short Cycles

Anything below 26 days is too short and suggestive of too much heat in the system or an inability for the body to hold the period back at the end due to weakness. The first problem might be associated with heavy, fast bleeding that is bright red and maybe a little thick and smelly. The second might be associated with fatigue, pelvic floor prolapse, loose stools and a loss of appetite.

Long Cycles

Long cycles are anything over 35 days. From one month to the next you might have a stressful day on days 14 and 15 and the body doesn’t feel safe enough to ovulate. But when things settle down again it should get down to business. After 35 days we’ve got issues that need addressing. Long cycles range in the 35 days to months or years range. There can be numerous reasons for long cycles, but the big two are blood deficiency and stagnation. Blood deficiency is a common one and will show itself with very light periods, dizziness, fatigue, poor vision, feeling cold, and/or muscle cramps. Stagnation of blood and qi in the reproductive organs will usually have painful periods, big mood swings and dark, clotted periods, painful PMS.

Last week when we talked about Blood we discussed bleeding duration, so in this installment I want to talk about lifetime duration instead.

Numbers in Chinese Medicine

Average age of menarche (first period) 12-14

Average age of menopause (last period) 49-52

In Chinese Medicine women run on cycles of 7: at 7 you get adult teeth, at 14 you get your period, at 21 you become an adult, at 28 you have babies, at 35 you finish having babies, at 42 your career takes off (okay I made up that one), at 49 you start going through menopause.

Everything right close to that time frame is normal. What isn’t normal is peri-menopausal symptoms at 37 or 41 or 45. If they come on that early let’s get your body stronger and healthier and buy you a few more years.

Why postpone menopause if you can?

For everyone under the age of 20 the idea of early menopause sounds heavenly. To everyone over the age of 30 it sounds more daunting. What are the risks of going through menopause too early? Western Medicine will tell you early menopause increases your chances of heart disease and osteoporosis. Chinese Medicine will tell you that early menopause is proof enough that the body is already in distress and needs strengthening. You don’t have to deal with 15 years of hot flashes or night sweats and you don’t have to go on replacement hormones. There is another option.  Acupuncture and herbs are known for restarting periods after long spells, even after early menopause. The earlier you catch it the better. Bringing a period back 10 years after it disappeared is obviously harder than amenorrhea (no period) for 6 months.

Blood: G-Y-N Post #2

This is the point in the intake when most people get squeamish and acupuncturists start looking like vampires. Tell me about the blood. Truth be told you can’t tell us enough about the menstrual blood.

The Questions

Color: Bright red, fresh red, brick red, purple red, brownish, blackish, pinkish, purplish, red fading to brown. We want to know. Healthy blood should be fresh red, quite red, though as the cycle draws to a close it may become more brownish. Purplish blood is suggestive of cold or stasis in the uterus and very often goes hand in hand with pain. Same thing for blackish blood, which is blood that has been stuck in the uterus for a while. Watery pinkish blood is a suggestion of blood deficiency. It usually doesn’t have any abdominal pain associated with it but fatigue, low backache, or dizziness. Brownish blood is tough to diagnose it could be caused by a number of factors. Mostly it means things are a little dirty and sticky in the uterus and it needs cleansing.

Clotting: In school we were trained to use money, half dollar, quarter, nickel, dime. Exactly how big are the clots. The bigger they are the worse it is. Quarter size or larger clots are suggestive of either heat thickening the blood so it can’t flow smoothly or of cold congealing the blood so it doesn’t flow at all and it gets stuck in there. Clots can also be indicative of fibroids or cysts if they are accompanied with pain and irregular periods. A healthy flow doesn’t have anything other than fresh bright red blood.

Viscosity: Yes, we will occasionally ask how thick it is. Super thick blood (think honey or molasses) means heat is drying the blood up. Usually this also involves very heavy periods and sometimes the period coming early because the heat is so intense the body starts to bleed. Thin blood that looks watery is mostly water as the body doesn’t have enough blood. Normal blood flows like blood. It is thicker than water, but not syrupy.

Flow: Do you spot for a couple of days? Do you immediately gush? How often do you change a pad or tampon on the first day? The second? The third? The fourth? And so on. Normal is difficult to say here, but I’ll tell you what is too heavy and what is too light. A woman shouldn’t bleed through a tampon in less than an hour, numerous times during the first and second day. That is too heavy. A woman shouldn’t change a tampon every two hours through the fifth or sixth day. That is still too heavy. However if a woman is only changing a tampon four times a day on the first two days she doesn’t have enough blood. If the period includes spotting on the second or third day the woman doesn’t have enough blood. The first three days of bleeding should be consistent and more then spotting. The fourth or fifth may be light enough to go with just a liner or change a pad twice a day. That would be healthy.

Signs Your Cycle needs Strengthening or Cleansing

• Big, numerous clots
• Six or seven days of heavy flow
• 14-day periods
• Spotting lightly past day 7
• One or two day periods
• Hour long periods
• Purple or black blood
• Flow that stops for a day or two and then begins again

One of the strengths of Chinese Medicine is defining normal. I love that. Normal isn’t really relative to all women. Just because a woman can handle it for three or thirty years doesn’t mean she should have a 9 day period. It isn’t healthy.  Just because it is convenient doesn’t mean that a woman should have a 2-day period. Both are indicative of other issues in the body. Again, the menstrual cycle reveals other health issues in the body, not just the health of the reproductive organs.

Please feel free to post questions in the comment section. Please restrict your questions to PMS and blood as there is more yet to come.

Image credit: yupiramos / 123RF Stock Photo

Listening To What The Body Has To Say

I posted an article on WoH’s facebook page the other day about the difference between listening and hearing. It explored how hearing is a safety mechanism so we can decipher if something is about to fall on us or if a burglar walks in at night. Even in the deepest parts of sleep our body is censoring what it thinks we need to listen to and what we can ignore. Take for instance the end of my long savasana this morning when I realized that there were three enormous trucks digging a whole in the pavement right outside my window. Hmmm. Missed that.

But that isn’t the type of listening I was thinking about this morning when I decided to skip the early morning yoga class I like on Wednesdays and instead stayed home to practice. I was literally two minutes away from leaving when I heard this rather confident, strong voice inside of me call up, don’t go to class stay home. My inner monologue immediately called this voice lazy. To which the voice challenged do a more vigorous practice at home and do the postures you know your body needs.

There was no arguing with that. So as soon as my husband left I rolled out my mat gathered my props and sat down. Immediately the voice started throwing out pose names. It wanted to start in supported supta baddha konasana. It wanted to take a long headstand and shoulderstand. It wanted a significant amount of twisting and all the big hip openers. It turned out to be a glorious practice.  At the end I jumped up to shower and the voice swooped back in and insisted on a long savasana stating that I needed to rest for a full afternoon of patients and an evening workshop. So I did and felt more rested because of it.

I use the word “listen” when I teach my students how to check in with their bodies. Yet, this recent article on the difference between listening and hearing makes me wonder if I’ve been hearing what my body needs and fully ignoring what my body wants.

Be careful before you immediately censor the messages from your body, maybe they are healthier messages than you think they are. Maybe your body is actually desperate for something that would make your day easier and you miss out on that opportunity.

New Marketing Scheme: Look Healthy

Seeing Beauty

A few weeks ago my sister got married. Though I am obviously biased, I mean this quite seriously when I say she was the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen. She was radiant and graceful and rosy-checked and full of love. It was a sight to behold. But it wasn’t the makeup and the hairstyle, though wow, they did a very good job with both. When we met up in my parent’s kitchen the morning of the wedding and she was standing there with her hair dirty from sleep and her face unwashed she was equally as beautiful as ten hours later walking down the aisle.

Sitting there for a couple of hours in the beauty salon watching as the amazing stylist fluffed and powdered and prepped her hair for her updo I kept commenting that her face looked magnificent. In the three weeks before the wedding she went and received one facial a week in addition to working out and drinking lots of water. Without question I had never seen her glow with such health.

New Marketing Scheme

It got me thinking and its been on my mind ever since. I want to radiate that kind of health. At some point our society said it was okay for doctors to be overweight and for nurses to smoke. It was okay for therapists to be stressed out and massage therapists to go without bodywork.

Well this acupuncturist and yoga teacher is fed up with it. I want you to want my business because you think I am an excellent example of health. If I don’t look healthy enough yet don’t bring me your business.

Starting this week I am challenging myself to be as healthy as possible, to keep better boundaries around work time, to exercise more, to spend more time doing fun outdoor activities, to cook healthier foods and to nourish my soul amidst everything.

So in addition to postering, online advertising and increasing my SEO I’m going to woo new patients with my glowing complexion and boundless energy.

Demand More

If you don’t need acupuncture right now then I highly suggest you start demanding more of your care providers. Find someone who is fit, who has a good glow in their face, who knows more than you about health. I once had a substantially overweight doctor ask me in a very condescending tone if I exercised regularly. I almost punched him. Health providers shouldn’t ask questions unless they can back it up with their own personal experience.

Who is a Health Care Provider?

Yesterday I was talking about this with my husband and we talked about how unhealthy so many Western medical professionals look. He then joked that it is like going to see a skinny chef. I thought about it for a second and said that I want to go to restaurants where there are skinny chefs. It means they are remembering to eat healthy meals at reasonable hours and that the food they sell has healthy ingredients. When I challenged my husband with this comeback he laughed and said that is because I think chefs are health care providers as well. I agree completely. Everyone out there making food, discussing our health, leading us in exercise routines or talking about our mental health is a health care provider. Demand more of them all!

Taking Care of Yourself

Sunday morning I woke up with a sore throat. I had the little headache, the little cough, and the sneezes. My body was coming down with something. So I skipped biking to yoga class, which sounded like too much for my sinuses and my chills. I drank throat soothers tea with tons of honey and I sat on the couch all day.  I thought I was taking care of myself.

What was actually happening was what looked like taking care of myself. I did the things that came to mind if I was just going to skim the top of the list. I didn’t bother really questioning my body for what it needed. I did what I wanted to do. No, let me rephrase that. I did what I thought I deserved.

Yes, folks, here it is. So much of taking care of ourselves is the allotted amount, not the necessary amount. It is like buying organic. I’ll buy organic food as often as I can, but every once in a while I end up with something a tiny bit horrible in my cart because the organic costs $2 more, not just $1 more. Why am I drawing lines in some places and not others?

Right now I’m getting lots of bodywork for back pain, I get weekly or biweekly acupuncture and I’m on a slew of expensive vitamins to recover from grad school. Most people would say that is really taking care of myself. Today, with this fourth day of a sore throat, I’m less certain.

All of that would be enough if I hadn’t put myself through the ringer for the last three years. Truth has it grad school + commuting + planning a wedding = longer than two months of recovery.

Today this really dirty word came into my mind. Pampering. I was in the shower exfoliating months of dead skin off my body and hardened feet and feeling fabulous. That is when it happened, the thought slipped through my mind—you just needed a little pampering today.

It almost ruined my whole shower. For three years I occasionally showered, I occasionally washed my hair and the closest thing to pampering was cutting my fingernails, which is technically an obligation for someone who pushes on people’s abdomens for a living.  I did not pamper myself and I certainly didn’t allow my mind to dream up ways that would make my body feel less chaotic, more appreciated.

That’s what I’m getting at today. Appreciation. This word feels less dirty and a little more aggressive.

Are you appreciating yourself?  Really it is a challenge.

Think of the way we take care of plants. We water them when they start to droop. Think of the way we take care of our cars, we wait until a light comes on. What if we didn’t take care of our bodies, we instead appreciated our bodies every day.

What if we asked our bodies every morning what they wanted from the day and listened? How would that change our little worlds?

When asked, my sore throat wants to neti, it wants to rinse with salt water, it wants to stay better hydrated and eat salty foods. It wants a nap sometime this afternoon and a little fresh mint in my water. I haven’t tried any of those things all week because I didn’t ask. Now I’ve got a treatment plan.

PMS: G-Y-N Post #1

PMS or Premenstrual Syndrome is just that, a syndrome. A compilation of ailments joined together because of similar circumstances. We all know the list:

• Headaches/Migraines
• Weight Gain/Fluid Retention/Bloating
• Emotional Disturbances/Irritability/Weepiness/Anger
• Low Back Ache
• Cramping
• Fatigue
• Insomnia
• Nightsweats

What does it all mean and should we be having it at all?

What is normal?

Elimination: The body is ridding itself of blood and tissue. This is a significant drain on the body. It is normal for the body to start showing signs the day or two before. Drier stools or softer stools the day of or the day before may happen. These are still both signs that the body is a little warn down and can’t handle bleeding effortlessly, but they are a vast improvement over days of constipation or numerous bouts of diarrhea which lots of women experience.

Emotions: The night before bleeding weepiness or feelings of vulnerability are understandable and I believe evolutionary. We shouldn’t be lifting heavy objects, staying up all night studying or running marathons right before or during bleeding. All activity (mental or physical) should be gentle and allow for periods of rest. Listen and appreciate the body’s wisdom and take some quiet time or ask for more affection from a partner if necessary. These are little things that go a long way.

Sleep: Night hours, or yin time, is quieted by ample fluids within the body. When you bleed there are less fluids available and the sleep can be affected. Slightly lighter sleep or more dreams is understandable, full blown insomnia or disturbing nightmares are suggestive of a deficiency of fluids and would benefit from treatment.

Important PMS Questions

When does it start? PMS that starts hours before the cycle is significantly better than the PMS that starts at ovulation. Mood swings, weight gain or pain that begins anytime before the day before the cycle is not only treatable it is not worth the strain on your life. Western Medicine utilizes the birth control pill as the exclusive means for altering PMS, but the pill doesn’t solve the problems it masks the problems until you are ready to come off the pill. PMS that begins early in the month is a suggestion of stagnant blood in the uterus or stagnant qi within the reproductive organs. This could be caused by internal cold, internal heat, strong emotions not being properly released or simply stress.

What is the intensity? Again if someone is home sick from work before the period starts, we have an issue. Migraines, flash anger or brutal cramping before the blood is a serious sign that the body is out of balance. These are remarkably easy things to treat with Chinese Herbs and Acupuncture. Sometimes I think we should be marketing to bosses, partners or family members asking for sponsors for a woman’s treatment. Would you like to see her as an active member of the world more days of the month? There is actually research out there now suggesting that Sylvia Plath’s emotional disturbances may have been related to very painful periods and extreme emotional changes due to her cycle. This is not a part of a woman’s health that deserves covering up. High intensity PMS that even slightly affects your life (regardless of your ironwoman pain threshold) is dangerous. Start talking about it and start seeing it as a problem.

Does it immediately end when you start bleeding? This is the telltale sign practitioners are looking for as a marker of how easy a gyn issue is to treat. If it goes away as soon as the blood comes it is probably due to stagnant qi in the body and is the easiest scenario to treat. If this is you, come in for a couple of months of treatment and get on with your life. If things stay dicey after the bleeding starts there is a deeper level of stagnation and though it may take longer to heal, will still show steady improvements from month to month in overall intensity.

PMS Warning Signs

• Your friends know all your PMS symptoms
• PMS starts with ovulation or soon after
• Your personality changes, not just your mood
• You are in pain that requires more than one regular dose of NSAIDS at any point during the month

Charting Your Cycle

I started charting my cycle this spring and I’m loving it. Charting allows you to see where in the month you have less energy, when headaches begin or if you have a nightmare on the 27th day of the month. Things you wouldn’t be able to remember from month to month. Charting is also very helpful to see how you can affect the cycle. One thing I’ve noticed for me personally is if I get run down my basal temperatures drop and stay down until I take a day or rest. Now when I see the movement downward I know I have to be proactive about rest to help my cycle stay healthy. Charting is also a way to actually see how many days of the month you are miserable and act as a motivator to make change in the body.

In Chinese Medicine there is a 3 month rule. Most GYN issues are significantly improved or completely fixed in three cycles. Can you imagine having easier cycles for the rest of your menstruating life?

Image credit: tashatuvango / 123RF Stock Photo

G-Y-N

I don’t even know how to start this post. I just know I need to write it.

50% of the people in this world will bleed monthly for a significant portion of their life. It happens. The good men of the world will support numerous women during their menstrual cycle, whether it is as a partner, friend, co-worker, or family member. The bad men of the world will exacerbate the cycles of the women near them. Really everyone has to deal with periods.

I love to talk about the things people don’t like to talk about, so a women’s cycle has always topped my list of favorite discussion topics. Now that I’m in business smoothing out women’s menstrual cycles and occasionally making it more fertile I’ve got even more to say.

I don’t have a problem with periods or bleeding or the changes that happen right before and right after. I have a problem with women who don’t respect their body. The cycle is one of the best weathervanes of the body. It reveals to us how strong we are, how much blood we have, how much heat we have, how much qi we have.

So to celebrate the fabulous menstrual cycle I’m planning the next six weeks to discuss periods. One Window of Heaven Words post per week will be about bleeding. Here is the line up to get you excited.

Week One: PMS

Week Two: Blood

Week Three: Duration and Frequency

Week Four: Cramps

Week Five: Temperature

Week Six: Female Intuition During the Cycle

Male readers, it is time to step up and be the mindful one in the relationship whether it is as a partner, family member or friend. Sometimes women can’t see the rhythms as they experience them. Read these posts, learn a little something about the mysterious 28 days and be an advocate for the women in your life!

Just think some of you will get to ovulate, bleed and ovulate again while you are learning. Aren’t you excited!

Image credit: nobilior / 123RF Stock Photo

Observation: Practice Lesson #4

As this is the last post in the Practice series I’ve been thinking an awful lot about what makes people stick to a routine. I’ve already talked about how I don’t think that discipline builds a practice or keeps it going, I’ve talked about lighting a spark to keep the fire alive in your practice and I’ve helped brainstorm ideas for the actually composition of a practice. Now what is going to keep you showing up every morning, every Thursday at 6:30 or Sundays at 3, whatever your chosen time slot.

This is what led me to the fundamental question: what do you gain from a practice?

I tried to think of the people in my life who have practices that don’t involve yoga, because I know all the benefits of doing yoga on a regular basis. I wanted to see the benefits of their non-exercise based practices. Two immediately came to mind. First would be my parents’ practice of drinking coffee together every morning in their living room. They don’t down their coffee over breakfast, they instead take about half an hour (sometimes more) and just drink their coffee and chat. They use it as a time to catch up, make plans for the day and to de-stress if the day is going to be hectic. I know it lowers both of their stress levels and I know it is the secret to their marriage. The other practice would be that of my father-in-law’s writing on Saturday mornings. In the midst of raising four boys and maintaining a very full career, he devoted each Saturday morning throughout his life to writing. It helped him keep the mindset of a writer, allowed for alone time in a busy household and energized him for the week.

These are two successful, long-term practices that are very simple, but additions to a busy lifestyle. So why when things get crazy did they keep them? Why is it worth showing up on your mat again and again?

Observation. Think of all the people in our lives we pay to observe us: doctors, therapists, supervisors, massage therapists, acupuncturists, etc. We want someone else to see the patterns, to notice the thing we’ve missed. And don’t get me wrong—that is a necessary skill set. Every time my acupuncturist treats me she sheds new light on this body of mine that I try to figure out 24 hours a day. We need that outside advice, but we also need to make sure that when we see these caregivers we know what is normal.

Even if normal isn’t healthy, it is worth knowing about. A practice lets you compare every single day to every other day that you do the same thing. Yoga students can attest to that first down dog in a practice when you first check in with the body. Think of the first down dog after vacation or after you’ve been for a long hike. The body is entirely different than the last time. We need to be able to compare.

You owe it to yourself to know what the body is capable of, what it is learning to do and when it has achieved something it didn’t expect. This isn’t just about injury and illness, though aren’t those two reasons enough? This is also about improving and the ability to be proud of yourself. With equal positive awareness it is also about aging and noticing what may be harder than it used to be.

The better we are able to say, hmmm, this is new, when something catches us off guard—the better equipped we are to walk into a doctor’s office and say this is new and I’m worried. Knowledge is power, but it requires regular observation.

When you show up to your next practice, be mindful. Do your day’s work. See what there is to see. Make a list of all the things you want to observe from this perspective. My parents are not just drinking coffee; they are monitoring their marriage, making sure it is healthy every morning. My father-in-law isn’t just writing, he is taking time to be an artist and see how his artist-self is after a week.

What observations are out there for the viewing in your practice?

Balance: Juggling Business, Life, and Sanity

Everyone knows the perks of owning your own business, but the downsides are less obvious. I love Window of Heaven Acupuncture & Yoga. It is the most exciting and wonderful job I could possibly imagine, but I think I need to remember it is a job from time to time.

When I am passionate about something my work ethic goes slightly haywire. The month of October has been a crash course in how much my mind can sustain.

Grad school is nothing compared to the hours I’ve been putting in behind my computer writing blog posts, planning marketing schemes, seeing patients, scheduling appointments and keeping up correspondence with long lost friends who have swept back into my life through the start of this business. Whew. It’s been great and it’s been full.

It isn’t sustainable, even if it is tons of fun. Bosses don’t require employees to show up for work before they shower or brush their teeth. I should be drawing the boundaries within the business in a more precise fashion.

I decided to make and publish new employment rules for Window of Heaven employees. Right now they only pertain to me, but I will respect them more if I contemplate having future employees.

1. No work before 8am or after 9pm (small steps)
2. Show up clean, fed and dressed to the office every morning
3. Weekend work is capped at 5 hours per weekend
4. Employees are required to attend one yoga class per week in addition to personal practice for inspiration purposes
5. Lunch is to be eaten before 12:00pm every day
6. Employees must drink 6+ glasses of water every day during work
7. Vacations and days off are fully unplugged (no email, no facebook, no phone)

I am the owner of Window of Heaven Acupuncture & Yoga, but I’m also a yogini, teacher, fiction writer, poet, avid reader, wife, sister, daughter, friend, dancer, bread baker, church member, walker, biker, movie watcher, gardener, cleaner, organizer and napper.

Running a heart-centered business requires that I am in balance in my life. Balance, like chaos, is contagious. Which would I prefer my patients catch? The answer is obvious.

This post will go live, I hope at least, on Friday morning at 9am.  When it goes live I plan to be sitting having my hair done in a fancy salon in preparation for my sister’s wedding. Most of this week I won’t be working or thinking about work. I’ll be playing the role of sister (and Matron of Honor) full time. See you again Monday the 29^th.

Window Of Heaven

The logo for my business had its infancy in a google search for beautiful windows. Windows have long been a fascination of mine as they are only half about what is inside and what is outside, but also half about this moment in between. I am lover of houses with special, distinctive windows on the street side. These spectacular windows always seem like the journey or transition period from who I am on the street to who those people are living inside their unique life.

It wasn’t until we were canoeing this summer that I saw the window inspiration for my logo. Seeing it from the water made it all the more stately and elegant. Before I could protest my husband had his camera out and was swiping a picture while we paddled by. The house was one of those dream retirement houses. Okay, it was one of those houses we like to dream about retiring to—close to some quiet, but deep body of water where we could keep a sailboat, big backyard looking over the water, and a grand kitchen with tons of floor to ceiling windows so every meal cooked and tasted is also a picnic. I bet we would have missed that whole house if it weren’t for that window, which stole our attention and offered us a moment.

Windows do that. They offer a pause, and a possibility.

I decided to call my business Window of Heaven Acupuncture & Yoga when we learned about Window of Heaven points in my theory class at school. I came home that night told my husband, wrote it on a card and put it in my desk. This set of 10 points mystifies me. They are on 9 of the 12 meridians and are mostly located around the neck and throat. Here is the exciting part—they are suggested for use when the body and the mind are disconnected.  Needling them is like making a small stitch in an invisible tear between the thinking head and whole of the physical self.

It is that separation that brings me to yoga and brings me to acupuncture. I desperately want everyone to feel what is going on in their body, if they so desire. If they don’t want to feel what is happening, I want to teach them how to ask the question why. We get separated from fear, from too strong emotions, from pain or from forgetting. Naming that reason is half of the way to welcoming the body back.

On the mat this morning I was lazily enjoying a delicious moment in a hip opener as I was thinking about writing this post and the phrase “this is a window too” popped into my mind. This following of sensation and search for exceptional moments in yoga is the seeking of windows to the inner self.  In fact it is the exact way I teach though I never before would have used that word.

Some Westerners prefer the translation “Window of the Sky” because the word heaven is too loaded. I’ve never been afraid of loaded words. So today I want to express my use of the word heaven in naming my business. I’m taking the definition of place. A perfect place or ideal location. A place we arrive at every time we stumble upon beauty in any of its forms, within ourselves or in the world around us.