happy weekend friends! 

We talk a lot here about yoga, breathing and meditation to help with anxiety, but there are many alternative therapies that help us heal from stress and compliment our yoga/meditation practices and I wanted to share a fun one with you today. Aromatherapy.  


What is aromatherapy?

Aromatherapy is a form of alternative medicine that uses volatile plant materials, known as essential oils, and other aromatic compounds for the purpose of altering a person's mind, mood, cognitive function or health. *from wikipedia 

You may have already heard of helpful essential oils and perhaps even used some.  For example, eucalyptus is a popular one to add to steaming water to help you break up congestion. But what are some, if any, that can help ease our anxious minds?  

7 Essential oils to help ease anxiety


1) Lavender 
The scent has a calming effect which aids in relaxation and the reduction of anxiety and stress

2) ylang ylang
Ylang ylang is extremely effective in calming and bringing about a sense of relaxation, and it may help with releasing feelings of anger, tension, and nervous irritability

3) Bergamot
Studies have shown that a sniff of this essential oil can be effective at helping to reduce the psychological stress responses, serum cortisol levels and blood pressure in patients with hypertension.

4) Sandlewood
One of sandalwood’s most important uses is to sedate the nervous system, subduing nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, and to some degree, reducing nerve pain. Researchers have found it relaxes brain waves

5) Mandarin
Mandarin calms the central nervous system 

6) Roman Chamomile
Roman chamomile (Chamaemelum nobile) has a warm, sweet, herbaceous scent that is relaxing and calming for both mind and body

7) Geranium Rose 
its aromatic influence helps release negative memories and it has been used traditionally to support the circulatory and nervous systems

How do you use aromatherapy?
aromatherapy helps keep us present!  you can dab a little on your wrists or under your nose, you can add a few drops to a tissue and take a whiff or even to a hot bath.  I use lavender essential oil on my wrists and temples before i go to sleep at night and i even have lavender scented epsom salts for baths. i'm a big fan of adding drops to a tissue and sealing the tissue in a baggie so i can sniff as needed!  You can even add some drops to a body oil and massage into your skin for a whole body treat!


Where to get essential oils?

http://www.mountainroseherbs.com/

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/?utm_referrer=

http://www.floracopeia.com/

I have a bottle of lavender essential oil body spray from Trader Joe's that I love and use daily and you can find most of those essential oils in the starter pack from Mountain Rose Herbs. 

have you ever tried aromatherapy?  do you use essential oils?


xo,b 




*as always, please consult a physician before using any of these oils or treatments to make sure its suitable for you

Even though I am now a few weeks into my kundalini teacher training, I can still rememeber one of the strangest, yet most powerful, things my teacher said to us.  She expressed the importance of honoring the energy that we were working with.  As we practiced, we were constantly brought back down to a state of stillness to check in with how our minds and bodies were responding to this energetic practice.  I couldn't understand the importance of it until I began to read more and more about the beginnings of kundalini and my home practice began to develop more deeply.  

It has been noted that if this energy isn't respected and is continually being drawn upward through our bodies that we can almost feel trippy side effects.  As we raise kundalini, we should bring it back down as well.  Balance.  What I found so cool about this, was that it was actually documented!  What that meant to me was that there truly was something powerful within this practice.  There were studies done to show how minds and bodies are effected while practicing kundalini.  Maybe it's my inner geek coming out, but I just thought that was amazing!  I often feel that we speak about the benefits of yoga and meditation and energy work (like EFT and kundalini) but most people kind of gawk at the idea that anything is actually happening inside of us.  

So you can imagine how excited I got when I came across this recent article in the NYT about the proven benefits of meditation.  This study shows that meditation actually makes us more compassionate.  How awesome is that?  

The Morality of Meditation

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineerChade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended. Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended effect — the reduction of suffering — empirically demonstrable?

To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaëlle Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an experiment whose publication is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. We recruited 39 people from the Boston area who were willing to take part in an eight-week course on meditation (and who had never taken any such course before). We then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly meditation classes, which also required them to practice at home using guided recordings. The remaining 19 were told that they had been placed on a waiting list for a future course.

After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the participants to the lab for an experiment that purported to examine their memory, attention and related cognitive abilities. But as you might anticipate, what actually interested us was whether those who had been meditating would exhibit greater compassion in the face of suffering. To find out, we staged a situation designed to test the participants’ behavior before they were aware that the experiment had begun.

WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or she) found three chairs, two of which were already occupied. Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair. As he waited, a fourth person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot, entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against a wall. The other two people in the room — who, like the woman on crutches, secretly worked for us — ignored the woman, thus confronting the participant with a moral quandary. Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for her, or selfishly ignore her plight?

The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces the odds that any single individual will help. Nonetheless, the meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

Although we don’t yet know why meditation has this effect, one of two explanations seems likely. The first rests on meditation’s documented ability to enhance attention, which might in turn increase the odds of noticing someone in pain (as opposed to being lost in one’s own thoughts). My favored explanation, though, derives from a different aspect of meditation: its ability to foster a view that all beings are interconnected. The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker of affiliation between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each other when distressed. The increased compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like — that divide us.

Supporting this view, recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng, Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others.

So take heart. The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More.”
link to story http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/the-morality-of-meditation.html?_r=1& 

Yeah. I'm still geeking out.  If you're not already hitting the meditation cushion regularly, get your butt on that!

meditation makes magic happen! 

xo, b

New research shows that the way we regulate our emotions plays a big role in how anxiety effects us.  

Emotional Strategies Can Influence Anxiety

14 May 2013   

When trouble approaches, what do you do? Run for the hills? Hide? Pretend it isn't there? Or do you focus on the promise of rain in those looming dark clouds? 

New research suggests that the way you regulate your emotions, in bad times and in good, can influence whether - or how much - you suffer from anxiety. 

The study appears in the journal Emotion. 

In a series of questionnaires, researchers asked 179 healthy men and women how they managed their emotions and how anxious they felt in various situations. The team analyzed the results to see if different emotional strategies were associated with more or less anxiety. 

The study revealed that those who engage in an emotional regulation strategy called reappraisal tended to also have less social anxiety and less anxiety in general than those who avoid expressing their feelings. Reappraisal involves looking at a problem in a new way, said University of Illinois graduate student Nicole Llewellyn, who led the research with psychology professor Florin Dolcos, an affiliate of the Beckman Institute at Illinois. 

"When something happens, you think about it in a more positive light, a glass half full instead of half empty," Llewellyn said. "You sort of reframe and reappraise what's happened and think what are the positives about this? What are the ways I can look at this and think of it as a stimulating challenge rather than a problem?" 

Study participants who regularly used this approach reported less severe anxiety than those who tended to suppress their emotions. 

Anxiety disorders are a major public health problem in the U.S. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, roughly 18 percent of the U.S. adult population is afflicted with general or social anxiety that is so intense that it warrants a diagnosis. 

"The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, anxiety and depression - which tend to co-occur - will be among the most prevalent causes of disability worldwide, secondary only to cardiovascular disease," Dolcos said. "So it's associated with big costs." 

Not all anxiety is bad, however, he said. Low-level anxiety may help you maintain the kind of focus that gets things done. Suppressing or putting a lid on your emotions also can be a good strategy in a short-term situation, such as when your boss yells at you, Dolcos said. Similarly, an always-positive attitude can be dangerous, causing a person to ignore health problems, for example, or to engage in risky behavior. 

Previous studies had found that people who were temperamentally inclined to focus on making good things happen were less likely to suffer from anxiety than those who focused on preventing bad things from happening, Llewellyn said. But she could find no earlier research that explained how this difference in focus translated to behaviors that people could change. The new study appears to explain the strategies that contribute to a person having more or less anxiety, she said. 

"This is something you can change," she said. "You can't do much to affect the genetic or environmental factors that contribute to anxiety. But you can change your emotion regulation strategies."

Last weekend, during my kundalini practice, I was lead through a powerful kriya (kree-ya) that released an immense amount of heaviness from my mind and body. A kriya in Kundalini is a set of poses and meditations and this one focused on releasing anger.  

Our teacher guided us through it.  He encouraged us to really release.  To really get pissed.  To really go for it!  And once I got that permission, I had a flood of emotion come up.  I became so entrenched in that kriya that I almost didn't hear him as he guided us out of it.  I have been dealing with some stressful situations and I never realized how much anger I was storing about it.  It was one thing to get all pissed off in the moment and when having to deal with the frustrations that kept coming up, but when I wasn't directly dealing with that particular stress, I didn't think I had any anger within me.  Turns out.... joke was on me because a sh*t storm came up!  And it was one of the most powerful releases I ever experienced.  My arms shook afterward, my body felt exhausted and my mind felt clear.  It was a beautiful moment of peace.  And since then, I've been practicing this kriya with amazing results!  

It got me thinking back to when I was anxious.  I know there's a lot of fear that clouds our minds and bodies when we're dealing with intense anxiety, but I think it can even go deeper.  Sometimes we're just downright pissed! 
 
"why me?" "why can't I be strong enough to let it go?" "why do I always have to deal with this?"

If any of this sounds familiar, don't be surprised.  I can sometimes forget how much anger I used to have towards my anxiety.  

So I wanted to share this clip from Maya Fiennes on a kundalini practice to release anger. This isn't the exact one I did, but it's very close.  Pay special attention to the mantra and breath. Anxiety creates frustration and frustration creates anger... so it's an important part of our practice to work on letting it go.  Mentally, I believe forgiveness does this too, but sometimes that's a hard thing to offer when your body is riddled with angst.  When you practice this, AND forcus on forgiveness (remember, its for YOU, not them!), miraculous shifts can occur!

xo,b 

I wanted to share a Kundalini meditation with you today that you can literally do anywhere!  I have been practicing this meditation and love the peace it offers to both my mind and my body.  This is a great meditation to incorporate into your daily life and also right before or after a stressful situation. 

KUNDALINI MEDITATION FOR STRESS RELIEF 


-sit upright in a comfortable position and rest your hands on your knees in gyan mudra