Wellness series: Radiate

Hello Blog readers! Happy May! The month of April has flown by, and mine was filled with lots of awesome stuff- visits from beloved friends with their new babies (the best kind of visits!), a re-commitment to a way of eating that helps me thrive (back to the Paleo template and feeling great), a new acupuncturist who specializes in and is treating us for Fertility (which has been super interesting and we have seen lots of positive changes already), and a huge new addition to our garden project (even more yummy food growing this year!). In the last week or so, I have gotten 4 requests from friends and blog readers who are trying to start down the path to wellness, and are looking for some "where to start" guidance. It seems more then a coincidence that I have been asked about this repeatedly recently, and I started mulling over the idea of doing a sort of "where to start when you feel like crap" series to highlight what worked for me and give some easy recommendations for starting your journey back to feeling well. I am going to try and focus on basics that will work for everyone- it is so overwhelming when you feel like crap and know you need to eat better/heal your gut/deal with your life/get more energy, etc etc etc- feeling terrible and trying to do so much at once to change is unmanageable and will just make most people throw in the towel right away. It's all about little steps that then add up to big changes. Nothing is going to change overnight, but you can and will get to a place where you think to yourself "hey, I haven't had a headache in a few days... and I didn't even notice" (or something similar, that was just my first experience with starting to feel better). I will break it up into categories, such as food, hormones, sleep/stress, supplements/herbs, and mind/emotional work... something along those lines - this is a fluid process, so I don't have it all totally mapped out now. Food will be the first topic, as that I feel food is the most important part of any healing journey. Food has the capacity to help us to thrive or help us to die, and I firmly support letting food be thy medicine... So my next post will focus on that. Today I just want to suggest something a little "woo woo" (that's the phase we use when I talk about something hippie-dippie around these parts), but something that I used as a tool when I began my healing journey (so bear with me, we are about to get flowery and mystical up in here!). I am a reader and a writer by nature, so words and images are very powerful to me. I love the sounds of certain words, and the colors and images that they invoke. Even just thinking about a word or an image can change your mindset (think mantra or power phrases) and focus your brain. When I started trying to get better, I sat down one day and thought "what do I want? in one word, what do I want to feel?" and I started writing down all these words that were inspiring to me in terms of wellness... such as "heal", "thrive", "nourish", etc. I picked my favorite of those words, and wrote it in colored markers on a piece of paper in my journal (you could just do this on a piece of paper too) and doodled pretty things around it, and it became my mantra- when I felt like shit or felt like eating something that I knew would make me feel sick or when I felt like I couldn't get a handle on my emotions, I envisioned my word. It helped center me, helped to remind me why I was trying to motivate to cook dinner instead of grabbing packaged food. I know you are probably all smiling a little smile and thinking "Oh Steph, you're so cute you are such a hippie", and while that is true, it really did change something for me. And it might work for you. It is really easy to get overwhelmed by the bad stuff when you are feeling unwell ("I always feel crappy and I won't ever feel better so I am just going to resign myself to feeling like this because cancer is unavoidable and the world is horrible" etc etc etc)- it is good to have a little mental gong of sorts, to bang on and remind yourself that you can get better and you will get better. If that sounds crazy to you, no worries, I get it, but it worked for me and I still use my word frequently to motivate me to keep moving towards thriving.

So we begin the wellness series with a word. I will share mine with you, feel free to use it or to come up with your own. When I asked myself what I wanted, when I was feeling completely sick and bogged down and in a big mud puddle of unwell, I decided I wanted to radiate. Bright beautiful light, radiating on everything and making everything warm and sunny and nourished. So I leave you with that today, go out into the world and RADIATE! Even if all you can muster up today is a smile at a stranger, or a compliment to a friend who is exhausted too, do it and radiate and feel a little glimmer of a glow. And feel free to chuckle at my hippie dippie-ness while you think it :)