Jan 25, 2015 – Winter Blooms

Weight Loss and Aftercare

Please Note: Winter Blooms is an educational website in no way meant to replace building a relationship with a trained EFT practitioner, counselor, or therapist. To find an EFT Practitioner, visit the AAMET website, the Gary Craig website, the EFT Universe website, the Tapping Solution website, or contact Jane at 802-533-9277 or jane@winterblooms.net for EFT coaching support.

Many of us choose this time of year to begin new diet and exercise regimes to lose weight, usually because during the holiday season we are either celebrating with family and friends to excess or we are in mourning because we have no one with whom to celebrate and “stuff” our deep grief with food. The abundance of successful diet programs advertised at this time of year prove that we’re fairly good at losing weight. The trouble comes with keeping excess weight off and developing and maintaining healthy food and exercises choices even when challenged by old habits of thought and action. I was reminded of the importance of what happens after we lose weight when I watched Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, 2, Joe Cross’s follow up film on the beneficial effects of “rebooting” our well being by juicing; in this film sequel, the warm and compassionate Joe Cross emphasizes the importance of community in maintaining healthy food and lifestyle choices. He also reintroduces the remarkable Phil Staples, not as the poster child for weight loss this time, but as the guy who falls off the wagon because of lack of community.

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Lessening Resistance to Meditation

The benefits of meditating – lower resting heart rate, reduced high blood pressure, increased longevity, increased creativity, reduced stress/increased inner peace, and even reduced sensations of physical pain to name a few – have established meditation as the heart and soul of the wellness movement. Doctors of every stripe recommend meditation to patients, psychotherapists encourage clients in its daily practice, and educators bring meditation in one form or another into the classroom to promote optimum learning environments within the minds of individual children and the group. Meditation’s proven benefits prompt us to ask why, when it is so beneficial to us intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually, we do not meditate on a daily basis. The answer lies in a single phrase: Resistance to Stillness.

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Lifting Seasonal Affective Disorder

Now that winter is officially here in the Northern Hemisphere, many are beginning to feel a familiar depression, often bordering on hopelessness, identified with short, cloudy, days and seemingly endless nights. Called Winter Blues, Seasonal Depression, and, clinically, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) this emotional distress is a potentially serious condition whose symptoms include anxiety, sleeplessness, food cravings and subsequent weight gain, and debilitating lethargy. Physicians treat SAD sufferers, who are mostly women, with a variety of pharmaceuticals that mask symptoms. There are, however, reliable remedies that actually help to shift the negative emotions associated with SAD, including EFT, aka Tapping.

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Making Sacred Promises

Finding the sacred in promises we make to ourselves and others is an art. We all know about the other kind of promises, those tossed off in the moment that we feel all right about breaking. “Six? Sure, I promise I’ll be there.” And in the moment, we mean it; we really do want to honour our promise to arrive when we say we will, because we want to show respect to those with whom we have relationships. But made in the moment, these ordinary promises can be broken by poor planning and lack of foresight. Then we tell ourselves, “Oh, I have a meeting at five I forgot about when I made those arrangements. They’ll understand.” And, most often, “they” do, especially when we send up a warning flag such as, “I’m running late. Please start without me. I’ll explain when I get there.” The kind of promise that becomes sacred doesn’t start out that way. We might initially consider the idea of losing excess weight for our health’s sake, or the idea of quitting smoking at the stroke of midnight, or the idea of exercising faithfully lightly. We can learn to turn these considerations into sacred promises that improve our lives through the time and attention we give to them.

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