Growing up as a young lady is not easy, as it becomes apparent very early- maybe somewhere around the age of 6 or 7- that nothing is ever quite right about who you are or what you’re doing. You’re too loud or don’t speak up for yourself, too tall and intimidating or too short for a world built to scale for men, too fat or too skinny, too muscular or spindly and weak.
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” -Melody Beattie, Author and Journalist
In a standard yoga class, whether it’s a traditional Ashtanga Primary or your favorite hot power hour, there is a formula to how the class is structured. There is a little warm-up with breathwork and stretching, some sun salutations to get your blood moving, and then the big hard stuff like the strength-building power poses, arm balances-you know, all the stuff of Instagram model fame. Other strength training modalities often use weights and movement to build muscle, but in yoga, we just use all of our muscles to stand still while we fight gravity. It’s a unique concept, that strength is in the stillness, that you can sweat and want to cry while simply stretching your hamstrings.
Now that we’ve been back at it for a couple weeks, as a massage therapist I can confidently say that your home office probably needs work. I know that in my industry we had literal hours’ notice that we weren’t going to go back to work in a typical capacity any time soon, and unless your HR department is psychic or extremely proactive you probably got surprised by a sudden work from home order. I’ve been massaging clients who have all sorts of weird WFH setups: most often a kitchen table, but some work on a couch, a few clients I’ve talked to are working at a breakfast bar and sitting on a stool (they definitely needed a massage.) We all did our best with what we had available, but now that we are settling into the distancing groove, you owe it to your body to find more comfort while at work. Below is a shortlist of tweaks you can make to your workspace to make it a little more livable, plus some low impact stretches I recommend to my clients to undo WFH tension. I know it doesn’t compare to a vacation to reverse the stress of quarantine, but working in uncomfortable circumstances will only serve to compound our stay at home frustration.
Routines or Rituals can help us feel grounded and balanced. There’s something comforting about living in a rhythm — and that’s okay. While bad habits can keep us from healthy life progress, healthy rituals and routines can propel us forward and elevate our quality of life. The Benefits of Rituals Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” We need rituals because they help guide us and give our lives a rhythm we can dance to. But we also count on them as lovely little reminders of what …
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