Mind and Body Wholeness For Moms

It is hard for most moms to gain control of their lives what with juggling jobs, housework and a handful of kids. Who has time to take care of herself?
'How are you feeling?' can be a loaded question, especially if you are sick.
Emotions like laughter and joy can be uplifting and healing, while emotions like fear or bitterness can be toxic and destructive. When you get angry or depressed it affects the nervous system and weakens the immune system.
Ancient healing practices suggest that there are certain emotions that make their home in certain organs in the body. This is an integral part of Chinese medicine.
The theory is that energy travels through specific pathways beneath the skin surface called meridians. When negative emotions are experienced, there is either an overabundance of energy, a depletion of energy, or it gets blocked altogether. This causes illness.
Here is breakdown of the equivalences emotions and organs from ancient Chinese practices:
Emotion Organ
Worry Lung, stomach
Fear Kidneys, bladder
Anger Gall bladder, liver
Grief Heart, lungs
Lack of acceptance Pancreas, spleen, colon lungs
Sadness Heart, small intestine
Guilt Stomach, heart
Financial burden Upper back lungs
Lack of support Lower back

Problems usually manifest emotionally before they do physically and once physical problems appear it is an indication that we are in real trouble.
According to traditional Chinese medicine, all health issues are due to an energy imbalance. Chronic problems come from decades of repression and irregular energy control.
Symptoms that our lives and particularly stress might be getting too much for us include fatigue, weakness, headaches and constipation. These tell us that the flow of energy is being blocked in our body.
It is also really true that sorrow can cause a broken heart! Strong emotions such as grief and heartbreak can actually cause death. You can die from unrequited love.
Deep feelings such as sorrow, pain and loss can actually put a physical strain on the heart. They can also cause stress and weaken the immune system. The heart functions abnormally and creates the physical sensation of pain in the chest. Too much of this continued stress can prompt a heart attack.
It also helps to realize that we might manifest everything that we think. In the film –The Secret –one of the guest speakers in the film, Mike Dooley, says it best, “thoughts become things.”
How we spend our time thinking about life is how we are going to feel about life from moment to moment. This in turn has an immediate effect on the inner functions of the body like the nervous system, respiratory system, chemistry and energy.

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Breathing Yoga for Stress

Stress is a factor that often contributes to ill health in moms – especially heart attacks and hypertension. All stress and tension is hard on the heart as it makes it pump more strongly.
If you are a person who is naturally prone to stress or if you work or home environment is overly stressful, you need to learn how to keep your stress levels down.
Doing so is the only way that you will be able to reduce your blood pressure if stress is a major contributory factor, so learning how to effectively combat stress is essential.
There are many different things that you can study and learn about which will help you to master the art of controlling stress.
The first thing that you should consider is taking up a discipline or hobby like yoga or meditation that can teach various different techniques for keeping stress under control.
The best thing is that as a starting point, there is a great deal of the information that you need to see whether yoga or mediation is ‘your thing' on the net, for free. This means that you can start learning and practicing yoga or meditation in the comfort of your own home and that once you have mastered the basics, you can then take things another step further by joining a local group or class.
Practicing yoga is a great way of acquiring the discipline that you need to be able to switch off at those times when stress might otherwise take over. As you can read, there are various different types of yoga that you can practice ranging from ‘gentle' (sometimes called ‘hatha') yoga to the far more impressive sounding ‘power' (or ‘vinyasa') yoga.
Another factor about yoga to consider is that there are several yogic asanas (poses) that are believed to help relive high blood pressure as well. Various asanas such as suryanamaskar (the ‘sun pose'), matsyasana (the ‘fish pose'), vajrasana (the ‘thunderbolt pose') and shavasana (‘corpse pose') are all useful for reducing high blood pressure with regular practice. This is obviously another good reason for thinking of taking up yoga.
Even something as simple as disciplining yourself to breathe deeply and slowly whenever you encounter a situation which otherwise might become stressful can be an extremely powerful way of learning to control your emotions. As with the other disciplines highlighted in this chapter, there are many different ways of teaching yourself how to breathe deeply and slowly when things start to go wrong, but perhaps the easiest strategy for learning how to control your breathing is to adopt the Pavlov method of learning to breathe deeply.
It is one that I would definitely recommend you adopt to teach yourself how to breathe deeply and slowly whenever stress threatens. Do this and you can significantly reduce the amount of stress you feel in your life, which should in turn help to reduce your hypertension.

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