Unit 9 Final

Well I am still working on my final project.  I have been working on it little by little each day so I don't get overwhelmed in the end. I am sad to say that this class is almost over.  I have gained so much especially about myself. My outlook and perception on life has changed. No longer is it all about my physical body and to what lengths can I push it but its now a never ending circle. The body effects the spirit and the spirit effects the mind and the mind effects the body. You can not have one without the other and still live in health, happiness and wholeness. I will miss our weekly mini meditations and the positive encouragements among us students.  I will miss you all. Tammie

Unit 8 What I found that worked for me.

Looking back at the past 8 weeks and all the exercises and practice sessions, the two that I have found the most beneficial are the loving-kindness approach and the subtle mind. With the love-kindness approach, I try to treat everyone how I want to be treated. When I speak, I want my words to come from the heart even when I am talking to a stranger while standing in line at Walmart. I found by responding to a person or situation instead of reacting, has allowed me to think about what I want to say or do and do it with loving-kindness. This is especially value when  my nerves are frazzled and I am about to fly off the handle at any moment and lose my temper. I stop, take a few deep breathes in and out, allowing my frustrations to leave with the in breathe and release loving-kindness on the out breathe. The other exercise that I have working for me is meditation and the subtle mind. Using meditation with the subtle mind exercise, I have found my mind finally becoming a bit more still with each day. This has given way to better sleep, the hamster finally has gotten of the wheel for a while or at least slowed down to a crawl. I do not feel so stressed, I am smiling more and able to cope with my never ending daily duties. My plan is to incorporation some meditation in my TurboKick classes as part of the cool down. I want to share what I have learned with others so that they can flourish and do the subtle mind exercise at night so I will get a good nights sleep and be ready for the wonderful things and possibilities that are in store for me the next day.

Physical Health Motivation

Many of you may know that exercise is my passions and before this class, I thought this was what being healthy was all about. Now I know there is so much more. Being healthy involves not only the body but the mind and the spirit. 8 weeks into  this class, my mind is calmer and my spirit is finally begin attended to. All this has lead to an even greater physical health. My body is coming into a balance. I what to use what I have learned to help others that are struggling with their own battles of weight loss with a balance life. I want to show you what  I have been able to accomplish and flourish as a human. I have not reached my full potential but like the sunshine creeping through a cloudy day, I see glimpses of what is possible in my life and how I am able to help others through my obstacles and battles.



Christmas 2007



In 2008, I topped the scales at 300 pounds and a size 24W,  to date I have lost 135 pounds and wear a size 8-10. This was accomplished  through proper nutrition and exercise. I am now a certified TurboKick instructor and with my knowledge in nutritional science, I want to help others find their lives's potential.



Nov 2010



May 2008



Nov 2010



My Wedding Day May 22, 2010

May 22, 2010

Meeting Asciepius - Unit 7

The exercise for this unit, Meeting Asciepius, I found a little difficult to try to envision a wise loving person that I know so the image that came into my mind was a old Asian Man that I have a small statue of. You know the bland one with a long white beard holding a long staft. I was able to focus on him and visualize the beam of white light reaching from him to myself. I just had to remind myself to keep focus on him image which was hard. My mother did this exercise with me and several times she fell asleep and when she snored I lost my focus. It did help me to refocus. I did this exercise right after I came home from my three hour kickboxing workshop so my physical body was exhausted which allowed me to focus on my mind. My tight muscles relaxed and my heart rate slowed down and cooled down my excited mood.


The saying "One cannot lead another where one has not gone himself" remind me of the idea that you just can't talk the talk but you have to walk the walk. You have to be a living example. An example of this would be, a doctor telling me to lose weight when themselves are overweight. What right to you have to tell me to do something when you yourself don't take your own advice. As a parent, I have to remember that I am the biggest influence on my children, they see what I do more then what I say. I can not tell them not to do this when I am doing it myself  This goes for any health and wellness professional. We are the living examples for your patients, they will see our actions and will be influenced by them. I try to remember that they are looking to me for help and guidance and the best thing I can do for them is to do myself what I am asking them to do. Beware of yourself and your actions, you will never know when someone is looking to you for an example.I have to make an intentional decision in all that I do and basically talk the talk and walk the walk. I can not help others when I have not helped myself. My journey can be used as an example and motivation for someone else has they embark on their own journey toward health, happiness and wholeness with love and kindness.

Integral Assestment Unit 6

The universal loving-kindness is was not only relaxing but helped to calm me. This past week as been very busy and stressful. I have felt like everything I did was for everyone else. Now don't get me wrong, I like to help people but it seemed that other's needs override my very own basic needs like sleep, exercise and time for myself not to mention the time I need to do my schoolwork. It kinda set me off, I felt like my basic needs were not important and came after other's wants. You say that it left me mad and with an angry attitude towards people. With this exercise, I let it all go. I felt like it allowed my heart, mind and body to rid myself of negative emotions and replace them with love and kindness and able to rejuvenate myself.
With the integral assessment, I always find assessing myself has always been a struggle.  Most of the time, I know what things I excel at and are good at  but determining what needs work and figuring out what I need to do has always been a struggle. This has been no different.
I realized that I have focused on my physical body in a physical ways but have ignored those exercise that have promoted the growth of my mind and especially my spirit.  This has lead to a dependency on my physical body to deal with all my emotional distresses and negative thoughts causing an over loaded mind and a weakened spirit. I thought if i kept my physical body exhausted, I would not have to deal with my stress levels and deflated spirit. I was wrong, it only caused my life to spiral uncontrollable and in turn affected my love ones and those that I interact with on a daily bases.
The one exercise that I want to focus on is yoga and meditation. I want to be able to slow down and calm down. I don't have to do everything for everyone especially when it comes to own health. I have to make time for myself to participate doing these things. I realized that if I want to help others it can not be at my own personal expense of health and mental stability. What good  am I  if I am stressed out and mad all the time and taxing my physical body trying to deal with my neglect of my mental and spiritual health.

Unit 5 Project Weight Loss

Subtle Mind!!!

Okay, first I have to say that i really like this one. This my daughter joined me, she may only be 9 okay almost 10 but if she could learn to this at a young age, it could only benefit her. I found the subtle mind exercise alot easier and relaxing then the loving kindness act. It seems easier to focus on my own breathing then figuring out who or how to send out love and kindness. My biggest obstacle has to be my own mind. Being able to settle my mind and not get all wound up in the thing that consume my mind. One thing i found helped was to place my hands on my stomach and able to feel the rising and falling of my chest. This reminded me to bring my focus back to the my breathing when some thought, feeling or picture grabbed it. I cant say that allowing my mind to acknowledge these distractions and then letting them go was easy so i visualized these things on a slide show. They entered my mind, I saw them and then they rolled by. Each time that they seemed to grab my mind, i brought my focus to my breathing. I think for now, focusing on my breathing seems to be the key for now. I can say with each breathe, I felt my body fall deeper in to a relaxed state. This may sound terrible but it reminds me of the time that I sprained my shoulder and my doctor gave me some heavy duty pain meds. I took them at night and it felt like my bed was giving me a big hug. It reminded me of the same thing. As I laid there on the floor, I felt like my body sinking deeper in to the floor. My daughter said that she feels light and refreshed and it helped her to breathe better. We have been all battleing a nasty chest cold.

My personal connection between my spiritual wellness to my mental wellness to my physical wellness seems to tied to the balance between the three.I have been working on my mental wellness to help relieve my stress levels with my over scheduled life. As my mental wellness becomes calmer, my spiritual wellness grow and I physical body is even better. I see the physical signs of stress and fatigue becoming less, my energy levels are increasing, my self confidence is becoming stronger, i am realizing that i am doing things that I once was to scared to do or things i thought I could not do and my relationship with other are becoming stronger.

Reaction

I posted this on my facebook the other day and man did i get some good responses..... so i wanted to share it with you.  This is kinda like my motto now that we have jumped into this integral health.......


i have chosen the pathway of life that allows me to live to my fullest potential and flourish as a human being granting me a great physcial body, a calm mind and a profound spirit




pretty good, don't yah think????

Loving-Kindness exercise

I have decided to do these exercise with someone in my family to get how they felt also. Last week, i used my old school husband. This time I asked my mom to join me. She has a wider mindset and willing to try new things. She said that it really relaxed her and once the she got done, she said that she felt a feeling of openness  and lightness. She said that she felt like she was floating and her heart was drawn open. As for myself, again my hamster was running on its wheel so it took a few minutes to get my mind focused. When it said to bring to mind someone you hold with great love and tenderness. I got stuck on that. Who should I chose, my kids my husband a close friend and I allowed my mind to get of track. I had to bring it back to the exercise.  I finally got into it when asked for you to focus on a loved one who is hurting. I focused on my sister, who has had multiple health problems and is trying to recover from surgery. She is having a difficult time allowing herself to heal. Not to mention, she has had great emotional suffering with the lose of her two sons and has yet to fully dealt with her emotions. As I took the in breath, i asked to take her suffering and on the out breathe i sent her my love, happiness, health and wholeness.

This exercise is going to take some practice to fully get the whole loving-kindness benefit. But then again this is what called getting a mental workout. Just like working out muscles, it takes practice. Not just practicing it once in awhile but making a commitment to partake in my mental workout everyday. Just like flexibility or cardiovascular training, if you don't do it everyday consistently, you can struggle and just might lose the ground that you have already gained. I cant see this similar to my TurboKick workouts and routines. In order to become a better instructor and learn my routines, I have to practice everyday. With each workout, I get better, stronger and able to help others with their journey into health. So each time i do this loving-kindness exercise the more I will benefit from it and be able to flourish.

Unit 3 personal reflections

Based on own reflections, and on a scale of 1 to 10 (ten being optimal well being), I rate my own personal
A-physical well being 9
B-spiritual well-being 3-4
C-psychological well-being 3-4

I have to admit that I have neglected my spiritual well being and played havoc on my psychological  well being with trying to control the aspects of my life that in reality I have little control over and not allowing the situations that I have a bearing on to constructively be changed. I have always focused on my physical well being, I consistently focus on exercise and nutrition and allowed the positive effects from my commitment to exercise to hopefully pour over into the others. i am finding that the run off is seriously lacking.

In order to create  wholeness with in my life and that of my family, I am going to take the time to allow myself  time to enhance my mental state and spiritual well being while incorporating it into my exercise routine. I allow myself one hour a day to focus on myself. This hour usually consist of an hour working out where my family does not ask anything of me or at least that is what i ask for and hope to get. This is my goal.

As a part of my cool down and stretching routine, I an going to try to incorporate mediation as a way to calm my mind. By calming my mind, I hope the decrease the stress levels and reduce my anger reaction. One thing I want to do is wake up in the morning 20 minutes earlier.The morning time is a stressful time in my house. We always seem to be in a rush to get the kids up and ready for school, eat breakfast and out the door in time to catch the bus.  There are times that the morning are beyond stressful that I have been brought to a full fledged anxiety attack resulting in tears, which spills over into work. Not a good thing!!!

Another things that I would like to do is to get a dog again. Not a puppy but an adult rescue dog. This came to mind today, when i took the kids to petsmart to look at the dogs for adoption. We as a family found a beautiful 2 year old mixed bloodhound that took to the kids like he belonged to us. We hope to have him with us as soon as we move into our new house sometime this month.  Just the calming effect of having a dog around to pet and love on for all of us would help. Plus, walking a dog would give me a chance to regroup my thoughts and out in nature and give the kids some exercise away from the Wii.

As far as my spiritual well being, I need to realize that I do not have to be busy with every minute of my life. There are time where just being still and be able to listen to things around me. Life does not always have to structured and schedules. i want to take a walk on the beach with my family, not having to worry about what needs to be done, what time it is and hurry home because this or that needs to be done. Just to slow down and enjoy a little bit of what life has to offer.

As far as the relaxation exercise for this week,  The Crime of the Century. I decided to ask my husband to join me since the kids were with my mom, shopping at Walmart. The thought of walmart alone causes my blood pressure to rise!!!! My husband is what I would call old school. Anything that is not in his norm or in any sense of alternative is a bunch of mumbo jumbo so I thought it would be interesting to see what he thought of the exercise. To my surprise, he actually enjoyed. He said that he felt relaxed but not tired. The usual tension in his neck and shoulder seemed to less and his lower back felt warm. The rest of the day, it seemed like he had more patience with things and willingness to help with the laundry and dinner. (if that is all it took to get help, he needs more of these exercise on a daily basis)
As for me, it took a while to clear my thoughts from my mind but once I did. I begin to visualize the colors radiating from my body. One thing that I noticed and this happens when I am trying to go to sleep, as I get into a relaxed state  and during the relaxation exercise, my body will jerk, pulling me back to a tense state. Like my body is saying, nope you can't do that. I have to admit that this has been a stressful week and there have been quite a few sleepless night. I wonder if anyone else has experienced this???

Journey On relaxation exercise (getting the hamster off the wheel for once)

I finally had some time to myself and listen to the Journey on relaxation exercie. Okay so if you have not got it, I am an exercise freak I workout at least 1 to 2 hour 5-6 times a week. I would call myself in training to perfect my kickboxing routine and developing my teaching skill. That is the motivation for such a committed and intense workout schedule. One day soon I will post my story and weight loss journey and then you will completely undertand my obsession. Now back to the point, the relaxation exercise.Today was no different, I gave 100% to my workout. I was invited to a friend's kickboxing class and needed some good pointers so after a 90 minute session my body was exhusted but my mind was pumped like usual. I wonder why after giving it my all my mind can not settle down and I feel like I want to do it all over again. With the kids in bed and the hubby asleep in the chair, I plugged in my headphones into my laptop and stretched out on the couch. At first, I had to really focus on what the speaker was saying but after a few minutes, the blood was traveling to my shoulder and down to my hand. They were warm and felt a sense of heaviness. I visualized pushing the blood out of my core and into my arms. It was a unusal sensation, like gently rolling wave. I can say that at the end of the exercise, I was relaxed and my mind did finally quite down. I am gonna have to remember this next time I am laying in bed at night and the hamster is going around and around on the wheel in my head.

Reflection

Now, 3 weeks into my class, Creating Wellness: Psychological and Spiritual Aspects of Healing at Kaplan. I am realizing that I have been placing most of my focus of health and wellness on my physcial body while almost ignoring my mental and most of all my spirtual health. This has lead to a complete unbalance of myself and has given way to complete stress. In the past, my way of dealing with things when life becomes overwhelmed was by giving 100% to a high intensity workout until my body is beyond fatiqued but not dealing with my negative mental thoughtsn and struggles with self-doubt. I beleived that I could control every aspect of my life even if it meant others actions. I neglected my personal relationship with God by trying to stay physcially busy. My mental and spiritiual health need exercising as much as my body. A body can not heal find and access its full potiential unless all apects are balanced. Look like a have a balancing act to work at.

something to be grateful for......Misty

Ending our seminar tonight, i was thinking about one thing that I an greateful for all .....i could think about was my friend ,Misty.  Monday the 27th of sept, she gave birth to a sweet healthy baby body who I like to call B-Rock. Some background, I work with Misty and get to  spend 5 days a week with her. She is more then a co-worker, she is my friend. Everyone that I could work with is like family. We all support each other through the good times and bad. My office traveled down to Myrtle Beach for my wedding last May. The boss even paid for the rooms for everyone.  We are family and I love each one of them. Well Misty is  9 years younger them myself. She has been married to a great guy, Kevin the head football coach of one of the local highschool for almost 6 years. Well all those six years, they have been trying to have a baby. Nothing worked so they turned to fertility medication and still no pregnancy. Her doctor wanted to try exploratory surgery and found nothing physcially that could be preventing her from getting pregnant. After the surgery, she was to start another round of fertility drugs once her monthly cycle started ( i thought that was a nice way of saying it!!) She never did. Then one day, she got really sick to her stomach. I told her that she is so pregnant. She was so afraid of another negative pregnancy test that she went a week, totally sick and throwing up. She gave in and went to the doctors........... later that day i got a text "im pregnant"!!!

we were so excited for her but her nausea and vomiting continued for the next 4 months!! then the dizziness, fainting, racing heartbeat and SWELLING!!!! lost of swelling. I felt so bad for her!!! her whole pregnancy was awful. she never got the great prego feeling that you get in your 2nd and early 3rd trimester. Each day, she had backaches and swelling and swelling and swelling. Finally her due date came and went. The doc decided to schedule an induction on a Monday... she went into labor sunday. it was back labor with 4 hours of active pushing. she was drained and sore but finally Brock was here. But the swelling did not go down, she went home wed and by early thursday she was rushed to the ER with congestive heart failure!!! all i could do was cry and pray to GOD dont do this, this little family does not deserves this, dont take Misty way for Brock, Kevin and the rest of us. That night I had a long talk with God asking him to heal her, take the fluid from her body and around her heart. Let it beat again, allow her to breathe.  She came home yesterday!!! She is home with her baby and husband. She has some heart damage but they do not know the extent and if she will be able to have another child due to the stress on her heart. She will have to take several meds for the rest of her life but she has the rest of her life with her family and her friends.  When she was released from the hospital, she had lost 30 pounds of fluid in one week. I am just so thankful that she is home and healing, she has a long way to go so I keep praying for her and I ask that you keep her in your thoughts and prayers. She and her family are dear to my heart and i love them so much.  So i am grateful for Misty and that she is home to start her life as a new mommy!!! she's going to be great!!!

what a blog???

this is going to be a whole new experience for me. I have only done a blog a few times on my non-exsistant myspace account. Lets see if this whole thing does not add to my choatic life and stress me out =P