Let’s get ready for summer! Many people always ask me, how they can keep up their exercise and healthy routines even while on vacation.  Well, I am going to teach you how.  I have just returned from one week in Costa Rica and thought I would share with you what I did to keep up my health and exercise routines.

Here are 8 tips to help you stay successful while on vacation.

1. Stay active.  Bring your workout clothes and running or walking shoes and find and plan ways to be active.  For me, I woke up and  practiced yoga every morning, found a nearby beach to walk and ran  or hiked most days. For strength training, I did push ups, dips, crunches, squats and lunges a few days during the week.

2. Eat smaller meals throughout the day and don’t skip breakfast.

3. Eat more fruits and vegetables. When I was in Costa Rica, I was able to try a lot of fresh fruit such as mango, papaya, pineapple, and get salads.  I tried to stay away from too much juice and fruit punch since it has more sugar and calories. However, fresh fruit is a great choice.

4. Eat healthy snacks. Start before you even get on the plane, by  bringing some healthy snacks for the plane ride.  You can also bring healthy snacks for your trip  or pick up healthy snacks once you get to your local destination.  When I got to Costa Rica, we frequented the local supermarket and bought some light yogurts, dried fruit, almonds, and apples as staples for the week.  The 5-7 servings a day rule is always a good goal to aim for.

5. Eat when you’re hungry. A good guideline whether you are on vacation or not is to match your food intake with your activity expenditure,.  You will find that you will usually be hungrier if you do more activity and less hungry if you do less activity.  You might ask yourself, “Am I really hungry?”

6. Exercise portion and indulgence control. Just because you are in a place that offers exquisite desserts, special cuisines, or alcohol doesn’t mean you have to partake in it all everyday.  You are on vacation, but you are still exercising good decisions around your health and meals.  A great practice might be too choose a few days that you will indulge a little more and really enjoy it and then eat healthily the rest of the days.

7. Rest and Relaxation. Sometimes when we go on vacation we can often feel like we need a vacation from our vacation. One way to schedule some R&R is to book a massage during your trip.  A way that I did this was to book my massage the last night before my trip home.  It was such a wonderful way to end the trip and made sure my muscles would be well rested before the long plane ride home.

8. Gratitude. Often our vacations can feel like they are going by so fast.  One way to prolong our enjoyment is to practice gratitude.  For me, my practice was waking up every morning and taking time to relish my natural surroundings.  For the last 10 years, I have begun my day with a short yoga practice.  While in Costa Rica, I brought my attention in this practice to the beauty around me, I was thankful for the quiet and spaciousness, and appreciative of the new adventures that I would get to experience that day.

To help get yourself in shape for summer and your next healthy vacation, check out IW’s outdoor fitness classes, starting up again this April.  For more information click here: http://www.intuitivelywell.com/body.html#outdoor

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When I speak to people about health and wellness, I always here this striving for work life balance.

The desire for balance is healthy and natural.  Our bodies perform best when we have a sense of homeostasis and equilbrium.  Just as our bodies enjoy balance so do we in our external environments.  We perform best and feel most satisfied when there is a sense of work, personal life, and family/community balance.  What this work life balance looks like is unique to each of us.  One of the ways, that we can create more of this balance is by giving ourselves more time and peace.

There are ways that we can do this while at work and out of work.  Sometimes these simple moments where we confidently open to difficult circumstances rather than feel rushed, inconvenienced, or anxious— can make all the difference in the world.

At work, there are many distasteful experiences that we tend to resist.   But the art of sitting still teaches us that when we resist—when we hold on and tense up and hold in—we only make matters worse.  We do have a choice in how we react and sometimes that choice is just opening up and letting go.  Letting go and opening to our workplace, with all its rewards, difficulties, and challenges, is the sane and confident thing to do.  By opening to our experience and even looking for what we can appreciate in that moment—we can create a more joyful workplace.

At home, your practice might be as simple as turning off the radio, the phone, the computer, and/or the TV; sit comfortably in a quiet place, relaxing the body and mind; mindfully breathe in, mindfully breathe out. As you do this successfully for several moments in a row, you will find the mind gradually becoming more tranquil, more focused, more clear, and more powerful. The Buddha might have said: “I know of no single thing healthier than doing one thing at a time.”
The openness and confidence we cultivate in meditation allows us to be available in our work and home life.  We don’t rush through firing someone because we are uncomfortable; we don’t throw a tantrum because our BlackBerry is on the fritz and won’t display our favorite icons. We don’t ignore inconvenient business facts so that we can recklessly present an upbeat public relations picture or feel overburdened by the needs of families or friends.  By taking more time for ourselves and grounding ourselves in meditation, we can react to many aspects of our lives with more calmness and openness.  We can be realistic about our lives— receptive to anything and everything that occurs.

Some ways we can create a deeper awareness and balance in our lives is to engage in mindfulness based classes, personal practice, sangha, or find a mindfulness based coach who can teach you how to create mindfulness strategies that work for your  everyday life.

Intuitive Wellness offers walking meditation for groups, mindful weight management, and mindfulness based coaching to support you in your desire for more work life balance.

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I came across this story a little while ago regarding Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche  and I thought it was such a lovely story to share in regards  of how to create more lasting happiness.  I believe that all people strive to be happy to be loved and maybe meditation gets us a little closer to that.

Now onto the story…Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a Tibetan lama who has been declared to be the happiest man in the world.  He was not born into wealth and comfort. He spent his earliest years in a remote Himalayan village lacking even the most basic amenities. Nor was he a lucky winner in the genetic lottery for moods. In his book, Joyful Wisdom he recounts being extremely anxious as a child in Nepal, having had what a Manhattan psychiatrist would likely diagnose as panic attacks, and how he cured himself of this chronic anxiety by making his fears the focus of his meditation. He has had to earn his happiness.

Rinpoche seems eclectic in studying paths to well-being, including Western recipes. A few years ago, he attended a five-day meeting at the Mind & Life Institute that brought together a group of neuroscientists and the Dalai Lama to discuss ways to overcome destructive emotions. He found that the Western scientific findings on emotions had much in common with his own approach to cultivating well-being.

But when it comes to his own pursuit of happiness, Buddhist theory and practice are Rinpoche’s chosen tools. He has done several years-long meditation retreats, in the privilege of some of the most renowned Tibetan masters.  However, what do we mean by happiness and how is this defined.  Is happiness supreme joy or states of equanimity?

Richard Davidson who heads the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, has found one distinct brain profile for happiness. As Davidson’s laboratory has reported, when we are in distress, the brain shows high activation levels in the right prefrontal area and the amygdala. But when we are in an upbeat mood, the right side quiets and the left prefrontal area stirs. When showing this brain pattern, people report feeling, as Davidson put it to me, “positively engaged, goal-directed, enthusiastic, and energetic.”

Mingyur Rinpoche came to Davidson’s lab as one of a dozen or so meditation adepts, each of whom had put in anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 lifetime hours of meditation. Research on expertise in any skill shows that world-class champs have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice; these were Olympic-level meditators.  One of the first findings from the research showed that when these adepts meditated on compassion, activity in key brain areas increased up to 100 percent, notably more than was the case in a control group who were taught the same meditation practice. The more lifetime hours of practice, the greater the increases tended to be. All this seems to confirm the idea that in the realm of positive moods, as in nearly every endeavor, worldly or spiritual, practice matters.

So can we all get a taste of Rinpoche’s bliss? Davidson worked with Jon Kabat-Zinn, a teacher of mindfulness meditation from the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, to see how a group of novices might gain from these methods. Kabat-Zinn, who has pioneered this contemplative method with medical patients to ease their symptoms, taught mindfulness at a high-stress biotech company; these beginners meditated for 30 minutes a day for eight weeks. Davidson’s measures showed that after the eight weeks they had begun to activate that left prefrontal zone more strongly — and were saying that instead of feeling overwhelmed and hassled, they were enjoying their work. So while the Calvinist strain in American culture may look askance at someone sitting quietly in meditation, this kind of “doing nothing” seems to do something remarkable after all.

Of course, there’s no guarantee of greater happiness from meditation, but the East has given us a promising path for its pursuit.

If you are interested in starting a regular meditation practice, the Intuitive Walking program will be starting in April outdoors in a beautiful natural setting in San Francsico.  To learn more about the class and to register, click here- http://www.intuitivelywell.com/walking_class.html

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