Serenity Wellness Podcast E13: Bringing Balance To Your Life

Hello,

Welcome to Serenity Wellness Podcast.

My name is Nicole White and I'll be your host.

This podcast is dedicated to helping you tap into your full potential of how you can heal and balance your mental,

Emotional,

And physical wellbeing.

Together,

Let's explore inner self,

Connect to our strength,

And manifest your true nature,

One full of love,

Purpose,

And passion.

Welcome everyone to episode 13,

Bringing balance to your life.

I hope that you continue to find these tools helpful for you and thank you again for all your encouragement and support in sharing this podcast with others you think might also find it useful.

I also am so excited to hear how many of you are listening and finding these wellness tools helpful.

And also,

We have such an amazing community here at Serenity Wellness Center in State College,

But I'm super excited that I'm getting to share this information and spread it around the world and starting to build these connections not only here in the people and beautiful souls that I'm connected with here in State College locally,

But also like I said,

It's just such an awesome feeling to know that this information is spreading well beyond here.

And again,

I appreciate all the feedback and support.

And you know,

Kim in Colorado,

Thank you so much for the information and feedback related to how you connected in that introduction to mindfulness.

And I hope you really enjoyed that mindful cup of tea.

And you know,

Heather in Ohio,

I am super happy to hear that you're enjoying the wellness toolbox avenue and really starting to find your own tools through your exploration of what works for you.

And Patty in Minnesota,

I'm so honored that you know,

You shared with me that my podcast is the first one you've actually been able to listen to in its entirety related to meditation and mindfulness and not get kind of bogged down or disconnected from it that you actually have been able to connect to it fully for the first time and all the ones that you've listened to that just means a lot to hear that feedback.

I really greatly appreciate it.

And Josie in Virginia,

I agree.

You know,

As far as your feedback on finding that science part helpful,

I too just find it so helpful in,

You know,

Bringing that integration of our science mind and our emotion self and how it really helps us connect the two I,

You know,

My I love to read and part of my go to and reading is often research and different books and things like that that do have to do with not only our exploration,

But I love reading research,

I was actually going to explore getting my PhD at one point because of how much I love doing research,

But I'm went the avenue I went instead and I'm doing research in my own ways and all the ways I've been starting to talk to you guys about,

And that I'm continuing to build on.

I'm also rich in the United Kingdom.

I love to hear that this podcast is making it all the way to the UK and thank you for your awesome feedback.

And I'm super happy to hear that you're also finding this series to be helpful for you.

So again,

Thank you everybody for listening and for your feedback and it just truly means a lot to me.

So with today,

In Episode 13,

Bringing balance to your life,

We're going to look at what life balance is something I'm referring to as your MPES.

So I'll explain kind of what that is,

What it means,

How you can incorporate it into your life and what it can do for you and just how you're living your life in this idea of balance.

Those of you who have been following me consistently each week,

Not only thank you,

I appreciate it,

But also you might be aware and recognize that this episode typically gets aired on Wednesdays and I am just putting it out today on Saturday,

So several days behind.

And it's kind of what led me,

As I explained in a back episode,

I have so,

So much information that I want to share with everyone and I just follow my intuition and guidance on what the next episode will be about.

And it was a perfect kind of tune in and tap into myself of what this episode should be about and what it has to do with,

You know,

It's Saturday and not Wednesday and I'm getting this out there.

And so last week,

You might be aware we had our free week of balance and,

You know,

So we had some extra things going on and I was leading some extra workshops in the evening in addition to seeing all my clients and doing all the stuff I do here for the center,

So leading the meditation and Reiki Circle last week.

And I came to realize in all the stuff I had on my plate last week that I was feeling a little non-balanced or imbalanced,

If you would,

But I definitely was noticing and tapping into that awareness of,

Okay,

There's a little too much on my plate right now and,

You know,

My life can certainly be busy with all the things I juggle around in terms of my work with clients and managing the Wellness Center and expanding on this,

You know,

I've got a year project going on as far as an amazing expansion I'm working on within for Serenity Wellness Center and so working on that stuff.

So I,

You know,

I'm okay with the fact that life can be busy right now,

But I also am mindful of when it gets a bit too busy and when it's like,

Okay,

I need to breathe for a minute,

I need to ground myself and I need to tap in and see where I'm at in my daily connection with my MPES,

Which again,

I'll explain that a little bit here today.

And so with that,

It led to me instead of doing my typical recording on Wednesday,

I spent that evening going to dinner with my daughter and my father.

And that was an amazing tap out of the stress and the busyness and tap in to feeding my own soul and connecting and sharing,

You know,

That space with my family at that time.

So here we are,

It's Saturday,

And I'm going to talk to you about what that has to do with today.

Well,

I mean,

I guess I already did that,

But I'm going to move in now to our topic for today.

And that is this idea of life balance,

What it means in terms of our MPES and how you can incorporate that into your life in a way that can help or maybe benefit you.

And so life balance,

You know,

We often wear a lot of different hats if you would in our life.

You know,

We might have a career or we might,

You know,

Our career might be staying at home and taking care of our family or managing everything happening in our family.

You know,

Just because you're not clocking in somewhere,

Doing that nine to five or whatever,

You know,

It doesn't mean that you also don't have this notion of like a career,

You know,

Stay at home moms or stay at home fathers.

Wow.

You know,

It's a whole lot that they have going on and they have to manage as well,

Or you if that refers to you that I'm talking to.

And so whatever it is for you,

These hats that we wear,

You know,

We have our career or,

You know,

To do part of our life,

We have our,

You know,

Maybe we are parents,

Maybe we are someone's well,

We're obviously someone's child,

We're here.

You know,

Maybe we are a grandparent or grandchild to someone,

We are friends,

We might have a partner,

You know,

Or be in a marriage or we have,

You know,

Maybe community stuff that we do.

And so there's that hat we wear,

And we do outreach in the community and trying to support,

You know,

Community outreach projects.

And maybe we have another hat that we wear that it connects us to,

You know,

I don't know,

Different aspects of ourselves that we're going to talk about here today.

But it's just all these hats we wear.

And it can be overwhelming sometimes and we can feel locked down and bogged down and feel that there's just not enough time,

There's not enough time to myself,

Like,

When am I gonna have time to do that I have to do all this other stuff.

And we can so so often just put our own needs and our own self on the back burner as a go to without even tapping in and realizing we're doing that we're so depleted and we're exhausted and we're tired.

And we'll just keep pushing and we'll just keep pushing.

And then we wonder why later we get sick,

Or we have chronic pain or inflammation cycles in our body or we can't think straight or we feel so overwhelmed that the fact of doing the dishes is too much or talking to somebody is too much and we want to just go in a cave or you know,

Go on a deserted island somewhere and just escape instead of engage,

Cleanse,

Clear and balance.

So today,

You know,

I thought it'd be really important again,

Not only because what I do in my daily life as far as mindfully tapping in and trying to be aware,

But also we've been building this wellness toolbox.

And what we've been starting with is just,

You know,

Some mindfulness tools and those daily mindfulness tools we've been working on and then starting to understand the science and the impact things have on our full body system,

How they're integrated and they communicate and collaborate together all these different multifaceted parts of ourselves.

But we've also started looking at aspects of the mind in terms of how we digest information,

You know,

That idea,

Like I mentioned before,

A thought can come and it can go and if we don't hit enter and download it into our system,

We don't have the emotion response,

And we don't have the physical manifestation.

It's just the thought,

It's just a word,

It's just the thing flowing by.

And so we've started to kind of look at that in terms of thoughts and that idea of making our body moldy and we've been learning lots of techniques and tools of how to balance those aspects of self and we're going to build much more on all of these things and all of these areas.

But as we're starting to do that and as we're starting to explore and we're going to get much deeper into things here as these episodes continue on,

It's a great time to tap into this part.

This part of how do I balance me?

If I'm building and I'm tapping into this wellness toolbox and I'm starting to kind of be more aware,

How do I start to balance all of this?

How do I start to balance the things I'm starting to notice I need and that I want in my life?

And so that's where this idea of our MPES comes into play.

These are just different aspects I explore within myself but also in all the different people I work with in a professional way in my life but also with the clients I work with in mental health or in our mindfulness training I do with people or those who explore and we talk more about the metaphysical realm of things and our energy body exploration.

I teach Reiki and all this other stuff as well but with it and all those different avenues that I work within myself and with others,

These areas here I'm going to talk with you today are things that I always encourage people to be mindful of and always I know is one of those words I say I don't encourage you to use a whole bunch but this is one place that always for me at least I think is important.

And so with the MPES I'm going to break that down for you and as I explore it and talk about it you'll hear different aspects of how to actually do it and tap in as we go through each.

So the M stands for our mental self.

There are so many different ways we can fill our mental self.

We've been building on those mindfulness skills which helps assist in all the ways that we've been learning in relation to our mental health and our brain health but also it's important to feed our mind each day.

Keeping it active,

Keeping it alert,

There's lots of research you know looking at that in terms of dementia and Alzheimer's and keeping the active mind going to help with that but just I'm talking now in our daily life keeping our mind busy as a way to continue along this path of mental health and well-being.

So in order to keep our mind active there are so many different ways that we can do that every day.

You can read something.

It doesn't have to be long.

You don't have to read a book.

Read a short article.

Read you know find your favorite magazine that taps into the things that are important to you and maybe read one article each day or you know find a favorite blog or a podcast.

Look at that.

You're listening to me right now so you're already tapping and feeding that mental part of yourself right now in that moment.

Learning something new from talking with others.

Get to hear their life experience.

Get to hear what they're an expert in.

Get to learn what they learned that day.

Not only is that helping us in the broad array of information out there to learn you know I struggle with that sometimes I'll be honest.

I love reading as I mentioned a little bit ago and learning and learning through reading or talking to others and podcasts and you know one of my favorite things though is talking with other people and hearing what they have to say and hearing what they've learned and what they know but sometimes my struggle is with loving to learn.

I just want to keep learning and learning and learning and recognizing that I have to get back to this balance.

I can't be you know I just can't possibly read and learn as deeply as I want to about all the areas I want to so tapping in and connecting with others who are experts in those areas and learning from them and connecting with them because not only is it about that learning but that part in itself as I mentioned is one of my favorite things to do learning through others and connecting with others because it's that part also that connection.

It helps us see and connect with our similarities and differences and the oneness that we all have this just beautiful connection and integration and just the building that it does also and sense of community and yeah all that great stuff.

So each day you know trying to take in all these opportunities for mental awareness and learning keeping your mind active taking in what's happening around you in your day all around you each day are opportunities to learn.

You know we might have a stressful day or a hard day or have just gone through another cycle that we keep repeating until we decide to learn the lesson that we are struggling to learn.

Those are times for mental clarity.

Those are times for mental reflection and learning our mental mind letting us learn.

So that's the M the mental part of self.

And then we have the P and that's our physical self.

Our physical self is you know something that again is so important when we look at this integration and this fullness of everything that we are.

And so our physical self doesn't have to be we have our workout every day.

It doesn't have to be long.

It doesn't have to be hard.

Just move move for 15 to 20 minutes each day.

I often work with people on developing kind of it's like our top fives and with this idea of physical movement come up with like your top five things to do.

And that way each day might be a different day for you.

You know maybe you don't want to do that workout that day or maybe you're not feeling like yoga that day or maybe it's too cold to go on the walk that you typically go on.

So allow yourself an opportunity and permission to just give some time and think of your top five things in movement what that is for you what that can be for you.

And then you have your go to those times you feel stuck in your mind and you can't feel like you can connect and think to what it is.

Well just pop your list.

See what you're feeling.

Ask your body what do you need in this moment.

And as I've talked about before don't forget the second part.

Listen listen to what your body tells you back.

So doing 15 to 20 minutes each day of some kind of movement whether it be a workout a walk dancing around your house or apartment walking around the block even it doesn't have to be a long walk.

Maybe doing a brief exercise doing some yoga doing some Qigong like whatever it is for you just getting that body moving moving.

And keep in mind you might be doing movement in your day already.

You know take the stairs instead of the elevator if you're able to you know walk to the place you want to go grab a coffee instead of driving your car if you're able.

You know just look for those small opportunities of things in your day that you can just do these slight adjustments and get that physical movement in your day.

Keeping in mind also this is going to be a whole series of episodes down the line but I just want to plug this in here as an added importance to be very mindful of what you're putting in your physical body.

Food is medicine you know we can put things in our body and not connect with the nutritional value it has or does not have.

We can maybe not quite pay attention to man every time I eat that I feel bloated or I've digestive problems or I notice that I have some chronic pain elevating inflammation in my body.

Lots of ways our body tries to indicate and tell us it's allergic or does not like the food that we're putting in it.

But also just being mindful again that food is medicine.

We've started talking about the integration of our body system.

Food can impact our mental,

Emotional and our physical health.

It can increase our depression and anxiety.

It can elevate substantially the inflammation cycles in our body.

Just start small.

Start small.

You know drink water.

Add some veggies to your meals if you're not already.

I recently started juicing.

Wow.

I love it.

I was the energy and focus and the amount of minerals and vitamins.

I'm primarily vegan as the way I choose to eat and it's amazing.

I guess it's really elevating the amount of nutrients and vitamins and things I'm getting in my diet by adding this juicing in the morning and it is giving me so much mental energy but also physical energy.

I was literally jumping around the kitchen the other morning after having juicing and we were joking that you know that energy and I was you know feeling like Tigger or I was jumping around on the pogo stick without the stick.

So I was just the pogo.

But it felt amazing and I continue to do that and incorporate that into my morning as a way for me to be mindful of the food and what I'm putting into my body because I do try my best to treat food as medicine.

And you know I completely understand organic is expensive and sadly they're actually finding in our testing that organic food isn't also always safe in the way that we think it is when we're buying organic.

Unfortunately some of the recent testing is showing that those chemicals you know what we often know of as Roundup and the other chemicals.

I know this is a debate but you can choose to disagree with me that is perfectly fine everything I say on my podcast is just coming from my viewpoint.

But to me but to me it's you know it's pretty clear if we're spraying chemicals on stuff to kill things well and then we're eating it.

Yeah we'll talk about that much more in a different episode.

But just being mindful I understand organic is expensive.

Obviously the best way to do it is to grow our own food but I also know that's not feasible or possible for everyone.

I also know it's not feasible or possible to always buy organic to not buy processed foods.

But if we can cook our own food and we can grow our own food and we can get away from processed foods trust me your body's going to thank you immensely.

If you do eat meat you know trying to buy locally sourced meat products and animals those that are not coming from factory farms you know buying grass fed or animals that are grass fed animals that are being loved.

So just think about again food as medicine and being mindful of what you're putting in your body and what you're feeding your family because it impacts the whole system.

We'll be talking also later about mindful eating.

It's just a whole nother category but just trying to give you snapshots of some information today.

So that's the P in the M.

P.

E.

S.

Our physical self.

E is emotion our emotional self.

Fill feed and connect to your positive emotions and also allow yourself to work through those that are difficult.

And that will be another series of episodes we talk about when we talk further about emotion.

But for today recognizing that connection with your emotion joy and happiness are in you always.

You don't have to go seeking outside of yourself for them.

Keeping in mind that at your baseline it is running through you this joy and happiness.

What you then do is you further fuel it.

You know you feed it and can feed it through your day but it's always there.

You don't have to seek it outside your house or yourself.

You are full of joy and happiness.

But to feed that further think of small things that you can do to connect to joy and gratitude humor and laughter.

Laughter is contagious.

I was spending some time with my friend a little bit ago a couple weeks ago and we were talking about you know a little bit of a difficult situation that her and her family are working through and we're in her living room and her daughter who is about two.

She has this ball and she comes over and she is just cracking up laughing.

I mean her whole body was shaking her little toes curled into you know the floor to try to keep her body stable from just the glorious whole full body experience of completely connecting to laughter and humor as a young child is so easily able to do just being in the moment and it pulled my friend and I right into that moment with her.

We went from you know working through some difficult emotion to just our whole body was shaking with her little daughter in joy and laughter.

And so finding ways to do that you know sharing a smile brings a smile to someone else.

It's all contagious.

It's contagious within.

It's contagious outside of us.

These are simple things they don't take long to do.

Just doing simple acts of kindness holding the door open for someone you know again sharing that smile looking around you and seeing the ways others around you are sharing and being kind it also helps to fuel that within yourself.

And again considering giving yourself permission to sit with those emotions that might not be as easy.

I'll talk much more about that you know like I said in other episodes you know why we fear emotion what creates that but also what it creates in our body when we swallow and hide emotion or think we can keep just stuffing it down or I'm just going to keep putting that away in that file cabinet and pretend it's not there.

Well it's there and it's going to come out and it comes out physically and it comes out in secondary emotions and it comes out all over the place.

And so giving ourselves permission to recognize and have compassion for the fear that we have but we must feel in order to heal.

If we don't feel these things and we don't work through them they just keep festering and building and we keep repeating patterns and get stuck in the same cycle that we want to break over and over again.

And it's not just fear of anxiety and depression or anger that people have.

So often I work with people who are also afraid of joy.

They're afraid of happiness.

They're afraid of love.

And they tend to intentionally or unintentionally do things to sabotage their connection with these beautiful emotions.

Beautiful emotions ebb and flow and it can be scary to recognize that but to you know disregard yourself or jeez I'm having a hard time finding the word I'm looking for but to like not allow yourself the opportunity to feel these joyous emotions it's a pretty vicious punishment cycle to put yourself into and you need to maybe tap in and ask yourself some questions on why that is why you would think you are undeserving of such beautiful things and you know again we'll explore that more.

But keeping in mind we fear emotions and it's different for everyone and some people fear the harder emotions and some people fear the happy pleasant emotions you know we fear them all for various reasons.

But giving ourselves permission to tap in to feel to feed to fill to connect to work through to manifest in a way that we want to be otherwise we get stuck and we just repeat things that just aren't serving us any longer.

So that's the E the emotion.

And lastly in the M.

P.

E.

S.

We have our spiritual self or our higher consciousness.

So this could be organized religion for you.

It could be a spiritual connection of some sort.

It could be a connection to your higher self or oneness.

It might be a deeper connection to your inner self and intuition.

There is no right or wrong.

It is whatever it is for you.

What you do might not be what I do what I do might not be what you do and that is perfectly okay we are our own individual but giving yourself permission whatever it is for you to tap in and to connect to your spiritual self or your higher consciousness.

With all of this it allows us to kind of reground and reconnect and remember our full purpose of who we are and what we're doing.

You know we can go through life in such a busyness and we're feeling and feeling and feeling but we're avoiding avoiding and avoiding.

We're not connecting and in allowing yourself this connection and all those different ways we can do that it just helps us to see the fullness more deeply of who we are.

And those are different aspects again we'll talk about fully or more fully in other episodes but just these snapshots to hopefully I hope in what I've done here gave you at least enough information in each of these categories to get you started.

And so that spiritual aspect of self and giving yourself permission and time each day to tap in in some way.

It could be a few minutes it doesn't have to be you know an hour just something.

And so that leads me to how do we do this what do we do.

As you've heard as we talk through this M.

P.

E.

S.

There's you know I shared some different ideas in each category of what to do but also some things to keep in mind.

Ideally if you can give yourself an hour each day to tap into your M.

P.

E.

S.

Not an hour for each one an hour each day.

And with the M.

P.

E.

S.

Something you can think of if this is your mindful practice of your entire self.

So your M.

P.

E.

S.

Is your mindful practice of your entire self.

An hour each day to tap into this.

If you don't have an hour that's OK.

Just do 30 minutes.

But keeping in mind some of these things don't take long at all.

You know the physical part of yourself might be the thing that takes the longest because really you want to try to give yourself 15 20 minutes of movement.

But maybe you have to spread that out.

Maybe do 10 minutes in the morning maybe do five minutes in the afternoon and maybe another five in the evening.

It doesn't have to be all in one chunk.

Ideally if you could do the you know 15 to 20 in a chunk of time your body's going to appreciate that because of all the different things that are going on behind the surface there but we're under the surface.

But you know again doing what you can do is what you can do and that is the most important.

So it doesn't have to be cookie cutter.

I'm not about the cookie cutter life.

So make it what it is for you because you are you.

You are not me or anyone else.

So if you only have 30 minutes that's okay.

Just trying to tap in trying to give yourself the permission and the time to do these things.

Remembering some of them don't take long.

You know this mental learning we can do it five minutes 10 minutes.

You know the emotion self.

We could do it through our day here and there.

It's just connecting and finding the few minutes that we can do to tap into these things or allowing yourself permission to do them even a little longer.

You can maybe even write something on your whiteboard if you have one of those or if you keep a journal log or something you know just kind of this mindful practice of your entire self the M.

P.

E.

S.

And letting that be your guide each day of what you can do.

And if you just write those letters down somewhere M.

P.

E.

S.

Put a little checkmark after you've done it that day.

You know just a way to tap in and to be aware.

Maybe give yourself a week of trying this out and checking in tapping in then to how you feel.

You can maybe do a little journal entry before you start your week of trying this new practice and then maybe you do one at the end of one week and notate any differences and you can do like a cost benefit analysis at that point.

You can kind of look at the before and afters and see the pros and cons and see to you personally is it worth continuing.

Is it worth continuing to give yourself permission and time to feed your full self.

Are you worth it.

I think you are but you have to think you are too.

So maybe trying it for a week seeing how you feel maybe then you'll give yourself another week.

You know there's a lot of buzz about it takes 21 days to create a habit and yes and no.

It kind of takes 21 days to start to create a habit.

It could take up to two months or so to actually fully get into the habit of doing something.

So don't be hard on yourself.

Give yourself permission to work through it.

Give yourself permission to give it a try.

You know who you are and what you need.

Communicate with your body and ask it too and don't forget to listen.

Thank you everyone for spending some time and space with me today.

I hope you found some connection in our discussion today about the mindful practice of your entire self and how you can incorporate that into your life.

Enjoy the rest of your day today and I'll be airing another episode here in the next few days and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Have a beautiful day.

You.