Resilient Reflections: Building your house; Foundations for your health (Part one)

Sharing information is sharing wealth and knowledge. For most of my clients, I felt a blog that you can read, is a more effective way to share that information. So Resilient Reflections was born.

My hope is for folks, particularly middle-aged women and on, to learn more about the foundations of yoga, movement, and self-care.

Blogs chat about various components of building foundation for a healthy life, and sooo much more!

Who knows what other topics may come along?

The foundations of a strong practice require learning about different styles of movement, what you like, where you are at in life and includes those components of your life you need to self examine order to remain committed, grow and maintain consistency both on your mat, and consequently, your life.

This will allow all of us to age healthier.

Growing your practice, and really your life, means building :

• a strong foundation

• habits, and;

• routine.

Building foundations, refining them, fixing the cracks, changing the décor. There is lot to talk cover. The intent is to support your practice or perhaps another area of your life that you’d like to tackle and don’t know where to start.

Building a solid foundation is a huge topic and various blogs and live Facebook shows we host weekly on PŪR Resilience slowly pick away at these fundamental topics by sharing nuggets of information, thoughts and suggestions and I look for feedback from anyone wanting to share it!

I compare building a personal, strong foundation whether for exercise, your practice here, or your life, is like building a house. You want to lay a strong foundation that will weather the storms.

You might get drafty windows, need some paint to spruce the place up or have a leaky roof. All normal maintenance of your home. But the foundation remains strong.

Two challenges people face:

Essentially, there are two rather common problems people face when it comes to change or wanting, key word WANTING, to make changes for improvement or just better choices:

1) A lack of resources. And I’m not talking money. You don’t feel you have enough time or energy to do all the things you think you should.

2) A failure of follow-up or commit. You set the intention to exercise every day, but three days later you’ve forgotten about it. (Sounds like a new year’s resolution, right???) And the major obstacles to a more aligned life aren’t the lack of a desire to change, but the many temptations that keep us where we are--too much tv, video games, meeting for coffee, chatting on the phone, scrolling FB or IG when you have free time, or it could be drinking, smoking, or eating junk food. Yes, many of us have jobs, kids, grandkids and activities we do everyday. But we also have choices with some of the other time we have or that we could create.

There are options to moving forward.

You could go cold turkey. Trust me not fun!

Or your foundation building could start by setting boundaries. Setting boundaries, is a big challenge for a lot of us. And your boundaries need to be relative to your temptation to go around or over them.

Some people have the ability to just say okay I’m going to cut down my tv to one hour a day. And do it. Others, maybe not so much.

If you are the latter, which many of us are, you need to take a good look at your habits (got you covered in a blog to come!).

But on a basic level, when you are trying to make a significant change in your life you need to avoid situations that trigger you. For example, if the first thing a smoker does in the morning is light a cigarette, then that’s the first habit to change. If you smoke more when you drink, well it goes without saying, maybe you should drink less. Some of our habits go hand in hand.

By identifying your triggers, you can start to make change if you choose. You want to lay your foundation before choosing your faucets. In order to build a strong foundation, just like you create a level foundation before building a house, you must set a level foundation, or take the first steps, before taking on larger goals.

Structuring Your Foundation

Three of the most useful tools for creating a foundation are:

• Getting Organized

• Daily Routines

• Personal Health

• Getting Organized

If you are surrounded by clutter, both physically and mentally, every goal will be much harder. Disorganization in your environment creates disorganization in your thinking. Clear, focused thinking is necessary to building a strong foundation and good, new habits.

Daily Routines

Once you start developing habits, you have to set a daily routine that works for you. A routine is a baseline of what you know you must get done everyday.

Personal Health

Your personal health is the third part of a solid foundation because achieving any goal requires energy. If you’re not in good shape, you’ll have less energy to invest every day. The better shape you’re in, the more fuel you have to use every day. And that’s where a lot of what we do at PŪR Resilience comes, in supporting a yoga and movement practice, consistently. What you do with yoga and movement is fuel for your body, mind and spirit, and the better shape you are in the more energy and fuel you have to use every day. All three of these goals are achievable if you put the right effort and focus in because they are mostly within your control.

But don’t go into overwhelm! A lot of stuff you may already have in place and don’t really realize it. If you have kids, or if you work in a typical office setting, waking up on time isn’t optional. Yet the tendency to stay up too late, and thus being extra tired in the morning, is.

If you work from home though, you may have to build these habits for your foundation. Set the alarm clock every day and get up preferably at the same time. Not hard but this builds consistency. So, the first thing you need to do is look at your situation and assess what you may need to change to start building a strong foundation for better health and self care.

Your life may just need a spring cleaning! If so, bonus! OR your life might need more of an overhaul. And this is achievable. By cleaning out one drawer at a time, you will get your house organized.

So, to start building your foundation, do a true assessment of you and your life.

Take a look at your strengths and where you may have challenges. What triggers do you have that might take you off course? PŪR Resilience has a journal that helps you through some of these questions. You can get yours here. Determine realistic boundaries and if you need to, ask for help. That help might be as simple as explaining to your loved ones that 3 days a week you are taking an hour to yourself and to leave you alone lol! Or turning off you phone so work is constantly rearing it’s head. Simple steps but ones we as women, seem often to struggle doing - asking for help.

Once you have done this, you’re in a position to get organized, build a routine that works for you, support your personal healthy journey and probably most important, to support everyone and everything in your life in a healthier way.

When you are healthy you have the fuel, you need to get through each day. When you are happy, so are those around you.