Simple Pleasures

As part of my Christmas, I was happy to receive plenty of tea- Chai Spice, Pomegrante and Orange Spice Infusers along with loose tea called Tali's Masala Chai from the World Tea House in Halifax, Prana Perfect from The Annex Book/gift store in Tantallon, and from The Tea Brewer(Mahone Bay)Lemon Lust Rooibos, Monk's Blend, Cream Earl Grey and Japanese Sencha. It feels heart-warming to sit with my special tea cups and specialty teas while reading from my current book, Courageous Dreaming, and watch the snow fall on the lake.

I think of it as one of the ways in which I care for myself.

Heart-Math and the researchers with the Global Coherence Initiative tell us how much more powerful our feelings are than our thoughts. In addition, our emotional energy resides in our hormonal system, heart, brain and immune system. The energy of our feeling registers and transmits faster than the speed of thought.

This is important because our feelings may be negative as in anxiety, sadness, anger and these feelings trigger chemicals that affect our health negatively. Increased and repeated adrenalin in our body can cause our blood pressure to rise and cortisol to affect our bone density and increase our rate of aging.

They offer techniques to immediately lower our stress level. One technique is to put your hand over your heart and visualize your incoming breath passing through your hand directly into your heart. and your exhale doing the same. As we do this, our heart begins to beat more rhythmically and the DHEA (the good/healing hormone) begins to be released. They also tell us that we can learn to manage and control our feelings just by paying attention to them and doing other simple techniques that are similar to the one I mentioned.

If you would like to know more about tuning into your heart and what that can do for your body and the collective consciousness, google HeartMath and CGI.