It hasn't been easy, but I have stepped up my exercise and gone back to meditation and yoga: techniques I had done regularly in the past.
I am a believer in the importance of sleep, yoga and meditation, but I can't remember how or when I got off track.
It's weird how these things happen to us yet we can't recall what triggered it. Forget the guilt, and slowly get yourself moving in the right direction.
I don't know the demographic of those who read this blog, but if you're over 60, you may think these techniques are a leftover from the 1960s, hippies and flower power. Not true!
Yoga, sleep, and meditation can have an impact on cancer. Did you know that yoga poses actually massage organs? I am concentrating on yoga poses that work on the liver.
I have hereditary high blood pressure. In May, they stopped making the medication I was taking. It was a drug that treated both high blood pressure and high cholesterol in one pill. Surprise, surprise: They decided to double their profits and sell each pill individually, and one of those was just dropped by my insurance plan! I had been wanting to get off this medication after reading articles indicating high blood pressure can be controlled with diet change. I decided not to take either of these drugs for a month and see what happened.
With medication, my blood pressure had been running about 135 over 93. The optimum number should be less than 120 over less than 80, according to the American Heart Association. If you hit 140 over 90, you have high blood pressure, or hypertension.
I took a meditation class, which just happened to be on a day when I had an appointment with my doctor. The nurse took my blood pressure, and it was 125 over 65. I asked her to retake it because I could not believe it was so close to normal. I had stopped the meds for about two weeks and had added one day of meditation. It still read 125 over 65! That blew my mind.
Meditation is now on my schedule full time, and we will see what happens at my next doctor's appointment.
I read an interview with Pete Carroll, who is coach of the Seattle Seahawks. He has his team doing yoga and meditation, and monitors the amount of sleep his athletes get at night. He finds these therapies to be as important as their practice routines.
Apparently, several well-known athletes also do yoga, which features Kevin Garnett of the Brooklyn Nets, Evan Longoria of the Tampa Bay Rays, and Tom Brady, of the New England Patriots.
I am feeling so much more energetic by adding these practices. I was spending too much time sitting and could feel my body losing muscle tone. It had become more difficult to pick up something from the floor, or to get up from the floor after stretching. I do believe this has had a positive effect on my general attitude. When you are tired and weak, you are not yourself. We should all force ourselves to walk to the corner every day. Even something this small can make a difference.
