We have two main goals: The first is to deal with your current issues, reestablishing your body’s balance or homeostasis. Our world seems filled right now with triggers for extra stress and anxiety, in addition to the everyday issues we all face at one time or another with sleep or muscle aches and pains. Once we’ve addressed whatever your own current challenges are, we can move on to the second goal — to get you on the path to true vitality, to begin to energize your entire being. We’ll bring the best practices from different medical traditions to accomplish this, fusing together a personal protocol for you to follow.
One medical tradition that is popular for energizing your body is Meridian Medicine. For thousands of years, ancient medical traditions have sourced energy pathways within the body to balance the body. These pathways, known as meridians, flow throughout your entire body. Along the pathways are hundreds of points, known as acupoints or marma points. When these points are balanced via acupressure, acupuncture or magnets, the body resets and recharges.
Join me in using this Meridian Medicine to balance your body. Are you feeling anxious or overwhelmingly stressed, experiencing lowered immunity or body aches? This indicates your meridians need balancing in order to soothe and uplift what ails you. The meridians contain a vital life force that energizes your body when balanced. This vital life force, also known as qi or prana, is readily available to support you and your current challenges.
“The cell is a machine driven by energy. It can thus be approached by studying matter, or by studying energy. In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.”
What is your Vitality strategy?
One formulaic way of expressing the path to vitality might look something like this:
In my Welcome video message, I talked about the journey that brought you here. It is important to understand that though the graphic above tries to reduce the path to Vitality as a formula, it is also its own journey: once we achieve some measure of the Wellness that we seek, it is not a destination, or the final solution to a formula, but just another point on a continuous path. It takes focus to maintain it. It takes work to tap your natural life force to constantly build it. There are many ways to do this — we’ve touched on a few that fuse together insights from different medical health care systems, but there are many others that are available to you. Below are a few suggestions, from an article I wrote for Thrive Global in April of 2020.
Bottling Bhutan Bliss: The “High-Five” Tips
How a breathtaking journey can remind all of us — among other things — to take a deep breath
By: Susan Shane, Licensed Acupuncturist
Photo by Simon Migaj on Unsplash
Sometimes an actual geographic journey turns into a wellness journey. It recently happened to me: after two weeks of hiking in Bhutan, where the air is as clean and pure as the chants that rise from the Buddhist monasteries that seem to dot every hillside, I realized that the rest of the world, including my own personal world, needed less Human Doing and more Human Being.
Here’s what I mean, with some “high-five” wellness tips for achieving it.
Bhutan has zero-to-negative carbon emissions. Because the air was so pure, I felt really healthy and happy. I wanted to bottle the air and bring it home. Because the scenery was astounding, I wished the hiking would never end. Since praying is a way of life in Bhutan, spending time meditating with monks was truly an uplifting experience. Throughout my magical kingdom visit, I was greeted with kindness. So as soon as my plane hit the tarmac back in the States, I thought, “How do I ‘bottle’ this entire experience? How do I keep this Bhutan bliss with me now that I am home? Can I maintain this type of physical and spiritual ‘high’ of happiness and wellness in my over-busy world?”
Here are the tips that I came up with:
1. Remember to breathe. Breath is life. How are you breathing? Use belly breathing or dan tian (the area below your navel) breathing to infuse oxygen throughout your body and mind. Close your eyes, focus on your breathing, and clear your mind. Yes, it’s probably the simplest meditation exercise, but a very important one. Take a minute. Breathe. Do less and be more.
2. Move your body. Walking is a wonderful way to keep oxygen flowing throughout your body and move qi (also known as prana) from head to toe. In this context, any properly done aerobic exercise is good exercise.
3. Be grateful for your life. Count your own blessings, and then expand your gratitude and pray for all people and peace on the planet we share. Work the prayer into your breath meditations. And while you’re at it, the planet itself can probably really use a few of your blessings right now. As even the youngest child in Bhutan knows, gratitude and praying/meditation are essential bottling elements for achieving bliss.
4. Spend time in nature. Go to the beach or the mountains or the desert. Make a sandcastle, hug a tree, or check out the cactus blooms. If you can’t get outside, watch a National Geographic or nature-focused show.
5. Stay hydrated — don’t wait until you are thirsty to drink. Drink water or sip herbal tea throughout your day for consistent hydration. It is no accident that so many religions consider water sacramental. In his book The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner tells a story in which the sudden appearance of garden spring water foretells the birth of a Bhutanese holy man.
These wellness tips are easy to do. They are also easily forgotten in the chaos of to-do lists, job and family emergencies, missed meals, missed deadlines, and missed connections of all sorts, especially with ourselves and each other.
Are you ready for more calm and happiness even with a busy lifestyle? Make no mistake, even these simple, easy-to-do, “high-five” tips will still take discipline and effort. But what journey worth taking, whether geographic or personal, did not pose a least a few daunting challenges?
Follow these five tips, and begin to carve your own path to an emotionally and spiritually enriched life. I think you’ll find that increased physical well-being naturally follows. You don’t have to undergo the rigors of an actual journey to Bhutan to enjoy the benefits of the life lessons to be learned there. Try to do less and be more, and you’ll be well on your way to Bottling Bhutan Bliss.
