Take a Break!

Take a Break!

If your tired, stressed out or your feet are just saying “give me a break” why not try Reflexology.

Imagine lying back in a comfortable reclining chair, there is soft relaxing background music. The room is warm and tranquil. Your shoes and socks have been set aside. You are relaxed. Your feet are placed on two pillows. Two hands gently grasp your right or left foot and begin kneading it, loosening each toe and relaxing the foot’s many muscles, tendons, bones and ligaments and stimulating over 7,000 nerve endings. Relaxing even more, you close your eyes and tension begins to melt away.

Whether it be meeting a deadline at the office, getting the kids ready for school, or planning a family gathering, stress makes a daily appearance. Most doctors agree that over 75% of our health problems today can be linked to stress and tension. They are like a tourniquet around the body’s systems. More people are turning to Reflexology as a means of relieving high levels of stress.

Taking time to relieve the stresses in life is one way we can promote better health and well-being. Reflexology does a lot more for your health than soothe your soles, it provides the basic need for human touch.

When you or someone you know needs to “Take a Break” why not consider Reflexology or Pampered Feet and Reflexology.

Call 334-358-3990 and set up an appointment or get a Gift Certificate for that special friend or loved one.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. Gift Certificates are available either in person or by mail. Call 334-358-3990 for more information. A Reflexology Gift Certificate can be a healthy choice for that special someone.

When you purchase a Gift Certificate for Valentine’s Day, you will receive hand poured lavender scented heart soaps.

Balance the Scale

Healthy Stress/Unhealthy Stress

Stress can be healthy or unhealthy. Balance and flexibility are the key words. Finding balance can be difficult to reach, but it is attainable and healthy to us as individuals.

Healthy stress is advantageous, acceptable, wholesome, allowable, and realistic. It can prove to be:

1. Advantageous for motivation to fulfill a goal you have chose. Something you want to accomplish and has meaning to you.

2. An incentive to formulate and put in place a realistic course to accomplish your chosen goal.

3. The encouragement to be a little more organized in order to reach the goal.

Unhealthy Stress is injurious, harmful, unwholesome, and can be destructive both physically and mentally.

1. Forced to fulfill a goal which you have no interest in completing. A goal others have chosen for you.

2. We know at the onset that the goal is unrealistic and possibly unattainable.

3. Constantly running behind schedule feeling strained and overwhelmed.

A signal of unhealthy stress is feeling exhausted, spent, worn-out, aggressive and overstrained.

When we feel we are becoming Human Doings rather than Human Beings, it is our signal that change is imperative. We have a choice, flexibility in our decision making is the only healthy choice we can make.

Diabetes: Laughter lowers blood sugar.

Laughing can lower blood sugar. A Japanese study reported in Diabetes Care found blood sugar levels were lower in people who laughed after a meal than in people who didn’t laugh. Why? Researchers don’t know yet, but they say daily laughter can help control diabetics’ blood sugar.-- Peggy J. Noonan

A Friend - A gift we give ourselves

A friend is someone we turn to,

When our spirits need a lift.

A friend is someone we treasure,

For our friendship is a gift.

A friend is someone who fills our lives with beauty, joy, and grace.

And makes the world we live in,

A better and happier place.

---Author Unknown

Tend and Befriend

According to Shelley Taylor, Ph.D., professor of psychology at UCLA and author of The Tending Instinct, friends and social support brings down our blood pressure, signals our adrenal glands to stop our corticosteroids.

Friendship networks are important to our well-being when we have soul-bared conversations with friends. It can help us to feel secure and boast our confidence to cope with stress. We women do feel a heightened desire to nurture--to “tend and befriend,” as Taylor puts it. She says the friendship response may explain why women out live men. We feel less anxious, less overwrought and less overwhelmed.

A considerable number of studies document the positive effects of social ties on the physical health and longevity of men. One, from the Harvard School of Public Health, found that men with strong social ties had an 82 per cent lower risk of dying from heart disease than men who were

socially isolated. The study’s lead author, Eric Rimm, SC.D. associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition.

As for keeping young, a key predictor of physical and mental health as you age is your degree of social connections says Gary Small, M.D. author of The Memory Bible. “People who are socially involved live longer,” he says. “They enjoy better overall health and have better cognitive functioning. These are pretty strong arguments for making time for our friends.

When we are already scrambling for downtown, how can we find time for our friends. It is important to MAKE time our friends. Too many people put off something that brings them joy, just because they don’t have it on their schedule. Plan/Schedule time to get together with friends and honor this schedule. It is one way to reduce stress and have fun in the process.

socially isolated. The study’s lead author, Eric Rimm, SC.D. associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition.

As for keeping young, a key predictor of physical and mental health as you age is your degree of social connections says Gary Small, M.D. author of The Memory Bible. “People who are socially involved live longer,” he says. “They enjoy better overall health and have better cognitive functioning.” These are pretty strong arguments for making time for our friends.

When we are already scrambling for downtime, how can we find time for our friends. It is important to MAKE time our friends. Too many people put off something that brings them joy, just because they don’t have it on their schedule. Plan/Schedule time to get together with friends and honor this schedule. It is one way to reduce stress and have fun in the

process.

Daily Opportunities

Every day you have the opportunity to do things differently. You have the opportunity to change and grow. You can find comfort in knowing that you can reorient yourself in the direction of your goals instantly by reading them and recommitting, sometimes more than once a day! No matter what you did yesterday, you can choose again today. Are you using that opportunity?

For some folks, a pattern exists-- that of continually “beating themselves up” for mistakes from the past. You know, the “I-should- have known-better”, “I should- have-seen-it coming,” a variety of self-talk. That kind of talk is only useful once or twice in any situation, and it only has value at all if it is used to determine what could have been done differently and learn from the experience. Some folks make a life work of beating themselves up for past mistakes, or missed opportunities. In fact, some people in some cultures focus entirely on the wrongs done to them generations before and generate anger that prevents them from seeing clearly in the present moment. Energy use is a choice, too.

Knowing both the direction in which you wish your life to go, and how you would like to feel on the journey, gives you information necessary for drawing your personal map. It is your choice what you take on this trip, which path you follow and when you would like to reach your destination. It is your journey, and therefore, your choice. Sure you may find some bridges washed out and have to find alternative pathways. You may find unexpected jungles that slow you down, however, remembering where you are headed rather than bemoaning what you left behind, will always move you forward.

For today, read your goals. (if you do not have any written goals, commit to writing one in each of four categories, today--(physical, intellectual, social or emotional, and spiritual.)

Take one step, large or small, in the direction of at least one goal before you sleep tonight. Just before you drift off to sleep, review your day and acknowledge yourself for the steps you have taken and make a plan for tomorrow.

http://www.OptimizeLifeNow.com.

Strength

The strength you’ve insisted on assigning to others is actually within yourself.

---Lisa Alther

If we think right now about people we admire and respect, we’ll usually find that their enviable qualities involve a certain degree of strength.

So we admire these people, wishing we, too, could be as strong as they are. Yet each of us has inner strength. This strength defines us as we are and makes us different. We cannot share the same amount of strength in all areas of our life - mental, physical, and spiritual--because we are all different.

Let us think back over the events of today and find our inner strengths.

We may work well with people; we may be a good employee or student. As we look around our homes, we may find further clues - handiwork, a tasty meal, flourishing plants, a set of weights, a shelf full of books, a completed crossword puzzle. If we spend less time envying another’s strengths, and look instead to ourselves, we will have more time and energy to develop our own inner strengths.

--Amy E. Dean

About Heart and Sole:

I hope you have enjoyed this newsletter, and it has inspired you to appreciate life and our choices in life.

We have just celebrated Christmas 2003. It has been a time to appreciate our friends and family. These people along with our individuality make us who we are, a special, unique person.

Wishing for you a wonderful 2004.

May all your dreams come true.

Paula

Cherish your visions and your dreams, as they are the children of your soul; the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

--Napoleon Hill

Recommended Reading:

The Tending Instinct

by Shelley Taylor

The Purpose Driven Life

by Rick Warren