Happy new you

Ayurveda, the sister of yoga, is a healing method from India and literally means 'the science of life'. The Ayurvedic approach to health is holistic. It includes nutrition and lifestyle advice to achieve a healthy, long and happy life.⁠

Ayurveda is all about optimal digestion. If you eat what suits you, your constitution and the season, your digestion works well and you are at your best. If you don't, you will become unbalanced and you will often suffer from ailments and a low energy level.

You can of course start the year with good intentions. Maybe you want to drink less, exercise more or say no. But if you love yourself and accept yourself fully, change will come naturally. Many bad habits are the result of avoidance or insecurity. For example, you eat or drink too much to avoid having to feel an unpleasant emotion. Or you don't say no, because you actually think you shouldn't take up that space. By developing self-love, many bad habits are no longer necessary.

Because often these habits are covers for your negative self-image. You move away from yourself instead of towards yourself because you don't want to see or feel something about yourself. You look for distraction in case of anxiety by looking at your phone, eating, drinking or watching television. Turn it around. See anxiety as an invitation to turn to yourself, instead of moving away from yourself. That way you can experience that there is nothing that needs to be avoided. As soon as you lovingly connect with your heart at troubled moments, you will develop more and more self-love and peace.

Five ways to create a postive mindset

• Full self-acceptance: embrace your beautiful and ugly sides. Put your shadow sides in the limelight. If you think you can be lazy, stupid or jealous, it's actually not that bad anymore. Because let's be honest, perfection is boring.
  
  An exercise in full self-acceptance: as soon as you experience an ugly quality of yourself, put it in the spotlight in your mind. Shine on it and say "I fully accept myself, I love myself the way I am."
  
  
• Are you divine self: don't discount yourself, don't adapt, but listen to what you want and show it. We are all afraid of being rejected and therefore often keep our opinions to ourselves. Let yourself shine. If you stay close to yourself with an open heart and open mind and follow your intuition, your beautiful self will blossom much more.
  
  Being an exercise in yourself: take a moment when you feel safe and express something you wouldn't normally express. Something you experience that way. It doesn't have to be big, just something small can also work beautifully. Do not reject the other in this, the other may think differently. Open your heart and say what you think with respect for the other.
  
  

• Ignore the inner critic: we all have a voice within ourselves that says that we are no good, that others are not okay, or that the world is unsafe. By recognizing this you can see it more as noise. A kind of radio with fear news in the background, which you can hear, but with which you identify yourself less and less. By meditating and looking at that voice as a chatterbox that goes on and on, you can loosen up from negative self-talk.

  An exercise in de-identification with the inner critic: Sit in a place where you cannot be disturbed. Wait for a thought to come up and write the thought down. Let it go and wait for the next thought. Write these down again. As a result, you can establish that you are not the inventor of the thoughts, but that it is an infinite flow, with which you do not need much.

• Selfcare: if you don't feel self-love, you often take bad care of yourself. After all, you are not worth it or you may not take that space for yourself. This makes you more frustrated and you can also experience more anger. Taking good care of yourself makes everything easier. Make it a priority and make room for it.

  An exercise in Selfcare: ask yourself, what do I need to feel good in terms of body, food and mind. Give yourself this challenge. You also immediately become a nicer person

• Manifest your dreams: When thoughts and expectations are positive, your state of being changes. How does that work exactly? When we imagine what it would be like to be happy, we activate our frontal lobe. This is the part of the brain that controls our behavior. So by imagining something, we are already a little bit on the way to changing our behavior. The more concretely you envision the situation, with the thoughts you would have and the feelings you would experience, the more the frontal lobe looks for the memories that resemble this and activates these neurological circuits that match this behavior. A clearer picture emerges, so that the emotions associated with this can be experienced even better. It then feels as if the new experience has already been real. You are building new neurological circuits, as it were real experiences, purely by imagining something. At that moment you influence your body and your state of being. You immediately feel better at that moment.

  But it gets even more beautiful! Quantum physics makes it clear that our subjective perception influences objective reality. Studies show that small particles behave differently when there is no observer. More possibilities arise, particles behave like a wave of energy. Once we have an expectation, the particles behave as we expect. Like, for example, an apple falls from a tree. As soon as the observer leaves, the particles again behave like a wave of energy. This means that objective reality would mold itself to our way of thinking. Now this has been proven for small particles, but what about larger objects or effects on a situational or behavioral level? Quantum physics points in the direction that we can influence our real lives with our thinking. So not just your feeling and health, but really on actual life events. So dream away and manifest your dreams!

'And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to Blossom.' - Anais Nin

I wish you a lot of self-love during this challenge!

Love,
Esther
Psychologist and founder bbb health boutique