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Life is Windy
March is considered a windy month primarily because it is a transitional season where the atmosphere struggles to balance warming air from the south with cold, retreating winter air from the north. This intense temperature contrast creates steep pressure gradients, resulting in high-speed, gusty winds. March serves as the bridge between winter and spring, creating a volatile atmosphere.
Like consistent weather patterns, our lives exhibit the balance of retreating cooler times with gusting warming winds of events, through our entire lifetime. Circumstances change in everyone’s life, no matter who you are, good and bad, right or wrong exist and the seasons come and go, and nothing lasts forever. Yet we persist in being surprised when our cool and calm personal temperature advances into high speed and gusty winds.
How much control do we have in the steep pressure gradients and high-speed, gusty winds of our lives? How can we bridge between our winters to spring into summer and remain in the cool and calm during the seasons … sure to come transitions. You’d be surprised.
In a podcast, listening to Dr. Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, the ‘mother of mindfulness’ and ‘mother of positive psychology’ discussing the studies of illusion of control, decision-making, aging and mindfulness, she argued for the enormous control we have over our health based on mind/body unity. Understanding the shifts in our personal weather patterns of our health and effect the mind has on our body is only a thought away.
Her work helped to signal mind/body medicine, which has been regarded by many scientists to be an important intellectual movement and one that now has ‘considerable evidence that an array of mind-body therapies can be used as effective adjuncts to conventional medical treatment.’ One such mind-body therapy is a shift from stress to how we label the stressor/event. She went on to say: "Once you recognize that nothing is anything independent of how we label it and that the culture gives us these labels, we don’t have to accept these labels." Example: Changing the label of victim to survivor is very different! One word can lead to a different expectation. We set ourselves up to stress with the language we use. The word ‘trying’ is another example. You don’t try to eat an ice cream cone; you eat an ice cream cone. The word ‘trying' has an expectation for failure. Giving up is not good, trying is better, but better than trying is doing.
Stress is not a function of events; it’s our view of events. It is a scientific fact that the use of our words and thoughts have power over the health of our body and that our cells are always listening to us. What we think about most we create. If you worry about the winter, dread the spring and hate the summer, the body will follow your command. Or your Mind/Body weather can find its balance when you remain cool during the windy season.
Love,
Hilda
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