How Do you Wake up to Yourself?

We can all wake up on the wrong side of the bed sometimes.  The other day I had one of those days. I woke up feeling irritable and agitated without even know why—and it took a while to figure that one out.  If I launch into the world too quickly from this negative space I could easily stir up unnecessary reactions to creating a domino effect of negativity throughout my day.  This is not how I want to gather my daily experiences, and neither should you.

 

Many busy Mums in my yoga classes, who are awake to yoga, build their daily routines around its practices.  Their mornings mostly look something like this: wake and take three minutes to do “in-bed-exercises” for the spine, to invigorate the nerve ganglions and pulse the cerobospinal fluid to clear the head and be able to ‘“bounce out of bed.—refreshed”. 

 

Then into the bathroom to look into their eyes and greet themselves with a positive thought, song or words.   Go sit on their yoga mat and practice pranasana and pranayama/mudra exercises for 15 minutes—to balance the brain oxygen to carbon dioxide ratios, and get the endorphins activated.   

 

Then prepare breakfast, attend to the children, husband, and household structure, feed the dog, cats and budgie…and before they go off to work, they pause for a mental rebalance for just three minutes to refocus on the meaning and value of their proposed actions throughout the day—a pause in action, a yoking within themselves using nada and pranava, in order to confront the potential chaos of the future “out there”, with more equanimity.   This is such a stabilising practice to flow their emotions, reestablish a high sense of self, and settle basic quietness in their mind.

 

But all this yoga practice will not produce the desired results if their brain neurochemistry is out of whack, and their immune system is unstable—and this is greatly predicated on their diet.  Most have experimented with their diet using graphs and controls to find the most delicious and cost-effective ways to eat and drink —to find their personal diet that affords them immune stability and mental clarity.  This does not mean following “join-the-club” diets where one-size-fits-all.  It means undertaking signature diet trials, initially using graphs and controls to determine delays and durations in immune reactivity, coupled to the effects on their mental and physical health when combining certain foods.  

 

Most of my yoga students range in age from early twenties to their sixties.  The vast majority don’t eat any cereal grains (rice, corn, wheat, rye, oats, etc) at all.  They have come to their own conclusions through their own “with and without” trials that eating grains reduce their ability to achieve high mental and physical health.

 

If you want to take your yoga practice to another level of benefit, consider doing a self-trial to replace all grains with other flours and seeds, even to five parts per million,  for a month or more.  It will probably be the greatest gift you could give to yourself for a more rewarding life.  When you do your trial, you simply buy foods that have no grains.  You can still enjoy eating bakery products by replacing them with available grain-free bakery products such as those provided by Deeks Healthy Bakery Products.  Check this out: www.deeks.com.au.

 

Bill Giles is a clinical immunobiologist who has been practicing and teaching yoga for four decades (www.billgiles.com.au)