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Relieve stress with the Good Skin Meditation

When you’re working with the Good Skin Solution, you understand that your skin is a map of your gut. Whatever is going on inside your microbiome, will show up on your skin. So in order to heal your skin, you’re first going to have to heal your gut. 

We know that the following four things cause microbiome damage which will map onto our skin:

  1. Sugar
  2. antibiotics
  3. environmental toxins
  4. stress

So what can we do about these problems? Well, we can substitute stevia instead of sugar. We can use probiotics to repair the damage of antibiotics. We can choose paraben-free, phthalate-free products instead of toxic ones, to apply to our skins and clean our houses.

But what about stress? In the modern world it surrounds us all the time!

A lot of the stress we experience in our daily lives comes from our inability to properly assimilate our feelings. Your heart is an organ designed to assimilate feeling and sensation, just as your gut is an organ designed to assimilate food. This is why your heart has an electromagnetic field about 60 times greater in amplitude than your brain. Feeling and digesting our feelings, is what our heart is designed to do.

But we spend most of our time trying to work out different ways to avoid feeling things. We watch TV, we over-eat, we drink, we shop, we do drugs, we gamble, we have affairs – all to avoid feeling our feelings.

So here is my suggestion, if you are brave enough to try it: feel your emotions by breathing them straight into your heart.

This is so radical, so revolutionary, that people are actually afraid of it. We spend so much time trying to deaden the pain that we are unaccustomed to walking directly into it.

The next time something happens that makes you feel sad or afraid – don’t try to numb the feelings, or avoid them, or distract yourself.

Instead, imagine yourself turning directly towards the feelings. If you were a compass, the feelings would be magnetic north.

  1. Orient yourself facing towards the feelings, and then BREATHE THEM DIRECTLY INTO YOUR HEART. Inhale your sensations straight into the center of you. Take a long, deep breath through your nose and suck those feelings right into your heart.

When your heart – and your lungs – are full, pause for a brief instant to think of all the people around the world – millions of them, probably – who are feeling the exact same thing as you, right this minute.

Then breathe out relief, for you and for all those other people. Breathe out through your mouth.

Do this three or four times, or until the feelings begin to shift slightly. You may feel a new set of emotion emerge. Now you may be feeling angry, or sad in a different way.

  1. Re-align your mental compass so that your new magnetic north is this new set of emotions. Face towards them in your mind. And again, breathe them straight into your heart. Pause for an instant to think of all the people around the world who are feeling the exact same emotion as you, right this minute. And breathe out serenity for yourself and for everyone, out through your mouth.
  2. Once more, turn towards the sensation. Again, breathe it straight into your heart. Pause for an instant to think of all the people around the world who are feeling the exact same emotion as you, right this minute. And breathe out wisdom for yourself and for everyone, out through your mouth.

This practice is inspired by the Buddhist practice of Tonglin. I find it the most active, necessary part of my toolkit in dealing with emotions. I use it every day, and I teach it to my team on the farm. I used this when I thought my husband was dying. It can be used in the most extreme circumstances, and it is battle tested. I recommend it to you. You always have your breath with you will never be abandoned as long as you do not abandon yourself.

To seek numbness and to avoid your feelings by drowning them in food or alcohol – that is truly abandoning yourself. Your feelings are your cookie to eat. You must eat them, and completely assimilate them. They are your teachers, and your companions. They are your lessons. Do not ignore them, drown them, or try to talk over them.

Because here’s the bottom line – your feelings do not go away. They simply submerge themselves back into your cells, cause stress inside you, and damage your microbiome.  

You can’t go around your feelings, or over them. You have to go through them. Breathe them in. Be very brave, and go straight into the fire. You will find that it does not burn you.

I promise!

 

Questions? Talk to a Nutritional Therapist on live chat!

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