Another great thing to reflect on is our habit evolution. It is natural for the regularity of our habit commitments to change over time, and reflecting on this can teach us a lot about what is working and what is not. Cate and Talya discuss their different methods of written reflections that allow them to form more coherent thoughts. Whether it be in the form of organized lists or the simple flow of words on paper, writing down what is on our mind can really aid in the act of reflection.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How to do written reflections
• Why reflection pairs naturally with the manifestation
• Why reflection is so powerful at the end of the year

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

• Talya’s website
• Talya’s holiday recipes
• Discover more about Body Thrive 
• Body Thrive Book

Show Highlights:

2:45 – Talya discusses the impact of her past year’s focus on the word “commitment.” While she found that it motivated her, she also reflected on how she could have applied the idea to other areas of her life in order to have a better impact.
7:20 – We are all wired into a cycle of both reflection and manifestation. However, if we only use manifestation without reflection, we cannot digest those lessons learned, which causes us to be out of balance.
14:00 – One way to improve the negative impacts of holiday food is to provide balance through adding in herbal teas or powerful herbs in order to aid digestions and balance in the diet.
15:15 – Cate discusses her wavering meditation habit. She emphasizes the benefit of reflecting on what is working for her and the changes she observes depending on her commitment impact her life.
20:55 – Talya encourages utilizing morning pages in our morning routines. This involves at some point in the morning writing three full pages of whatever your mind conjures. It is great for emotional healing and having such tools can hold you in place long enough to have some kind of presence or experience with yourself.
28:45 – Talya explains the word she has chosen to play with for the new year, and why. By directing our focus based on our reflections, it helps us to turn a new page.
38:25 – There is a serious power in deep reflection and deep digestion. These processes allow us to realize our assets and how they plug-in with strengths and weakness that themselves plug-in to meet our obstacles head-on.

Your Favorite Quotes:

• “I’m committed also to feel good and being happy and joyful and knowing when it’s time to let go.” – Talya Lutzker
• “We are wired into a cycle of reflection and manifestation.” – Cate Stillman
• “We don’t know what we don’t know.” – Talya Lutzker
• “This is where I didn’t show up as a visionary, this is where I didn’t show up as a leader, this is where I showed up wanting someone to do it for me.” – Talya Lutzker

Guest BIO:

Talya Lutzker is founder of Talya’s Kitchen – an Ayurvedic kitchen about so much more than food; it’s a place to drink up deep nourishment for the heart and soul of who you are. Talya helps women reclaim their radiance through food, nutrition, Ayurveda and self-care.

She found her passion and purpose in Ayurveda when she turned to it for her own healing in 2001. Since then, she’s authored three cookbooks, founded the RAD Cleanse (Radiance Ayurveda Detox) and opened doors to Nourishment School. Connect with Talya on her website, Facebook  and Instagram.

Maybe it was the feeling of being sick and tired of being sick and tired. Or, perhaps you are itching to expand into a bigger, brighter, more vibrant version of yourself. Change may have been inspired by a big birthday, the new year, or some other life milestone. Whatever sparked your desire to change, this decision point has a certain quality – excitement, determination, willpower at its peak.

You are ready for action

This is a time of high motivation. It’s the perfect time for making plans, putting systems in place to support you, and for making your intentions known to a friend or accountability partner. All of these actions will serve you well when you enter the inevitable periods of low motivation, when the practice of your new habits or routines will feel less sparkly, not as exciting, boring even.

The time of high motivation excitement can also lead us to make very grand, possibly even unrealistic plans for our change. It’s so normal and human to do this. We learn from our early years and from the all messages around us that change is an all or nothing proposition. No pain, no gain. We strive for perfection and we want immediate gratification. Statistics suggest that making big resolutions to change are usually not successful – only about 9% of people who make a New Year’s Resolution feel they are successful in achieving their resolutions.

Do or Die vs Ease and Grace

What if change didn’t have to be a do-or-die scenario?

What if we made changes easily, gently, gracefully?

Behavior scientists tell us that the best way for most people to make change is to do it in very small steps. This is approach is sometimes called Kaizen – the Japanese word for improvement. This approach has been used in business, healthcare, banking, and other industries to make continuous, incremental improvements to processes and systems. In Yoga Health Coaching, we use Kaizen as a core strategy for establishing healthier habits.

No Big Shocks

Once we embrace the idea of taking small, incremental steps toward change, we have taken a big step toward achieving the vision we have for ourselves! Kaizen is a way to change habits slowly and gently. No big shocks to the system. Micro changes are achievable and help create motivation over time. With this momentum we begin to identify as someone who succeeds at making changes. This spurs on the next small step.

Kaizen is the tactical plan for successfully making change happen in your life. The other important aspect of making change happen in a gentle and sustainable way is mindset. Mindset is how we see the world through the lens of our beliefs, values, and attitudes. Mindset directs our internal dialog (aka self-talk) and in turn, directs our actions. It will reinforce the way we approach change. If we believe change has to be “all or nothing,” we will likely take big, bold (and largely unsustainable) actions toward our goals.   

Change can be easeful

A mindset that says, “change can be easeful,” will direct us to take actions that are empowered and evolutionary, yet gentle and nurturing.

You’re probably already aware of the mindset that would support easeful change:

Is your glass half empty or half full?

If you operate from a “glass half full” mindset, you already know how it feels to orient toward empowered ease. You know how the power of being the victor rather than the victim. You understand how to be an active rather than passive participant in your life. You take an evolutionary approach to life instead of a reactionary approach.

If this is not your current default mindset, cultivating more easeful and empowered beliefs and attitudes will bring you to a more grounded place from which to expand and grow. Body Thrivers know this as Habit 10: Easeful Living.

“Easeful living is a grounded connection to your natural state, your divine inheritance as a human, the basic teachings of heaven and earth.” – Cate Stillman, Body Thrive

If easeful living and graceful change feels illusive, you are living in disconnect from expansive consciousness. You feel separate from the whole of creation. You feel a strong and uncomfortable tension between where you are today and the potential you know is inside you.

The antidote for disconnection is grounding

Grounding means getting back in touch with the “ground of being.” Some may experience this concept of “being grounded” as a clear and clean connection to a higher power, consciousness, God, or Mother Earth. There are many ways to reconnect yourself to the ground of being. From a place of groundedness, you have the capacity to approach your life – and any changes you want to make – with an expansive, easeful, blissful mindset.

Here are a few practices that you might use to for grounding:

• Get lots of deep, rejuvenating rest. Go to bed by 10pm. Allow your body time to rest and repair itself with deep, restorative sleep. If you have trouble winding down at night, create a simple and calming bedtime ritual. This may include: a foot massage with essential oils; light stretching or gentle yoga; sitting in silence for 5 minutes (or longer); or making a gratitude list or other journaling exercise. If a bedtime ritual is new to you, pick just one element to practice and take a Kaizen approach to make it a habit.
• Practice self-massage. Abhyanga is the ancient practice of self-massage with oil, used to awaken the divine within. A regular practice of self-massage facilitates the flow of energy in your body, wakes up your whole being on a cellular level, and builds up your confidence and self esteem. This is an amazingly effective practice for connecting to your essential wholeness – the ground of your being.

Grounded, graceful, gentle change is possible when you set your intentions with kindness and compassion.

There is no finish line

Our lives are busy, complex, and ever-changing. This is just one more reason that taking an easeful approach to change will serve you well. The habits and routines that support the vision of the person you want to become cannot be set it stone. Because you have (or are cultivating) an evolutionary mindset, you will always be “Kaizen-ing” your habits to move toward your next evolutionary step. There is no finish line and no “correct” way to do this.

As you work on habit changes, cultivate compassion for yourself. You don’t need to get it right and it won’t help to beat up on yourself if it takes a long time to establish a new habit.

Know that your lifestyle changes are an act of love for yourself and those around you.

What will be your next small, gentle step toward the next version of you?

Setting New Year’s Resolutions

We have all been there.  We set up these lofty goals with high motivation. We want to exercise more, eat healthier, gain or lose 10 lbs, meditate more, have more energy and less stress. More often than not, these well thought-out and good intentions last as long as our motivation is high. In fact, USA Today reported that by mid-February, 80% of resolutions fail. This is at least in part because while we are highly motivated on January 1st, most of us have busy, overcommitted schedules and, as current habit science studies show, we are low motivation most of the time. According to University of Scranton. Journal of Clinical Psychology, there is only a mere 8% of people who are successful in achieving their resolutions.

How do you make sure you stick to your healthy goals even in the midst of a chaotic life?  

Your Big Why?

It is important to know the reasons for your goals. Without the compelling reasons for what you have to achieve, you will lose steam rather quickly and find yourself on the same ground if not worse than a year ago. It is not just about having better rest, it is about having more energy to carry on the daily activities with ease, spending quality time with your loved ones, reducing emotional eating that has caused your weight gain, being a calm and confident mom to your children or having the time and space to reach your higher potential.  

The top 3 New Year’s resolutions in 2017 are diet or eat healthier (71%), exercise more (65%) and lose weight (54%). Sure you want to lose 10 pounds, but your bigger WHY, when you dig deeper, could be that you want to have the swift mobility to play with your kids or grandkids. Your big WHYs will be the anchor that grounds to stick to your new healthy habits you when you are distracted by other shiny objects or ideas, or simply being over-consumed by the busyness of life.

Which of your current habits  adversely affects your health and the quality of life which, if addressed, would make you feel how you want to feel — lighter in body, calmer in spirit or more grounded? You may have to do deep soul-searching to realize what is out of integrity in your body. When you do, WRITE IT DOWN and connect it to HOW YOU CAN FEEL  when you upgrade these habits. Now these habits will reflect your new identity, how you see yourself and how others see you.

Design your day based on how you want to feel

Once you get clear on how you want to feel, you need to invest time, money and effort to make it happen. You have the full control of designing  your future self of who you want to become, what shape you want to be in and how you want to feel.  It comes down to prioritizing by asking ourselves some of these questions: Do I want to sleep in for another half an hour or get up now and invest in an invigorating run? Do I want to spend $5 on Starbucks everyday or invest it in my yoga membership? Do I want to conveniently order in pizza or invest extra time to prepare my own healthy food?

The state of your well-being is directly related to how much attention you invest in eating healthy, doing regular exercise, having restful sleep, sitting in silence and connecting to the rhythm of nature.

Invest in Wellness pros

Your time on this planet is limited and precious. If you are smart enough to know there are better ways to do things that will bring your desired results faster, wouldn’t you invest in that?

Changing habits is hard. Effective habit changing strategies is not common knowledge. If you are like many people, you may know WHAT you want to feel, you just don’t know how to get there.

Invest your time, energy and money in those who have been where you are and know how to get you to where you want to go faster and with greater ease – be that a holistic practitioner, a personal trainer or a health coach. That is what they are trained to do. They can help you shift not only your habits but also your mindset towards growth in body, mind and spirit.

What gives a better return on investment than you investing in you? What you gain in working with someone who gets results is not only a healthier you now,  but also incalculable savings   on costly prescription drugs or expensive medical procedures in the future. The coolest thing  of all is living in a healthy, thriving body gives you more time and freedom to participate in life full-heartedly, in whatever shape and form that suits your fancy.

Don’t Do it Alone

Human beings thrive in groups. Studies have shown that we are more likely to hit our goals when we are involved in a community with like-minded people headed towards the same direction. The accountability factor in group community keeps us on track with our commitment, reignites our motivation when we slack off and level up our performance by learning from each other’s successes and failures.

If you have been working on your health goals by yourself with great and sustainable success, good for you, because for most of us, when life throws us a curveball so go the health goals out the window!  If you have tried doing it alone without significant results, may be it is time to open yourself up to the group experience as the power of group connection will transform you beyond your own expectation.

Still not convinced? Ask yourself if it is the ego, the fear of being vulnerable or the self-sabotage attitude that is holding you back from connecting in a dynamic group.

Update your Operating System

We often cannot make commitment to change because it is inconvenient, it stirs up our existing relationship with people around us, it challenges our outdated belief system that was passed down to us from our parents, our culture, or imposed on us by our peers and it disrupts our complacent lifestyle. The stakes are high if you don’t keep your New Year’s resolutions. Our current lifestyles are making us sick – whether that is from being overscheduled, overnourished or under-exercised – pick your poison. Lifestyle and autoimmune diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart attack, cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia (the list goes on and on) are on the rise. Do you want to wait until you can’t afford not to change because it is a life and death situation?

Is there any room for health improvement in your body? Do you want a vibrant health by design so that you can carve out how you want to live life to your highest potentiality?  What else is possible when your body, mind and soul are in alignment?

Set your New Year’s resolution mindfully.  Invest wisely.  Live meaningfully.