Personal Wellness
Integrating Mind, Body and Heart
What is the mind-body connection?
The mind-body connection creates a dimension to the work out by integrating the whole person. This increases your skills of paying attention and focusing in all three areas of development; physical, mental, and emotional in order to facilitate optimal performance.
Benefits of exercise on well-being
Studies have shown that just 30 minutes of exercise can lift your mood for 12 hours. Activity grows our brains and releases BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factors) that build and maintain our cell circuitry and infrastructure. This means that exercise is like Miracle Grow for the brain.
Exercise elevates the important neurotransmitters that traffic thought and emotion, and influence our mood, attention, perception, motivation, action, memory and learning.
Exercise gets our brain into peak performance and creates a cascade of neurochemicals that bolster the brain’s infrastructure (serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine).
Exercise strengthens conscious awareness in the pre-frontal cortex where our executive functions take place.
Personal Practice
Create an Intention
Once you have shown up for your workout, set an intention.
- What do you want to lean into today? Pick one word: courage, trust, strength, focus, resilency, fun, joy, love, clarity. The list goes on.
- Select one intention and keep coming back to it as you create meaning to your workout.
- Lean into those hills and sprints.
- When you cool down look for the good.
- Give yourself credit for doing your workout .
- Carry what you learned from the workout into the world.
Show up for your workout
- As you begin your workout, notice how your body feels.
- Take a few deep breaths and begin to release any tension and stress from your day.
- Feel your body in that moment and just begin to notice and observe the sounds around you. Then take a step deeper and notice how your body is feeling.
- Consciously bring your breath into areas that need your attention.
- Bring your attention and breath into your feet and breathe into your feet, breathe into the ankles, the lower legs, the upper legs, the belly (draw your navel in and up). Breathe into your lower back, your upper back, your heart, your arms, wrists, fingers, your neck and your face.
- Balance effort with ease. Relax your body and step into your strength and the workout.
