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There is SO much we know about a recipe for health. Are we doing what we know to be healthy?

Life gets in the way and frankly, focussing on ourselves is difficult. Prioritizing self-care is not necessarily a guilt free endeavor. What about our children, spouses and parents? Don’t they require our care? And what do we do for self-care? How did we learn to do these things? Is what we are doing right? And with the time and money we have are we getting the most benefit we can?

For me personally, optimal self-care is a goal that I strive for but don’t necessarily ever reach. I try to prioritize healthy, whole foods diet, regular exercise and good sleep. These, I believe are fundamental to our basic well-being. There are certainly times when life gets in the way of the these practices and so it is the continual striving that I think is key. Keeping your eye on the prize while being patient and understanding with yourself is the way to go.

Naturopathic medicine expertise is in the area of self-care practices and I think that lots of medical problems can be avoided if we optimize how we care for ourselves and our loved ones. Simply starting by serving a veggie snack to your kids or going for a walk in the fall weather are good places to start. Each day, as these tiny efforts accumulate your body and mind and loved ones will thank you.

In our previous post, we discussed holding onto material things and how having some clear, intentional streams for possessions to leave us can relieve this burden. This holds true in our bodies where, having a clear exit for waste and things past the point of usability helps everything run more smoothly.

This is the most fundamental point for all detox programs; clear out what is not serving you anymore. How are the wastes eliminated from the body? Are the paths out clear and open? Just for review, the pathways out of the body include: stool, urine, sweat and breath (also mucous/coughing, etc.). And the organs that perform these functions are the colon, kidneys, skin, lungs and liver. Many times people start a detox thinking that they should do a bile flush or liver cleanse, but if the bowels are not eliminating well, it will backfire. What I mean is that the organ of choice will purge what it can, towards the colon, only to be reabsorbed by the colon wall (whose job is absorb all moisture), and you are back where you started, or sometimes even worse off.

Step one of any detox should be looking at the bowels. No need to go overboard, but regular, timely, bowel movements need to be ensured so that this cycle of reabsorption of waste can be avoided. It is even trickier when trying to balance hormones, when they are deactivated and sent to the bowel for elimination only to be reabsorbed and reactivated.

If the organs of elimination are not happy and functioning well, then any body will have problems. Just like the streams of material goods exiting the house have to working to avoid clutter, the streams out of our bodies have to be working to avoid heaviness, sluggishness, low energy, poor sleep, cravings, etc. This is an area where the vague but chronic complaints can be addressed in a very health promoting ways. Getting those organs of elimination working can spruce up the whole system and then we can more to more specific steps of tonifying and supporting areas that need it.

Please reach out for a naturopathic consult if this message of detoxification resonates with you.

Sometimes I close my eyes and see visions of a conveyor belt bringing things into my house. It is so EASY for things to make their way in. There is a constant stream of clothes, gifts, hand-me-downs, paperwork, school handouts, mail, stuff, that all have a green light into my house and life. (Yes, I’m fortunate, grateful and happy about it too but not focusing on that here.) But the stream heading out of the house is not as constant. Older stuff, unused stuff, outgrown stuff accumulates in the corners and on the shelves. It is as though sending stuff out of the house and back into the world is going against the current and takes a lot of effort.

Part of the effort is the decision making. How much stuff do we actually need, how much do we want and how much are we just too indecisive about that it just lands someplace? These questions sound rhetorical, but they really shouldn’t be.

I remember walking 500 miles across the North of Spain, doing the Camino de Santiago, when I was 17 years old and I carried what I needed on my back. I was happy. Anything that didn’t serve a vital purpose was let go, as it wasn’t worth its weight, literally. Now, many years later, with a family and house, it is quite different, but I would like to be closer to that pilgrimage mentality than I am. There are a lot of benefits to having less and the headlines are often about this. In fact, I enjoyed the recent article published by the New York Times entitled “The Unbearable Heaviness of Clutter” . Even the title is fantastic. Clutter is heavy, it adds weight to our lives and slowness, distraction and stress. Things that drag us down. We cannot readily find what we want. It’s like playing Where’s Waldo to find matching socks.

So how do we choose what we hold on to? I love Marie Kondo’s method, the author of ‘The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up’. She recommends holding the object and asking ourselves, ‘does this object spark joy?’. I love it because it a subjective question, with no rules and yet, sparking joy isn’t easily accomplished; a certain threshold must be met in order to spark joy. Tons of objects will not reach that threshold. I don’t doubt that each of the items in my pack during that 500 miles pilgrimage sparked joy for me.

This season I’m going to try to clear our some spaces in my life and house, so I have wiggle room. Room to move and create, to rest and be inspired. Room to feel the lightness.

Stay tuned to see how this mentality might spill out into other areas in life….

Hello.  Welcome to the Flower City Naturopathy blog! I look forward to sharing with you and welcome your interest and comments. Thank you for spending a moment of your precious time here.