Health Through Harmony
Learning to balance your lifestyle can be the key the greater wellbeing.
By Rory Lipsky, L.Ac.

What is Harmony?
Everyone has a way of experiencing harmony. Most of the time we hear it in a song or some other piece of music, but harmony can be experienced in many ways. When we accomplish an important task in what seems like an effortless way, we experience a sense of harmony. When circumstances and events come together to make us feel all is right with the world, we feel like we’re in harmony with life. Or sometimes, we just plain have a great day and can’t even explain where the sense of harmony comes from.

When your internal thoughts, feelings and moods are synchronized with your physical, outer world, you are in harmony. Everyone has experienced this feeling, but most of us have trouble hanging onto it, or reproducing it. While this may seem like a tall order, with consistent practice and awareness you can learn to create great states of harmony, joy, happiness and health within yourself.

When you are living in a harmonious way you will be much more effective at everything you do. You will handle stress much better. In fact, you will actually experience less stress because you will just “flow” right past it. When faced with a stressful situation, you will find yourself much more present, with many more coping skills at your disposal. And you will be much less irrationally and emotionally reactive.

Choice: The Great Equalizer
Choice is defined as having the power, right, or liberty to select from among varying options. As humans, we are endowed with this ultimate gift, the power to choose. This means that at every moment of our conscious existence we can move left or right, up or down, backwards or forwards. We can choose to yell or to speak civilly, we can be honest or we can be dishonest, we can stay up too late and be tired or we can go to bed early and be well rested. Of course, there are consequences to every choice we make, and often there is no way to undo what we choose. That is sometimes the cost we pay for this freedom of choice.

To choose wisely it is important to understand that an outside force has only as much power over us as we give it. This one realization can profoundly alter the way we live our lives. Think about all the things in your life that you give your power away to: “What will they think of me if I fail? What if I look bad? What if they don’t like me?” All of these thoughts create self-limiting roadblocks that we enforce – even if only subconsciously. Think of it: You on one side of the gate, and your dream on the other, and the only thing truly standing in your way, is your own fear. But there is hope. We can effect our own transformation by taking daily steps to return ourselves to deep and powerful harmony.

Pick Your Tools
The first step to creating a harmonious life is taking the time to access your life – to decide what parts are harmonious and what parts are not. I cannot emphasize enough the power of being clear and honest with yourself about the things in your life that work and the things that don’t. Maybe your career is going great, but you don’t exercise enough. Or maybe your workouts are great, but your personal life leaves you emotionally out of balance. Whatever state your life is in, you have the power to make it better by first being honest with yourself, and second working consistently to make it better. Distilled to its essence, living harmoniously means making the right choices for yourself everyday. Whether it’s lifestyle choices like diet or exercise, or less obvious choices like how you choose to look out for your internal emotional self, the choices you make are the key to improving the areas of your life that you’ve decided need improving.

Healthy Eating - Diet
Choosing to eat food that is healthy for you is one of the most basic choices you can make, and it has a very direct effect on your health. A healthy diet is an individual thing and in part depends on your overall constitution, your current age, and your current activity level. Each of these things will influence what it means to eat a healthy diet. Suffice it to say there is not one magic diet for everybody. There are many theories about the best way eat to choose from. Choosing the right diet requires an intensive inquiry into what actually works for your individual body, and the diet that makes you feel great might not work for someone else.

Herbal Supplementation
One extremely important aspect of one’s diet that is often overlooked is herbal supplementation. The power of herbal supplements to improve one’s health and vitality cannot be overstated. Taking herbal supplements can have a dramatic improvement on your state of health and wellbeing if you know which herbs to take and take them appropriately. There are several basic concepts to keep in mind when shopping for herbs.

Formulas
It is usually better to take an herbal formula rather than an individual herb. Formulas are more balanced then individual herbs, and the formula can be created for a specific purpose. Also, it is much easier to judge the effects of the supplement when it has a focus to what it does.

Extracts
It is important to get your herbal products from a company you trust. Herbal extracts vary greatly in their efficacy and buying from a trusted source with a good reputation is important. In a nut shell, look for companies that use highly developed extraction methods and that use natural and organic ingredients.

Consistency
Taking herbs everyday even in smaller doses is much more effective than taking larger doses irregularly. If you are a person who tends to forget things, I recommend putting your daily dosage into a bottle of water and sipping it throughout the day. (As well as some Schizandra or Ginko Biloba!)
Empty Stomach
Taking herbs on an empty stomach is usually preferable because it allows the body to absorb the beneficial aspects of the herb much easier. For the same reason, you should try to wait at least 10 minutes after taking herbs before eating, if you can.

Exercise
Exercise is an equally important part of a healthy lifestyle – although exercise, like diet, is a very individual thing. It is important to do the kind of exercise that your body responds to. In general, the healthier a body is the harder it needs to be worked. As you’d expect, the more out of shape the body is the gentler the workout needs to be. This may sound simple, but you will achieve much greater results in much less time by working your body to 80% of its capacity and using the remaining 20% of energy to recover. Knowing your 80% and using it when exercising is a powerful tool!

Emotional Connection
Dealing with your internal emotional self is crucial to living a harmonious life. It is important to spend time each week checking in with your self to gauge where you are. I recommend spending some time writing in a journal. Journaling will give you some quiet and private time to be honest with yourself about the issues you are facing in your life. The more you write about your internal life, the more you will see improvements in your health and state of mind.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when you begin to journal: Am I doing what is truly important to me? Am I afraid of change? What part of me feels hurt? What does the angry part of me want to communicate? What does the mad part of me need to let go of? What is it that is really important? Try writing the answer to one or two of these questions or to questions of your own and open the floodgates to whatever you feel. Just let it come out organically. You don’t need to force anything or feel you need to do anything other than what comes naturally.

Meditation
Taking time to achieve states of deep relaxation, reflection and tranquility is perhaps our highest function as humans. Not only does meditation have profound health benefits, as recent scientific studies are showing, but it also enables us to awaken and cultivate such traits as compassion, understanding, tolerance, charity, and forgiveness.

Basic Meditation
Basic meditation involves deep breathing in through the nose and out through the nose with the eyes closed. It is important to get into a position that you can sit, stand or lay in comfortably, and it is also helpful to be in a peaceful location. Once you have gotten into position, try focusing on the natural rhythm of your breath. Simply watch yourself breathe. Notice that thoughts come and go, and every time you find yourself thinking thoughts, (as opposed to observing your breathing), just try to let go of whatever it is you’re thinking and let your thoughts wander back to your breathing.

Being in Harmony
Being healthy and living harmoniously is one of the most basic steps we can take to make our world a better place – for ourselves and for those around us. It all begins by balancing the aspects of your day-to-day life, and finding a rhythm that works for you. Remember that you have the power to choose, and even though it may be difficult, choosing a harmonious lifestyle will ultimately lead to a more fullfilling life.