Let’s be honest: as we move through 2019 many of us can get easily distracted with notification after notification. We’re connected 24/7 to our smartphones and other tech devices that bombard us with information and reminders of the convenient pleasures of instant gratification.
Spring is the season to clear out the cobwebs and nurture growth. It’s also the perfect time to check in with your environmental wellness—that is, your health as it relates to your relationship with nature and your environment. Environmental wellness is a holistic approach to maintaining your health, the health of those around you, and the health of our natural world.
Mind-body exercises intended to harmonize the body have been trending in our culture for years now. Yoga poses elegantly shared on our Instagram and Facebook and other social media sites picture long-limbed profiles of our friends mid-stretch with hands and toes reached out to emphasize the beautiful lines and symmetry of their practiced bodies. The pictures we share may seem vain at times; however, the positive value of these poses reflects a conscious effort toward balanced symmetry, flexibility and total alignment of the body as part of a lifestyle toward holistic health.
Imagine your entire body wrapped in a fibrous suit, designed essentially to hold all the parts of you together. Its elasticity allows for the capacity to expand and contract, to be both flexible and strong. This incredible, all encompassing band of connective tissues is known as the fascia. It lies beneath your skin, connecting and encircling all of the bones, muscles and internal organs of the body.
The question of the connection between mental and physical health has been asked repetitively for centuries, and it has only been in the last several decades that Western medicine has caught up to holistic practices and began to acknowledge an interdependent relationship between the two. Mental and emotional patterns create biochemical pathways in the body, and it follows that just as the mind affects the body, so too the body can affect the mind.