Fall Gracefully into Fall with these 5 Practices

Fall has arrived. It is evident in the cooler temperatures, shorter daylight hours and the apple trees heavy with ripening fruit. This has been one of the most unusual summers, and if you are like most of us, you might have gotten away from some of the healthy practices that support your mind and body for the better.

A new season delivers an opportunity to renew your energy to live your best life with a new hope and a new sense of focus. The five following practices will allow you to return with ease and grace back into routines that support your wellbeing in mind, body and spirit. These practices are drawn from the foundations of wellness that create and sustain your overall health and wellbeing.

1. Meal Planning + Preparation

If you enjoyed your share of outdoor dining and takeout this summer that afforded you some semblance of normalcy, you might be ready to get back into a routine of cooking more at home. If you have a busy day it can be hard to decide what’s for dinner and you may not have the energy to cook. However, if you plan and prep ahead of time it’s one less decision you have to make.

The process of dedicating time and energy to cooking is much easier when you have a plan—and then a plan for how that plan will get implemented! Beginning with meal planning for the week on a calendar, and then determining what can be prepped in advance saves you a ton of time and energy when it comes to the actual mealtime. Soups, salads and stir fry’s can be easily prepped so you can cook once and have easy meals to put together all week long. Veggies and fruits can be washed and prepped so they are easy to grab and go. Check out my resources page HERE for some further inspiration.

2. Morning Intention Setting + Gratitude

If the summer zapped your morning routine, now is a great time to reevaluate and ignite a new one. A morning routine allows you to set up your day in an intentional and meaningful way. The simple practice of asking yourself, “how do I want to feel today?” can significantly impact your mood, your perspective and your continued focus for your day. When setting your intentions for the day, you begin with asking yourself that simple question, “how do I want to feel today?” Write down three feelings you’d like to experience throughout your day today. Then ask yourself, “what ACTION do a need to take to create these feelings?” These feelings are not necessarily going to create themselves, however, you can intentionally create them by taking the action steps that you know will help you feel how you want to feel. You can create these feelings with a mindset of taking decisive action consistently throughout your day. Write down one to three actions you can take per feeling that you want to cultivate within yourself. Now look through your plan for the day and note when you will complete these actions. Visualize yourself completing them and notice how that feels.

Next, take a moment and consider what you feel grateful for in this moment. Write at least three of them down. As you see each of these things on the page, feel the emotions that come along with having this attitude of gratitude. Take time to savor these feelings. This simple practice added to your morning routine may take only 5-10 minutes and yet can have a major lasting positive impact on your mood, your focus, your energy and your daily outcomes. (You can read more about creating a morning routine HERE.)

3. Move Your Body Daily

You may have been active this past summer, however, if your day has looked significantly different since living in these quarantined times, you may have ended up moving less without your normal commute or it may have been too hot for you to enjoy getting outside.

Enjoying the cooler crisp temperatures gives some space to getting out for a brisk walk, a bike ride, a morning jog, and soon enough, maybe spending an afternoon raking leaves. If you prefer to get your movement in indoors, there are so many options online these days for live classes or on demand through YouTube. Even a 20 minute walk, workout, yoga class or stretch can make a big difference in your energy for the day. Moving daily offers a healthy release of stress, an improved mood, detox for your mind and body and always provides a sense of accomplishment. Nobody ever regrets being consistent with exercise! (You can read more about the health benefits of moving your body HERE.)

4. Meditation

Many people tell me they want to meditate but either don’t know how, don’t know where to start or say that it’s too hard or too difficult to maintain. The research is very clear that meditation has a plethora of benefits including improved mood, mental focus and clarity, reduced stress, just to name a few. (You can read more about the benefits if you’d like to HERE.) Meditation offers time to be quiet, to just be, and this is not how most of us normally roll. We have so many distractions and most of us are always multitasking. When you take time to meditate you allow your nervous system an opportunity to find its way to balance, for your thoughts to settle, and for your body to relax. Offering yourself even five to ten minutes to find a point of focus (such as your breath) and maintain your attention on that point of focus can offer a huge return on your time investment.

Meditation is a very simple concept and yet it’s not so easy in practice. Using an app like InsightTimer, a simple timer like the one on your smart phone, taking a class or individual training with a teacher are all a great way to get started with a meditation practice. Generally, starting small and building up over time makes a big difference in your likelihood to stick with it as the practice gets more and more comfortable with time and practice.

5. Journaling

Our current circumstance is probably the craziest and most jarring experience in my 44 years. Creating a space to process everything that you are thinking, feeling, experiencing, wondering, fretting about, hoping… through journaling can offer tremendous benefits. A journal offers a dedicated place to write out your thoughts, feelings, concerns, hopes, dreams and more. Journaling offers a place where you can document your day for stories to reflect on in the future or to pass down to future generations. Journaling allows you an opportunity to reflect and become more deeply self-aware, notice any problematic patterns you might have or it can be a place to simply hold space for yourself.

Journaling can be one of the most therapeutic practices. A journal acts as a container, a special place to hold the inner workings of your mind and heart along with the stories of your life. Having this container creates a safe place to hold all of this for you while simultaneously creating separation from having to live with your thoughts and feelings swirling all of the time. Once you close your journal after letting it all pour out of your head and onto the page, you can let it go and enjoy the release you created for yourself. You can put your journal away and give yourself freedom from the mental and emotional swirling.

I recommend you select one of these five practices that you feel could benefit your current life and will make the most positive impact based on your present circumstances. Begin to integrate this practice daily, ensuring that you create consistency with the practice you choose and notice the impact that it has on your life and your wellbeing. Once that practice has become a consistent habit that you no longer have to think about doing, move on and begin another. The most important thing is that you make your wellbeing in mind, body and spirit a priority within your life. I’d love to hear what practice you will integrate and the impact that it has on your life!

Spring Cleaning for Emotional Eating

During this time of the year, you might spend some extra time cleaning out your home. Clearing out the cobwebs and dust bunnies that have collected in the corners over the winter, changing out clothing for the new season and getting rid of old stuff that might be cluttering your space and fogging your mind. This process requires a lot of effort and when it is completed it feels so refreshing. After a good spring cleaning you feel lighter, calmer, and accomplished don’t you? I know I love a clean and clutter free space, I just don’t always love doing the work it takes to get there!

While you might spend this time cleaning your physical space, do you ever think about spring cleaning your pantry, fridge, habits and emotions? Spring is a time of renewal and hope. With more light, energy, nature and bright colors all around, spring provides inspiration. If you have become bogged down by emotional and stress eating and these habits feel frustrating, NOW is the time to clear it all out.

When you consider spring cleaning for emotional eating, it’s helpful to work in the direction that makes the most sense for you. You might begin from clearing your pantry + fridge to then clearing your habits and emotions. However, you might feel more comfortable working from the other way around, where you clear out emotions + habits and then shift to kitchen. No matter which direction suits you the best, the outcome will definitely be the same. Through this process of spring cleaning for emotional eating, you can refresh and renew your relationship with food—and with yourself.

Spring Cleaning the Pantry + Fridge

While it might make more sense for you to work from the other direction, l will start with clearing out the pantry and fridge first. When you spring clean there is a process of letting go of things that no longer serve you, releasing built up grime, dust and dirt and a creation of positive feelings with the action you are taking. The same is true as you clean and clear your pantry and fridge.

When starting, you want to align with your goal and then determine if the items in your fridge and pantry serve you and your goals. What do you want? How do you want to feel? Do the foods currently in your fridge and pantry provide that outcome? If yes, take inventory and plan when you will use them. Get creative, cook new dishes, refresh old ones, have fun with it. If no, these items don’t align with your goals and how you want to feel, you can choose to donate them or give them to a neighbor or friend. It’s a helpful process that will leave you feeling empowered and motivated to care for yourself. After the clearing process, be sure to organize and clean them out so it feels calming to open and access your fridge and pantry.

During this clearing process, notice what foods might be “trigger” foods. Trigger foods are ones that it’s difficult to stop eating once you start or ones that you crave to temporarily suppress stress and uncomfortable emotions. These foods are not bad foods or good foods, they just may not serve you and it’s helpful to evaluate if having them in your space helps move you in the direction of your goals. If they don’t, you don’t have to keep them.

Spring Cleaning Habits + Emotions

Now let’s dive into spring cleaning for your habits and emotions. This process is a bit less straight forward. You can’t just give or throw away your habits and emotions so easily. You can start this process of spring cleaning emotional eating through self-reflection. Be honest with yourself about how often you are using food to suppress stress and emotions, how often you turn to food for comfort. Be curious about how that makes you feel about yourself. Become aware of how any habits and patterns of stress and emotional eating have created a rift in your relationship with yourself and your body.

Once you can deeply reflect and develop self-awareness, you can begin to clear out the habits and develop healthier ways to cope with your stress and emotions. To change a habit you need to replace it with a new, healthier, more desired habit. If you have been feeling stressed during the quarantine or if you struggled with any winter blues, you might have developed a habit of soothing with food in the evenings, when feeling down, lonely or bored, among other emotions. For example, maybe you started eating something after dinner that comforts you and releases your stress regardless of whether or not you were still hungry. There may be some pondering about wanting to stop this habit or maybe even some guilt for having it, however, it feels too difficult to break.

You want to consider spring cleaning this habit first by determining what else could you do in the evenings to soothe your mind and body that do not include the comfort foods? How do you want to feel? Can you practice assessing your hunger levels and committing to only eating if you truly feel hungry? Can you journal to connect with why this habit feels so good and so bad at the same time? You want to dive into self-awareness and self-reflection and create a plan to shift this habit into something more desirable and something that can still soothe you without food.

Changing a habit takes time and constant self-reflection and self-awareness. I recently wrote 10 blogs about creating a life that you love, you can review the overview here. You can go back and check out each of the steps in depth on the blog for support with this challenging change process. While awareness is the first step, you have to create action steps and a formulate a plan to actually follow through.

When you are spring cleaning any habits that no longer serve you, awareness that the habit has become problematic is the first step and then deciding what you could do and aligning with a sense of what you truly want is the next. Then you, of course, need to have a plan for how you are going to make it happen. Following through, consistency and believing in yourself are super important when it comes to creating the change you desire.

Commit to yourself to spring clean just one habit. Be sure to give yourself time to reflect in order to ensure that you make it happen.

As you begin to shift your habit, you may notice more emotions and stress to become present when you are no longer soothing them with food. This is where journaling is a great place to start when working to spring clean your emotions. Giving yourself time and space to recognize, sit with, understand, process and release your emotions is essential. Journaling offers you a specific safe place to do this.

Anytime you experience a food craving is a great time to pull out your journal and get in touch with the craving. This way you can determine if it’s an emotional craving or more general craving. Go through the Pause, Reflect, Release process where you first pause and give yourself space away from the craving. Then reflect where you can explore and understand the craving and then attempt to release the craving. If is an emotional craving, you will choose a coping tool to help manage or release the emotion. If it is a general craving, you might choose to eat the food, however you want to be sure do so mindfully. Allow yourself to savor and enjoy your food.

Breath work, movement, and talking are additional helpful tools to cleanse and clear in mind and body. No matter what you do to begin to spring clean your stress and emotional eating patterns, start somewhere and believe in yourself and your ability to create the change you desire.

The Power of Visualization

Your mind is your most powerful tool for healing. When you picture something in your mind, it is perceived as possible and the nervous system responds accordingly. If you are still in quarantine, this can be a useful technique to add that will help support the process of finding inner balance, inner calm and inner peace.

Visualization is a technique that is used to improve wellbeing, performance, follow through and outcomes. When you rehearse something in your mind, visualize yourself doing it, you are more likely to make it happen. Visualizing helps bring what you can imagine in your mind come into fruition.

When you visualize something in your mind’s eye you can cultivate any inner experience. When you are dealing with stress, anxiety, uncertainty and any immobilizing feelings such as helplessness, hopelessness or fear, you are essentially imagining negative outcomes. If you shift this to positivity, hopefulness, and empowerment, you can create a whole different outcome and a far more peaceful state of being.

When managing stress there are some very helpful visualization techniques you can use to release the discomfort of stress and bring on a feeling of inner peace. Releasing negative, uncomfortable, untrue and non-useful thoughts can be a helpful visualization to practice to support the process of letting these thoughts go.

Visualization to Release Thoughts and Calm Your Mind

Here a few visualizations you can use to imagine your thoughts releasing from your mind:

• –  Picture yourself sitting under a tree. Imagine that your thoughts (worries, stressors…) are on the leaves floating down from the tree, releasing the thoughts and letting them go.

• –  Picture yourself lying down in your favorite space in nature, imagine releasing your thoughts to the clouds and watch them floating away, letting the thoughts go.

• –  Picture a hallway with doors, imagine that your thoughts are coming in through one door and leaving through another, letting the thoughts go.

• –  Imagine a revolving door, picture your thoughts coming in and then leaving through the door.

• –  Picture yourself seated on the banks of a river, imagine a basket of leaves beside you, anytime you are distracted by a thought, take a leaf out of the basket, write the word thought onto the leaf, place the leaf into the river and watch it float away.

You can set a timer for any amount of time, even 1-5 minutes can make a big difference. Practice the visualization related to releasing your thoughts to help let them go. Notice the impact.

Visualization for Productivity

If you are struggling to get the things done in your day that you’d like to do, you can use visualization to improve your chances to get stuff done. First, write out your plan for your day. Then, spend 3-5 full, deep breaths holding the image of getting each item on your list completed.

Notice any resistance or struggle. If there is a strong resistance, be curious about why it is there. Keep practicing until you can picture yourself completing the item on your list without resistance or make any adjustments to your schedule as necessary. Reflect on this process and notice the impact on your productivity, motivation and ability to follow through.

Visualization for Healing

The final visualization technique I will include here supports healing stress and anxiety in mind and body. This visualization offers an ability to feel supported, calm, safe and content.

Begin by resting comfortably. Imagine a small sphere of light resting at the center of your chest. This can be a soft, golden light, or it can take on any color that is soothing, comforting or healing to you. With each inhale, imaging that the light is expanding throughout your body, with each exhale allow the light to return to your heart center. Continue with this deep breathing until you can visualize the light expanding all the way around your whole physical body. Once you can visualize that you are resting in this sphere of light, continue to breathe slowly and deeply, leaving the light in this expanded state all around you.

Picture yourself resting in this light space. Picture yourself breathing in the light, filling your body with soothing, calming and healing energy. Allow yourself to feel safe, calm and supported as you are resting within this light space.

After 5-20 minutes, begin to imagine the light slowly contracting with each exhale. Continue with this visualization until it returns to a single point at your heart center. Now imagine in your mind’s eye your light moving deep within your heart space. Allow all that remains of your light deep within your heart space and picture it as a sparkling gem. Know that you can repeat this visualization of your light any time you need to, for healing, to help you feel safe, calm, supported and full of vitality.

No matter how you begin to use visualization, know that you hold the power within to shift your mood state, your thoughts, your nervous system and your own daily outcomes. What visualization technique will you try today?