Evidence-Backed Lifestyle Habits to incorporate for Long-term Brain Health [Episode #837]

Summary: In the October Solluna Power Hour episode, Kimberly discusses the theme of building resilience and strength across physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. She emphasizes the importance of daily practices, nutrition, and emotional well-being in fostering a holistic lifestyle. The conversation covers the significance of heart coherence, the impact of food on immunity, and the role of spiritual growth in achieving inner peace and resilience. Episode Sponsors FATTY15 OFFER: Fatty15 is on a mission to replenish your C15 levels and restore your long-term health. You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription Starter Kit by going to fatty15.com/KIMBERLY and using code KIMBERLY at checkout. USE LINK: fatty15.com/KIMBERLY LMNT: OFFER: To get THE PUREST, MOST DELICIOUS PLANT-POWERED protein blend, infused with real vanilla and harmonizing adaptogens go to Animamundiherbals.com and use code: KIM20 to get 20% off your purchase! USE LINK: Animamundiherbals.com and use code: KIM20 to get 20% off your purchase!   Episode Chapters 00:00 Building Resilience and Strength 12:10 Food Cornerstone: Strength and Immunity 22:39 Body Cornerstone: Movement and Stability 29:45 Emotional Well-Being: Heart Coherence 38:48 Spiritual Growth: Inner Resilience   SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS Glowing Greens Powder™ Feel Good SBO Probiotics Feel Good Detoxy Feel Good Digestive Enzymes Feel Good Starter Kit Feel Good Skincare KIMBERLY’S BOOKS The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart The Beauty Detox Solution Beauty Detox Foods Beauty Detox Power Radical Beauty Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life You Are More Than You Think You Are OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY! How to Believe in Your Self Worth with Jamie Kern Lima How to Raise Your Standards In Your Love Life with Matthew Hussey How to Eat to Beat Your Diet with New York Times best selling author Dr. William Li The issues with consuming vegetable and seed oils with Dr. Catherine Shanahan How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo How to Optimize Your Metabolic Health with Dr. Casey Means TRANSCRIPT: Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:00.91)Hi everyone and welcome back to our October Power Hour Show where our theme this month is building resilience and strength physically, emotionally and spiritually. So just a reminder, this show is now once a month, the first Thursday of every month where we talk about our month’s themes and tips and tools across our four cornerstones, food, body, emotional well-being and spiritual growth to support you in the month ahead to feel your very best. And I have to say, I’m very excited about October in particular. It is one of my favorite months. It’s definitely one of my kids’ favorite months. They have been talking about Halloween and all the adventures and all the different parties and, you know, decorating everything already for a few weeks. There’s a shift now. It’s starting to feel like we’re really into fall. There’s a shift energetically. There’s a shift in the weather. And there’s a lot that we can do to build resilience and strength on the inside, which we’ll talk about today, which takes place across many layers of our being, so that we can feel centered as we march forward into the rest of the year, into the rest of the fall. We support our immunity, we support our gut health, we support our emotional stability, so that we continue to feel more clear, more energized, and we will enjoy our lives more and more which is really what feeling good means. It means that we can go through life being open, open-hearted. We feel more light, we feel more connected. And this really is possible the more we encompass our holistic Four Cornerstone lifestyle. So before we get into our show today, a little reminder that the show notes for today are at mysolluna.com, M-Y-S-O-L-L-U-N-A.com. You can check out the research, links to other articles, podcasts I think you would enjoy. If you haven’t yet signed up for our newsletter, I highly recommend that you do so to stay on top of community happenings. We give out recipes, we have community events, we have special deals. So it’s really amazing to come deeper into the community. I’d love to invite you deeper in. And also, little announcement that the hidden power of the five hearts. My latest book is now out in paperback. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:22.766)So can check it out wherever books are sold. All right, let’s get right into our theme today, which really has to do the core is resilience and strength, which comes from the inside of us. So when I think about resilience, when I think about strength, I now think about it in terms of staying centered. So what I mean by that is there’s a lot of things. that life will throw our way. Everything is constantly in a dynamic flux of shifts and change. Maybe we go to the grocery store and they’re out of a lot of the vegetables and things that we wanted. How can we stay centered and shift and not get rigid and upset or lose our center if there’s a huge traffic jam or if we’re getting barrage of emails or texts that you know can feel unexpected. When we are off our center, when we start to let the thoughts run, a lot of getting off center has to do with the mind which is why our heart work is so important and heart coherence which we’ll also talk about today. What happens is that we start to secrete more stress hormones and cortisol and this has a direct impact. Stress, which comes from thoughts, has a direct impact on lowering our immunity and also breaking down our cells and our organs and aging us in many different ways. So this month is a wonderful month before we get fully into the holidays. And while we’re still a little bit transitioning to the beginning of school, maybe still a little bit at the end of summer, which we talked about in our September power hour show. This is a really great month to root down into our center, into resilience, into our daily practices so that we build and can continue to build this resilience, which is inside of all of us, right? We can tap into this potential inside of all of us. Instead of feeling like we’re bracing for change or we’re just more susceptible to whatever’s being passed around, whether it’s Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:42.904)you know, cold or flu around your kid’s school or around your office or whatever it is, right? We start to build the inner terrain. And again, we’re going to talk about this physically, emotionally and spiritually, and they all very much work together. So what’s happening in terms of ancient wisdom, how Aryavita talked about fall and October is that we’re starting to really come into Vata season, which is air and wind. And this can start to increase feelings of anxiety, restlessness, also dryness and feeling more scattered. So from a Ayurvedic standpoint, it becomes even more important right now to support your Agni, your digestive energy with warm foods and steady routines, which is known as Dinacharya. Even though the outside starts to feel like, okay, there’s a lot going on. And I can say that for myself, I tried to keep up with, there’s WhatsApp groups for both of my kids’ classes. And of course there’s all the chess and the tournaments and my little one’s swim classes and work and scheduling and just so much, right? And I know you have so much going on, but we create this steadiness in our practices, small, simple steps. I always start with a warm drink in the morning. Maybe it’s hot water with lemon. Maybe I start to add ginger. I take my probiotics first thing. These daily self-care practices are building resilience just by virtue of doing them consistently. And it starts to feel really good emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Doing your daily meditation, taking time for stillness. Traditional Chinese medicine. teaches us that fall is governed by the lungs, which is linked to grief and immunity. So I used to think of grief only in terms of bigger things, like when I lost my mom, and there’s these life events. But there’s many smaller things that we can grieve and let go of all the time. We can even grieve the end of a day or, you know, the end of a wonderful Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:04.654)dinner or get together with a friend. We might be feel a little bit reluctant to say goodbye. We may say feel a little bit of grief even when we say goodbye to our kids when they go off to school. And so it’s really important to allow grief through, which means that we need to let it be felt. And we can do that. We’ll talk about this more in the emotional well-being cornerstone. We can feel things deeply and still feel that resilience. that comes when we’re centered in our hearts. It’s the thoughts again saying, you know, I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want this to change. I don’t want to let go of this. That really keeps grief as an energy trapped in our body. So it prolongs it. It causes suffering. It lowers our energy. And so it’s really important that we actually learn to let things through us. And again, when it comes to immunity, we’re going to be talking about that a lot. through all our different cornerstones because immunity means we’re less, we’re not as susceptible to being taken down by what is in the outside world, so to speak. So that could be, you know, different circumstances. It could be viruses and bacteria. It could be, you know, more wind and different weather. We start to build that resilience within what we’re doing. and the practices that we are following and the lifestyle choices that we are making. And this is enormously empowering and enormously effective. We cannot control everything in the outside world. There are definitely going to be colds being passed around. There is going to be perhaps cold rain that comes or, you know, unexpected shifts, which could feel, you know, lots of things out of our control. So what we really do, the wise, the wise one, and I know that we’re all working on building our wisdom together as a community here in our feel good community, our saloon a community is that we turn our attention inside because the more we remain centered and resilient, the more life can shift and life can change. We have our center and we are healing and building our own inner terrain. So Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:27.026)And I will say, and I was gonna get right into the cornerstones, but I can’t help but talk about the heart just a little bit, which we’ll get into more as well. When we think about the center of our being, I probably touched my heart a couple times already during this podcast. Our center, our heart is closer to our true self than our head is. And of course we wanna use our brilliant mind. We want to be able to have thoughts and to process and to… you know, rationalize things and to go through the world and have rational thoughts. But at the same time, when our hearts are coherent with more coherence, more connection with our brains and our nervous systems, we don’t have to feel the overwhelm. We don’t have to feel all this reactive energy. We’re not meant to be machines. Something happens and then we immediately fly off the handle or we immediately get stressed or the thoughts start spinning. We break these patterns. which for many of us could be going on for many years and decades by coming back to our center, breathing, keeping awareness, relaxing into the moment while we focus on our hearts. And then we’ve become more and more clear about how to handle what life brings us. So we’ll talk about this more in a moment, but perhaps as you’re listening to the rest of this podcast, You can even start to relax into your heart right now. You might be walking your dog, you may be doing the dishes while you’re listening to me. You might be driving in your car down the freeway. Wherever you are, just take a moment to relax into your heart and notice how that shifts the way that you receive this information and even relax your shoulders, your chest, your hips, your jaw, anything that feels a little tight. And this is a way to keep growing even in resilience, the more tension we start to release, tightness. It’s like a tree branch that doesn’t bend in the wind. So it ends up breaking, right? Tension and stress carry through all different areas of our life. So even when we’re listening to a podcast, even when we’re here together, use these moments to consciously release. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:46.518)and relax your body, relax your mind, relax into your heart. And this will start to carry over into the rest of your life as well. So our food cornerstone, let’s go into that first. And here we want to talk about building strength and immunity and agony, digestive fire and gut health, because this is a really important month to really turn this up before it starts to get even more windy and even deeper into the vata season. We can start to notice if we’re already starting to feel a little bit off, certain imbalances might show up as sugar cravings, maybe your appetite is erratic, maybe your digestion is off, you’re starting to feel a little bit more constipated, more bloated, or just a bit more scattered. You may start to feel your immunity is dipping down a little bit, or a lot, depending. So it’s really important, some of the things that we want to work towards. tangible symptoms, tangible markers rather, is that our appetite is regular, our elimination is regular, we need to be eliminating every single day for some of us multiple times a day but definitely every day we want to be releasing toxins, we want to strengthen our immunity and so it becomes you more and more few and far between when we actually do get sick. And we want to just feel this inner sense of groundedness that is something that you have to experience for yourself. For me, it starts to feel like I’m a bit more set back when stuff is coming across my desk or in my life or, you know, things that is brought to my attention by my husband or whatever. just a bit more, again, just seated in myself and not as caught up in stories, not as reactive. It’s such a powerful place to be. And that groundedness and that sat-backness, if you will, if I can describe it as such, means that strength, real strength, which is an energy. It’s a force field, which makes you strong. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:09.942)resilient to handle what life is bringing to you emotionally. Again, like our show title. Physically, you’re not going to get sick. You’re not going to break down from things that are happening, busyness at work or whatever. And spiritually, you start to build more trust of the universe, God, source, life, however you like to think of it. Just deep, deepness, right? Wisdom is growing. So one of the things, one of the tangible things that we can do from a food perspective is to add the warming spices. I love warm elixirs. This is such a great time to use this as a self-care modality. Heat up water, keep some of these spices on hand, mix them in, cook with them, use them in your soups. I’m talking about ginger, cardamom, turmeric, all of these stimulate agony. They boost circulation. Cinnamon is also really great as well. It’s also great for helping us to metabolize sugar. I use ginger in definitely my elixirs now. I’m all about lemon and ginger water, hot water. And I use it in a lot of different soups and I throw it in for my kids and I cook with it in big chunks usually and then I pull it out of their bowls. Sometimes I’ll even chew on a big chunk and I think it’s a really important It’s one of those really important and expensive ingredients that you can always stock in your kitchen. And if you feel like you need to up the ante, have hot water with lemon and possibly raw honey and ginger several times a day. Another really great plant, a food to boost your immunity is spirulina, which comes from the water. And I think it’s such an amazing, powerful, nutrient-dense food. It has iron, has vitamin A, it has amino acids, builds protein strength in the body in a way that your body can actually absorb. And it’s one of our key ingredients in our glowing greens powder, which by the way is a synergistic formula that blends plants from the land and plants from the sea. And yeah, it’s potent in antioxidants, it’s wonderful food. So I highly recommend bringing it into your repertoire now and going forward. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:34.838)And then back to what our Uveda teaches about warm, warming foods. I remember when I was a raw foodist in New York for a couple of years, and there were moments when I felt really good and it was usually in the warm months. And I was trying so hard to stick to this diet and a lot of my friends were on it too. And I really remember wanting warm vegetable soup, but being like, no, no, no, it’s cooked. And I think that’s what happens sometimes when we want to. stick to a certain protocol and it starts to override our natural inclinations, our natural intuition. And so you’re probably already drawn to warm soups. And I encourage you to check out the many recipes we have at mysalina.com. All our recipes are super simple and easy, which is how I cook. It becomes even more simple over time actually, because I think that when food is simple, you’re celebrating the flavors. and it’s easier to digest and it’s more in keeping with our lifestyle, which is that simple, is energy efficient and opens up the greater Shakti, the greater energy to run through your body and to run through your life. We don’t need to overcomplicate things. You don’t need a lot of stuff. You don’t even need millions of products. You don’t need millions of skincare items. You don’t need millions of steps in your recipes. And so please check out our, again, our recipes online. And the other thing I wanna say about food is this is the time to veer away from the iced coffee, the iced drinks, the processed snacks, having excess caffeine. You may have gotten into a habit, which is a good time to be aware of, to bring awareness to it now. Maybe just having two, three cups of coffee, and it’s a really good time to say, all right. I really enjoy my coffee when I drink it. I’ll have one cup. And after that, let me switch to something else because a lot of times we just really like the warm drink and maybe we just don’t need as much caffeine as we think we do. So I encourage you to check it out because caffeine, as we know, in excess can just start to overload your system. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:51.886)And it can lead to excess pitta. can aggravate vata as well. You start to feel more scattered. And again, this is about resilience and inner stability. So I want to call out a few research links. One is a 2022 study in Frontiers in Nutrition that showed spirulina supplementation enhanced immune cell function and reduced markers of oxidative stress. I love the research that shows the know, the age-old, the time-old wisdom, the plants being so powerful, right, because it just shows that nature has such a high level of intelligence. Again, back to not over-complicating everything. We just need to align more to nature. The International Journal of Arduvator Research found that warm cooked food support, Agni and resilience during vata season. No surprise there that the Arduvator Magazine is backing this up. But I wanted to point to this article, which is quite interesting. And then also a 2023 publication in nutrients linked dietary diversity to greater microbiome stability in immune adaptability. So we’ve talked about this a little bit in prior episodes, but I want to call it out here that it’s a really good idea to rotate your vegetables. We’re coming into a different season, which means there’s different foods which will be in season. I love going to the farmer’s market. It’s funny, I was joking about this. Sometimes it’s more expensive and sometimes it’s the same and sometimes it can be a little bit cheaper, but no matter what, it’s definitely more fresh. So for me, it’s like a treat. I’d rather go to the farmer’s market than to most any restaurant these days. It just tastes really, really good. And then you just get a instant sense of what’s in season without having to think about it so much. Also, I wanna call out digestive enzymes, which some of us take, some of us haven’t tried yet. I wanna talk about how important they are because I think that… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:00.546)They are not really, there’s a lot of misunderstandings about what they do and their purpose. So first of all, our resilience and our centeredness is based on how much Shakti and energy is flowing through us as a total system, right? We can talk about acupuncture, meridian points, Marma points, whatever it is, but there’s energy flowing through the totality of your system. This is one of the reasons we take detoxi and eliminate because we don’t want waste inhibiting that flow. Another thing that is very energy intensive is digestion. Everything from mastication, chewing all the way to elimination. So when you take digestive enzymes, every time you eat, the enzymes help to break down the food so you’re not using your body’s energy. This is a huge secret, if you will, way to age less quickly. you want the enzymes to help break down the food. It also helps to prevent bloating. It also helps to absorb more nutrition. But a big part that I don’t think people get is it will help you preserve your own body’s energy, which again can then be re-channeled into immunity, resilience, warding off inflammation, cellular degradation, many things. So I encourage you to take the enzymes. We have amazing feel-good saluna enzymes which are researched. They have three times more lipase. They also help to break down fiber. Before you eat, I keep them now in my purse and in my car and I take them every time I eat for these very reasons. Okay, now let’s talk about our second cornerstone which is body. Strength through movement and stability. So when we are… Resilience in the body comes from both of these things. We want to be, we want to have mobility, right? We want to be able to move in different directions and we want to feel a level of strength in our core, in our bones. We want to be consistent as well. And I admittedly, I’m not as consistent with lifting weights, but it’s something that I’m working towards because I know it’s really great for joints and our bones and our muscle systems. and Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:20.814)I remember and I shared this with you when I interviewed Dr. Suhas, who’s an Ayurvedic physician, Vaidya. He talked about prescribing me weightlifting because I have a lot of vata energy. can get, you know, I’m very creative, but I can also get, you know, spacey and very airy and I tend to, you know, I can run very thin. And so he said weightlifting will actually help your mental and emotional constitution to feel more grounded. And so to be honest, I am not always consistent, I’m working toward it. So one thing that I did is I started to keep a set of weights, which for me is five pounds each, right? I’m starting light, but just doing some basic arm exercises, triceps, biceps. I kept a set, I keep a set near my son’s sandbox. And so when we’re out there playing and it’s still warm enough here in LA where we can play outside, I’ll do some of those exercises and it just makes it really practical. I also kept a set. I also keep a set in our bedroom next to one of our house plants on the side so it doesn’t look ugly, it’s not out of place. But sometimes while I’m filling up the bath and my kids are doing Legos or playing, I’ll do a couple sets then. I see them. I’m like, yeah, I remember. So I’m always honest with you guys. Do I do it three times a week every week? No. But because I keep the weights in a place where I see them, do I do them more? Yes. So I encourage you, however you want to think about, you know, building strength, starting to bring in weights, maybe for you, it’s doing a class, you work into your schedule or you go to the gym set times, you know, whatever it is, consistency is a really wonderful way to build that strength and that routine. And this helps so much with, again, the strength, the resiliency. And this also helps with everything, including sleep on your body is balanced in the way it’s being worked out and, you know, moving in different ways. It just starts to, you start to cycle between rest and movement and rest and movement. And there’s just more natural rhythms that you can start to build in. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:46.136)For me, walking is my favorite way to move. And I walk in the middle of the day and I walk outdoors and there happened to be a lot of hills where I live. So it feels like a level of strength training in that way. If you don’t live in a place with hills, maybe there’s a place where there’s some stairs. You you can go up and down the stairs a couple of times because I do, I used to do beach walks every day. And then we moved. to the mountains. And I really notice, okay, I’m doing the walk at the same time, but I do feel that strengthening element of hills. So I think if you can work that in, and again, any sort of strength training that feels good for you, any type of exercise or class or yoga asana class, I think it’s really great. It’s not just about cardio as we know, but resilience can really come from the ways in which we strengthen our bodies. I also think that, you know, going back to body for a moment, We notice that dryness that comes in. So it’s a really great time to maybe add two layers of moisturizer to your skin and your feel good moisturizer. If you checked it out, our Saluna one has really beautiful plants, non-toxic, high powered formula. This is a great time to do Abayanga or at least to oil the bottoms of your feet before you go to bed. which our Yovita teaches helps to ground energy and it also helps to just rest your nervous system. And it can be really nice to stretch your body before you go to bed so you don’t go to bed stiff and wake up with an even stiffer neck. Again, I don’t do it every single night, but if I have a couple of minutes to stretch and bring out my yoga mat, it feels really good. We can decompress. We can release a lot of energy through our bodies and breath work. And when you do that before bed, it’s a wonderful practice that can feel really great as well. So a couple of research studies I wanna call out. 2022 British Journal of Sports Medicine study found that 30 to 60 minutes of strength training per week reduced the risk of cardiovascular disease and all cause mortality. And I wanted to call this out because it’s per week. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (28:01.654)So I think to myself, if I’m lifting weights about 10 minutes, because that’s what I’m doing right now, if I, if I’m when I do do it a couple of times a week, that’s doable, right? Sometimes I think I’m not going to go to the gym and spend hours. And to be honest, I’m not going to the gym period right now at this moment in my life. But if I keep the weights around next to the sandbox and I do it a couple of times a week, that adds up and that has impact. And I hope that’s inspirational for you as well. A 2021 study in pediatric research found that morning light exposure improved sleep quality, and energy regulation. So this is so powerful. If you can spend a couple minutes in the morning, sometimes me and my kids play a couple rounds of soccer on our lawn. Sometimes I don’t do it first thing. I have to drop the kids off at school. But then I come back and I’ll be doing some work on my phone and I’ll sit outside for a couple of minutes or I’ll try to meditate outside. And I know it’s not always possible. not maybe rainy where you live that day or it’s not sunny or whatever. But when you can get some morning sunlight, it really is medicine. Just get it on your limbs. Just get it in and it feels really good and it does help to set you up for great sleep that night. And lastly, a 2025 review in the Journal of Aging and Physical Activity found that walking improves cognitive resilience and executive function. Alright, now let’s talk about our third cornerstone, is emotional well-being. And this is what I was talking about. This is the heart of what I was saying at the beginning of the show, because yes, we can definitely eat. Our lifestyle is holistic and integrated. So we want to eat foods that are strengthening our gut health. We want to lots of fiber. We want to have spirulina. We want to take our SBO probiotics, which is important for that inner resilience and supporting mood regulation. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (30:04.654)We want to lift the weights and move our bodies. But I really feel like a huge missing piece in most people’s holistic wellness is emotional well-being. And emotional well-being has a direct impact on mental health. The mind. Why? Because it’s our emotions and our feelings which are creating many of the thoughts. When we still ourselves emotionally and we can learn to digest emotions, which in my work and in my research can be done in a very effective way through learning about the power of the heart and heart coherence, we start to shift our perspective. The outer world doesn’t have to change for you to feel more resilient, for you to feel more grounded, more happy, more content, more fulfilled, more at peace as you move through the day. And that’s a big part of shifting from the propelled heart stage, which I talk about in the Hidden Power, the five hearts, to the steady heart. The propelled heart is the stage in life where we are on all the time, go, go, go, make it happen, know, burnout and working all night and always on and constantly scrolling. We’re so attuned to the outer world that we don’t have the energy to place the focus on the inner world. And then wisdom starts to grow and information comes in and hopefully from our Feel Good Podcast can help contribute to that. Because what I’m doing here is passing on to you what has really helped me and what I’m so grateful to have learned about. So then we learned that hold on here. If I’m trying to make everything better in my life to feel peaceful, everything has to be just so, so I’m happy. I’m never going to be happy and peaceful. Things are always changing. So emotional resilience, which directly affects your immunity and your physical resilience, comes when we can be more neutral with what is happening before us in our lives. It doesn’t mean that we don’t interact. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have ideas and inspirations and we don’t take inspired action. But what it does mean is we don’t have to feel so up and down, so reactive, so extreme. Emotions and feelings will come. But this is what we want to Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (32:29.698)We want to work on daily life, being our teacher, not just meditation, which I’ll talk about in our spiritual cornerstone, which is important. It is a nice anchor. It’s a baseline, but then there’s the rest of life. Right. And I talk about this in the steady in life chapter, steady in life practice in the book. It’s not a chapter to practice in the book, which has helped me so much is when we start to feel inner disturbances. you know, this road is closed. have to take a detour or the parking lot is full. This is super annoying or whatever is coming up for you. You can use your heart as an anchor, right? Which means you focus on your heart. Sometimes I even put my hand on my heart. You start to take some nice deep breaths. You become aware that there is an emotion there. You don’t try to push it down or suppress it or wish it, wish it away. You let yourself relax. into the heart as you also allow the frustration to be there. You’re not buying into it. You certainly don’t want to keep that energy going by the thoughts. Ugh, why can’t a parking lot spot open up? Why is it so crowded? Why are all these people here? Whatever it is, move your attention away from the thoughts, move it into the heart, and then just relax. It’s really simple, but it really works. Try it for yourself more and more. You just breathe nice and slowly and you relax. And what happens is that energy starts to dissipate. And as you work with the heart, which is closer to your true self, which is the soul, the spirit inside of you, the part of you that’s even observing all of this happening, which is actually untouched by the outer world, right? The true self is not the ego. It’s not the fluctuations of the mind. There’s a steady part of you. that start to align with more and more. You start to let those emotions dissipate. Let them be there again. You’re not bypassing or pretending they’re not there. You let them be there and you let them have their space and dissolve. And then you can stay more centered because clarity comes. Your perspective and your thoughts shift and change. And then you can say, well, I guess I’ll just go to the lot next door or maybe I’ll park across the mall. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (34:56.01)I know it’s not crowded and I’ll have a 10 minute walk and it’ll be nice. Right? It’s not being so reactive. This is where the stress builds that breaks down our immunity and our strength and resilience. There’s a billion zillion things that can happen in your daily life that will take your energy if you are not watchful. Right? If you’re not really paying attention. And you can start to notice If there’s just more, I would say, pitta, fiery energy building up, you’re more moody, you’re more irritable, you’re more anxious, that’s because anxious energy is building inside of you. That’s because irritability is building up inside of you. So you don’t want it to be like a gasket that blows, right? You want to let it through, let it through just like you digest food. And again, this is the power of the heart. And I can’t tell you how impactful it’s been on my life, not just the heart aligned meditation, which I teach, but also just the daily practices in life, the steady in life practice. So then all of this is in the hidden power of the five hearts. You can also listen to it. There’s paperback, there’s hardcover. It really teaches in depth about how you can start to really work with your heart, which is a brain, but it’s so much more than that even. It’s an energetic power center. And then you can feel much more resilient and adaptable. Like you’re just flowing down the river. Okay, a rock comes and you just flow around it. You don’t have to get into this big kerfuffle. You don’t have to get, like this angst. Just breathe and release, breathe and release. Focus on your heart and heart coherence again, it can be measured in HRV patterns that are smooth, sign like waves. They’re not erratic and jagged. which emulate what’s going on in the inner state, right? And it colors, all of this colors how you see the world. The more we become centered and we allow our emotions to come through us, the more we will see beauty in the world and we will see through to the hearts of others and the light in others, where we would have judged, where we might have been harsh with ourselves or others, we start to feel more compassion and softness, where we might’ve… Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:16.726)you know, rushed through and missed a moment to be kind or connected. We take that moment to speak to a stranger or to acknowledge the person in front of us in a deeper way. And so all these micro moments build into a more fulfilling life, a more resilient life, a more joyful, peaceful life. And again, it all starts in the inner terrain. So there’s some interesting research studies I want to call out here. One comes from the Heart Math Institute, which is the institute that we did our research study on the heart aligned meditation actually. And it founds that heart coherence helps to lower cortisol, improve emotional resilience, and stabilize heart rate variability. So there’s lots of research on the physical benefits. as well as the emotional benefits. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Education found that journaling improves mood and helps to reduce depressive symptoms. And I didn’t talk about journaling specifically yet, although I do want to say here that journaling is something that I absolutely love because there is something releasing about writing something down and getting it out of your head. and onto paper where you can start to digest. You can sit with those emotions or feelings that were brought up and you can work with your heart as you journal. So what I do is I write, I take pauses, I breathe. I literally work on seeing things from my heart’s perspective. I reframe. It’s really powerful to do that. And there’s some really great journaling prompts in the new book as well, if you wanna check that out. Okay, so our fourth cornerstone. spiritual growth. And spiritual growth means to me that we become more anchored to the stillness, to the steadiness inside of us instead of to the external world. To be worldly we can say means we’re expecting the world to make us happy. We are looking to the world. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (39:36.354)to find solutions to all of our so-called problems and challenges. And when we grow spiritually, the more we realize that there’s this wholeness and this completeness inside of us, and again, a very potent access point is through our hearts, where we’re actually not lacking anything. We need to tap in more to that inner resilience and that inner strength instead of expecting life to give it to us, instead of trying to take more. from the moment, take more from our relationships, take more from any opportunity that’s in front of us. Instead of taking and taking, we’re more at peace and we’re more, again, this feel good starts to take on deeper and deeper meaning for me, which has been the name of our podcast for many years. But to me, feeling good means this is a spiritual high state where we are okay. with what life is bringing us. We’re less attached to things. Feeling good is open, connected, more lightness. So we do this, we create this from, first of all, meditation. And as I mentioned just now with our emotional cornerstone piece, emotional wellbeing cornerstone. It doesn’t mean that meditation is everything because there’s the rest of daily life. So we want to work with our emotions as we’re flowing through life and our feelings, which then impact our thoughts. And that’s part of part of spiritual growth as well, which is why everything is interconnected. But when it comes specifically to this cornerstone, which is really wonderful about meditation, is that it gives us a glimpse to be really in tune with that part of us, the true self energy, which is unchanging, which is the truth of our nature, which is powerful. is kind, which is loving, which is again whole and complete. And the more we spend time in there, and the Heart Aligned Meditation is only eight minutes by the way, and then you can do other practices or you can spend more time in there, you can expand it, we start to really increase our baseline of coherence. We become less easy to trick, to be duped, to buy into all our feelings and thoughts as reality, all the stories we tell ourselves. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (41:56.716)To buy into the world has to make us happy. The world has to be just so. This is such a huge way to be resilient because we are not as tied to the external world. Of course, we have goals. We want certain things to happen or not happen. But with a much less stringent level of attachment, rigidity starts to fade. Again, remember the analogy of the tree branch that breaks into more strength and softness, which are the qualities of the heart. There’s so much softness when you think about love, right? And compassion and care. There’s this strength in being adaptable, like water, it shapes around the boat, it shapes around the rocks. And so this means you’ll be literally more resilient inside your body, your inner terrain, your immunity, your gut health, everything strengthens. as you find this spiritual level of attunement, knowing that no matter what, you ultimately can handle what life brings you. You ultimately are going to be okay. So the Heart Aligned Meditation is a really powerful practice that I can offer you. We will link to it in the show notes. Another thing that I feel really helps me now more and more is AWE, A-W-E, right? finding more awe in daily life. Because it breaks us out of the cycle of thinking that this has to go a certain way and this propelled heart energy has to be like this and how dare that person talk to me and blah blah blah. Like all the inner dialogue that can feel really tumultuous. In these tiny moments, if we realize, we bring it back to the fact that we’re on a rock spinning through space and we aren’t in control. And life is moving along, right? And someday we’re all going to pass. Can we come to this moment and find awe and just seeing a patch of sunlight or awe just watching our dog run across the floor and the fact that they move in such a way or awe that this pile of sprouts was able to Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (44:21.102)push through the soil and create this incredibly nutrient-dense food right or whatever is in front of us. These tiny, so-called tiny things are all miracles. And I talked about this on a recent community Zoom. There’s a difference between appreciation and gratitude. Gratitude is very wonderful as well. And there’s a lot of research on gratitude taking us into a deeper place. But appreciation, which is the… energy that we work with in the heart aligned meditation is very opening in a slightly different way because it’s gratitude and it’s thankfulness, but there’s awe in it, right? It’s just like, appreciate that tree so much. I appreciate how my child is so happy or just bounces into the room. I really appreciate how my cat is snuggled up to me. So find these moments of awe. as you’re driving to work, as you’re sitting in line at the bank. And you can just find more of that and you realize that there’s so much magic in each and every day. And you can be more centered in each and every day. You don’t need such specific things to be happy. And this will build your resilience and your strength so much as well. In tandem with our other cornerstones, know, practicing your heart aligned meditation every day, taking your SBO probiotics, know, strength training, healthy foods, all the things we talked about, we talked about today are going to help you be resilient right here at the top of the month as you sail into October. It’s going to be a wonderful month. I hope that these tips and tools inspired you. I’m excited for you to hear, to hear more of your feedback. I would really appreciate a podcast review on Apple or Spotify, which is such a wonderful way to support the show. So thank you in advance from the bottom of my heart. I’d love a review as well for the new book if you happen to have read it yet, or again, please check out the new paperback. not, I will be back here on Monday for our next interview show. Again, lastly, check out the show notes at mysaloon.com. Join our newsletter list. Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (46:41.292)so you can come more deeply into the community. I look forward to connecting with you. I’m really grateful, really appreciative that we found each other. And so I’ll see you soon. Take great care and sending you so much love.